What Happened to Journalism?

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is Big Fun uh so what's it like to start a new Media company that's astonishing you guys did that well it's it's first of all it's a pleasure to be here and and I read the skeptic but I actually don't read it in and I need to get that print the print subscrition few still in print it looks gorgeous yes it is nice yeah we're we're Four Color throughout now which is actually cheaper than it used to be when we were black and white because things have just changed so much and you know when we started skeptic 1992 I didn't even know about distribut Distributors to bookstores I actually went uh physically I went to bookstores and said hey would you like to carry my magazine one of them finally said you know there's companies that do this I went oh that's awesome that is basically what starting a media company is like it is going door too asking for for help with something yeah um to to answer your question so you're able to do this primarily through subscriptions only or do you also have donors or investors or yeah so um I guess to to go back in time um bear and I were both at the New York Times bear quit with a fiery resignation letter remember um and we didn't really have a plan after that um I was still there I kind of went on leave to gather myself and figure out what to do um and eventually a few months after bear had been thinking you know am I going to do this or that I I was sort of like maybe you should be a rabbi that sounds like fun um but we we figured let's start collecting some email addresses at least and I had heard of substack and knew a little about bit about the new publishing ecosystem and so we just I I set her up on a substack docomo or something like that um just to collect emails and just to kind of have a distribution platform and I of course set it up so wrong in so many ways I our her first year of accounting is like a real mess um but then people started signing up and and the signups were happening a lot a lot a lot a lot and then we started offering you can pay for premium content and we'll put something behind a pay wall we'll figure out what we'll start publishing more we'll start publishing other people's voices and more bear and and eventually I mean very quickly it was making her New York Times salary and then twice for New York Times Sal just through subscribers everyone paying $5 a month and then and then 3x and then I sort of was looking at the chart and I was like this is I mean I'd covered startups for years at I started the San Francisco Chronicle and eventually made my way to the times where I started as a business reporter and I'd seen startup charts and I was like this is a startup this is pretty exciting and so um I left the times in part because it was becoming untenable to be there and because people were making it impossible to do any fun reporting or interesting reporting um on the most interesting stories of the day and I write about that in the book but I also left the times in part because the what what com sense now the Free Press looking at the growth chart I was like I can't miss out on this I we got to build this thing and so I quit and kind of became the first business manager of it which was a mess as I said with the accounting um and then started a little Friday humor column that I've been doing ever since and it's very very fun and then this week I actually just started a health column too so now I'm doing also random rants about health and and Wellness I wonder if you could I wonder if you could have done this even just 10 years ago uh because the platforms and kind of the Norms of people giving five bucks a month or whatever became so commonplace I think people over the last decade maybe a little more maybe a little less have gotten used to the idea of paying for news and paying for subscriptions I think early on there was this kind of a cardinal sin that a lot of Publishers just put their content online for free and didn't really think much of it and just thought their print products would say would continue to be as lucrative as they were and obviously that turned out not true but people are really comfortable paying a subscription for writing that they want and and content that they want and that's really amazing and so you see this flourishing of new voices and this flourishing of it's on subst but it's on a million different platforms that make it very easy for writers who don't know how to do web design or don't know how to do the the basics make it very easy for them to set up a um new tiny Media company now we're sort of a midsize Media company if you like it's it's pretty incredible you're over a million followers now right we well um I don't know how you count our numbers our yes our our um our unpaid list like our total list is something like I think it's almost 900,000 or something I'm going to get that wrong but but then our paid list is less than that but it's also a lot and it's allowed us to hire a team and we're more than 20 people now we raised a little bit of money at the beginning when we weren't sure it was going to grow this well and we have sort of spent it over the last three years um and me always being the like overly conservative voice in the room wary of any spending but um yeah it's it's grown and it's and it's been great well it's fascinating it'll be interesting to see where this goes from here because um you know one of the things I've noticed is my monthly um bills are starting to add up of the number of subscriptions I have I mean I have the Wall Street Journal the New York Times Washington Post and then I have a couple of podcasts then I have you guys shenberger mat Matt taibe and then Netflix Hulu Amazon you know it's like you know five bucks five bucks 10 bucks five you know it's like all of a sudden it's like wait a minute more can I do of this I the worst is Hulu just came at me with um they wanted me to they're giving me ads even though I pay for Hulu and I had to subscribe to the next tier up my my be and my dad were watching Shogun and I got in a lot of they gave me a lot of my dad especially for for not upgrading us and being too cheap to get the $17 a month Hulu or whatever but yeah yeah it's exhausting and of course there will hit a moment where people get exhausted with all these subscriptions that is going to happen for sure yeah and I think one of the things that the Free Press that we're trying to do is to bring together some of the best of these new voices and kind of be a hub for it so that looks like obviously news roundups like what I do but then also it looks like reprints and bringing the best of a smaller subscription product to you by and we we will you know pay the person we'll reprint it and and bring it to our audience and so hopefully saving people some amount of that subscription fatigue but no it's interesting I mean I I think we're all feeling it yeah so you were at the New York Times the gray lady the all the news that fits to print the paper of record and you left that's astonishing let me read a little section here from so astonishing well I'll make it clear here by reading your own section here you're talking about well you want to go to Seattle to cover the antifa movement and the um Capitol Hill autonomous Zone Chaz and your editor well you say I ran into a colleague who was a rising Newsroom leader he said he was worried about me and this he was worried about what these story ideas said about me and if I was thinking about my career he was worried I was into all this cancel culture stuff I said I'm just so curious about what's going on up there what else am I supposed to do he said that's a question for a therapist not an editor antifa was nonsense fake a nothing Burger a non-story non- interesting and not real he said the reason he doesn't go to Seattle and cover things like this is because he knows right now is the time for white people to sit certain things out some things that are not important some things that are not important things shouldn't be covered the Capitol Hill autonomous Zone and whatever was going on there wasn't important antifa wasn't important why do you care no but seriously why do you care at the York Times this is astonishing that somebody would say something like that cast your mind back to the height of 2020 and there was a concerted effort to silence anyone who wanted to do reporting that wasn't completely doctrinaire I mean it that is still here now I think it's done a little bit more subtly I think it's done a little bit um more with a little more sophistication but in 2020 it was pretty blunt I mean you had NPR saying we're not covering the hunter Biden laptop because it's a non story that was pretty blunt like now they don't cover this or they cover they sort of downplay it in a in a subtler way but at the time it was like no we're putting our foot down so so yeah I was Finding again and again that anything that I wanted to write about that wasn't helpful to the movement of 2020 that wasn't helpful to the to the activist cause was becoming very very hard and and when I would manage to get a story through it made me a Target and these are all I mean I have the tiniest violin here right like is the a Target what so I had colleagues sending out nasty tweets about me I had people saying mean things or sharing embarrassing photos of me as a teenager that they found on my Facebook or whatever like internally it's like it's like middle school bullying I'm not I'm not like a I was fine but it was emotionally really jarring cuz I had grown up in the world of kind of prestige old America where like the New York Times by old I mean like the old way of thinking about how the media worked and how the what to want and the New York Times was the top thing for a writer to want that was it that was the only dream and so to find myself kind of all of a sudden on the outs and on the kind of being bullied being left out being kicked out of slack rooms being like all this stuff it was really jarring and I think yeah I mean it was like kind of a moment of growing up in a lot of ways and and dropping what I think of now as childish fantasies about what these places are and about what the New York Times is and I don't think it's like a malicious place or anything but it's a business and it's a business that serving an audience that wants a thing it's a business so to what extent are they making business decisions and they don't really believe any of this stuff they're just going along with the woke mob or they are they True Believers or some mix I think it's a mix but I think that that leaning in in the same way that giving your audience right red meat right-wing content is is good business to to some for some media companies giving your audience sort of blue andon as I like to call it like q andon but on the left giving your audience s blue andon content and the latest like uh headline about how how Trump is a the fascist that of all fascist in all history and the latest this and that like I think people both believe it and I think it's also good business like giving people red meat is always going to sell and I just didn't get into journalism to give people red meat I just I'm like your magazine skeptic I I'm just a skeptical personality I'm a kind of you know I don't all the things about my personality that made me sometimes like a difficult kid or a difficult student actually worked really well for journalism and I think when I was coming up in journalism at like the local paper the San Francisco Chronicle that was really well suited for that environment and I think most sort of old-fashioned thoughts of the journalist are thoughts of people who are a little bit separate from their moment or a little separate from what's around them and curious about it but skeptical and now I think the ideal journalist for or journalist for these places is not a skeptic and is not curious the ideal journalist is basically like a party member an activist a very devoted activist and hopefully a good writer but that's almost secondary and yeah I think that's the transition that that we all went through in 2020 and and and the times kind of sloughed off a bunch of the Skeptics and the worry warts and and then everyone moves along were there no uh sort of old school editors in there a Ben Bradley at the Washington Post kind of guy that says hang on this is not our job to be activist we're supposed to be reporters or they just retired now there's a mix of that um I think there was I mean I know there was some amount of movement to um to Stave this off there were voices were people reaching out to me privately and saying you know I love this story and you're so brave to have gone up and done this story even though now people are tweeting mean things about you and I was sort of just like this is insane like grown men you know and um yeah there was that movement but people were very scared and and you don't want to lose your job I mean you have to remember in in this time also Donald mcneel who for me became a very important figure I think he really summarized this in ways that are almost recognized enough but DOD mcneel was the longtime science reporter he was kind of a gray beard he'd been there forever he he'd been in South Africa he'd been all over the place he's an amazing guy and um I don't you don't need the whole it's interesting I'll tell the rec count it chly for listeners that don't remember he had on like a trip with a bunch of students some student had asked him about whether it was fair that their friend got in trouble for using the nword and Donald had responded well what was the context that your this kid used the nword but in asking that he'd used the word this happened years ago he had been sort of properly punished for it and gotten a little censored within the times and I don't remember exactly the details of his punishment but something had happened and then years later during the height of this movement when when I was kind of dealing with the Chaz stuff and covid was happening and Donald was the lead Co reporter and he was a skeptic he was a real not a skeptic of Co but he he was a real reporter who wasn't just going to go along with everything he um this old scandal bubbled up and there was sort of a movement to OU him and it was this drum beat and it was this like here's this old Scandal remember this old Scandal hey Donald mcneel you should respond about this old Scandal and it nothing new emerged nothing new about him or anything and it was used basically to to fire him to get him to resign is I'm sure the proper term but I remember thinking if the place could do this to a man who devoted his whole career really selflessly to this institution uh that's and and that's happen that's happened a lot is it your sense that or what is your sense of the psychology behind that uh you know off what do they call it offense archaeology we're going to look through and rumage through your old uh Twitter feed or whatever see if we can find something to get you on I love that term I've never heard that offense archae What offense archaeology I I don't know where they came from but it's true that's so good and and it and it's the punishment is so dramatic like you should be fired you should lose your your living your livelihood um you know that's that's very different from you know I disagree with you let's have an argument something like that that does seem worse it's almost like in the old in the Middle Ages when you know the the the worst Heretics were those who were once Believers and then they fall away those are the ones we really have to punish so like a liberal who is skeptical or whatever like Donald mcneel you know we have to really go after him maybe is it is it a signal to other people you better stay in line 100% like I think I was more irritating to the movement because I'm a liberal San Francisco lesbian like I I tick all the boxes I believe technically in the right things politically like I I like universal healthcare and strong public school you know all these things that used to be what made you count as a good liberal um but yeah yeah it's definitely that it's only this is a movement of punishment kind of within liberalism to to try to move things in in a wanted Direction and to try to move the liberal of her um but yeah it still happens the offense archaeology it's really wild and there's this there's this Blood lust to it so like I think now of Rachel dozal who right the listeners are no Rachel dozol um was the woman the mom activist who who in I think Seattle Pacific Northwest who um was involved with the NAACP and claimed she was black but she wasn't and that was found out I think her family or whatever came forward and said she's not black she's involved in Black activist circles and but she identified as black and lived in black community and wanted to identify that way and obviously that's a very eccentric thing and she lost her job within the NWA CP and lost her status and and became kind of a social Pariah she became international news for months like months and months um and you would think then she'd kind of be left alone you would think that would be enough but it's not and so now years later this eccentric woman with a little odd beliefs but relatively harmless is trying to eek out a living she's working part-time at a public school she's on only fans selling pictures of herself and people discovered this they found this and she again became a laughing stock she again the schools was the the school was called her job again was taken from her the the photos of of her only fans which I'm sorry all the sort of porn empowerment sex work empowerment people suddenly use it as a cudel when when they realize the truth which is that is not empowering and and it's and it's used to punish her yet again years later and that to me is the sort of insanity sorry I'm adjusting my little headset but why would they go after her and not lots of the other women that go on um only fans and make a lot of money like aella probably the most famous one that was making like $100,000 a month and she's kind of held up as like wow she's an entrepreneur good for her go girl because Rachel doll is all upset the movement she was she was she was not doing the proper things she was embarrassing to it she was um she became kind of like a scapegoat of Oddity and odd behavior and look at this white privilege she's taking on a black identity and and um I don't know people became obsessed with her and they became obs obessed with kind of hunting her down and so that I all to say that's kind of how people treat um anyone within the movement who who crosses it in some way or questions it too much or um seems to be potentially a dissident and there's just like a a sort of obsessive hunting that goes on for years and and there's no escape from it so like Donald mcneel will be followed by this for years and right a little bit like what Coleman Hughes is experiencing now by um champing color blindness you know it's it's one thing for a White Guy to do it and just be accused well you're just a white supremacist or something but he's in the tribe so for him to say this you know you probably saw yeah that's right you guys even posted on The View his appearance on The View which was just so impressive he was so calm it's phenomenal yeah and uh but yeah I guess that's the psychology of it one of our own that falls away has to be really punished not not only for their own Discretions indiscretions but uh as a signal to everybody else this could happen to you hman is so special that appearance on The View he was phenomenal I mean he I for anyone who didn't see Sonny hoston basically went after him and was trying and was just trying to poke holes in his argument but he knows his argument so well and he was so calm and he just handled it and kind of pushed back really politely when the ladies were trying to of bully him in the traditional ways you might expect and um it was it was great I texted my editor we share an editor and I said I hope you know that if this happened to me I would leave the stage crying I just there's no way in hell I'd have that that kind of calm and composure well it's like if you bring up Shelby steel or Glenn Lowry or Thomas Soul you know the the response seems to be is well they're they're not really they're not real black or something like that or they're just conservatives they've been corrupted you know something like that and that's why I like what what Coleman said was was let's just stick to the ideas and not make it about me it doesn't matter what I think who cares what I think let's just talk about the ideas and it's like what okay last point on the New York Times yeah um I recall Barry was brought there you know she was my editor at the Wall Street Journal IID I think she was I think it must have been right out of college she cuz I was writing um book reviews for them fairly regularly and she was my book review editor um that's awesome so I've known her for a long was she a good editor oh yeah oh absolutely of course yeah and uh and then all of a sudden I saw that she she went over to the New York Times and then the impression I got was they brought her in to to have a more balanced not that she's a conservative but that she's not an Uber Progressive liberal maybe or something she's objective she can find other voices that our readers need to hear and she did that and and so anyway so let me read another portion here from your book um one early this is you at the at the Times um one early evening I was having drinks with an editor and a group of colleagues the editor who I liked a lot heard I was dating this very bad liberal and he looked at me straight in the face and said he thought it was pretty messed up he wanted to know how could I do that she's a Nazi she's a Nazi Nelly he said I tried to laugh it off and he kept going like are you serious Nelly he lobbed another she's a Nazi my colleagues agreed they kept going he couldn't believe I would do this like wow eventually I got him to change the subject that's you're talking about Barry there a na I mean what I mean that's pretty bad it was it was surreal I mean for me it was a very hard moment I would say it was at the time at the time I was Jarred by it and I was upset but um it it had become something akin to normal like it it was it was within the energy that was building internally and so I was sort of used to it but yeah it was it was a it was a really upsetting moment but my point is that they've gone so far to the left that even a Weiss is now not a Centrist she's a Nazi I mean a champion of Jewish causes is a Nazi right I mean that's that's the point of that story I think which and it's a term now that we here used a lot for for especially against Jewish people um at the time I'd never really heard that used for a Jewish person it was very odd like it was so strange why would you think of that like of all the insults it was like why Nazi is so strange um but yeah she was really a fire brand and I could never quite figure I always thought maybe there's some secret political thing that's that I'm going to learn next that's actually the secret dark politics but I could never much figure it out myself but um yeah I would say it became very clear that if I was going to keep being interested in story like what I was interested in I.E the most interesting stories of 2020 that we were supposed to just all collectively ignore and and if I was going to keep dating bear then it wouldn't be possible to have a career at at the times it wasn't it wouldn't be possible and so such is life but yeah so I wrote about that that I promise that's only the first few pages of the book and then it's a book and then it's a book about different places and on the ground reporting and it is not all a woe is me no I don't give that impression my point is that it's a it's emblematic of how far left the left is gone to the point where maybe uh the better word for that is Progressive rather than liberal I mean I trust you consider yourself a liberal still in the old traditional sense of How It's defined yeah yeah I think I think what you saw Wasing of the progressive Progressive the progressive is a lot of things the progressive versus liberal let's say let just to the points of tension I would say a major one would be like a great example would be housing the progressive doesn't want cities to build more housing the progressive wants the backyard gardens to stay sunny and beautiful thinks that new market rate house in is suspicious and dangerous and capitalist um and the liberal wants more housing the liberal wants housing next to Transit basic old-fashioned thoughts like that um so that's that's it where where I come from in San Francisco that's kind of an eternal fight where you have these people casting themselves as as leftists who are arguing for policies that of course make the city more expensive and make it so only extremely Rich can live there um and they call anything else capitalism and neoliberalism whatever fascism um the progressive versus liberal in let's say education the liberal would say let's put more funding into schools let's make them better let's measure that they're getting better um let's try to make public schools that compete with private schools and that are better than public than private schools the progressive would say let's not measure anything tests are all racism tests testing is a racist practice there is no such thing as a non-racist test that um like in San Francisco there was I I'm referencing San Francisco a lot because a lot of this book started and sort of in me it started by being a San Franciscan and by loving that City and wanting it to thrive and seeing the kind of left liberal battles that were happening there so with in San Francisco 8th grade algebra which was offered as a test in accelerated course um a lot of people who were testing in were Asian young Asian students and the progressive left decided to disband eth grade algebra and successfully got it disbanded um and and made it so it was you couldn't have that class alge became illegal and so that's not a liberal idea and and I'd say that's kind of like what makes the progressive different or philosophies like that yeah and the reason behind it is that if uh any cohort of people are falling behind on those tests then we got to get rid of the test rather than say help those groups rise pull themselves up it's it's equality of outcomes versus opportunity the traditional liberal respon is always you want equality of opportunities you want great seventh grade math so that more kids can get to eighth grade Algebra the new Progressive thinking is getting to eighth grade Algebra should never be the goal that's a that's a nasty goal and and that really has been the philosophy that has won the day in our cities I mean it sounds crazy and I'm I'm maybe not arguing it well enough I'm maybe sort of making a caricature of it but genuinely that is what happened in San Francisco and and that's the philosophy that's won the day in most American ities and and yeah the the American Liberals are have been for the last couple years really on on their back feet I would say I just posted this morning this story about Joe is a woman Baer b o a exactly Stanford University math education uh responsible for the new California math fra framework a set of curriculum recommend ations that Advocate against teaching most middle schoolers algebra sent her own kids to a $448,000 a year private school that teaches algebra but that's the story every time that's the story you're always going to find like there's it's the biggest advocates for this are people who send their kids to private school and to whom it's completely irrelevant but the idea seems lovely the idea very is that these poor little people can't make it on their own but I can can no it's that it's that everyone should be equal and that we are equal and it's almost religious it's like we're all equal under God's eyes so why should some kid be in a more advanced math class the idea behind it a lot of the ideas behind the progressive arguments are beautiful and that's why they're winning that's why they have one so like a lot of the ideas let's say around I have a chapter in the book about abolish the police and the defund movement thanks to the crime wave that that movement did see itself eventually lose but for years it was winning and it was winning because it's based on a very beautiful idea which is that people are good and people don't want to hurt each other and they don't want to steal and if just given enough resources and therapy and community events and maybe an herb garden in the neighborhood that people won't do crime that's genuinely the philosophy and that's beautiful and I wish that were true like and so you sound like an if you're like no people are really bad people will hurt each other doesn't matter if they have money they'll still hurt each other doesn't matter if they have a community garden they'll still steal from each other like I it's a so I think that's in part why this movement won for so long and and has won in so many places because to argue against it is to argue in some ways that human nature is not perfect and that we need police even if we eliminate poverty that we still need police yeah yeah that's part of the progressive worldview I think it's blank slatis or it's what Thomas Soul distinguished in his book here I'll just read this portion of summarizing that conflict divisions uh he argue that these two clusters of moral values uh are intimately linked to the vision one holds about nature either as constrained conservative or unconstrained liberal now I would say Liberals are much more realistic now and its progressives that are uh holding this unconstrained version he called these constrained and unconstrained all showed that controversies over a number of seemingly unrelated social issues such as taxes welfare Social Security healthare criminal justice and War repeatedly reveal consistent ideological dividing line along these two conflicting V Visions quoting from Soul if human options are not in inherently constrained then the presence of such repugnant and disastrous phenomenon virtually cries out for an explanation and for Solutions but if the limitations and passions of man himself are at the heart of these painful phenomena then what what requires explanation of the ways in which they can be avoided or minimalized right so yeah is that unconstrained we can have a perfect utopian society if only we did X it's a beautiful quote Yeah Yeah so I mean that's what's behind so many of these things you write about so let's just talk about some of these some of these stories by the way these essays are beautifully written were they originally um a standalone essay somewhere or are they just for this book the San Francisco chapter was published in the Atlantic and um that that was a standalone essay I mean like the one you where you because I like your approach where you embed yourself so to speak an embeded journalist in the you know white privilege movement and you go to this seminar or Workshop or whatever it was maybe it was on Zoom but any case um that whole uh Robin D'Angelo movement what was that like what are these people thinking I mean some of these passages in here are just astonishing what these people were saying uh let me just pull one up here um right here we go uh yeah racism is structural oh yeah so here's some of these quotes a woman named Mia introduces herself she's a white woman with a biracial child and says she's scared that her whiteness could harm her child ladia says it's frustrating that white women were fighting patriarchy for so long and now just as that seems done she feels like she's lost to her whiteness it's like here I am ready to speak my truth and sort of being told to step aside she wants to know how to do that without feeling resentment Clair lives in Los Angeles and loves her cats what I struggle with is how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body being a privileged white supremacy person anyway this goes on and on you have these great quotes from all these different women do they what are they thinking they're throwing themselves on their sword in this way is going to do to actually help black people that that's an interesting question but yeah so the context for this is um I took a bunch of anti-racism courses over o over the course of reporting this book and I write about one kind of to part of the same program um and and there were over multiple days and they featured anti-racist coaching and a lecture by Robin D'Angelo and a lot of them are about the concept of unpacking uh our whiteness unpacking the internalized white supremacy that is just being white and what are people thinking when they're signing up for this I think they're thinking that white privilege sounds pretty sick and that if white if being white is causing pain then they should figure out how to stop that pain and I think they're good kind people who are trying to stop hurting the world through their body's existence and the class is similar to what you'll see in most kind of corporate America trainings now around these issues most elementary schools around these issues um it starts with kind of racial awareness becoming very aware of yourself being white very aware of your flesh um and then it moves into what what this movement and what its leaders describe as white traits and sort of white values and how to dismantle them so white values that they outline and again I'm going to be saying this but I think this stuff is wildly racist not even just racist against whites I think it's racist against nonwhite people but how how they Define white values is um timeliness being on time is is a white value attention to detail is a white value um why oh my God the list the list is so crazy I um it's it's um individualism is a white value and so it's all about carving these values out of you so so over the course of this class over 4 days or so um people slowly tried to break themselves of these values and it was pretty stunning to see and pretty stunning to be around because it's it's so psychological and it kind of means you have to like break your mind and there's not an escape from it there's never an escape from it now now how do they think this will help the world like I said they think that their existence hurts the world but also there's you're probably hearing our dog yapping at squirrels we don't people are used to these are podcasts people are used to stuff this is working from home has really been a bad but um the the I now I've lost my train of thought well let me just rephrase it like let's say it's all true and I have white privilege okay how does this help some black guy get a lower mortgage rate on his home loan or get a raise at work how I mean if I'm Elon Musk and I'm in a battle with Mark cubin and Mark cubin says look I I buy all this stuff and I own all these companies I'm going to change the policy I'm going to give raises to the black PE I'm going to what I'm going to that could happen but these women that are in the seminar how are they going to change those kind of very specific things early anti-racist the Early anti-racist movement was more about actual tangible things and and wage equity and you know punishing people for saying nasty things in the workplace and things like that that make a lot of sense the movement the movement started with really concrete ideas around how to make life better for for black Americans and and for people in countries outside of America who were in horrible situations and uh you know there were all kinds of campaigns around freedom for different peoples and whatnot over the years as the therapeutic language has taken hold as this has become it's gone from activist corners of Berkeley to more popular trendy corners of just like middle class upper middle class American white ladies it became more an internal struggle so it it the the the anti-racist teachers the robin d'angeles of the world would say that the most important thing is to fix yourself internally and that it's not necessarily about fixing the boardroom or or it's not about any concrete thing it's it's a therapeutic psychological battle within yourself as a white person and and like a lot of the stuff that kind of won and that became the dominant um anti-racist move and so to do anti-racism was to join one of these groups and was to was to participate in this kind of psychological game around rooting out your internal whiteness rooting out these values that were that were poisoning the world and and like you say yeah it has nothing to do with making life better for black Americans it doesn't give tangible benefits it it would be better if people just like wrote checks basically or or I mean I could think of a lot of things that probably do more efficient things but as a writer it's just it was very rich the these the psychological movement of it all these essays you write are pretty non-judgmental you know a lot of these I'm reading thinking this is just great a Prime Cut how is she not screaming at these people this is just insane what they're saying I me again back to that that point it's one thing there are some still some racist out there there's misogynists there's homophobes and so on they they are out there they're not going to take these courses exactly I mean so who are these for you know these are for good liberals like you that that don't have a racist bone in your body well they would certainly not say that any of us don't have a racist bone in our bodies even if you don't know it I guess it's unconscious yeah or systemic yeah it's the way you move through the world it's a um yeah I mean it like so much of this time it's been about a kind of reformation or a revolution inside progressivism it's not about reaching out and changing someone else's mind it's not about converting a Trumper to a liberal or a this to a that like it has nothing to do with that and and and actually it sort of sees that as as grotesque and as um like if you're someone if you're a conservative already if you vote for Donald Trump then like you are so far beyond the pale that even talking to that person would be like high risk morally like really gross freaky dangerous I I and so there's no effort to like reach out to people who don't already agree it's just a movement of radicalizing the already agreeing and of sort of pushing the liberal left and of pushing um yeah kind of radicalizing the center leftward right here's the thought I had for the last few years on this idea of white privilege do I have it or is it that you know I have whatever the default is of the American system and some people don't have it because the American system has frankly historically not been very fair a lot of people have not had the opportunities and we're thankfully doing something about that now the last half century or so um uh but so you know is it a push or a pull or a or a negative or or positive you know how do how do you think about that the the which part which part well the part that in other words it's not that I have privilege for being white it's that other people don't have the default I just have the default um there's nobody holding me back I just do whatever I want to do and other people are held back and that's the problem I'm not the problem the problem is is the system itself is holding people back even if it's not held back by racist people the system is systemically racist not redlining in real estate for example because that's been outlawed now but apparently there are still discrepancies in these neighborhoods 50 years after the fact where you know so on that kind of stuff still exists I mean I think there's structural problems and I think also that there are racist individuals I think that there's plenty of racism in America like I would never say there isn't it I think it's obviously a problem that should be fixed obviously we have horrible schools that are predominantly um filled with minority kids who are getting a subpar education and like that's awful and that's appalling and that's those are the battles that um liberals historically fought and to me it's the turn towards the psychological and the turn towards saying actually instead of making the school better instead of making things better for a a black American Family who wants to succeed and wants get have a good good jobs and good home in a nice neighborhood all this stuff instead of improving those things let's let's try to let's try to sort of hurt the schools that are doing better or hurt the kids that are doing better and and it's it's a scarcity mindset and a kind of um anti-progress mindset like it it doesn't actually want it yeah I guess scarcity mindset is the is the way to think of it that that like the only reason that one person is succeeding is because someone else is failing rather than thinking let's see how we can get that failing school to be better um but yeah I mean the the fundamental fundamentally of course these issues are real issues and that's why these movements strike a cord they they hit and they work and BLM as a movement can take off because clearly there's bias and clearly there's racism and and to deny that is foolish but but at the same time like there's a chapter in the book about BLM and some of the money stuff and basically what happened was the movement raised a ton of money and because reporters were too scared to report on what was going on and where it was was being spent and and how it was being raised it was allowed to basically be scammed away allowed to to be spent whatever way the small group of Founders decided they wanted to spend all the BLM funds enormous amounts of money were raised by this group raised on the names of dead black children I mean raised in in very intense ways and you now see the parents of those children writing letters at telling the the group to stop and all this stuff but because because the American Media was basically told you can't report on this or or or you'll be of pushed out of whatever place you're at it it was allowed to to steal and to do actually the opposite of anything helpful and so if you believe in these values you should want it the the the you should want a good non-corrupt BLM mhm it's basically my argument yeah so in meeting some of these people like say some of the antifa people that you met and so on um another question I had is just say take the January 6th uh riots how many are there are True Believer Mega people versus just people that like to stir up uh and you know or maybe you know this this is my rights Revolution I didn't get the Civil Rights women's rights gay rights but this is the next big one and I want a part of it Whatever It Is defund the police or BLM or me too or or white priv I'm just going to jump in there because I want to do something I think people like Revolution I think people like it's action right remember we were all doing the heat of this a lot of this we were in lockdown yeah we were isolated and this was this was action it was fun it was communal so so in in one of the chapters I um report on antifa antifa's kind of actions in the Pacific Northwest and um how popular it was getting how big and how actually a lot of the traditional or a lot of the BLM events were being overshadowed by the antifa events which were really the dominant movement up there and um first obviously there was a concerted effort to ignore what was going on even as these groups of kids with guns were taking over entire neighborhoods of of Great American cities I mean which is just these made for these amazing scenes I mean there's um in Seattle there were kids in Seattle the gay neighborhood chat um was taken over and renamed Chaz eventually was they called it chop I don't really know why they changed the name but um it was taken over by a group of antifa activist and they sat around they blockaded the streets and they sat in lawn chairs with guns across their laps I mean it was surreal scenes of of real even small but real efforts at Revolution um and and I mean how many are True Believers versus just there for the fun you could ask that of any yeah revolutionary movement I think a lot of people are just there for fun and there's probably a few smart people who are kind of leading the thing like any other movement but but but the take the smart ones that are true believers what did they think they were going to do once they you know have the neighborhood or they had the power it's the same question I ask about the January 6 people had they gotten Nancy Pelosi what were they going to do then Jesus I mean speciically I don't want to know because well yeah I think they did yeah I mean did they were they goingon to like propose new bills and take a vote on it were they going to do procedural boring you know bureaucratic red tape stuff no so what you know so I no no I think they thought that they were going to show how beautiful the world they could create would be just how good it was going to be and when you say no cops are allowed here when you say we're going to make our own ambulance system we're going to make our own you know it's it's the dream of anyone who's starting like a any Utopia it's it's we're going to do it fresh and we're going to finally get it right and I think they really thought that I think I think they really thought that I I don't think that those guys were lying there's no Financial incentive to taking over Seattle's gay neighborhood I mean it it it was a utopian project and the fact that people were killed the fact that children were killed in there um teenagers sorry I just shouldn't say children was inconvenient and problematic but Revolution takes time was sort of the argument and um change is hard and I think that I mean now you have a reckoning now you have the families of those who were shot trying to suee the city and and say how could you have abandoned this place where police cars would refuse to go where ambulances wouldn't go where people were allowed to bleed out yeah like how could how could the city allow this and now and now you have the battle and of course the payouts are all of that but um yeah that was I posted on Twitter the last sentences of your chapter on that uh and quietly almost exactly 3 years after the neighborhood was first taken over and renamed Chaz the ice cream shop owner Molly moon Nel filed a lawsuit against the city she wanted to be really clear that she still supports the police free Utopia police free Utopia but that also the city needs to pay her for having abolished the police in the police free Utopia this lawsuit does not seek to undermine Chaz participants message or present a counter message her lawyers wrote rather this lawsuit is about pl's constitutional and other legal rights of which were overrun by the city of Seattle's decision to abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood leaving it unchecked by the police again this is like an onion type story you just can't make this up it's astonish you got to love lawyers you got to love lawyers because the lawyers managed to say both that that this this I'm I'm sure very sweet ice cream shop owner does want to abolish the police and supports all the has philosophies around abolishing the police all the you know antifa but also is suing the city for abolishing the police I mean it's it's yeah I know you can't make it up did you mean anybody in any of these movements that was like an MLK or Malcolm X or a Lenin or some somebody with an actual like model of here's how we're going to get from here to there over the next 20 years through reform through legal change through you know lawsuits or whatever or are they more spontaneous in the moment it was more spontaneous in the moment I don't think we're at the point yet where we have that character I do think you're right though to point out that that one of that someone like that will emerge I a lot of the sort of more famous characters who I write about are like I would say the lead leaders of BLM are mostly in it for cash and and for the expense accounts and to use the funds to buy a party house and like stuff that is human and understandable but not very like exciting or inspirational um I didn't I don't think there is the kind of MLK of it all yet but I think there could be I think I think I think there's potential for someone like that to arise who's who's not a corrupt figure and who just believes in these things and I mean I think that'd be pretty exciting interesting yeah yeah I do you think there's any of them like that no I've well I mean someone like ebra X candy I suppose thinks of himself that way I don't think he's the right person for that but but at least trying to lay out an intellectual foundation for the movement where you go from there are political I mean there's other you know Arguments for reparations for example where they actually try to make a case by putting some numbers on what was lost in slavery of course you'd have to apply that same reasoning to the native Americans and what was lost all that land is probably even more valuable and so on but you know I think something like that you know and you know I wrote the moral Arc so that was published 2015 you know just just as the Supreme Court voted to make same-sex marriage the law of the land okay so it seemed like we've made it right and then and then all this other starts going the me to movement BLM George Floyd and all these things and it's like oh there's something else going on here yeah I mean I think the the broader question you're asking is basically there's a long march of liberalism towards ever more sort of progressive philosophies and who who are we to ever say stop here or don't go there um and I think it's a really interesting argument and it's one I kind of wrestle with and you could also go the opposite direction and you could say well okay we should walk that back we should walk that back and I mean you could end up arguing yourself all the way women shouldn't have the right to vote right like you can liberalism begins a little while ago now um I think throughout the movement to let's say gain my rights the right to vote the right to marry um it was often the moderate who got that got that win so let's say the right to for gay marriage was won not by the radical Chic activist It Was Won by the Practical people who said this is better for our taxes and this is and this is um you know we deserve this kind of economically if nothing else and the the radicals actually were anti- the gay marriage fight an anti-gay marriage as a as a priority and anti-gay marriage as an idea because marriage was heterosexual it was heteronormative it was capitalist it was all the things that that were bad and so it was it was not considered the Chic leftist thing at all and the people who won it were were for a long time um or the people who argued for it early on were for a long time kind of shamed for that um but the more broadly I mean it's something to wrestle with constantly and and I think that we're at the point now where some of these things are in Conflict so let's say trans participation in sports in women's sports you would have the new Progressive saying that the next step in the march of progress is for anyone who identifies as a man or as a teen boy to be able or as a teen sorry anyone who identifies as a woman or as a teen girl should be able to participate in women's sports girl Sports and that that's the next step but is that the like as a person who believes in women's sports is that actually a progressive step in a fair playing field for teen girls I mean like that to me no like I would say I I would say that doesn't intuitively make sense and I don't think that's a step forward in some March of progress like I think that's a lie and it's a lie to say that that's the step forward it's not and and that actually kind of is a step backwards for women's sports to to to say that anyone who identifies a certain way is is allowed to play in those in in those matches and and the movement uses the language of liberalism it says how pedantic to have women's sports be separated do you not think women are strong enough do you not think women are good enough to play against biological males like how how um sexist of you and these are arguments that will be used often and and it's like well I'm not sexist but I do know that there are certain physical differences between men and women or males and females and I don't know what to say like that just is what it is I can't open a jar of pickles like I I'm not I don't know how to have that argument um yes and they'll often break it down to little scientific things like like oh well testosterone or this or that and it's like anyways so yes there's a large long March of progressivism and the Long March towards more liberal things and and that March has gotten me so much I mean me personally I'm a woman with my own bank account I'm married to a woman like this is these are Miracles that are that I can enjoy because of the fights of earlier generations of people who dedicated themselves to get those Miracles um at the same time I don't think it means you have to blindly take anything that's someone says is the next step in this March and say okay great I'm on board I I don't think that's what it means it doesn't mean that for me yeah I think the women's sports participation is kind of the perfect example it's and it almost makes you feel a little crazy having to make these arguments because it's just like how is it controversial for me to be saying that women's sports would be decimated if if there weren't gender rules like it it's there I think we again t Thomas Soul had this great line about there's no there's no Solutions there just compromises in in society and I think that's the case there's what you might consider conflicting rights you know a lot of you know rights issues come down to conflicting rights we can't have everything right abortion you know it's the rights of the fetus to live the rights of the mother to choose and so on and so we vote or we get the judges we want or we you know we fight about it politically uh you know in the case of sports it would be nice if we just let anybody do whatever they want but there's a reason reason we don't because it's not fair so we have to have rules about this then you have the more ontological question that is can you actually change your sex not gender but sex your biological sex and this seems to be where the tension is you know most of us are a little more open about the idea of gender being socially constructed people have these different identifications but actual changing the biology you know I think the most the consensus among scientists is that you you can't you can't actually do that and then you have this kind of um a dualism a cartisian dualism of I'm in the wrong body well there's no you and your body you are your body and all of this goes back to a very ancient idea where we are kind of Natural Born Duelists that we feel like there's a mind inside my brain that's separate from the brain there's a soul separate from my body and and when I die it floats off and goes off into the quantum ether or wherever it goes right I mean that's pretty natural most people the research on this from cognitive psychologists is super interesting you know you watch a film like Freaky Friday where Lindsay Lohan and jam Lee Curtis switch bodies and hilarity ensues right uh but there's no switching you are your body there's nothing to switch right there's no soul there's no mind there's no gender girl Male inside your female body there's no such thing but but the there's no soul there's no mind them's fighting words well I know I yeah I I'm a full-on materialist modist I don't I think these are just words we use and I'm I'm probably in the minority on that position so if you want to push back that's fine but I think that is what's in part youing I think one thing that the movement's done that's very odd to me is this sex and gender breakdown so how it was taught to me in my great sort of feminist all girl schools and and how I originally read Judith Butler who argued this although now Judith Butler is changing their tone on this um but it was that gender is a construct that gender is like an activity we play as a society and that makes intuitive sense like you look at the color pink or I remember there's like classic example like pink used to be coded male and then it became coded female and like all of these different things that let you know that you're just playing with gender and it's all show and so of course you can change your gender and you can present as a male as a man you can present as a woman and that intuitively makes total sense and I think that people should be obviously allowed to change their gender it should it's not even a question of allowed the state should have no involvement with it and they should be able to live however they want to live and all this your sex I I don't know what it means to to say that you that that your sex changes versus your gender changes I mean I don't I don't under it we have the genes we have and it just is what it is and um I don't think that means that we shouldn't treat trans people with respect and that if if someone's discriminated against for being transed that by their employer that employer should be in trouble all of these things of Rights but the the Eraser of the sex gender divide is a really weird thing because yeah it it it I think it's a losing I think it's very much a losing argument for for that movement um and it's become for whatever reason their Central argument and and whatever reason is because the movement now says that it wants people with penises to be in women's prisons and all of this and like and that that shouldn't be questioned so yeah that's why it's necessary but um it seems like a very chaotic breakdown and a mess and a losing battle and I you know it's it's yeah well you've probably seen that you know the Tavistock Clinic was closed in London and in the UK Health Services banned now cross horm cross- seex hormones and puberty blockers and things like that probably saw the um the wpath files that Michael shenberg released where you know for years these so-called experts these are phds MDS psychiatrists surgeons and so on talking amongst themselves and answering questions of doctors who are contemplating doing these surgeries or or implementing these hormonal treatments to teenagers underage minors uh asking well do we know anything about the long-term consequences for say for fertility or their their sexuality when they're adults and the answer was no we don't know anything and then and then the next line is well let's just do it anyway like wait what so you know the revelations have been you know the research the science was never there to say this is okay and again let's just separate that you know minors versus adults you know somebody who's of age and says this is what I'm going to do you do what you do you I'm going to do me this is what I got to do I feel right and I'm going to take the surgery or what I'm going to do fine but that's you know that's not what we're talking about here with underage kids yeah and a lot of the ideas that became very popular in this movement which again positioned itself as the next step in progressivism were these and I write about it in the book in the last couple chapters the ideas behind it were these very curiously AR like uh oldfashioned very sexist ideas it was ideas like if your toddler is wearing if your toddler girl tears off her baret and likes to wear boy clothes and that's a gender message that that child is sending you and if you're toddler boy is trying on his mom's shoes that's a gender message and you should pay a lot of attention to that and it's like what are you talking about like kids are playing around with these things and and the idea that there's some like essential femaleness to fluffy skirts is to my like oldfashioned feminist mind quite sexist like I wear pants is that am I questioning my sex because it I mean and that that all comes down to the the Eraser between sex and gender so the kind of playfulness of gender and of became AAS and everything became about the body and changing the body and so yeah over the last few years we've seen the movement start to change young people's bodies and we have no idea what happens I mean even even something is simple a lot of people will say to critics well surgeries were very rare you know hysterectomies or or um masectomy those things are very rare for children for for teenagers masectomy maybe a little bit but even that very rare and yes those were very rare but what was a lot more common were hormones and it would start with puberty blockers and then it would be testosterone and there's kind of like an effort to pretend like giving a teenage female testosterone is minor it's just a pill but to be honest a masectomy is more minor than than testosterone therapy for a teen because it changes you forever it changes I mean both change you forever but one if you take testosterone your face changes your voice changes your your bones change your hair changes in ways that you can never if you change your mind in a few years you can never reverse it doesn't go back your Jawbone doesn't go back to what a biological female jaw would look like at that age whereas anyways I mean this is me arguing between what's worse momies or testosterones for 15-year-olds um but yeah it just became very very strange I would say what won out and and the shellenberger and the W path files and what you're seeing now is all moderate voices moderate what is even even these politics mean all voices who were a little bit skeptical of the sort of most extreme version of this anyone who said maybe we should have a few more therapy sessions or maybe this kid has autism and also they were abused and should we give them hormone therapy yet all of those voices were completely shunned completely censored often ousted from clinics and and and you see them now as whistleblowers and and at we published one of these whistleblowers a very brave woman named Jamie Reid um who's phenomenal a gay woman married to a non-binary person I mean who whose sort of biography makes her unimpeachable in a lot of ways and she the backlash she faced and the backlash that the mainstream liberal world was trying to smear smear her with I mean it was it was shocking and in retrospect that a lot of that backlash was kind of like the death of this movement it was like kind of people like freaking out um because they knew that it was losing and they knew that it's not unreasonable or transphobic to say that a 14-year-old girl should maybe have some counseling before we right away give her testosterone like these are really reasonable positions and the movement has very successfully smeared any ents for many years and I think now we're finally starting to see dissidents coming out who saying this is nonsense like to go back to an earlier chapter timeliness is not racism yeah individualism is not a white trait that's crazy and why weren't we allowed to say that for a few years like that's crazy so I think the title of the book is Morning After the Revolution because in certain ways obviously this movement is still going obviously is I don't know there was just a Free Beacon expose about some some Insanity at UCLA Medical School so I'm not going to pretend this thing is is done by any means but I think the normal moderates the normal Liberals are finally of speaking out and starting to say we're not going to be smeared for saying reasonable normal things is that inart not only your book but also the Free Press and and the efforts that you Centrist liberals or whatever you want to call yourselves not progressives fascist fascist that's right neo-nazis hoping to yeah yeah exactly that's that's the term you're really fighting a culture War which I support I'd like say maybe Chris rufo who wants to actually change laws which I'm always kind of questionable about I don't like the state getting involved in these issues you know maybe sometimes it's inevitable but I mean so fights over words you know pronouns or oh I meant to ask you about you know black bodies and now I see in your chapter on White Privilege they were talking about white bodies what does that mean why are they reducing humans to just bodies what does that mean because because this is a really reductive movement in a lot of ways and it it's obsessed with skin color I mean I wish there was there are more poetic ways to say it but a lot of it is just an obsession with skin color and with race and it wants to reduce us to these very simplistic categories and to just our visual identifiers so yeah and it's like a dehumanizing term the idea of black bodies white bodies like yeah like that were just these kind of balls of colored flesh wandering around um you and I are both although you now not believing in a soul I don't know you might start you might start picking up some of this so you and I are both in Southern California we know a lot of Latinos and Latinas I don't know any Latin X's do you know anybody that uses that term that actually would use the term one of my favorite one of my favorite um threads in all this was the effort to make latinx a thing um and they really got far I mean they had the White House they had the top the American power using latinx or latinx or whatever it is latinx I don't know the pronunciation I I refuse to learn the proper pronunciation I've heard them all um yes this was a effort to make the term Latino non-binary and so because Latino is male and Latina is female and so everyone should be Latin x i it was basically an effort to just signal a certain political thing but no the the I I've never met anyone who identifies that way and most polls show that actually Latino people find it quite offensive to be called latinx and um and it was interesting I mean one of the scenes that I reported on was a homeless encampment um in a largely Latino neighborhood that was kind of taken over or run and organized by white Democratic socialists of America and white sort of leftist activists yeah and the racial dynamics of that were fascinating because you had a bunch of these socialists living in with local homeless folks taking over the neighborhoods one park and making it into kind of another of these Anarchist um home bases very trendy kind of chic like whenever the police would try to close it down there'd be like trendy like Vice reporters protesting with everyone else like to to keep it open um and the people who were trying to fight it were local Latino families who were like we use this park this is our park we have our family events in this park and so the racial Dynamics I mean so much of the last few years have been a battle with in kind of elite white American communities and it often had nothing to do with or vaguely annoyed or hurt local communities of color as the movement would call them and um and I'm not the first to point this out I mean like you have bachar Saron points this out all the time Rob Henderson pointing the term luxury beliefs like this is this is a long explained phenomenon but it's still a phenomenon it's still very funny and so I was just reporting on it and kind of pointing out the humor of it all um but yes the white/ Latino um Battlegrounds were very odd yeah and no one wants to be called L tanks no all right so you guys have also been following and supporting Jonathan Height's uh research in his new book The anxious generation you know there's but but it's an open debate what the cause of the raw Spike and teen depression anxiety cutting suicidal ideation anorexia and so on what are your thoughts on how that debate may play out that is you know is it bad parenting is it bad therapy like Abigail shrier writes about is it too much FaceTime too much Social or screen time Facebook is it you know social media I don't know what are your thoughts on that big ongoing debate I think Abigail shrier and Jonathan height are both totally correct in their assessment of it I think Abigail writes about the therapeutic mindset and the idea that instead of you know instead of raising resilient kids we're raising kids to think of themselves as traumatized at all times and and kind of um making everything into like a clinical almost medical diagnosis so she writes about how now instead of saying someone's shy we say they have social anxiety everything is in this medicalized really dramatic language that becomes an entament for kids who think of themselves then as ill or as as weak and all these things are impossible to overcome like you can talk about overcoming shyness but it's a lot harder to talk about overcoming your social anxiety um and then Jonathan hit I I totally B the argument that phones are making us crazy and and especially that social media for little kids like 13-year-old girls is um taking a stressful age and kind of putting a blowtorch to it like it's like I can't imagine if we had that when I was a teenager Facebook came online just as I was going to college thankfully but um yeah they're both right and there's been of course well I think the phone thing were finally seeing more consensus on for a while the idea of demonizing phones was considered like it's like are you like a Mormon Homesteader like everyone needs phones everyone needs computers and now I think there's finally an A S broader consensus that among parents that these things are uniquely dangerous for kids if nothing else then even if you don't think that the the hour on the phone is bad it's an hour taken away from an activity that might be better opportunity cost yes you see kids I mean they're not having sex until much later they're not drinking as much all these things that were the joys of being a teenager I don't know some of that might be good actually no I know I think some parents are happy because the phone kind of neuter their teenager and the phone kind of kind of placates and pacifies this this this wild creature that is in their in their house I do have a question on the data itself I'm going to ask Jonathan about this when he comes on next week is oh yeah give I I don't know I I don't know the deta understand but I think it's an open question that is to say how big is that Spike really what if some of it is a not just an expansion of the category of depression or anxiety or whatever so you throw more people in that bin but also some of it is self-fulfilling in the way that Abigail says that is normal teenage sadness or you know anxiousness or whatever is now pathologized and then the person themselves start thinking well maybe I am depressed I have depression and then the survey taker comes around they go yeah I tick the box I am depressed or they answer those questions on the surveys you know do you ever feel this you ever feel that and they go yeah yeah I do you know three times a week yeah my therapist told me so and and and so they get they get the data point they're in that data point that's a spike but it's not really a spike it's an artificial Spike that's self through AB says it's driven by screen social media and so I don't know the answer to this I maybe nobody does but it's an open question I think I'm I'm willing to believe I think I obviously think ABS is right and I also I'm willing to believe that having a piece of black glass in your phone that connects you to the world to everyone you've ever known to allows you to broadcast I mean these are ially new things and I don't know that we've I don't know that Jonathan ha even goes far enough in terms of recognizing How Deeply new this all is for humans to manage um yeah I mean we're all just like living in it in the experiment of it so it's it's hard to step back and see it but I think I hope at some point our descendants will look at our and say oh my God how stressful that must have been for them to figure out all the rules around this to figure out descendants Nelly this is probably going to all play out in the next year and then in two years from now there'll be some other crazy Revolution that that that we don't no I I'm not ready all right uh yeah Morning After the Revolution what else do you see coming I mean if you can project at all what would be the next thing that everybody's going to be riled up about that you're going to you're going to go off and embed yourself into I the next thing I want to write is a book of fiction I want to do short stories really oh well good because you're a really good writer you're a great I kind of want to do thank you I I want to do fiction I think um what's the next I think we're in this one for a little while longer I I would like to say it's all over and we're now there's going to be uh you know a whole new set of conversations but I don't think we're done with this one yet is is what I would say like I I I I yeah I don't think the movement's done quite yet with us yeah that could be because it does touch on those deeper issues of human nature and society and the way we want to structure it which is a NeverEnding conversation that just goes from one generation to the next that's what politics is all about there's no there's no empirical truths to be discovered so much as battles to be fought over conflicting rights yeah I love how you phrase it that way I think the the Battle of conflicting rights is exactly right by the way you're such a good writer I really admire you're writing and how do you I always like to ask writer how do you write do you get up every morning I'm Gonna Knock Out 3,000 words or do you have a structure I I don't I don't have a really good structure the only thing I have a very good structure for is my Friday column where I I wake up Thursday morning really early and I just write all day and nothing can interrupt me that's the only day I'm really really like a fascist about um but no I don't have like a beautiful system I probably should like invent one always joking about sort of half joking about being a a Hillary fan you you you you were a Hillary fan right seriously hell yeah are you kidding yeah yeah well this is another one conversations I have in my head about you know are we the rise of trump and authoritarianism populism and Putin and this and that is this really a trend or is it just a little quirky ENT moment in time it's interesting to think would American liberalism have radicalized like it did if Hillary had won and to some extent I don't think so to some extent I think Trump was such a galvanizing character and so setting for people and so radical in his own right his language and his how he carries himself how he moves mov through the world how he acted as president how he spoke as president that it was it was like destabilizing and radicalizing and a lot of people have read about like whatever norms and our Norms fell apart and you could say that yeah our Norms kind of fell apart and I think at the time when some of those people were saying oh Trump is um the norm breaking another Norm broken unprecedented I sort of thought it was like I would roll my eyes at a certain point because it was like oh my God everything's unprecedent everything is this but it was true and it did seismically shift conversations and allow for more radical voices on the left and the right like the topic of This Book Is My World which is American liberalism blue cities that's where I live that's what I write about but the the yeah I think Trump's presidency definitely allowed for the chaos that we saw unfold and and you see I mean it's less relevant in cities and um universities and kind of the worlds that I move in but you obviously see a similar irrational radical bizarre movement on the right um as the rose on the left and you could argue oh the right kept it kept it down more or kind of like kept their moders I don't know if that's true though and and um yeah yeah if my president if Hillary Clinton had won we'd all be reasonable and calm we'd all be America would be just like a peaceful bucolic land of moderate liberals and moderate conservatives quietly arguing over dinner parties are you worried about the 2024 election are you guys going to cover it in the Free Press and I'm worried about it as a as a writer cuz what is new to say about Trump and B like I've never been more bored by two people in my life like I can't believe I have to think about them more it's just that's how I'm wor are you worried about it um not that much although some of my liberal friends are you know you hear the rhetoric this is our last election if Trump trump wins I mean there was Bill uh Robert daero and Bill Mah going you know if Trump get wins your show is going to be cancelled how's Trump going to cancel real time I mean unless he bought HBO and fired him or something I mean I just don't I don't think he has the cash anymore he doesn't have any cash to buy HBO right uh and you know would how wouldn't the Supreme Court have something to say about you know somebody that says you know we're not going to have any more elections I mean how would that even happen I don't see that uh you know and and on the plus side Biden is in he's in the White House Trump left uh he didn't want to leave but you know he's gone so I don't know I I I tend to think our system is pretty robust yeah I think some of the hyperbolic language is unnecessary I mean you can argue that Trump was a bad president or that Trump did XYZ bad thing without resorting to hyperbole which undermines the whole thing like I don't know if you saw the blood bath comment of last week oh yeah but yeah right like it's like Trump says lots of crazy stuff or bad ideas all the time like that idea he was talking about when he said the blood bath thing of a huge tariff on all important good Goods is bad but the media of course clung on to the bloodbath comment and it became this whole cycle around how Trump's going to slaughter all of democrat it's like it's like guys like you don't need to go to the looniest interpretation of things to say that this is not a good idea or that this guy is acting like a jackass or whatever you want to say like well we'll have you on after the election it'll be the it'll be the morning after the election After the revolution dispatches from the wrong side of History by Nelly BS get this book it's a great read big fun and uh thank you so much for your work and thank you for thank thank God it's Friday because that's big fun I love how you have people take a picture of their screen reading your column from around the world that's really clever I really love that it's a lot of fun Michael thank you so much

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 3,398

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic

Id: uUfkVLkvPzk

Length: 93min 44sec (5624 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2024