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Peter Boghossian is a philosophy instructor, activist, author, speaker, and atheism advocate. He is a full-time faculty member at Portland State University.
4 appearances
James Lindsay is a writer, political commentator, mathematician and podcaster. His latest book, "The Queering of the American Child," co-authored with Logan Lancing, is available now.www.newdiscourses.comwww.queeringbook.com
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Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
L. Ron Hubbard, Dianetics: The Modern Science Of Mental Health
Guests who spend most of their time thinking about the cultural discussion surrounding gender, sexual identity, etc
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You can even hear their breathing. It's so sensitive.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Live already? Damn, there's no countdown?
Jamie, you're radical. You're radical.
Mr. Bogosian, welcome back. Good to see you again, sir.
Thanks, thanks. Good to be here.
Mr. Lindsay?
Good to be here.
James or Jim, depending upon preferences?
That's right. Go with Jim.
First of all, gentlemen, and there was one other person that you did this with,
this whole project?
Helen Pluckrose from England.
Shout-out to Helen from England.
Thanks.
Is she back across the pond right now?
She's across the pond.
Fish and chips.
She's making tea and managing Ariel magazine.
That's right.
Excellent. All right. Well, shout-out to her as well.
Let's explain what you guys did and what's so significant about it,
because when I first read it, my first inclination, I had two reactions.
One was a huge laugh.
I laughed really hard, and then I said,
Thank God somebody exposed this.
Yep.
So, tell me what you guys did.
Jim, go for it.
Yeah, so...
Let's explain who you guys are and what you do.
Okay.
My background is in mathematics.
I bailed out on academia in 2010, though, because I kind of see the writing on
the wall, and so now I am a renegade gender scholar, and I write nonsense about
genitals.
That's primarily what I do.
I mean, I manage a business at home, so I got out of academia.
Yeah, and I teach philosophy at Portland State University, and I met Jim years
ago.
We collaborated, and we've written a number of things over the years, and at
some point, it just came to be, we had to do something about this.
It was just too ridiculous, and it was translating into the real world, and so
we collaborated, and here we are.
Well, let's explain what you did and what was ridiculous.
What we're talking about, what was ridiculous, is there's many fields of
studies that you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous.
Right.
Literally filled with nonsense, taught by nonsense people who live in these
nonsense bubbles, and then they give these degrees, and these people go out in
the real world.
Exactly.
And they infect things.
Yep.
Their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses.
Like, you see it infecting.
James Damore.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, let's explain what you guys did.
Yeah, so we started about a year, I guess a year and a half ago now, it was
last summer.
We started writing a bunch of academic papers for the journals that represent
these fields.
And so everybody understands what an academic paper is getting out of the gate.
This isn't like an op-ed that you dash off for like Washington Post or some
magazine or whatever.
This is a thing, like academics work their careers to write one or two of these
a year.
Yeah.
And so they're really hard to write.
They're supposed to be hard to get published.
So we wrote 20 of them in 10 months.
And seven of those got accepted.
Four were actually published.
And at least four more, yeah, we got busted.
And at least four more were on track.
Maybe five or six more would have gotten in.
What's the difference between getting accepted and getting published?
So the process with everything in academia is really slow, and a lot of people
don't know this.
So you send off this article, the editor looks at it, and the editor either
gives it the thumbs up or the thumbs down.
If they give it the thumbs up, it goes off to peer reviewers.
And that process takes months, often as long as – I mean, with one paper,
there was eight months under peer review.
So the reviewers look at it.
They try to figure out if the arguments are good.
They try to figure out if the research is good.
They evaluate that.
They give extensive comments.
They send it back to you.
Then you have to revise it according to whatever they say.
Make it better is what's supposed to happen.
They made ours crazier.
And so then they did every single time.
We took the feedback and made the papers just the most extreme thing.
Most extreme things.
And so then you send them back.
So now you're probably three, four months in just to the review process, not to
the writing, which should also take months.
And then the editor will either send it back to the reviewers to see if it was
good enough or they'll just evaluate it themselves depending on where it stands.
And then they'll make a decision as to whether or not to accept it or reject it
or ask for more revisions.
And then when they accept it, that means the journal is ready to publish it.
But then the publishing process requires all the typesetting, proofing.
All the stuff that goes into making it professional for an academic journal.
And that can take months.
And publishing is the coin of the realm.
Like, that's it.
So the ideal is one paper every year in the humanities broadly.
So if you – that's how you credential yourself.
That's how you get tenure, which is a job for life.
That's how you get to teach people these ideas who then, as you said, go out
into the workforce, you know, five, six years later and infect everybody with
total silliness.
So it's the gold standard peer review.
So we saw a tremendous problem.
Can we tell people some of the titles of these?
Sure.
Because right now they're like, what the hell are these guys talking about?
So we had an article.
The one that got the most press was about dog humping in Portland, Oregon.
It was called – how did it go?
Was it called Queer Performativity and – was it rape culture?
Rape culture.
And queer performativity in dog parks in Portland, Oregon.
Yeah, we claim to have examined under a fake name.
Is that a real word?
They're all fake names.
Performativity?
Oh, yeah, totally.
They have their own lingo, their own, you know –
But is that a word in the English language, performativity?
I mean, in the academic English language, not in common parlance.
But that's like the whole thing.
This is huge, right?
This goes back a long way.
That's Judith Butler's whole thing was that gender –
Who is Judith Butler?
Judith Butler is probably the most influential feminist scholar – or gender
scholar, actually, I should say,
that's been in maybe the last 30 years.
She's big time.
And so she had this whole thing that gender is performative.
It's something you perform.
It's not something that has anything to do with your biology.
Retracted article.
Oh, yeah, there it is.
Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in
Portland, Oregon.
Why is it retracted?
Because it's bogus.
Because they realized that you guys were hosing them?
Yeah.
Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity.
We claim to have closely examined the genitals of –
Just under 10,000 dogs.
Just under 10,000 dogs and then interrogated their owners as to their sexual
orientation.
So we checked out the dog's nuts and then said, excuse me, sir, are you gay?
Yeah.
And you asked them if they gendered their dogs?
Yeah.
Well, we made up these totally insane, you know, dogs humping incidents and how
they beat female dogs, but they didn't beat male dogs.
So that's one of the papers that we made.
You know, the other paper that we wrote –
Well, this one also, they had the whole thing like if a male dog humps another
male dog, especially men, would freak out and break it up.
Yeah.
Stop that because that's the queer performativity part.
Yeah.
But then if a male dog humped a female dog, they'd be like, you know, get her,
girl.
Yeah.
Get her, get her, you know, get on it.
So you're basically raging against heteronormativity.
That's exactly correct.
We told them exactly what they wanted to hear and we gave them bogus statistics
to fuel what they already wanted to believe.
Yeah.
And we started off with the idea that what we wanted to get to was a conclusion
and then we made up all the crap in between to get to it.
And the conclusion was feminism should train men the way we train dogs so that
we can get rid of rape culture.
You know, put them on leashes.
You know, it's right in the paper.
It's all there.
Unfortunately, we cannot put men on leashes.
It's not politically feasible to put men on leashes.
You guys wrote that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
They published it.
Or they yank their leashes when they misbehave.
Yeah.
And this paper didn't just get.
Published.
The journal said that this was exemplary scholarship and gave it an award.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
It says one of the best pieces.
It's this year is their 25th anniversary.
So this journal has been doing this for 25 years.
Yeah.
And it's their 25th anniversary.
So they're picking out the best papers throughout the whole year and putting
them, you know, probably to place in some issue of their journal.
And ours was going to be in the seventh issue.
It was going to be the number one.
Well, it either is great or it's not great.
So it either is great or it's not great.
Like, why are they retracting it?
Oh, yeah.
Because they know we're bogus.
So what?
You were right.
Well, it's like a broken clock.
Yeah.
The clock's broken.
Well, it is actually 12 o'clock.
So they would claim it incorrectly that we fabricated statistics.
But we wrote other papers called – one was fat bodybuilding.
So they claim that there should be a category introduced in traditional bodybuilding
called fat bodybuilding where people come and display their fat before the
audience.
And we didn't manufacture any statistics for that.
And they loved that.
They thought it – you know, one line in that paper was, a fat body is a built
body.
And then one of the reviewers was like, I wholeheartedly agree or something
like that.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
And then we wrote other papers like, to Hypatia, we published a – got
accepted, not published.
But that one, we claim that it's unacceptable.
It's unethical to make fun of anything to do with social justice.
Right.
And so if you want to make fun of things that don't have anything to do with
social justice, that's good.
So if we wanted to make fun of men, that's great.
If you want to make fun of white people, that's great.
If you want to make fun of anything to do with social justice, that's a problem.
So we made – we said that, you know, South Park's a huge problem.
The Simpsons is a huge problem.
We went into talking about how Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have the right
idea.
But then the journal was like, ah, but they're straight white males.
So you have to, you know, nuance around that to make it clear that their
position is white men,
even though they're on the side of social justice, it's not quite good enough,
you know.
So they published that.
They published that.
They published that.
What was that one called?
That one was called When the Joke's on You.
And we made – we wrote it so that they would think the joke is on us because
we cited our own work in there.
Right.
But the joke was actually on them for publishing it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Duh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This – it's so funny how racist you can be as long as you're racist against
white people.
That's what we saw is that as long as you are going up the river against
privilege,
then you can really just get away with some nasty stuff.
Yeah, and you can generalize.
Oh, totally.
Gross generalizations.
Gross generalizations.
Absolutely.
Do not treat people as individuals.
Absolutely.
It's very strange.
It's very strange that this is the left.
You know, I was a kid in San Francisco in the 1970s.
We lived in, you know, like – there was the hippie times.
And that's – I lived there from age 7 to 11.
And it kind of formed a lot of my opinions about people like the who gives a
shit part of my appreciation for any group,
whatever it is, whether it's race or gender or sexual orientation.
And I just – I don't understand it from either way.
I certainly don't understand it from a racist perspective.
But I really don't understand it from racism that's condoned because it's
racism against white people.
Oh, yeah.
That this is the left.
This is – these are the people that are preaching against hate.
And these are the people that used to be the people that were supposedly so
open-minded and so open to ideas.
And now they're trying to stifle creativity and stifle dissent and stifle
anything that doesn't fit inside that very narrow paradigm that they're trying
to push.
It's very strange.
Yeah, they co-opted the civil rights movement.
The good name of the civil rights movement is kind of the brand that they ride
on.
You know, they're fighting against racism.
They're fighting against sexism, misogyny, et cetera.
And the thing is, is that's not really what's going on here.
They've actually tapped into this – to throw around the term, this postmodern
notion that everything in society has to do with power dynamics.
And the power dynamics have to be understood in terms of groups and how those
groups have traditionally held power and exercised power.
And so immediately it becomes stuck in this idea that it's all about this group
or that group and how they relate to one another.
And I don't mean like, hey, let's get along really.
I mean like white people are imagined to always be over black people.
And therefore, you know, there's always this natural power dynamic of oppressor
versus oppressed.
And this is stuff that came straight out of this weird postmodern philosophy
where you saw these dissatisfied French philosophers in the 60s.
You know, all this stuff you were talking about was going down.
They saw all this stuff and they said, wow, you know, okay, power dynamics are
the thing because – I should go back a step.
The postmodern philosophers like Foucault and all of this got all hooked up on
power because they were dissatisfied with seeing what they called grand
narratives, Christianity, capitalism, Marxism.
They saw all these huge, you know, explanations for how the world works and
said, you know, they're not working.
Look how bad communism failed.
Look how there's so much, you know, bullshit coming out of this or that from
religion.
It's not working.
We need to just get rid of all of it.
We're going to deconstruct this.
We're going to break it down to its power dynamics and then we're going to look
at it in terms of who has masterhood over who, who's oppressing what, where's
dominance.
And it's just kind of grown.
It got picked up in the academic culture in the 1960s.
That's how old this stuff is.
And then it took this huge turn in the 1990s and got really vicious and that's
where it really got – you know, that's when it turned intersectional actually.
That was during the political correct days?
That's when the political correct thing kind of blew up, yeah, is when all this
stuff was coming out.
So that would have been, you know, late 1980s is really when all of this
political correctness stuff started coming out of the academy and then a few
years later you see it coming all over politics, which is typically what
happens.
It starts in the academy a few years later, it leaks into the culture and
politics or media or the tech sector now, whatever it happens to be.
The stifling of creativity is the most disturbing part about it, like the
agreement that South Park and the Simpsons are a real problem.
It's so bizarre because, like, here's the thing.
If they miss the mark and it's not funny, it won't work and then it'll be a bad
show and no one will like it.
But if it's funny, there has to be something about it that people find ironic,
satirical.
There has to be something about it that people are enjoying that has to point
to some truth.
And the denial of this and instead like the saying, oh, it's white males that
are causing this problem and you shouldn't attack this or that or, you know,
there's subjects that are off limits and social justice should never be
attacked.
To agree to agree to that, it's so preposterous.
This is life we're talking about.
Yeah.
This is literally the nuance of life.
All the various strange things in the spectrum of human behavior and all the
things you encounter in life.
And to segment and limit what is and is not, what's off limits and it's not off
limits based on race, based on things that a person can't control at all.
You're just born white.
So if you're born white, you're born an oppressor.
You're born a victimizer.
And if you're a white male, you're a fucking piece of shit.
And you can say that.
White hetero male in particular.
Oh, God.
I mean, I've seen so many tweets from people.
I mean, so many virtue signaling tweets.
But one of my favorite ones is this feminist who said, all white, white
straight men are trash unless proven otherwise.
Yeah, that's the thing, right?
All of us.
All of us.
All of us.
There's 150 million of us.
I mean, give or take, you know, how many gay folks there are.
Yeah, trash.
Yeah, trash.
No problem.
And that's proven otherwise.
And prove you're not, right?
How do you do that?
You've got to be an ally.
You have to be an ally.
Oh, no, they ask us to problematize allyship, too.
You see, there's power dynamics.
Once you say, hey, I'm an ally, now you've made it so that you have like a
shield where people can't call you a white supremacist anymore.
And you are acting on behalf of other people and, you know, you're speaking for
them.
So you now have assumed power and you're reproducing the same power dynamics.
That was the Mein Kampf paper.
Yeah, our paper that rewrote Mein Kampf actually was about allyship.
And they were like, you didn't problematize allyship.
Yeah, we had two of them that did Mein Kampf.
One of them we just more or less replaced Jews with white men.
And you literally took Mein Kampf, the actual words from Mein Kampf, and put it
in this paper and replaced the word Jews with the word white men, and they
accepted them.
Well, we had two papers that did Mein Kampf.
We had two versions.
So that one did not get accepted.
What were the quotes that you guys used?
I mean, so with that one, what we did was we took the whole document online and
we just searched the word Jew.
And we just started picking sentences and paragraphs.
So what was it?
At the end, it was something like, if we don't combat whiteness, it's going to
be the funeral wreath for mankind.
That's straight out of Mein Kampf.
Yeah, they didn't accept that paper, though, because that paper, turns out, was
written from the perspective of a white lesbian who hated her own whiteness.
And they said that it was positioning her as a good white.
And because she's making herself out as a good white, again, allyship isn't all
it's cracked up to be.
She was making a problem.
She should have really been forwarding the ideas of the black scholars that she
read way more and not talking about herself so much, even though it was a paper
designed to be talking about herself.
Yeah, because that was what Hitler did, so that's what we had to do.
Now, the other Mein Kampf paper was about feminism.
And what we did was we took the chapter, it's chapter 12, we took the chapter
where he says, this is why we should have the Nazi party and what is expected
of people who are going to be part of it.
And we took out our movement, our party, he didn't call it a Nazi party in the
chapter, but everywhere he's like, our movement.
Took that out, put in intersectional feminism.
And then modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly.
Theory?
Yeah, theory, that's what they call it.
Theory is a good, I love that word.
Yeah, theory.
I love when, feminist theory, I love when they throw that around.
Like, what are you saying?
But you're saying things that like, once you say that, you're good.
Like, you can say something ridiculous and then say feminist theory.
And they're like, oh, it's in feminist theory.
Yeah, that's the thing, right?
It's so much of the stuff they come up with, let me throw them an olive branch.
Like, so much of the stuff they come up with is a creative idea.
Maybe there's something to some of this stuff, right?
But what they're putting forward is hypotheses.
And then they're treating them as conclusions.
So they're putting forward this idea.
I saw one on Twitter today.
It was something like, this is about South Park, how it's been laundering
racism into society and making everybody comfortable with racism.
And that's why everything's so racist and people are shooting Jews is because
South Park made it normal.
But they're treating that as a conclusion, but that's a hypothesis, right?
So we could test that.
It's conceivable that you could actually try to parse out what variables need
to be controlled, see, you know, South Park came out.
It started doing these themes.
How does it track?
Statisticians can do kind of amazing things with that stuff.
But they're not doing that.
They're not testing it.
Instead of testing it, they're concluding it and they're using theory to do so.
And they're, no, go ahead.
No, no, it's even bigger than that because why don't they test it?
Well, if they tested it, and this is, I'm not making this shit up.
You won't believe me, but this is true.
If they tested it and the test showed that their hypothesis was wrong, they
would say that the test was racist.
Right.
That the test is condoning racism and that's why it didn't give them the
desired result.
How would you test something like that?
Because, I mean, I'm not a statistician.
I'm actually a mathematician, but I'm not a statistician.
They're two different things.
So I'm not exactly sure how you would test that.
But conceivably, you could gather data, survey data, and see how attitudes have
changed.
Maybe you could track these kinds of articles, kinds of events that are coming
out.
You could kind of pair that up with what's been shown on South Park.
Yeah, who are at South Park and track that with attitudes.
Yeah, but there's no effort to do this.
They're like, oh, South Park presents these ideas, which they then cherry pick
because there's other ideas that they don't talk about that point the other
direction.
These ideas are problematic, that's the big word.
Theoretically, that's a problem.
Why?
Because they, and I'm not joking, they literally believe that use of language
creates the power dynamics that define society.
So South Park's using language and imagery that creates a power dynamic that
makes people more comfortable being racist.
Boom.
Theory.
Done.
No test needed.
No even attempt test.
And then if the test happened, the test itself would be racist unless it
confirmed the hypothesis.
Right, so they start with an agenda, and then you mentioned the word laundering,
which could your former guest, Brett and Heather, talked about ideal laundering.
I think that's important for the listeners.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's really what's going on here is they're forwarding these hypotheses.
They don't treat them as hypotheses.
And then they write up a paper.
Paper, like we were saying, is the absolute gold standard of academic work.
They send the paper off.
The reviewers, in our case, has made our papers crazier every single time, so
they push it further into the ideology or the madness.
How does a reviewer do something like that?
What input do they get to have?
Well, they said, for example, that we should problematize allyship.
If we want our paper published, we've got to problematize allyship.
I love that word, problematize.
Everything.
Everything.
Problematize everything.
Dog parks, problematize everything.
Literally anything can be problematized and looked at through a feminist lens.
It's a great word.
They problematize everything.
Everything.
The whole world's a fucking problem.
That's why we call it grievance studies.
The whole world's a problem.
It's a grievance.
They're massively...
Okay, so then...
But do the homo...
The transphobia thing.
Yeah, the trans paper.
So we wrote this paper saying that straight men are generally transphobic,
meaning, in particular,
the kind of niche, weird definition that you see on the internet and activists
sometimes,
that they aren't interested in having sex with trans people who have penises,
trans women
who have a penis in particular.
And so we said, well, that's a kind of transphobia.
And clearly the reason that they might be transphobic is because they don't
practice putting things
in their butts.
So if they start putting stuff up their butts, in particular, we called the
paper dildos.
So you can imagine what we were saying.
They should put up their butts.
The whole paper was called dildos?
No, that was the nickname we gave it.
The paper was called going in through the back door.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we argued that if straight men just penetrated themselves and had their
girlfriends peg them
through exposure therapy, you know, you start small and then work your way up,
you can remediate
transphobia.
Yeah, we'll make them less transphobic as a result.
So by self-penetrating or having your girlfriend peg you, you can be less transphobic.
And they thought this was a great idea.
So we based this off of eight interviews, really 13 interviews with men.
And I say really eight, 13.
There were 13 interviews documented, but five of them were gay people, not even
straight people.
So they don't really apply.
So then we have these eight interviews with straight men.
We made one of them a conservative.
And he's just, so we could just put in like, you know, crazy things that a
conservative might
say about this.
And they were like, why don't, why weren't there more conservatives
participating?
So I was like, well, I'm going to run with this.
And I wrote this whole thing.
We invited six conservatives to participate and only one accepted.
And to kind of summarize why in the words, and this is in the paper, in the
words of one,
I don't want to be a part of some stupid liberal study about shoving things up
your butt.
And they published it.
And they published that.
Boom, right in.
Right in.
Right in.
Oh my God.
Here it is.
Retracted article.
Yep.
Going in through the back door right there.
Oh my God.
Now, did they contact you after they retract your article?
They go, you guys are fucking assholes.
You're wasting our time.
We spent hours reviewing your papers.
We got a couple of pretty bitter responses, but mostly no.
Mostly they've kind of put their head in the sand and kind of avoided talking
to us.
What I was saying before the show started, that I read one article that was
really diminishing the impact of what you guys have done.
Saying like, what?
It's not a big deal.
Wrong.
They were trying to make it seem as if what you guys had written was just a
prank.
Yeah, that's not what happened here.
That's absolutely false.
There's a lot of papers that seem like parody that make it through that you
guys aren't writing.
Oh yeah, we could pull up one about how Hot Wings, like there's a TV show,
Spicy Ones or something like that about Hot Wings.
Oh yeah, the YouTube show.
Yeah, yeah.
So they had a whole...
Hot Ones?
Hot Ones, that's what it was.
There is a paper out there about that show and it's all about how Hot Sauce has
everything to do with masculinity and being manly and they didn't have enough
women on the show.
Problematized.
Because it's sexist and the Hot Sauce I think was the sexist part and it has
all these bizarre conclusions.
We cited that in the paper we wrote about Hooters where we put in the part that
there was masculinity contests of eating the Hot Wings, who can eat more Hot Wings?
And then they'd say, oh, I ate 20 Hot Wings, ask out the Hooters girl.
Professor, man eating show Hot Ones is problematic for women.
See, problematic.
He's an ally.
There we go.
Yeah, but that's a real paper, right?
So we cited that paper.
It's real.
There are thousands of papers like this.
There it is.
The spicy, spectacular food, gender, and celebrity on Hot Ones.
And so as a professor, he probably teaches this stuff to his students, right?
So now everything's problematized and this is what credentials him.
You get seven, in general, you get seven of these.
It says it's a woman.
Seven years.
Yeah, yeah.
She wrote it.
But who's the other one?
Tisha?
At the end.
Who wrote that?
Introduction.
Oh.
What's the difference?
There's two people there.
Oh, it's a commentary.
Is it an article about the article?
Introduction?
Yeah, that's probably what's going on.
Commentary and criticism.
Hmm.
Yeah, this is, it looks like, I mean, I haven't read this specifically.
Wait a minute.
Listen to the first statement.
Food media have been recognized as cultural artifacts that reference culturally
and historically
specific ideals of gender.
Exactly.
Drawing on the simultaneously mundane and omniscient qualities of food as a
medium for interrogating,
interrogating ideas about feminism and identity performance.
See what I was telling you.
Shut the fuck up.
It's all there, man.
That's like everything we're talking about.
This is such unbelievable horse shit.
No.
This person is teaching at Central Michigan University.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is for real.
This is for real.
And so there is now an ever-expanding group of these folks.
They teach.
Do you want to read more of it?
It's so fucking funny.
We didn't write this one.
In this commentary and criticism section, the authors introduce a diverse
sample of case
studies that demonstrate the emergence of feminist ideas in and through food
media.
Oh, yeah, man.
What the fuck are you talking about?
They're really worried about that.
Get a job!
Get a real job!
Go out there and work.
Do something that someone wants to pay for.
Do something of value.
Engagement with hot sauce.
God, this is so crazy.
Right.
Uh-huh.
And this is what they're teaching our kids.
Racial assumptions inherent to post-feminist food culture.
Oh, yeah.
I was going to write a paper about how cornbread is being gentrified, and that's
why we'll never
get over racism.
Because white people are making pumpkin spice cornbread.
There's something that I tweeted the other day about some- Gadsad tweeted it,
and I retweeted
it, about some woman, she was taking back bone broth.
Oh, I saw that.
Yeah, that's good.
What in the fuck are you talking about?
People have been cooking bone broth for thousands of years.
Thousands of years.
It's a way of getting nutrients from the food you eat.
They've problematized it.
Oh, look at this.
Queer woman of color wants to decolonize bone broth.
Stop appropriating my culture.
It's Gadsad.
He's awesome.
That is so fucking preposterous, a queer woman of color.
This is what I'm saying, man.
There's a thousand papers like this out there for every one we wrote.
Yeah, a thousand of them that you might as well have written.
Well, you couldn't tell if we did or didn't.
And that's part of the thing is people can't differentiate what we've done.
In fact, not only can they not differentiate it, they give us an award.
So they can't differentiate it from the stuff that's already out there, and the
stuff
that's already out there is polluting people's minds.
Now, you guys, at least you used to work in academia.
You work in academia.
How are your peers treating this?
Are people mad at you?
Well, Pete is going to have a lot to say about that, I think.
But for me, from academic people, I've had two kinds of responses.
But some of those are like, ah, you guys.
And then the overwhelming of them are the same thing over and over and over
again.
And I mean a lot of people.
Thank you so much for doing this, but I can't.
Don't tell anybody.
I'm trying to get a job.
I'm up for tenure.
I can't talk.
Thank you.
This needs to go.
And that's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
You can't proceed through academia now unless you bow to this stuff.
Tenure sounds like tyranny.
The whole thing sounds preposterous.
So you can keep a job for life.
Well, the idea was supposed to be that you work your ass off for a few years.
And then it was supposed to be to defend academic freedom.
So you get tenure.
Then you can go forth and put out some crazy ideas.
Really, like, dig into some stuff.
And they can't fire you for, you know, coming up with maybe weird stuff.
And then people would argue about it.
But now it's kind of become the situation where people get in their job and
then you can't get rid of them.
Right, right, right.
What, is there a way to fire people?
Well, if they do something like sexual harassment, then usually, yeah.
Yeah, you can find a way around the tenure thing.
So.
What is it like for you?
Now, you are actually teaching.
It's super uncomfortable.
Are people upset at you?
Yeah, I'd say they're enraged.
You know, I mean, the only thing I can think of is, like, if you taught at a
Christian school and then you went in and, you know, took videos and posted
them on YouTube of defecating the Bible
and then just walked into the school.
So I think it's kind of similar in that they have bought hook, line, and sinker
into microaggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity initiatives.
There's no questioning.
And it's something for me that makes me deeply uncomfortable when my students
can't ask questions, when they can't – they're just uncomfortable to voice
their opinions about things.
And I think that, to say the least, a lot of people are enraged at me.
But exactly what Jim said, some people will come in like, oh, thank you so much.
But again, I can't be public about this.
What is the ratio?
I mean, for me, it's like 95% people who are really happy it happened and can't
let it be known.
But I'm not, you know, facing these people every day.
Yeah.
Well, you know, through the videos from Evergreen State, you can see Brett Weinstein's
interactions with not just students, but also some of the professors that were
there.
Some of these preposterous people that he had to work with that are buying in
hook, line, and sinker to this stuff and they live in these insulated worlds.
Absolutely.
And they just – they create these people that also want to stay inside these
insulated worlds and then just sort of stew in these ideas and then, again, go
out into the real world.
Yeah, and they think they're better people as a result.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, that's the big trick.
They're doing the good work.
Yeah.
Yeah, because to, like, question this, maybe to look at it and say, ah, you
know, that kind of looks like bullshit, but I don't know.
A lot of these guys are left-leaning people or outright leftists.
A lot of them want to do the right thing, right?
Yeah.
They really do.
These people really care about progressive agendas, you know, getting over any
lingering discrimination that's going on, racism, sexism, etc.
They really want to do the right thing.
Good for them, right?
That's what we want.
But they actually have to question – or, like, run counter.
You think of that, like, as a river of morality running through their mind.
They actually have to go upstream a little bit, and that's hard.
It feels weird.
You have to say, wait a minute.
Maybe this scholarship, maybe this stuff isn't the best way to do it.
But then the first thought you have is, well, these guys are – these people
in these disciplines, grievance studies, are fighting racism.
So if I go against them, then I'm going against the people fighting racism, so
maybe I'm helping racism.
And that's what we keep – if we get any criticism, that's what it always is.
You're helping racists.
You're a tool of the right, etc., etc., etc.
Yeah, you're a racist.
Yeah, or we are outright racists.
Yeah, outright racists and accused of being alt-right, if you disagree with any
of this stuff.
Any of this.
I get accused of being alt-right all the time.
I lean so far left.
Universal health care, universal basic income, free schooling.
I think education should be free.
I think we should pay for – I believe in a lot of socialist ideas.
Totally.
But I'm right-wing, because I make fun of people that want to study problemization
of dogs fucking.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, this is really where it is.
That's where it is.
If you look at, like, whether I support gay rights, women's rights – I'm on
board.
All of them.
All of them.
Right.
I'm on board with all that shit.
Yeah.
Take more of my taxes.
I fucking – I can afford to pay more if I really believe that people are
going to get real health care and real education.
We're the same.
I would be fucking very happy.
Very happy.
Yep.
If I thought it was all being appropriated and used correctly, fuck yeah.
Let's make the world a better place.
So that's the thing, right?
Is if all this scholarship that they were doing on race and gender – that's
important stuff.
Right.
So if they're doing that right, why wouldn't you want to be behind it?
Right.
But they're not doing it right.
How do I know?
Because I made up papers about dog humping and made up the conclusion before I
wrote the paper, and then, boom, they publish it and give it an award.
Also –
If I can start with the conclusion and then work backwards to that conclusion,
then I'm not doing rigorous scholarship.
I'm making shit up.
Well, also, there's no room for dissent.
None.
Absolutely none.
Yeah.
Zero.
And in academia, you can't even – you have to teach whatever the moral orthodoxy
is.
So just imagine this.
Going into a university, you're trying to – your young mind, your young kid
– and I'm deeply concerned about these kids.
They're going and they never hear the other side of an issue about immigration.
They never hear the other – so they become brittle over time.
So when they hear it, they just – they don't know what to do.
They're shocked by it.
Professors are terrified that they'll get a complaint.
They'll have to go to the diversity board.
I've been told that I'm not allowed to render my opinion about protected
classes.
And you teach ethics.
And I teach ethics.
I don't teach accounting.
Protected classes.
Yeah, protected classes.
I've also – that's a great –
What does that mean?
That – thank you for asking.
I've asked for a definition of protected classes, a list of protected classes.
I didn't receive any.
But yet you can be criticized for –
Yeah, I cannot – I cannot offer –
You can be fired for it.
Yeah, I cannot offer –
But there's no list.
Under –
Oh, no, no, no, no.
No.
So, yeah, I was up on a Title IX violation.
I'm not –
You were up for a violation?
A Title IX violation.
What is it, Title IX violation?
Title IX violation is serious shit.
It's federal discrimination law in universities.
Yeah.
You were?
Yeah.
You?
What did you do?
I can't talk about it.
It's legal.
It's illegal.
But among the other things that came out in that meeting were I'm not allowed
to render
my opinion about a protected class.
And so, for example, I can't – so, homosexuals, I know, are covered under
protected classes.
You can't have an opinion on homosexual people?
I can have an opinion, but I can't –
What if it's a positive opinion?
Well, so, the example that was used in class was evidently – I made a comment
– okay,
so, let's take a step back.
Okay.
So, this is an ethics class, and I was talking about how sexual choice does not
fall into
the realm of morality.
So, if a guy's gay and he likes another guy, that's just not a moral thing.
That's just –
Preference or –
Yeah, it just is what it is, like a matter of taste.
Sure.
And I don't remember the whole thing, but someone in the class said, well, you
know, you shouldn't
have taste or something, or you shouldn't have – and I can't remember the
exact frame
because I'm getting this third hand from my violation, you know, my trial.
No one came to someone else.
Somebody said in class, well, what about this?
And I made the comment – I said, everybody has something – everybody has a
preference.
Like, you can't say that no one had a preference.
I said, it would be as if – it would be as if I said, well, you know, I don't
want to
date someone who's 400 pounds.
So, that comment then got turned into something when they called somebody else
in – the Office
of Diversity and Inclusion called someone else in, and it was made that I was
rendering
my opinion about people who were 400 pounds.
When my – what I was doing is saying that homosexuality itself, there's no
reason to
give that – it's just not a moral thing, but people lump it in.
But the main point of this whole thing is that we have situations in which
professors
can't talk about protected classes, students are afraid to ask questions,
everybody's
walking on eggshells, and the students aren't learning.
And phrases are taken out of context.
Phrases are taken out of context.
Now, if you want a place to go to celebrate whatever the reigning moral orthodoxy
is, then
the university is a great place for you.
Did you explain what you meant by saying that you – like, saying you don't
want to date
people over 400 pounds?
Did you explain the context of the use of –
She wasn't interested in the context of it.
And the trick is he didn't even say he doesn't want to date people over 400
pounds.
He said it's like –
He said it's as if I said that.
Exactly.
I phrased it into the hypothetical.
Right.
Right.
So there are entire things –
But if you had said, maybe I don't want to date people over seven feet tall,
maybe
you could have got away with that.
Yeah, I don't think people over seven feet tall are a protected class.
Right.
You could have got away with that.
Yeah.
Even though it's still basically the same thing.
It's a preference issue.
So I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, and he said to me, oh, you can't
say that.
You should never have said that.
And I said, really?
Why?
He said, well, you should have said, well, I don't like dating blue or green
people.
I'm like, why?
They don't exist.
There were no blue or green people.
Who is that going to resonate with?
But what if they start coming around, man?
And then they become a protected class, and then someone goes back and looks at
what you
said 10 years ago about blue or green people, and you get fired.
And that's how that works.
If you look at – there's all this stuff coming out about victimhood culture
and how
it propagates and how it develops.
And that's one of the things.
It's called competitive victimhood.
Right.
You could call it –
Competitive –
Competitive –
That's the formal term of people who study this.
I love that.
That's wonderful.
When people are fighting over who's a bigger victim.
But you see it all the time.
It's like you see people in society, it's like, oh, the Black Lives Matter
people go
nuts, and then all of a sudden the white supremacists are out, and they're like,
oh, white people
have it hard, too.
The second they – the second somebody hears, oh, black people have it hard,
somebody's
got to be like, white people have it hard, too.
That's competitive victimhood.
Right.
And so then when you have like a moral economy, if you will, where you can kind
of cash in
and gain status or gain access to speaking or whatever it happens to be by
holding a certain
sense of victimhood or grievance, then you're going to find people competing to
find ways
to get that for themselves.
Yes.
Right.
Everybody's going to go – I mean, you have the infrastructure there.
Everybody's going to go after trying to maximize their own utility within that.
Yeah.
So people over seven feet tall aren't a protected class yet, but the second
they realize that
they might be able to cash in on it, they might lobby for it.
Competitive victimhood.
Grievance jockeying, it's been also called.
Yeah, I've called it grievance jockeying.
I think Gadzad, since you mentioned him, called it the oppression Olympics.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's wonderful times.
It really is.
So if you look at the root – so here's the thing that we thought about
extensively.
If you look at the root, where is this stuff coming from?
All of this stuff is coming from these – the canons of knowledge.
They're bodies of literature.
They're peer-reviewed.
And that's the idea laundering thing again, which we should get to.
So all of that stuff is coming from this.
And if you want to make – if you want to get back to constructive politics,
to get back
to people having conversations – and that's the thing.
Like, that's, I think, one of the reasons that your show has been so successful
is it's
a combination of authenticity with – you can have – you're totally willing
to have
conversations with no holds barred, right?
You can't have that in the academy.
So people need to go to you to hear these thoughts and to wrestle with ideas
and to engage.
It's just –
You can't really do it anywhere else other than a podcast.
Well, you can't do it in the academy.
But you can't even do it on the Today Show.
They fired Megyn Kelly for asking why is blackface racist, which is a stupid
fucking question.
No doubt.
She's not a bright woman in that regard, socially, right?
It's a very clumsy, clunky thing to say.
But they just fire her.
They fire her.
They should have – what they should have done was brought in black scholars
and black
intellectuals for a week just to fucking grill her.
Exactly.
And that would have been amazing television.
But that attitude that you have is not what they have.
So they want to punish the transgression, right?
Well, I think they just want to stop hemorrhaging.
And I think they didn't like her anyway.
Well, that's true.
The word is they really didn't enjoy her and that she wasn't a nice person and
she was a mean person.
But it was a learning moment, right?
It was a teaching moment that's lost now.
Yes, yes, yes.
It's lost.
But think about it in terms of what we were talking about earlier, where the
scholarship's stretching back again to the 60s.
You have this idea that all of society is constructed out of power dynamics
that are mediated through language, media, imagery.
And so she just now became problematic.
And she put out ideas that would be dangerous and poisonous, not something to
discuss the merits or dismerits of, not something to work through, not
something as a teachable moment.
She put out an idea that's dangerous.
She can't put out ideas anymore.
Well, you know, it was really interesting, too.
She was so disingenuous in how she approached it.
It was so obvious.
You know, what a black person is it?
Why is it wrong for a black person to dress as a white person?
It's not.
No one ever said that.
Why are you pretending?
You're just setting it up so that you could say a white person wearing black
face.
Think about the other cultural moment there, too.
So, like you said, they bring in black scholars.
And at the end of that, she said, you know, I really listened to that.
And I didn't know that.
And I was wrong.
And I'm changing my mind.
There was this woman on Twitter that said her video looked like I retweeted it,
that it looked like a hostage video.
The only thing that was missing was her holding up a newspaper that showed the
date.
I saw that.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was an Australian woman.
Yeah.
Ah!
The whole thing is so fucking funny.
But that is one of the worst ways to really dissect ideas.
Because, first of all, there's a studio audience.
That fucks everything up.
Second of all, you have these massive time constraints.
And then you have advertisers.
Then you have a bunch of executives that are all cowards.
They're all just ready to pull the trigger on anything.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Anytime they can blame you for anything that went wrong and get rid of you or
fire you, fire him.
Get rid of him.
Get rid of him.
Bring in the next person.
You know, and then what they'll most likely do is to show they've learned they'll
hire an all-black crew.
Right.
A diverse crew.
Yes.
That's probably what they're going to do.
As a matter of fact, I think I've read...
Aren't they doing that?
See if they do that.
They're replacing Megyn Kelly with a crew of color.
Think about where that works, right?
It works...
You said they're cowards.
They're afraid they're going to damage their brand or whatever it is.
Yeah.
Where does that work?
Or who works on that?
Bullies, right?
So these people, why are they so pervasive in the academy?
Why are they so pervasive in media?
They know they can bully these people.
They know that they can go lean on this stuff and somebody's going to be cowardly
and then they're going to be able to, you know, make something change in the
direction they want it to change.
You see it even creeping into politics.
They try to do it with policymakers.
You see it a lot more in a lot of other countries.
Right now we're in this massive, like, backlash against it in American politics.
How's that going?
You know, did 2016 help your progressive agenda gang?
Holy crap.
Well, that is a part of the problem with the, what are they saying?
So, yeah, look at this.
Today, as you know, we're starting a new chapter in the third hour of our show
as it evolves.
It's evolving.
It's a fucking living being.
We want you to know the entire Today family will continue to bring you
informative and important stories just as we always have.
And look, two black guys and a brown chick.
That's 100% diverse.
We got rid of the ice princess.
It's all diverse.
That's the thing.
The way that diversity is defined, if you had a panel that was just black guys,
it would be 100% diverse.
Yeah, so they've redefined the word diversity.
They've redefined the word inclusion.
But to people outside the academy, they think, oh, diversity, it's a great
thing, right?
You know, we have, but that's not what it means.
It means kind of when everybody has the same ideas about something.
It's also when you, if you're enforcing diversity, for what, we have to, we
would have to find out, like, ultimately, the goal is to find out what, what
causes people to succeed.
And especially succeeding in something that is benign as talking, right?
You're just talking.
That's all you're doing.
So what causes someone to succeed in talking?
What makes their ideas valuable?
What makes them someone you enjoy listening to?
And then finding, like, what impediments there are to that in all the various
communities and fix it at the root level.
What doesn't work is saying, we need one Chinese lady, we need one black guy,
and we need one white guy.
Because if you do something like that, you're not going to get the best show.
Nope.
Or you're not going to get the best anything.
Well, you're not even guaranteed to achieve the goal you're claiming.
So, again, it goes back to theory.
In theory, and I mean theory in terms of postmodern critical theory that this
stuff's all based in that we studied, the idea is that if you have a particular
identity, now you have a particular view of the world.
And people of other identities have different ones.
And, in fact, there's this whole thing called standpoint epistemology that says
that if you have a marginalized identity, you know more about the world than
other people because you live in two worlds at once.
So the idea is, oh, if we get a black guy in here, he's had a different life
experience.
Therefore, he can speak truly to that.
If you get a Chinese lady in here, she can speak to that.
So on and so forth.
So the guess is that by virtue merely of bringing in people who look different
with different races or genders or sexes or sexualities, then you automatically
get a diverse set of opinions.
But that doesn't work.
That's not how that actually works.
You could take people of every race, educate them on the exact same social
justice curriculum, and they all think exactly the same thing.
But at least in something like hosting the Today Show, you are just talking.
Once you put these sort of diversity standards to something like mathematics,
that's when things get super squirrely.
Yeah, they're trying to do that a little bit.
I'm sure they are.
They tweeted that thing I wrote about mathematics, and they wanted people to
sign an equity, which is another word that they have co-opted.
They wanted folks to sign an equity statement and a diversity statement.
And the thing is –
Well, explain that.
Explain what they're trying to – that you have a commitment to diversity.
Yeah, you have a commitment to diversity, and you have a commitment to equity.
And so equity does not mean treating people equity.
It's not like you have a commitment to equality, which is – we should all
have a commitment to equality.
It's – equity is defined differently.
It's to make up for past injustices or to make up for some deficiency that has
occurred somewhere along the line.
Yeah.
Affirmative action is an equity movement.
It's to treat people differently in order to level the playing field.
Yeah.
So it's not treating people – it's not treating people equally, and that's
the key thing.
It sounds like it is, but it's not.
It's a word that they've smuggled in.
Straight out of the literature, again.
It's, again, out of – all the stuff comes back to the literature.
So if you look at the word equity in the dictionary, you get one definition.
But if you look at the word equity as they're applying it –
Yeah, in sociological definitions, it's a very specific thing that means
something slightly different from what people assume it means.
So here's the question you should ask somebody.
Anytime you hear someone use the word equity, just ask, oh, I'm curious, why
didn't you use the word equality?
Can you think of a – would the sentence be the same?
Would the meaning be the same?
Well, the meaning is not the same.
That's why they used equity and not equality.
Well, equity is a finance word.
That's why it's weird.
Equity is also a – yeah.
So they don't make up new words, right?
They co-opt.
Yeah, they co-opt.
They change.
And then they smuggle diversity, inclusion.
Yeah.
And they write these academic papers, and they come up with these ideas.
They start with their conclusion.
They push it through.
It gets published.
And that's just like – it's like the academic equivalent of money laundering.
Yes.
Right?
So how does money laundering work?
Yes.
You take some money.
You got – you know, ill-gotten money.
You put it through, you know, this shell company or this thing or the other
thing,
and it comes back to you, and now it's had a legal trail that makes it legit,
right?
Well, here you take some prejudice, you write it down as an academic paper.
You publish the thing.
It gets the academic stamp on it.
It's the gold standard of knowledge now.
And now this prejudice you started with now looks like legitimate knowledge.
Right.
It can go straight in the classroom.
It can go straight to activists or policymakers.
It's a real problem.
Yeah.
And when then –
It's really funny, though, that you – you're saying it's like academic money
laundering.
It is.
It is.
Yeah.
That's Brett – that's –
That's Brett Weinstein said that.
That's Brett Weinstein said that.
And that's what it is.
It comes out the other side as knowledge.
Yeah.
So then they think they have knowledge.
Right.
So –
Our paper about the dildos, the guy said,
this paper is an important contribution to knowledge.
Yeah.
Who – who said that?
The reviewer one, I think, out of the –
The reviewer one?
Who the fuck are you?
Yeah.
Important contribution to knowledge.
I would hope reviewer one was just hitting a bong right before he wrote that.
Just baked out of his mind, laughing – laughing at the whole thing.
Knowledge.
Who – what kind of person gets attracted to wholeheartedly agreeing to these
ridiculous ideas?
Like, what – what are the people like?
It's a great question.
I think it's people who want to save the world.
Well, we – I think we would all like to save the world.
Yeah.
I'm much more cynical than you, but –
Yeah.
They've got a –
No, they've got – they've got this idea that – I mean, we talked a moment
ago about
privilege and we kind of, you know, brushed real close to the idea that it fits
kind of
like original sin.
And so they see that the downside of privilege, the opposite side
discrimination or racism, sexism,
et cetera.
Hate is the big word, you know, fight hate.
He's using hate.
This is hate speech.
That's where I think they got the term.
That's like the evil thing.
You're born with privilege.
That's like original sin.
So what do they want to do?
They want to fix – they save the world by clearing out the evil of privilege,
by clearing out
hate from the world.
For them, utopia means nobody hates.
And by hate, we mean something like racism, sexism, et cetera.
So it's a noble idea.
But then when you start looking at it in this, like, ridiculous way, like you're
born with
privilege and now you're just stuck with it, right?
What can you do?
It's original sin.
You can be sorry for it.
You can try to be an ally and work it off.
You can check it, whatever the hell that means.
You can do a lot of things, but you can't actually atone for it.
You can't get over it.
You can't get rid of it.
Then you get the situation where it's like they really, really need to take
desperate
measures, like let's lock it all down.
Let's tell these people that they're wrong.
Let's try to point out how white supremacy is in them because they're white.
Let's point out how masculinity is an ideology that needs to be destroyed.
That was Lisa Wade.
She wrote that last year.
Masculinity is an ideology that needs to be destroyed?
Yeah, it needs to be –
Toxic masculinity.
Because Trump – and this is the thing, right?
I think in the past couple of years, of course, before Trump it wasn't – they
had other
avatars.
I think there's a lot of anger and frustration, justifiably so, at Trump.
And they see this.
And so I read so many other – usually op-eds, not their academic pieces.
And it's like men are like this.
Men are blah, blah, blah.
And you can tell they're just talking about Trump.
But they can't touch him, so they're pissed off and they try to take it out on
all men.
I think that's like a huge thing.
They see these problems.
They exaggerate the problems.
They practice problematizing.
And that's a thing, right?
They practice this stuff.
You go to school.
It's in the general ed curriculum.
Maybe they major in this stuff.
You get good at finding problems.
I was just talking yesterday.
I came over – I never actually – I got to Los Angeles a couple times before,
but I've
never been to the beach.
I never actually made it down.
So I went down to Santa Monica.
I go to one of these burger places right on the – right by the pier.
And it says that this is the burger that made Santa Monica famous.
And immediately, you saw the Hot Ones thing, right?
I was like, there's a paper in this.
You see the problems.
Here you have this manly double cheeseburger being marketed.
That's what made Santa Monica famous?
Oh, so manly food culture is the kind of like colonialism that goes and makes a
city become
a city.
It makes a place into a place.
And you could – I could write a paper about that in three days.
Do you have to have credentials to write a paper?
Do you have to have a PhD?
No, technically not.
And that's a sad thing because their response to this has been, oh, we're going
to screen
better to see who is actually writing these papers so they can't trick us.
But that's bullshit.
Well, how could they possibly trick you?
The point is that scholarship is that it should stand on its merits.
If the argument's solid, if the research is good – and they thought our
research was
good.
That's my point about the dog humping thing.
Yeah.
They should leave it the way it is if they're saying that this is such an
important piece.
Right.
Well, I mean, I would walk back on that one because we did make up the data.
And falsifying data is not cool.
Well, what data would be incorrect?
Like what – when you did falsifying –
Oh, we didn't even go to the dog park.
We definitely didn't ask anybody about their dogs or their genitals or anything.
I bet you could have and achieved similar results.
We said that there's a dog crapping on another dog's head in the paper.
And like that didn't happen.
I'm sure that didn't happen.
And maybe it did happen.
I mean, this is insane.
But we had other papers that didn't do that.
Fat bodybuilding didn't do that.
The one that's the one that jokes on you didn't do that.
There's no made-up data in most of our papers.
And why shouldn't those stand?
Right.
Why should they stand by those?
Exactly.
I can get it.
Because they can't differentiate real scholarship from bullshit because they're
in this crazy
ecosystem in which their ability to make discerning judgments about things has
been dulled because
they put an agenda before the truth.
I keep seeing all these academics coming like they get their gotcha moment on
us.
They're like, ah, I read your paper.
It's actually a real paper.
It's good.
Yeah.
How crazy is that?
It's like, yeah, thanks for noticing, you know, asshole.
That's exactly what we were trying to do.
We weren't writing just stupid pranks.
The dog park paper is pretty funny.
But we were actually trying to learn what's going on there.
Thanks for noticing.
Somebody finally did.
But that means, of course, they don't want to admit that we actually learned
this stuff
because then when we say it's shit, they're stuck with somebody who knows what
they're
talking about saying it sucks.
And they don't want that either.
Now, when you said there's people that are trying to save the world, like, what
do you really
mean by that?
I think they're the people who are trying to build the kingdom of God on the
planet Earth.
You know, to draw a metaphor, a religious metaphor, they're people who see an
evil and they
want to purge the world of that evil by any means necessary.
And the evil being, like, privilege, privilege, hate, white supremacy, patriarchy.
It's the new religion.
Patriarchy.
So as Christianity goes down, it's just, you know, the Game of Thrones.
The only reason you need new gods are because people don't believe in the old
gods.
Right.
And so we have these religious modules, or what have you, in our brain, and the
new religion
is intersectionality.
And we see...
And that really is what it is, right?
It's exactly what it is.
Yeah, the parallels are staggering.
And we've been writing about that and talking about that for years now.
And I've been studying religious psychology for years, and it's all over the
place in this.
It is political correctness is paralleled with blasphemy.
It's the same thing.
Even the parallels of heresy.
The parallels of...
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
I mean, it's so stunning how easily people sort of slide into these preconditioned
slots.
Here's the one difference, and I think this is a key difference.
The reason that it's easier...
And I mentioned this to Pendulet when we did a talk, and he just couldn't
believe it.
The reason that it's easier to talk to a Christian, for example, about faith or
about their religion
is because at the end of the day, it comes down to faith.
These people don't have any faith.
They have knowledge, quote-unquote.
They have their bodies of scholarly literature, which were ideal-aundered.
That's what they have.
So they can point to these things and say, well, I don't know how many...
I know.
How do you know?
Well, Robin DiAngelo's white fragility.
How do you know?
There's a study.
There's a study.
Yeah, there's a study.
There's a study.
There's a study.
Well, I know how some of those studies are written, and I don't trust them.
And you shouldn't trust them either.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you see that, I mean, even in nutrition, I mean, you see it in everything,
in terms
of like almost a religious or religion-like acceptance of specific ways of
eating or specific
ways of communicating, specific ways of being.
It's just so strange how people seem to have this natural inclination to adopt
predetermined
patterns of behavior.
Right.
Yeah.
I think, actually, there's a pretty decent understanding of that from the
perspective of moral psychology.
You've got this idea that somebody has seen something as good, so it elevates
them, it makes
them better.
So clean eating might be good, right?
Whatever clean eating means.
For some people, it's vegan.
For some people, it's like all you eat is grass-fed beef.
Who knows?
But you've got clean eating, and you've got dirty eating, and you go into the
clean
thing, and so you've got this kind of like purity thing.
And eventually, you take this so seriously that it becomes kind of a sacred
value to you.
Well, what's sacred mean?
You know, we have this kind of vague sense, oh, you know, holy, this, that,
that's sacred,
and it's something really important to somebody.
Well, what it really means is that it's taken on so much moral importance to
somebody that
they no longer will allow it to be questioned.
When something's sacred, it's now been removed from the sphere of being doubted,
questioned,
or whatever.
And so when you have this idea like that, let's say that privilege is the cause
of racism,
and you've elevated that, or the problem with everything in society even, and
you've elevated
that to like a sacred value that can't be questioned.
You can't say, maybe there's another dimension to it.
That's when you start getting these kind of religious-like behaviors, you start
getting
these problems, because you've got a place where it can't be, A, questioned, B,
made
fun of.
We were talking about the comedy earlier.
This is killing comedy, right?
It's absolutely killing comedy, because you can't make a joke, because if the
joke goes
a little bit wrong, now you've committed a heresy, you're a blasphemer.
Yes, but no, because people love when you go against it.
That's true.
The weight of it is there, but when you resist it, people scream and throw
their hands up.
Yes, yes, yes.
So this is really interesting, because if we take the theory about humor at
face value,
right, that you can only go against a power thing.
So we say, okay, you know what?
We wrote one of our papers.
The joke's on you is about that.
Let's say they're right.
Why do people love it?
Well, it's because everybody knows these guys have power.
They're trying to pretend that they don't have power, that they're the victims,
they're
the oppressed.
Meanwhile, they're bullying everybody into everything.
They're firing people for saying the wrong thing in class, you know, whatever
it is.
That's only possible if they have power.
And the joke, when South Park makes fun of, like, what was it, PC Principle or
whatever?
When South Park makes fun of that, the only reason people laugh, if their
theory is right,
is because they're powerful.
If their theory is wrong, because it's just funny, then we can talk about
something different.
But if they're actually right, if they're actually making a point here, they're
not recognizing
that they're admitting that they have seized a lot of cultural power.
And that's why people celebrate when you go back against stuff.
That's why people have sent us so many emails like, this is the greatest thing
ever.
Thank you so much for doing this.
There's all this shit like, you guys are heroes, blah, blah, blah.
Why?
Because they wanted to see you laughed.
Why?
Because it's funny as hell is why.
And why?
Because these people are, they're influencing the shit out of stuff.
Yeah.
And if they weren't, if they were just, you know, victims who don't have a
voice, who can't
make any impact, who aren't bullying people, everybody will be like, why are
you bullying
those guys?
Why are you being a dick?
Right?
But everybody thinks it's funny.
And why?
Because...
Because they have real impact.
They have real impact.
They have real impact.
Yeah.
And that's one of the things that we really want to convey to people, is that
this, what
happens in the academy does not stay in the academy.
No, it's spread.
It's spread throughout the world now.
And I've read some articles about some things that we've said on this show that
are just fucking
completely preposterous and taken totally out of context and presented as some
evidence
of, you know, whatever transgression that's impossible to defend.
It's very strange.
It's a very strange time for communication.
It's a very strange time for ideas.
Yeah.
But I also think it's really exciting.
It's exciting that all this nonsense is going on.
That's one of the things that I really loved about what you guys have done.
It's exciting.
It's exciting that you guys have, you've infiltrated and had these fucking dummies
public, not just
publish your shit, but praise it.
And say how amazing it is that you wrote a bit about fat bodybuilding.
I mean, fat acceptance is this one, fat shaming and fat acceptance.
There are two preposterous phrases.
There really are.
You know, I mean, you shouldn't be mean to people.
That's it.
But fat shaming because someone's fat.
No, you can't call me fat because I'm not fat.
It doesn't work.
Yeah, so that's real similar.
So that body of literature, here's something that I learned when I read this,
is they don't
use the word obesity because, this is really interesting, because obesity, it
gets back to what
Jim was saying.
Obesity is a narrative.
It's just a story.
So they use the word fat.
Excuse me.
So there's not obesity bodybuilding, there's fat bodybuilding.
And there are all these narratives.
So why would one want to buy into one narrative rather than another narrative?
Why is fat okay and obesity bad?
Ah, because obesity is a medicalized narrative.
That's right.
Whereas fat is just a description.
Yeah.
So they're rejecting medicalized terms.
Well, they call it healthism.
I'm not making that up.
What?
Healthism is a narrative.
It's a power structure where healthy and thin people are imposing their view of
how body
should be on fat and unhealthy people.
And there's thin privilege.
Like, they'd look at you and you've got all the, you know, because you're
muscular too,
so you wouldn't just be straight, white, heterosexual, cis, et cetera.
I mean, you've got health privilege.
You've got health privilege.
Fitness privilege, probably.
Fitness privilege.
Also an ableist.
Ableist, you've got that privilege.
It falls into the ableism.
You're really, it's not good for you.
Yeah, it falls into that.
Health privilege, that's real?
That's a real one that they're using?
And they also claim to be the healthy at every size movement.
You can be healthy at every size.
And obesity is just a medicalized narrative.
Yeah, and that's really important, though, because the point of that is to say,
if your doctor tells you you're fat and it's a health concern, then you don't
have to listen.
Yeah, that is a, I've read that before.
And I read an article by this woman who was morbidly obese.
Charlotte Cooper?
I don't know what her name was.
But she was talking, she was also using, like, really misusing some studies on,
there was some, there have been some studies on people who are overweight
and that there could possibly be some health benefits to being overweight.
These studies have been widely dismissed now.
Not only dismissed, but they go in direct contrast to the great volume of
studies
that show how terrible it is for your health to be that fat and that heavy.
But this person, I don't remember who it was or why she was doing this,
but she was clinging to these one or two studies that have been dismissed.
These are biased epidemiological studies that have been dismissed.
But she was putting them in this blog as if this is some sort of evidence
that not only is it not unhealthy to be fat, but it might be healthy to be fat.
And now think about this person in an academic position as a professor teaching
young people this,
particularly young girls.
Particularly young girls who might have eating disorders.
Health, a white privilege?
What?
Oh my God, is this real?
This is a real paper?
This is definitely real.
Oh my God.
This is how this stuff goes, man.
They think it's a, they think it's like when the doctor says you're overweight,
it's a concern for your health.
They see that as a form of fat shaming, saying that they're not all right the
way that they are.
They're not being accepted the way that they are.
There's a power dynamic that healthy people are imposing upon overweight people.
They have myriad issues that they come up with.
And I mean, sure, some of these complaints have got to be somewhat real.
You know, they don't make as many oversized clothes, you know, plus size
clothes.
It's harder to get styles.
There's some legit stuff, you know, that they might want to say,
hey, well, can we do something about this?
But on the other hand, the whole thing that like saying that it has nothing to
do with health,
it has nothing to do with your like triglyceride levels, heart disease, etc.
It's just, it runs, it's anti-evidence.
It runs in the face of every conceivable piece of evidence.
They're teaching kids this, they're in schools, and there are classes, fat
studies classes,
and there's an actual...
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
There's fat studies?
There's fat studies.
Yeah, that's the journal that published the fat bodybuilding.
The journal is fat studies.
Jamie's going to bring it up.
I told you, Pete, I told you 30 million people are waiting to find out that fat
studies is real.
An interdisciplinary journal of body weight in society.
Yeah, and this is what Jim was telling me.
He's like, when we do this, 30 million people are going to now know that there's
something fat studies.
Now, fat studies doesn't do what you think it does.
You probably think, oh, fat studies, you know, what are triglycerides?
How much should you exercise?
No.
What's a good diet?
How much sugar is too much sugar?
Well, that is absolutely not what this journal does.
Frozen, a fat tale of immigration, what the hell?
Crafting weight stigma.
Hold on a second.
All right.
Crafting weight stigma in slimming classes?
A case study in Ireland?
So I'm telling you, you go to a slimming class, you're going to go lose weight,
you take a fitness
class or something, whatever slimming classes are.
Fatness and temporality.
And they use a stigma against being fat.
They basically say fat's bad for you.
Look at this one.
Priorizing fat oppression, intersectional approaches and methodological
innovations.
You just said a bunch of nonsense.
The oppression of fat people is built into institutions, pervades the cultural
landscape and affects,
dude, we could have written this, it affects the relationship and perceptions
of people of
size.
People of size.
It is its introduction to the special issue on fat.
I love people of size.
It's not the new people of color.
Right.
Exactly.
Fat is the new black.
Parallel.
That's right.
People of color is a problem now, too.
You can't say people of color?
Well, you can, but you see, there's people of color and then there's BIPOC,
which I don't
know how you pronounce that.
I don't know if it's BIPOC or what, but that would be black and indigenous
people of color
because they have even more oppression than the other people of color and they've
got to
fight over who gets...
More than yellow people of color?
Yeah, for example, or probably brown.
Is that why Harvard can discriminate against Asians that are trying to get in?
Let's tap our noses and just move on, right?
So, but then that's even a problem because indigenous has recently been branded
a racist term
because you're not actually honoring, yeah, you're not hitting the actual
tribal identity.
If you get right on the cutting edge of the stuff, it's like really going into
meltdown
mode.
Indigenous is because it's too random?
Well, yeah, you're generalizing.
Cherokee, Yavajo, Nez Perce.
Yeah, okay.
So you can see, again, the competitive victimhood going on, who gets to claim
more of the victimhood
pie and, oh, now we've got this thing about people of color, so they get, you
know, victimhood
status, but why, if that goes to all people of color equally, that's not fair
because these
people of color are even more discriminated against, so they should get more of
it.
It's really, they're fighting over a piece of a pie of victimhood-ness.
I love the Canadian term First Nations.
First Nation people, it's a better term because really, fucking every single
human being that
came to North America came from somewhere else.
Yeah.
I mean, so, speaking of which, in the fat, since we're talking about in the fat
bodybuilding
paper, I put in a Star Trek reference at the end, I love Star Trek, I put in
something
like, fat bodybuilding is the final frontier for fat activism.
Oh, they didn't like that.
No, they didn't like that.
They said it was, uh...
They said that we couldn't use the word frontier because it evokes imagery of
the genocides
of the Native Americans to choose a different word.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Frontier.
Holy shit.
Think about Frontier Airlines, right?
What's up with them?
They're in trouble.
They're fucked.
Your whole worldview is so utterly distorted and twisted, and the things you
believe are
totally untethered to reality, but yet you believe there's knowledge.
You believe it's knowledge because it's published.
And think about what it does to the students that pick this stuff up.
You go to college, you pick this up, you start majoring in it.
You could be majoring in something where you actually learn to do critical
thinking, to engage
with ideas.
If you're disadvantaged going into college, that's your best chance to get out
of that
situation is to grapple with great critical thinking, learn some great skills,
whether
that's, you know, engineering and the sciences, something like that, whether it's
even if
it's you want to get into, like, studying race and sociology, soft sciences, or
you want
to get into just literature, do it honestly and you're going to get somewhere.
But you get into this stuff where you can literally just make up your
conclusions.
What are you doing?
You're teaching these people how to think about problems.
They're seeing, you know, the burger in the Santa Monica Pier is a problem now.
I see it everywhere I go after I did this for a year.
So you get the people in the habit of seeing problems everywhere.
Are you helping them?
Are you getting them out of the problem?
Are you guys going to write a book about this or anything?
Yeah, we might one day.
I don't know.
It's a great idea for a book.
The hard part is we could actually probably write 10 books.
So condensing it down to a book, usually you got an idea and you got to blow it
up to
a book.
Right.
We have to condense this down to a book.
I think talking about the problem, like just explaining what you've already
explained
on this podcast and actually having those studies that you did publish and the
whole
thought process behind creating them would be a great book.
Well, we got a documentary happening about it.
Mike Naina is a documentarian from Australia that got hooked up with us.
Is he a white male?
He's not.
He's brown.
He's half black.
He's half black.
Watch out.
Tell him how we met Mike.
Oh, yeah.
So it's interesting because we were starting out this project and then we ended
up talking.
We couldn't talk to anybody about it.
It's so hard to keep a fucking secret this big, right?
You just want to tell people like you aren't going to believe what I'm doing.
I can't tell anybody.
So we find a few trusted friends.
We're telling this one guy, a buddy of ours, and he's like, oh my God, I know a
documentarian
who's making, who's like investigating all this shit going on in the
universities already.
He's already interested.
Would you guys be interested?
This would be a compelling documentary.
Would you guys be interested in talking to him?
So we get in touch with him and he's like, listen, you know, I'll shoot this.
I think there's a film here.
I think you're going to ruin your careers.
That's what I'm going to film.
But in any case, I'll film this.
But here's the deal.
I'm only going to shoot it if you commit 100% to transparency.
Let me tell the full story, honestly, what's really happening.
You know, we don't get to sugarcoat anything and make you guys look good.
And of course, he thought we were just going to crash and burn.
Yeah, that's what he told us later.
He's like, the only reason I agreed to this, I was sure that you guys were
going to torpedo
your careers, like positive.
Yeah.
And so he thought it was, you know, going to be that.
And he would have to like convince us to let him show it because we wouldn't
want to.
But does he know that you don't work in academia anymore?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But we were doing the project.
So we reached out to him and said, well, through the mutual friend.
How would it ruin your career?
Well, I maybe would never get another job if I wanted to go back into academia,
for example,
or I mean, I still, it hasn't happened yet.
But you see people who do academic misconduct get banned from ever publishing
academic papers
again.
That could still come down for me.
I don't know what it probably won't, but it might.
And if it does, you know, then if I try to get a job working for like a think
tank or
university or anything that depends on that, I'm locked out of that now.
So especially is going to ruin Pete's career, too.
So to be honest, he works in, he works in not just the university, but Portland
State.
You know, it's like ground zero.
Do you think it's over for you?
I don't know.
I don't know what's going to happen.
The people, when it's over for sure, they're always like, I'm not sure.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen.
I don't know.
It's best not to prognosticate too much with all this stuff.
You see, now we talked about Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying.
They got firebombed, right?
Their thing just blew up, blew the hell up.
And then they got pushed out of their jobs.
But in a sense, it's like, I don't know.
I was talking to them when we were in Portland and it feels like they kind of
took the fall.
And people are like, whoa, that's too far.
And I don't know if that's the case or not.
But if so, maybe.
Well, what's too far?
Like pushing people out of their jobs, like students patrolling the campus with
bats trying to find Brett to pull him out of his car if he showed up.
Yeah.
Like that, I don't care who you are.
That's too far.
I mean, that's not even civil society.
Who thought that was too far, though?
The students did?
Not there, but a lot of people.
Like people saw this stuff.
Enrollment is.
Like, did you think it was too far, right?
I thought it was insane.
I thought the government should have come in and shut down the school.
Yeah.
It really did.
Tons of people around.
I mean, like everyday people who saw this story think, whoa, shit, this stuff's
gone too far.
The fact that they're allowing that guy to remain as president.
Oh, yeah.
It's still there.
It's absolutely nuts.
It's absolutely nuts.
When there was that scene in the, wherever it was, conference room or wherever
it was, when the kids were telling him to put his hands down.
Yeah.
Because he's being aggressive with his hands.
Yeah.
And he puts his hands down and they start laughing.
Yep.
It's like, what in the fuck is this?
It is a system set up to where you can't win is what it is, deliberately.
But it's hilarious.
Well, it is.
They were laughing at him.
He put his hands down.
They're like, stop making hand gestures.
You're being aggressive.
He puts his hands down.
They started laughing.
They started laughing at him.
I didn't find it funny.
I found it terrifying.
I found it terrifying for what it means for all of us.
Yeah, if that can happen at a college campus.
I mean, that's where ideas are supposed to be shared, discussed, explored, et
cetera.
If that can happen at a college campus, everything's up for grabs at some point.
Well, that college campus is really strange, right?
It's really strange.
They're struggling now.
Enrollment's down.
Well, radically.
Radically down.
Yeah.
I mean, they could literally go under because of this.
It looks like it might happen, yeah.
It's too bad because when it was doing well, as Brett was explaining, it was a
wonderful place to teach because he could do whatever he wanted to.
Really cool stuff.
He could take them to the park and they could do a class in the park.
He could have a class where, you know, whatever, regardless of what he's
teaching, he could teach about something else.
Yeah, crazy field trips somewhere, you know, all this stuff, you know,
adventures with the students.
Didn't the creator of The Simpsons go there, too, speaking of The Simpsons?
I think he was an alum from there.
It's such a shame because they're just such decent people.
Yeah.
They're just such kind.
They're great.
They're both great.
They're both so smart, too.
So really legitimately smart.
And fiercely progressive.
And fiercely progressive.
They're decent humans.
Of course, which means they're alt-right adjacent.
Right.
Right.
It's just fucking hilarious, man.
These people.
It's a strange, strange time for ideas.
But I think this is also some sort of a symptom of this culture that we live in
where everyone gets to voice their opinion.
Everyone feels entitled to voice their opinion because of social media and
because of this instantaneous ability to post whatever you feel about anything,
whether it's a comment on YouTube or a tweet or a Facebook post.
This nature of everyone putting in input, instead of earning your right to be
heard, you know, and through merit and through your work and through people
saying, hey, this guy is smart.
This girl has great ideas.
This person really has some good points.
That's Tom Nichols' ideas.
Before, we used to criticize people from a point of expertise.
Now, people who have absolutely no expertise feel that they're entitled to not
only criticize but have everybody else listen to their criticisms.
I think you're on to something with the social media, right?
Because you post something and it gets like four interactions.
And you're like, well, how come Joe Rogan's thing got like 4,000?
It's not fair.
Right.
And so there's this like kind of competitive jealousy kind of thing going on.
And I think we've seen that a lot, you know, these kind of, you know, people
who don't have a lot to bring to the table and they want to get, you know,
maybe it's a spot on a podcast.
Maybe they want to get on, you know, a conference or something, a speaker at a
conference.
And we've seen this for years.
What happens is, well, you know, you got some big name that's coming.
Well, let's just like can him and say, well, he's a sexist.
He said this terrible thing.
Now he can't be at the conference or we'll protest.
Get him out.
Put one of our guys in.
Or when they start to get more power, it's like, let's make sure half of our
people are there or else we're going to make sure that we say your conference
is racist.
Then that becomes like just a hot mess.
Nobody wants to go to the conference.
It's not going to be financially soluble.
So it falls apart.
I mean, this stuff's been going on.
This seems to be what's going on.
And I think you're touching something where social media, and Tom Nichols talks
about it too, generating a kind of narcissism where people feel entitled.
Like, I have a voice.
Nobody's listening to me, but they should listen to me because they, of course,
think their ideas are great.
And the rise of social media coincides with shutting down speakers.
Absolutely.
Speakers on campus.
It didn't used to happen that way.
It used to be even if people protested it, the speech went on and people
debated that person.
Or the people got a chance during the Q&A section to challenge these ideas.
That's what it's all about.
That's what it's supposed to be all about.
Yeah.
You know, if you have a problematic person, you have a person that you feel is,
they have ideas that are questionable, you bring in a person whose ideas you
feel are counter to those ideas.
And you let the audience see how these individuals discuss these things.
When I was in high school, Barney Frank debated some guy from, he was some very
conservative person.
I forget what the, there was a ridiculous conservative group that had some
really funny name.
I forget what it was.
But he was like this really canned Ronald Reagan style conservative.
And Barney Frank was, I think he was still in the closet back then.
But he was this like very articulate, powerful left wing guy.
And they did it inside, you know, this court, this community center in our high
school, whatever it was, you know, some auditorium.
And I got a chance to watch this one guy talk about all these different, you
know, whatever it was, gay marriage or whatever is conservative ideas and
values.
And a marriage should be between a man and a woman and all these, these
different things that would, today at a lot of college campuses, you'd want
those shut down.
You don't want someone propagating these ideas.
Right.
But Barney Frank came on after him and eloquently dissected what was stupid
about it and what the constitution is all about.
What makes America great is our freedom and our ability to express ourselves.
And by doing so, me as a 16-year-old kid and the audience got to see ideas
dissected and ideas debated and see two people from polar opposite perspectives
just battle it out and let the best idea win.
And I'm sure there was probably some people that were in that audience that
came out of it with a different perspective.
Like, yeah, gay people shouldn't get married.
And yeah, marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman.
I'm sure of it.
I'm sure of it.
And that's what happens in a democracy.
Yes, that's...
You're talking about the very foundation of liberal society.
You're talking about John Stuart Mill here.
I mean, you're talking about John Adams.
You're talking about the foundation of a liberal society here.
And that's what the scholarship runs, what we looked at, runs directly counter
to this.
Remember, the idea is that if people are putting out language, the idea that
some people are going to come away with a heteronormative idea or a homophobic
idea, that's already a catastrophe.
Yes.
So we can't allow it.
We've got to pull the speaker wires like a demor event.
We've got to...
Yeah.
We can't let that go on.
Yeah, that's my point.
It's like, what happened where, you know, these kind of interactions between
contrary ideas is so...
It's so dangerous that one or two people could possibly be shifted.
I mean, even if it's 30% of the audience.
I mean, who the fuck knows what's going to happen when people are sitting there
listening?
And who's to say that you're right or you're wrong?
That the way to challenge ideas is not pulling the plug on the speakers.
It's better ideas.
If you fundamentally subscribe to the idea that heteronormativity, let's use it
as the example,
if heteronormativity is the power structure that's holding down gay people and
preventing them from having equal opportunities,
if you fundamentally believe that, anybody else getting convinced, anybody
being reinforced under the idea of heteronormativity,
isn't just a few, like 70% changed their mind and 30% stuck with it.
That's just bolstering the already imagined to be completely dominant view.
It's really kind of anti-progress, right?
Because it views the idea that power structures can't change.
They're always rooted in some identity.
Whoever has, you know, there's more straight people than gay people are okay.
So therefore, straight people always have power.
Therefore, anything that reinforces heteronormativity is going to be a
catastrophe that reinforces.
And the next thing you know, people are going to be beating gays in the snow or
something like that.
It's also the complete infantilization of young adults.
That's it.
Because you're telling me these young adults aren't smart enough to
differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas.
Well, if they're learning all this grievance study stuff, like I just said,
their critical thinking is getting hobbled.
But here's my point.
If you're a person who's a young, progressive, well-read person who's got some
rock-solid ideas about people being able to live their lives without
discrimination and all the things that I'm sure we all agree on,
and you sat and listened to some right-wing, alt-right asshole spewing hate, is
it going to change you?
No.
Is it going to affect you?
Of course it's not.
No.
So who is it going to affect?
Like, who are these ideas going to reach?
Why do we assume that people are so much more easily influenced than we are?
What is that about?
This isn't this infantilization of young adults.
It is.
It's bubble wrap on kids.
It's fucking, it's nerfing the world.
Sharp corners, got to put a fucking cushion over it.
Exactly, and Lucanoff and Haidt just published that book, The Coddling of the
American Mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think if you look at Haidt's work and the Heterodox Academy, and he's
fighting for this, but we have infantilized people.
We have infantilized students, and I don't, I hope that the tide is changing.
I don't know.
One of the things we wanted to do with this project is give people the
opportunity to speak out and say, you know, they don't speak for me.
I want to hear what someone has to say about immigration, the other side, quote,
unquote.
Sure.
I want to hear what, I want to hear the best arguments, because then I want to
engage them myself.
And, you know, I also think that we should have people of all, I think it's a
problem that people who go into teaching, I can't remember what the study I
read, the overwhelming percentage of people, college educators, are on the left.
I'm on the left.
I think that's a problem.
I think that they need diverse voices.
Diversity also has to be ideological diversity.
And if you want people to be less brittle, and if you want people to be less
infantilized, they have to hear the other side.
But they have to hear, this is also Mill's idea, they have to hear it from
people who believe it.
Yeah.
That's in John Stuart Mill's book on liberty.
It's not enough to have heard that the other side, the argument from the other
side exists.
You need to hear the best case put forward by people who really, really
subscribe to it.
And then work against that.
If you can defeat that, then it deserves to be defeated, right?
Yeah.
And this is the thing.
I think, you know, in general, human beings, we all put forth our best ideas,
and we're all wrong most of the time.
We can be a smart guy or a smart woman, whatever.
We're all pretty stupid.
We put forth a lot of ideas.
Most of them are wrong.
It's true for everybody.
It's true for you, me, everybody.
And what we should really be relying on is, you know, I put down an idea, and
you're like, well, I don't know about that.
And so we start cutting away the bullshit that I tucked into my idea, the stuff
I didn't have right.
We do that, and now the idea that survives that process is better.
And then somebody else comes along and says, wait, wait, wait, that part's
probably a little bit bullshit, but this you could add to it and make it better.
And then some of that's wrong.
And this is the process of how we really produce knowledge.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's what gives us a vibrant culture, too.
Right.
And as opposed to what we see here, where the three of us can make up a
conclusion and write a paper to support it.
And then if you criticize it, you had to have criticized it because you were
sexist or because you were racist.
If you do a scientific test that shows that it's wrong, the science must have
been sexist or racist.
You know, anything, once you're doing that, you're just, you're really in the
weeds.
You're not helping anybody.
Right.
And we need to study these areas, gender and race, but we need to do it right.
Yeah, and we need to do it freely where you could just talk and you don't, you
don't get accused of all sorts of horrible transgressions.
Exactly.
And that's not, that's the culture that I, that we want to see in here.
And that's not the culture we have.
Well, I think there's, you know, everyone is railing against identity politics.
And I think we can all agree identity politics are a huge problem.
Yeah.
But another problem that goes along with it hand in hand is identifying
personally with ideas where these ideas are connected to your ego.
Your identity.
To who you are.
Exactly.
Yeah, I wrote a book about that.
Did you?
Yeah.
What's it called?
Everybody's Wrong About God, and it sounds like I'm just going to go after
religion, but it's actually the culmination of my study of religious psychology.
And so really what it was was targeting, I mean, it talks about what's going on
with religion and why people believe religion and what God actually stands for
in terms of, you know, psychology as it might see it.
But then what it was really targeting was I saw all these people who are like,
you know, loudmouth atheists, and they were like this and that and the other
thing, and they have this whole community, and I saw, holy shit, they're doing
the same thing.
Yes.
Right?
They're doing the same thing.
And what are they doing?
They're identifying as an atheist.
I am an atheist.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
Well, I want to be a good atheist.
How the fuck do you be a good atheist?
That doesn't make any sense.
Do you remember Atheism Plus?
Atheism Plus was exactly what I was looking at, bro.
That was my favorite.
That was gold.
I watched a whole speech, like, smoking a joint and laughing my fucking ass off
at this dork who was speaking in front of some other group of dorks that were
all part of the Atheism Plus movement.
And he just kept just ranting about sexual harassment and diversity and all
these different things and attaching them to atheism.
Exactly.
Motherfucker, you're making your own religion.
Exactly.
That's what you're doing.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
Hi, Joe Rogan saw it straight through it.
You know, there it is.
I was laughing.
Dude, he was so...
Because the guy was such a virtue-signaling little weasel.
Oh, totally.
Totally.
Sneaky fucker.
Sneaky little fucker.
Yeah, a little sneaky fucker that was trying to get girls to like him.
I guarantee you that.
Yep.
You see what it is, though.
I've got to be a good atheist.
How do I do it?
Well, I don't know.
Because Atheist means don't believe stuff of a certain kind.
So they have to start tagging...
Plus, it was so strange.
And it was...
Plus what?
Plus social justice.
How did that...
It died off because it didn't work.
Well, those people are still grumbling around or whatever.
But what happened to it, I think they...
Oh, I doubt it.
Oh, they've got a whole blog.
They complain about our project.
Yeah.
You know what they said?
They're still there.
Yeah, we're straight white men.
Oh, well, you're straight white men.
We're there for...
We have bad motivations.
Motivations.
That's what we get all the time.
Because we're straight white men.
Because bad white men, straight white men are basically like a little arrow
running around
looking for vaginas.
And anything you say is basically just a little sneaky way for you to get
inside of a vagina.
And all of this little stuff.
You just try...
Making your way through society.
It's a little ironic when you put it that way.
It's what it is, right?
But the truth is, though, if they think that...
I mean, this is the article of faith here, is that privilege exists and always
preserves
itself.
So we're straight white men.
We criticized what's supposed to be, but isn't, social justice work.
It's bad social justice work.
You know, capital social justice.
It's screwed up.
So we criticize that.
Therefore, why?
We must be, because we're white men, trying to preserve our status.
Because it's our motivations and we're...
Of course.
You guys are a problem.
And that was the depth of their analysis, given that they're, you know, like,
some of them
are professors and stuff.
That's the best they could come up with.
And wouldn't it have been better to say, you know what?
There's a problem here.
Yeah.
And we want to study this stuff and we need to clean house.
And thank you, guys.
We appreciate it.
But you would have to step so far out of your belief system and be so objective
and so self-aware
that you're realizing you're in some sort of a preposterous group.
And very few people are willing to admit that most of their life's work has
been nonsense.
Yeah, especially when you get rewarded for that, you get promoted for that, you
get accolades from that.
You carry status and privilege.
Look, I mean, when people join some fucking wacky cult, like, they don't join
it saying,
ah, this is bullshit, but it'll be fun.
They believe it.
Right.
They buy into it.
Yeah.
And this is no different.
It's like what we're talking about, about ideologies, how people, they lock
into these predetermined
patterns of thinking and behavior.
And this is what's happening here.
And it's very much like a cult.
It's very much like any other groupthink sort of environment.
It's like Scientology grew up in the university.
Yes.
So everything they put out about thetans and volcanoes or whatever they've got,
all of a
sudden, that's not like just crazy, you know, L. Ron Hubbard, was it Dianetics
or whatever.
That's gold standard knowledge, academic press, Oxford, you know.
Yeah, so you get a degree.
Yeah, and then you get to teach it.
And as somebody wrote an article criticizing his history, and they're like, oh,
they don't
understand, you know, they think we just talk to each other in a bubble.
We talk to policymakers.
We talk to media.
And it's like, no shit.
That's why we did this.
You know, you talk to, you do talk to other people.
You are running into, you know, PR, sorry, HR departments.
You're telling them how to do the diversity officers and all this.
They're institutionalizing.
They're institutionalizing.
And to talk to policymakers, I get emails.
I don't know if you saw a year before all this, we did this really, you know,
bad attempt
at it called conceptual penis as a social construct.
So we said that penises are a social construct and they cause climate change.
And this got a little bit of attention.
I've been getting emails ever since then from some member of EU parliament.
And they're like, we have another gender initiative that we're going to try to
basically foist
upon, you know, EU.
And then it's going to like dictate how Europe now works with Africa going
forward about climate.
And so because I wrote this conceptual penis and climate change thing, and it's
all based
on, you know, making fun of gender studies.
It was at the time anyway.
They were like, you know, you're an expert.
So now that EU's calling me, you know, what do we do about this gender
initiative?
But that's real, right?
The EU parliament's not like nothing.
That's not, that's not, you know, it's not like a meeting of some dorks at a
conference.
That's real.
They're coming up with policy to dictate how they want to interact with Africa
for the
next, you know, 20, 30 years.
That's real.
And these people are emailing me saying, this scholarship that you guys are
criticizing is
really, you know, it's on the agenda of the EU parliament.
So help.
All right.
Well, it seems like what we're, what we have here is sort of a wave of ideas,
right?
It goes in and it goes out.
It's going back and forth.
And you need this sort of balancing act.
And things need to go so haywire that people step in and go, well, I'm pulling
my fucking
kids out of Evergreen State.
This is crazy.
And that's a great example of a place that went too far.
Yeah.
And what we don't want to have happen is we don't want people to pull their
kids out of
the universities because there are some.
Not the university, but these departments don't major in it.
Exactly.
Don't major in it.
But it's.
Which department specific?
Gender studies, critical race studies, cultural studies.
Queer theory.
Fat studies, if it happens to have one.
I read a biography of a guy who teaches critical whiteness.
Oh, yeah.
Critical whiteness is a thing.
That actually, there was a journal and then it got, it got so out there that it
got criticized
out of existence.
But it's a big thing.
There's some big paper I was reading just before we went public with all this
and I got
asked about it.
Luckily, I read it because we did the Mein Kampf.
Of course, Israel's like, you got Mein Kampf published.
Oh my God, we need to talk to you.
Israel, like TV, you know, I was on Israeli TV.
What the hell?
And so all these Israeli journalists are calling me, talking to me about it.
And over the Mein Kampf, and I read this one paper.
They're like, well, do you think that Jewish studies is like this?
And I found this paper just before this all came out.
There was Jewish studies criticizing critical whiteness studies because there's
this whole
thing about how the critical whiteness people accuse the Jews of being white.
And then there's all this, you know, who's, where does the oppression lie?
Because, you know, the Jews have had it pretty rough over, you know, the last 2,000
years
or thereabouts.
But then you got the critical whiteness people being like, no, they're white.
It's a white privilege, blah, blah, blah.
And then the Jewish studies people are like, hold up, you know, don't put us up
here and
say that we're all white supremacists.
You know, we were gassed by the white supremacists.
You can chill out.
So there's this huge, like, critical studies fight between the Jewish studies
people and
the critical whiteness people over whether Jews count as white people or not
and have
white supremacy built in.
And they asked me about this, the Israeli journalist did, and I was like, well,
you know, I have to
sympathize with what their argument is, but they're still using the same broken
methods.
And so you still want to see better methods, right?
I think the Jewish people have a point.
You know, we've been pretty heavily oppressed for 2,000 years.
You start with, like, you know, the Romans decimating them and then the diaspora
and then the
Holocaust and every, it's just not good.
So I think they have a point that, you know, don't just say, oh, we have crazy
white privilege
and they're there for white supremacists.
But if you want to do that, you know, maybe this methodology of complaining
about it's not
the best way to go.
It's complicated stuff, but at least they're against the critical whiteness
stuff.
This critical whiteness thing you were saying, is they have a journal?
They did.
The Journal of Whiteness Studies or something like that, critical whiteness.
And what happened to it?
It lasted for about three years and I don't know exactly why it fell apart, but
it fell
apart because I was really upset because I wanted to send a paper to it and it
doesn't
exist anymore.
What were you going to send a paper on?
The rewrite of Mein Kampf where the woman, the lesbian woman excoriates her own
whiteness.
I was going to send it to that journal and then it doesn't exist anymore.
So I had to send it to a critical race journal who then said, ah, it's a good
idea, but
you're positioning yourself as a good white and that's a problem.
All these papers, by the way, they're all online.
We were completely transparent and honest with everybody.
There's a Google Drive.
A Google Drive with every paper, all the peer review comments.
All the review comments, everything, the Mike Naino's videos, everything is up
there.
It's totally free for everybody.
Yeah, we get accused of being grifters.
We don't have, how?
How are we grifting?
It's in a Google Drive that anybody can just go download all of it.
I don't recall getting money for that.
We want to, we really do think that, and I'm, yeah, there you go.
Swedish professor rebels against university's critical white studies.
This is new, yeah.
Oh yeah, a couple days ago.
One of Sweden's most merited and acclaimed political scientists and long-term
critics of
identity politics, Bo Rothstein, has argued that identity-based disciplines
like Grievance Studies,
which deals with the concept of collective guilt, have no place in academia.
Yeah, Grievance Studies is, yeah, right on.
Yeah, that guy's inspired.
Yeah, we, we, we, we came up with Grievance Studies, so it's delighted to see
that that's caught on.
Bo, start a podcast immediately and a Patreon page so that you don't have to
worry about losing your house.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Right on.
I mean, I don't know how it is in Sweden.
Yeah, I don't either, but that guy's probably screwed.
Whatever the fuck they did with Jordan Peterson, they created a goddamn monster.
Oh, yeah.
You guys fucked up.
You guys created a multi-millionaire who's worldwide famous and is a huge bestseller.
He was just talking to Swedish politicians on TV the other day, so, you know,
watch out.
They fucked up with him.
Boy, did they fuck up.
And Dave was just texting me, a friend, Ruben, was just texting me pictures
that are all full.
It's crazy and the energy in that place is crazy.
He's selling out 5,000 seat theaters.
He's a rock star.
He's a fucking rock star.
He's an intellectual rock star.
It's hilarious.
Good for him.
Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of other guys are doing it too.
Sam Harris is doing that now as well.
Yeah.
They're doing these gigantic, huge speeches.
It's like.
Good for him.
Fine.
Well, absolutely good for him.
But what I'm excited about is how many people are interested in the debate of
ideas and that this is not happening on the college campuses.
That's right.
But a lot of these people that are graduated, have graduated from college or,
you know, are in the working world, they're very fascinated by this.
It's real.
It's what you were saying.
It's been suppressed for long enough.
Now, you know, Jordan Peterson, what was his thing?
He's like, you're not going to tell me the words I can use.
Right.
When there's 78 different words for genders, I can safely say you're fucking
crazy.
Yeah.
It's like this desperation to try to find a unique identity that you can
consider to be super special or whatever.
It's totally.
But it's.
And you want to see even crazier as you go into, like, you go on these blogs,
and I think they're mostly on Tumblr or something.
It violates my rule, never use Tumblr, where they talk about the different
sexuality identities, like different kinds of, you know,
I'm interested in this kind of person, but not this kind of person under these
circumstances, but not under those, that has, like, some, you know, 18-syllable
academic word for it now.
And there's people whose whole, I don't think they're academics, I think they're
activists and geeks on Tumblr, but they come up with these crazy descriptions.
There's, like, hundreds of sexual orientations.
Yeah, it's just people wanting to be different.
I think so.
They want to be special, and they're not good at anything.
That's, I think, a thing.
So that was the other part of, I guess, one of the things that Jim said when I
said I was more cynical.
I think that the, in general, the critics tend to be angry, and I'm not saying
that their anger is legitimate or illegitimate, but they seem to be angry.
They seem to be almost universally under-accomplished.
Yes.
So they're upset at you because you have whatever, a big show or a lot of
followers, whatever they're upset about, big platform or audience, they're just
generally disagreeable people, and they found these communities of other people
who are enraged, who are also under-accomplished, who they can lash out at
people together and then virtue signal, you know, get rewarded for, oh, you
know, Rogan, that bat, whatever they want to call you or whatever they want to
call us or whoever else.
Some kind of an oppressor, probably.
Yeah, some kind of an oppressor.
And there's something that's so, I don't know how we can deal with that.
I mean, our attempt to do this was to try to delegitimize where they get their
knowledge from, like what they call knowledge, what they could point to.
We tried to say it's not knowledge and delegitimize it.
But we really do need to get back to some kind of productive discussion,
productive politics where the far right disown their lunatics and we disown our
lunatics.
And we get back to work about whatever, the oceans, plastic, whatever it is
that we're talking about.
Because right now the discourse is corrupted.
We're not doing what we need to do in the academies.
These people are continuing to pump out this nonsense that's totally untethered
to reality.
It's a huge problem.
I'm sick of it.
You're sick of it.
We're all sick of it.
We're all sick of it.
We're sick of it.
I'm sick of it.
I've had it.
I've had it with these folks.
It just doesn't seem like it's sustainable.
I don't think it is.
It seems like some weird thing that's going to run out of energy.
Well, it's eating itself.
It constantly eats itself.
Like we did the thing about the people of color and the black indigenous people
of color.
They fragmented.
You see when you get into the critical race literature that it's like, okay, so
you're brown or you're black, but you have slightly lighter skin, slightly
darker skin, slightly darker than that, really dark.
They have different levels of privilege.
And it's just cutting things apart.
The idea, though, that this is going to create some kind of a coalition that
can then defeat, you know, the plurality or something like that is ridiculous.
It's exactly the opposite.
So what do you see?
You see this stuff starting to blow up.
You see the Democrats bleed seats.
They've lost like a thousand legislative seats across the U.S. since Obama got
elected in 08.
How are you going to get your agenda if you don't have any legislators, if you
don't have anybody elected?
And so then what happens?
2016.
I can't say that the reason that Trump got elected, because there's lots of
reasons, had something to do – no, I will say it had something to do with
this because every conservative person I know that's not just a reactionary is
like – and I live in the southeast, man.
I know some conservatives.
Most of my friends are conservatives because I don't have a choice.
If I want to have friends, they're going to be conservatives.
It's who lives there.
So I talk to them and they're like, oh, yeah, they're tearing down this kind of
statue.
Oh, yeah.
And it's not like they're tearing down Confederate statues.
They're tearing down Thomas Jefferson.
You know, it's like they're –
George Washington.
George Washington.
Halloween's a problem.
Whoa, whoa, whoa.
I didn't know.
You didn't know Halloween's a problem?
No.
Where are you going with us for Halloween?
I'm a shark.
You're a shark?
My kids are mermaids.
Is that my problematic?
Oh, God.
If they're mermaids and you're a shark, you are definitely taking like a
dominant power position.
That's power.
They pick my outfit.
I don't pick my outfit.
I have kids.
Oh, oh.
They tell me what I am.
Is it an issue?
I don't know.
I'll try to figure out a paper for that.
Yeah.
But what's wrong with Halloween?
Halloween?
Yes.
Oh, God.
Cultural appropriation.
Sean White apologizes for Tropic Thunder Simple Jack costume.
Oh, no.
He dressed up as a black person.
No, Simple Jack is the mentally handicapped person.
Oh, yeah.
Okay, okay.
That's right.
I don't know who that is.
Robert Downey Jr. might be the last guy ever to wear blackface.
Yeah, that's true.
And pull it off.
When are they going to pull that show?
When are they going to pull Tropic Thunder is problematic.
I don't even know the show.
There's probably a paper.
You never saw Tropic Thunder?
Never.
God damn it.
It's a funny movie.
Yeah.
It's wonderful.
You'll love it.
And it's entirely politically incorrect.
Yeah, it's as politically incorrect.
I'm writing it down.
Tropic Thunder is a fucking great movie.
It is a gem.
It's a great movie.
It's really funny.
See, now we're going to be racist and ableist for saying that it's funny.
Oh, yeah, for sure.
We've got real issues.
We do have issues.
What's wrong with Halloween again?
Halloween is, well, mostly there's a lot of cultural appropriation going on.
So somebody might dress up like I put on a sombrero and a poncho.
That's an issue.
Yeah.
That's an issue.
It's an issue.
Especially on Tuesday if we have tacos today.
Yeah, you can't be a Native American.
You can't be a Native American.
There was that big stink just now about the Victoria's Secret fashion show
where they had
their indigenous colors and their feathers they were wearing and walking around
half naked.
You can't do that.
So it's the idea mostly that people are going to take costumes that are insensitive
to other people.
Cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation.
So it's not possible.
Can you still dress up as Bruce Lee?
Oh, man, I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Because he's Asian.
For a while.
At Harvard, maybe, because he's Asian and it gets complicated.
But no, this all blew up at Yale a few years ago, I thought, for sure.
Yes.
Nick Christophels.
Yeah, yeah.
How do you say his last name?
Christakis, I think.
Christakis.
Yeah, something.
So it blew up on him.
He's coming on soon.
Yeah, he's cool.
Oh, he's a good guy.
Yeah, that was hilarious.
Those kids screaming at him.
Screaming at him.
It's supposed to be a safe place.
Yep.
It was just his wife put out an email saying, maybe it's okay to be politically
incorrect on Halloween.
Yeah, it was just, you know, choose your costume how you're going to choose it.
We're all adults.
It's probably bad to be deliberately offensive.
And yet, it's also bad to overreact to incidental stuff.
Oh, yeah.
It's all this stuff.
Like, little girls, if they're white, can't dress up as Mulan.
Oh, that's right.
Pocahontas.
I forgot about that.
Pocahontas is a new one.
Yeah.
Pocahontas problem.
But I think Bruce Lee is still on the menu.
I don't think anybody's gotten in trouble for being Bruce Lee.
You could wear, like, the tracksuit.
Yeah, I get the tracksuit.
Like, Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill.
Oh, yeah, that's a big footprint across my chest, right?
Footprint?
Yeah, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar kicked him.
Right, right, right, right.
But a lot of people go with, like, the cuts.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I don't have enough abs for that.
That's going to be a bad costume.
What is this?
Yeah, you could buy a Bruce Lee costume.
Look at that.
For now.
For now.
For now.
Who knows?
Oh, it comes with a wig, too.
Yeah, dope.
For now.
Oh, even a baby costume.
Look at that.
Look at that.
As long as you're Chinese, that baby's Chinese.
That's fine.
Oh, that guy's fucked.
Yeah, that guy's going down.
Can't be a Kung Fu guy.
No.
No.
Not allowed.
Can't be a ninja.
No, way too much cultural appropriation.
Boy.
This mess that we're in.
Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
I think so.
Yeah?
Yeah, I think so.
The response that we've got so far has been really positive.
It's all, like, the secret positive.
So the feeling I get is that...
In academia.
Well, from academics, yeah.
The general public has been way more positive than that.
Super positive.
Super positive.
Super supportive.
So the wind is changing, right?
If we're getting that much...
We got no real blowback.
We got lots of positivity from the public.
Even academics are reaching out.
They're, like, secret positive.
With them, it's like, one more thing, right?
We need a critical mass, because what they are is they're all lined up.
They know the first one to step out of line and challenge the stuff's getting
shot.
It's like the communist situation.
After communism fell, nobody really believed it anymore.
But they had to go along with the party, or they're going to get shot.
But if a whole bunch of people come forward at once, they can't shoot everybody.
So it feels like we're in that powder keg situation now, right?
Where all it's going to take is...
We hoped it was going to be this.
You know, our thing was going to be the trigger that let 30% of academics come
forward and say,
you know, it's bullshit.
And if enough people start saying it, other people start feeling safe to say it.
We wish more people feel safe.
You know, we took a risk.
It's been fine for us.
We'll see what happens to Pete.
But if more people take that risk and start speaking out,
then there's change coming.
Now, you work...
You were a mathematician.
Yeah.
And that's your background in academia.
That would appear at least to be something that is beyond all this stuff,
because it's just dealing with numbers.
Yeah, math itself mostly has not been touched by this.
But there's this whole branch in there that's called the studies of science and
technology.
And mostly what they go after is, you know, the sciences or whatever,
especially they go after biology and psychology.
And they feel like they've got a lot of inroads into that.
We wrote the astronomy paper to try to push that all the way to a hard science.
We said that astronomy is sexist and can only be fixed by putting in queer horoscopes.
They thought that was a good project.
They keep asking him to rewrite it.
Yeah, they keep asking me to submit that.
I got an email yesterday asking for that one again.
So, even though we've come public.
So, with math, mostly where you see this stuff hitting, though, they don't...
I mean, some people are saying that math has inherently got sexism or racism
because, I guess, apparently women and minorities are going to be naturally bad
at numbers,
is what they're assuming.
I don't know what they're assuming.
That's ludicrous.
But they mostly go after education.
So, they say, oh, look, the scores, the SAT math scores or whatever,
for men, white men are higher than for black men or something like that.
Why could that be?
Well, you know, maybe there are a lot of factors that go into that,
but they don't give a shit about a lot of factors.
It's racism.
So, therefore, math education must be racist.
Therefore, we need social justice initiatives in math education.
And that's exactly what they do.
And so, then you have diversity math, and I don't even know what that is.
But it's not something that you would see, like, at mathematics research level.
It's something that you see at junior high school, elementary school,
that they're teaching your kids, which is why it's scary as hell.
So, is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Yeah, I still think there's a lot.
I think people hate this stuff.
I think people are getting sick.
People outside hate it.
People outside hate it.
And people inside hate it, too, though.
But they're afraid.
Yeah, I had this guy come up to me repeatedly last week.
This guy, he's got two PhDs.
Brilliant guy.
He comes up to me repeatedly.
What you did is so important.
It's so necessary.
I can't talk about it.
I'm sorry I can't talk about it.
I wish I could talk about it.
But I talk to a lot of academics, and everybody's saying the same thing.
They know you got them.
It's only a matter of time now.
One more event, and they shake off the fear.
I think it's close.
I don't know what the next event is.
I don't think it's more bogus papers.
I think it's probably somebody getting fired that didn't deserve it or
something like that.
One more thing, and people are going to be ready to shake this off.
Why does this ideology infect tech companies?
And it seems to get them more than it gets anyone else.
What is it?
You should ask Damore that.
I don't know.
He's fucked.
That guy can't get a job.
He just got one.
I just talked to him the other day.
He just got one.
Well, don't say where he's working.
No, definitely not.
They'll go after him.
Yeah, I don't know why it's in tech so much.
Maybe there's some kind of Silicon Valley connection there or whatever,
where, you know, Silicon Valley is in, you know, the kind of Bay Area,
California.
You've got a lot of the liberal hippie stuff that started out,
as you were talking about, in the 60s and 70s.
So it's kind of in the water there.
In general, I would say that what you're seeing is that this stuff has,
the big turn to making this applied was in the 90s, right?
So they've had an entire generation of students that have just been
really getting this stuff crammed down their throat.
They really have taken over the education in the last 10 years.
It was just starting when I left academia.
In 2010, that, you know, it was like, oh, we're going to focus on diversity.
We're going to have diversity commitments.
It's going to get into the general curriculum.
So you're getting more and more students that are getting educated in this
that are now going out into the workplace, right?
So if half your workforce in tech, because tech moves so fast,
I'm just guessing why this might be a thing.
Tech moves really fast.
So you've got to have some fresh training to go in there.
If they've been educated with diversity stuff crammed down their throat the
whole time
and there's huge initiatives to try to, you know, increase representation of
women in particular
in tech, and these are seen as, you know, automatically good initiatives.
If there's been – this is the culture that they're being educated in,
and then they take that culture to the workplace and think this is what tech is
about,
and then they're surrounded by like-minded people who encourage it,
it's totally plausible that what you've got is sort of a tech echo chamber
that's bouncing these things around and keeping it there.
Here's another question.
Why is it that – I mean, here's the scenario, right?
The scenario is universities are almost predominantly taught by people that are
on the left.
It's massive.
It's in the 90% range, right?
When you have this sort of environment of these nonsense ideas that are
accepted as fact
and taught and put into published papers,
then you have a situation where the left routinely attacks itself
and devours itself for not being left enough.
You're always having people that are upset that someone's not progressive
enough.
Left-wing people attacking left-wing people.
You do not see that on the right.
Well, you did.
That's kind of what the whole Tea Party movement was, right?
But they didn't do it in the academic field because they didn't have power
there.
Because they weren't academics.
Right.
Well, yeah, that shift started in the 60s and 70s.
They started bringing in these –
But the Tea Party field, when – that was during the Obama administration,
right?
Yeah.
So that's when – what was the biggest fear for every Republican congressman
then was that they're going to get primaried from the right.
So they were going to have some populist Yahoo go screaming about whatever they
scream about.
There's going to be more to the right, harder conservatism, conservative
movement, capital C, capital M kind of thing.
And they're going to just drill into the – you know, the reason that the
conservative politics aren't succeeding is because we're not conservative
enough.
That's the prevailing view where I live in the southeast.
It's the same thing as you see in the universities but reversed in terms of
polarization.
So – but isn't that just an excuse for the lack of success?
It is.
It's –
But with the people on the left –
It's an excuse combined with a commitment to the ideology, whether it's
conservative movement ideology, whether it's social justice, scholarship,
whatever it happens to be.
Right, but you see far more of these left-on-left attacks than you do right-on-right
attacks.
You do right now, yeah, certainly.
Except, of course, for election time.
Sure.
When people are trying to, you know, beat their opponents.
Sure, sure, sure.
It just – it seems to me that they're somehow or another related.
I mean, I would like to look at how many people on the left will attack others
for not being progressive enough, not being left enough.
So I think it's a panic, right?
You see, this is the kind of behavior you see in a panic, a moral panic, for
example.
And so Helen and I, the third person who worked on the project with us, Helen
and I wrote an essay about a year and a half ago and talking about how the
extremism on both sides is really the problem and most people reject it and
should fight it.
Most of us are sensible people in the middle who hate this.
In fact, data just came out showing that it's 80% of the population hate the fringes,
both sides.
So – and only 8% are on the left and 12% are on the right of the fringe,
however that works out.
And so we wrote this thing and we said that what's going on actually – we
called it existential polarization.
So you have this idea that everything's an existential crisis.
So the far right – we'll start with them – sees that if the Democrats get
power, oh, it's open borders, the terrorists are coming in, our entire way of
life is going to be destroyed.
Catastrophe, catastrophe.
Oh, no, Judith Butler is going to be 95 genders.
Quick, stop the Democrats no matter what.
And then you have the left, oh, my God, if they get power, everything's going
to be racist.
We're going to be beating gays in the snow.
It's going to just be the worst thing in the whole world.
That's actually kind of a joke.
But it's for real, though, that they think that the world is going to fall
apart if the other side gets power.
And so when you have that kind of a situation, you have a panic and you see the
slightest bit of advantage happening on the other side is just something to
completely freak out about.
And then what do you do?
You say, oh, well, the only possible recipe to balance the scale is to turn
further our way.
If we go toward the middle, that puts the balance.
Say if the right goes really far right and we on the left move toward the
middle, now the whole balance has moved right.
So the only way to keep the balance close to the middle is if they go right, we
go left.
Right?
So then that's going to keep the balance.
But what that actually does is this is going to get nerdy.
Hang on.
That actually puts all of the weight on the outsides.
And you think about a spinning thing, right?
It's got centrifugal forces happening.
What's that trying to do?
It's going to rip the spinning thing apart.
Well, if you have all the weight crammed in the middle, like a wheel, it doesn't
come apart, right?
Now imagine if you had like two billiard balls and you have like this big long
stick and there's two holes for the billiard bars.
They don't go in it like locked in.
They're just sitting there.
And you spin that.
What's going to happen?
They're going to fly right off, right?
So if you have all the weight on the outside and you start spinning a thing, so
that's like the political conversations, the dynamic, it's going to rip the
thing apart the more weight gets to the outside.
So one side going to the fringe doesn't mean the other side should go to the
fringe.
That's how you tear a nation apart.
That actually makes a lot of sense if you can conceptualize it like an object.
There's really a damn good YouTube video floating around out there where
somebody takes a jet of water and spins a skateboard wheel until the centrifugal
force gets so high from it spinning so fast it rips it apart.
It's worth looking up.
I don't know what the hell you'd search to find it, but it's a powerful visual
and you can see it.
As stuff moves to the outside, the centrifugal force goes up and up and up
until finally the thing, the structural integrity of the thing that's spinning
can't hold itself together anymore.
It rips apart.
Well, listen, gentlemen, and shout out to your friend.
What is her name again?
Mike Naina.
Oh, Helen Pluckrose.
Oh, Helen Pluckrose.
Pluckrose across the pond.
Thank you guys for doing this.
We really appreciate it.
Thanks for being here.
Yeah, man.
We appreciate your support because we need support.
We can't do this without support, so thanks for having us.
My pleasure.
Thanks for doing it.
Where can people see these things?
Where can they read them?
The best place to go is going to be to go to our filmmaker's YouTube page, Mike
Naina on the YouTube.
N-A-N-A?
N-A-Y-N-A.
N-A-Y-N-A.
Yeah, so on his YouTube page is some videos.
He's kind of playing with the footage that he's collecting for the documentary.
On top of that, though, if you go to the video we originally released, which is
on the page, you can find it easily.
There's the link to the Google Drive.
There's a link to all of the documents we put out.
To our aerial piece, we explained what every paper does, why we wrote it, what
we were trying to show with writing the papers, what the problem is that we
need to address, and what we think that this shows and what we can do.
Yeah, it's all accessible through his YouTube channel.
We're kind of making that the central hub, and so people can go there and
explore and watch some more videos of us.
Well, thanks for being here.
This was a lot of fun.
I appreciate it.
Again, I really appreciate what you guys are doing.
Thanks, man.
Thank you.
Bye, everybody.
Thank you again.
you