The Joe Rogan Experience - #1191 - Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay

Episode Date: October 30, 2018

Peter Boghossian is a philosophy instructor, activist, author, speaker, and atheism advocate. He is a full-time faculty member at Portland State University. James Lindsay has a Ph.D. in mathematics and a background in physics and is also the author of three books.

Yeah, it's good stuff. Live already? Damn, there's no countdown? Jamie, you're radical. You're radical. Mr. Boghossian, welcome back. Good to see you again, sir. Thanks, thanks.

Good to be here. Thanks. Mr. Lindsey. Good to be here. James or Jim, depending upon preferences. That's right. Go with Jim. First of all, gentlemen, and there was one other person that you did this with, this

whole project. Helen Pluckrose from England. Shout out to Helen from England. Thanks. Is she back across the pond right now? She's across the pond. Fish and chips. She's making tea and managing Aerial Magazine.

That's right. Excellent. All right. Well, shout out to her as well. Let's explain what you guys did and what's so significant about it because when I first read it, my first inclination, I had two reactions. One was a huge laugh. I laughed really hard. And then I said, thank God somebody exposed this.

Yep. So tell me what you guys did. Jim, go for it. Let's explain who you guys are and what you do. Okay. My background is in mathematics. I bailed out on academia in 2010, though, because I kind of see the writing on the wall. And so now I am a renegade gender scholar, and I write nonsense about genitals.

That's primarily what I do. I mean, I manage a business at home. So I got out of academia. I write nonsense about genitals. That's primarily what I do. I mean, I manage a business at home. So I got an academia. Yeah, and I teach philosophy at Portland State University. And I met Jim years ago. We collaborated and we've written a number of things over the years. And at some point, it just came to be we had to do something about this. It was just too ridiculous.

And it was translating into the real world. And so we collaborated. do something about this. It was just too ridiculous and it was translating into the real world. And so we collaborated and here we are. Well, let's explain what you did and what was ridiculous. What we're talking about, what was ridiculous is there's many fields of studies that you can get legitimate degrees in that are absolutely preposterous. Right. Literally filled with nonsense. Right. Taught by nonsense people who live in these nonsense bubbles.

Right. And then they give these degrees and these people go out in the real world. And they infect things. Yep. Their ridiculousness infects certain, particularly tech industry businesses. Like you see it infecting. James Damore. Yeah.

Well, let's explain what you guys did. Yeah. So we started about a year, I guess a year and a half ago now. It was last summer. We started writing a bunch of academic papers for the journals that represent these fields. And so everybody understands what an academic paper is getting out of the gate. This isn't like an op-ed that you dash off for like Washington Post or some magazine or whatever. This is a thing like academics work their careers to write one or two of these a year.

And so they're really hard to write. They're supposed to be hard to get published. So we wrote 20 of them in 10 months. 20 of them in 10 months. And seven of those got accepted. Four were actually published. And then we got at least four more. Yeah, we got busted. And at least four more were on track. Maybe five or six more would have gotten in. What's the difference between getting accepted and getting published? So the process with everything in academia is really slow. And a lot of people don't know this. So you send off this article, the editor looks at it, and the editor either gives it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. If they give it the thumbs up, it goes off to peer reviewers, and that process takes months, often as long as, I mean, we had one paper that was eight months under peer review.

So the reviewers look at it, they try to figure out if the arguments are good, they try to figure out if the research is good, they evaluate that. They give extensive comments. They send it back to you. Then you have to revise it according to whatever they say. Make it better is what's supposed to happen. They made ours crazier. And so then they did every single time. We took the feedback and made the papers just the most extreme thing. Most extreme things. And so then you send them back. So now you're probably three, four months in just the review process, not to the writing, which should also take months. And then the editor will either send it back to the reviewers to see if it was good enough or they'll just evaluate it themselves depending on where it stands. And then they'll make a decision as to whether or not to accept it or reject it or ask for more revisions.

And then when they accept it, that means the journal is ready to publish it. But then the publishing process requires all the typesetting, proofing, all the stuff that goes into making it professional for an academic journal. And that can take months. And publishing is the coin of the realm. Like, that's it. So the ideal is one paper every year in the humanities broadly. So if you, that's how you credential yourself. That's how you get tenure, which is a job for life. That's how you get to teach people these ideas who then, as you said, go out into the workforce, you know, five, six years later and

infect everybody with total silliness. So it's the gold standard peer review. So we saw a tremendous problem. Can we tell people some of the titles of these? Because right now they're like, what the hell are these guys talking about? So we had an article. The one that got the most press was about dog humping in Portland, Oregon. It was called, how did it go? It was called Queer Performativity and, was it Rape Culture?

Rape Culture. And Queer Performativity in Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon. queer performativity and was it rape culture rape culture and queer performativity and dog parks in Portland Oregon yeah we claim to have examined under a fake name is all fake names formativity oh yeah they have their own lingo their own you know but is that a word in the English language performativity I mean in the academic English language not in common common parlance but that's like the whole thing. This is huge, right? This goes back a long way. That's Judith Butler's whole thing was that gender is performed. Judith Butler is probably the most influential feminist scholar or gender scholar, actually, I should say, that's been in maybe the last 30 years.

She's big time. And so she had this whole thing that gender is performative. It's something you perform. It's not something that has anything to do with your biology. Retracted article. Oh, yeah, there it is. Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. Why is it retracted?

Because it's bogus. Because they realized that you guys were hosing them? Yeah. Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity. We claim to have closely examined the genitals of just under 10,000 dogs. Just under 10,000 dogs and then interrogated their owners as to their sexual orientation. So we checked out the dogs' nuts and then said, excuse me, sir, are you gay? Yeah.

And you asked them if they gendered their dogs? Yeah. their dogs yeah well we made up these totally insane you know dogs humping incidents and how they they beat female dogs but they didn't beat male dogs so that's one of the papers that we made you know the other paper that well this one also they had the whole thing like if a male dog humps another male dog especially men would freak out and break it up yeah stop that because that's the queer performativity part yeah but then if a male dog humped a female dog, they'd be like, you know, get her, girl. Yeah. Get her, get her, you know, get on it.

So you're basically raging against hetero normativity. That's exactly correct. We told them exactly what they wanted to hear. And we gave them bogus statistics to fuel what they already wanted to believe. Yeah. And we started off with the idea that what we wanted to get to was a conclusion. And then we made up all the crap in between to get to it. And the conclusion was feminism should train men the way we train dogs so that we can get

rid of rape culture. You know, put them on leashes. It's right in the paper. It's all there. Unfortunately, we cannot put men on leashes. It's not politically feasible to put men on leashes. You guys wrote that? Yeah.

Or to yank their leashes when they misbehave. Yeah. And this paper didn't just get published. The journal said that this was exemplary scholarship and gave it an award. Oh my god! So it's one of the best pieces. This year is their 25th anniversary.

So this journal's been doing this for 25 years. And it's their 25th anniversary, so they're picking out the best papers throughout the whole year and putting them, you know, probably to place in some issue of their journal. And ours was going to be in the seventh issue. So it either is great or it's not great. So it either is great or it's not great. Like, why are they retracting it?

Oh, yeah. Because they know we're bogus. So what? You were right. It's like a broken clock. The clock's broken, but it is actually 12 o'clock. So they would claim it incorrectly that we fabricated statistics, but we wrote other papers. One was fat bodybuilding.

So they claim that there should be a category introduced in traditional bodybuilding called fat bodybuilding where people come and display their fat before the audience. And we didn't manufacture any statistics for that. And they love that. They thought it – one line in that paper was a fat body is a built body. And one of the reviewers was like, I wholeheartedly agree or something like that. Oh, jeez. So we wound up – yeah. And then we wrote other papers like to Hypatia. We published that. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, and then we wrote other papers

like to high patient we published got accepted, not published, but that one we claim that it's unacceptable. It's unethical to make fun of anything to do with social justice. And so if you want to make fun of things that don't have anything to do with social justice,

that's good. So if we wanted to make fun of men, that's great. If you want to make fun of white people, that's great. If you want to make fun of anything to do with social justice, that's good. So if we wanted to make fun of men, that's great. If you want to make fun of white people, that's great. If you want to make fun of anything to do with social justice, that's a problem. So we said that South Park's a huge problem. The Simpsons is a huge problem. We went into talking about how Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have the right idea, but then the journal was like, ah, but they're straight white males, have to you know nuance around that to make it clear that their position is white men even though they're on the side of social justice it's not quite good enough you know oh so they published

that they published they published that what was that what was that one called that one was called when the joke's on you yeah and we made we wrote it so that they would think the joke is on us because we cited our own work in there right but the joke was actually on them for publishing it yeah yeah duh yeah yeah this it's so it's so funny how racist you can be as long as you're racist against white people that's what we saw is that as long as you are going up the river against privilege, then you can really just get away with some nasty stuff. Yeah, and you can generalize. Oh, totally. Gross generalizations.

Gross generalizations. Do not treat people as individuals. Absolutely. It's very strange. It's very strange that this is the left. You know, I was a kid in San Francisco in the 1970s. We lived in, you know, like there was the hippie times and that's i i lived there from age 7 to 11 and it kind of formed a lot of my opinions about people

like the who gives a shit part of my my my appreciation for any group, whatever it is, whether it's race or gender or sexual orientation. And I just, I don't understand it from either way. I certainly don't understand it from a racist perspective, but I really don't understand it from racism that's condoned because it's racism against white people. Oh, yeah. This is the left. This is that these are, these are the people that are preaching against hate. And these are the people that used to be the people that were supposedly so open-minded and so open to ideas.

And now they're trying to stifle creativity and stifle dissent and stifle anything that doesn't fit inside that very narrow paradigm that they're trying to push. It's very strange. Yeah, they co-opted the civil rights movement. doesn't fit inside that very narrow paradigm that they're trying to push. It's very strange. Yeah, they co-opted the civil rights movement. The good name of the civil rights movement is kind of the brand that they ride on. You know, they're fighting against racism. They're fighting against sexism, misogyny, et cetera. And the thing is, is that's not really what's going on here. They've actually tapped into this, to throw around the term, this postmodern notion that

everything in society has to do with power dynamics. And the power dynamics have to be understood in terms of groups, and how those groups have traditionally held power and exercised power. And so immediately, it becomes stuck in this idea that it's all about this group or that group and how they relate to one another. And I don't mean like, hey, let's get along really. I mean, like, white people are imagined to always be over black people. And therefore, you know, there's always this natural power dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed. And this is stuff that came straight out of this weird postmodern philosophy, where you saw these dissatisfied French philosophers in the 60s, you know, all this stuff you were talking about was going down.

They saw all this stuff and they said, wow, you know, okay, power dynamics are the thing. Because I should go back a step. The postmodern philosophers like Foucault and all of this got all hooked up on power because they were dissatisfied with seeing what they called grand narratives, Christianity, capitalism, Marxism. They saw all these huge, you know, explanations for how the world works and said, you know, they're not working. Look how bad communism failed. Look how there's so much bullshit coming out of this or that from religion. It's not working.

We need to just get rid of all of it. We're going to deconstruct this. We're going to break it down to its power dynamics. And then we're going to look at it in terms of who has masterhood over who, who's oppressing what, where's dominance. And it's just kind of grown. It got picked up in the academic culture in the 1960s. That's how old this stuff is. And then it took this huge turn in the 1990s and got really vicious. And that's where it really got, you know, that's when it turned intersectional, actually. That was during the political correct days.

That's when the political correct thing kind of blew up. Yeah, that's when all this stuff was coming out. So that would have been, you know, late 1980s is really when all of this political correctness stuff started coming out of the academy. And then a few years later, you see it coming all over politics, which is typically what happens. It starts in the academy. A few years later, it leaks into the culture and politics or media or the tech sector now whatever it happens to be this stifling of creativity is the the most disturbing part about it like this like the agreement that south park and the simpsons are a real problem it's so bizarre because like here's the thing if they miss the mark and it's

not funny it won't work and then it'll be a bad show and no one will like it. But if it's funny, there has to be something about it that people find ironic, satirical. There has to be something about it that people are enjoying that has to point to some truth. And the denial of this and instead like the saying, oh, it's white males that are causing this problem and you shouldn't attack this or that. Or there's subjects that are off limits and social justice should never be attacked. To agree to that, it's so preposterous. This is life we're talking about. This is literally the nuance of life.

All the various strange things in the spectrum of human behavior and all the things you encounter in life. And to segment and limit what is and is not, what's off limits and it's not off limits based on race, based on things that a person can't control at all. You're just born white. So if you're born white, you're born an oppressor. You're born a victimizer. And if you're a white male, you're a fucking piece of shit. And you can say that. White hetero male in particular.

Oh, God. I mean, I've seen so many tweets from people. I mean, so many virtue signaling tweets. But one of my favorite ones is this feminist who said, all white straight men are trash unless proven otherwise. Yeah, that's the thing, right? All of us. All of us. All of us.

There's 150 million of us. I mean, give or take, you know, how many gay folks there are. Yeah, trash. Yeah, trash. No problem. Unless proven otherwise. And prove you're not, right? How do you do that?

That's like witch trials. You have to be an ally. Oh, no, they ask us to problematize allyship too you see there's power dynamics once you say hey i'm an ally now you've made it so that you have like a shield where people can't call you a white supremacist anymore and you are acting on behalf of other people and you know you're speaking for them so you now have assumed power that was reproducing the same power dynamics that was the mind comp paper yeah our paper that rewrote Mein Kampf actually was about allyship. And they were like, you didn't problematize allyship.

Yeah, we had two of them that did Mein Kampf. One of them we just more or less replaced Jews with white men. You literally took Mein Kampf, the actual words from Mein Kampf, and put it in this paper and replaced the word Jews with the word white men and they accepted it. Well, we had two papers that did Mein Kampf and put it in this paper and replaced the word Jews with the word white men and they accepted it. Well, we had two papers that did Mein Kampf. We had two versions. So that one did not get accepted. That one did not.

What were the quotes that you guys used? I mean, so with that one, what we did was we took the whole document online and we just searched the word Jew. And we just started picking sentences and paragraphs. So what was it? At the end, it was something like, if we don't combat whiteness, it's going to be the funeral wreath for mankind. That's straight out of my comp.

Now, they didn't accept that paper, though, because that paper, turns out, was written from the perspective of a white lesbian who hated her own whiteness. And they said that it was positioning her as a good white and because she's making herself out as a good white again allyship isn't as all it's cracked up to be she you know was making a problem she should have really been forwarding the ideas of the black scholars that she read way more and not talking about herself so much even though it was a paper designed to be talking about yeah because that was what hitler did so that's what we had to do. Yeah. Now, the other Mein Kampf paper was about feminism.

And what we did was we took the chapter. It's chapter 12. We took the chapter where he says, this is why we should have the Nazi party and what is expected of people who are going to be part of it. And we took out our movement or party. He didn't call it a Nazi party in the chapter, but everywhere he's like our movement. Took that out, put in intersectional feminism and then modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly and theory yeah theory that's what they call it i love that word yeah theory i love when feminist theory i love when they throw that around like what are

you saying but you're saying things that like once you say that you're you're good like you've said you can say something ridiculous and then say feminist theory and they're like oh it's in feminist theory yeah that's the thing right is so much of the stuff they come up with let me throw them an olive branch like so much of the stuff they come up with is a creative idea maybe there's something to some of this stuff right but what they're putting forward is hypotheses and then they're treating them as conclusions so they're putting forward this idea. I saw one on Twitter today. It was something like, it was about South Park, how it's been laundering racism into society and making everybody comfortable with racism. And that's why everything's so racist and people are shooting Jews is because South Park made it

normal. But they're treating that as a conclusion, but that's a hypothesis, right? So we could test that. It's conceivable that you could actually try to parse out what variables need to be controlled, see, you know, South Park came out and started doing these themes. How does it track? Statisticians can do kind of amazing things with that stuff. But they're not doing that. They're not testing it. Instead of testing it, they're concluding it and using theory to do so. And they're – no, go ahead. No, no. It's even bigger than that because why don't they test it? Well, if they tested it – and this is – I'm not making this shit up. You won't believe me, but this is true. If they tested it and the test showed that their hypothesis was wrong, they would say that the test was racist. That the test is condoning racism, and that's why it didn't give them the desired result. How would you test something like that? I mean, I'm not a statistician.

I actually am a mathematician, but I'm not a statistician. They're two different things. So I'm not exactly statistician. I actually am a mathematician, but I'm not a statistician. They're two different things. So I'm not exactly sure how you would test that. But conceivably, you could gather data, survey data, and see how attitudes have changed. Maybe you could track kinds of articles, kinds of events that are coming out. You could kind of pair that up with what's been shown on South Park. Yeah, who are at South Park and track that with attitudes. Yeah, but there's no effort to do this.

They're like, oh, South Park presents these ideas, which they then cherry pick because there's other ideas that they don't talk about that point the other direction. These ideas are problematic. That's the big word. Theoretically, that's a problem. Why? Because they – and I'm not joking. They literally believe that use of language creates the power dynamics that define society. So South Park's using language and imagery that creates a power dynamic that makes people

more comfortable being racist. Boom. Theory. Done. No test needed. No even attempt test. And then if the test happened, the test itself would be racist unless it confirmed the hypothesis. So they start with an agenda.

And then you mentioned the word laundering, which your former guest, Brett and Heather, talked about, idea laundering. I think that's important for the listeners. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's really what's going on here is they're forwarding these hypotheses. They don't treat them as hypotheses. And then they write up a paper. Paper, like we were saying, is the absolute gold standard of academic work. They send the paper off. The reviewers, in our cases, made our papers crazier every single time,

so they push it further into the ideology or the madness. How does a reviewer do something like that? What input do they get to have? They said, for example, that we should problematize allyship. If we want our paper published, we've got to problematize allyship. I love that word, problematize. Everything, problematize everything. Dog parks, problematized allyship i love that word problematized everything everything is everything problematized everything dog parks problem everything the problem literally anything can be problematized and looked at through a feminist lens they problematize everything everything the whole world's a fucking tool that's why we call it grievance studies the whole world there's a grievance is they're massively okay so then but to do the homo – the transphobia thing. Yeah, the trans paper.

So we wrote this paper saying that straight men are generally transphobic, meaning in particular the kind of niche weird definition that you see on the internet and activists sometimes that they aren't interested in having sex with trans people who have penises, trans women who have a penis in particular. And so we said, well, that's a kind of transphobia. And clearly the reason that they might be transphobic is because they don't practice putting things in their butts. So if they start putting stuff up their butts, in particular, we call the paper dildos. So you can imagine what we were saying, that you put up their butts. The whole paper was called dildos? No, that was the nickname we gave it. The paper was called going in through the back door.

Really? Yeah. Really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Going in through the back door. And then there's a lot of technical words. Did that one get published? Yeah, that's published.

You can see it online. You can see it online. So we argued that if straight men just penetrated themselves and had their girlfriends peg them through exposure therapy, you know, you start small and then work your way up, you can remediate transphobia. Yeah, well, make them less transphobic as a result. So by self-penetrating or having your girlfriend peg you, you can be less transphobic. And they thought this was a great idea. And so we based this off of eight interviews, really 13 interviews with men. And I say really eight, 13.

There were 13 interviews documented, but five of them were gay people, not even straight people. So they don't really apply. So then we have these eight interviews with straight men. We made one of them a conservative. And he's just so we could just put in like, you know, crazy things that a conservative might say about this. And they were like, why don't why weren't there more conservatives participating? So I was like, well, I'm going to run with this. And I wrote this whole thing.

We invited six conservatives to participate and only one accepted. And to kind of summarize why in the words – and this is in the paper. In the words of one, I don't want to be a part of some stupid liberal study about shoving things up your butt. And they published it. They published that. Boom, right in. Right in. Right in.

Oh, my God. So we wrote – There it is. Retracted article. Yep. Going in through the back door right there. Oh, my God. Now, did they contact you after they retract your article?

They go, you guys are fucking assholes. You're wasting our time. We spent hours reviewing your papers. We got a couple of pretty bitter responses, but mostly no. Mostly they've kind of put their head in the sand and kind of avoided talking to us. What I was saying before the show started that I read one article that was really diminishing the impact of what you guys have done,

saying, like, what, it's not a big deal. Wrong. They were trying to make it seem as if what you guys had written was just a prank. Yeah, that's not what happened here. That's absolutely false. There's a lot of papers that seem like parody that make it through that you guys aren't writing. Oh, yeah, we could pull up one about how Hot Wings, like there's a TV show, Spicy Ones or something like that about Hot Wings.

Oh, yeah, the YouTube show. Yeah, yeah. Hot Ones? Hot Ones, that's what it was. They had a whole – there is a paper out there about that show, and it's all about how hot sauce has everything to do with masculinity and being manly, and they didn't have enough women on the show. Problematized. Because it's sexist, and the hot sauce I think was the sexist part. And it has all these bizarre conclusions.

We cited that in the paper we wrote about Hooters. We put in the part that there was masculinity contests of eating the hot wings, who can eat more hot wings. And then they'd say, oh, I ate 20 hot wings. Ask out about Hooters. We put in the part that there was masculinity contest of eating the hot wings. Who can eat more hot wings? And then they'd say, oh, I ate 20 hot wings. Ask out the Hooters girl. Professor, when eating show hot ones is problematic for women. See? Problematic. He's an ally. But that's a real paper, right? So we cited

that paper. It's real. There are thousands of papers like this. There it is. Spicy spectacular food. Gender and celebrity on hot ones. And so as a professor, he probably teaches this stuff to his students, right? So now everything's problematized. And this is what credentials him. You get seven in general.

You get seven of these. It says it's a woman. Seven years. Yeah, yeah. She wrote it. But who's the other one? Tisha at the end. Who wrote that introduction? What's the other one? Tisha at the end. Who wrote that?

Introduction. Oh. What's the difference? There's two people there. Oh, it's a commentary. Is it an article about the article? Yeah, that's probably what's going on is. Commentary and criticism.

Hmm. Yeah, this is, it looks like, I mean, I haven't read this specifically. Wait a minute. Listen to the first statement. Food media have been recognized as cultural artifacts that reference culturally and historically specific ideals of gender. Exactly. Drawing on the simultaneously mundane and omniscient qualities of food as a medium for interrogating ideas about feminism and identity performance. See what I was telling you.

Shut the fuck up. It's all there, man. This is what we're talking about. This is such unbelievable horseshit that this person is teaching at Central Michigan University. Yeah. This is for real. And so there

is now an ever-expanding group of these folks. They teach. Do you want to read more of it? It's so fucking funny. In this commentary and criticism section, the authors introduce a diverse sample of case studies that demonstrate the emergence of feminist ideas in and through food media. Oh, yeah, man.

What the fuck are you talking about? We're really worried about that. Get a job! Get a real job! Go out there and work. Do something that someone wants to pay for. Do something of value. Engagement with

hot sauce. God, this is so crazy. Right. And this is what they're teaching our kids. Racial assumptions inherent to post feminist food culture. Oh yeah, I was going to write a paper about how cornbread is being gentrified and that's why we'll never get over racism because white people are making like pumpkin

spice cornbread. There's something that I tweeted the other day about some Gad Sad tweeted it and I retweeted it about some woman she's taking back bone broth. Oh, I saw that. Yeah, that's good. What in the fuck are you talking about?

People have been cooking bone broth for thousands of years. Thousands of years. It's a way of getting nutrients from the food you eat. They've problematized it. Look at this. Queer woman of color wants to decolonize bone broth. Stop appropriating my culture. That's Gad Saad.

He's awesome. That is so fucking preposterous a queer woman of color this is what i'm saying man there's a thousand papers like this out there for everyone we wrote yeah a thousand of them that you might as well written well you couldn't tell if we did or didn't and that's part of the thing is people can't differentiate what we've done i mean in fact not only can they not differentiate it they give us an award so they can't differentiate it from the stuff that's already out there and the stuff that's already out there, and the stuff that's already out there is polluting people's minds.

Now, you guys, you guys, at least you used to work in academia. You work in academia. How are your peers treating this? Are people mad at you? Well, Pete is going to have a lot to say about that, I think. But for me,

from academic people, I've had two kinds of responses. But the overwhelming – but some of those are like, ah, you guys. And then the overwhelming of them are the same thing over and over and over again. And I mean a lot of people. Thank you so much for doing this, but I can't – don't tell anybody. I'm trying to get a job. I'm up for tenure. I can't talk.

Thank you. This needs to go. And that's everywhere. It's everywhere. You can't proceed through academia now unless you bow to this stuff. Tenure sounds like tyranny. The whole thing sounds preposterous

that you can keep a job for life. Well, the idea was supposed to be that you work your ass off for a few years and then you, it was supposed to be to defend academic freedom. So you get tenure then you can go forth and put out some crazy ideas really like dig into some stuff and they can't fire you for you know coming up with maybe weird stuff and then people would argue about it but now it's kind of become the situation where people get in this situation they get in their job and then you can't get rid of them right right right yeah what is there a way to fire people

well if they do something like sexual harassment and yeah that you can find a way around the tenure thing so what is it like for you now you you are actually super uncomfortable are people upset at you yeah i'd say they're enraged you know i mean the only the only thing i can think of, it's like if you taught at a Christian school and then you went in and took videos and posted them on YouTube of defecating the Bible and then just walked into the school. So I think it's kind of similar in that they have bought hook, line, and sinker into microaggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces, diversity in initiatives. There's no questioning. And it's something for me that makes me deeply uncomfortable when my students can't ask questions, when they can't, they're just uncomfortable to voice their opinions about things. And I think that,

to say the least, a lot of people are enraged at me. But exactly what Jim said, some people will come in like, oh, thank you so much. But again, I can't be public about this. What is the ratio? I mean, for me, it's like 95% people who are really happy it happened and can't let it be known. But I'm not, you know, facing these people every day. Yeah. let it be known but i'm not you know facing these people every day yeah well you know through the videos from evergreen state you can see brett weinstein's interactions with not just students

but also some of the professors that were there there were some of these preposterous people that he had to work with oh yeah that are buying in hook line and sinker to this stuff and they live in these insulated worlds absolutely and they just they just create these people that also want to stay inside these insulated worlds and then just sort of stew in these ideas and then, again, go out into the real world. Yeah, and they think they're better people as a result. Yeah. Yeah, that's the big trick. They're doing the good work.

Yeah, because to question this, maybe to look at it and say, you know, it kind of looks like bullshit, but I don't know. A lot of these guys are left-leaning people or outright leftists. A lot of them want to do the right thing, right? Yeah. They really do. These people really care about progressive agendas, you know, getting over any lingering discrimination that's going on,

racism, sexism, et cetera. They really want to do the right thing. Good for them, right? That's what we want. But they actually have to question or like run county. You think of that like as a river of morality running through their mind. They actually have to go upstream a little bit, and that's hard. It feels weird.

You have to say, wait a minute. Maybe this scholarship, maybe this stuff isn't the best way to do it. But then the first thought you have is, well, these guys are – these people in these disciplines, grievance studies, are fighting racism. So if I go against them, then I'm going against the people fighting racism, so maybe I'm helping racism. And that's what we keep – if we get any criticism, that's what it always is. You're helping racists. You're a tool of the right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You're a racist.

Yeah, or we are outright racists. You're a tool of the right, etc., etc., etc. You're racist. Or we are outright racists. Yeah, outright racists and accused of being alt-right if you disagree with any of this stuff. Any of it. I get accused of being alt-right all the time. I lean so far left. Universal healthcare, universal basic income,

free schooling. I think education should be free. I think we should pay for it. I believe in a lot of socialist ideas. Totally. But I'm right-wing. Right. Because I make fun of people that want to study problemization of dogs fucking. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is really

where it is. That's where it is. If you look at whether I support gay rights, women's rights, I'm on board. All of them. I'm on board with all that shit. Take more of my rights. I'm on board. All of them. I'm on board with all that shit. Take more of my taxes. I can afford to pay more if I really believe that people are going to get real health care and real education. We're the same.

Totally. I would be fucking very happy. Very happy. Yep. If I thought it was all being appropriated and used correctly, fuck yeah. Let's make the world a better place. So that's the thing, right? Is if all this scholarship that they were doing on race and gender That's important stuff

So if they're doing that right Why wouldn't you want to be behind it? But they're not doing it right, how do I know? Because I made up papers about dog humping And made up the conclusion Before I wrote the paper And then, boom, they publish it and give it an award If I can start with the conclusion

And then work backwards to that conclusion Then then I'm not doing rigorous scholarship. I'm making shit up. Well, also, there's no room for dissent. None. Absolutely none. Zero. And in academia, you can't even – you have to teach whatever the moral orthodoxy is. So just imagine this.

Going into a university, you're trying to – you're a young mind, you're a young kid. And I'm deeply concerned about these kids. They're going in, they never hear the other side of an issue about immigration. They never hear the others. So they become brittle over time. So when they hear it, they just, they don't know what to do. They're shocked by it. Professors are terrified that they'll get a complaint. They'll have to go to the diversity board. I've been told that I'm not allowed to render my opinion about protected classes. And you teach ethics. And I teach ethics. I don't teach accounting.

Protected classes. Yeah, protected classes. I've also, that's a great question. What does that mean? Thank you for asking. I've asked for a definition of protected classes, a list of protected classes. I didn't receive any. But yet you can be criticized for being fired for it. Yeah, I cannot offer. But there's no list?

Oh, no, no, no, no. So, yeah, I was offer – You'd be fired for it. Yeah, I cannot offer – But there's no list. Oh, no, no, no, no. So, yeah, I was up on a Title IX violation. I'm not – You were up for a violation? A Title IX violation. What is a Title IX violation? Title IX violation is serious shit. That's federal discrimination law in universities.

You were? Yeah. You? What did you do? I can't talk about it. It's illegal. But among the other things that came out in that meeting were I'm not allowed to render my opinion about a protected class. And so, for example, I can't – so homosexuals I know are covered under protected classes.

You can't have an opinion on homosexual people? I can have an opinion, but I can't – What if it's a positive opinion? I can have an opinion, but I can't. What if it's a positive opinion? Well, so the example that was used in class was evidently I made a comment. Okay, so let's take a step back. Okay. So this is an ethics class, and I was talking about how sexual choice does not fall into the realm of morality.

So if a guy is gay and he likes another guy, that's just not a moral thing. That's just preference. Yeah, it just is what it is, like a matter of taste. And I don't remember the whole thing, but someone in the class said, well, you know, you shouldn't have taste or something or you shouldn't have. And I can't remember the exact frame because I'm getting this third hand from my violation, you know, my trial. So someone came to someone else. Somebody said in class, well, what about this? And I made the comment.

I said, everybody has something. Everybody has a preference. Like you can't say that no one had a preference. I said it would be as if I said, well, you know, I don't want to date someone who's 400 pounds. So that comment, then got turned into something when they called somebody else in the Office of Diversity Inclusion called someone else in, and it was made that I was rendering my opinion about people who are 400 pounds. When my what I was doing is saying that homosexuality itself, there's no there's no reason to give that. It's just not a moral thing.

But people lump it in. But the main point of this whole thing is that we have situations in which professors can't talk about protected classes. Students are afraid to ask questions. Everybody's walking on eggshells and the students aren't learning. And phrases are taken out of context. Phrases are taken out of context. hills and the students aren't learning and phrases are taken out of context phrases are taking out of context now now if you want a place to go to celebrate whatever the reigning moral orthodoxy is then the university is a great place for you did you explain what you meant by saying that you

like saying you don't want to date people over 400 pounds did you explain the context of the use of she wasn't interested in the context of it and the trick is he didn't even say he doesn't want to date people over 400 pounds. He said it's as if I said that. Exactly. I phrased it as a hypothetical. Right. Right. So there are entire things –

But if you had said maybe I don't want to date people over seven feet tall, maybe you could have got away with that. Yeah, I don't think people over seven feet tall are a protected class. Right. You could have got away with that even though it's still't think people over seven feet tall are a protected class. Right. You could have got away with that, even though it's still basically the same thing. It's a preference issue. So I mentioned this to one of my colleagues, and he said to me, oh, you can't say that. You should never have said that. And I said, really?

Why? He said, well, you should have said, well, I don't like dating blue or green people. I'm like, why? They don't exist. They don't exist. There are no blue or green people. Who is that going to resonate with? But what if they start coming around, man, and then they become a protected class, and then someone goes back and looks at what you said 10 years ago about blue or green people, and you get fired.

And that's how that works. If you look at – there's all this stuff coming out about victimhood culture and how it propagates and how it develops, and that's one of the things. It's called competitive victimhood. You could call it – Competitive? Competitive. That's the formal term of people who study this i love that yeah that's wonderful when people are fighting over who's a bigger victim but you see it all the time it's like you see people in society it's like oh the black lives matter people go nuts and then

all of a sudden the white supremacists are out and they're like ah white people have it hard too the second they the second somebody hears oh black people have it hard too. The second somebody hears, oh, black people have it hard, somebody's going to be like, white people have it hard too. That's competitive victimhood. And so then when you have like a moral economy, if you will, where you can kind of cash in and gain status or gain access to speaking or whatever it happens to be by holding a certain status of victimhood or grievance, then you're going to find people competing to find ways to get that for themselves.

Yes. Right. Everybody's going to go – I mean, you have the infrastructure there. Everybody's going to go after trying to maximize their own utility within that. Yeah. So people over seven feet tall aren't a protected class yet, but the second they realize that they might be able to cash in on it, they might lobby for it. Competitive victimhood.

Grievance jockeying, it's been also called. Yeah, I've called it grievance jockeying. I think Gadzad, since you mentioned him, called it the oppression Olympics. Yep. Yeah. It's wonderful times. It really is. So if you look at the root, so here's the thing that we thought about extensively.

If you look at the root, where is this stuff coming from? All of this stuff is coming from the canons of knowledge, their bodies of literature, their peer reviewed. And that's the idea laundering thing, which we should get to. So all of that stuff is coming from this. And if you want to make – if you want to get back to constructive politics, to get back to people having conversations. And that's the thing. Like, that's, I think, one of the reasons that your show has been so successful is it's a combination of authenticity with you can have – you're totally willing to have conversations with no holds barred, right? You can't have that in the academy.

So people need to go to you to hear these thoughts and to wrestle with ideas and to engage. It's just – You can't really do it anywhere else other than a podcast. Well, you can't do it in the academy. But you can't even do it on the Today Show. They fired Megyn Kelly for asking why is blackface racist, which is a stupid fucking question, no doubt. She's not a bright woman in that regard socially, right?

It's a very clumsy, clunky thing to say. But they just fire her. They fire her. What they should have done was brought in black scholars and black intellectuals for a week just to fucking grill her. And that would have been amazing television. But that attitude that you have is not what they have. So they want to punish the transgressor, right? Well, I think they just want to stop hemorrhaging.

And I think they didn't like her anyway. Well, that's true. The word is they really didn't enjoy her and that she wasn't a nice person and she was a mean person. But it was a learning moment, right? It was a teaching moment that's lost now. Yes, yes, yes. It's lost. But think about it in terms of what we were talking about earlier, where the scholarship's stretching back again to the 60s.

You have this idea that all of society is constructed out of power dynamics that are mediated through language, media, imagery. And so she just now became problematic, and she put out ideas that would be dangerous and poisonous. Not something to discuss the merits or dis be dangerous and poisonous not something to discuss the merits or dismerits of not something to work through not something as a teachable moment she put out an idea that's dangerous she can't put out ideas anymore well you know it was really interesting too she tried she was so disingenuous and how she approached it so obvious you know what a black person is it why is it wrong for a black person dressed as a white person? It's not no one ever said that Why are you pretending you're just setting it up so that you could say a white person wearing black mate blackface

Think about them think about the other cultural moment there, too So like you said they bring in black scholars and at the end of that she said, you know I really listened to that and yeah I didn't know that and I was wrong and I'm changing my mind There was like woman on Twitter that said her video looked like, I retweeted it, that it looked like a hostage video. The only thing that was missing was her holding up a newspaper that showed the date. I saw that.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this Australian woman. Ah! The whole thing is so fucking funny. But that is one of the worst ways to really dissect ideas. Because first of all, there's a studio audience. That fucks everything up. Second of all, you have these massive time constraints.

And then you have advertisers. Then you have a bunch of executives that are all cowards. They're all just ready to pull the trigger on anything. Anytime they can blame you for anything that went wrong and get rid of you or fire you, fire. Fire him. Get rid of him. fire you, fire. Fire him. Get rid of him. Get rid of him. Bring in the next person.

And then what they'll most likely do is to show they've learned they'll hire an all-black crew. Right. A diverse crew. Yes. That's probably what they're going to do. As a matter of fact, I think I've read – aren't they doing that? See if they do that. They're replacing Megyn Kelly with a crew of color.

Think about where that works, right? It works – you said they're cowards. They're afraid they're going to damage their brand or whatever it is. Where does that work? Who works on that? Bullies, right? So these people, why are they so pervasive in the academy? Why are they so pervasive in media? They know they can bully these people why are they so pervasive in the academy why are they so pervasive in media

they know they can bully these people they know that they can go lean on this stuff and somebody's going to be cowardly and then they're going to be able to you know make something change in the direction they want it to change you see it even creeping into politics they they try to do it with policymakers you see it a lot more in a lot of other countries right now we're in this massive like backlash against it in American politics. How's that going? Did 2016 help your progressive agenda, gang? Holy crap.

Well, that is a part of the problem. What are they saying? So, yeah, look at this. Today, as you know, we're starting a new chapter in the third hour of our show as it evolves. It's evolving. It's a fucking living being. We want you to know the entire Today family will continue to bring you informative and important stories, just as we always have. And look, two black guys and a brown chick.

That's 100% diverse. We got rid of the ice princess. It's all diverse. That's the thing. The way that diversity is defined, if you had a panel that was just black guys, it would be 100 percent diverse. Yeah, so they've redefined the word diversity. They've redefined the word inclusion. But to people outside the academy, they think, oh, diversity, it's a great thing, right?

But that's not what it means. It means kind of when everybody has the same ideas about something. It means kind of when everybody has the same ideas about something. It's also when you – if you're enforcing diversity, for what – we have to – we would have to find out. Like ultimately the goal is to find out what causes people to succeed and especially succeeding in something as benign as talking, right? You're just talking. That's all you're doing. So what causes someone to succeed in talking?

What makes their ideas valuable? What makes them someone you enjoy listening to? And then finding like what impediments there are to that in all the various communities and fix it at the root level. What doesn't work is saying we need one Chinese lady, we need one black guy, and we need one white guy. Because if you do something like that, you're not going to get the best show. Or you're not going to get the best anything. Well, you're not even guaranteed to achieve the goal you're claiming. So, again, it goes back to theory.

In theory, and I mean theory in terms of postmodern critical theory that this stuff's all based in that we studied. The idea is that if you have a particular identity, now you have a particular view of the world, and people of other identities have different ones. And in fact, there's this whole thing called standpoint epistemology that says that if you have a marginalized identity, you know more about the world than other people, because you live in two worlds at once. So the idea is, oh, if we get a black guy in here, he's had a different life experience. Therefore, he can speak truly to that. If you get a Chinese lady in here, she can speak to that, so on and so forth. So the guess is that by virtue merely of bringing in people who look

different with different races or genders or sexes or sexualities, then you automatically get a diverse set of opinions. But that doesn't work. That's not how that actually works. You could take people of every race, educate them on the exact same social justice curriculum, and they all think exactly the same thing. But at least in something like hosting the Today Show, you are just talking. Once you put these sort of diversity standards to something like mathematics, that's when things get super squirrely. Yeah, they're trying to do that a little bit.

I'm sure they are. You retweeted that thing I wrote about mathematics and they wanted people to sign an equity, which is another word that they've co-opted. They wanted folks to sign an equity statement and a diversity statement. Explain that. Explain what they're trying to, that you have a commitment to diversity. – that you have a commitment to diversity. Yeah, you have a commitment to diversity and you have a commitment to equity. And so equity does not mean treating people equally. It's not like you have a commitment to equality, which is we should all have a commitment to equality. It's – equity is defined differently. It's to make up for past injustices or to make up for some deficiency

that has occurred somewhere along the line. So yeah, affirmative action is an equity movement. It's to treat people differently in order to level the playing field. Yeah. So it's not treating people. It's not treating people equally. And that's the key thing. It sounds like it is, but it's not. It's a word that they've smuggled in. Straight out of the literature again. It's not treating people equally, and that's the key thing. It sounds like it is, but it's not. It's a word that they've smuggled in. Straight out of the literature again. It's again, all the stuff comes back to the literature. So if you look at the word equity in the dictionary, you get one definition. But if you look at the word equity as they're applying it.

Yeah, in sociological definitions, it's a very specific thing that means something slightly different from what people assume it means. So here's the question you should ask somebody. Anytime you hear someone use the word equity, just ask, oh, I'm curious, why didn't you use the word equality? Can you think of a – would the sentence be the same? Would the meaning be the same? Well, the meaning is not the same. That's why they used equity and not equality.

Well, equity is a finance word. That's why it's weird. Equity is also a finance – yeah. So they don't make up new words, right? They co-opt. Yeah, they co-opt. They change, and then they smuggle diversity, inclusion. Yeah.

And they write these academic papers, and they come up with these ideas. They start with a conclusion. They push it through. It gets published, and that's just like – it's like the academic equivalent of money laundering. Yes. Right? So how does money laundering work? Yes.

You take some money, you got ill-gotten money, you put it through this shell company or this thing or the other thing, and it comes back to you, and now it's had a legal trail that makes it legit, right? Well, here you take some prejudice, you write it down as an academic paper, you publish the thing, it gets the academic stamp on it, It's the gold standard of knowledge now. And now this prejudice you started with now looks like legitimate knowledge that can go straight in the classroom. It can go straight to activists or policymakers. It's a real problem. Yeah.

It's really funny, though, that you're saying it's like academic money laundering. It is. It is. Yeah. That's Brett. That's Brett Weinstein said that. That's Brett Weinstein said that. And that's what it is.

It comes out the other side is knowledge. Yeah. So then they think they have knowledge. Right. Yeah. Our paper about the dildos, the guy said this paper is an important contribution to knowledge. Yeah. Who's that?

The reviewer one, I think. The reviewer one. Who the fuck are you? Yeah. Important contribution to knowledge. I would hope reviewer one was just hitting a bong right before he wrote that. Just baked out of his mind, laughing at the whole thing. What kind of person gets attracted to wholeheartedly agreeing to these ridiculous ideas?

Like what are the people like? It's a great question. I think it's people who want to save the world. Well, I think we would all like to save the world. Yeah. I'm much more cynical than you. Yeah. They've got a – no, they've got this idea that – I mean, we talked a moment ago about privilege and we kind of brushed real close to the idea that it fits kind of like original sin.

you know, brushed real close to the idea that it fits kind of like original sin. And so they see the downside of privilege, the opposite side of discrimination or racism, sexism, et cetera. Hate is the big word, you know, fight hate. He's using hate. This is hate speech. That's where I think they got the term. That's like the evil thing.

You're born with privilege. That's like original sin. So what do they want to do? They want to fix, they save the world by clearing out the evil of privilege, by clearing out hate from the world. For them, utopia means nobody hates. And by hate, we mean something like racism, sexism, et cetera. So it's a noble idea. But then when you start looking at it in this like ridiculous way, like you're born with privilege and now you're just stuck with it, right can you do it's original sin you can be sorry for it you can try to be an ally and work it off you can check it whatever the hell that means you can do a lot of things but you can't actually atone for it you can't get over it you can't get rid of it then you get the

situation where it's like they really really need to take desperate measures like let's lock it all down let's let's tell these people that they're wrong. Let's try to point out how white supremacy is in them because they're white. Let's point out how masculinity is an ideology that needs to be destroyed. That was Lisa Wade. She wrote that last year. Masculinity is an ideology that needs to be destroyed? Yeah, it needs to be destroyed because Trump.

And this is the thing, right? I think in the past couple of years, of course, before Trump, it wasn't. They had other avatars. I think there's a lot of anger and frustration justifiably so at Trump. And they see this. And so I read so many other, usually op-eds, not their academic pieces. And it's like, men are like this. Men are blah, blah, blah.

And you can tell they're just talking about Trump. But they can't touch him. So they're pissed off and they try to take it out on all men. I think that's like a huge thing. They see these problems. They exaggerate the problems. They practice problematizing. And that's a thing, right?

They practice this stuff. You go to school. It's in the general ed curriculum. Maybe they major in this stuff. You get good at finding problems. I was just talking yesterday. I came over. I never actually – I got to Los Angeles a couple times before, but I've never been to the beach. I never actually made it down. So I went down to Santa Monica.

I go to one of these burger places right by the pier, and it says that this is the burger that made Santa Monica famous. And immediately you saw the hot ones thing, right? I was like, there's a paper in this. You see the problems. Here you have this manly double cheeseburger being marketed. That's what made Santa Monica famous? Oh, so manly food culture is the kind of like colonialism that goes and makes a city become a city. It makes a place into a place. And I could write a paper about that in three days. Do you have to have credentials to write a paper?

Do you have to have a PhD? No, technically not. And that's a sad thing because their response to this has been, oh, we're going to screen better to see who is actually writing these papers so they can't trick us. But that's bullshit. Well, how could they possibly trick you? The point is that scholarship is that it should stand on its merits.

If the argument's solid, if the research is good, and they thought our research was good. That's my point about the dog humping thing. Yeah. They should leave it the way it is. If they're saying that this is such an important piece. Right. Well, I mean, I would walk back on that one because we did make up the data.

And falsifying data is not cool. Well, what data would be incorrect? Oh, we didn't even go to the dog park. We definitely didn't ask anybody about their dogs or their genitals or anything. I bet you could have and you'd see similar results. We said that there's a dog crapping on another dog's head in the paper. And that didn't happen. I'm sure that didn't happen.

And maybe it did happen. I mean, this stuff is insane. But we had other papers that didn't do that. Fat bodybuilding didn't do that. The one that jokes on you didn't do that. There's no made-up data in most of our papers. And why shouldn't those stand? Why shouldn't they stand by those?

Exactly. I can get it. Because they can't differentiate real scholarship from bullshit because they're in this crazy ecosystem in which their ability to make discerning judgments about things has been dulled because they put an agenda before the truth. I keep seeing all these academics coming like they get their gotcha moment on us. They're like, ah, I read your paper. It's actually a real paper. It's good. Yeah. How crazy is that? It's like, yeah, thanks for noticing, you know, asshole. That's exactly what we were trying to do. We weren't writing just stupid pranks. The dog park paper is pretty funny, but we were actually trying

to learn what's going on there. Thanks for noticing. Somebody finally did. But that means, of course, they don't want to admit that we actually learned this stuff because then when we say it's shit, they're stuck with somebody who knows what they're talking about saying it sucks. And they don't want that either. Now, when you said there's people that are trying to save the world, like what do you really mean by that? I think they're the people who are trying to build the kingdom of God on the planet Earth. You know, to draw a metaphor, a religious metaphor. They're people who see an evil and they want to purge the world of that evil by any means

necessary. And the evil being like… Privilege. Privilege, yeah. Hatred, hate, white supremacy. It's the new religion. Patriarchy. So as Christianity goes down, it's just, you know, the Game of Thrones.

The only reason you need new gods are because people don't believe in the old gods. Right. And so we have these religious modules or what have you in our brain, and the new religion is intersectionality. And we see— And that really is what it is, right? It's exactly what it is. Now, the parallels are staggering.

We've been writing about that and talking about that for years now. Now, I've been studying religious psychology for years, and it's all over the place in this. It is political correctness. It's paralleled with blasphemy. It's the same thing. The parallels of heresy. The parallels. That's exactly right.

That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, it's so stunning how easily people sort of slide into these preconditioned slots. Here's the one difference. And I think this is a key difference. The reason that it's easier. And I mentioned this to Pendulant when we did a talk and he just couldn't believe it. The reason that it's easier to talk to a Christian, for example, about faith or about their religion is because at the end of the day, it comes down to faith.

These people don't have any faith. They have knowledge, quote-unquote. They have their bodies of scholarly literature, which were idea laundered. That's what they have. So they can point to these things and say, well, I don't know. I know. How do you know? Well, Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility.

How do you know? There's a study. Yeah, there's a study. There's a study. There's a study. I know how some of those studies are written and I don't trust them. And you shouldn't trust them either. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you see that, I mean, even in nutrition. You shouldn't trust them either. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you see that, I mean, even in nutrition. I mean, you see it in everything.

In terms of like almost a religious or religion-like acceptance of specific ways of eating or specific ways of communicating, specific ways of being. It's just so strange how people seem to have this natural inclination to adopt predetermined patterns of behavior. Yeah, I think actually there's pretty decent understanding of that from the perspective of moral psychology. You've got this idea that somebody has seen something as good, so it elevates them, it makes them better. So clean eating might be good, right? Whatever clean eating means. For some people it's vegan. For some people it's like all you eat is grass-fed beef. Who knows? But you've got clean eating, and you've got dirty eating, and you go into the clean thing. And so you've got this kind of like purity thing. And

eventually, you take this so seriously that it becomes kind of a sacred value to you. Well, what's sacred mean? You know, we have this kind of vague sense, oh, you know, holy, this, that, that's sacred, and it's something really important to somebody. Well, what it really means is that it's taken on so much moral importance to somebody that they no longer will allow it to be questioned when something sacred it's now been removed from the the sphere of being doubted questioned or whatever and so when you have this idea like that um let's say that that privilege is the cause of of racism and you've elevated that – the problem with everything in society even. And you've elevated that to like a sacred value that can't be questioned. You can't say maybe there's another dimension to it.

That's when you start getting these kind of religious-like behaviors. You start getting these problems because you've got a place where it can't be A, questioned, B, made fun of. We were talking about the comedy earlier. This is killing comedy right it's absolutely killing comedy because you can't make a joke because if the joke goes a little bit wrong now you you've committed a heresy you're a blasphemer they're gonna yes but no because people love when you go against it that's true the weight the weight of it is there but when you resist resist it, people scream and throw their hands up. Yes, yes, yes. So this is really interesting because if we take the theory about humor at face value, right, that you can only go against a power thing.

So we say, okay, you know what? We wrote a paper, one of our papers, The Jokes on You, is about that. Let's say they're right. Why do people love it? Well, it's because everybody knows these guys have power. They're trying to pretend that they don't have power that they are the victims they're the oppressed meanwhile they're bullying everybody into everything they're firing people for saying the wrong thing in class you know whatever it is that's only possible if they have power and the joke when south park makes fun

of like what was it pc principal or whatever when south park makes fun of that the only reason people laugh if their theory is right is because people laugh, if their theory is right, is because they're powerful. If their theory is wrong, because it's just funny, then we can talk about something different. But if they're actually right, if they're actually making a point here, they're not recognizing that they're admitting that they have seized a lot of cultural power. And that's why people celebrate when you go back against stuff. That's why people have sent us so many emails like, this is the greatest thing ever. Thank you so much for doing this. There's all this shit like you guys are heroes, blah, blah, blah.

Why? Because they wanted to see you laughed. Why? Because it's funny as hell is why. And why? Because these people are influencing the shit out of stuff. And if they weren't, if they were just victims who don't have a voice, who can't make any impact, who aren't bullying people. Everybody will be like, why are you bullying those guys? Why are you being a dick?

But everybody thinks it's funny. And why? Because they have real impact. They have real impact. Yeah. And that's one of the things that we really want to convey to people is that what happens in the academy does not stay in the academy. No, it's spread. It's spread throughout the world now. And I've read some articles about some things that we've said on this show that are just fucking completely preposterous and taken totally out of context

and presented as some evidence of whatever transgression that's impossible to defend. It's very strange. It's a very strange time for communication. It's a very strange time for ideas. But I also think it's very strange. It's a very strange time for communication. It's a very strange time for ideas. But I also think it's really exciting. It's exciting that all this nonsense is going on. That's one of the things that I really loved about what you guys have done. It's exciting.

It's exciting that you guys have infiltrated and had these fucking dummies not just publish your shit but praise it. And say how amazing it is that you wrote a bit about fat bodybuilding. Yeah. I mean, fat acceptance is this one, fat shaming and fat acceptance. They're two

preposterous phrases. They really are. You know, I mean, you shouldn't be mean to people. That's it. But fat shaming because someone's fat? No mean you shouldn't be mean to people that's it but fat shaming because someone's fat no you if you you can't call me fat because i'm not fat doesn't work yeah so that's real similar so that body of literature here's something that that i learned when i i read this is they don't use the word obesity because this is really interesting because obesity it gets back to what jim was saying obesity is a narrative.

It's just a story. So they use the word fat. Excuse me. So there's not obesity bodybuilding. There's fat bodybuilding. And there are all these narratives. So why would one want to buy into one narrative rather than another narrative? Why is fat okay and obesity bad?

Because obesity is a medicalized narrative. That's right. Whereas fat is just a description. So they're rejecting medicalized terms. Well, they call it healthism. I'm not making that up. What? Healthism is a narrative.

It's a power structure where healthy and thin people are imposing their view of how the body should be on fat and unhealthy people. And there's thin privilege. Like they'd look at you and you've got all the – because you're a muscular too, so you wouldn't just be straight, white, heterosexual, cis, et cetera. You've got health privilege. You've got health privilege. Fitness privilege probably. Fitness privilege.

Also an ableist. Ableist, you've got that privilege. It falls into the ableism. Really? It's not good for you. Yeah, it falls into that. Health privilege? That's real?

That's a real one they're using? And they also claim to be the healthy at every size movement. You can be healthy at every size, and obesity is just a medicalized narrative. Yeah, and that's really important, though, because the point of that is to say if your doctor tells you you're fat and it's a health concern, then you don't have to listen. Yeah, I've read that before and i read an article by this woman who was morbidly obese charlotte cooper i don't she's i don't know what her name was but she was talking she was also using like really misusing some studies uh on there was some there there there have been some studies on people who are overweight and that there could possibly be some health benefits to being overweight. These studies have been widely dismissed now. Not only dismissed, but they go in direct contrast to the great volume of studies that show how terrible it is for your health to be that fat and that heavy.

But this person, I don't remember who it was or why she was doing this, but she was clinging to these one or two studies that have been dismissed. These are biased epidemiological studies that have been dismissed, but she was putting them in this blog as if this is some sort of evidence that not only is it not unhealthy to be fat, but it might be healthy to be fat. And now think about this person in an academic position as a professor teaching young people this, particularly young girls. Particularly young girls who might have eating disorders. Exactly.

Health, a white privilege? What? Oh, my God. Is this real? Is this a a real paper it's definitely real this is how this stuff goes man they think it's a they think it's like when the doctor says you're overweight it's a concern for your health they see that as a form of fat shaming saying that they're not all right the way that they are they're not being accepted the way that they are there's a power dynamic that healthy people are imposing upon overweight people they have myriad issues that they come up with. And I mean, sure, some of these complaints have got to be somewhat real. You know, they don't make as many oversized

clothes, you know, plus size clothes. It's harder to get styles. There's some legit stuff, you know, that they might want to say, hey, well, can we do something about this? But on the other hand, the whole thing that like saying that it has nothing to do with health it has nothing to do with your like triglyceride levels heart disease it's just it runs it's anti-evidence it runs in the face of every conceivable piece of evidence they're teaching kids this they're in schools and there are classes fat studies classes and there's an actual whoa whoa whoa whoa there's fat studies There's fat studies? There's fat studies. Yeah, that's the journal that published the fat bodybuilding. The journal is Fat Studies.

Jamie's going to bring it up. The journal. I told you, Pete. I told you 30 million people are waiting to find out. Fat studies. Yeah. That fat studies is real. An interdisciplinary journal of body weight and society.

Yeah, and this is what Jim was telling me. He's like, when we do this, 30 million people are going to now know that there's something fat studies. Now, fat studies doesn't do what you think it does. You probably think, oh, fat studies, you know, what are triglycerides? How much should you exercise? What's a good diet? How much sugar is too much sugar? Well, that is absolutely not what this journal does. Frozen, a fat tale of immigration. What the hell? Crafting weight stigma. Hold on a second. Crafting weight stigma in slimming classes?

A case study in Ireland? So I'm telling you, you go to a slimming class, you're going to go lose weight, you take a fitness class or something, whatever slimming classes are. Fatness and temporality. And they use a stigma against being fat. They basically say fat's bad for you. Look at this one. Theorizing fat oppression, intersectional approaches, and methodological innovations. You just said a bunch of nonsense.

The oppression of fat people is built into institutions, pervades the cultural landscape, and affects – dude, we could have written this – and affects the relationship and perceptions of people of size. People of size. It is its introduction to the special issue on – I love people of size is not the new people of color. Right. Exactly. Fat is the new black. Parallel.

That's right. People of color is a problem now, too. You can't split that up. You can the new people of color. Right, exactly. Yeah, fat is the new black. Parallel. That's right. People of color is a problem now, too. You can't say people of color. Well, you can, but you see there's people of color and then there's BIPOC, which I don't know how you pronounce it. I don't know if it's BIPOC or what. But that would be black and indigenous people of color because they have even more oppression than the other people of color and they've got to fight over who gets...

More than yellow people of color? Yeah, for example, or probably brown. Is why harvard can discriminate against asians that are trying to get in let's tap our noses and just move on right so so but then that's even a problem because indigenous has recently been branded a racist term because you're not actually honoring yeah you're not hitting the actual tribal identity if you get right on the cutting edge of the stuff it's like really going into meltdown mode. Indigenous is because it's too random? Well, yeah, you're generalizing.

Because you're not saying Cherokee, Salvo, Nez Perce. Yeah, okay. So you can see, again, the competitive victimhood going on. Who gets to claim more of the victimhood pie? And, oh, now we've got this thing about people of color, so they get, you know, victimhood status. But why, if that goes to all people of color equally, that's not fair, because these people of color are even more discriminated against, so they should get more of it.

It's really, they're fighting over a piece of a pie of victimhoodness. I love the Canadian term, First Nations. First Nation people, it's a better term, because really fucking every single human being that came to north america came from somewhere else yeah i mean so it's speaking of which in the in the fat since we're talking about in the fat bodybuilding paper oh yeah i put in a star trek reference at the end i love star trek i put in something like fat bodybuilding is the final frontier for fat activism oh they didn they didn't like that. No, they didn't like that.

They said it was – They said that we couldn't use the word frontier because it evokes imagery of the genocides of the Native Americans to choose a different word. Yeah. Yeah. Frontier. Holy shit. Think about Frontier Airlines, right?

What's up with them? They're in trouble. They're fucked. Your whole worldview is so utterly distorted and twisted, and the things you believe are totally untethered to reality, but yet you believe there's knowledge. You believe it's knowledge because it's published. And think about what it does to the students that pick this stuff

up. You go to college, you pick this up, you start majoring in it. You could be majoring in something where you actually learn to do critical thinking, to engage with ideas. If you're disadvantaged going into college, that's your best chance to get out of that situation is to grapple with great critical thinking, learn some great skills, whether that's engineering and the sciences, something like that. Even if it's you want to

get into studying race and sociology, soft sciences, or you want to get into just literature, do it honestly and you're going to get somewhere. But you get into this stuff where you can literally just make up your conclusions what are you doing you're teaching these people how to think about problems they're seeing you know the burger in the santa monica pier is a problem now everywhere i see it everywhere i go after i did this for a year so you get the people in the habit of seeing problems everywhere are you helping them are you getting them out of the book about this or anything? Yeah, we might one day. I don't know. It's a great idea for a book. The hard part is we could actually probably write 10 books.

So condensing it down to a book, usually you've got an idea and you've got to blow it up to a book. We have to condense this down to a book. I think talking about the problem, like just explaining what you've already explained on this podcast and actually having those studies that you did publish and the whole thought process behind creating them would be a great book. Well, we got a documentary happening about it. Yeah. Mike Naina is a documentarian from Australia that got hooked up with us. Is he a white male? He's not.

He's brown. He's half black. He's half black. Watch out. Tell them how we met mike oh yeah so um it's interesting because we were starting out this project and then we ended up talking you know we couldn't talk to anybody about it so hard to keep a fucking secret this big right you just want to tell people like you aren't going to believe what i'm doing can't tell anybody so we

find a few trusted friends we're telling this one guy a buddy of ours and he's like oh my god i know a documentarian who's making who's like investigating all this shit going on in the universities already he's already interested would you guys be interested this would be a compelling documentary would you guys be interested in talking to him so we we get in touch with him and he's like listen you know i'll shoot this i think there's a's a film here. I think you're going to ruin your careers. That's what I'm going to film. But in any case, I'll film this, but here's the deal. I'm only going to shoot it if you commit 100% to transparency. Let me tell the full story, honestly, what's really happening. You know, we don't get to sugarcoat anything and make you guys

look good. And of course, he thought we were just going to crash and burn. Yeah, that's what he told us later. He's like, the only reason I agreed to this, I was sure that we were just going to crash and burn yeah that's what he told us later he's like we the only reason i agreed to this i was sure that you guys were going to torpedo your career it's like positive yeah and so he thought it was a you know going to be that and he'd have to like convince us to let him show it because we wouldn't want to but does he know that you don't work in academia anymore yeah yeah but we were doing the project so we reached out to him and said well through the mutual friend How would it ruin your career? Well, I maybe would never get another job if I wanted to go back into academia, for example. I mean I still – it hasn't happened yet.

But you see people who do academic misconduct get banned from ever publishing academic papers again. That could still come down for me. I don't know. It probably won't. But it might and if it does you know then if i try to get a job working for like a think tank or university or anything that depends on that i'm locked out of that now so um especially he's going to ruin pete's career too let's be honest he works in he works in not just the university but portland state you know it's like ground zero for you i don't know i don't know what's going to happen. The people, when it's over for sure, they're always like, I'm not sure.

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know. It's best not to prognosticate too much with all this stuff. You see, now, we talked about Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying. They got firebombed, right? Their thing just blew the hell up. And then they got pushed out of their jobs.

But in a sense, it's like, I don't know. I was talking to them when we were in Portland, and it feels like they kind of took the fall. And people are like, whoa, that's too far. And I don't know if that's the case or not. But if so, maybe. Well, what's too far? Like pushing people out of their jobs,

like students patrolling the campus with bats, trying to find Brett to pull them out of his car if he showed up. Yeah. Like that, I don't care who you are. That's too far. I mean, that's not even civil society anymore. Who thought that was too far, though? The students did?

Not there, but a lot of people. Like, people saw this stuff. Well, their enrollment is... Like, did you think it was too far, right? I thought it was insane. I thought the government should have come in and shut down the school. Yeah, tons of people. Tons of people around.

I mean, like, everyday people who saw this story think, whoa, shit, this stuff's gone too far. The fact that they're allowing that guy to remain as president oh yeah it's absolutely it's absolutely nuts when there's that scene in the wherever it was conference room or wherever it was when the kids were telling to put his hands down yeah because he's being aggressive with his hands yeah and he puts his hands down and they start laughing yep it's like what in the fuck is this it is a system set up to where you can't win is what it is, deliberately. But it's hilarious.

They were laughing at him. He put his hands down. They're like, stop making hand gestures. You're being aggressive. He puts his hands down. They start laughing at him. I didn't find it funny. I found it terrifying.

I found it terrifying for what it means for all of us. Yeah, if that can happen at a college campus, I mean, that's where ideas are supposed to be shared, discussed, explored, et cetera. If that can happen at a college campus, everything's up for grabs at some point. Well, that college campus is really strange, right? It's really strange. They're struggling now. Enrollment's down. Well, radically.

Radically down. Yeah, I mean, they could literally go under because of this. It looks like it might happen, yeah. It's too bad because when it was doing well, as Brett was explaining, it was a wonderful place to teach because he could do whatever he wanted to. Really cool stuff. He could take them to the park and they could do a class in the park. He could have a class where, you know, regardless of what he's teaching, he could teach about something else. Yeah, crazy field trips somewhere, you know, all this stuff, you know, adventures with the students.

Didn't the creator of The Simpsons go there too, speaking of The Simpsons? I think he was an alum from there. It's such a shame because they're just such decent people. They're just such kind. They're great. They're both great. They're both so smart too. So really legitimately smart.

And fiercely progressive and both fiercely progressive they're decent humans of course that means they're alt-right adjacent right right it's just fucking hilarious man these people it's a strange strange time for ideas but i think this is a it's it's also subs it's some sort of a symptom of this culture that we live in where everyone gets to voice their opinion. Everyone feels entitled to voice their opinion because of social media and because of this instantaneous ability to post whatever you feel about anything, whether it's a comment on YouTube or a tweet or a Facebook post. This nature of everyone putting in input instead of earning your right to be

heard, you know, and through merit and through your work and through people saying, hey, this guy is smart. This girl has great ideas. This person really has some good points. That's Tom Nichols ideas. Before we used to criticize people from a point of expertise. Now people who have absolutely no expertise feel that they're entitled to not only criticize but have everybody else listen to their criticisms. I think you're on to something with the social media, right? Because you post something and it gets like four interactions and you're like, well, how come Joe Rogan's thing got like 4,000? It's not fair. Right.

Right? And so there's this like kind of competitive jealousy kind of thing going on. And I think we've seen that a lot, you know, these kind of, you know, people who don't have a lot to bring to the table and they want to get, you know, maybe it's a spot on a podcast. Maybe they want to get on, you know, a conference or something, a speaker at a conference. And we've seen this for years. What happens is, well, you know, you got some big name that's coming.

Well, let's just like can him and say, well, he's a sexist. He said this terrible thing. Now he can't be at the conference or we'll protest, get him out, put one of our guys in. Or when they start to get more power, it's like, let's make sure half of our people are there or else we're going to make sure that we say your conference is racist. Then that becomes like just a hot mess. Nobody wants to go to the conference. It's not going to be financially soluble. So it falls apart. I mean, this stuff has been going on. This seems to be what's going on. And I think you're touching something where social media, and Tom Nichols talks about it too, generating a kind of narcissism where people feel entitled. Like I have a voice, nobody's listening to me, but they should listen to me because they,

of course, think their ideas are great. And the rise of social media coincides with shutting down speakers. Absolutely. Speakers on campus. It didn't used to happen that way. It used to be even if people protested it, the speech went on and people debated that person or the people got a chance during the Q&A section to challenge these ideas. That's what it's all about. That's what it's supposed to be all about.

If you have a problematic person, you have a person that you feel is – they have ideas that are questionable. You bring in a person whose ideas you feel are counter to those ideas. And you let the audience see how these individuals discuss these things. When I was in high school, Barney Frank debated some guy from – he was some very conservative person. I forget what the – there was a ridiculous conservative group that had some really funny name. I forget what it was. But he was like this really canned Ronald Reagan-style conservative. And Barney Frank was – I think he was still in the closet back then but he was this

like very articulate powerful left-wing guy and they they did it inside you know this court this community center in our high school whatever it was you know some auditorium and i got a chance to watch this one guy talk about all these different, you know, whatever it was, gay marriage or whatever is conservative ideas and values. And a marriage should be between a man and a woman and all these different things that would today at a lot of college campuses, you'd want those shut down. You don't want someone propagating these ideas. Right. Right. Ideas dissected and ideas debated and see two people from polar opposite perspectives just battle it out and let the best idea win. And I'm sure there was probably some people that were in that audience that came out of it with a different perspective. Like, yeah, gay people shouldn't get married.

And yeah, marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman. I'm sure of it. I'm sure of it. And that's what happens in a democracy. Yeah, you're talking about the very foundation of liberal society. You're talking about John Stuart Mill here. I mean, you're talking about John Adams. You're talking about the foundation of a liberal society here. And that's what the scholarship runs that we looked at runs directly counter to this. Remember, the idea is that if people are putting out language the idea that some people are going to come away with a heteronormative idea or a homophobic idea that's already a catastrophe yes so we can't allow we got to

pull the speaker wires like a demur event we've got it we can't let that go on yeah that's my point is like what happened where you know these kind of interactions between contrary ideas is so it's it's it's so dangerous that one or two people could possibly be shifted even if it's 30 percent of the audience i mean who the fuck knows what what's going to happen when people are sitting there listening and who's to say that you're right or you're wrong? The way to challenge ideas is not pulling the plug on the speakers. It's better ideas. If you fundamentally subscribe to the idea that heteronormativity, let's use it as the example, if heteronormativity is the power structure that's holding down gay people and preventing them from having equal opportunities, if you fundamentally believe that, anybody else getting convinced, anybody being reinforced

under the idea of heteronormativity isn't just a few, like 70% changed their mind and 30% stuck with it. That's just bolstering the already imagined to be completely dominant view. It's really kind of anti-progress, right? Because it views the idea that power structures can't change. They're always rooted in some identity whoever has you know there's more straight people than gay people or okay so therefore straight people always have power therefore anything that reinforces heteronormativity

is going to be a catastrophe that reinforces the next thing you know people are going to be beating gays in the snow or something like that it's also the complete infantilization of young adults because you're you're telling me these young adults aren't smart enough to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas well if they're learning all this grievance study stuff like i just said their critical thinking is getting hobbled but here's my point if you are a person who's a young progressive well-read person who's got some rock solid ideas about people being able to live their lives without discrimination and all the things that i'm sure we all agree on and you sat and listened to some right-wing alt-right asshole spewing hate is it gonna change you is it gonna

affect you of course it's not so who is it gonna affect like who who are these ideas going to reach why do we assume that people are so much more easily influenced than we are what what is that about this isn't this infantilization of young adults it is it's bubble wrap on kids it's fucking it's nerfing the world. Shark Corner's got to put a fucking cushion over it. And Lou Kanoff and Height just published that book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think if you look at Height's work and the Heterodox Academy and he's fighting for this, but we have infantilized people. We have infantilized students. And I don't,

I hope that the tide is changing. I don't know. One of the things we wanted to do with this project is give people the opportunity to speak out and say, you know, they don't speak for me. I want to hear what someone has to, you know, I also think that we should have people of all – I think it's a problem that people who go into teaching – I can't remember the study I read that overwhelming percentage of people, college educators, are on the left. I'm on the left. I think that's a problem. I think that they need diverse voices. Diversity also has to be ideological diversity.

And if you want people to be less brittle and if you want people to be less infantilized, they have to hear the other side, but they have to hear, this is also Mill's idea, they have to hear it from people who believe it. Yeah, that's in John Stuart Mill's book on liberty. It's not enough to have heard that the other side, the argument from the other side exists. You need to hear the best case put forward by people who really, really subscribe to it. Yeah. And then work against that. If you can defeat that, then it deserves to be defeated, right?

Yeah. And this is the thing. I think, you know, in general, human beings, we all put forth our best ideas and we're all wrong most of the time. We can be a smart guy or a smart woman, whatever. We're all pretty stupid. We put forth a lot of ideas. Most of them are wrong. It's true for everybody. True for you, me, everybody. And what we should really be relying on is, you know, I put down an idea and you're like, well, I don't know about that. And so we start cutting away the bullshit that I tucked into my idea, the stuff I didn't have right. We do that. And now the idea that survives that process is better. And then somebody else comes along and says, wait, wait, wait, that part's probably a little bit bullshit, but this,

you could add to it and make it better. And then some of that's wrong. And this is the process of how we really produce knowledge. Right. Yeah. And that's what gives us a vibrant culture too. Right. And as opposed to what we see here where I can,

the three of us can make up a conclusion and write a paper to support it. And then if you criticize it, you had to have criticized it because you were sexist or because you were racist if you do a scientific test that shows that it's wrong the science must have been sexist or racist you know anything once you're doing that you're just you're really in the weeds you're not helping anybody yeah and we need to study these areas gender and race but we need to do it right yeah and we need to do these areas, gender and race, but we need to do it right. Yeah, and we need to do it freely, where you could just talk. And you don't get accused of all sorts of horrible transgressions.

Exactly. And that's the culture that we want to see in here, and that's not the culture we have. Well, I think everyone is railing against identity politics, and I think we can all agree identity politics are a huge problem. is railing against identity politics. And I think we can all agree identity politics are a huge problem. But another problem that goes along with it hand in hand is identifying personally with ideas, where these ideas are connected to your ego, to who you are. You cling to them, did you? What's it called?

Everybody's wrong about God. And it sounds like I'm just going to go after religion, but it's actually the culmination of my study of religious psychology. And so really what it was, was targeting, I mean, it talks about what's going on with religion and why people believe religion and what God actually stands for in terms of, you know, psychology as it might see it. But then what it was really targeting was I saw all these people who are like you know loudmouth atheists and they were like this and that and the other thing and they have this whole community and i saw holy shit they're doing the same thing yes right they're doing the same thing and what are they doing

they're identifying as an atheist i am an atheist yeah what does that mean well i want to be a good atheist how the fuck do you be a good atheist that doesn't make any sense do you remember atheism plus atheism plus was exactly what i was looking at, bro. That was my favorite. That was gold. I watched a whole speech, like smoking a joint and laughing my fucking ass off at this dork who was speaking in front of some other group of dorks that were all part of the Atheism Plus movement. And he just kept just ranting about sexual harassment and diversity and all these different things

and attaching them to atheism. Exactly. Motherfucker, you're making your own religion. Exactly. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Hi, Joe Rogan saw it straight through it. You know, there it is.

I was laughing. Dude, it was so, because the guy was such a virtue signaling little weasel. Oh, totally. Totally. Sneaky fucker. Yeah, sneaky little fucker. Yeah, sneaky little fucker. Yeah, a little sneaky fucker that was trying to get girls to like him. I guarantee you that.

Yep. You see what it is, though, is I've got to be a good atheist. How do I do it? Well, I don't know, because atheist means don't believe stuff of a certain kind. So they have to start tagging. Atheism plus was so strange. And it was plus what? Plus social justice.

How did that? It died off because it didn't work. Well, those people are still grumbling around or whatever. But what happened to – Oh, I doubt it. Oh, they got a whole blog. They complained about our project. You know what they said?

They're still there. Yeah, we're straight white men. Oh, well, you're straight white men. We're there for – we have bad motivations. Motivations. That's what we get all the time. Yeah, because we're straight white men. Because bad white men, straight white men are basically like a little arrow running around looking for vaginas.

And anything you say is basically just a little sneaky way for you to get inside of a vagina. And all of this little stuff, you just try making your way through society. It's a little ironic when you put it that way. It's what it is, right? But the truth is, though, if they think that – I mean, this is the article of faith here, is that privilege exists and always preserves itself. So we're straight white men. We criticized what's supposed to be but isn't social justice work. It's bad social justice work, capital social justice.

It's screwed up. So we criticize that. Therefore, why? We must be because we're white men trying to preserve our status. Of course. You guys are a problem. That was the depth of their analysis, given that some of them are professors and stuff.

That's the best they could come up with. And wouldn't it have been better to say, you know what, there's a problem here. And we want to study this stuff, and we need to clean house. And thank you, guys. We appreciate it. But you would have to step so far out of your belief system and be so objective and so self-aware that you're realizing you're in some sort of a preposterous group.

And very few people are willing to admit that most of their life's work has been nonsense. Yeah, especially when you get rewarded for that. You get promoted for that. You get accolades from that. You carry status and privilege. Look, I mean, when people join some fucking wacky cult, they don't join it saying, ah, this is bullshit, but it'll be fun. They believe it.

Right. They buy into it. Yeah. And this is no different. It's like what we're talking about, about ideologies, how people, they lock into these predetermined patterns of thinking and behavior. And this is what's happening here. Yep.

And it's very much like a cult. It's very much like any other group think sort of environment. It's like Scientology grew up in the university. So everything they put out about thetans and volcanoes or whatever they've got, all of a sudden, that's not like just crazy, you know, L. Ron Hubbard, was it Dianetics or whatever? That's gold standard knowledge, academic press, Oxford, you know. Yeah, so you get a degree.

Yeah, and then you get to teach it. And somebody wrote an article criticizing us yesterday, and they're like, oh, they don't understand. You know, they think we just talk to each other in a bubble. We talk to policymakers. We talk to media. And it's like, no shit. That's why we did this. You know, you do talk to other people.

You are running into, you know, HR departments. You're telling them how to do the diversity officers. They're institutionalizing. They're institutional. And to talk to policymakers. I get emails. I don't know if you saw a year before all this, we did this really, you know, bad attempt at it called

conceptual penis as a social construct. So we said that penises are a social construct and they cause climate change. And this got a little bit of attention. I've been getting emails ever since then from some member of EU parliament, and they're like, we have another gender initiative that we're going to try to basically foist upon EU, and then it's going to dictate how Europe now works with Africa going forward about climate. And so because I wrote this conceptual penis and climate change thing,

and it's all based on making fun of gender studies, it was at the time anyway, they were like, you know, you're an expert. So now the EU is calling me, you know, what do we do about this gender initiative? But that's real, right? The EU parliament is not like nothing. That's not, you know, it's not like a meeting of some dorks at a conference. That's real. They're coming up with policy to dictate how they want to interact with Africa for the next 20, 30 years.

That's real. And these people are emailing me saying this scholarship that you guys are criticizing is really – it's on the agenda of the EU parliament. So help. All right. Well, it seems like what we have here is sort of a wave of ideas right it goes in and it goes out it's going back and forth and you you need this sort of balancing act and i agree things need to go so haywire that people step in and go well i'm pulling my fucking kids out of Evergreen State.

This is crazy. That's a great example of a place that went too far. And what we don't want to have happen is we don't want people to pull their kids out of the universities because there are some... Not the university, but these departments don't major in it. Exactly.

Don't major in it. Which department specifically? Gender studies, critical race studies, cultural studies, queer theory, fat studies if it happens to have one. I read a biography of a guy who teaches critical whiteness. Oh, yeah. Critical whiteness is a thing. That actually, there was a journal and then it got so out there that it got criticized out of existence. But it's a big thing. There's some big paper I was reading just before we went public with all this, and I got asked about it.

Luckily, I read it because we did the Mein Kampf. Of course, Israel's like, you got Mein Kampf published. Oh, my God, we need to talk to you. Israel TV, you know, I was on Israeli TV. What the hell? And so all these Israeli journalists are calling me, talking to me about it. And over the Mein Kampf, and I read this one paper, they're like, well, do you think that Jewish studies is like this? And I found this paper just before this all came out, that was Jewish studies criticizing critical whiteness studies, because there's this whole thing about how the critical

whiteness people accuse the Jews of being white. And then there's all this, you know, who's, where does the oppression lie? Because, you know, the Jews of being white. And then there's all this, you know, where does the oppression lie? Because, you know, the Jews have had it pretty rough over the last 2,000 years or thereabouts. But then you got the critical whiteness people being like, no, they're white. It's a white privilege, blah, blah, blah. And then the Jewish studies people are like,

hold up, you know, don't put us up here and say that we're all white supremacists. You know, we were gassed by the white supremacists. Chill out. So there's this huge, like, critical studies fight between the Jewish studies people and the critical whiteness people over whether Jews count as white people or not and have white supremacy built in. And they asked me about this, the Israeli journalist did, and I was like, well, you

know, I have to sympathize with what their argument argument is but they're still using the same broken methods and so you still want to see better methods right i think the the jewish people have a point you know we've been pretty heavily oppressed for 2 000 years you start with like you know the romans decimating them and then the diaspora and then the holocaust and every it's just good. So I think they have a point that, you know, don't just say, oh, we have crazy white privilege and are therefore white supremacists. But if you want to do that, you know, maybe this methodology of complaining about it is not the best way to go. It's complicated stuff, but at least they're against the critical whiteness stuff.

This critical whiteness thing you were saying, they have a journal? They did. The Journal of Whiteness Studies or something like that. What happened to it? It lasted for about three years. And I don't know exactly why it fell apart. But it fell apart because I was really upset because I wanted to send a paper to it. And it doesn't exist anymore.

What were you going to send a paper on? The rewrite of Mein Kampf anymore what are you gonna send a paper on the rewrite of mine conf where the woman the lesbian woman excoriates her own whiteness i was going to send it to that journal and then it doesn't exist anymore so i had to send it to a critical race journal who then said ah it's a good idea but you're you're positioning yourself as a good white and that's a problem all these papers by the way we were they're all online we were completely transparent and honest with everybody. There's a Google Drive. A Google Drive with every paper, all the peer review comments.

All the review comments, everything, the Mike Nader's videos, everything is up there. It's totally free for everybody. Yeah, we get accused of being grifters. We don't have – how? How are we grifting? It's in a Google Drive that anybody can just go download all of it. I don't recall getting money for that. We really do think that, and I'm, yeah, there you go.

Swedish professor rebels against universities' critical white news studies. Oh, yeah, this is new. This is new, yeah. Oh, yeah, a couple days ago. One of Sweden's most merited and acclaimed political scientists and long-term critics of identity politics, Bo Rothstein, has argued that identity-based disciplines like grievance studies, which deals with the concept of collective guilt, have no place in academia. Yeah, grievance studies is, yeah, right on. Yeah, we came up with grievance studies, so it's delighted to see that that's caught on. We came up with greed and studies, so I'm delighted to see that that's caught on.

Oh, to start a podcast immediately and a Patreon page so that you don't have to worry about losing your house. Right. Yeah, exactly. Right on. I mean, I don't know how it is in Sweden. Yeah, I don't either, but that guy's probably screwed. Whatever the fuck they did with Jordan Peterson, they created a goddamn monster. Oh, yeah. You guys fucked up.

You guys created a multimmillionaire Who's worldwide famous And is a huge best seller He was just talking To Swedish politicians On TV the other day So you know Watch out They fucked up with him

Boy did they fuck up And Dave was just Texting me A friend Ruben Was just texting me Pictures that All full It's crazy

And the energy In that place Is crazy He's selling out 5,000 seat theaters. He's a rock star. He's a fucking rock star. He's an intellectual rock star.

It's hilarious. Good for him. Yeah. I mean, look, a lot of other guys are doing it too. Sam Harris is doing that now as well. Yeah. They're doing these gigantic, huge speeches. It's like.

Good for him. Fine. Well, absolutely good for him. But what I'm excited about is how many people are interested in the debate of ideas and that this is not happening on the college campuses. That's right. A lot of these people that have graduated from college or are in the working world, they're very fascinated by this. It's real. It's what you were saying.

It's been suppressed for long enough. Now Jordan Peterson, what was his thing? He's like, you're not going to tell me the words I can use. Right. When there's 78 different words for genders, I can safely say you're fucking crazy. Yeah. It's like this desperation to try to find a unique identity that you can consider to be super special or whatever. It's totally.

But it's. And you want to see even crazier as you go into like you go on these blogs. i think they're mostly on tumblr or something it violates my rule never use tumblr where they talk about the different sexual sexuality identities like different kinds of you know i'm interested in this kind of person but not this kind of person under these circumstances but not under those that has like some you know 18 syllable academic word for it now and there's people whose whole i don't think they're academics. I think they're activists and geeks on Tumblr. But they come up with these crazy descriptions.

And there's like hundreds of sexual orientations. Yeah, it's just people wanting to be different. I think so. They want to be special and they're not good at anything. That's, I think, a thing. So that was the other part of, I guess, one of the things that Jim said when I said I was more cynical. I think that in general the critics tend to be angry. And I'm not saying that their anger is legitimate or illegitimate, but they tend to be angry.

They seem to be almost universally under-accomplished. So they're upset at you because you have whatever, a big show or a lot of – whatever they're upset about, big platform or audience, they're just generally disagreeable people, and they found these communities of other people who are enraged, who are also under-accomplished, who they can lash out at people together and then virtue signal, you know? Yeah. Get rewarded for, oh, Rogan, that bat,

whatever they want to call you or whatever they want to call us or whoever else. Some kind of an oppressor. Yeah, some kind of an oppressor. And there's something that's so, I don't know how we can deal with that. I mean, our attempt to do this was to try to delegitimize where they get their knowledge from, like what they call knowledge, what they could point to. We tried to say it's not knowledge and delegitimize it. But we really do need to get back to some kind of productive discussion, productive politics, where the far right disown their lunatics and we disown our lunatics.

And we get back to work about whatever, the oceans, plastic, whatever it is that we're talking about. Because right now the discourse is corrupted. We're not doing what we need to do in the academies. These people are continuing to pump out this nonsense that's totally untethered to reality. It's a huge problem. I'm sick of it. You're sick of it. We're all sick of it.

We're all sick of it. We're sick of it. I'm sick of it. I've had it. I've had it with these folks. It just doesn't seem like it's sustainable. I don't think it is. It seems like some weird thing that's going to run out of energy.

Well, it's eating itself. It constantly eats itself. Like we did the thing about the people of color and the black indigenous people of color. They fragmented. You see when you get into the critical race literature that it's like, okay, so you're brown or you're black, but you have slightly lighter skin, slightly darker skin, slightly darker than that, really dark. They have different levels of privilege, and it's just cutting things apart. The idea, though, that this is going to create some kind of a coalition that can then defeat the plurality or something like that is ridiculous. It's exactly the opposite.

So what do you see? You see this stuff starting to blow up. You see the Democrats bleed seats. They've lost like 1,000 legislative seats across the U.S. since Obama got elected in 2008. How are you going to get your agenda if you don't have any legislators, if you don't have anybody elected? And so then what happens? 2016. I can't say that the reason that Trump got elected, because there's lots of reasons, had something to do. No, I will say it had something to do with this because every conservative person I know that's not just a reactionary is like – and I live in the southeast, man.

I know some conservatives. Most of my friends are conservatives because I don't have a choice. If I want to have friends, they're going to be conservatives. It's who lives there. So I talk to them and they're like, oh, yeah, they're tearing down this kind of statue. Oh, yeah. And it's not like they're tearing down this kind of statue. Oh, yeah. And it's not like they're tearing down Confederate statues. They're tearing down Thomas Jefferson.

You know, it's like they're – George Washington. George Washington. Halloween's a problem. Wait, wait, wait. I didn't know. You didn't know Halloween's a problem? No.

What are you going as for Halloween? I'm a shark. You're a shark? My kids are mermaids. Am I problematic? Oh, God. If they're mermaids and you're a shark, you are definitely taking a dominant power position. That's power.

They pick my outfit. I don't pick my outfit. I have kids. They tell me what I am. Is it an issue? I don't know. I'll try to figure out a paper for that. What's wrong with Halloween?

Halloween? Yes. Oh, God. Cultural appropriation. Hold on. Sean White apologizes for Tropic Thunder Simple Jack costume. Oh, God. Cultural appropriation. Hold on. Sean White apologizes for Tropic Thunder Simple Jack costume. Oh, no. He dressed up as a black person.

No, Simple Jack is the mentally handicapped person. Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. That's right. I don't know who that is. Robert Downey Jr. might be the last guy ever to wear a black face. Yeah, that's true. And pull it off.

When are they going to pull that show? When are they going to pull Tropic Thunder? It's problematic. I don't even know the show. There's probably a paper. You never saw Tropic Thunder? Never. God damn, it's a funny movie.

It's wonderful. You'll love it. And it's entirely politically incorrect. Yeah, it's as politically incorrect as writing it down. Tropic Thunder is a fucking great movie. It is a gem. It's a great movie. See, now we're going to be racists and ableist for saying

that it's funny. Oh, yeah, for sure. We've got real issues. What's wrong with Halloween again? Halloween is well, mostly it's there's a lot of cultural appropriation going on. So somebody might dress up like a put on a sombrero and a poncho. That's an issue. Yeah. It's an issue. It's Tuesday if we have tacos today.

You can't be Native American. You can't be a Native American. There's that big stink just now about the Victoria's Secret fashion show where they had their indigenous colors and their feathers they were wearing and walking around half naked. You can't do that. So it's the idea mostly that people are going to take costumes that are insensitive to other people. Cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation. So it's not possible. Can you still dress up as Bruce Lee?

Oh, man. I don't know. I don't know. Because he's Asian. Cultural appropriation. So it's not possible. Can he still dress up as Bruce Lee? Oh, man, I don't know. I don't know. Because he's Asian? For a while. At Harvard, maybe, because he's Asian and it gets complicated. But no, this all blew up at Yale a few years ago, I thought, for sure. Yes. Nick Christophers.

Yeah, yeah. How do you say his last name? Christakis, I think. Christakis. Yeah, something. So it blew up on him. He's coming on soon. Yeah, he's cool.

He's a good guy. Yeah, that was hilarious. Those kids screaming at him. Screaming at him. This is supposed to be a safe place. Yep. It was just his wife put out an email saying maybe it's okay to be politically incorrect on Halloween. It was just, you know, choose your costume how you're going to choose it.

We're all adults. It's probably bad to be deliberately offensive, and yet it's also bad to overreact to incidental stuff. Oh, yeah. It's all this stuff. I feel like little girls, if they're white, can't dress up as Mulan. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that.

Mulan is a new one. Pocahontas problem. But I think Bruce Lee is still on the menu. I don't think anybody's getting in trouble for being Bruce Lee. You could wear, like, the track suit. Yeah, Pocahontas is the problem. But I think Bruce Lee is still on the menu. I don't think anybody's getting in trouble for being Bruce Lee. You could wear the tracksuit like Uma Thurman did in Kill Bill. Oh yeah, that's right. That's a big footprint across my chest, right?

Footprint? Yeah, or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Kicked him. Right, right, right. But a lot of people go with the cuts. Oh yeah. I don't have enough apps for that. That's going to be a bad costume. What is this? Yeah, you can buy a Bruce Lee costume For now

Who knows Oh, it comes with a wig too Yeah, dope For now Oh, even a baby costume, look at that As long as you're Chinese, that baby's Chinese That's fine You can't be a Kung Fu guy

No, not allowed Can't be a kung fu guy. No, not allowed. Can't be a ninja. No, way too much cultural appropriation. Boy, this mess that we're in. Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? I think so. Yeah? Yeah, I think so. The response that we've got so far has been

really positive. It's all like the secret positive. So the feeling I get is that In academia. Well, from academics, yeah. The general public has been way more positive than that. Super positive. really positive it's all like the secret positive so the feeling i get is that academia well from academics yeah the general public has been way more positive than that yeah positive super positive so super supportive so the the wind is changing right if we're getting that much we got no real blowback we got we got lots of positivity from the public even academics are reaching out they're like secret positive with them it's like one more thing right we need a critical mass because what they are is they're all lined up they know the first one to step out of line and challenge the stuff's getting shot it's like the communist situation after communism

fell nobody really believed it anymore but they had to go along with the party or they're gonna get shot but if a whole bunch of people come forward at once they can't shoot everybody so it feels like we're in that powder keg situation now right where all it's going to take is we hoped it was going to be this. Our thing was going to be the trigger that let 30 percent of academics come forward and say, you know, it's bullshit. And if enough people start saying it, other people start feeling safe to say it. We wish more people feel safe. We took a risk.

It's been fine for us. We'll see what happens to Pete. But if more people take that risk and start speaking out, then there's change coming. Now, you were a mathematician. Yeah. And that's your background in academia. That would appear at least to be something that is beyond all this stuff because it's just dealing with numbers. Yeah, math itself mostly has not been touched by this.

But there's this whole branch in there that's called the studies of science and technology. mostly has not been touched by this, but there's this whole branch in there that's called the studies of science and technology. And mostly what they go after is, you know, the sciences or whatever, especially they go after biology and psychology. And they feel like they've got a lot of inroads into that. We wrote the astronomy paper to try to push that all the way to a hard science. We've said that astronomy is sexist and can only be fixed by putting in queer horoscopes. They thought that was a good project. They keep asking him to rewrite it. Yeah, they keep asking me to submit that.

I got an email yesterday asking for that one again. So even though we've come public. So with math, mostly where you see this stuff hitting, though, they don't – I mean, some people are saying that math has inherently got sexism or racism because I guess apparently women and minorities are going to be naturally bad at numbers is what they're assuming. I don't know what they're assuming. That's ludicrous. But they mostly go after education.

So they say, oh, look, the scores, the SAT math scores or whatever for men, white men are higher than for black men or something like that. Why could that be? Well, you know, maybe there are a lot of factors that go into that, but they don't give a shit about a lot of factors. It's racism. So therefore math education must be racist. Therefore we need social justice initiatives in math education. And that's exactly what they do. And so then you have diversity math, and I don't even know what that is.

But it's not something that you would see like at mathematics research level. It's something that you see at junior high school, elementary school, that they're teaching your kids. Which is why it's scary as hell. So is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Yeah, I still think there's a light. I think people hate this stuff. I think people are getting sick. People outside hate it. And people inside hate it

too, though. But they're afraid. Yeah, I had this guy come up to me repeatedly last week. This guy, he's got two PhDs. He's a brilliant guy. He comes up to me repeatedly. What. This guy, he's got two PhDs, brilliant guy. He comes up to me repeatedly. What you did is so important, it's so necessary. I can't talk about it. I'm sorry I can't talk about it.

I wish I could talk about it. But I talked to a lot of academics, and everybody's saying the same thing. They know you got them. It's only a matter of time now. One more event, and they shake off the fear. I think it's close. I don't know what the next event is. I don't think it's more bogus papers.

I think it's probably somebody getting fired that didn't deserve it or something like that. One more thing and people are going to be ready to shake this off. Why does this ideology infect tech companies? And it seems to get them more than it gets anyone else. What is it? You should ask DeMora that. else. I know. What is it? You should ask DeMora that. I don't know.

He's fucked. That guy can't get a job. He just got one. I just talked to him the other day. He just got one. Well, don't say where he's working. No, definitely not. They'll go after him. Yeah, I don't know why it's in tech so much.

Maybe there's some kind of Silicon Valley connection there or whatever where Silicon Valley is in the you know, the kind of Bay Area, California. You've got a lot of the liberal hippie stuff that started out as you were talking about in the 60s and 70s. So it's kind of in the water there. In general, I would say that what you're seeing is that this stuff has, they've, the big turn to making this applied was in the 90s, right? So they've had an entire generation of students that have just been really getting this stuff crammed down their throat. They really have taken over the education in the last 10 years. It was just starting when I left academia in 2010 that, you know, it was like, oh, we're going to focus on diversity. We're going to have diversity commitments. What's

going to get in the general curriculum? So you're getting more and more students that are getting educated in this that are now going out into the workplace. So if half your workforce in tech, because tech moves so fast, I'm just guessing why this might be a thing. Tech moves really fast, so you've got to have some fresh training to go in there. If they've been educated with diversity stuff crammed down their throat the whole time, and there's huge initiatives to try to increase representation of women in particular in tech. And these are seen as, you know, automatically good initiatives. If there's been, this is the culture that they're being educated in, and then they take that culture to the workplace and think this is what tech is about, and then they're surrounded by like-minded people who encourage it, it's totally plausible that what you've got is sort of a tech echo chamber that's bouncing these things around and keeping it there.

Here's another question. Why is it that, I mean, here's a scenario, right? The scenario is universities are almost predominantly taught by people that are on the left. True. It's massive. It's in the 90% range, right? When you have this sort of environment of these nonsense ideas

that are accepted as fact and taught and put into published papers, then you have a situation where the left routinely attacks itself and devours itself for not being left enough. You're always having people that are upset that someone's not progressive enough. Left-wing people attacking left-wing people.

You do not see that on the right. You did. That's kind of what the whole Tea Party movement was, right? But they didn't do it in the academic field because they didn't have power there. Because they weren't academics. Right. Well, yeah, that shift started in the 60s and 70s. They started bringing in these— But the Tea Party field, that was during the Obama administration, right? Yeah. So that's when—what was the biggest fear for every Republican congressman then was that they were going to get primaried from the right.

So they were going to have some populist Yahoo go screaming about whatever they scream about. It was going to be more to the right, harder conservatism, conservative movement, capital C, capital M kind of thing. And they're going to just drill into the, you know, the reason that the conservative politics aren't succeeding is because we're not conservative enough. That's the prevailing view where I live in the Southeast. It's the same thing as you see in the universities, but reversed in terms of polarization.

So, but isn't that just an excuse for the lack of success? It is. But with the people on the left? It's an excuse combined with a commitment to the ideology, whether it's conservative movement ideology, whether it's social justice, scholarship, whatever it happens to be. But you see far more of these uh left on left attacks than you do right on right attacks you do right now yeah certainly except of course for election time sure when people are trying to you know beat their opponents sure sure sure it just it seems to be that they're somehow or another related i mean i would like to look at how many people on the left will attack others for not being progressive enough, not being left enough.

So I think it's a panic, right? This is the kind of behavior you see in a panic, a moral panic, for example. third person who worked on the project with us, Helen and I wrote an essay about a year and a half ago and talking about how the extremism on both sides is really the problem. And most people reject it and should fight it. Most of us are sensible people in the middle who hate this. In fact, data just came out showing that it's 80% of the population hate the fringes, both sides. Yeah. So, and only 8% are on the left and 12% are on the right of the fringe, however that works out. And so we wrote this thing and we said that what's going on actually, we called it existential polarization.

So you have this idea that everything's an existential crisis. So the far right, we'll start with them, sees that if the Democrats get power, oh, it's open borders. The terrorists are coming in. Our entire way of life is going to be destroyed. Catastrophe, catastrophe. Oh, no. Judith Butler is going to be 95 genders. Quick, stop the Democrats no matter what. And then you have the left. Oh, my God, if they get power, everything's going to be racist. We're going to be beating gays in the snow. It's going to just be the worst thing in the whole world. That's actually kind of a joke. But it's for real, though, that they think that the world is going

to fall apart if the other side gets power. And so when you have that kind of a situation, you have a panic, and you see the slightest bit of advantage happening on the other side is just something to completely freak out about. And then what do you do? You say, oh, well, the only possible recipe to balance the scale is to turn further our way.

If we go toward the middle, that puts the balance... Say if the right goes really far right, and we on the we go toward the middle, that puts the balance. Say if the right goes really far right and we on the left move toward the middle, now the whole balance has moved right. So the only way to keep the balance close to the middle is if they go right, we go left. Right? So then that's going to keep the balance. But what that actually does is this is going to get nerdy.

Hang on. That actually puts all of the weight on the outsides. And you think about a spinning thing right it's got centrifugal forces happening what's that trying to do it's going to rip the spinning thing apart well if you have all the weight crammed in the middle it's like a wheel it doesn't come apart right now imagine if you had like two billiard balls and you have like this big long stick and there's two holes for the billiard bars they don't go in it like locked in they're just sitting there and you spin that what's going to happen they're fly right off right so if you have all the weight

on the outside and you start spinning a thing so that's like the political conversations the dynamic it's going to rip the thing apart the more weight gets to the outside so one side going to the fringe doesn't mean the other side should go to the fringe that's how you tear a nation apart that actually makes a lot of sense if you can conceptualize it like an object there's really a damn good youtube video floating around out there where somebody takes a jet of water and spins a skateboard wheel until the centrifugal force gets so high from it spinning so fast it rips it apart. It's worth looking up. I don't know what the hell you'd search to find it, but it's a powerful visual. And you can see it.

As stuff moves to the outside, the centrifugal force goes up and up and up until finally the thing, the structural integrity of the thing that's spinning can't hold itself together anymore. It rips apart. Well, listen, gentlemen, and shout out to your friend. What is her name again? Mike Nina. Oh, Helen Pluckrose. Oh, Helen Pluckrose. Pluckrose across the pond.

Thank you guys for doing this. We really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Yeah, man. We appreciate your support because we need support. We can't do this without support. So thanks for doing this. We really appreciate it. Thanks for being here. Yeah, man. We appreciate your support because we need support. We can't do this without support, so thanks for having us. My pleasure. Thanks for doing it.

Where can people see these things? Where can they read them? The best place to go is going to be to go to our filmmaker's YouTube page, Mike Naina on the YouTube. N-A-N-A? N-A-Y-N-A. N-A-Y-N-A. Yeah, so on his YouTube page is some videos.

He's kind of playing with the footage that he's collecting for the documentary. On top of that, though, if you go to the video we originally released, which is on the page, you can find it easily. There's the link to the Google Drive. There's a link to all of the documents we put out. To our aerial piece, we explained what every paper does, why we wrote it, what we were trying to show with writing the papers, what the problem is that we need to address and what you know what we think that this shows and what we can do yeah it's all accessible through his YouTube channel we're kind of making that the central hub and so people can go there and

explore and watch some more videos of us and well thanks for being here this was a lot of fun yeah again I really appreciate what you guys are doing thank you thank you bye everybody Well, thanks for being here. This was a lot of fun. I appreciate it. Again, I really appreciate what you guys are doing. Thanks, man. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you again.