The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 41 | James A. Lindsay & Peter Boghossian | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: June 15, 2019

Glenn sits down with both James A. Lindsay, an author, and mathematician as well as Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of Philosophy at Portland State University. These two men along with their associate Helen Pluckrose spent 10 months writing 20 hoax papers that illustrated and parodied what they call "grievance studies" and submitted them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Out of these 20 papers, seven of them were accepted, four were published online, and three were being processed. Being dubbed as "Sokal Squared", this hoax has been applauded by several scholars for unmasking what they called academe's leftist, victim-obsessed ideological slant and low publishing standards. If you're worried about the state of culture in this country, if you're curious of the inner workings of the world of academia, and you're fed up with the increasing authoritarian ideology from the left or from the right, this podcast is for you.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We constantly hear about activism on campuses. We have gotten familiar with the stories of the far-left ideologies and ideologues and activists that claim to be professors. These days, a professor with a conservative belief or anything right of Marxist is about as rare as a polka dot rhino. Academics have gotten so extreme that they're increasingly turning on fellow liberals. So it's a big deal when you hear about some academics fighting against the system. It's even a bigger deal when they use. the left's own insane words and ideas as a postmodern Trojan horse. Today's guests are unique.

They are among the handful of academics brave enough to challenge the corrupt system and the pernicious ideas that it forces and force feeds on college students. Best of all, they're doing it in a very funny and clever way. Along with their associate, Helen Pluckrose, who couldn't make it today, they're responsible for the grievance affair. They wrote articles that translated passages from Hitler's Mind Kampf into postmodern feminist terminology and submitted them to peer-reviewed academic journals in fields including gender studies, queer studies, and fat studies. That's a quote. If you're worried about the state of culture in this country, you're curious about the inner workings of academia.

You're fed up with increasingly authoritarian ideology from the left or from the right. This podcast is for you. This is a very rare conversation and an important one for the future. I grew up, I didn't go to college. I skated through school. And I realized when I was 30, alcoholic, I don't know anything. And it's not that I wasn't smart. It was that I didn't, everything I believed had been taught to me.

You know what I mean? I believed in God because everybody around me taught me about God. I believed in whatever my worldview was. It was shaped by other people. And so I wasn't me. Something that changed my life was I read a letter from Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr. It was his nephew. And in this letter, it said he was trying to educate him

to line up all the basic things you had to do to be an educated man at the time. The last one was religion. And this changed my life. Jefferson said, above all things, when it comes to religion, fix reason firmly in her seat and question with boldness, even the very existence of God. For if there be a God, he must surely rather, honest questioning over blindfolded fear. that gave me permission that I had never thought of before on every front question with boldness. There is no bad question and there is no dangerous answer. Does that make sense?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally. So I, Peter, you want to go ahead. Well, I'm thinking that there are certain, well, first, thank you for having us on. Sure. I think that there are certain questions that are better than other questions. Daniel Dennett writes an article in which he talks about if it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well. And I think that the first thing you need to figure out is it's certainly true that we're taught things in our society, in our culture, in our university systems.

And we have to be able to question those. We have to have. We have to construct institutions and systems that allow us at the most fundamental level, not only to question, but to teach us that questioning is virtue. But we also need to kind of find our own way in terms of thinking about what should I start to think about. If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well. So I would agree with you. And that's why at 30 I went back to school. Right.

Because I didn't want to learn what to think. Right. I needed to learn how to think. Exactly. And our universities are not teaching that now. Nobody's teaching critical thinking. And in fact, the exact opposite is happening. we're being told don't question this.

So I want to start with just this framework first. There's kind of a two-part question. What created the world we're living in was the dark ages going into the age of enlightenment and reason? Science, weigh it, measure it, show it, prove it out. That's all being dismantled now. Right. So where would you put us, if you looked in the history of man, where would you, what would you compare this time to? Where are we? Where are we headed? I mean, it's probably clear as to say that it's sliding back toward a kind of feudalism, but not an economic feudalism. It's a feudalism of ideas of thought. So.

Tell me, explain feudalism. Yeah, so feudalism, you know, you have kind of each little area has its lord who's in charge and, everybody does what the Lord says and they work on the Lord's fields and they produce crops for the Lord and the Lord gets his share and in return he provides some kind of governance protection for that group of people and so that's kind of an economic system where you kind of have these little fiefdoms that are that are led by you know some kind of a royal figure or what is it sub royal figure or whatever and it's got this this idea basically that everything's kind of like okay here's this little one and here's this little one and this little one, and they all kind of, you know, trade with each other and fight with each other and whatever. And it's all done by the elites at the top of that.

And so I don't think we're sliding to an economic type of system like that, but an intellectual one, where you have, you know, so-and-so's thought leader, and then there's this other thought leader that other people follow, and people are in these little groups. They say, oh, well, you know, I kind of follow Glenn Beck, or I kind of follow Judas Butler, or I kind of follow, you know, whoever it happens to be, they have their way of thinking, their preferred, way of interacting with the world and everybody can kind of find their own little, if you want to call it a tribe, their own little fiefdom or whatever, and we're losing the common ground that you mentioned that came from the Enlightenment, which would ultimately be the correspondence theory

of truth. But you can, the truth somehow corresponds to an objective reality that we can look at, observe, measure way out, as you were saying, and have some kind of external to any particular person standard by which we can say, okay, this is true because if you do the experiment, you get the result. If I do the experiment, I get the same result. If a robot with no mind, it does the experiment, it gets the same result. If a dog could do the experiment, it would get the same result. So something that makes the same result keep happening is fundamental here. And we're kind of erasing that. It's, you know, it's kind of an age of prejudice and opinion. And people get to follow whose prejudices and opinions they like best. And so you see this kind of

fracturing and even, you know, balkanizing where these, these little groups are kind of at war with one another and they don't agree and they can't see eye to eye and they can't get along. Tribalism. It's very tribal in a sense. Yeah. So I see that's where we're headed if this kind of very, as they call it postmodern, you know, modern would be the enlightenment idea that there's some science and reason. Yeah, science and reason. Democracy and capitalism and so on. And then we're kind of heading to this place where we're fracturing it out and making it be about your truth versus my truth and that was that was the that was the question that i wanted to ask next was

define truth what is truth we're now living in a place where it's well that's your truth right yeah speak your truth right yeah so so i think people confuse the external world and the internal world like subjective states so if it's a map so here's the question for your audience if two people have conflicting beliefs about the same thing must someone be wrong and the answer to that is it depends if it's a matter of taste no you like pepperoni on your pizza i hate pepperoni in my pizza you like beethoven i can't stand beethoven i don't know if you like any of these things um so there are different types of truths there are truths within language seven plus five is 12 a bachelor's an unmarried man there are truths about the world

Something falls at 9.8 meters per second squared speed of light is 186,000 miles. So there are truth and what's happening now is in to go back to what you said about the Academy. I teach critical thing for living that professors are increasingly looking at the university system as an ideology mill and the goal is not to find the truth. It's to place an agenda. It's it's an agenda driven kind of activism in which they want people to go to their own truths and we can talk. about this thing called standpoint epistemology which is a big driver in this is I think I said no no use of the word epistemology oh did you no okay okay it just it's just it's not all it means is how you know what you know it's just a process that people use to knowledge so some people use and not so here's the thing not all and I think so we have obviously you and I have different political beliefs we have different metaphysical beliefs about God and and and and and That's why this conversation is so important, and it's why the tragedy of this whole thing is that we have to come here to Dallas to talk to you because this is not happening in our academies. And people don't, our kids are.

I'm not welcome. I'm less welcome on university campuses than you guys are. That's an astonishing statement. Correct. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And this is the kind of conversation that I think should be happening on college campus.

And it's not. Right. Right. And not even the most contentious conversations like, well, we need to get Black Lives Matter with police officers who actually teach and train people in tactics. Because if you know, more dead bodies keep piling on, right? There are direct consequences for not having these conversations. But so, so think about it like this. You have your reasons for belief. I have my reasons that I don't think, God belief, that there's not sufficient evidence for that. We can have that conversation. But what you're not saying is. is, and I'm sure you're not saying this, if I'm wrong, I'm sure you'll correct me. That's just true for me. Like, you're not saying that this is just some highly subjective thing that people participate in. And what we're seeing now is this torrent of subjectivity. This demeaning the objective. So hang on just a second. I have faith. Yeah. Okay. There's difference to me. And I could be the one guy who reads it this way. Okay. But I can't prove.

God to anything. There's no proof. There's no proof. So I have faith. What my father used to say to me all the time when I was growing up is don't talk to me about God. Talk to me about first cause. What was first cause? A second before the Big Bang. It could be a Big Bang. Could not be a big bang. We have no idea. Sounds like Big Bang is it for a right now. Good. What happened the second before? And that's where I can't prove. I mean, it could have been Wiley Coyote, light and a fuse. of a giant bomb. I don't think so, but it could have been we don't know. So those who say they're atheists, aren't you more of an agnostic because you don't know what first cause is? I don't know what first cause was. Right. So I kind of think that it is, is God. It might be just a

mathematical equation, but where'd that come from? Right. So this will take our conversation down a different road. Can we keep it brief? Because I'd love to have you and talk about that, but I want to make sure we keep on track. Okay. So the principle there is their bottom line, Victor Stringer said the universe could have always existed. It could have been caused by a Big Bang.

Krauss says the universe could have come from nothing, could have been God, could have been any one of a number of things now. And I agree with all of those things. Right. So if we don't know what it is, that doesn't mean we should believe something. It means we should calibrate our confidence accordingly. And so the key there of this whole thing in the same thing you learned when you were questioning at the beginning you started saying this is if you and then you asked me what truth was. I think that the key to this whole discussion is are you willing to revise your beliefs?

Yes. Are you will? Okay. So, okay. So right now, this is the rule of engagement that we have. You are a sincere inquirer. I am a sincere inquirer. I know him.

He is sincere inquire. We're all willing to sit down and have a conversation. we agree on the rules of engagement. Now let's have that conversation. The problem is that we are acting, we are engaging with people primarily in university systems that are not good faith actors, as you'll say. They're not willing to revise their beliefs.

Correct. They look at speech as a form of violence. They do not want you to come on campus. What are you going to do on campus? Are you going to start lobbying grenades? No, they don't want you to come on campus because they think that there's something in two reasons. one intrinsically dangerous about your ideology but and coupled with that is this idea and jim can

speak to this is they look at truth as a form they look at speech as a form of violence speech is not a form of violence and the moment you start thinking that speech in violence are synonymous you destroy the enlightenment project you give up any possibility you have to leading a better life you that's the death of hope is the failure to be an honest broker in conversations with people with whom you have substantive political moral and moral disagreements. Yeah. To wheel it back a bit, this subjective turn, as Pete was calling it, this is a rise of subjectivity.

What is truth? And he talked about there being the objective world. And then we have ways to know, usually science, what's going on, the objective world. And then you have this subjective world. So he doesn't like pepperoni on his pizza. He said that's a subjective truth. That is his truth. Yes.

It is, in fact, a real fact about the entity of Peter Begotian. Whatever that happens, I don't know if you really like pepperoni or not. I thought you did. I'm trying not to eat meat. He doesn't like pepperoni and he hates Beethoven. We're narrowing you down. That's right. We've got a finger on you now.

But when people speak about their subjective truths, what they are speaking about is something that they know about themselves that they cannot possibly be wrong about because it's about themselves. Correct. And so at that point, there is no conversation to be had. Now, the problem is when you start blurring those two worlds, when you start saying that one's subjective truth, one's experience in the world and your own interpretation of that experience, somehow trumps the ability to do an outside measurement of that or to take another view of it. And that's where we're seeing the breakdown in conversation. People believe that their truth is the truth. So doesn't this come down to, like Pendelet's a good friend. of mine. He's an atheist. And I really think he's a good man. Really good man. I've never tried to sell him religion or anything else. He's happy in his life. Isn't it where it breaks down? Sometimes I feel like Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Maher are kind of the same. They're both saying, you don't believe this, you're bad. You're just stupid. You're just whatever. And I'm like, dude, I don't isn't that where the problem is if you don't believe this this and this that I believe you're just a bad person or you're just stupid and it's like I don't care are you are worse it's even worse is that if you don't believe what I believe you're an existential threat yep that's where we're at yes

you're an existential threat you are you're the cause of the doom of society right and it's the rare person I think you guys are in this category and and Penn is, again, I hate to keep going back to atheism, but when he stood up at the big atheist meeting on the mall a few years ago, he stood up and said, let's not be the people that the Christians have always said we were or that they were to us. Let's not be those people. That's not.

That is, that's what the country needs. That's what the world needs. I agree. The part that's particularly grotesque about that. is that if you, you ought not to be friends with someone who holds a certain set of beliefs. And if you are, you too are a bad person, even if you hold the beliefs of your own tribe. And there's no currency to be gained by crossing the political aisle right now. There's no currency to be gained.

A lot of currency to lose. And there's a lot of currency to lose. And we've seen it happen, and I'm sure you've seen it happen when, right? You can think of specific examples when you've sided with a Democrat or you've sided with somebody because you think it's the right thing to do. And it's not that you have an axe to grind against something. Like, I don't have an axe to grind about the metaphysical world. I just don't think that there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God.

But if I would show that evidence, I would believe. And if someone doesn't happen to have that belief, you know, when my parents died, you know, I got the privilege of holding both of my parents' hands when they died. And the dads are Armenian. So the dead high, they call them the priest came in. The religious folks came in and and these are just look, I don't agree with them about metaphysics or God, but these are just fundamentally decent people. They're kind people and when I was in Las Vegas for this happening, I brought my daughter. I don't usually talk about my daughter. I get very emotional, but we adopted her from China and the whole community that he lived in in Sun City. Everybody was a Trump supporter. The whole place was a Trump supporter. And I truly dislike Donald Trump. I legitimately dislike this man on every level.

But to say that his followers are somehow racist, now that doesn't mean he doesn't have some racist followers. It's just it's a misapplication. Who says? Who says? You voted for Obama? I did. Geez, I didn't realize I was sitting with somebody who just approves of drone strikes on citizens.

Right. What are you talking about? You could have voted for him. But you weren't necessarily for the drone strikes. We're not these one-dimensional people. If you think, you know, if you think that you're, when did we become the group of people that you have to buy all of it or none of it? 1994.

That was a joke. You said it with conviction. He did. And I was like, wow, that's great. It's going to be a big podcast. It's also the death of nuance, right? That's what happens when you have these tight net ecosystems and you constantly chuck people out of the sphere.

You're chucking people out of the sphere and nuance dies with that. 144 characters. 144 characters, yeah. I mean, you can't make any point in that. Right. You can't, I mean. No, you can only slam dunk on somebody.

And you were just talking to me about the social media today. Yeah, I've actually reflected pretty heavily on social media over breakfast. and the influence I had. I sat down, was waiting for breakfast, and I didn't pull out my phone, and then I got bored, and I pulled out my phone and looked at Twitter. And almost as soon as I did, it was like, I lost the train of thought that I'd had had. In that moment of boredom, I had started to become creative. I started to think. I started to, you know, be curious about people around me and things that are happening and just my own thoughts. And the second I pulled it out, now social media is directing my thought. It's either, you know, people speaking to me, my feed,

and then it's the things that I've subscribed to follow. And now it's directing my thought. And I figured out that, you know, a little moment of self-reflection. I put my phone back in my pocket and reflected on this. And I feel like I've been kind of sucked into a trap on this for the last couple of years where I get bored. And I work a lot, so I'm tired. And so I don't want to go do something difficult. I want to just relax.

So what do I do? I turn to social media. I don't watch TV, really. So I pull out social media. And it never struck me quite as profoundly as it did. I mean, I've known there are problems, like psychic problems with engaging too much of social media. But it just immediately, in that instant, took away all of my creative thought and directed it into whatever noise was being thrown in front of me. And so much of that becomes because 140 characters or whatever, it's so easy to just put that, like, you know, a little slap out there or that slam dunk or just whatever it happens to be.

That's partisan baloney. Right. And there's a currency to be gained. A lot of social currency. tribe. There's only, there's, there's, there's only two, in social media, it's either tear down or build up. Yeah. And it's a lot more profitable to tear down. And easier. Yeah. It's very difficult to put out a thing to build something positive in the world because, A, it's really easy to be wrong. So you probably are on some level, even if you're doing something really great and positive and you thought about it a lot. Something's probably wrong with it. So there's places for B, millions of people who see it or thousands or whatever your reach is to start trying to grab with, with, their claws and pull that down and tear it apart. And it's, there's a million problems with everything. It's very difficult to be right. This is something I talk about a lot, but you want to talk about science. You know, it's very difficult to be right. I think Carl Sagan talked about it as

crying truth from the fabric of the universe, like diamonds or something. It's very difficult to pull out a truth. So we put out, we're smart people. We put out ideas. Maybe we're 90% wrong most of the time. It's kind of Sturgeon's law, right? 90% of everything is crap. And so most of what we think, we're smart, We put out an idea. We think we're on it. And when it's 90% wrong. And so what do we do? We have to whittle that wrong stuff away.

And when that process is collaborative, rather than, you know, you get this kind of social credit for just trashing somebody, then you have science happening. Or if you say, I'm sorry, you know, I made a mistake. I thought this way. People will meme it out a hundred times. Oh, yeah. Put your face on it. And then. And so there's, there's a mechanism in place, a social mechanism.

And I don't know if this dysfunction exists independent of social. media or social media just amplifies it there's a mechanism in place to make you not want to say you know what I made a mistake yeah yeah and we need to create a culture how do we fix this well beside the conversations we need to create cultures when it's lauded when people say I don't know when it's a lotted when people say you know I made a mistake we need to stop yeah we need to stop this idea that oh he flip-flopped well you know what maybe he had different evidence there's a difference but I've always said as I I've talked to politicians for 40 years.

That's why my hair is white. I don't know why your hair is white, but my hair is white from, yeah, talking to politicians. And I've always said to the audience, there's a difference between flip-flopping and growth. Right. That's right. If you're not changing your mind over 10, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, you're not alive anymore. Right. You know, if you can tell me, you know, Mitt Romney said, I was for abortion and all right.

I was against abortion and now I'm for it. And I'm like, uh-huh. If he can't tell me what room he was in, what the wallpaper or the color looked like, he's lying to you. Because you don't go from life to no life or whatever. You don't make a change that big without something profound. So I asked him the question. And I said, tell me that moment. He had the moment.

He was sitting in Harvard. I mean, he knew everything about. it that's not a flip-flop that's an honest that was the key to Jefferson right honest questioning right honest not gotcha not I'm trying to win here but honest and and the interesting thing about that to me is that that's an attitude and the attitude is are you willing to revise your beliefs so the the idea then well how do you formulate your beliefs my my guess is that people how do you formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence yeah right

So if you formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence and some that must mean by definition that some piece of evidence could come in to make you question the belief you already have, then you'd have to revise it. Correct. Now, if you're unwilling to revise your beliefs on the base of evidence, then you don't formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence. You formulate your beliefs on the basis something else, which is fine. Then just say so. Right. Don't lie to me and certainly don't lie to yourself. And that's the, you know, like you mentioned the God thing again, like you can have a conversation.

conversation with people when they say, you know what, you're going to go to hell. Like, I like having conversation with these people. These are honest people. They're honest, bro. I might disagree with them. But okay, now we're honest. You know what I think. I know what you think. Now we're going to have a conversation, right? The problem is that when either people make these unbelievable subjective moves about my truth, your truth, or the thing that I see that is so despicable right now is that they reduce you to some characteristic that you have. You're white, your male, you're heterosexual, your able-bodied, your privilege, privilege is the original sin. This is the new religion, right?

And so situated truth. So they demean any claim that you have about the world because of something, some characteristic you possess. Martin Luther King would not be welcome in today's academia, I don't think. Oh, no, no. In fact, one of the universities, I think in the University of Oregon a few years ago, tried to problematize him. They had the bust of Martin Luther King, and I think they were doing some renovations,

so they had to do something. There's the plaque and it has the section from the I have a dream speech. And they were saying, oh, well, Martin Luther King wasn't sufficiently inclusive to sexual minorities and trans people. So he's problematic. It's like,

holy crap. Right. Where are we, you know? We hold these truths to be self-evident. Right. What truth does this collection of 350 million people hold self-evident? Hmm.

Can you think of anything? freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. I mean, these are things that still is, I think those are on the ropes. I think they are on the robes, but I think, oh, I took your question to mean originally. No, no, no, I mean today. What is it that you could say, I could wake every American up in the middle of the night and say, hey, what do you think about? And they'd be like, what?

Of course not. Or of course. What is the self-evident truth? Yeah, and I don't know the answers. I know that that's one of the reasons for the, that's a strong conservative message that we've kind of lost something there. And we've lost what we've lost in not having self-evident truths is we've lost a kind of social cohesion, which prevents us from looking at each other like people and having compassion.

The important part of that is all men are created equal. And I mean, I'm stressed created, not just because of God, but created as that you're created equal. You don't end up equal. You know what I mean? You got to bring something to the table. And we don't have that anymore. And we don't, you know, we separated church and state for a very good reason. But I contend we are back with church and state.

The church is just academia. I fully concur. I've written on this extensively. If I don't graduate from the right college or even go to college, I don't have a place at a table at all. I have nothing. I can create anything in my own life. And I can do it without the education. It means nothing. And so they're closing all those doors. And if you're not in that group and then groups beyond that one, you're toast. We've got a papacy. There's a bit of that going on. Yeah. We can speak to how to solve or address some of those problems. You know, legacy

entitlements and the college scandal thing, we have to do away with legacy entitlements. So if you went to Stanford, like my wife went to Stanford, if you went to Stanford, your kids get more points. That's anti-meritocratic has to be done away with. So I think, so here's another example. I think we're in a broad agreement on the principles, the rules of engagement, how to have civil conversations, why we need to open up the universities, why, you know, we haven't talked about diversity of opinion. Wait, wait, wait, wait, when you say open up the universities, I think I agree with that. I just wanted to define this.

That may mean that more Asians are... That's not what I mean. No, I mean that specifically we need diversity of opinion in the university system. Okay. So I actually am not a Marxist. I actually think we need somebody teaching Marxist economics in a university system. I agree. And I'm not a Marxist.

And I think that we need a diversity of opinion to give people and we give students the critical thinking, the infrastructure. We teach them how to talk about this. And Mill spoke about this. You need someone who actually believes this stuff. So I teach an ethics atheism class. I teach arguments for the existence of God, but I don't believe them. So it's, and I tell people all the time, that's why I try to have guest lectures come in who believe this. So. Robbie George and Cornell West. Robbie George and Cornell West. All the time. And they're friends. Right. And they get along. And they don't agree on anything. And Phil Fisher from Veggie Tales and myself. And other people. So when you hear diversity, what people think, normal people on the street think,

oh, diversity, that must mean some kind of under that moniker's diversity of opinion. That's just not true. It means in the most superficial way. And so the folks inhabiting the universities right now, they're changing the meanings of ordinary words, equality, equity, et cetera. And they're doing it from a theoretical perspective that if you actually look into and come to understand where these people are coming from, it sort of makes sense. sense. So why would you assume that, you know, two people of different demographic qualifications automatically have different opinions? Well, that's where we go back to the standpoint. Then epistemology is the word we can't say. Standpoint way of knowing things that you,

that you know. So it turns out that when you believe fundamentally, as these people truly do, and these people have taken over academia, the educational system, that to have lived a particular experience as a particular race, sexual orientation, etc., confers special knowledge that other people can't possibly have, you automatically see that diversity of identity implies diversity of thought. But that's the wrong kind of diversity. And I think there was a study. Didn't we just see this? There's a study just the other day that came out that showed that diversity training,

for example, isn't working. They force people to do this. Correct. Multi-billion dollar industry. and it's not working. It doesn't actually achieve anything. So I think because they're focused on the wrong thing. What should they be focused on? They should be focusing on differences of opinion, differences of perspective.

So if it's kind of an extreme example, but you may, for example, have a philosophy department and they have a particular problem that, you know, they're hashing out. Bring a mathematician in. They have a completely different way to look at it. Does it matter if the mathematician's white, black, Asian? No, it doesn't matter. Bring a mathematician in. a different way of thinking about it. Now you're looking at something in the political sphere.

You're looking at immigration or you're looking at, you know, anything, guns. You're looking at any topic. You need somebody who's representing the different perspectives. So what's the conservative perspective? What's a libertarian perspective? What's a liberal perspective? What's a progressive? That's diversity. That's diversity. I'm a self-educated guy. I couldn't afford to go to college for very long. So I went to the library. And I read Alan Derser. and Adolf Hitler. I mean, I would go for the, I'd look for the people who had the most diverse possible viewpoints on things and read them and knew that if they intersect anywhere, if there's

anything there, okay, we know that one line is true. Right. Because they both agree. And then you just kind of whittle yourself in. It's why we don't burn books. And yet we're burning people and burning thoughts. and erasing their legacy. Cancel culture.

Yeah, cancel culture. It's the same as Burning books. It's a cancel culture. Well, if you're too problematic, you get canceled. Like, you'd cancel a TV show. But then you make sure that all of the, you know, it's not available on Netflix anymore. You can't get the old, you know, DVDs even. So I've called that digital ghettoization.

Yeah. I mean, you know, you put them behind a wall. That's today's a bookburn. You can talk all you want behind that wall. No one's going to see you or hear you. Right. But yeah, yeah, sure, you're behind that wall. I mean, that's what's happening.

There's a lot of that, yeah. This is the modern book burning. This is modern book burning. When you take, say, a body of work from somebody who you've deemed problematic and then you erase that body of work to where people can't access it anymore, people can't engage with it. You deplatform them and don't let them speak. You deny them, you know, you erase their Patreon or something.

So if they had that so now they can't make money doing what they're doing and they have to go find something else to do, it's the equivalent of book burning. So we are there and that needs to be stopped. I don't know any other way to say. It just needs to be stopped. We need to have, you know, we need to welcome a diversity of opinion. You know, one of the most interesting thoughts that crossed my mind this year is a guy I was talking to in February.

He told me he sets aside one month a year. It's usually August, I think he said, but it's arbitrary. He sets aside one month a year to read opinions he explicitly disagrees with. That's all he reads. So he's a libertarian guy. So for an entire month, all he does is he digs into the kind of either conservative or liberal or progressive or whatever thought he doesn't agree with. And what he tries to do is tries to find, and this is the key, tries to find the most sense he can make out of that. And then bring that back to his own worldview the next month.

Yeah, I need more of that. I think which key in that. It also creates empathy. It creates empathy. It does. I think which key in that is that that is an attitude. That's an attitude that that guy has. And the more 52, the more I think about this stuff, the more I realize that it's all about values.

Like if people value certain things, we have to help people value diversity of opinion. We have to help people value revising their beliefs. We have to help people value what's true. So here's the problem. Here's the problem because you're right about that. But here's the problem as I see it. Let me give you two examples. One, I don't think the border wall has anything.

to do with Mexico. I think it has everything to do with conservatives who have been saying, look, we've got a problem. We have people coming across our border. We don't have any idea who they are. We have safety issues. We have companies that are abusing these people, et cetera, et cetera. And we got to have a secure border. We have to know our visa program. That was the problem in the first place. We haven't done any of that stuff. And you people in Washington, both sides keep saying you're going to do something. The reason why I think people want the border is they don't trust Washington. It's not about Mexicans. It's about I want a border and I want a wall because you're going to tell me one thing while you're trying to get elected.

And then you're going to do the exact opposite. You can't tear down the wall. I don't trust you anymore. It is a clear, tangible symbol. Correct. Now let me give you the next example. Transhisteria. The female penis.

You wrote a paper about that. I know you did. Okay. So you throw all this crap at people. I mean, when did we all of a sudden, where we expected to know what a cisgender male was?

All of a sudden it just appeared one day. And everybody was like, well, you don't know what a cisgendered male? And like, no, I've lived 48 years and I've never heard that before.

Where did it come from? People are printing up words. 2014. And I'm not joking this time, I think. I know. So Donald Trump would not be president

if people hadn't in academia and people in power hadn't all of a sudden saying well you're a cisgendered male and so you don't and nobody could stand up to that's a bunch of crap I keep trying to find things to disagree with you

and I'm failing that's 100% that is absolutely true we wrote a thing about that like almost a year before the election Peter and I together wrote a thing saying, for Quillette, saying that basically that kind of the exact point, that the left is driving people nuts. And Trump's going to allow.

They don't see it. And I'm utterly baffled by why they don't see it. And they'll say to me, people like, well, don't you realize the bigger threat is in the White House? And I'm like, can I swear on your show? Yes, go ahead. Who the f*** do you think put in there? The far left put in there.

Yes. People call us tools for the right. And I'm like, you want to talk about a tool for the right? an article in the Washington Post that says, why can't we hate men? What better tool could you give the right than that? I mean, come on. We're not the tools for the right. All this reparations talk and everything.

The whole thing is. Oh, my God, just hand it over. And you know, just give him the election. And who is the guy? I can't never remember his name. He's the mayor of like some small town in Indiana. He's running for president. He, Buttigieg.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. So here's a guy who's gay who says, I don't have a problem with Chick-fil-A. Right. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, thank you. Now, this guy might be the most radical Marxist ever.

Right. But there, I know conservatives who are like, oh, I could talk to that guy all day. Right. Now, that will work against him. Right. But it's just because he's normal. Right. He's not getting up every day going, who can I destroy or?

Who am I pissed about? Outrage culture. Right. Virtue signaling. Correct. And I think that guy, and there's another one that is also really. Chang or. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yang. Yeah. Andrew Yang. Yeah. Who also, you can listen to and go, I don't agree with universal basic income. However. He's being eviscerated by the far left.

Correct. Right. And you listen to, I mean, I've been saying this to my audience for years. You don't know what the future is bringing in the. next 10 years. We got we have to talk we can't just go I'm against universal income right wait well do you know all the problems that are coming down the road right this guy is articulating talking about problems has intelligence behind it he's not eviscerating people okay so I think those two guys could win right I think we need to have a conversation about that so I about what well about what do you

criticize like there are so many things to criticize about Trump, but how he likes his stake is not one of them. Right? I mean, we have a failure to understand, and it doesn't even, I would go so far as say, it doesn't even matter what somebody thinks. It's totally irrelevant.

All that matters is what are they going to do. And when we find, so this whole Biden, they're trying to paint him as some creepy dude or whatever. Doesn't matter. And nobody's made a charge. That is a total distraction. Yes. It is a distraction from what we need to be taught.

What is he going to do? What are his policy positions? Does he have sufficient evidence for those? Let's take a look at those. Anything else, we're not doing the Republic justice. We are cakes and circuses right now. Totally. It is total cakes and circuses.

And this is what really concerns me. And I'd like to talk to you guys about, I don't know the deep thinkers. I don't know who's out there. I don't know who even in Silicon Valley. who's, we are just taking a cell phone and then putting our thumbprint on it, where we all said, I'm not giving anybody my thumbprint, how dare you have my thumbprint? Now, I remember 20 years ago, we're like facial recognition technology in the hands of the government, that's not good.

Okay, but it'll open my phone. It'll open my phone. We're in a surveillance capitalist system that with people who are in bed with freaking China. Right. And we're talking about Joe Biden and creepy pictures. Right. Who are the deep thinkers and what are the questions we should be asking ourselves? Because it's coming whether we like it or not.

It's coming. Yeah, problems are coming. But the technologies. Yeah, let me ask you this. My theory is the Industrial Revolution, 150 years, that kind of change is coming in the next 10. Oh, totally. That's Kurzweil's idea. Totally.

Yeah. is it? It's based upon the Moore's law. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That technology, the world in the next 50 years will be more different than the world in the last hundred. It's the change is coming at exponential places. And the problem is that we don't have a moral infrastructure to deal with that.

Like abortion would be a great example of that, how the, what are those, amniocentesis and to detect certain. So we're changing our technology. but our moral infrastructure hasn't been brought up. So now this is probably my own hobby horse, but that's why we need to have the conversation, right? Yes. If you do not have conversations about these things,

we know for a fact the problem will not solve itself. So we need to talk about this, the surveillance state, we need to talk about this. And I would argue that the place that we need to talk about this is the universities. But I've utterly given up on that. I know, like maybe this is where our district is. I disagree.

I think it needs to happen in the public square. everywhere, but, but, but the problem is when people go to college, they need to see those behaviors modeled for them. Like, this is what civil, so I, you know, it needs to return to what it's supposed to be. And I'll give a talk and I'll have an associate professor stand up and start screaming at me with, I was with Brett, Brett, uh, Brett and Heather and Christina Hoff Summers. And they'll, she stands up and she starts screaming at us in the middle of the talk. I mean, that's the thing is that they're actually teaching to focus on cakes and circuses. They're teaching to focus on and they're, and then So this is the key thing, too, that's so, this is an important deliverable.

When you ask them, why do you do that? They'll point to the literature that they have made up in the first place. The whole thing is bullshit. And they'll say, well, it's Judith Butler's disruption. Performative disruption. Disruption. We need to disrupt this. The key difference.

We asked you, or you actually just said, why do you believe in God? It's faith. Okay. So however you want to take that, you admit, there's this. There's no way to measure it. Yeah, yeah. They, on the other hand, how do you know this? Well, here's 50 years of scholarly literature that we cooked up. Correct. I know how to cook it up. I'm good at cooking it up. There's a very famous painting of, I can't remember which battle it is in the Revolutionary War. And there is... Is it full of white guys? There's one black guy in it. Oh. And he was the hero of that battle. Okay. And he's standing behind another guy and he's kind of holding him like this. And he's, kind of holding him like this. And he's,

The painter who painted it at the time said, this is who this was. He was the hero, blah, blah, blah. Now, paper after paper after paper has come out. And all of a sudden, he's the slave of that guy who was holding the horse and was showing cowering behind the white guy. No, that's not what the artist said. And the brilliance that these folks have done,

it's postmodernism, right, is what our friend Brett Weinstein calls. ideal laundering. So they have this idea, like they have this moral urge and they don't know how to discharge this urge. They don't know what to do. So they get a bunch of other people who have this urge together, who have some kind of deep moral feeling about something and they write a journal. Are they publish a journal? And then they idea launder. They start publishing their their, I think they're insane ideas, but they start publishing these ideas and journals. And then those journals inform public policy. So when someone says, how do you know the trigger warnings?

How do you know safe spaces? How do you know microaggressions? Well, they point to the journal article. It's the same thing. You're training men like you train dogs will prevent rape culture. Well, you push it through a journal. Now it's knowledge. Now it's knowledge.

You have the same thing. This is how they distorted history. We have, for instance, George Washington, all of the stories written by the guys at the time that knew him. We're next to him. Those have all been erased. Right. And new professors come in with new studies. It's their opinion.

and they start quoting the next book quotes that guy and the next book quotes the two guys. And then all of a sudden it's done. And what you're probably looking at there is coming out of what they call critical race theory and critical race theory is openly historically revisionist. What's it supposed to do? It's supposed to show that the white power has always been trying to maintain itself. So somehow, no matter what happened, like the civil rights successes, for example, that was white people trying to make themselves look good by giving black people rights.

that it was a means for white supremacy to maintain itself. So they rewrite history in a sense that always serves the narrative that they're trying to spin. And then if it gets any legs behind it, once it gets published. And they teach your kids now. And they assign their papers. Go ahead. So how do we two things. How do we solve this?

You're in trouble with your university. So I'd like to talk about that. And then second, I'm raising two teenagers now. My first two went went to university. My next two, I'm not comfortable with that. I mean, if you knew it actually went on in the university, you'd really not be comfortable with that. Right.

Yeah. But, you know, my wife keeps saying, if they don't have the certificate. She's right. I mean, we're kind of in this crunch period where I don't know what to do. So let's first address. How do you change it? when you guys were exposing academia for what it was and you get in trouble because you didn't alert academia that you were trying to expose academia.

Right. So the question is how do we change it? If you want to change academia, I mean, I think we've got a plan actually and not to tout too much. But, of course, people know, a lot of people know that there's a documentary film being made about the work we did should come out early next year. Mike N-A-N-A-N-A. He has a YouTube channel in which he shows, he documents this. So the film is a thing, of course, but aside from that, we're working with Mike now to start going in a new direction. And we think that there's three dimensions to what we need to do to fix this. First, we need to continue to expose the problem. Let people see it. I mean, in a sense, I feel like we've already detonated a bomb under the dam. And the cracks are there. It just hasn't broken yet. I have tried to get people like you to sit at this table for a very long time.

Oh, it's not easy. It's not easy. Not easy. Even the guys who I am, I'm cheering for. I'm vocally cheering for and I'm taking bullets. There's no political capital. They won't sit down and do it. So who has, do you have the volume of people that have the courage to break through and say, I don't care who I sit with?

It's coming. I have faith. Okay. All right, good. I don't have the evidence. Actually, I kind of do. I get a lot of emails of, don't tell anybody,

but I fully agree with you. I think the wind is changing. At the same time, the other side is gaining strength. I mean, when Zuckerberg says, you know what, we invite the government in to kind of help. Oh, dear God, help us.

That's not good. No. So hurry. So the second thing. Continue to expose. Second thing is that we, and this is where our expertise has landed us because we immersed ourselves in this, we explain exactly what we're kind of doing here. How did this happen? How did we get here? And we just keep

disseminating that message. And why does it matter? Why does it matter? And then the third thing is we start to articulate a different vision. And so I get asked this question a lot. And I should be doing a show with somebody soon about this, I think, a podcast. And I get this question all the time. I'm a liberal. I care about social justice issues. I'm worried about racism, et cetera. But I think the social justice warriors, as they're called, are nuts. What do I do? We start answering those questions. We start articulating what the founders of the U.S. articulated in the first place about liberalism. We go back to the liberal foundations. Are you a conservative? Okay, but are you also a liberal in the sense of... I'm a classic liberal.

That's what I mean. Are you... Do you subscribe to the, as Pete called him, the rules of engagement? Okay. Let's re-articulate those and let's talk about why they matter. What they mean what they do so you have to to be able to do that you have to reverse what Roosevelt did to us by taking liberal and changing the meaning of it because it was progressive yeah right I you're a conservative so they put you on this European left and right scale no what made America different is we said no to that scale exactly who here on a different scale we are on this freedom scale and that is not even considered so

when different access that's right it is like i'm a conservative i'm a constitutionalist i i would love to live next door to you and we would be best friends and on sundays i'm i might meet you for a barbecue after i go to church and you don't go to church and we're going to be fine yeah that's that's real liberalism i'm a liberal atheist in the south that's like all my friends right it's true right so totally that is we've lost that we're losing it and if you've And I'm not even concerned anymore. I'm actually worried at this point. Mm.

It's really interesting because I spend a lot of time with conservatives because I live in the South. A lot of my friends are libertarians, conservative liberals at heart with conservative views. And I am actually encouraged by what I'm seeing there. Again and again, I hear the same thing. And I don't know what the reasons are. Maybe it's just because Trump's in power and all of this. but I do know that I keep hearing again and again, I'm tired of all the fighting. I'm tired of it being, you know, daggers against daggers.

I'm tired of it being that I can't be your friend because our politics differ. Let's go back to what Jefferson said, where matters of religion, politics, and philosophy don't separate friends. And I hear this so consistently from conservatives that I do have hope that there's at least a sea change going on. I do think that. Because I did not experience that living as a liberal in the South for the last. decade. This is new to see this as the main voice that I'm hearing. There's a hunger to have an adult conversation with people who has a different view without being called a racist or a bigot or a homoful. Because what I see is people reaching across the table with an open hand.

Right. And some people on the other side are going to slap it, but other people are going to take it. And the more people who take that hand, whether it's a liberal reach into a conservative or there's a conservative reach to a liberal, the more people who take that hand, the faster this problem gets fixed. And you probably find you have fall more in common. One, one, as far more common if they're conservative with a liberal. And part of the reason is I think it was telling Jim, I think last night at dinner, it's really weird. Like here we are, two liberal atheists. We're on your show. We're hanging out. I'm having a good time. Your staff was fantastic to me. It's really interesting. It was, it's almost like that there have been, there were two tribes there

were at war with each other for millennia. You remember how we felt after the fall of the Soviet Union? I remember that. Remember? And we all went, these people are just like, us. I thought they were behind the wall plotting our death. And they thought the same thing about us. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, it was the leadership. You know, the leadership on both sides making us feel like you were this great enemy. No, no, no, no. It was the systems warring. And we were pawns. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I'll finish the thought. So we're sitting, we have fundamentally different views about things, you're not calling the university

telling them I beat my family, which is what people do to me. You're not calling the university, telling them that I'm a rapist, which is what people do to me. You're not, you know, when Jerry Coyne or Dawkins, whoever, they had a difference of opinion

with creationists about age of the earth or whatever, speciation, whatever it was, there were certain, they didn't call, Bruce Gilley from my university wrote a piece called the case for colonialism. They wanted his P.A. The journal editors had to retract it because he had death a death sentence a death

The journal editor got the journal editor. They wanted to take his PhD from Princeton So think about this I was so you're sitting there I'm sitting there there there was an intense tribalism up until about three years ago And then all of a sudden the aliens came down the crazy crazy aliens came down the intersectional maniacos on the left and they're just randomly torturing everybody they're imprisoning people. They're not engaging in the rules of engagement. They're not sitting. They don't value civility. They don't value discourse.

They don't value dialogue. I don't know. They're out. It is, it's scaring my tribe. It is scaring my tribe. I mean, my listeners have been with me for a very long time, you know, a lot of them since 9-11. And we've gone through an awful lot of stuff.

And we've thought things and we're wrong on things. We were right on some things. But we've seen this coming for a long time. And it wasn't Obama. I mean, when I was on Fox, I was like, it's Democrats. Right. Please don't do this. Right.

Because the pendulum is going to swing just as hard. 100%. And now we have people throwing that pendulum the other way. The next guy. I'm worried about the next guy. Right. Right. So, right.

So we've kind of been through this. But I'm having for the very first time, people come up to me and say, Glenn, I am terrified. Yeah. Because this is happening. It's like you said, aliens. I said at Fox at some point, they want to tell you they're Marxists. They want to tell you you're wrong.

And they at some point will take the masks off and say, yeah, I do believe I should be in charge. And we've got this, I think what's happening. Some of these people, it's like a culture of death. It just is not anything the average American recognized. It's the absolute denigration of truth. How are we going to solve our problems? So the one thing that one commonality among these extremists is biology denialism. I totally believe in trans rights, 100%.

But that doesn't mean that I need to deny biology. That doesn't mean that I need to make up my own canon of literature and basically make stuff up. I can say that everybody who disagrees is morally defunct and people are good. I can't speak for other people around the world, but I think we're all the same. I'm worried about how are we are very few evil people. Yeah. Core maximum of light. Right.

And I don't know of a person who says, oh, we're in a dress. I think they should be executed. Right. Nobody wants that. No, nobody wants that. No, we can all live next to each other. Yeah. And just as a sides, parenthetically, these people are utterly upset.

with other people's sex lives. Utterly obsessed. That's why our paper about sex toys going in the butt to change people's political views. Thank you for that. Was a shoe in. He at least asked, and I swear, sex toys in the butt. Why not? Just throw it out of it.

I was not swearing. Remediate your transphobia. That's right. Tell me the difference between postmodernism, Marxism, Marxism, socialism. Socialism. Well, this is there a great time to have Helen around. I was going to say this is Helen. So socialism, as far as I understand it, it's an economic system that was born out of Marxist philosophy.

So socialism is ultimately an economic policy where the means of production are owned by the government ultimately. As contrasted with communism, where it should be ideally owned by everybody equally by the people, the commune. Right, right. But somebody has to manage the commune. Correct. stuff breaks down. Marxism is a philosophy that was ultimately looking at the winners and losers of capitalist society and saying that the fact that it generates winners and losers, in particular losers,

is not fair. And therefore it needs to be overthrown. And I mean, in this kind of simplest brass tax, that's really what Marx was getting at. And that it was unstable and will eventually stimulate its own revolution is what he was pointing at. what you have with postmodernism is something completely different. Postmodernism, in the general sense, was a rejection that these grand sweeping explanations like Marxism, like science, like Christianity. There's no gods.

Any such big story could tell the truth. And in fact, this got more and more what they call deconstructive. Take apart the big story. See where it fails. See where it's problematic. Where it doesn't work. Take it apart. it down until there's nothing left. And also then use it and put a new set of...

That came later. Okay, that came later. And so postmodernism in its first place was just this skepticism that these big stories we told ourselves through the modern era and the pre-modern era, which would be religion, you know, the middle ages. These grand narratives, we should just be totally, and they say skeptical, but cynically skeptical of them to the point where we just break them down entirely. Then in the 80s and 90s, People who were steeped in postmodern scholarship started to realize you can't really achieve anything if all you're doing is breaking it down. Helen calls that period the high deconstructive phase.

And then in the late 80s going into the 90s, something new happened. We now call that applied postmodernism or even grievance studies. And those are kind of synonyms that we've used. Grievance studies sticks better. People kind of get a feel for it. So applied postmodernism took the view that we can't deconstruct the idea of, of truth and be purely subjective because if we say that nothing is true, we can't do anything. So they decided that two things, precisely two things are true.

And one of those things is that there is oppression that's based on power dynamics rooted in society. And the other is that that is tied to, intrinsically tied to identity. So your identity, not like Marx now where's, you know, bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, rich versus poor, if you will, owners versus workers. Now it's people with privilege have the power and the privilege that runs society and everybody else is a loser. And so you see this parallel that came up in the 80s and 90s with what we've called applied postmodernism that language and identity and representation all modulates what we can

know about society. But the one fundamental thing that's true is that oppression based on identity exists and is a problem and must be. overthrown very much in line with the same kind of thinking that Marx was doing. Of course, these thinkers were informed by Marxism, but being that they're also informed by postmodernism, they were very skeptical of Marxism. And as we've had many Marxists reach out to us and thinking we're great, I think it's been confirmed that Marxism, Marxism actually sees this social justice stuff as an attempt

by the bourgeois left to steal the working, steal the left away from the working class and create a new elite, a new bourgeoisie that's separate. So would it be better to say a Leninist, as opposed to a Marxist, is a more of a danger to free freedom, free thought? I don't know that much about it to speak to it. Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what the specifics on that are. Yeah, that's when Helen is our expert on that. We each have our expert.

Ultimately, the most important thing here is that you do have this idea that certain people are oppressed and by virtue of their oppression, they have special knowledge. Right. And they also have a right to try to overthrow whatever is oppressing them. So meanwhile, the people who have power and privilege, and this is key. This is the most key point. Always, whether intentionally or not, always work to maintain their power and privilege. Everything they do.

Preserving epistemic pushback is one of things it's called. What our founders knew. That's why they created all the systems. that they did that are now being either ignored or dismantled. To, yeah, to minimize the impact of that. And so that's the difference between equality and equity. I get all these emails from the Portland Public Schools where they always use the word equity.

Have you heard the word equity is thrown around and not just in the realm of finance? And it doesn't mean what you think it means. Well, I don't know, maybe you know what it means, but people, they make terms, they either smuggle in the change the meaning of words, racism or they they smuggle in new words that have other meanings. And if you just ask someone on the street, well, do you know, do you want to be equitable

to people? Well, sure, it sounds pretty good to me. Equitable is a positive word. I want to be. Who doesn't want to be equitable? Who doesn't want diversity? I don't we want equity. But the problem is that it means that you have to address past injustices.

And by definition, that can't be equal. Equity means adjusting shares. It's equality of outcome, including. as a mathematician, I would say, integrated over history. So that's why if you say, they say, oh, this, you know, women don't have it fair. And then you point out some statistic where it's like, oh, well, women actually have 70% representation there. They're actually dominant in that sense now demographically. They'll say, oh, but historically they weren't.

Right. So equity means- Make up that injustice, right? Yeah. So it's adjusting shares in order to make things equal. So this is one of the big. blocks in our way. I really in Abraham Lincoln

great guy halfway through we're losing every battle and he's like okay what do I do and he called the country to a day of humiliation you know hey let's recognize what we've done here and he at that point said this is about slavery.

It's not about the union. It is about slavery. And if we need to heap all of the treasure up and we lose it all, we lose it all. But this is right. And that's when we started to win the war for the North. He shot right after. You know, we win the war and he shot. Right after he says, charity toward all, malice toward none.

We have the same thing happening. and it just festers then, gets worse again. We have Martin Luther King, shot, Malcolm X, shot, RFK, shot. And the response both times from Americans was the same. We took care of that. We spent enough blood. We took care of that, okay? We freed the slaves, so we don't need to deal with it.

The next time, we went through the 60s, and those guys were shot, and we have the civil rights movement. So we never sat down. and just bled. You know what I mean? And that's a very human thing. We have to bleed as a nation. But nobody's willing to bleed because you're going to take stuff. You're going to now make me pay for things.

I didn't do. So we stopped talking to each other because we have all these roadblocks where we have to talk to each other. We have to. So how do we get there? Yeah. I was thinking about what you said if you wake up Americans, you know, in the middle of the night, what would they say? And I was thinking when you were telling that story of a few things about how important it is to be across from a sincere, earnest person.

And how much of a difference that makes in the quality of dialogue. And honest questioning over blindfolded fear. And social reward for people who change their mind. Social reward. Wow, he changed him. He said he didn't know. Wow, fantastic. We laud that.

We don't go on social media and call the guy a moron for the next 10 months and meme amount. How do we get back to the idea that we should have, that we need spaces where we broker honest conversation among people who have substantive disagreements? And why do we need to do that? And what are our common values? I think the thing we've got to do is drop blame. Blame's cheap. Blame is easy. You guys, you conservatives, you, da, da, da, you know, whatever.

It's easy. I don't care. The thing is. I care that we look at it and say, you know, it's like I, you don't make a decision when an event is happening. That's the worst time to make a decision. Took my kids to Auschwitz. I believe, you know, what I say is coming. And I know that there is persecution of somebody that is very possible.

six years, seven years ago I took my kids to Auschwitz and I said this is the day we decide who we are there's no problems. Totally. Today is the day we decide who we are. And I get hammered for bringing up the seeds. These were the seeds

that the National Socialists were planting. These were the seeds that were planted 30 years before Hitler. Who hammered you? Who hammered you? The left and Jewish organizations very left Jewish organizations. And they hammered you because why?

You're bringing up Nazism. How dare you bring up Nazism? And my point was, what does never forget mean if you can't talk about, I'm not saying you're a Nazi. I'm saying this kind of thinking is planting the seed. And in the wrong soil, that seed will grow. Right. You know what I mean? So you get the wrong.

So I'll throw something. What do you think about this? Do you think that extending that metaphor onward, the wrong soil means not being able to talk about our problems? Yeah. So I and and and, um, uh, uh, uh, enmity. Yeah. Hatred. Hatred.

Hatred. You are my enemy and I'm going to win. Right. That soil. Yeah. You start planting certain seeds in there at your growing. Yeah. Blame.

I'll throw it. Blame. Yeah. Blame. These people did this. to us. These people are doing this. And there's a Jews that did this. It was those bankers that did this. Now

you can, you round up, you round up anybody you want. I'll throw out something to you that I think this is right. I'm not sure of it. I think that I think part of the problem was we're so polarized, I don't think debates are doing us any good.

I remember years ago I saw John's do it in Crossfire and I didn't get what he was talking about. But I think slowly over time, I think we need to move towards the conversational model. Everybody is so interested in winning. Well, what are you winning? How do you win a conversation?

You think you're winning, but you're actually losing. This is honestly why I started here with nothing in this giant room. No, nothing, just a table and a conversation. And I want to have thinking conversations where somebody goes, no, I don't know if that's quite right. You know what I mean? where you're allowed to think you're allowed to say something maybe that you haven't really formulated. Formulated entirely where you're being a little risky.

The thing is, is that... And that's an attitude, right? Yeah. That's an attitude. And how do we get people to adopt that attitude? I don't know if you'd market it as cool or how you do it. It is. Market it is cool.

We all saw merchants of cool and how MTV manufactured a whole generation of cool kids. So I remember reading Dust Capitol and thinking, and I'm sorry, I'm not the brains you guys are, but I read that. I know about that. That's nuts. I just don't, I can't make heads or tails, most of that. Yeah. And I thought, yeah, this is cool. Yeah.

But Jefferson is not. Why? Yeah. Because it was underground. Yeah. And I remember thinking 20 years ago, someday, Jefferson. is going to be underground. And it will just become cool because it's the forbidden thought.

That was 2015. Since I'm tracking dates for us, kind of making them up as I go. It's true, though. I mean, they started tearing down statues of him. So it was around 2015. Jefferson's gone underground. Everybody should go read some biographies and read some of his letters. They're good.

They're really good. They're really good. Let me go to the future. All right? Facebook, Google, they terrify me because I know China 2025 and China 2020. They terrify you. Why? They terrify me. They both excite me and terrify me. I am both, I think the future is the brightest or the darkest of all mankind. And we're just, hey, let's go. We're not

thinking this through yet between AI, A-G-I-A-S-I-S-I. We wrote a paper about that too. I love you guys. We said that if we were to keep on the path we are, we're making AI, AGI in particular, into a masculine force, and that's why it'll destroy the world. And the solution to that is to make it an irrational feminist, and that will solve all of our problems.

And it was just, we got busted by the Wall Street Journal before the paper came out, but it was a shoe-in. It was a shoe-in. They gave us no editorial remarks on it. They thought it was a great idea. That's funny. Anyway, not to interrupt. Anyway, but go ahead.

So, um, uh, we are, we are playing with things that people may not even hear, but around the world are just like they want to be first. Mm-hmm. And they're willing to play with things that is an alien life force. Oh, yeah. Just thinking that. Yeah. Fakes, facial recognition.

And that is, all of that's in tracking. Yeah. With, with social scores. 20. We're doing social scores right now. We're doing them here. You know what I mean? Just in a different way.

But we're doing the same thing. We're brave new world. They're 1984. That's a good way to put it. And no one is thinking this way. We have politicians who are acting like it's 195. I mean, I talk to them about AI and they're like, well, we should, maybe we should look at some laws. Are you kidding me?

By the time you guys do anything? Anything, it's way beyond that. So they're acting like it's 195 and they're talking about we're going to bring jobs back. No, you're not. No, you're not. Because you're trying to get the unemployment rate to zero and Silicon Valley is trying to get it to 100%. One of you guys is going to win and I don't think it's you. So at some point, Washington realizes they either have to turn on Silicon Valley and blame all this job against those.

guys with the Frankenstein kind of stuff or or Silicon Valley which I would count on is smart enough to say if we get in bed with them we can partner because then they can control people will have control of markets etc etc it is a nightmare waiting to happen so what are you proposing oh I'm not necessarily proposing anything I don't know if I'm smart enough. That seems a problem out of many people's depth. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I am a libertarian.

I don't like the idea of breaking up companies. I'm very much into AGI and ASI. And I feel like we need a Manhattan project, but I don't trust it with the government, and I don't trust it with Google. I don't trust it with really anybody. and if you I think DARPA has the right idea if this is what they're really doing

which is let's be second but let's take our time to get you know AGI that likes man now I don't know how you can I mean we'll be a fly you know just our day will drive AI or ASI insane

Earthworm Yeah right So I don't know what to do. I just think we should be having a conversation and a realistic conversation, not where you take Stephen Hawking's words, I think, out of context.

He wasn't saying that mankind will, there won't be any humans on the planet. He was saying you're going to merge with machines so homo sapien as you know it won't be around. That's what he was saying. We should have those kinds of conversations.

so the people in the middle of the country and around the world start to get an idea, maybe we should stop talking about Joe Biden's pictures and start talking about this because this is coming in the next term or two or three terms. Yeah. So what do we do? I have, that's way beyond my area of expertise. I have not even a remote clue about what we would do about that. You know Ray Kurzweil?

No, I've read all this stuff. I don't know him. I know him. I've interviewed him a couple of times. He is both exhilarating and terrifying. Because he doesn't believe in, he believes that man is just a collection of thoughts and patterns. Right.

So once you can duplicate that pattern. When you take the ghost out of the machine, all that's left is the machine. Right. So he believes by 2030, time, you know, he's whatever, but he believes by 2030, I can, I can copy you. And so I don't have to worry about, you don't have to worry about death. Right. He told me one time, this is 2004, maybe. He said, Glenn, you just have to stay alive until 2030.

Yeah, he's, he's overestimated those timelines. And a few years ago, Moore's Law fell off the rail, so it's no longer a law. It was just operative for a period of time. But the principle is that for singularity, it just extends that range out. So instead of 2030, maybe 2040. Yeah. So time doesn't, I mean, time, more time we have, the better. Right.

But we're in a society right now that says, uh, it used to be arguing abortion in the womb. Mm-hmm. Now we have a baby. Now we're into Peter Singer territory. Right. Now we have a baby. Do I let that live or die?

We've seen that play out before. That's exactly what Peter Singer's argument. And also, and that has been crazy for 30 years. And also, they don't like him on college campuses either. So if it's good for the goose, it's good for the gans. Like if we're letting everybody on or we just say, you know what, new policy, no external speakers. But the point is that it's not just people like you and me that they don't want on. campus it's the right right so so we're now entering a territory where a baby a doctor can look at a baby

outside of the womb and say well mom didn't want it so i don't have to i don't have to give it anything you could just it could just be neglected and died and die so so there are a few things operative here one is what to do about these encroaching technologies and you know there's no constitutional right to privacy and how do we navigate that technologically and politically. I'm the wrong guess for that. I don't think you're the right guess for that either. I have absolutely no idea. Can you, but you, ethics, you see the point I'm making from, I can copy you.

So if you have cancer and it's really expensive, you know what? We're just going to put you down, but we're going to download you because you're going to live forever right here. The body is too expensive. That's okay. to that when you you when we don't have some sort of sanctity of life at this point with the coming technology shouldn't we be having these ethical questions right now yeah we should be having those conversations we need to develop a moral infrastructure we need to get the diversity of voices

again and we need to figure out what the best arguments are against the position So I'll bring it back around to something that I've been thinking about. Part of that is, and I think you share my belief with this, that we should be able to rationally derive our values. And we have a whole bunch of folks in there thinking, in the academy thinking that there is no rational derivation of values. There are these immutable starting points that have nothing to do with rational power dynamics and race and oppression variables that Jim was mentioning. So I think the larger picture of this is if we don't like, for example, you know, Jordan Peterson's pronoun thing and the Lindsay Shepard case where she wasn't even allowed to present the other side, we need to teach our kids that. They need to hear the best arguments from people on the other side. So we make them in Jonathan Haid and the Hight and the Hedodox Academy and Greg Lukenev, I've talked about this.

We make them resilient, right? We make them resilient to these ideas, and so they don't crumble. So right now, we really do have a type of epistemological fragility. People are completely fragile, and they fall apart once you start looking at their epistemological. How do you know that? Why do you know that? Again, as you said, and you're absolutely correct, there were no questions allowed in this framework, right? So the thing that...

And we're lazy. We don't ask questions. And I think we don't ask deep questions because we're afraid of the answer. And so we need to create values that we need to create. systems in which people value these things. They value intellectual engagement. They value emotional resilience. They value talking to someone across the aisle. They value a friendship. And if all of your friends believe the same things, man, you need to get a new set of friends. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So that would, I mean, obviously we can talk like this and we can try to reach people in the culture and hopefully something

will happen. But I mean, from what we've seen in our work, it's utterly critical. that we do something to deal with the problem that this ideology has taken over education and is doing so at every level. How can you best foster these kinds of values and attitudes? I mean, in the past, that has been the proper role of the best of religion, not to say that religion, I mean, religion goes off, like everything, goes way off the rails. Sure. But in its proper role, where it's not bigoted, it's not hated, it is teaching you to love one another. It's teaching you to be charitable and decent and don't lie and don't steal and blah, blah, blah, blah. That is your house of values.

That's gone. So where do you see those values coming from? Yeah. So the only reason people believe in the new religion is because they stop believing in the old, right? It's Nietzsche. It's kind of just thinking about Game of Thrones, but yeah. Now I have the new gods and the old gods. Thank you.

And so Jim and I have written extensively about how there's a new religion. And then this new religion is, I don't know if it's a religion or a worldview or a cult. It's almost a religion. It is a faith tradition. Or not tradition, really. It is a faith system for certain. The social justice is a faith system at this point. But they won't admit it because they don't have to because they can.

like knowledge. They aren't pointing to scripture. They're pointing to, but it is their scripture. It is. It is. It is. It is. We have the parallels that you can speak to. Privilege being original sin, political correctness, being blasphemy. Privilege also being depravity. Yeah, right. It corrupts you totally and makes it so that you can't do anything. But in, depravity in the religious sense or Calvinist sense, it's that you are depraved in the sense that you seek to sin. And here it's your privilege, so you seek to maintain your privilege. It's It's a perfect parallel concept. And they go all the way down.

Wokeness is being born again. And you can just go down the list. Have you written this yet? Yeah. Yeah, I wrote it just before Christmas. Aerial Magazine. Helen Pluckrose is our third contributor. It's in Aereo magazine.

It's 15,000 words, so enjoy your time. Oh, I will. It's a solid hour. And I think so part of this is, you know, we hosted the James DeMore event at Portland State University. And it was going to be James Moore myself. And we invited the Women's Studies Department on stage. They said, no, two days later, a James DeMoor. James and Helen Pluckrose and I did an event at Portland State and we invited the women's studies again

Nothing we have consistently invited people to have conversations with us and it's Incredibly difficult when you want to have a conversation with us. That's why it's it's so interesting to me that the people on the right have been so welcoming to us, right? I mean, I've never lied to anybody you know I'm an atheist, you know I'm a liberal I've never lied to anybody, but you've never lied to anybody about what you believe and I've been a totally taken aback by how welcoming people are. Because you, because perhaps you have bought into the narrative that the right and some on the right are this way, are a progressive right, are a big government, big control,

you know, that there are those Christians who are like, my way on the highway, good, we can get everybody baptized or whatever. Yeah. That there is at sliver, but the right generally,

the strength still is this constitutional, I don't hate my neighbor. I don't mind. I want to work together. We're here because we see this vision that people can do something great with their life that's different than mine. Right. That's that that's, it's a small group of people. But I think it's actually getting bigger because it's, it's in the American DNA, I think.

It's in the American DNA. And that sliver is the same as the social justice sliver. Yeah. They're the same. Yes. In the sense that they feel like they have some special access to truth that everybody has to get on board with. Yes.

And this has all been described in the literature about authoritarianism. You get to a certain point of conviction and certainty in your views. And then it's called conventionalism. That's the name of the phenomenon where you believe that your views are conventional for you and must be for everyone else. And so you start to try to impose those on other people and claim. special knowledge to do it. And we've already eaten up 90 minutes and I could talk to you guys for a long time.

It would be fun. I'd love to have you back. We really appreciate the fact that, and I say this with total sincerity, that you are a sincere of conversation. I appreciate you having us on even though you know we have differences of opinion and that's fantastic. Well, I mean, you don't understand how, I'll tell you. you're making a big deal out of this. Is this not happening anywhere? Because nobody...

Not in our lives. Not in our lives. I mean, since we've come out with us. People on, quote, whatever our side should be, aren't inviting us on their shows. They're not talking to us. They're heaping... Two left-wing outlets since October. They're heaping derision on us. Like, you know, so when we did the atheist thing, everyone was like, oh, you know, you guys are just liberals or whatever. Well, they were right. But now that we've done this and that we've attacked kind of our own tribe or our own side. And the reason is, even though I share a lot of those impulses, that doesn't mean you get to make stuff up. That doesn't mean you get to pretend that something is knowledge.

Like, we really need to have something we can count on, something we can go to, something we can point to, and then we can squabble over public policy. But we need to have things that we can point to and say, hey, you know what, we know this. This has been, we've come about this, the integrity of this process is intact. You don't have to worry about it. The process needs to be defended. Yeah, the process needs to be defended. And that's the other thing that we've lost. So I really do appreciate you inviting us on, you having a sincere and honest conversation with us.

And that's exactly what we need. And we're not having it. So can I tell you something? Yeah. I feel exactly the same way. Thank you for coming on. I've wanted to have a conversation with Bernie Sanders forever. And the reason why he's honest about what he is.

Yeah. Generally speaking, you know, for a politician, he's like, he's been forever. Yeah, I'm a socialist. Yeah, I honeymoon in the Soviet Union. I can have a conversation with a guy like that. You're going to go to hell. Same kind of a thing. Like, people are honest about what they believe.

They're forthright in their speech. The Greeks call it parahesia, speaking truth in the face of danger. If you said something that there shouldn't, I don't think there should be danger. Me too. When you're exploring truth. I agree. If you're honest brokers. I totally agree.

And, you know, when you said you mentioned Dershowitz and Hitler, and then I thought, the first thing I thought I thought, oh, God, is, you know, 5,000 people are going to say, you know, Glenn loves Hitler now. So, but there is a danger. And the danger is that, you know, like, I'll be around Portland State University and I'll walk around. And I'll see a picture of me with this huge, grotesque villain nose saying, you know, with the little thought bubbles, saying, you know, I'm pro-life, Republican, love Trump.

None of those things are actually true. And so the dangers that they attack our motivations, they attack me for things that I don't even believe, there's something that is... The danger is also that we let them get away with something we should all be standing up and saying no to, which is, let's suppose even that they're 100% morally right. Okay, let's just pretend that their views are 100% morally right. If they can't actually articulate that, if they have to force it upon us, then they're still wrong. They should be able to articulate. They must be able to articulate it in a way. that's convincing. That's the rules of engagement.

Right. After Trump was elected, I said, can we, can we stop now for a second? Because half the country does not like him, and they're not going along. And when it flips, the other half will not go along. So we either have to change people's hearts or we just might as well start building gas chambers. Yeah. Because you're going to have to liquidate. There will be bad things coming down the pike. Yeah. And none of us want that. And one way to solve that is through dialogue, conversation.

Reach across the table. Yep. Keep reaching across the table. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this onto a friend so it can be discovered by other people.