James Lindsay: Cynical Theories and the Failing University

welcome everyone to the 41st episode of thinking out loud today we're joined by james lindsey this is his third time on the podcast and every time he's on i always get depressed as he makes his compelling case for why our academic institutions are in serious trouble he has a book out that he wrote alongside helen pluck rose who was also on the podcast titled cynical theories they document what's going on with critical theories and how they got into the university as well as why they're bad for a functioning society in this episode we talk about quite a bit ranging from topics such as this idea of guilt by association the changing cultural landscape his book obviously and much more it's honestly been such a pleasure to have gotten friendly with him as he was able to properly diagnose this craziness that i've been witnessing not just on my university campus but in the public consciousness as well as i said in the podcast the first time i encountered these crazy woke ideas was on a one by one basis and it was difficult for me to fully grasp where all of this was coming from i think this is what lindsay and pluck rose brilliantly answer in their book anyways i hope you enjoyed this episode okay i very controversially went on glenn beck's show today oh no [ __ ] that's what i did this afternoon it's like the fourth time i've been on there it's all good but yeah i mean that that's one of the problems is this whole guilt by association thing deborah so got that when she came out with her book the end of gender and then people are saying that she's catering towards the right-wing audience because she went on ben shapiro show and she went on dave rubin and so it's this whole thing where it's like you want to have an honest conversation but at the same time your message gets diluted based on the i guess meta aspects of what it is that you're doing yeah i've actually been getting some heat about that um recently and my my answer to the people that want to play guilt by association is [ __ ] them i mean that's it i don't care anymore about guilt by association because i actually think it's the poison that's tearing society apart that you aren't allowed to have a conversation with somebody in case they use your words or your ideas for nefarious purposes i was so frustrated with it last year that i actually wanted to create a policy because i wanted to create a policy that said i won't go on any right-wing media source whatsoever for two weeks after any significant left-wing media source has me for an honest dialogue maybe even not an honest dialogue just one of the ones that yell at me i don't care um and then i decided not to do that but it would have been the results would have been the same it's like since the grievance studies affair came out we've had something like seven or eight hundred media appearances or interviews i don't know it's an absurd number and um i think i could count on certainly on two but maybe on one hand the number that would be identifiably left-wing and so it's like i just wanted to kind of challenge people and just say you know what if you don't want me to go on right-wing sources put me on left-wing sources you want to have a conversation in where where it's for the left let me talk to people on the left oh no you don't want that no you don't want me to talk to the left because i might i might actually persuade some people that i'm actually a liberal that i'm actually progressive in most of my stances i'm certainly socially progressive i'm mostly economically progressive without losing the plot and i might actually convince people that i'm a reasonable human being with reasonable perspectives and because i'm not woke and in fact i'm openly anti-woke that would be a massive failure if they were to expose me to left-wing audiences that are going to now see that i'm not this straw man caricature that they made of me and so i wanted to put this thing out there in the world and say look you don't want me to talk to the right you're afraid that the right is going to use me all right fine put me on the left i'm in demand and you can either host me or you can watch other people host me and this is sort of my attitude about it now um people are really worried about this whole association thing oh well you're supporting uh you're supporting cernovich or something i haven't talked to cernovich but that was brought up the other day with me because i guess i retweeted him at some point i don't even remember retweeting i don't care i retweet for the argument that's there not for who said it and so i'm sitting there thinking like so who cares um if you don't want like why is cernovich even like in my orbit at all well it's because like why is he paying attention to me or whatever or maybe it's glenn beck or whatever i talked to glenn beck today why is glenn beck willing to have me on his show at all if i'm this kind of a progressive liberal it's because the the the left has lost its [ __ ] mind and they won't talk to people and they won't have honest conversations and all of a sudden the right is like well you know we're willing to talk to people and i just don't have time for it man this guilt by association thing let me actually get into the theory since it's what i do intersectionality has two tails right or two heads i guess we could say one is to join people together who have the woke critical consciousness so you know you're asian that person's black somebody's gay they all have oppression therefore you're all on the same team right so if you all have a critical consciousness you're on the same team you all understand systemic oppression blah blah and it joins together as systemically oppressed all of the so-called marginalized groups and your positionalities and whatever well it has another effect i've been saying it this way for a while i'm not allowed to have black friends now right you're not allowed to have a black friend why are you not allowed to have a black well if i have a black friend and i talk about having a black friend i get yelled at for that constantly no you're just saying you have a black friend oh that doesn't make you not racist it's like hold on you know the the kind of joke extreme version of that is you're not allowed to have black friends anymore but this is true the other side of intersectionality is to make it so that any identity groups that aren't coming from the position of agreeing on critical consciousness aren't allowed to interact with one another you're not allowed to have atheists in communion with christians you're not allowed to have christians a communion with islam you're not allowed to have white people in communion with black people and if you do the point of intersectionality is to say ah all the intersectional points the positionality must be continually engaged anything that maintains white comfort is suspect you have to constantly be uncomfortable that's not a real relationship that's nonsense and so it's to constantly make it so that people who have different identity groups that don't agree with intersectionality aren't allowed to work together because that's tokenizing there's racism in the relationship manipulation or somebody's being used or whatever somebody's white adjacent now um and that's poison it's just straight poison and i i think that it's time to to first of all i don't have the energy to care about it anymore second of all i think it's time to lift up and say you know what no i would rather have right wing people listening and talking to me how much more effective would i be at influencing right wing thought if the people considered me a trustworthy friend versus if they considered me an enemy who's going to scream at them and maybe you know throw a brick through their windshield which one of these people are going to listen to so we just had matt thornton on the podcast yesterday and one of the things i i told him was like we could have just avoided so much of this crap if we just actually had conversations about the serious subjects instead we just decided to let this politically correct um partisan nonsense just take us over so we can't talk to each other but and now um you know one good point that matt brought up was that um what do left and right even mean anymore this is no longer about left versus right this is about authoritarianism versus people who actually value proper epistemologies free speech academic freedom freedom in general and and um people who who are truly truly anti-racist not this [ __ ] that's that's that's coming out there with a walk culture that this this is the new houston position it's it's a mess but yeah it's it's realigned everything i mean like um it okay maybe i shouldn't put it this way but i almost feel like we're in another um political realignment similar to what happened during the 1960s during the southern strategy only this time it's a completely different paradigm that's i mean it's actually the echo of that i haven't had the chance to do the research as deeply as i wanted to but during the upheavals of the 1960s you actually had both the left and the right split in half in some sense i don't know if it was you know numerically in half but we're going to use that as as imagery and there was what was called the new left versus the the old left yeah and then there was the uh neoconservatives versus the paleo conservatives was was the split there and um the paleo conservatives in the new left actually kind of teamed up and the issue of the day was interventionism in vietnam and the so you actually had journals that were created by people like murray rothbard who's like mr super paleo libertarian that were in conjunction with people who went on to join the black panthers and uh they've called themselves things like left right journal and so what you actually do have is this shifting away now from where the the issue isn't what the left right spectrum used to mean right um they still have relevance they still have salience but that's not the that's like a political difference and now we're in like a meta-political difference if you want to use fancy words um the the fight of the day now is but i mean it's still global global intervention versus uh not global intervention to the point of protectionism but um the real issue is matt articulated it is and i think this is a litmus test question do you believe objective truth exists and can we know something about it and if the answer to that question is yes you're on one side and if your answer is it's complicated or it depends or whatever you're on the other side or just flat out no you see you know the activists are openly declaring war on the idea of objectivity and objective truth um which never works out real well yeah what was interesting and what you know for me it was really difficult to get a grip of what exactly was going on when i started to recognize a particular pattern that was emerging from academia and from the general public consciousness as well so i remember my first introduction to this sort of woke take on sociology was when i had a conversation with one of my co-workers at the time i used to work at a barnes noble which is the epicenter of woke thought really when you're working and this was when she first introduced me the whole concept that black people can't be racist and so and it wasn't like that was my whole epiphany it was just that was one instance and then i encountered another instance as the claim that racism is everywhere and it's just a matter of us attempting to analyze the situation to determine how racism manifested itself it was just like one crazy idea after another that kept springing into reality it was like a game of whackable for me where i just kept hitting bad ideas coming up and i had no idea where this was coming from and so what i really appreciated about the work that you guys did i mean this was like five years in the making this was back in like 2015 when i started really you know i was like at the at the i don't want to age myself but at the end of my high school career obviously and going into the university system and so what i appreciated with the work that you guys did was that you guys really put a name to this beast that we were dealing with where did all these ideas come from because even though most woke people that you pull from the street have no idea who judith butler is is they have no idea hufuko or leotard are many of their ideas stem directly from that line of thought so how did you guys find the string to follow that led you to the genesis of the ideas that are now espoused by let's let's call them woke us danny people yeah yeah so the same way that you did ultimately except that we just ended up by the bounces of history digging deeper um i also this would have been seven i guess years ago started to watch my own as you guys know i was active in the atheist movement before any of this and so i watched my intellectual heroes especially um sam harris and richard dawkins getting called sexist it was really sexism was the systemic sexism and the atheism movement was like the thing the atheism movement basically had like me too before me too was a thing um and then i didn't really pay attention to gamergate but that was also happening you know and i started to see a lot of these like virulent arguments about systemic sexism and the issue that i had was okay i looked it up you know i listened to people i looked it up and i saw in the literature of systemic sexism oh and i'm you know taking it in uh as it is trying to understand it as it is and i'm like fine and i came back to some of these arguments that were going on mostly on twitter but also in like discussion forums and comment threads under articles that i was involved in and i was saying things like okay i acknowledge that there is systemic sexism and i acknowledge that there is sexism i also acknowledge that they're not the same thing so why don't we take care to be very clear which one we mean at any given time and then i just got called a sexist for that and i was like okay something is really weird going on with this and so you know it led eventually this the this experience that i kept having was similar and in watching this very kind of religious social justice thing emerging that was trying to study within the atheism movement it was called atheism plus at the time which is atheism plus social justice as they explicitly put it and then you know peter's having similar experiences helen's having similar experiences helen writes this very uh successful essay why i no longer call myself a feminist that then led to another very successful essay how uh french philosophers ruined the west or something like this um peter's having tremendously ugly experiences at portland state of course at portland state but to the point where he's trying to engage conversation and then his events are getting you know shouted down or violence is coming up or they're getting canceled ahead of time because the security costs projected to the university are so high because of the threats of violence that are supposed to be coming up it's just trying to have conversations around the issue and then he start you know they say oh well it's going to be a bunch of you know people who hate this worldview crapping on it on stage it's never you know promoting the worldview and so peter starts trying to invite people to come and join in on the conversation and they uh said no every single time you know he contacts the gender studies department and says why don't you guys come participate in the conversation they say no every time and then um he invited them three or four times and then they reported him to the university for harassment for inviting them to participate in a conversation they demanded to be you know somebody they didn't i don't think the professors did but somebody demanded that they'd be included so peter tried to invite him and then they reported him for harassment he had to go to a hearing about it and it's like something's badly wrong here and so uh as many people have heard of course obviously the grievance studies affair becomes very relevant as many people have heard that started with the the conceptual penis and the conceptual penis started with the feminist glaciology paper that infamous paper about ice and gender and how ice has sex and it has different genders and the pretty ice is blue and the dirty ice is sorry the blue pretty ice is female and the ugly dirty ice is male and you know the the ice having sex is just crazy and frying fat next to a glacier causes it to like wreck your village and then we need to put art projects in glaciology or else it's not uh inclusive science and it's just like what the hell is this and so then we you know following this kind of culture war that's budding up around that the academic literature mostly because of that twitter account real peer review and then seeing this paper uh we we read an article by matt ridley and matt ridley wrote that he maintained that the feminist glaciology paper was a hoax well peter and i were both aware of and fans of alan sokol peter's actually friends or was friends we're all friends with alan sokol now but um peter was actually friends with alan sokol at the time and um we saw the word hoax and peter called me one day and said let's hoax ginger study so i was like okay and so he wrote the conceptual penis as a social construct you know in a matter of i wrote the first draft of it in a matter of almost no time then peter made it just so graphic and horrible and then you know we worked out whatever was going to be we put the thing out there the media splash happened we got humiliated mostly because we were and tried to defend ourselves but we were mostly wrong the journal was there was a scandal there but it wasn't the scandal that we called out and the scandal wasn't even that there exists predatory journals it was the fact that that a reputable journal forwarded our paper to a predatory journal within the same publishing house which is a academic practice that should not exist and instead of focusing on that of course we went the other direction we got called out we had good faith and bad faith criticism lobbed at us and so we decided to do it again and do it right and that within a few months time the hoaxing thing wasn't working out so we actually had to start reading the literature and understanding it and then it was like oh [ __ ] wow this is where this it's like i mean this isn't my analogy and it's not i i didn't run into it in this context but it is very much like finding the dead body in the in the well that's poisoning the town's water it's like oh this is what's going on and so helen had already signed up to write a book post modernism and got a publisher it was going to be called post-modernism the good the mad and the ugly which is kind of funny uh i had signed on to be an editor for that at a very uh significant capacity and we had toyed with the idea of making me a co-author but hadn't finalized that idea and then the project happened the grievance studies affair and we learned enough about this stuff to really be able to make a convincing case that case is called cynical theories which comes out this week and so helen and i dove deep deep deep into the uh scholarly literature around it the background literature you know so much fun reading foucault struggling with deredan finally giving up and um all the rest struggling with butler i can read you with butler now i i struggled when i read some of her stuff the first time i had i couldn't make heads or tales of it but i can read judith butler like just normal now it's scary um so we we wrote cynical theories and got very conversant in it and realized this is what's happening here uh and that's sort of the whole story like how did how did this happen why why on earth did did how did we make the leap from being normal people to re to this deep understanding of what culture which as you said you know it's dependent on foucault it's dependent on dairy dots it's pronounced leotard is dependent on herbert marcusa somewhat on theodore adorno max horkheimer these these philosophers that are kind of out there and some educated peoples like the edge of their imaginations but not really there and then you've got like you know average everyday people spouting off foucaultian ideas like well whether or not something is true depends on who has the authority to authenticate the truth then you're like holy [ __ ] do you know who foucault isn't like no never heard of him you know but that's a fukodian idea and so this this ideology has somehow um escaped the lab to use our our fun uh pandemic metaphors and people don't like when you when you get a virus if it's you know you work in say the lab you know where you got the virus but when it gets out in the wild 99 of the time you don't know who who made you sick you don't know what it was that made you sick and so in this case it's like what happened and now we've been trying to trace back and figure out how the hell did so many kids start thinking and talking like this um yeah it was um that was actually my introduction to your guys's work you uh helen puck rose and peter progotion i was already familiar with bogotian because as you said i was also in the new atheist community and i also saw the seeds that were being planted there uh through the atheism plus movement and elevator gate and whatever and so i was already familiar with bogojian but what was amazing to me to see was the reception that the grievance studies hoax had so someone whom i respect very much i mentioned before that i'm a physics major so of course i look up to people like sean carroll was that he was critical of you guys because he viewed what you did as mean and that was that that's exactly his wording and what blew me away by that is like what you guys uncovered was effectively basically educational malpractice it was like you you found you found an assassin you found a murderer or a rapist and he's criticizing the fact that you the that you found out who this murderer was because you looked through his personal journal it was like you can have a conversation about the methods that you guys implemented and whether or not that was ethical or whether or not you know there could have been a a different conversation to be had but the fact that there was this really uncovering of just awful um awful academic practices i guess i laid it out and he was more concerned about the method was really ju it really just goes to show how a lot of people are either one not willing to actually engage with these things and i want to ask you about that particular in a bit and two just how deep in the sand some people have their heads in when it comes to these sorts of topics and on that question i do want to ask you this really quickly is that you mentioned on the joe rogan podcast for instance that the last time there was a substantive paper against this whole uh critical methods was like back in the 1990s is that a result of the fact that these people in effect are really bullying their way into getting at the top of the of these of this narrative i guess right so if you disagree with them they'll either label you label you a sexist or a racist or a misogynist or what have you and is this a byproduct or that or is there something deeper why why is why haven't there been any published papers really of substantive quality arguing against these ideas well i mean i think it's actually a much simpler explanation there is of course that they brand you a racist or that the journals are are scared to go against it because either they don't publish things that go against it or they've taken in by it or they they think they're going to get in trouble and there could by the way be more substantive criticisms of it out there that i'm not aware of but the the last ones that i really have been able to find that are are you know from an outside perspective and really trenchant on specifically critical race theory or in the late 1990s and the simpler reason to put it honestly is uh what's covered in the paper nobody can figure out why they should bother there are no incentives to criticize it it was like this weird intellectual even the papers say it's weird intellectual backwater that has it's like it generates a lot of activity within its own circles and then nobody outside of it circles paid any attention to it and so it's like the attitude that you kind of picked up was okay there's these you know groups of scholars that are kind of just doing this thing and it's wrong but it's not really doing anything like it doesn't matter because nobody takes it seriously like and this these are in law journals and they're like well you know it's interesting in the academy but nobody outside of the academy is paying any attention to it and i don't think people understood that it being in the academy meant that it was also in classrooms it was it was teaching people so while the papers themselves were having very little effect in terms of influencing actual law or legal practice they were teaching new lawyers how to think about the world yeah who a generation later become kind of a problem uh and and this is i think kind of the the source of what's going on and i do want to be clear there are some general papers that do criticize some of this that i know that are later nicholas shackle for example has a beautiful takedown of post-modern methodologies from i think 2005 or six that is of course outside of the 90s and it's one of the best papers on the um out there about it everybody should go read it it's called something like that acuity of post-modern methodologies or something uh he talks about the martin bailey in that paper that long ago nobody paid attention because again it's just like this weird academic i've tried to explain this to people even before we went public with the agreement studies affair it's like we got to talk about academia we got to talk about academia that's rotten academia i mean i know you're you know still connected to it but the reality is the academia might as well be narnia the real world does not give a rat's ass what's going on in academia and so they're like oh yeah it's weirdo professors doing weirdo ideas big fluffy white hair or whatever they get probably a picture of dairy dye in their head and then um at the same then it's students who are just like young idealists getting all caught up and stuff and they have their weird relationships with their professors and then they grow up and they get out in the real world and the real world will set them straight blah blah blah and again nobody ever really suspected that they would believe those crazy ass ideas and take them out into the real world and start trying to demand that the real world change around them and that once you get to the point where say so people who are educated in the 1990s right so people who are graduating college around 1990 how old are those people now right those people are like 50 they're in their 50s and so what are they doing you know they if they were educated and they took a lot of this stuff on and they get out of the real world how many people are there who are against this stuff left in the company when everybody who's 50 and under has been educated at least in part with some of these ideas where everybody's had their mind blown by howard zinn if they're under the age of like 55 or whatever they've got a little bit of this critical mindset a little bit as critical sympathy um i don't think people realized that this stuff slowly leaks out and like you said with sean carroll it's like the the reasons are so odd it's like people don't want to be mean they don't think anybody should be mean everybody should be nice it's extra weird if there's meanness that points in a direction around race or sex or sexuality like i've obviously been very very very widely smeared and up to and including that i think the people of color don't belong in science by the way i think it's great genuine physics um just to point that out by the way i know that your agent so you're like kind of not people of color anymore like um oh [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] jesus [ __ ] everything everyone thinks i'm asian armin of abu from atheist republic thought i was asian and he kept making a bunch of asian jokes towards me i'm like i wanted to talk about kung fu and [ __ ] god not dude sorry man oh this guy is into that [ __ ] uh well we're going to talk about this all right well we'll go get some tacos okay oh no yeah mexican okay yeah i got you um no but anyway i appreciate that you being being mexican also are in physics it's like i got literally smeared the people of color i think that people of color aren't allowed to be like in science or something like this and it's like holy [ __ ] i don't think stuff like that and then why why did this happen was because i criticized a person who happens to be black who knows how to play the wound collector game around it for making terrible arguments about two plus two like you know two plus two doesn't turn out to equal five and you can't even like jimmy the situation to get two plus two equals five in any reasonable way i mean it's all transparently bogus but i mean you got this guy doing like chicken math right it's like if you put one chicken and you have another chicken and sometimes you come back and then there's three chickens so one plus one equals three it's like what the hell is this and so i'm like this is wrong this is stupid and this is a lie and so because i was black now that's racist abuse and i don't believe that people of color belong in stem and that was the the the conclusion it's just like uh [ __ ] man what is going on with this and so there's this weirdness about being mean in the direction of people of color so i can't be mean to to you guys even if you you know said like oh mean what does it mean you know this is the thing my kids used to come home from school and be like how was your day well the teacher was really mean how was the teacher mean well i turned to my homework and she said that i got it wrong it was like was that mean and yeah because it hurt my feelings that makes it mean and it's like i had these conversations with my own kids and they're like you know nine to 12 or something and it's like i even thought at the time i was like that's really weird so there's this whole thing like criticizing like if you if you threw me some some physics which i actually probably sucked too bad at physics now to say anything about but let's pretend i was your physics teacher and you threw me some physics it was wrong and i'm like no right hand rule man you know you've got your you've got it backwards this is this is not how how we do cross product and then you're like listen i'm mexican that's racist or whatever it's like but that's actually the depth of the argument i'm not allowed to criticize your work because it's mean and then being mean in the direction of downward in the in the intersectional hierarchy is is now racist and it's like this is the world that that we actually live in and then you have people as you said like sean carroll who are like kind of in on this i've got this whole thing going on on the two plus two with tim gowers or timothy gowers i don't know if he goes by tim you shouldn't shorten people's names for them vince and so um that's okay you can call me jim so uh but yeah it's like i got this whole thing going on with timothy gowers where he's like trying to obfuscate around two plus two and it's just like why and he's like well i happen to consider myself on the woke end of the spectrum do you think ours is a field medal he's like i consider myself on the woke end of the spectrum and so and he's got all these weird tweets about trying to like argue about how weird ways you can kinda construe two plus two equaling something different than four and it depends on the circumstances you have this thing with significant figures like does two plus two equal four point zero zero and it's like i rolled my eyes so hard i think i strained a muscle and so then it's like why are you doing this though and it's like well he doesn't want to be mean and i am mean and kareem's not mean so clearly meanness becomes like this variable but turns out reality is mean as hell and if you have the wrong answer it's really mean if you want to make meanness be like that right when the bridge falls down that's me when the plane crashes that's mean when the engineers who designed the 737 max 9 made it so that the bigger engines on it made a change the shape of the engine cavity so the engine actually functionally became extra wing which gave extra lift so then they decided well we better put a we don't want the engines to stall so we need to put in a lift override um program in the in the computer and then this resulted in crashed planes and dead people getting the answer wrong is really mean and so it's like i don't understand how this isn't to harken back to peter this is like a absolute failure to morally triage right uh certain consequences matter more than other consequences you getting your feelings hurt and nobody dying because you had to fix your answer is okay uh you having your feelings protected and then 37 people dying as a result less good and i don't understand how people have become so centered on feelings in this wound collecting game that uh reasonable smart people have lost track of that and until we figure that out i don't think we reverse this trend at all james i actually i'm really really glad you mentioned that because that actually folds into something that i've been looking into um on my own time like just about like why people predicate so much on their feelings and um thinking the entire world is mean or or as you say first of all i i've read most of the book and i've been studying post-modern ideas in my own time and i i really have to say i have no idea how this [ __ ] was even even able to make it into our universities in the first place the epistemologies are they're all bad they're based on personal experiences just i'm just resting on a bald ass assertion that we're living as you say in this really complicated power grid where like about power and privilege just based on someone's identity they have to take a word from about it they want to tear everything down without any suitable replacement um there was one criticism on twitter that um seemed to have some merit it pretty much argued the book was was was really really good and i and i think it's an excellent work of scholarship um but it didn't quite explain why those postmodern ideas just took hold so quickly and um what i've been doing especially since every everything that happened with george floyd about two months ago well i wanted to start looking into it it caused me to start looking into the um uh some of the issues facing the black community today and like um i i read some um some works by um some black conservatives one of which is shelby steele and he made in the book what i thought was a very very compelling argument about how when during the 1960s which coincidentally was when post which when post-modernism was was rearing its head um that that during that decade we had we had the vietnam war going on we had the civil rights movement we had the women's rights um or or whatever and um that era was a time in which it really turned a mirror on the west saying like you guys we supposedly want um the right to explore your own happiness to um to to to to to to lit to live with fr to live freely but yes but yet you have these is these institutions and rules in place to oppress people of different sexualities of different uh who are of a different gender of a different skin color what have you and and there's a mirror showing up saying look you guys are a bunch of hypocrites you're you're responsible for all of this and in his argument was that that created a a in an aura of shame and it it turned it made the only morally acceptable view especially on the left um to to to to to preface everything you say by saying the west sucks we suck it doesn't matter like you know how much progress we made we just suck and we gotta make up for it and that just seemed to be the kind of gasoline that allowed this um this this critical race theory just just to catch fire so quickly is that a perspective that you would agree with yeah generally speaking i agree with everything you said the actual vector were english departments so i would actually probably contend that you know sciences um most scientists until quite recently were not particularly interested in any of this and the science is always just kind i mean sorry physicist but you're an elitist uh the scientists sciences are always kind of like yeah if other people do whatever but we do science you know there's this real attitude there's this kind of competitiveness between the sciences and the humanities then you get within the sciences and they fight over who has the best science and of course the mathematicians all win and then everybody makes fun of the mathematicians and mathematicians aren't mathematics isn't a science so whatever but um this whole thing right this whole academic pecking order and the scientists tend to see themselves as above all this crap and then there's a lot more artsy fartsy room to play within the humanities but particularly the english departments is where a lot of the stuff came in the the shame hit them really hard they're like oh wow we're just reading all these books by white people oh wow they're all white men we need to put in you know women we need to put in people of color we need to put in black people in particular and so you started to have within english departments as it's like the the birth of ethnic studies the birth of um of women's studies and gender studies the birth of african-american studies and very many cases came out of english departments and in general these english department-derived humanities fields understood how the scientists who are ignoring them felt about it so you have this higher degree of sensitivity and play going on in the english departments because the scientists are kind of like yeah we do science uh the point of science is it's universal so it doesn't matter who does it so race and racism it doesn't matter um yeah fine whatever you know maybe we've been [ __ ] in the past we'll try to do less of that okay can i go back to the lab now and then give these english people that are just like all getting into it all the classes are about discussion i can't remember outside like outside of my core curriculum when i did physics i majored in physics and i majored in math um i don't remember a class and involved discussion ever in any of my major field courses right it was we went in and we watched people derive [ __ ] on the board the whole time and then we went home and tried to figure out how to derive it ourselves the whole time and there was never any like oh well what did this mean to you so there's all this other flex flexibility in english departments so you have professors that are playing into that and then you have at the top of this this recognition that science made them sort of academic second class citizens and so there's going to be resentment and envy about that level of prestige i'm important too and so they were very s it was very susceptible for them to take this stuff up and it was into an english department specifically where post-modernism was injected for the first time it was injected into the yale english department as a matter of fact the first post-modern philosophers came over and spoke or the first injection into the west of the post-modern philosophy was at the yale english department which then took it up with with tremendous gusto and used it as their new high-tech means of um doing critique really their literary criticism and to explore the social implications and social ramifications of their critique and so you have this happening and then all of a sudden you know what what is postmodernism offering them post-modernism offers them the ability to say science is no better it's just another way of knowing your way of knowing is on par with science and so all of a sudden this whole weird correspondence theory of truth like well no as richard dawkins famously put it it works [ __ ] science works science gets right answers about the world and you can say yeah this is a better interpretation or more meaningful interpretation of shakespeare or a less meaningful or less authentic uh interpretation of shakespeare and you can get into those whole debates but it doesn't produce knowledge of the same type it doesn't produce knowledge that corresponds clearly to the world and post-modernism came along and said you know that corresponding theory of truth thing that's holding you guys down it's like the the devil whispering in the english department's ear you know that the correspondence theory of truth it's fake it's politics it's just politics by other means your ways of knowing are just as important just as valid and because they've been excluded maybe they're more valid and they speak to human concerns not to disembodied concerns and you start using all this weird language and so all of a sudden you have lots of technical jargon you have anti-scientific ethos you have uh that exact feeling you were talking about you know the shame and hypocrisy uh and wanting to make up for it i've heard all of these fill in the blank studies departments described and i feel bad because i can't think of who it's somebody famous described them as as intellectual affirmative action and so they were they created these departments and allowed them to do their thing unchecked in a way of of literally saying look how progressive we are in the university it's not a really i mean i i think that a lot of these theories kind of point to something so you see like the interest convergence there in critical race theory it's like oh you know people in power just do things to help other people subordinate to them when it's in their self-interest and it's like yeah the universities totally did that it's like you guys are describing yourselves you like the whole progressive architecture it's like let's just give women their own like [ __ ] department and call it women's studies let's just give black people their own [ __ ] department to call it african-american studies and um let's not hold them to you know rigorous standards uh if they're going to make sociological conclusions we're not going to hold them to the standards of sociology and then these things happen to be filled with as you pointed out activists yeah activists who the weather underground was like the or weatherman underground i guess was like the like let's go blow building side of it but meanwhile there were all of these other activists who'd been educated by people like herbert marcusa at columbia and you know his thoughts caught fire following the publication of one dimensional man and then repressive tolerance so by the late 60s he was like the thing um they all started to go get phds they all started to go and say well let's go basically make sense of marx's claim is that the point of understanding the world is to change it we started like filling these departments that were being made with activists and these act i guess with this weird naive belief that activists would you know just let them do what they will they won't change you know they won't infect anything else that that that will surely stay contained where it is and i think that that's actually what happened but you're right this that the the real seed of this was the ugliness and [ __ ] sureness of the west having a mirror held up to it as you as you put it and showing that you know you guys are massive hypocrites and then a huge amount of oversteer as a result that then concentrated itself within the least rigorous departments that were also loaded with rigor envy um sort of is like this toxic stew that allowed this to to allow the the march to the the academies uh to take place and from the academies they took over the colleges of education very early on so then it got interested the rest of the schools once you've got the schools it's going to get into basically everything yeah there was a there was um an article an op-ed actually in the wall street journal a few weeks ago it's probably a month by now written by lawrence krauss and he said that he really just echoed everything that you said where we all recognize people in the stem fields recognize the sort of deconstructivist attitude that was in the humanities but you sort of just laughed it off left it in place let them do their own thing and in my head i'm thinking like that's probably one of the worst things you could have done because now this thing is pestilentially spreading towards stem i'm reading books now two books in particular that i read the um the gender mosaic and this the spectrum of sex courtesy of our mutual friend colin wright and so i'm reading these books and i'm perfectly open to having this conversation whether or not yes blank slateism is a more accurate representation of neuroscience yeah whatever i'm totally willing to hear the science on this but the problem is that as you said now activism is starting to spread rather than any actual wanting of having an objective understanding of science so these books i i [ __ ] you not half of these books are activist based so like the first portion of the gender mosaic like literally like the first three chapters is apologizing for the history of science in which science was used to justify women being dumber than men it's like what are you doing why are you wasting three chapters talking about this stuff generating that shame that they're going to use to manipulate you for the rest of the book um yeah this is definitely the thing man this is how it works um and it's it's so common so the the the scientists misunderstood and everybody misunderstood and we misunderstood this so we had this conversation with peter so many times the when elevator gate and all of this crap was happening and the atheism plus was happening within the atheism movement the prevailing attitude of most of the the people who were against it was mostly well just leave it alone if you engage with it you give it oxygen it gets more power which is true um and so just ignore it and don't feed it you know indifference is is the the most powerful thing the worst thing in the world is it's not that your book gets criticized that your book gets ignored that sort of attitude and that doesn't work when you're dealing with zealots it just doesn't because the zealots don't being ignored doesn't stop zealots it just makes them try harder um whereas you know a normal person would go and they would say uh you know here's my case and they fight for their case and after like you know six or eight months or a year or two they're like i'm not getting anywhere bail out normal human behavior like i'm just not getting anywhere with this zealot zealots and activists just don't do that they just keep going and keep going and keep going and they keep pushing and keep pushing so as you pointed out it festers if you leave this stuff alone and people thought the right thing to do was to leave it alone um to yeah you know you know they do what they do but we do real theory that was sort of the attitude of the sciences as i was you know when i was doing physics in the 90s and the early 2000s that was the attitude like yeah people in the english department can do whatever they want we do science you know and i don't think anybody realized that the they had a objective which was to own the entire culture of first the the departments than the university then the society around it uh and they were not going to be you can't you can't ignore people who are basically using the fact that you're not looking to produce materials that aren't being criticized and then to use those to infiltrate administrative positions where they have the capacity to affect policy but that's what activists do i mean a common idea that's just tossed around casually which just drives me insane to hear it is like that you know going woke is just a quote-unquote continuation of the civil rights movement but you know looking at everything that's going on around us it's it's it's been taken just miles just beyond absurdity and the the most insane claim in all of this is that robin deangelo explicitly says this in her book um objectivity is is is is is a white man's way of of of of of viewing the world or this is um you know it's a product of western culture which is corrupt or some stupid something stupid like that and like um but when i when i was reading your book and you're talking about epistemic violence that part was absolutely crazy because you know for our listeners if someone is accused of being racist um the so-called post-modern race anti-racist standpoint actually says it's oppressive to ask someone to explain their views uh why this person is racist and it's oppressive to not make an effort to explain themselves so you have this this this this this kafka trap that um puts someone in um a scenario where they're in which they're racist by default but if you if you take out objectivity you you accuse someone of being um white by trying to put some kind of objective standards then you can pretty much justify anything is racist now and but you know what absolutely just blows my mind is that people still think this is quote unquote no big deal and not worth talking about because social justice for minorities should be the paramount goal but you know this isn't about social justice anymore it's about academic and social freedom and the very epistemologies that make that make the world go round um you know we see so so much for the so much of it being surrendered in the name of a faux diversity and inclusion and i i think people are they might be waking up to it but you know seeing how popular um these quote-unquote anti-racist movements are i i'm really wondering um is if as if there if there or is there not a silent majority out there that's really concerned about this and wants to push back against it i mean do you see it like i i i mean personally speaking for myself i don't think we're gonna win out against this just by um putting facts in people's faces i think we need to put up have some kind of counter narrative um that to the idea that the west is quantico and evil but that really does depend on whether or not there's a good um group of people that would that's willing to push back against this stuff so i don't think that there is a silent majority who would like to speak up but feels like they cannot i think that there is a there are a significant number of such people and they are starting to speak up more often the majority of the silent majority if you will is disinterested they don't know what's going on they don't understand it they don't want to hear about it they don't want to listen to it they've had enough of it and they just want it to go away and so they are not the kind of silent majority that just needs to learn to speak they're the kind of silent majority that is um not aware of the significance of the problem and or even i don't know that it's incapable but it's more unwilling to learn and this is actually very it's very weird as i mean we put this in cynical theories that it seems like this is all very very hard to learn because of all of the dense jargon but it's actually very very simple to understand it basically does like three things over and over and over again and so uh it's it's not a complicated world view uh it's not sophisticated in any regard but it sounds like it it it mimics the highest echelons of scholarship and academic thought very very effectively and by mimicking it so effectively it makes most people just think over my head and that's more or less it uh you know so i don't think that there's a silent majority just waiting to speak up and i also don't think that we're going to to push back effectively on this by trying to put facts in people's faces or even just by doing what i'm mostly doing which is trying to educate people as to what it actually is because even the explanations i give even when people take those and walk like uh simplify them down another level to where they're even more accessible people still read it and they're like i don't i don't think that's what it really you know it can't really be that and so or they're like i just don't understand what it's talking about and so i don't know how how you get people to to care about that kind of an issue um it wears a very effective cloak of being highly academic that most people just don't want to engage with that's too specialized too complicated too many new words nobody knows what any of it means and so no i don't i don't know what it takes but i do think that it does take rousing a counter narrative uh of some form that speaks up and says you know you don't have to say that the west was perfect to say that the west is good you know that perfect is the enemy of the good thing you can say you know we did some right [ __ ] things and we learned our lesson that's a thing that you actually can say you know i think that the most clear example of that in the world is nuclear weapons you know we built them we had them we dropped them on japan we stared at the mushroom clouds and we were like holy [ __ ] never again and i think that this is actually a thing that we like as far as the counter narrative would go that people have to be willing to say a simple truth which i consider to be my second rule of life is everybody sucks at everything at first including you that's my second rule for living and so we develop technologies right whether it's the internet whether it's nuclear bombs whether it's the machine gun on the front of an a-10 it's so badass um we invent technologies and we don't realize the uh unintended consequences of those technologies until they become apparent that's why they're called unintended consequences and so we have to learn we we're going to make the shape of progress is like a sawtooth thing you you know you you create a thing it has bad impacts that nobody expected then you have to learn from those impacts to to harness the thing and make it work better in the future the internet's a great example of this nobody everybody thought oh cool we can keep in touch with our friends and our family blah blah facebook yeah and now it's like our politics is like a puddle of nuclear sludge you know it's just nobody wants to go near it it's radioactive everything's on fire in its vicinity it's like chernobyl melted down but what you learned from chernobyl melting down about you know what kind of security and safety policies you need to have you know honesty and reporting what kinds of materials you need to use and so on and so forth same thing with with you know social media we've got to figure out how to use that so i think that there's this this big lesson that that can that has to somehow become part of the narrative which is look life is messy and we're doing the best we can and we're making mistakes along the way but then there's there's a difference between learning from our mistakes and moving forward and actually generating progress which that's what progress means is learning from our mistakes and going forward and then there's the idea that we're just going to decide we're never going to make mistakes again we we sort of phrased that in cynical theories a lot of people have have said they really love this line it was helen i can't take credit for it helen wrote this um but that the the line is um equal access to a pile of rubble is not a worthy goal and that's that's absolutely the case you know we can i was just writing something that i'm hoping to publish within a week or so uh right before i jumped on with you guys and i was talking about how you know you're kind of using metaphor i was talking about how one of the ways that you can get rid of the shadows is by just turning off the light um but that's not exactly you know what you want so what the the narrative has to be is is one that says you know where the enlightenment if you will liberalism if you want you can make it about america if you want to also is bringing light into the world and it does cast some shadows and we have to find out what you know what to do about that as we figure out where they are we position new lights you know or new new whatever and it there's still shadows it's a process of learning but it's still bringing light into the world so for example with critical race theory they talk about the horrors of slavery they talk about the horrors of jim crow they talk about this and that and they're right but they never bother to talk about the fact that no other society ever figured this stuff out now i'm not talking about america here i'm talking about liberal democracy no other society in human history ever figured this out no society in human history ever figured out that it was a bad idea to go conquer your neighbors and steal their land by killing them and raping all their women and making them genetically partly you nobody thought that that was not okay until liberalism came along and started talking about the rights of the individual it's been a human constant and they can say oh well you know look at it's totally different because guns and disease and blah blah blah all the different horrors and they came in native americans and you know this and they can talk so easily about the bad things that happened as we were learning the lessons without pointing out or ever having to deal with the fact that nobody else figured it out either right and so the process of bringing light into the world is is is not going to be just this oh it's light so everything's light now it's just it doesn't work that way um and if you say look at these shadows look at these dark places we have to get rid of them by any means well the easiest way to do that especially when you don't know what the hell you're talking about because you don't do science and you think objectivity is a myth that's used to hold people down is to just shut the light off and that's not a solution anybody wants equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal helen also phrases it very eloquently when she says that there's a assumption on a lot of people's part and it's very common within post-modern thought it's basically the entire game of what foucault calls his archaeologies and his genealogies uh where people you know expected that liberalism came onto the scene or science came onto the scene and now everything's liberal everything's scientific and that's just not how it works right it's not like oh you know francis bacon wrote down science and now we have you know we're perfectly objective totally scientific perfect everything it's not how it works this is a very unrealistic expectation that people have and that it's very easy to get dissatisfied with the fact that things aren't better i god i've thought about this for so many years that um there's this huge level of dissatisfaction that things aren't better you know you start thinking and get the better the world gets the more poignant it gets like when do you feel it you feel it when you go to the doctor and then the doctor's like we don't have anything for you we don't know what to do about that i suffer from personally from psoriasis and you go to the doctor like we can give you some cream we don't know what causes it it may be a steroid but it'll make your skin thin up and you'll bleed a lot or you know have these other problems you're like uh i don't know if i want that well you can try these high-tech moisturizers you know we don't know what to do for it is is basically the long short we don't know where it comes from and you're like you leave and you're driving home with your prescription for like lotion and you're like what the hell what the hell why can't we cure this you know and it's like why isn't everything better already and when it's psoriasis it's funny but when it's cancer it's not and there's this ability to get really dissatisfied that things aren't better now you know we have all this advanced technology so why is there still poverty that's not funny you know poverty is not funny we have the ability to produce incredible you know physical infrastructure like homes roads electricity water and yet we have that thing going on in flint where their water got just wrecked and what's going on with flint's water and why isn't this being corrected in a reasonable amount of time and what is going on and so there's this ability to become very dissatisfied with the imperfections of the world the better everything is because you can just get get to the point where you expect that stuff's going to work like i lose my [ __ ] almost on a daily basis and my cell phone is slow like pause for a minute and remember it's like my phone is it's getting old and so it's like i try to open up like twitter and it's like it says it just gives me this white screen it says tweet and it doesn't show me that if i get a push notification what it is and sometimes it takes it like 30 seconds and i'm like shaking my fist like i'm gonna throw my phone and it's like literally i grew up you know riding a [ __ ] metal dump truck down the driveway and that was like all i had to to to do that was like fun or whatever you know it's like nah you know it's really easy to get pissed off at him for imperfection when you're so used to a high standard of living and so i think that the con that contributes quite a lot this dissatisfaction with um science in particular in the 60s you'd start looking at the post-modern rejection of science well science was supposed to solve all the problems of the world and you kind of heard that narrative really strongly through the positivist movement in the 30s 40s and 50s you were i don't know if it's you ever have to watch those old videos like the the 1950s nuclear and rocket era and it's got that voice and they're like and now human beings can go to the moon you know and they've got that whole like everything is going to be great because we have science you know and there's this almost like religion of science that then stuff still sucked and so people were like the hell with this it didn't work and so you have this post-modern cynicism and dissatisfaction with science and along comes michelle fuconi's like yeah look what science did in this look the science did in that haha look how science said that people were crazy it's all about controlling people it's all politics and people are like yeah man yeah and so this whole idea that like people wanted science to solve all the problems of the world and it obviously couldn't so when helen says you know people expected that once liberalism came on the scene everything would be liberal once enlightenment came on the scene everything would be enlightened it's not a realistic assumption but when you have that it's very easy to become aggrieved or cynical and and get very mad at that which isn't providing you with the level like why the hell would i want to throw my cell phone because it's loading a tweet slowly because it's not doing what i wanted to do it that's you know the way i wanted to right now and so that level of you turn that into like not your phone which you want to throw but society which now you want to tear down the system that's not giving you the financial you know pathways in life that you think that you've been promised and you find yourself in a situation where antifa doesn't look like it's that bad i have a bunch of friends that are like that they think antifa is not that bad because occupy wall street didn't work that's literally the depth of their analysis occupy wall street didn't save us from the oligarchy kleptocracy whatever the hell word they use at the time all of these rich people and wealth inequality and dirt and then get on their whole little tirade about it and occupy wall street didn't work and the the system shut us down and the republicans and it's the conservatives and ah and they get all angry and then they're like yeah so i side with antifa and that's what they they tell me this stuff and it's just like really like you didn't get your way so tear it all down this is going all over social justice movements right now i mean like there's a video going around on on twitter the other day and saw some poor guy get kicked in the head because you know when his back was turned for god's sake yeah that one messed me up i watched that and i was just like okay i'm not okay today um that's how that you know it's like i start having these visions like i'd like to see that guy get shot you know it's like bad it's like normally i'm you know no not bad no and it's just like that's the that's the visceral impulse that's starting to come up when you start to see this stuff but i understand you know i do listen to my lunatic bernie friends if you guys are bernie guys i'm sorry uh but i listen to them and i hear their frustration and i get it i get it right it's like especially you got you know vince man you're in a bad place i don't know how much you're paying for your education but people in your generation are getting ripped off you're going so many of them are going to college they're paying out the ass for an education i have so many friends who have 12 they have a half they're like grown up they've graduated they got their jobs they're out in the world they finally bought a house and their student loans are twice their mortgage and it's like they're that's that's you got ripped off at that point that's insane to be saddled with that much debt and then with an oversaturated job market uh this problem they call elite overproduction we've made basically just too damn many educated people and the problem isn't that you know you i remember john green you know what's his name the fault in our stars was that his book something about alaska alaska remembers or something peppered farmer remembers i don't know john green anyway hank green's his brother they had that channel the brothers or something that hated each other vlog brothers or something and so i mean i used to pay attention to these guys and john green had this very famous line that he talked about about education when i guess it was one of the elections and education for everybody and john was like um you know i want an educated society because i want p i want more people educating society because i want more people to understand more about the world they understand you know liberal the the liberal um education the the core curriculum stuff they understand um science they understand more about the world rather than less and they understand more about economics they understand more about that and if you take out even if you take out the the weird social justice stuff in college and say that wasn't there i used to think man john's right on it right but even if you take out the woke side of of what's going on in college he's still wrong because the problem is educated people myself included often become [ __ ] snobs i wrestled for a long time after i finished my phd being basically poor but unwilling to get a job that i viewed as beneath me because i had a phd i hear this all the time you get sold the promise when you go into higher education that the reason you're going into higher education is so you don't have to get one of those bad jobs you get to have a good job you get to have a better job you get to have some cushy office job or some fancy research job or whatever it is depending on the level of education so you don't have to go work with the plebs you don't have to be one of them you get to be an elite and so if you produce too many people whose attitude is that they are entitled to have a job that you know doesn't exist that there are only so many of an elite level job if you will or a high education level job and they're not willing especially to get the degrees in those sectors of the economy where there actually are those jobs like learn to code uh you create a massive problem because now you have a lot of people who are unwilling to do menial jobs if you will or blue blue collar jobs or service level jobs or whatever it is they view themselves as too good for those jobs but they can't get a real job they're saddled with that their their financial situation is enraging they've been and they have every right to be angry they're just angry at the wrong people society didn't screw my friends over here the university system did university system which is a result of things that happened at the level of the government is who screwed them over the university told them yeah just major in this get a degree in that doesn't matter you know what are the job prospects so don't worry about that you can fulfill your dreams you know and keep paying tuition by the way uh meanwhile the university moves more and more into a student services centered activity uh uh or uh administration and it moves more and more into a so like my brother works in a university uh and he's constantly livid um that the only thing that the deans are ever talking about when they have their their faculty meetings are is student retention how do we make sure we keep more students well don't give them bad grades which will make them be discouraged to make them leave so how do we keep students how do we make sure the students are having a positive and fun experience in college so they remain consumers of this in paying this super high tuition the universities enabled by whatever bad policy the universities have screwed over a generation by producing snobs with useless degrees who are then going to become bored and pissed off and then they're smart enough and want to do elite stuff where they're going to go blog about it all the damn time they're going to they're going to go talk about it in elite production ways which is writing which is content creation and which is art and so on and you really you know creating a massive class of under employed debt ridden and debt saddled people who have no options but to take a massive hit to their own inflated sense of themselves to participate well in the economy is a freaking nightmare and we are living in that nightmare right now so uh let me throw one more brick at the university i suppose universities for for me what what was this is my concern with what's going on in academia and why this sort of social justice phenomenon is flourishing in academia is because as much as i respect and admire people like deborah soh and colin wright both of them seem to have chosen to leave academia because of this new poli newfound political pressure in which there's an expectation that your results have to comport with a particular narrative and that is the social justice narrative and i get that i totally get that i recognize the fact that they don't want to continue to be lambasted by these activists scholars but at the same time i'm thinking well isn't that kind of part of the problem as well the fact that there are so many people with heterodox viewpoints that are leaving academia because they don't want to deal with the grief and i recognize that that's something i'm going to have to deal with absolutely right if this channel ever takes off which i doubt it will but let's just say for the sake of the argument that it takes off and people are aware of my arguments are aware of my viewpoints i know that i'm going to be dealt with a lot of grief in in the physics community and i'm willing to deal with that i'm willing to go through with that because i don't want the academy to be as to turn into this homogenous culture so i i don't yeah i don't know what your thoughts are on that it's hard because the i mean it's really the horns of a dilemma because uh it's not pleasant and in like in colin's case uh it wasn't even a choice he just basically got cornered out and squeezed out and there's there's there's other problems actually we can talk about with regard to that that i ever thought of when i was in my own phd program that make it very hard and i watched my brother struggle with it and his he's a professor now and i watch him struggle with the the realities of this particular problem but that's not ideological and so this this ideological problem though is um it's very unpleasant if you can get the job if they don't squeeze you out uh it's gonna be very unpleasant and uh so that's one horn of the dilemma the other horn of the dilemma though is if you bail you've now increased the homogeneity of the academy and this is actually part of the strategy you can read this you know the goal is to wear people down and get them to quit some days i get so much [ __ ] now some days it's literally the only thing that keeps me from quitting what i do is is i think they want me to quit the goal is to piss me off and wear me out and dry me up so that i'll quit and i'm like nah [ __ ] them they can't have that i'm not giving that to them and so i i have the same feeling that you do because it's just in a different realm and what what is going to be definitely needed are heterodox academics people who are focused on the science for example if it's in physics people who are focused on whatever the field is people who are insiders inside this homogenous you know it's like the underground railroad of academia basically you have students who aren't all bought into the ideology and they're going to be looking for like safe harbors where they can have a professor who isn't all about that peter gets this all the time he gets people opening up to him and i've heard this from other professors who are not woke they have like this whole little like closet army in the closet army of students who are like you don't believe it either you know and they all whisper about it because it can't be said openly and they're all afraid they're going to get pilloried in their classes or whatever so it takes people who are going to be like that and i admire the courage and the grit of people like yourself who are willing to stand up and do that because it's going to be necessary it's absolutely going to be necessary i can't actually get upset so i want to take the horns of the dilemma and call it two opportunities rather than two two losing positions because there's an opportunity for the people who stay because they're going to set the course for the new thing once this ideology eventually eats itself or crashes and burns supposing it doesn't just take everything down with it as it goes people who stay are going to be the ones who set the course so you are putting yourself in that position that's an opportunity on the other hand people who leave are going to be going out and building the kind of infrastructure that necessary to create the incentives to force the academy to change the academy isn't going to be able to change like it's visit it can run this stupid as you as you said bruce this stupid um bloated business model because it has no competitor you can't get a college degree without going to college and you can't get a lot of jobs without a college degree once you change the fact that they have monopoly on a certain type of elite certification once you change that dynamic then you can start to create things that pressure them uh so if you start creating pipelines um and i know that some entities have done this i've spoken with some people who are integral to doing this where you take a course through something that's mostly online but maybe it does something more than that and you become certified say to code or whatever it happens to be without having to go through the whole thing and then google will still hire you who's going to go get a 300 000 degree when you can go get the same the same thing in like one-fifth of the time for uh you know eight months maybe instead of four to five years and then you can get that in you know for for a tenth of the cost who on earth is going to take the the bloated university option so the university's painted itself into a corner so there's opportunity for both parties there's going to be a lot of building of new infrastructure that infrastructure is that's going to be a very fruitful sector of the economy unless it gets just forced out and there's going to be a lot of fruit for people that are doing it meanwhile it's going to put pressure on the university to get out of its terrible model that it's operating with right now on like every level and then the people like you who end up deciding to stay in the university vince become well placed to lead in bringing the university back to a place of high standing because right now i mean they lost me it's hard to lose me like i'm like academia you know they've college degree okay boomer you know whatever and it says oh yeah you have a phd you do yeah yeah you know it's just like so somebody's gonna have to lead the the charge though to re-establish the the worth and the the status of the university and people like yourself who don't buy into the [ __ ] but want to fight through it and stick in there we need them too um it doesn't take all kinds but i think in this case it takes both kinds yeah what i often wonder is that the best case scenario has got to be someone like stephen pinker who didn't fall for any of this [ __ ] he is a psychology professor at harvard he is uh like one of the leading linguists in the world he's on the american um the american society of [ __ ] i can't believe i'm forgetting it the national academy of sciences there we go most prestigious scientists in the world he is incredibly popular has like under 700 000 followers on twitter written some of the greatest works in sociological scholarship i guess if you want to word it that way he's not exactly a sociologist but he's written about it and he is one of the key targets of the woke wukostani people so i think and even him he's got tenured again he is very prestigious in the academy he he is probably the best case scenario where sure he's safe in his position right he um it's not like he's gonna get fired or anything like that he's not gonna get canceled he's not gonna get censored to the point where he can't speak his truth but he's still getting lambasted so much so to the point where the society of linguists uh wrote a letter basically saying that they'd want to disassociate themselves from him he is constantly people are trying to ratio him on twitter people are trying to label him as a racist as a sexist for his views on blank slateism or on on race relations and that to me is like that's best case scenario of what happens to someone in academia and that's because he is so incredibly popular imagine the people like colin wright who say the same things as he does but because he doesn't have the prestige or he doesn't have the amount of the platform that he has he got he got wiped out of academia as he said he was basically forced out because he couldn't get a job and so that's what i'm concerned is going to happen to me because i'm not going to get to a stephen pinker level of amazing scholarship that is going to be able to inoculate myself that's the best 25-year process oh god if that yeah right and so and then it's still a minority of scholars ever reached that that tier um yeah it's a big problem and it actually touches it's it's totally not relevant to what we're talking about it actually touches upon the other problem i noticed in academia which is that um and maybe it's just simply that a lot of people who are in programs don't belong in them but what i realized was that there was no room to have a life outside of for me mathematics um in fact i got in trouble with my advisors over having a life outside of mathematics and there's a character i don't want to name him because i don't want to bring anything on him but he was like the quintessential math guy right it's like he all he wanted to do it's like he would even say things like you know he comes to the office and he does math and he goes home and he eats a quick dinner and then he does math because why would you want to do anything except math and it's like you know it's like how do you compete with that guy if you want to do anything else in your life but work all the time and because of the way things have worked out there are enough of those in most academic departments where it's very difficult if you want to be a normal human being on top of that to compete with the absolute scholars of the scholars and so there's some level where i think that's almost what it takes to to succeed in academia and become a pinker but i don't know what pinker's life is like maybe he has lots of interesting hobbies that i don't know about i don't know him personally but certainly this guy that i went to grad school with did not uh but no i did i got in trouble with my advisors for having outside interests and for also getting married um they're like that will distract you from your math i was like and so where are you one of the things that you know i think maybe one of the few bright spots about this whole coveted crisis is like you know it's getting people to rethink how we want to um how we how we work at home and there might be an opportunity here to i might be overly optimistic here but there might be an opportunity here to reform how education works especially since um no one is going to be going on campus everyone's going to be learning from their their remote computers um now and um i you know i i don't know if this post-modern influence is going to reach out from the the university to online sessions but i don't know enough about it but i'm hoping there's something there but i'm more concerned now about like um how deep it's it's gone i mean they're teaching intersectional principles um out of my old high school in bay area and i was in a private meeting with a few friends of mine about a month ago one of my friends is a school teacher and she's a part of a movement and i like to say that she's probably helping to lead the charge to um to to to push back requests to change our curriculum from the k-1 through 12 level um with with what i'm what i'm dubbing social justice extremism just keep trying to keep this well culture away from our kids but you know the bottom line is that material is already out there and if it's sunk that deep like you know we'll we'll even removing it from college campuses help you know especially since the the epistemology what's what's being taught isn't so much the material but the very epistemology is saying i i need to go by standpoint epistemology right that's the key yeah that's what i keep trying to tell people people actually ask me like well is it indoctrination is this is this an indoctrination like no it's a reprogramming it's actually programming people to think in a different way so the epistemology and the ethics underlying it are much more important than uh the specific content or the specific ideas um it's it's a way to think about the world and i share the fear that you have i do think however the covet is the opportunity that you describe and it's very interesting it's a battleground now james if i can just briefly interrupt you here i mean like one of the most telling things about this was like um i one of the authors i've quickly become a fan of is thomas chatterson williams and he got into um a spat with zebra with whatever his name is candy the guy who wrote how to be a quote-unquote anti-racist and um he challenged him with a question saying like okay if this if civil western civilization is so systemically racist then explain to me why um why asians and asians are just a complete um uh uh it's a term just um that's an umbrella for so many groups of people like you know south asians indians yeah and um he asked them like why are these people at the at the top of the food chain here and like i think there was a graph even on twitter saying that indian americans had the earned the most they have the highest standard of living here and like you know what what skin color do indian americans have well they're black um and um candy as far as i know has not answered him um and so because that's that's that's that that that objective um standard that objective piece of knowledge completely blows a hole through this this through this um this crt [ __ ] and yeah the fact that nigerian americans are very very near the top as well and you know they're rather famously black really tells a story here uh yeah i mean there are so many of these holes and you know they try to patch the holes this is where you know your physics comes in because it's like watching them try to build epicycles um and the same thing's happening around around covid here because you know all this stuff is online all of a sudden there are now new openings in the market to challenge the universities there are new avenues by which even public schooling can be challenged uh homeschooling pods and homeschooling groups and things like that so what are they trying to do well make that illegal as fast as they can because they don't want people to be able to do that what are they trying i just saw today that they've taken a school system and they're gonna have a lot of their instruction online because of the the virus and they're making the parents sign a document saying that they won't watch what their kids are being exposed to they have to sign and if they don't sign the kids can be thrown at taken out of the school and it's like i don't like to say phrases like masks off but what in the world is going on here you know something really weird is happening with that so i think that the opportunities um that it's very weird you know covet actually in some sense is a huge catalyst for this to i guess jump the shark in the way that it did but it also is presenting a large number of opportunities it is a disrupting event that prevents the status quo of the the previous economy which includes public schools as they were which includes universities as they were from continuing and one of the things i noticed i saw an article the other day that i put on twitter i made fun of it um are there some teachers that are complaining that they can't stop their their students you know these are like third graders and seventh graders and things from being radicalized out of social justice on youtube and it's like you somebody commented and i wish i could give them proper credit somebody commented and said that feeling when you're you complete your long marks of the institutions and all the institutions crumble at that exact moment so you don't have them anymore and i was like that's so exactly what's going on right now and it is kind of the ray of hope right uh but we do have to watch things like the law now as for what you know this whole [ __ ] with candy and the different races i think that those are the things that have to just keep you bro keep being brought up candy couldn't answer uh thomas because um he doesn't have an answer he doesn't have an answer there's not an answer to that question and the only thing that they can do i mean famously nicole hannah jones has been trying to grapple with that whole thing and is more or less just exposed that she doesn't like asian people like she's had a complete freaking meltdown it's been almost like where's my popcorn like let's put some let's put some caramel on this popcorn you know let's have a popcorn party uh where's my cheese powder because it's like she's just utterly melting down around the fact that she's trying to argue that asians should be discriminated against and the asians haven't have not experienced uh prejudice and all this other [ __ ] that just doesn't make any sense and she's just looking more and more racist against asian people herself and so if candy gets pulled into the same thing same thing's going to happen to him and unfortunately i think that actually nicole and jones is a very clever woman i don't think that that candy is a very smart guy so um i don't think it would go well for him if he got into that tussle now thomas thomas and i know each other a bit now thomas uh is a very smart man thomas is very very perceptive and very intelligent so if candy were to actually try to go at him with that i think thomas would have him tied in a knot that he couldn't get out of pretty quickly yeah it makes more sense for him to go make 10 million dollars from twitter to have his [ __ ] anti-racist uh institute at boston university and then to go do paid speaking gigs at nasa so long as the gravy train's gonna flow that way because it probably won't last forever if you can't answer more of these questions but that's the thing is i think that these are the things when you start talking about you know you said counter narrative earlier that's correct there's also the need to pick at the problems and to make very public the shortcomings of this you know very cartoonish theory okay you know america's systemically racist explain the success of nigerian americans explain the success of asian americans explain the success of south asian or indian americans you know just write down the list you just keep doing explain the the success of jews you know jewish americans it's just go ahead explain it explain it come on and there are explanations for these things in some cases and in other cases that you're not allowed to talk about what the explanations are but um they have to be made uncomfortable and one of the things where we talked about niceness you know sean carroll this niceness thing is that a lot of people feel like it's inappropriate to make these people uncomfortable to make anybody uncomfortable and depress them and press them and press them and try to hold that jello to the wall and that's what has to happen i mean again their whole one of their foundational premises is that uh whites are comfortable with the racial status quo so anything that maintains white comfort is suspect well just change the word white to woke and the woke are comfortable with the current hegemonic status quo so anything that challenges woke comfort or that maintains woke comfort is suspect challenge them on this force them to take up the issue um and again and again ask them those those are the questions that need to keep being asked thomas said did the lords work in that and i know this is an atheist podcast but um thomas did the lord's work by bringing up that that point with candy and being in a position to where like if i did it people just think it's a publicity stunt but thomas is taken much more seriously in some regards and so it's very good for him to have done that yeah yeah i mean what like i'm reading how to be an anti-racist and this book is filled with these just like passing remarks that are completely up substantiated so he'll say something along the lines of yeah the reason why black people underperform when it comes to s.a.t and gpas was because they were given that stereotype that they were dumb and so they just acted upon that stereotype but it's like why are you ignoring like other racial so asians when they came off the boat the reason why they're so smart and they excel academically is because we gave them that stereotype and they acted upon that stereotype why are there some uncomfortable realities that we're just not allowed to trespass on so i'm going to jump into the sharks right now with the hispanic community for instance where i know that speaking from within my community that hispanic people or i guess mexicans to be more specific they don't value education as much as white people do nor that and they certainly don't value education as much as asians do that's a nuke that's a minefield right there to even enjoy and i don't know if that's true again that's personal experience so i can't say that that is a substantiated claim but why am i not allowed to mention that into the conversation on these topics and so welcome to social constructivism yeah exactly man and so that's why it's so aggravating just reading i i blame you for for for leading me down this critical race theory um rabbit hole where every time i see an anti-racist book i buy it and and i this thing's like heroin to me now i love reading this stuff because it's just so lunatic but he's a good one for that i like yeah i mean great i like reading and first of all i do want to say that i think candy in general is a very honest man um i think that shines in his writing i don't think he's a very smart man that also shines in his writing but isn't it and you can go back and i don't mean to interrupt but isn't it just so fun with candy's writing the way that he basically takes like the most if you've ever listened to him speak he's even worse about it like the most gratuitous like stereotypes and then he just like repeats them and then somehow pulls like a linguistic magic trick and then that's obviously what everybody the white people force everybody to believe so that's just how it is and it's like it's just one stereotype after another after another where it's even as somebody who's you're not not as not as a white person as somebody who exists in 2020 you know reading this you're like nobody's thought that in like 50 years like what the hell are you why did you write that down um and hots i i get your heroin comment because yeah just like reading this stuff that's like wow they really do that well they did it again wow robin daniel really said that she was scared to have to join her black people yeah it's like as you said it's like we don't want to say it but the mask slips right when robin d'angelo says something like uh the only reason why jackie robinson was pretty the way we viewed jackie robinson the jackie robinson story was that he was the first black man that was good enough it's like no one thought that but you and you just told this you just you just told us how racist this is my this is my hot take guys this is my hot take i i i've been trying to disabuse myself of this and i cannot so i'm now becoming convinced of it um my hot take is that what all of this [ __ ] theory is doing is that it's revealing that progressive america has done a lot less reckoning with race for example than they like to pretend they were no we're on the right side of racism so we don't have to think about it and the conservatives are all racist and so they had to think about it are we really racist are we being racist you know so they had to grapple with it no this is when i do this that's not racist but when i do this that would be racist okay and so they actually had to grapple with it and so all these progressives got like a got it got like a get out of jail free card on dealing with that and so now you have these theorists who live in super progressive echo chamber bubbles and think that everybody thinks like that because that's how they think and all their friends think and they're like wow look at all this racism of all the people so it's like i think they've actually figured out that progressives and i say this is somebody who identifies as progressive in the technical senses social and economically both but like in the the movement sense or the po you know whatever the what people call progressives they're white liberals as they've been called in many cases it's like [ __ ] man i think that they just figured out that they're all actually racist and haven't figured out how to deal with it yet it's i had this impression the first time when i first started learning about critical race theory like five years ago i was like you know i think these are the people who walk down the street and like happen sometimes you see somebody of a different race say it's a black person and you say oh there's a black person it just pops on your head you don't know why it pops in your head it just does and then you move on with your day because who cares it doesn't matter and then some people though are like you're not supposed to think that oh my god i noticed race oh my god i saw a black person i thought a black person oh no they start freaking out in themselves i got called a racist for telling this story the first time i've said it probably too you know like james know his face sometimes he doesn't it's like i don't know why [ __ ] pops in my head i was crossing a bridge with mike nena our filmmaker and i had his like thirty thousand dollar camera in my hands i was crossing a bridge in portland walking across and i had this overwhelming impulse to throw it in the river i don't know why that popped in my head it just did it's like you go to a building a tall building and you're like i should jump and you don't know why that psychopathic crap comes in your head it just happens then you move on with your day because it's just ridiculous stuff happening in your head and so anyway certain people white progressives in this case primarily notice race and they don't like that they notice race and they don't know how to grapple with the fact that they noticed somebody's race and so then they're like i noticed right oh my god and they go into this whole like scrupulous ocd fit and then they run back to their apartment and write a blog you know their nice brooklyn apartment and they write a blog excoriating racism and all the racists and all how white people are all complicit in racism and all they're really doing is confessing and it's in a sense sad because that's confession by projection but i really think like the more i think about it the more of this especially people like d'angelo where it's really prominent and barbara applebaum and allison bailey these white whiteness theorists uh richard delgado and for example is another one i read the stuff they write and i'm just like okay they have i don't even want to call them racist i don't i don't think it matters they are for the first time in their lives grappling with with the facts of race and racism and they because they've surrounded themselves only with people like themselves don't know how to handle it and they're they're unearthing the fact that this is actually very common in people who thought themselves as good white progressives and insulated themselves right you know who you know i hate that you know it's an atheist show but you know who i noticed don't have a problem with race at all southern baptists like i went to one of their big conventions this year and it's like there's all kinds of races all over the place and everybody's just friends in christ and everybody's happy and they're talking about their brotherhood it's never an issue and it's like they've they've dealt with it and i think that a lot of these white progressives like peggy mcintosh very famous so he's like oh i live in a super white neighborhood and white privilege means living in a super white neighborhood and never dealing with people of other races and it's like what you know have you never gone to like uh say like like for me one of my favorite places to go eat we have this mexican grocery store and they do like the best tacos that you could as you would expect that you could imagine and it's like for years i used to go to this place and i was like the only white person there and it's like the poor person like coming out to take the order it's like okay i know a little spanish i can help you out here you know it's just like that and you know it's got like all these dudes kind of looking at you sideways because you're like the white guy in there it's like have you never done that before it's like have you not even you know ventured into other parts and then you know it's you know dealt with dealt have you just never experienced other people is that what this is robin it's okay um but you don't have to put it on all of us it's like that's my hot take i feel like they have on earth that i and i hate to say it because i identify as being on the progressive left that the progressive left is just full of [ __ ] racists we're just people who have just never who are taking their own experiences i i get this this feeling when i was reading fragility she's taking her own experiences and then projecting them on to other people and but yeah you know and she uses that convenient post-modern line objectivity is is is is is white or whatever and it's it's not possible and it's not desirable yeah it's um i mean yeah yeah there's this optimization oh go ahead no no i i was just gonna continue on the same line of thought and just kind of like cheerlead so you can go ahead okay i was gonna say that there's this narrative of just victimization treating these pocs um or by pocs as these really defenseless creatures that are just at the brew ends of the white man's fist i've even i've listened to some people talking about this sort of thing going so far as to say that we shouldn't criticize religion when black people are around because they need religion to help them go through these racist times i'm like that is jesus christ you want to talk about the bigotry of low expectations you talk about there and what makes it such a bit nerve-wracking to argue against things like critical race theory that people will say things like this is what the black community is trying to tell you and you're ignoring them there's a part in the book white fragility in which d'angelo she documents instances in which black people tell her that it would be revolutionary if people recognize the things that she's talking about and they also point to other authors who talk about race in a critical sense like leila sad austin brown you know abram kennedy and they say things that like you know these people are clearly representative of the black community now i don't know if this is the case because you can also just as easily point to people like glenn lowry john mcwhorter coleman hughes thomas chatterton williams shelby steele and mcwhorter specifically says things like he goes so far to say that the majority of black people disagree with this critical approach to race but they just don't mention it um i don't know if that's true but i mean it's possible given the fact that there are polls in the latino community that are not too happy with the whole latin x shenanigans that they're doing no you didn't say it right you can't say it next you can't do that you have to do it the way they do it you have to say latinx you have to put the whole team you could almost have like that like you know spanish passion in there it's got to be there yeah cultural appropriation to have spanish passion in there that's what are you doing i don't do it i'm like latinx and they're like you know i listen to them then they're like it's very important very you know anglo accent it's very important that we all take very seriously the latinx community and it's just like so weird when they like throw the accent on it or whatever and it's like they can't say somebody's name normally if they've got like a you know a latin or hispanic name they've got to like say it with the accent because that isn't at all like patronizing or weird to do that yeah like [ __ ] man it's like what is wrong with these people you know yeah latinx is not that popular with with the latinos oh i did it too yeah i mean i'm glad because it's nonsense i see like abraham candy says latinx or latinx uh deangelo says it uh leila says it in her book me and white supremacy and every time i say i'm just like [ __ ] off like jesus christ like three percent of hispanics like support it and it's only like one out of four or one out of five i've ever even heard of it yeah what are these green x's doing it's so nicely on twitter called them but you know even if it were the case let's say for the sake of the argument that yes it is most black people that go with this approach that wouldn't make it true right so you can point to other communities that largely have grievances as well that don't fit this narrative fit by critical methods so that i remember there was an instance in which i was having a conversation in which that was the accusation that was thrown at me right you're not listening to this community and we were specifically talking about like the critical approach to this whole thing right like black people can't be racist power structures the whole deal and what i was saying was that okay so let's look at other groups other large groups that seem to have a consensus when it comes to a particular viewpoint let's look at the evangelical christian group that they widely say that they're oppressed in the united states that christianity is under attack do you agree with that and obviously the answer is no why why is it a no for them you're so so this is what i managed to convince her from you're clearly using an external mechanism to determine what objective reality is in this group but you're not you're not doing it with this group what's the difference here what is the distinguish here both groups are telling you their reality but you're only exactly you hit the end you hit it right on the head and so my my argument would be like it is clearly possible to use external mechanisms that we can employ to understand reality and it is racist to only use that mechanism for a group of people but not for another group of people based on the color of their skin and this is what the problem that we're dealing with so this goes back to the whole narrative argument that that would that we were talking about like an hour ago and you know coleman hughes mentioned that the reason why this can seem like such an uphill battle at times is because we lack a meta-narrative to ground our arguments not a marine not a meta-narrative like in the way that they would claim enlightenment values are a meta-narrative right but more like like more literal so he specifically addresses this in the context of the anti-racism debate but i think we can easily apply this to all the other grievance departments as you've coined it right so where for them there's a man there's a meta-narrative of the good guys versus racism the good guys versus sexism versus the powerful more like it yeah so it could have history right oh my god yeah the right side of history yeah or as layla sad says it how to be a good ancestor right it's like jesus oh yeah so it could help to explain why this seems so alluring like they use language that is very seductive abraham candy constantly use this word like words like liberation liberty you know liberate yourself from the shackles of oppression but we don't have it anywhere near as strong as they do so it's like how do we find some meta-narrative that gives us a some ground against this is why it's like so hard to like talk about this because it's so easy to look at us and view us as the bad guys when the words racism sexism are associated with what it is that we're claiming just by us participating in it right you don't even have to argue against it you have to be actively an anti-racist in order to not associate yourself with these words and even then if you're white you're still going to be associated with them so it's like no matter what it it's a it's a sword that you're going to end up stabbing yourself with yeah that's right the the the that not even narrative but meta-narrative battle has to has to be won and that's ultimately one of the things that we're missing you know how do you how do you articulate the ideas of freedom of thought and freedom of conscience and freedom of uh speech in a way that's super compelling against something like uh you know that speech causes pain and we're going to create liberation from from all of these you know it's a very difficult thing because that liberation paradigm which is neo-marxist by the way uh does create part of the backbone of of their meta-narrative and the answering one as you know i've run into many many times in my own effort like people ask me well what do we do and i'm like go back to what we were doing before and this is not that compelling it's like what we were doing before was pretty good could we like back up to that it was like working out okay um and so it doesn't have that that compelling thing but luckily we might be able to to take away the whole thing you know i'm trying to push i tweeted the other day as you saw truth matters there's a whole like there's a whole tweet truth matters racist um well that's the thing is you know what can you tap into under truth matters well you immediately gain all that civil rights footage the truth will set us free you know um so that you can steal their liberations paradigm from them because the the truth is that um as i phrased it in in a talk i gave in london last year uh uh reality is the thing that you run into and your beliefs are false and so there is the ability to to try to start cr crafting a meta-narrative in defense of truth and in defense of equality these are actually virtues and values that people can believe in they just have to remember that they have to be articulated and defended um i think that there's a lot of fruit in fact where are you guys both in california i know i know you are bruce uh are you in california too yeah yeah i'm in california so you guys are trying to get rid of your your state's anti-discrimination language in your in your state constitution which seems like a pretty fertile ground to talk about how equality before the law is is a key thing and equality is something people value and then this of course gets to flip the script and put them on their back foot because then they have i even see them do it on twitter all the time they're like yeah but that doesn't achieve equity but if you can you can just say that you're right equality doesn't achieve equity equality is the higher virtue and then keep pushing with that then i think that there's the ability to start crafting this narrative one of the pieces of the narrative and i don't know how it all comes together as like a cohesive meta-narrative but one of the pieces of the narrative is where we started this conversation talking about go by association um one of the pieces is we can be friends again i can be friends with whoever i want i i can be friends with people who have conservative views they can be friends with people who have liberal and progressive views um i can be friends as an atheist with christians and the christians can be friends with me and i'm taking heat from my relationships with christians the christians in question are taking heat for their relationship with an atheist i think they're taking five times the heat that i am their community is really not happy with it and we can be friends we can be friends you know i was just on glenn beck's podcast earlier today and at the end he's like i hope i can call you a friend or whatever and i was like yes sure yes you know i disagree with an overwhelming amount of the things that glenn beck thinks and says but i think we could be friends i even have said this repeatedly i think he'd be a great next-door neighbor i kind of wish he was my next-door neighbor um he's an interesting guy and we can be we can be friends despite the fact that we have radically different views about faith radically different views about politics and that we can even legitimately think if if i can think of well if glenn got his way with politics that bad things would happen and he could think well james got his way with politics bad things would happen we can think that about each other and then we can go on you know the first tuesday of november and i can go deliberately cancel out glenn's vote and he can deliberately cancel out my vote then we can go have a barbecue and laugh about how we did it and talk about stuff that actually matters in life in terms of our day-to-day existence so we can be friends we can it's just there right you know um i think that that's a huge part it's like can't we all get along was really a thing and i i think that there's space for that again so truth matters friendship matters um the idea though also i don't know how to get that one going if like i'm an individual stop speaking for me like i don't get to do that because i guess i do you know i'm an individual don't tell me who i am because i'm white and you know you're an asian hispanic guy so don't tell you nobody gets to say who you are because you're asian hispanic i'm just kidding of course by the way um yeah so nobody gets to say though what you're like you're not you don't no i'm not a [ __ ] latinx you know and i'm just not you know and so you can do this you know you don't get to speak for me i'm going to speak for myself that's a pretty powerful narrative too and i can be friends with who the [ __ ] i want to be friends with and i can think what i want and i can say what i want and you know that's pretty bold [ __ ] right there and we're going to be equal in that you get to say what you want i can say what i want you get to vote for whatever stupid [ __ ] you want i'm going to go cancel out your vote and then we're gonna have a barbecue and this is possible it's i mean i'm just like [ __ ] man when where do i sign up for this society i'm ready to go like where do i have to move to get to live like that again um so i think there's something there that could tap into something and i'm hoping that you know the ground is actually fertile for that like um as i said before like i'm a huge admirer of thomas and chad thomas chatters and williams i'm hoping to get a chance to talk to him at some point but um what in his books the theme that i walked away with was made crystal clear in uh when i was frequenting when i was frequenting instagram when when um when the whole floyd thing happened and um there was this group that actually put out a saying asians for black lives matter and this person who put it out there um wrote that she had gotten lambasted for it she said i thought it was just a positive message that everyone would agree with and i i wrote her a response i didn't send it because i was pretty sure i get like i get i never hear the end of it from her is that um she would be very surprised to learn that i had spoken to several members uh um several several friends i have who are black who are not on bl on board with a lot of the ideas that black lives matters or or some of its factions um espouse and um and she said asians as though it was just one cohesive energy but like if there's anything to take away from um from thomas's book is that black doesn't mean black asian doesn't mean asian white doesn't mean white there's so many ways that they interact so many ways to identify with the things other than just than just than than your than your skin color and um to say that you speak for one group that's that's the ultimate expression of arrogance um right there and it it doesn't even make any sense in that long run but you know the the concern the primary concern i have especially seeing um what i saw on twitter today when jack from twit from twitter actually gave candy uh 10 uh 10 million dollars is that yeah exactly and he's and candy i i believe is pushing for some kind of anti-racism department in our government saying we need people trained in anti-racism and thanks to the grievance studies and especially examining this post-modern [ __ ] that um which is in yours and helen's book which i recommend that everyone read this training isn't much more than a bunch of scholars literally getting their bs in bs and pure [ __ ] and um if it doesn't have any validity if there's no objectivity if there's no objective standard for which to determine if a group is actually oppressed or not anything can be racist anything can be um considered oppressive and therefore you have a system for for chipping away at people's freedoms based on the purpose of their skin color and leading us straight back into a racist society that's right that's exactly right um yeah candy's a whole thing is let's look at the outcomes and if there are any differences in the outcomes then clearly there must be racism hidden somewhere within it he's not he doesn't i'm just like i'm not interpreting this this is actually his view i'm representing him fairly yeah and even to the point where he openly says you know if discrimination creates uh outcomes that are unequal then i'm sorry if anti-discrimination creates outcomes that are unequal then anti-discrimination is racist and if discrimination creates outcomes that are equal then discrimination is anti-racist and it's like this is some you know some some some 1984 [ __ ] right here you know just the discrimination is anti-racist like that's like straight out of the whole thing and it's so poorly thought out uh i know i think i've actually talked to you guys about this before but the the the stride method uh for hiring but i i was talking with with a scholar one time who is in a science department and he was telling about the stride method and he said well one of the things is that females have half as many first author papers as males so the stride method would say when you have a female applicant you double the number of her first author papers to make up for that discrepancy and i said do you know the reason why women have half as many he said no and i said do you think it's all discrimination or might there be other things and he got like really mad at me and was like what else could it be what else could it be he's like really mad on the spot and it's like i would agree with having a conversation not necessarily coming to the conclusion but i think there would be a debate that's fair and reasonable to have if we were to discover that discrimination accounts for some proportion of difference like that that we would say okay well discrimination is not fair it is demonstrably causing this disparity so let's try to figure out a way to account for that and and you know be more fair about things i could see a conversation around that for sure and maybe even it's a good idea i'm not even gonna say it's a bad idea i don't know but i'm not willing to say well we saw the on the back end of this whole thing there's this level of difference and we don't know what caused those differences and we're not going to look but we're just going to monkey the numbers to fix it and make everything equal that's when i was on rogan's podcast and i said it's literally like finding a hole in your wall and saying well just some wallpaper over it you know good to go and uh like i got a problem with these freaking yellow jackets and and one of my walls not in our house side building and it's like you know are they going to chew through the wall and get in the building that's not good um you can't just like i can't just go like paint over the hole or something you know you've actually got to fix the problem you've actually got to figure out what the causes are you actually got to do something so where candy is like oh well we need to understand anti-racism no what we need is rigorous research into why these differences occur we need to suss out all the causes as best we can we then we need to start trying to address what they are you know vince you brought up the cultural aspect with the hispanic community for example that you've been embedded in with in terms of the their how well they value education versus say you know how well famously tiger moms in asian communities can value education um for their children uh and so there are these other aspects to the question and as you said it's a minefield you're not allowed to bring it up you just have to say oh look differences you know 70 cents on the dollar better give them a 30 raise or 32 raise or whatever it works out to for the fractions in that case i'm not going to do woke math and get it wrong i just don't know what i just don't know what 10 divided by 7 is off the top of my head um i guess it would be uh use your phd powers i can't do fractions and sevens was it 14 28 uh what's the next one um 30 for 42. so it would be 0.42 so you'd have to go by about a 42 percent increase 42.6 increase there phd powers no woke math take that 10 divided by 7. um so you know you really do though you have to figure out you can't just blindly say oh this is the gap so we're just going to make up for it without understanding what caused it because what's going to hap that is a version if you want to put it in a different way of oversteer we see a problem you're driving down the road but suddenly a deer comes out in front of your car that's a problem you see a problem and a lot of times the reason that people crash isn't because they swerve to miss the deer because they swerve to miss a deer and then they realize that that took them you know into the other lane and they jerk the wheel back the other way and it's called oversteer and then they spin their car and end up in the ditch or something like that and this is the thing right so it'd be oversteer to take kendy's solution can be saying hey look there's these discrepancies irresponsible policy since he loves that word by the way it's a stand-in for systemic he even has said that he says policy to mean systemic because people don't understand systemic it means the same thing as everybody else but he likes this word policy well here's a policy uh that has these outcomes and so now we're just gonna you know flip it over that is that is immature yeah here's a policy that has these things let's dig into why let's try to figure out why and let's try to figure out realistic solutions that actually can fix the problem like no black people get lower scores on sats better get rid of the sat that's a terrible solution why would you equal access to rubble is not a worthy goal why on earth would anybody get behind this so i i don't know my whole point it's so frustrating after years of this people like why did you do the grievances affair well because i think that these issues are important i think that we should do good work and rigorous scholarship to find the right answers to the questions rather than just answers to the questions because we're more likely to get wrong answers than right answers because right answers are hard to get and that somehow that's like i guess i don't want black people in stem level white supremacist answer to to the question and you know candy gets 10 million dollars yeah well i guess uh that's probably a good way to end this this is officially our longest podcast that we've ever done two hours yeah dude this is this was great we cracked two hours i was really hoping we would hit that mark and we did and we had a great i think we had a great uh substituting conversation in which i learned yeah i learned a lot we really got a lot of information out there um i hope people are well are familiar with these topics because uh i was talking about the same some other guy's podcast and he said that um a lot of the words that i said went over people's heads because i guess this is like a lot of people like don't know um what it is when people talk about like critical methods or theory or foucault it's like well like i'll take a slow down and i remember the first time i actually had you on a lot of the stuff was going over my head when you were like telling us about the history it's like well this is this is like next level stuff but i think we had a great conversation um james you have a book coming out cynical theories comes out on the 25th right 25th right that's the official date i guess i guess it's in stores now if you can go get coronavirus with your book yeah go for it go to barnes noble and get that um it's once more it was fantastic also check out james's website new discourses in which he documents really everything that's going on he even has a fantastic dictionary for all this you know what is it called the language for the wokish or something the translations from the vocabulary yeah i'm a big big tolkien fan so i borrowed off a tolkien here and the thing is i i i really recommend that all of our um all of our listeners um hope you know they read that book so they can understand the terminology they're familiar with if they're really afraid about like what's going on out there in our universities and our schools today and like you know i i i'm i hope everyone like follows you james because you're one of the few people i know out there is really really pushing back against this regressive nonsense and you know keep swinging that big chinese sword of yours to keep mowing down those the enemies of one reason no that is some serious culture very very are you giving me permission to use it okay good yeah that's what i was waiting for put her in the position um yeah that damn thing's heavy man you're an honorary asian james yeah i knew it yesterday oh god uh but yeah and as you said what they learned their language because they basically have a language under their own and the words they say the way that they use these words the conclusions that they're specifically looking for you know be like the mongolians and learn the opposition's language to take them over uh so yeah thank you once more for coming on the podcast it's been fantastic and we hope to see you again in the future it was wonderful yeah man thank guys thanks guys it's really good thanks for listening to this episode if you enjoyed this episode be sure to subscribe for more podcasts as well as short videos discussing topics within the realm of philosophy religion and culture you can follow me on twitter at latent physicist and on instagram babylon project yt you can also purchase some merch if you're interested and you want to rep the thinking out loud podcast make sure you also purchase james's book as my friend thomas sheedy described it it's a master's level education on this crazy woke phenomenon for dealing with anyways thanks for watching and i hope to see you in the next video you

Channel: The Babylon Project

Views: 12,478

Keywords: James Lindsay, James, Jim, Lindsay, Cynical Theories, Critical Theories, book, review, podcast, thoughts, gender studies, postcolonial studies, queer studies, fat studies, disability studies, social justice, scholarship, university, physics, critical methods, religion, atheism, woke, black lives matter, peter boghossian, helen pluckrose, grievance studies, hoax, academia, acadamy, the babylon project

Id: f37mXxYDons

Length: 124min 12sec (7452 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020