The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - A Dialogue with Label-Defying Journalist Jonathan Kay

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

I first became aware of Jonathan Kay through his writing for the online magazine, Quillette. And for full disclosure, I got to know him better because he is one of their editors, and he has edited several of my own pieces for that magazine. Before that, however, I had been a fan of his writing, and was happy to be able to have an extended conversation with him about writing, journalism, false news, and politics, to name a few of the topics we discussed. Our dialogue occurred shortly after the appearance of a comprehensive 15,000 word piece of investigative journalism piece by Kay about a supposed organized sex-ring in the Psychology Department at McMaster University in Canada. Outrageous claims had surfaced, which ignited the university, and the local media, destroying the careers of various faculty and others, all of which eventually turned out to be false. Kay carefully explored how the original story developed, what factors prompted the University to act, and how local media played up the salacious claims without much investigation. It was a typical example of how false news can propagate, and also an indictment of the way Universities handle such claims, and local media may promote them. The appearance of this story gave us the opportunity to talk about the state of journalism in general. Jonathan has had a unique career and background, which made him a particularly interesting dialogue partner about this issue. He actually was educated as a metallurgical engineer, and following that he pursued a law degree at Yale University, and was a tax lawyer before eventually becoming disenchanted and deciding to pursue a career in writing and journalism. He also defies easy labelling. While he was a founding editor of the conservative Canadian newspaper The National Post, he also helped Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau write his memoirs. It is Jonathan’s non-ideological bent, perhaps due to his early training as a scientist and engineer that makes his perspective on today’s news so refreshing. We discussed his own background, what got him into writing, his experiences, and stories including the recent claimed Indigenous Residential School scandal in Canada, and the controversy surrounding the naming of the James Webb Space Telescope in the U.S. When I contacted Jon this week to let him know the podcast is coming out, I learned that he had just completed a lengthy investigative piece about University of New Hampshire astrophysicist/gender studies social justice warrior Chanda Prescod Weinstein who, in the process of claiming victimization for herself and others, has apparently been bullying, harassing, and intimidating a host of others online, leading to complaints recently being filed at her institution. It coincidentally just came out yesterday, so this podcast is particularly timely. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I enjoyed talking to this fascinating man. As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. This past summer, I had a remarkable dialogue with a journalist Jonathan Kaye who defies all labels, and one of the things I really enjoy about him, is that his background and his experiences all over the map. And, of course, because it's an Origins podcast, we began with his origins, which are really quite interesting. He has a master's degree in engineering from McGillian.

University in Canada and then went and did a law degree at the Yale Law School for a while he was a tax lawyer before he slowly drifted into writing and journalism. And he was a founding editor on the editorial board of the National Post and has written for many different magazines and is now an editor and writer at Quillette, the online journal. He's also written books and also ghost written books and helped other people with the books. Among other things, he helped Justin Trudeau with his memoir, which is interesting, since many people might want to classify Jonathan because of his background as a conservative writer, well, that's what I say. He defies simple labels. And our conversation began around a story that he had recently broke,

a huge investigative story, 15,000 words for Quillette that he'd written, about a claimed sex ring in the psychology department, at McMaster University, which turned out to be ultimately a hoax, but not before many people's careers were impacted. And he investigated this in great detail, both its origins, its impact on the local community, how local newspapers ran with the story without necessarily knowing any details. And it's a very interesting example of how fake news, if you will, and salacious fake news can propagate throughout the media. And we discussed journalism more more generally, both the state of journalism in the world and his own stories that he's written on not just the McMaster's story,

but stories on in the indigenous residential schools and the big scandals that were claimed about mass graves there. Also on stories related to, in fact, the James Webb Space Telescope and claims about James Webb himself. and again misstated claims about James Webb. It was a really fascinating discussion, as I say about the state of journalism with a remarkably fascinating man, and I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

You can watch it ad-free on our Critical Mass Substact channel, which supports the nonprofit origins project foundation, which produces this podcast. So I hope you'll consider subscribing to that substack site. Or you can watch it on our YouTube channel. I hope you'll consider subscribing to that or listen to it on any podcast site.

But however you listen to it or watch it, I think you'll find this discussion with Jonathan Kay, remarkably interesting and insightful about the state of journalism, politics, and writing in the modern world. Enjoy. Well, Jonathan, thanks a lot for agreeing to be on the show. I've wanted to have you on for a while. It's nice to be able to spend some time with you, at least virtually.

I appreciate the opportunity. I've been a, you know, I guess I first knew you being a fan of your writing and then got to know you a little bit as we as you've edited some of my writing and which and in spite of that i like you and but i i i as you may know this is an origins podcast and i try to i want to talk to you about your writing and some of the key fascinating stories you've been working on but i like to find out about people's origins and how they got to where they are at the beginning of each episode. And sometimes it takes a fair fraction of it

because it's fascinating to me. And I hope to people who listen. But the first surprise to me was that you did your degrees in engineering. And I was shocked to see that. But let's go, before we get there, let's go further back. I know your mother, Barbara, a writer. I learned your father was a financial person. I wondered, so tell me about the upbringing.

Was politics a frequent subject of discussion in the house? Yeah. I think for a certain kind of late 20th century Jewish household, especially in a place like Montreal, it's just politics is kind of inescapable. So do you have the politics of language and Quebec separatism within the Anglo community in Quebec? I'm not going to belabor the parochial,

politics of Quebec, but it's, especially in the late 20th century, there's a lot of separatist agitation and the Anglo community felt sometimes beleaguered by the French majority in Quebec, which itself felt beleaguered by the Anglo majority in Canada as a whole. Canadian politics are so fascinating to international listeners that I'm sure they're, they want me to go on for hours, but I will resist that. Well, you know, it's interesting. You're 15 years younger than me or so. And so I experienced that in a direct way.

I remember the War Measures Act, which I'm not, which I. Yeah, Trudeau. Yeah. Pierre Trudeau, I should. Yeah, the other Trudeau. Yeah, the other Trudeau. Yeah, that was the FLQ. That was a legitimate, though minor by international standards, a terrorist campaign.

Yeah, they killed a well-known. Mr. Pierre Laporte. And I remember it because my brother was actually, he's now a Southern American Republican, but he was a separatist in Quebec and taught at the University of Sherbrook Law School. Wow. And I only spoke French to him for 10 years.

I only spoke, he had completely assimilated. And so it was an interesting time. I think he was a student then in Ottawa. and he got arrested briefly during that time. If you didn't get arrested at least once as a student in those days, yeah, I mean, although that's interesting. It's like six degrees of Lawrence Krause. I had no idea.

Anyway, but on top of the, again, parochial Canadian Quebequa politics, you also had a lot of the questions about Zionism and the Middle East that Jewish communities, maybe less so now, but certainly during that period, you know, Montreal had an unusually high concentration of Holocaust survivors among its sizable Jewish community at the time. My mother was involved in the city Brompton Center, which at the time, and I think still had a very prominent role in the cultural life of Jews.

Our household was never especially religious. I myself call myself a lapsed Jew because I'm not observant, But that's most Jews. I think you're part of the majority. I'm part of the majority. But certainly Jewish in a cultural and political sense, so there was just a lot of talk. Again, I think most people who grew up in this kind of household will know that certain kinds of political questions about identity, about belonging, about bigotry, anti-Semitism, certainly Zionism, you know, foreign policy. all of this was kind of part of the oxygen of daily family conversations.

So, so yeah, politics was a big part of it. But also, you know, maybe closer to home for you, science was also a big part of my upbringing. I was going to ask about that. Yeah. So my dad was, he was an only child who grew up in a Russian exile community in China. So, yeah, yeah, northeast, Northeastern China. Wow.

Mid-20th century had a sizable white Russian and also sizably Jewish population, largely composed of emigres who actually helped the Chinese build out the railroad. Oh, that's the reverse of Canada. A little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's when my dad grew up, came to Canada. As part of, you know, those full complex series of population movements after World War II, he and his mother and father ended up in Canada. None of them spoke much English, including my father, got deposited in a Montreal school,

I think around the age of 10, speaking barely in English. He's a Russian speaker. And eventually he became an engineer. And then, yeah, so he was a metallurgical engineer. and he went to McGill University. I ended up not having any idea what to do with my life. I ended up as a metallurgical engineer. I did a master's degree.

So my master's work focused on thermodynamics and fluid flow. And so I wrote computer simulations of heat transfer and fluid flow in pyromatological processes. So like blast furnaces and all that stuff that basically extracting metal from ore. That was kind of what I did. And then I realized that I liked writing computer simulations, but I wasn't particularly skilled at working in a industrial environment where it's a aligned theory with industrial reality. And I ended up at law school practices of tax lawyer for a couple years in New York City.

Realized I didn't like that very much. At the age of 30, kind of began real life as a journalist, and that was 25 years ago. Well, you know, this, I want to unpack this because I do find it fascinating. I didn't, and now I even find it more fascinating because in some ways you followed both your parents' careers then. I mean, I hadn't realized your father was an engineer in the same field as you. And then, of course, your mother's a journalist, so you really did move in both areas. But who, so why, I want to ask, this then leads me to maybe understand a little bit more about why you went to engineering.

Did you go in because you're, well, when you were younger, did either your parents have more of an influence on you? Or did you talk science to your dad? Or did you, did you read books about science? Or was that ever? So, yeah. So I think as a teenager, for younger listeners, it's hard to communicate how oblivious teenagers of my generation were to the whole idea of like the future. And I gave lots of thought to like what kind of car I wanted to drive and, you know, the Montreal Expo starting rotation. And if you ask me, well, what do you, you know, when I was 16 or 17, what do you want to be when you grow up? I kind of just assumed I'd make a living, but I didn't really know how. And this is in distinction. You know, I see my own kids who are at that age.

kids today are just much more focused on that. They realize they have to get started. On a career, yeah, we didn't think about when, and I, and I think it was even more so when I was younger, no one ever, when I went to school in the, you know, university in the, in the early 70s, I, yeah, no one thought, cared about a career. And part of this is, I'll say part of it is privileged because I grew up in, in a Montreal Jewish community where every single person I knew went to college. it wasn't a question of whether you'd go to college it was which college how many degrees are you going to get

um i mean i was sort of dimly aware in my bubble of privilege that there were people who didn't go to university but we didn't even it wasn't even something you talked about in in my household or the household my relatives was that was that because you uh to some extent was it because it was a jewish household too i mean my my parents unlike your parents mom need my parents went to finish high school. But it wasn't, it wasn't even ever considered that my brother and I wouldn't go to university. He was going to be a doctor. I was going to be, I mean, he was going to be a lawyer. I was going to be a doctor. He became a lawyer, as it turned out. And, and may have been at Yale law school around the same time as you, although he's a lot older, but he went back to, anyway,

I want to ask about that. Yeah. So I graduated, I graduated Yale law in 97, although I wasn't a particular gifted law student. But I will say that part of this is because it may be, I don't want to say generational because between you and me, I think it's a fraction of a generation. But my mother, my mother was born in Canada. And her own father came over from Poland when he was young. And I think her mom was actually, might have been born in Canada. I'm not sure. But so on her side, there was already, you know, a full generation of people that had gone to university. And in that kind of immigrant culture, one generation makes a huge difference. because my mother's father, literally, as a child,

sold rags on the streets of Toronto out of a push cart. Shmata. Yeah, Shmada. I mean, it was like the lowest rung of the shmata business. Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, he was just part of this, like, you know, adventures of Augu March, like, if you sort of, those immigrants,

not necessarily Jewish stories, but immigrant stories, like starting from the very bottom in large American, or in this case, Canadian city, people will recognize him as a character. He was successful, worked hard, and then, you know, had children who could take for granted some of the trappings of, yeah, of socioeconomic privilege in North America.

And so, as I said, I just took her for granted, I'd go to university. And this was still an age where if you went to university, you kind of just assumed you'd stumble into a good job. And now that's not the case, right? Like unless you're careful, you could, get good marks in university and end up in in working at McDonald's not there's anything wrong with working at McDonald's. I've worked at McDonald's, but, but it's not something you maybe aspire to

after investing three or four years of education. And so again, I didn't think about it, but I had the habits of mind of an engineer because my dad was always very gifted. But by the way, both my parents are still around and probably we'll listen to this. So I don't want to speak about them in the past tense. But he had the habits of mind and speech of an engineer. So like when talking to me as a kid, he'd

say things like, hey, you ever wonder why ice floats? I said, no, why does ice float? And you say, well, let's talk about density. And then let's talk about what would happen if like most solids ice were more dense than that's

liquid form. You know, life wouldn't exist on the planet it because the whole underside of lakes and ponds would just be, you know, a frozen tablet and, you know, you'd get no life developed. So even as a kid, he, again, this wasn't engineering, but it was just looking at the world through an analytical lens. How lucky. Yeah.

I was very lucky. Yeah. And my mother, I don't think has any particular interest or gift with math or science, but just gave me a completely, like she'd give me books to read. and she'd introduce me to writers that I came to love, and some that I came not to love. You know, like she introduced me to George Orwell at a young age, which I did love.

Yeah, sure. How could you know? And then, you know, she's always been passionate about mystery novels. So that's something that I didn't much care for. But there were always just plenty of books in our house. I was going to ask about books. Parents and books are two things and that are important. So your mother sort of was the encouraging for books.

Your father was the encourage you to think, you know, analytically about the world. And by the way, I meant to tell you my physics teacher jokingly said that the fact that water is one of the few substances that expands when it freezes was proof of God. But he meant it as a joke. Yeah, it's, I mean, it's one of these little things that is the key to life, right?

Yeah, life wouldn't exist on earth if rivers and oceans froze from the bottom up. But so parents, no, but your father eventually, like many engineers, in fact, I think like the majority of engineers, frankly, left and went and either became management or finance. Is that the case? Yeah, so he was a metallurgical engineer. and in Canada at the time still had a large mining and as a result of mining a large ore processing industry and so he eventually made a living doing things like going off to mines or geological discoveries you know people were deciding whether it would become a mine and he had the expertise to evaluate whether it was a good investment based on things like, you know, what's the concentration of precious metal within, you know, the ore samples and how accessible is it. And that's how he made a living. And then eventually he became, you know, open to other investment opportunities and he got into biotech.

But yeah, as you say, there's a lot of engineers who, are able to translate their knowledge of some core element of like design engineering or process engineering into expertise in a particular business area and in turn you know over the course of your career they they can do all sorts of things now but that wasn't that what you decided that wasn't the direction you decide to want to go in but before we get to law school it's still amazed me because it is a jump I mean I'm often wondered what I guess you know how much of a jump it would have been for me to consider law school when I graduated. But before then, we talked about, you know, both your parents and books and science,

but the one thing I did want to ask was about school. School, was that an encouragement to you? And did that, did you like science in school? Or were teachers particularly useful in terms of encourage you to read or write? Or was it, you know, I found, it's amazed to find that people have mixed. For some of them, really good teachers were instrumental in their life. And for others, they found school got in the way. So I'm always interested to find out what in your case.

So I think there's a certain type, I think like maybe Bill Gates is the paradigmatic example, where he's just this guy who had a kind of monomania for computers. And he was never going to have a teacher who was going to match his own enthusiasm level or native skill in that area. So I mean, I think in Bill Gates, I don't think he even got a college degree. He was just in such a... He did drop out of him. Yeah.

And then I think well below that level of intellect and success, there's somebody like me who had gifts, but he definitely needed teachers to encourage them. And I, again, part of my privilege, you know, I went to a good school. It was called Semenhouse. It was like a, you know, little Victorian suit and tie boys' school in Montreal. Oh.

Sort of like a lot of, call it, I guess immigrant communities, like the Anglo community in Montreal was more Anglo than the source community in UK. Sometimes these communities get frozen in time. So if you looked at the old stock, Wasp Anglo community in Westbound,

which is where a lot of, it became like, you know, something that looked not quite like 19th century UK, but like we had, these schools where we wear suit and tie, and we sang God save the queen when I was in very early grades. And we said grace before meals and stuff. And it also happened to be a very good school. With outstanding English teachers and science teachers and math teachers, I was able to learn calculus in grade 11.

And so by the time I got to university, you know, calculus wasn't an issue for me. Statistics, linear algebra. I was able to breeze through all that stuff, in part because I had teachers who taught it well and encouraged it. And it made math fun for me. And if math is fun, then engineering is, I wouldn't say it's a breeze. There were courses that were challenging for me. Boundary value problems is something that to this day is, it gives me nightmares.

And I know electrical engineers who still work with boundary value problems. If you've never had to do BVAP, I don't recommend it. What about physics, though? I always wonder why people, is it because of a job? I mean, because to me, well, you know, when I was chair of a department, we actually created an engineering physics degree to encourage, you know, engineers who are interested in science to be able to get a degree, you know, a degree that would, you know, give them a credential and also allow them to, you know,

focus a little more on some of the science. Yeah. I mean, I have a mixed relationship with physics because physics is almost too broad a term for it's, I mean, physics is about understanding the universe. And so I tell people, it says, oh, I don't like physics, I like chemistry. And I say, well, chemistry is physics. It's the physics of atoms and it's the physics of electrons. And, you know, if you're studying electron orbitals, guess what? You're studying physics. Yeah. I used to like to teach all of chemistry in one lesson when I talk quantum mechanics. I'd say now we're going to do all of chemistry.

Yeah, I mean, if you understand orbitals, then you know, you're, and by the way, I'm sure there are people in chemistry and in physics who, who it is kind of blurry, whether they're chemists or whether they're, physical chemists, yeah. I mean, I, my, my, most of my latter exposure to physics came in terms of analyzing things like, you know, the transition between laminar and turbulent flow and fluid. the kind of engineering I was in, there was a lot of like analysis of like, well, how much pressure is required to, to push a certain kind of like non-neutonian fluid down 100 meters of pipe at a facility. And ultimately, at the end of the day, 99% of the time these things get reduced to rule of thumb formulas that sit in engineering trade books.

Yeah. Which was always kind of unsatisfying for me because as a grander, ad student, you're always like, well, you know, forget the formula. Let's figure this out from first principles. That's the, that would, you sounding like a physicist more than an engineer there. Well, yeah, except I never had to bring power to actually like do it from first principle. So at the end of the day, I was like everybody else. I relied on these rule of thumb, you know, sort of called them cheat codes. And I did really enjoy, though, the theory of, especially heat, you know, he transferred I guess I had a fantastic thesis supervisor.

His name is Frank Mutiarty. He subsequently took on a leadership role in engineering as a bull at McGill. And to me, the greatest quality you should look for in a thesis advisor is somebody who has an emotional connection with the subject matter. So in the case of Frank Machiarity, so again, there's probably more detail than you want about my master's work. No, sure. I designed this experimental apparatus to, we were dealing with something called the heat pipe, which is it's a phase transformation-based way of. They actually use it, I think, in some astrophysical applications. You have an intervening medium.

in this case it was sodium and you're evaporating the working substance in this case sodium at one end of the heat pipe and it the gas flows to the other end which is the heat sink and then it turns into a liquid and ejects the the heat associated with phase transformation and then it goes back to the heat source And so this has lots of applications in pyromatillurgy. And anyway, so I built this contraption out of Pyrex. And instead of sodium, we used, I think it was called naftylene. It's basically, I think sodium hexafluoride, if I remember correctly, it was the stuff you make mothballs out of. And I set the apparatus up and we had it going and it worked great.

Like it's just a, if anyone who wants to, they can read my master's thesis at McGill University. But what I remember was I set up the apparatus, I took my measurements, I made sure it worked, and then I went home. And then like an hour later, I realized I forgot something I needed at school. And I came back and I saw Frank Mushiarty, my thesis supervisor, still looking at it, like still watching it run. Like it was the greatest television program he'd ever seen. Like he was binge watching it. You know, this is the days before Netflix. Yeah.

I said, Frank, like, what the hell are you doing? like it's like 8 p.m. or something he says yeah I know but it's just so mesmerizing isn't it? And I thought oh my god what a nerd and but then I also thought like this is the quality you want in a thesis supervisor and it also convinced me this is why I'm never going to become a professor because I think I don't think it's a sufficient condition to be a successful academic I do think it's a necessary condition to become an academic and so that moment I think taught me like this is the kind of this is the kind of relationship you have to have with science

and then that particular aspect of science to really spend the next 30 or 40 years of your life publishing papers and supervising other people and setting up experiments and recording that and all the frustrations that go with it sure um because not and not every experiment's going to be successful and but and if I may tax your patience on this this was the same thing that convinced me to get out of law because I was a tax lawyer. This is several years later. I was a tax lawyer on Park Avenue catering to these very wealthy clients who, you know, wanted to escape taxation on the, you know, when they'd sell assets and stuff. And my boss, his name was Nat Boydman. He worked out of Montreal. He was this legendary tax lawyer. Like, he would spend his weekend reading about

this stuff. And I remember once I called his office on a Saturday just to leave a message. And he answers the phone. I said, no, what are you doing with the office on Saturday? He says, oh, I was just reading this new paper on international taxation. I just lost track of time, you know? And I was like, no, I don't know. I think that's like, that's absolutely foreign to me. But then I realized it was the same thing as Frank Nucciardi looking at the tabletop experiment. Like this was in his Netflix. And if that's your Netflix, that's a great way to make your career. Yeah. I mean, look, I love those stories because, you know, I think it's true.

And I think you've elaborated that it's true in every field. But I can certainly attest. I've often tell people that scientists, you know, don't do science because they want to save the world. Or, you know, they do it because it gives them great pleasure. And they couldn't possibly do it well if it didn't because you can't spend, as you point out, 20 years on stuff, most of which is, a lot of which is frustrating or fails. If it's some way, it didn't give you some kind of positive, personal and emotional feedback. And I think it's true if you want to excel in any profession and, you know, you've indicated it. But

and journalism. Let me ask you, but then I am intrigued because you, when did you, so you graduated in engineering. You never worked in engineering. You decided right away you wanted to go to law school. and why? What was it about law school? Was it a job? Was it a matter of sort of a career that might have a job afterwards or was it something else? No. So the law school thing, by this time, I guess I was already in my early 20s and I retained the same completely ignorant, childlike naivete about professional life. And I just kind of assumed that if I picked the right field, professional life would be sort of very similar to what I was studying and I had this very good friend who I went to high school with. He also from Montreal and his name was Chris Naughty and we would we would study at the library

together in McGill and he was studying for the LSAT, the law school admission test. And I remember he was showing me what he was doing and it was like you know you'd read something and you have to answer questions and my favorite like these I think was called logical reasoning. It was like Sally is having a dinner party and A can't sit next to B and C has to be across from D and E and F can't be like I was like oh wow cool I love doing stuff like this like I guess this is what

being a lawyer is like so I become a lawyer and and then I and by the way part of law school is kind of like that not with dinner parties but you know with sort of the arguments you make yeah yeah like it's not maybe it's maybe 20%

like that and that was the part I was good at and then as with engineering the part where it was more real-life application of theory wasn't really my strong suit. I was a tax lawyer and tax law. Why tax law? I mean, I hate to say it, but that sounds to me like the most boring possible part of law. That's a stereotype. Yeah.

So tax, I like tax law because it was kind of as close to the academic aspect as you'd get in any kind of branch of law. Like if you're doing, I don't know, things like labor law or litigation, you know, there's a lot of like kind of strategizing and, you know, client management. But tax law is like there are certain, you know, when you're structuring transactions, it's not that different from structuring a dinner party in an LSAT question. Yeah, no, I can see it now that you mention. It's sort of a... Now, the problem is if you're interested in changing the world, it's not like I'm, you know, Nelson Mandela or anything. that but you're kind of making rich people richer. So your typical client, I was working, I was working for a firm called Goodman Phillips-Faimberg, which doesn't exist anymore.

I was, it was a Canadian firm, this was their New York City office, and most of our clients were very wealthy Toronto or Montreal-based companies or individuals or families that were trying to like, you know, buy and sell US-based assets and not pay a lot of tax. And surprise, surprise a lot of these people had a lot of money to begin with and my job was to make sure they still had a lot of money at the end of the transaction which again like was kind of fun from a logic game's point of view yeah but it didn't feel like the most important work in the universe um and you know again you don't have to be a social justice warrior to maybe think uh you know there's nothing wrong with that work i don't it's not like when i quit i just like wrote social justice

graffiti on the side of the building, you know, explaining why I didn't nail any theses to the door of the law firm. But it wasn't for me. And I was just more drawn to the fact, you know, in journalism, I could write about a hundred different things. Yeah, tax law. Like the thing is, if you're a writer, you like writing about anything. So the part of being a tax lawyer that I liked is when my boss would say, hey, I want you to write a memorandum about this new change that has been made to the estate tax law. And even though I was writing about something like just really most people would find incredibly boring. And at the end of the day, maybe I found boring.

The act of putting words on the page to explain this stuff, I really enjoy it. And that's for those who are foolish enough to ask me for career advice, the number one advice, it's not just me who offers this, is what is the aspect of your current job, if any, that you enjoy? And how can you extrapolate that to full-time employment in that? So being a lawyer, the 20 or 30% of the job that involve writing, even on extremely technical subjects, I liked. And I was like, okay, well, how can I do this all the time, but about like every week tackle two or three different subjects. So I'm not just writing about law. And that's kind of how I stumbled into journalism. So you, okay, so I hold that thought because I think that's interesting.

You sort of, I know a lot of people who, and interesting enough, sort of late, not late in life, but at a mid-curricular. or early career level, suddenly we realize, hey, I don't do something else. And interestingly enough, it's not something that different than one of my parents do. One of the most famous examples I know is one of the smartest physicists in the world, if not the smartest guy named Ed Witten, who sort of developed string theory. He was doing politics. He actually wrote speeches for McCarthy. If, you know, Eugene, if he had won, then Ed Witten might have become a White House aide.

but then lost and then it suddenly realized oh my father's a physicist maybe i should do that and within about a year he'd mastered all of physics yeah yeah and uh but anyway um what this is solipsistic or at least it's personal but when did you enter Yale law school i'm just interested uh 94 oh okay and then i graduated 97 yeah the most famous person in my law school class because i I don't anticipate you're going to ask that question, but people always ask me that. Like, who was the Bill Clinton of your law school class? I was Cory Booker, who went on to make a huge name for himself for the mayor of Newark. And, of course, he's a senator, Democratic senator.

And he was a couple months ago, I was at my 25th law school reunion. He was there. Always a charmer. we knew him we knew he'd go far because i think he played tight end at stanford and he was just like tall good looking um i don't know if he's mixed race or black or but just like the most charming just uh lights up a room uh brilliant and i think he had like one of his relatives were jewish or like he'd come to we'd do pass over satyrs and he'd come

and within five minutes i think he was like leading the service like It was just, you just knew this guy was going places. And whatever you think was politics, I don't think there's a person in my class who he didn't charm. I mean, it's just really smart. Well, you know, that's a key part of being a politician. No, I only asked because I taught at Yale, as you may or may not know, for almost 10 years. And I did not know that. I was teaching the physics department.

And I left because I didn't want my daughter to go to high school or middle school to high school. school in New Haven. But that's interesting because New Haven is the classic town and gown, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's just, it's exactly the many go outside the university. As one of my graduate students used to say, it had all the disadvantages of a big city without any the benefits. But anyway, so I left in 93, so we almost overlapped. If I can say New Haven is a fascinating place because I lived in the Taft building, Southeast, corner of college and chapel. Yeah.

Named after President Taft, who, by the way, was also a Supreme Court justice and a legislator. I think he's the only president who wore the triple crown. Yeah. And in the lobby of our building was a bar. It was just the weirdest place because, like, it was just known that Yale students didn't go to that bar. Yeah.

It was like there were Yale students living all over, but that was, that was a towny bar. And there was a place across the street where, oh, that was a towny bar that's weird. And coming from Canada, where we don't have this as much, this sort of like checkerboard ghettos and stuff like that, is the whole experience of living in New Haven was such a mind-blowing education in American,

the realities and the hypocrisies of American rhetoric about class and race, and it's always one big melting pot. And, you know, even at Yale where I was surrounded by all these, you know, very well-meaning highly progressive as the term we didn't use them but we know you're very progressive liberal people but they all lived in the same little enclaves yeah of course yeah no you you play there are parts of yale like that way i went once the medical school you just wouldn't go that

part new haven yeah and the and the building you were in i think i remember that i mean it was sort of depressing to me there there was it was sort of the only mall downtown and all the i think i i remember in the macy's closed down i think it just sort of felt like it was a disaster yeah yeah just and you go down there it was like and it was like five blocks from my office and it was like a different world and it was depressing but uh i understand it let's go back to the discovery that you like to write which is interesting and and did it occur and by the way again since i always seem to make it's it returned to me at one summer or another i i like to write and but i was really fortunate in the sense that my scientific career allowed me to to be i mean

i had to sacrifice every now and then but allowed me to do my science that i really enjoyed and then and then switch back and forth to writing. And so I hadn't planned it that way, but it turned out to be, was nice about that, is that you could balance and, you know, back and forth, as long as you stayed up most nights all night. But so being able to write. I mean, if you're successful enough that academia, you can start writing your own ticket. Exactly. If you're, I was lucky enough to be successful enough in science to be able to write.

And that was just for some people, that's, that means that's university administration for other people. I almost got suckered into that. I'm so glad I did. A big mistake. The dark side. I was just saying to someone else the other day that I've really never met an academic who's gone into administration who hasn't gone to the dark side, who hasn't been subsumed. And I've only know, actually, I know one or two. And I've known a lot of deans and presidents.

And they all become Darth Vader. But anyway, we'll talk about universities in a bit because it saddens me what it's happening. And okay, so did it occur to you when you decided you want to be a journal, when you realized that writing was what you really liked, that your mother was a journalist? And hey, you know, did you talk to her about that transition? So my mother had always like dabbled in writing things like book reviews. Yeah. For things like the Montreal Gazette and other publications.

She didn't become a columnist at the, the National Post, which is the Canadian newspaper where I started my journalist degree, until four years after I had been at the National Post. So, you know, much in the way there's like these families, like, like for instance, you know, Barbara Frum is a famous CBC broadcaster. And then, of course, David Frum and Linda Frum became writers and journalists. And I think sometimes, I'm certainly absolutely not as famous as any of the Frums, but I think sometimes people see that my mother is a successful columnist and that I've been doing journalism for 25 years and they assume it was kind of a similar pattern. It's actually not. I became a full-time journalist in 98. My mother only became a weekly

columnist, a regular columnist in 2002, four years later. Four years later. And so in a way, it was kind of the opposite because she saw that I was having a great time with the National Post. I made some introductions and, and I think she is, she is certainly, a more gifted natural columnist than I am because she has very strong opinions. She certainly knows. I was, I love doing journalism, I live writing essays, I love being an editor and a podcaster, but every week saying, this is where the truth lies on issue X in 750 words, there's a certain personality and talent that goes with that.

I never had that. And I was a, I was a columnist for maybe a decade. Yeah. But my columns always veered more into like book reviews or essays. Not that I didn't have my opinions, but, you know, she very quickly developed a very strong falling for her columns and still does. It's been... You had a voice that was clear, you know. Yeah.

And left or right. This sort of goes left or right. Yeah. And she has that. And so because she gained, and rightly gained so much fame in Canada for her columns, I think people said, oh, you know, then along came John riding her coattails. And I agree to that with that to the extent that I think she's more well known, deservedly so.

But chronologically, I actually got into the professional before she did. Interesting. Now, let's go, I hate to, I'm sounding like I'm grilling here, but, and I am, I guess. It's your podcast, yeah. I know, I know, but it's, but I found it, you know, we'll get to other, the great thing about having a podcast that lasts a while is that we can go into depth in a variety of areas. The National Post, so you started your career at the National Post, which was just starting.

Why the National Post? Oh, well, because they hired me. No, no, but, I mean, was that the reason? I mean, but look, I have to say, and I don't think I've ever said this publicly, I mean, I had already left Canada a long time before the National Post began. And from a distance, when I saw it, I thought, oh, you know, this conservative thing, you know, And now, of course, I have been writing the National Post, among other things. And I'm just wondering, did you, you know, the other national newspaper, which is the one I knew when I left was the Globe Mail, the only national newspaper in Canada at the time when I left when I lived there.

Was it, it had nothing to do with politics or it was just a matter of an available job or what? So I had been writing as a hobby, I guess, for the previous year. So after law school, I became a lawyer and evenings and weekends, I'd sort of write these freelance articles about everything under the sun and I'd send them to a bunch of places. And one of the places I sent them to was this magazine, which is now defunct called Saturday Night, which was run out of Toronto. The editor was a guy named Ken White, who's now a successful book publisher. Ken White then became in 1998, the founding editor-in-chief of the newspaper, the National Post, which Conrad Black had started. And it was just part of the good luck that has gone with me my whole professional life, which is like this is the last broadsheet newspaper created in Canada.

Because it was like the brief interregnum when there was like maybe a sort of a conservative journalistic flourishing in Canada. They wanted an alternative to the Toronto Star on the Globe and Mail. And it was still seen as possible as like, hey, maybe we can make money from broadsheet newspapers. And it was that little window of opportunity. They created the National Post. I got hired because Ken White knew of me through my freelance work. And that's how I started my career. So, you know, I was kind of flipping.

I said, why did I go to the National Post? Because they hired me. There was, this was also the period in Canadian arts and letters, which maybe it still exists, is that there was such an inferiority complex of Canada vis-à-vis the United States that the fact that I had an Ivy League degree in Canada meant that like, it's like, oh, he has no journalistic experience. He's kind of a nerd and he doesn't interview well, but he went to Yale, so like maybe we should hire. And that's kind of how I got the job. I mean, that and the fact that I think, you know, I wrote some fairly well received

articles on a freelance basis, but in today's climate, I never would have got hired because when I started hiring people, I started hiring people based on proof of concept of like, well, you know, do you have a blog that people read? Do you have social media feeds? Like, show me stuff you've written and on an ongoing basis that shows that you can come to work Monday to Friday and produce journalism that people want to read. Part of it was 1998, you know, blogging and social media wasn't so much a thing. But so people just got hired on the basis of like, well, this seems like a smart person who's written five or six articles for, you know, like the Canadian journal of stuff no one really particularly likes to read. And no one gets hired on that basis anymore. So I was like

one of the last cohort of journalists who got hired kind of just on the basis of my resume, which didn't even have that much to do with journalism. That's interesting. Yeah, no, I know that having, you know, obviously gotten my degrees in the United States and working in the United States to see that, use a Canadian preference. There was that guy who tried to, I forget his name I should know him, an academic who thought he could become prime minister. Michael Ignathev. Yeah, Michael Ignathev. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, well, Harvard. And, yeah, it turns out the Liberal Party was very impressed with his Harvard resume, but voters not so much. Yeah. I say I met Michael Ignathev a couple of years ago on Young Street in a Canadian tire store. He's the nicest guy in the world. I mean, all these politicians, when you meet them. They have to be.

There's, but, well, Stephen Harper is a little cranky, but Michael Ignat, it's, you know, after all the sort of slings and arrows of politics, you kind of like start to half believe a lot of the accusations made a game. Oh, you know, Ignatjev is just this academic snob who, you know, just sort of like swaned into Canada from Harvard and wanted to be coronated. Yeah. But 90% of this is political propaganda. At the end of the day, you know, it felt kind of bad for Ignatius. you know he drank the kool-aid that all these liberals had poured into his glass yeah and at the end of day he's just a very smart guy who's written some very good books who wasn't a particularly good politician yeah well he discovered that but he's still not he's done okay since then so it's okay

um uh the there's one thing i found when reading about you that did surprise me yeah given to some extent given the writing and and given the direction of the of the of the of the place you write foremost now, was that you were you involved in writing, helping Justin Trudeau with his memoir? Yeah. So you want to go over that and tell me your opinion of Justin Drew? So this was 2014, I guess, and Trudeau was on the cusp of, well, as we now know, we didn't know at the time, but as we now know, he was about to become a multi-term prime minister. and his people came to me or came to my agent and said like we need a writer who can like stress test a lot of the stuff that we want to put in the book which is to say they weren't looking for somebody who would just act as a kind of scribe for you know every aphorism or sunny promise that that came out of Justin's mouth they wanted something. somebody who could push back and say, what does that mean exactly? Or, well, we could put that in the book, but I can tell you the conservatives are going to jump over all that because, you know, you've used the phrase root causes.

Or if you, like, I knew where the minefields were when it came to language. And I also, I also had worked on several other successful books. Like, part of my professional life is I'm a ghostwriter and I help people. Yeah. So, I mean, it's just not the first of the last. book of Ghostbred. Interesting. And I got to say Justin is incredibly charming and also a very smart guy. So I think politics makes people dumber. Yeah. And Justin, if you got to know, he's a great athlete. He's very charming. He's very widely read. So this is something I think we included in the book,

is that Pierre Trudeau, Justin's dad, was a very stereotypical sort of intellectual father who was always like giving his kids things like, you know. I was going to say it'd be hard for me imagine being Pierre Trudeau's son and not being exposed. Like he would, he would, they had one TV in the house and it was in the basement and like I think they were allowed to watch like an hour of TV a week. It was and then you know the kids would ask a question about geography and just, you know, Pierre would say, well, here's a book about, you know, by Herodotus, why don't you, you read about his travels in Asia Minor, whatever, like it was kind of a little over the top. But what I was impressed with Trudeau is that he actually wore his reading quite lightly. So, I mean, I think

he did read writers like Herodotus, like on his father's urging. But if you went to his study where we conducted some of the interviews, you know, he was a huge fan of, you know, he was a huge fan of um, hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Well, that shows great taste. Well, it does, but it also shows like he wasn't ashamed of his adolescent reading preoccupations. Like every 15 year old boy read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and thought it was high literature, including me. I, I, I think it's still think it's high literature. So there you go. So, but, but, but he, he wasn't embarrassed about talking about that or Star Wars or, um,

uh, uh, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, Game of Thrones. That's great. Song of ice and fires. He was an intellectual snob and, you know, yeah, which Pierre Trudeau was. He was, but in an age when you could get away with it. Oh, absolutely. When it was a bad, when it helped him tremendously.

And his defeat sense. I mean, I grew up in that era. I'm older than you. And Pierre Trudeau was prime minister during much of the time I was in my adolescence and later. In fact, for what it's worth, I used to work next. door to the prime minister's place when I was in college and I used to see Justin in the lawn. Because in the old days, you could just go up to the house and knock on the door, which we

used to do all the time and ask for Margaret. And, yeah, so it's weird for me to see if it's prime minister now because, yeah, the Hertzberg Institute of Astrophysics used to be right next to the Prime Minister's house and I had summer job. I never worked at the Hertzberg Institute of Astrophysics, but I did work at the McDonald's, at the corner, southwest corner of Atwater and St. Catherine, where on at least one occasion, Pierre and Justin came in for a hamburger that I cooked. Oh, there you go.

I was 16 years old. 60 degrees of separation. This was 1984. I was making $3.54.54 an hour as a fried cook at that McDonald's, which was Kitty Corner from the Montreal Forum, where the Canadians then played, but no longer. And once in a blue moon, Pierre Trudeau would come in. it was on this occasion that he came in with Justin.

And yeah, I was one of the fried cooks that day. So again, not Hertzberg Institute of Physics, but still an important Montreal institution. Absolutely. Yeah. Maybe more. So, yeah, no. Okay. Yeah.

Well, I think the Hertzberg Institute moved out west to Vancouver Island afterwards. But it was, yeah, so you had more than a decade apart. It's good to hear that about Trudeau. Now, so you think the image of Pierre Trudeau as kind of this jock, lucky gene kind of goofy guy, or at least non-intellectual, is completely invented by politics. Yes. Yeah, no, I thought, well, what's interesting, I would say, is politics creates its own truth. And that was a caricature. and an incorrect caricature of Justin at the time a decade ago when he got into politics.

And you think politics has made him dumber like it does many people? But it makes everyone dumber. I mean, it made Stephen Harper dumber. You know, so Justin Trudeau was elected Canadian Prime Minister because he was the opposite of Stephen Harper. Stephen Harper was this sort of a vuncular, cranky, like, Justin was, you know, a 40-year-old who acted 30 and Harper was like a 50-year-old who acted 70. And Harper was cranky before he became prime minister. And becoming prime minister just makes you crankier.

And I think in Harper's case, he had a naturally partisan defensive disposition. You know, I'd met Harper several times before he became prime minister. And I saw, I even put this in the National Post column, this is this guy is too, anti-social to become prime minister. He's like, you know, in our editorial meetings with him, he was just, I think he'd literally roll his eyes if he didn't like the question. Whereas Trudeau was all sort of like firm handshakes and hugs and steely-eyed eye contact and charisma.

What kind of things you expect of a politician? Yeah, I mean, yeah, he had a natural, and he was very good and physically energetic when it came to the street level politics. You know, I'm learning because I've come back to Canada and I can see. what looks like more of an American tinge of this left, right, and whatever, is a guy, he seems to be trying to take on the mantle of the cultural warrior, at least, that I see in the states, in the states, the right is using the culture wars as a hook to try and attract, and they are, to attract what were some liberals. And I see, I see him doing the,

is somewhat of the same thing in Canada. Yeah, so this guy, his name's Pierre Poyevra, I think I'm pronouncing his name correctly, who leads what is called the Conservative Party in Canada, although the politics of Canada's Conservative Party are probably allowing more with the Democrats in the United States. It is true that he's taken on some of the postures associated with the right-wing culture war in the United States.

He made some noises about the World Economic Forum. some of the, frankly, conspiracy theories about the WEF. But in general, he's sort of backed off from that stuff because that stuff really doesn't fly particularly well in mainstream Canadian politics. As with the primary system in the United States, you kind of have to go to the... It's sort of like it's centrifugal at the beginning

to kind of get mobilized followers and then it's centripetal after you've conquered that part of it where you're trying to go back and get mainstream voters. In Canada, the media has just a very sensitive tripwire over anything that seems even remotely conservative. So you tend to get punished severely for any posture that's conservative. Also, I mean, to be fair, Paliavra also was sort of full-throated in defense of this Ottawa convoy protests,

which would be some of your listening. have heard about, which really was a kind of populist, not quite anti-vaxor, but like anti-vaccine mandate protests that took place in Ottawa. And the politics of that were not particularly radical by U.S. conservative standards, but Canadians, I mean, they treated it as like, you know, the invasion of Rome by the banus. As an interruption, which, of course, yeah, they thought it was like, you know, the Bolshevik takeover of St. Petersburg in 1917. It was, it was. except they disapproved of it. It was a big moment, and I think that was sort of how Pollyover's image was cemented,

and maybe we'll always be cemented in the mind of a certain kind of progressive journalist or voter, which is fair enough, like he did put down stakes with the convoy protest. That said, if you look at the actual substance of his position, and the substance of pretty much like any conservative Canadian politician, you know, none of them want to get rid of abortion. Things like, you know, the death penalty has been prohibited in Canada for many, many years. Yeah, I don't know. Probably even when I left, I can't remember, but probably right.

It was a Supreme Court. It was probably about 20 years ago, not quite 20 years ago, but you got a single-payer health care across Canada, and I don't know a single. And he always speaks. They all have to speak in favor of that. You know, so what kind of conservatism, at least in the American idiom, the idea of a conservative who's fine with single-payer health care, who's fine with no capital punishment, who's fine with essentially universal abortion access without any federally mandated, you know, gestation limits. Again, he's a Democrat. He's a Democrat who has adopted a few culture war postures. Well, you know, his quoting of Jordan Peterson is another thing, I guess, you know, sort of he seems to have sided with George. Jordan Peterson has become the Emmanuel Goldstein of Canadian progressive politics.

And like, again, to be fair, especially in the most recent incarnation of Jordan Peterson. Like he says some pretty provocative stuff. Oh, he does. I know having, you know, we've been talked together and we email and he says things that I just find sometimes. But, badly ridiculous. But, you know, it's sort of like you now have progressives who define their demonology of conservatives according to like how many times they've retweeted Jordan Peterson. He's become like the currency of progressive outrage. Yeah.

Although he says, you know, there's a number of things, obviously since I've talked to him, there's a number of things I strongly agree with as well and that his concerns of them. He has an outsized on both sides. Yeah, I'm amazed. Among his detractors, he's become this odd sort of litmus test about where you stand on a dozen issues. Well, let's talk about issues now. I want to move on to your writing. And I guess I do want to, you know, I was going to talk about the walrus, but I think I'll skip that. I want to, I want to talk about how you got involved in Quillette, because that's how I know you best, both as an editor and a writer.

And then I want to talk about some of the recent stuff you've written. including the incredibly comprehensive investigative journalism, which is, I don't know if it's the longest story that I've ever read in Quillette, but it certainly was one of the longer ones, 15,000 words, I think. It was long. And, and, and, yeah, anyway, it's someone who I, I don't know if I'll always say, I get paid by the word in Quillette. I know, I know.

That's why Dickens novels were so long, right? Yeah, I know, I know, scribble, scribble, scribble, I know Dickens was very. I'm not, I'm absolutely not comparing myself to Dickens. No, no, I know, but. it's exactly right you got paid by the word it's clear why john k does krauss podcast compare itself to dickens like i do not want that no no but i know i know that feeling and i i'm aware of it when in writing for word but anyway um how did how did how did you um get involved a quillette and and and i i you know and quillette is another interesting you know people often see a quillette and a boy it's another lightning rod like it's suddenly

I'm a right wing whatever because I write for Quillette. And how did you get involved? So I've always been a gadfly in journalism. So when I was at the National Post, which was, and remains, to some extent, a conservative publication, I was sort of like the token liberal on the editorial board. And especially when it came,

like climate change was an issue that I really spoke out on. You know, this was, say, the 2000s, maybe the very early 2010s when I was at the National Post. And there were a lot of conservatives who were like, oh, global warming is a myth. It's all sunspots. It's natural, you know, anthropogenic global warming is made up. It's, you know, Al Gore convinced Kofi Annan that this was an issue. It's like, and I said, no, that's nonsense.

The scientific background for you was important. It was. Although there are plenty of scientists who spout nonsense and plenty of non-scientists who spout truth. So I don't want to create a sort of light. But at least being skeptical and worrying about evidence, which is all that really matters to me. I mean, I was reading, I'm not a climatologist,

I'm not an oceanographer, you know, I'm not a solar scientist, but I know enough about science and engineering and math that I'm able to read peer review papers in all of these fields and at least understand what their conclusions are, what their methodology is because, again, you know, I spent years studying science and it gives you a certain kind of vocabulary. And I remember I'd be in editorial board meetings with conservatives and say, like, are you really claiming like there's this conspiracy among, you know,

several different academic fields, which includes the editors of all these peer-reviewed journals and, you know, chairs of department of all these different fields because global warming is not one scientific field. Yeah, sure. Yeah. It crosses over to, you know, half a dozen different fields, all of which, you know, observation of earth phenomena and thermodynamics and all these sort of things. And it seemed like crazy to me that says, no, no, no, the whole thing is a hoax.

And so I kind of became estranged from mainstream conservatism on that basis. But I'm kind of like, to be fair, I'm sort of made my whole career becoming estranged from things. It's not so bad. No, because then I went to the walrus, which you mentioned briefly, and the walrus is kind of like paradigmatic Canadian progressive bien-pinsent left of center

very worthy monthly magazine you know a lot of stuff about you know feminism that publishes poetry a lot of like activists get published there and the writing you know just to be fair the writing is good it's it's fact-checked it's still around it's the walrus.ca if

anybody wants to read them and I'm proud a lot of a lot. I became the editor and chief for a brief period in 2016, part of two thousand, like maybe almost two years. And I mean, at the time, I thought, oh, well, this is great. I've become estranged from conservatism,

but now, like, now I found my place in the world. But then, you know, in keeping with my personality, I very quickly took note of the hypocrisies and pieties. that characterized left-wing journalism Canada. And the blind spots, and there was friction there too. And a lot of that was my fault, because I think to be the editor-in-chief

of that kind of like establishment, Toronto, left-wing, a lot of the money comes from charity, and it's the same kind of funding sources as you'd get from like the opera and the symphony. You have to exhibit a certain kind of, like, forbearance when it comes to, like, a lot of the humbug surrounding Canadian leftism. And I understood that going into the job, but it wasn't in my personality to stick with that. And I left in frustration because it wasn't just the editorial policies.

It's just the job wasn't right for me in terms of my personality. And I think both my supporters and detractors would, acknowledge that that's true. And for a couple of months after the walrus, I thought, well, I guess I'll just be like this ghost writer who, I don't know, occasionally writes on social media and maybe contributes. I started contributing to the Atlantic and the New Republic. And I just like doing freelance and paying the bills with ghostwriting. And then I started reading Colette.

And Willette was like, wow, this is a publication that maybe even I cannot become estranged from because I like it just seems to be very sensible and based in science and was like equally dismissive of of left and right yeah which people don't realize well so what's interesting about quillette is quillette is not a conservative publication yeah and and we established that definitively during the pandemic because we stood four square behind vaccination and the science of vaccination and the science of public health. And we actually lost writers and lost readers because, you know, we refused to, you know, write about the giant hoax that is the COVID pandemic.

And my boss, Claire Lehman, who's based on Australia, took the lion's share of abuse because Australia, I mean, Australia had a kind of unique relationship with COVID because it's an island. And so things went up and down there. The oscillation amplitude was much higher. And as a result, when they hit difficult patches with COVID, their public health measures were more stringent than you saw, for instance, in North America typically. So, you know, you'd get these right-wing cultural commentators saying, oh, you know, Australia has set up a system of concentration camps for people with a suffering from coach. The whole, it was all BS.

But because Claire did not take the bait and, you know, refused and rightly refused to give oxygen to all this conspiracyism, you had a lot of hardcore conservatives who followed Brett Weinstein down the rabbit hole in this issue. Yeah. And there was a period. And I think the period to some extent continues now that most of the trolls that I had track on social media, maybe not most, at least half are, are conservatives who like, I'll tweet something about Canada Day, which we just observed here. And it's like, uh, you know, oh, are you

sorry that Canada Day isn't a holiday where you throw people into concentration camps or what? Like, it's just, and these are, again, these are conservatives. And sometimes I have to look carefully say, okay, well, is this a left wing person who's upset about my views on issue X or is it a right wing vision and because there's a rough balance between those two i know i'm doing my job because i'm making everyone angry yeah that's if you can do that you've done yeah you've done your job i just tweeted about canada yesterday i was intrigued to see if i'd be told because when i moved here i was shocked it was right at the time of all of this incredible reaction about the the the the residential schools and and where i moved into pei i'd moved to get partly to get away from the culture wars and

and the first thing i'd happened when i was here was at the statue of Johnny McDonald was removed from downtown. In Charlottetown. And I wrote about it for the Wall Street Journal. And I was just shocked and dismayed. But I was surprised. This time, I didn't get any, as far as, no, no, no, whenever about a candidate yesterday. This is the first canada since 2019 that hasn't been accompanied by a social panic.

Well, social panic is too strong the word. by an obsessive focus over masks, national shame about, like, you know, how can you celebrate a genocide state, or some combination of their, like, public health and national self-recrimination. Like, in my neighborhood, people were actually able to, like, do fireworks and have barbecues and picnics and not get hectared about how they were failing. at public health or failing at the job of reconciliation in regard to indigenous communities. It was actually just like a normal candidate. Yeah, I was shocked. It was just like a normal. I was really, you know, it was really great this year to see that.

I mean, not that I'm, I still don't carry flags. I've never been a flag carrier. No, I mean, that's the thing about Canada Day is like I'm kind of typical, like when I grew up, celebrating, you know, July 4th, 4th of July in United States. It's like I was always like this sneering Canadian as like, oh, you know, look at those silly Americans, patriotism is the opiate of their masses. And Canadians always pride of themselves on being muted in their love of Canada. But then the kind of overboard self-flagellation that you saw among progressives in Canada in recent years has actually, as these things often happen, you know, history works and force and counterforce has sort of a overreesome. has sort of awakened this,

call it American style, more full-throated patriotic spirit that you now see with like people going around with flags and I kind of like it to be honest. I mean, Karen is an amazing country. You know, historically, like all countries, we've done some bad things.

I think progressives have a point that we need to take Frank's talk of it, especially in regard to indigenous people. Although we were, went like totally overboard. There was a movement and you still see it with like Canadian progressives insisting that Canada's government have to apologize for slavery. Yeah. Even though slavery was outlawed by the British decades before Canada came into existence, but there's all these like esoteric arguments. It's like, yeah, but you know, Canada was formed by

people who were the sons and daughters of people who profited from it. It's like, okay, I get it. you know, none of us, six degrees of separation from sin. None of us are without sin, but like the desperately, desperately felt need to piggyback on American obsessions with like the 1619 project and all that stuff. Yeah, well, you know, this is a good segue. Because I was thinking of what articles are yours to focus on it. And I picked three or four. But the first, the first, and there's several articles,

but the first subject that we may as well talk about is, this mass grave thing because what intrigues me you know I always and if it isn't clear I try and connect science and other things periodically in this in the in the podcast because I think it's an essential part of public policy as well as culture and by the way I will although it's self-serving to say this I will say the reason I wrote my physics of climate change was specifically for conservatives because I found that conservatives would refuse to listen to the science because they didn't want to hear the policy recommendations that they should stop driving their cars. So I said, and it was a friend of mine who's a libertarian. Well, no, it was actually a Penn Gillette,

who's a magician. And he basically said, I don't want to hear, I want to hear the, I just want to hear the science so I can make my own decision. So I decided to write a book with no policy recommendations, just on the science of climate change, hoping that it would be more receptive to conservatives who could say, okay, I've read the science, but I still don't want to do these policies. So anyway, But it was interesting how that people turn their mind off or switch off if they feel that the science is going to or that the discussion is going to require then policy recommendations that they disagree with. They'd rather not even discuss the science or think of it as a hoax. So that's why I wrote that particular book. Segway, you just named job to magician. Is that Penn, the Las Vegas? Yeah, yeah, Penn and Teller. Yeah, they're both friends. So how are you with getting tickets? Because I'm going to Vegas and a couple of them.

I will get you, in fact, not just tickets. I'll get you special seats and backstage, okay? So I knew it was the right decision to do this podcast. Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of this, I may do a magic trickery too for you because I like magic. I probably will. In fact, I have some in my pocket right now. Oh, boy, it's almost like this was set up.

Yeah, it was almost it is. And I will say to my great pride, although I did very little. But if you go look and look for the scientist's deck of cards, It was one of their magic tricks that I helped them with. But anyway. Okay. But, yeah, but Penn is an amazing man. And we've had a podcast and a very, totally self-educated,

but one of the most widely read people, I know. But he is a libertarian, and he doesn't like to be told what to do. And he said, you know, basically he said, this is the book I've always wanted, which is, and it was a factor for me. It was right at the beginning of the pandemic when I had a lot of time in my hands. And I said, let me just write a book showing the science. hey, this is just a science. You can decide to do with it what you want to.

It's just, this is just science. There's nothing. Anyway, so that, but your arguments reminded me of that. And I, and I, I kind of hope it'll have some legit longevity in that regard, at least be more. I actually, we actually sent it to every member of Congress, hoping that some of the conservative members of Congress, who didn't see this as a, as an advocacy book. Right. And actually one of their legislative age didn't get, of Republican legislative age, actually didn't get touched with me. It didn't have the, obviously, the impact I'd like. But now, anyway, getting back to you and not me, if it's possible.

The, and then we will do a magic trick, I promise. Okay. Let's talk about, the reason I want to talk about the hot button topic of these, of mass graves is I view this. As one example, when I talk about what got me in this public policy discussions, is that, you know, you should all, I have this quaint notion that public policy should be based on empirical evidence and also should be testable. So if it doesn't work, you change your mind, you know, the kind of things the scientists would do. And fact versus faith, I've kind of been a well-known supposedly atheist. And part of the reason is I think, you know, I don't like basing anything on faith no matter what. I mean, it's okay to have a,

predisposition to something, but then you you test it against empirical evidence. And as someone who came in to Canada right in what seemed to be the height of this amazing self-flagellation over the schools, and I should tell you, I studied Canadian history for a while before going physics. So I have a, yeah, so it hit me as well. But this fact that, if you ask most people on the street, I think most people in street would say that mass graves have been discovered in Canada. And yet, you wrote what your most, a brief piece you wrote just the other day said in Canada asking for evidence now counts as denialism, which is something I see all the time in academia. Ask what's the evidence that academia is systemically racist or sexist? Just tell me the evidence.

That immediately makes you, you know, sexist or racist. And here you talk about the possibility that asking for evidence may become illegal. I doubt it. I hope it won't be. But why don't you elaborate on that? So first I will say I was hesitant to choose that as a headline because for those, you know, I wrote a whole book about conspiracy theories about a decade ago. It was called Among the Truthers.

And anybody who's familiar with conspiracist subcultures will know that a very common trope, among hard-boiled conspiracy theorists is, hey, I'm just asking questions. I'm just looking for evidence. You know, did planes hit the World Trade Center and did, you know, the fuel inside the planes caused the destruction, or was it controlled demolition? You know, I'm open-minded.

I just want to see evidence. And then you say, well, okay, let's look at the NIST report on the collapse of WTC 1 and 2. Like, how about that? It's like, you know, Purdue University did this detailed finite element. simulation of did you look at that?

It's like yeah but the people who wrote it are like you know it's led by the second nephew of Rockefeller and like and then let's just ask questions about like whether they're in on it and so the trope of I'm just asking questions has a long and not particularly

salutary tradition in this field and so just asking questions in a kind of dog way where you're going toward a preconceived conclusion is not a good way to get the truth. You can hide it. You can clothe it in the seeming sense of science. And I see it in, you know, aliens.

I get it everywhere. Climate change, aliens. Yeah, right. Yeah. So I think that just to lay out the basis on the residential school grades thing is that for those who are outside Canada. And I presume that most of your listeners are outside Canada. Although who now, you know, maybe the

white hot star power of Jonathan K. will draw in millions of Canadians. And who knows. I doubt it. But Canada, as maybe even people outside Canada know, has this this, in many ways, shameful history in regard to indigenous

peoples. European people came, you know, really starting in the 17th century and then quickly dwarfed the indigenous population. We made treaties with indigenous people. In many cases, those treaties were broken. All sorts of diseases were spread.

As more Europeans came, the balance of power shifted against indigenous people. The construction of the railroad across Canada meant that people just had less contact with indigenous communities in the interior, with whom they often were, you know, rubbed elbows with. when it was difficult to get across the country. Now you could take the train and then you could fly. And many indigenous communities kind of became forgotten. And in the 19th century and continuing on well into the 20th century, there was a blueprint, an educational blueprint,

which was championed, I should say, by many progressives, as we would now call them, including Pierre Trudeau and John Kretchen. It was a longtime liberal prime minister late in the 20th, century, where indigenous peoples were going to be benefited and integrated into the Canadian economy and educational system, they were going to be taught English and French, taught valuable vocational skills. However, it also was the case that many of these schools were left to the supervision of priests, nuns, ministers without adequate supervision. Some of them, as you can imagine, were cruel. Some of them, even if they weren't cruel, were negligent. The things were, the

thousands of children who were in after 1920 were in many cases forced to go to these schools those corporal punishment are many cases they were punished with sadistic punishments in some cases not all cases if they spoke their indigenous languages they were stripped of their culture and all of this rightly was made the subject of national investigation those truth and Reconciliation Commission that was struck and delivered an authoritative report, which detailed all this and actually made an accounting of the, there was at least 3,000, and it's probably more like 4, 5, 6,000 or 7,000, children, students who enrolled in these so-called residential schools and died.

Typically, as I said, of tuberculosis, but the death rate, even in an age when children, tragically many of them did die of preventable diseases, or now preventable, there was a higher proportion that died at residential schools. So all of this is fact. No one is denying it.

And this is a baseline for what happened in 2021. In 2021, additional allegations were put forward based on ground penetrating radar surveys, GPR

radar, the GPR surveys that were done at first. It was a former indigenous reserve, or so I should say, former residential school in Camle with British Columbia. And it was said that GPR data, was ground penetrating radar data, indicated the presence of 215 child graves that had not been known before. And it was indicated that it was suggested that these were, were not just children who died of tuberculosis, but perhaps children who had been murdered in cold blood. And that what we were dealing with was, wasn't just the neglect and racism

that had already been documented for many years in regard to residential schools and as legacy. But this was something new. And it was something like out of a horror film where hundreds and perhaps thousands of children, because other GPR surveys were made in other parts of the country, were extinguished in cold blood. And a lot of people, including me, took this at face value.

However, this was two years ago. And as the months passed, it began to emerge that the only evidence for this was this GPR data. Now, anybody who's listening to this and maybe is in construction or excavation or, you know, archaeology or in my case, you know, I've worked in geology and stuff like that. I have some passing acquaintanceship with GPR technology and is very limited what it can determine. What you typically have to do is you get readings through GPR. It shows you things like soil dislocations. Like, well, the density of soil is greater here. And then you have a disruption.

And then you have another patch and then another disruption. And then you have to dig up the earth to see what's actually there. GPR survey data can show you the best place to dig to do further invasive investigations. And it is used for among other applications, it's used to find like pipes and old irrigation ditches and tree roots. And it's also used to find old cemeteries because typically, you know, graves are spaced at regular intervals. and this GPR data that was announced in 2021 in Camloops and these other reserves was said to be consistent with the presence of 215 graves that had been secretly dug and children thrown into them. But there hadn't been any follow-up investigation.

And it now appears that these claims are kind of dubious because in all that time, no human remains have been found. Let me ask, I've gotten that out of your piece and reading. But what I don't know is, has excavation happened? Has people deliberately not wanted to disturb that sacred ground? Or has people try? I mean, the natural thing to do would be to dig. It's like a forensic thing.

If you're looking for a murder, usually you dig up the, you try and find the body. So this is the thing. So it said to my knowledge, hasn't been any systematic effort to investigate it, which is odd for a few reasons because it's been claimed, well, this is, you know, this is sacred ground so we can't disrupt it. To which my response is, wait a sec. Some white guy, it's alleged, took a dead child and threw it into the ground to cover up evidence of his crime and that's sacred ground. Yeah, yeah. If that allegation is correct, this is the very opposite of sacred ground. This is a crime site. And by the way,

that white guy who allegedly did this, he could still be walking the earth because some of these schools operated well, you know, had not be well into the Cold War period. It's not impossible that some of these people could be alive. And to the extent we're taking it seriously, like this is an actual crime site.

It should be, well, you want to dig up old bones and retramatize the survivors. It's like, well, if these were claimed white students who were, you know, if it was said that there are 215 white kids who were buried in the local provincial park, they, I mean, you would have yellow tape and shovels and people in hazmat suits and provincial investigators there, like, within 24 hours. Not just that. Generally, in crimes, well, to make, in crimes, people generally like to get closure by finding out if their relative who is missing,

was that, you know, was that, is that? Yeah, and in this case, it's kind of the opposite where, again, it's all very hazily done. It's like, well, you know, I'll give you one example. It's a United Nations body. It's either under the offices of the United Nations or the international criminal court in the Hague. Basically, people with expertise in analyzing evidence like this in places like Sabranichan. or Rwanda, for instance, their services have been made available. And the last I heard of this in early 2023 is their services were rejected on the basis, at least temporarily, on the basis that they weren't informed enough about like indigenous cultural practices and there wouldn't be enough leadership being exerted by local indigenous tribes.

The whole thing seems very kind of dodgy to me. I want to emphasize that it is absolutely not out of the question. that bodies will be found at one or more of these sites. Canada, like pretty much every country on earth, is full of unmarked cemeteries. The cemeteries that used to be marked, but in the early 20th century, it wasn't uncommon. You know, a pauper's grave would be marked,

if at all, with like a small wooden cross that would succumb to the elements after a couple of months. And then it becomes an unmarked grave. It is, you know, this, I think, Camleaves Residential School, I think there was a church, I think there's cemeteries at many of these places because any place you have a church,

you often have a cemetery. If you tore up the ground in all of these places, I'm sure you would find a few bodies. The idea that these are bodies that, A, were buried secretly in unmarked graves to begin with and that the bodies of children and that they're murdered children, it's like four different logical steps you're taking. But all of that was taken on face

by the Canadian meteor in late May in early June of 2021 on the basis that well we have this GPR data this ground penetrating radar data and it was sort of imagined in the public mind that this like

radar you could like see little skeletons or you could see caskets or whatnot which of which GPR data shows nothing of the kind it shows soil dislocations which are typically used as areas to further investigate through invasive means.

This was all taken at face value, in part because Canadians were assured that the idea of these children being murdered and buried in these spots accorded with the sort of mystical teachings of indigenous knowledge keepers, and very few journalists wanted to be seen as interrogating the epistemology

of indigenous knowledge keepers. And what do knowledge keepers keep? They keep knowledge. Well, if it's knowledge, then that's good enough for us. Yeah, and then there you go. I mean, that's another hot button issue. But I mean, I've written about this. New Zealand, of course, has gone to the extreme

of trying to teach quote indigenous knowledge along ways of knowing alongside real science and science classes. And I've gone on record and I'll say it every time. There's no such thing as knowledge except empirical knowledge. There's no revelation. Revelation isn't knowledge, never has been, never will be. And it comes full circle to some extent into a kind of right-wing, call it right-wing, Christian creationism where things are known kind of because it is known Calisi.

Yeah. You know, and it's anti-scientific. But in the Canadian context, it very much became a political phenomenon, because what happens was this all this what I'm describing here was sort of compressed into a kind of social panic that that played out in the space of a couple of weeks in the late spring of 2021 justin trudeau the prime minister went went in very deep on it and immediately lowered canadian flags on public buildings and lowered them for five months yeah uh which was was incredible i mean i was wondering when i first moved here which was was in that time, why all the flags were lowered? More than five months.

And it became this kind of mortifying spectacle because he was asked, well, it's been five months. Like, one of the flags going back up. And he said something to the effect of, well, like, when indigenous people tell me that they can go back? But when are indigenous people going to say, you know, when is some duly designated representative of hundreds of thousands of people, to the extent any such person could present themselves, say, okay, it's.

It's been three and a half months. That's exactly enough time. Now they can go. So then on some, I think it was Remembrance Day, the whole thing was kind of mortifying and pretextual. The flags went back up. But from that moment, Justin Trudeau did a photo op.

He went down on one knee at another First Nation, not Camloops. And the liberals, it was also an election year. So the liberals campaigned hard on being kind of the penitence, penitence in chief of Canada and oh there's all this important work we have to do with reconciliation and making amends and you know who wants to elect those battled racists uh into power when what's really needed is people who know how to uh to whip themselves into to a good uh frenzy of self recrimination which you know the liberals under trudeau in particular prove themselves quite adept at uh academics when you know hard on it

You know, this proves we need to decolonize the campus. And journalists went in Vardong, including conservative journalists. And then as the months passed and it was kind of like, oh, wait, you know, it's been six months, it's been 12 months, it's been 18 months, it's been 24 months. We haven't actually found any bodies or human remains. No one really had any interest in revisiting this issue because if you were a journalist, it often meant you then had to like go back and delete about a dozen tweets. and maybe correct half a dozen stories you've written about all this, treating all this as fact.

Politicians, you know, they'd all, not all them got down on one need, but they'd all said things that reflected a credulous attitude toward this, and no one wants to correct the record. So instead what you had is you had now journalists and politicians, they talk about 215 potential graves, 215 plausible graves, 215 suspected graves, around a year ago you started seeing these words creep into journalism, where journalists and politicians would take stock of the fact like, okay, we admit it, we don't actually know the graves are there, which, by the way, hadn't been the case, for the most part, when the story was first reported. So they were kind of like going forward started to kind of cover off the fact that no one had actually seen any real evidence that these graves were there.

But there was this sort of gentleman's agreement among Canadian pundits and politicians that were just kind of kind of take a mulligan on all that stuff we said in mid-2020. We're not going to revisit that because everyone went in a heart on that. And if, you know, if other people aren't going to admit they were too credulous, I'm not going to admit it. Because so it's sort of like kind of a herd mentality. Yeah, sure. Well, yeah, it is. It is. And we'll just agree to slowly back on. But there's no other issue like that. It's completely unique. Like, I don't know any other issue in Canadian journalism where it's just, there's this kind of asset agreement that we kind of went nuts on the story. And but the Canadian press made it the story of the year for 2021. And in their announcement of it being the story of the year, they describe them as unmarked graves.

Yeah. Canadian reporters had not yet gone into the ask. covering habit of saying, you know, plausible grades or potential grades. So, you know, you could go online and these stories are still there, uncorrected. New York Times. New York Times wrote at least two stories. Yeah, I mean, I want to go, I want to end this eventually when we get there about talking about what we can do. And journalism, the idea of not, I'm not saying we're wrong, which is, I think this, my new book says, I don't know, is the key, most important three words in science. It should be the most important three words in journalism and in politics. And parenting. And parenting, parenting and teaching.

Absolutely. And I've always said a parents and teachers should be more willing to say, I don't know, because it's an invitation to discover. It's not just a negative thing. It's an invitation. Let's try and figure this out. But yeah, no, I think it tends to be more the norm than the exception. I mean, you point, I'll give another example. I don't want to go into it a lot because I remember having Matt Ridley on the podcast and who wrote a book about, I think it was called virus or something or viral. Anyway, it was about, you know, with the pandemic, the source. You know, the key question was it. was it, did it come from a lab in China? And it's a fascinating subject where we still don't know the answer to tell the truth. But the press jumped right, as did many outlets, but the press and to some extent, the scientific community jumped on it right away and said, no, no, it cannot be, you know,

because that's a dangerous political statement, even though, I mean, there were some right-wing people who were saying it was, you know, bio-weapons and they intended it. But the whole point of this was maybe it was an accident. And no, we can't have that discussion right now because that is politically unacceptable. And so all the media just said, there's no substance to this conspiracy theory. And of course, now we, you know, we don't know.

And the media is sort of bad. You begin to see even in the media that we're totally refused to discuss it, that now are at least willing to say, you know, especially as scientific reports come out saying we don't know. But you see that same backing off. It's not as extreme. Same embarrassing spectacle where I remember there was a letter, I think it appeared either in science or nature, you know, signed off by multiple luminaries saying, you know, no one should talk about how this could be.

COVID came out of a Chinese lab. And then the Biden administration itself. Democratic administration, I forget, maybe it was a year ago or 18 months ago, basically openly said, we're going to investigate whether this was in the Chinese lab. And I'll be honest, this has never been a big issue for me. Like, I think it's entirely possible that this was an inadvertent leak from a lab in China. I have no idea. And it's never been a strong issue for me.

But I've always thought it was nuts that you weren't allowed to talk about. Well, what's interesting. Yeah, exactly. It's nuts that you're allowed to talk to it. Just like it's nuts that you can't ask the question or these graves. Anytime you can't ask a question or it's nuts, because that's the antithesis of science, but it should be the antithesis of us. Sometimes it is nuts. I mean, to say was the moon landing's hoax?

Well, it's all right to ask the question. Because then I can prove why you're nuts to, I mean, I can then argue and point out all the fallacies. I think that's why Christopher Hitchens, my old friend, used to argue, defend these Holocaust deniers because, you know, his point was that they should have the right to prove that they're complete idiots. Yeah, no, it's true. Michael Shermer, who it would shock me if Michael Shermer hadn't been on this podcast. Oh, he hasn't, as a matter of fact.

Oh, he should be the next case. He should be here instead of me. No, no, no, no, no. He wrote a whole book that came out in 2000, I think, about Holocaust deniers. Yeah, yeah. He interviewed them and he took them. I mean, he certainly didn't take their ideas seriously. The idea is garbage, but he took them seriously as called a pathological phenomenon in terms of the world of ideas.

Like, how do you generate such garbage ideas? Because these people aren't necessarily like stupid. They're just like there's something wrong with the way they see the one. Yeah, and sometimes they're malicious. But I guess I'm an extremist in that regard. I think there's no question that we should, that is unaskable, no matter how ridiculous or offensive. And we have the right to ignore it. We have the right to debate it. And all of the, you know, how we respond to it is up to us. But, but yeah, so, you know, right, I was very suspicious. I thought, okay, these are, you know, because with the lab league. And then I actually read Rat Ridley's book, which was an interesting book because it was scientific. They didn't take an ad, they didn't advocate. But at the end of the book, it was pretty clear.

that there were a lot of open questions, and in particular, by the way, the person who organized that letter in science was one of the people who worked with the lab in Wuhan. And so you begin to wonder about self-interest there. In any case, so I think the exam, the reason I brought this up, partly because it is a hot button issue in Canada, at least, and may raise a liar of people, is to me it's one of these cases of if you can't ask the question because it's so offensive to people, there's some problem. And you're roughly right. We don't know. No one knows if these are, you know, even if they are graves, whether they're hidden graves

or as you point out, just grave, grave site. Close the loop on this, the effect of all this, this effort to pretend that we know things that we don't actually know, culminating, and this was the subject of my article, there is now a campaign afoot among some liberal politicians and some academics to refer to anybody like you and me who takes Frank stock of all these things to label us as denialists. Yeah, sure. The idea that pointing out the fact that human remains haven't been without is somehow morally tantamount to Holocaust denial. Because that's the plain intention of using that word.

It's a continent. Yeah, it's like the saying, well, you know, you're like Ernstundle or something. Well, it's become, it's sort of an extension of the critical race theory stuff we're seeing the states where if you question it, you're suddenly automatically racist, right? And so it, you know, it's the old thing about witches, right? If you if you, if you don't say you're not a witch or witch, and if you say you're a witch or witch. Yes, although I will say that if we start getting into critical race theory, but we're going to, the sun's going to come down. No, no, I'm not going to avoid that because it's not even worth in our discussion. Well, maybe anyway, it's a different discussion. Okay, I think we've, I was going to say beat that dead horse, but that's probably in poor taste. But the, I want to, as I say, my intent is sort of empirical evidence and fact and reason, which I think should be that one of the reasons I do this podcast and our foundation does what we do. And much of the writing I've done in my life is that I think science and reason are not just interesting and fascinating to learn about the universe, which I think more people should be. excited about, but they can be useful in the rest of our human, you know, culture and and self-governance. And so that's my deep belief in why I promote this stuff. So that's one

example. There's three, I should say, there's three things I want to talk about. Just so that was one. I want to talk about an article about, because I just had, I just did a podcast with Hakeem Alusha and recorded it last week, an astrophysicist. talking about James Webb. And I noticed, you know, you had a piece actually a long time ago, well, last year, December last year, on what happens there. And the danger that come from trying to have frank discussions about issues that where scientists have become ideologues and a large part of the scientific community, especially in astronomy, had become ideologues. I would argue, and I've written about this, I think, in Quillette, among other places.

And then I want to go to the McMaster masterpiece that you wrote because I want to talk about academia. And then after that, I'd like to talk about what we could do because I think a lot of this is a relationship of journalism and public policy. So in any case, I want to jump to this. I don't want to spend a long time because I just did a whole podcast. But you wrote a piece early on, one of the earliest piece I saw, which was around the time that New York Times wrote a reporter there, Michael Powell, did a great job writing about this. But an astrophysicist happens to be president of National Society of Black physicists, Hakeem Alu Shehey, as he taught me how to pronounce his name,

is looked at this claim, which was a small group of ideologically based. help but say it, astronomers had argued that the James Webb Space Telescope should not be named that because he was a homophobic and probably racist and anti-Semitic and whatever else. Because somehow in the 1950s that was the norm, I first learned about it, to tell you the truth, I first saw a ridiculous piece in Scientific American, which unfortunately used to be a good scientific journal. I used to write for it, but it's now not. they wrote a piece saying it shouldn't be named Hubble, it shouldn't be named Jibb's Taze's Salscope because of that.

And I automatically get my hair on my head sticking out when I see mores of this era being imposed on people in an earlier era. I thought it was just that. I didn't know the claimed evidence. But where it lost any credibility to me was when I saw their supposed solution was to rename it the Harriet Tubman space telescope because Harriet Tubman in the underground rail yard must have looked at the North Star at some point and I thought well okay this is just kind of push it's obvious that this has been driven by something other than the science so so

Hakeem was working at NASA and looked at this and came up to the conclusion there was no evidence for it and he thought it would just end the debate but he found exactly the opposite Maybe you want to talk a little bit about it. So I remember being struck by that. And I think I put it in the article that Hakeem al-wehi. Is that how you can ask you? Al-U-Shehi. Al-U-Shehi.

What was remarkable about Hakeem-Alushahi isn't just... I can't get right. I can't say... Anyway, both of us are probably pronounced it. Yeah. Okay. Because this is painful. I got pure place.

yeah, I was name kind of right, but so let's just say I'm one for two on that. Okay. But what he did, I'm going to assume it's a he, him. What he did was a stunning self-directed research project. Yeah, yeah, amazed, remarkable. He relied, he went after primary documents to discover the political views of James Webb. And when looked at government documents, looked as, you know, how representative was, were his views.

And just to be clear, homophobia was rife. Like if any person, even a progressive person from that era where walk among us now, like their views, you know,

they'd be shocked that that gay marriage existed. Yeah, yeah. In the same way, you know, we just celebrated Canada Day and, you know, you look at the founding fathers

of Canadian Confederation, I'm sure their views of Jews were like, Yeah. I don't know if they were out in anti-Semites, but it would shock me to, you know, they probably were, but like, you know, life goes on. Yeah, it was just the norm. That was the thing. Like, you know, you have to accept that the arrow of time goes forward. I don't know when Benjamin Disraeli was, anyway, go on.

But yeah, there was just a lot of anti-Semitism and a lot of, it was, still a lot of anti-Semitism, but there it was sort of more than you could be a polite anti-Semite. And in the same way that it was. just kind of assumed that among a lot of people of homosexuality was either call it a sin or abnormal or a perversion or a mental disease. Unfortunately, these misguided concepts were prevalent. And this guy did this really stunning and thorough. And he's a good writer too. He published it. If I remember Craig, he published it in a medium maybe. Yeah, medium and a blog on medium. Yeah. And he said, look, there's all this controversy about James Webb, instead of relying on Slavic, he's

Logans, I'm going to go back and look at what he actually said and did. And he found that a lot of the things, including, I think, like just received wisdom. He found that quotes are made up. All the stuff that was attributed to James Webb was actually misattributed. And he could document it was attributed to other people. So it ended up on Wikipedia, like all this misinformation about Webb, which indicted in which like suggested he was eaten by the standards of his time to be a bigot. Yeah.

Was literally made up. It found its way to Wikipedia. and then people started to quote Wikipedia, and then Wikipedia being what it is, like, you know, then you get citations to the misinformation that was itself based on the pre- people would say people would claim to have read Wikipedia, have even read it, and they became the sources,

one astrophysicist in particular, but anyway, go on. Well, one astrophysicist in particular happens to be a black woman who has very much made a name for herself as being like the leading anti-racist, in the field of physics, which is fine. Like if you, you know, there's, well, I'm not sure if she's, yeah, anyway, going. There's racism everywhere in society.

Like, the progressives are wrong. It's like, you know, you'll find racism in, in every academic field and every. Yeah, but not systemically, I would argue. Anyway. The point is that racism is an ineradicable disease. Yeah. Part of the human condition. And if you look hard enough, and sometimes you don't have to look that hard, you, you will find it.

So I, I'm just saying this because. If this woman, if you want to say, I'm going to be the leading light of anti-racism in physics, that's fine. That's great. Just, you know, tell us, tell us to be pointing. However, the story was complicated here because this guy who did this incredible forensic project, Hakeem, he published a book, sort of a biographical book about his own experience in physics, around the same time that this woman, again, who had branded herself as kind of like, you know the leading light of black of of anti-racism among black physicists and it turns out like there had been this sort of like political struggle or quixotein that had gone on in the association of black physicists not all which i understood but like well as far as i can tell that's largely invented too by the way by by by the woman as far as he wasn't quite he he basically said he never knew about any of that stuff it was all new to him It seems like he had done this bad stuff, but she didn't provide a lot of detail.

And the difference was, by the way, he grew up in Watts and New Orleans, in a drug-dealing family and had no, it's amazing. His education came where it was. And she grew up in sort of a more affluent. She's at least half-Jewish, right? Yeah, half-Jewish. And it turned out, by the way, I wasn't going to go in the details, but I read his whole book in preparation for the interview. And he was craved. There were no books where he grew up.

I mean, he was poverty in its extreme sense. And he eventually, you know, he found roots. That was one. But he found the rise and fall of the Third Reich. And he started to read it. And he didn't. And what he said is he never heard about Al Hitler. And at the beginning, he thought, oh, this guy's a hero.

And it took him a while. And he says that in there. And then, of course, he gets criticized for everybody saying, how dare you be a Hitler defender? And in any case, it's kind of. It, because he made a joke about it, I think the fact that he was so ignorant. By Albert Speer, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was architect. In any case. But as far as I can tell, yeah, so anyway, go on. No, so she's very privileged, say, half Jewish, which to my mind makes it a half shonda. And I was just so impressed journalistically at all the research he had done. And at the end of the day, what it turns out is James Webb, far from being. like the dynamo of homophobia within, you know, the McCarthy era Washington, like hardly distinguished himself as a homophobe.

You know, again, he was a creature of his age, but to the extent you're going to acknowledge the roots of NASA and of the exploration of space in any figure in Washington. Like you're just, you're going to come across people like Webb. And if not just that, he also discovered that Webb not only but worked incredibly hard against racism in NASA and actually worked extreme. So, you know, that's what that's what apparently hit how came first because he assumed that what was a homophiles. He assumed, you know, that what he read was right. And but then when he started to investigate Webb, he discovered that internally Webb had worked really hard against discrimination in another aspect of NASA and said,

that doesn't jive. Why would a personality who was working so much, because racism was prevalent back then, just as much homophobia? Why would someone who'd fight that tie against that tide be so much to jump on this tide? And that's what caused his skepticism and caused him to begin to do the journalistic. This is a true empirically driven mind. Yeah. And so it's great that he was on the podcast because he's quite fascinating. And for him to admit that he read Horizon Decline of the Third Reich and that, you know, You know, he sounds like he's very self-aware about like, yeah, because he, how ignorant, you know, he was of this stuff back then. But like, on the other hand, how many people ignorant or not are willing to like rise in the cloud of the Third Reich is not an easy read.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's, but guys, people like that who are auto-di-dicts, at least in some respects, and are incredibly open-minded and let the evidence drive their beliefs instead of vice versa. they're rare words. Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's, you think, the reason I wanted to bring this up was not just to criticize or to, but the, the, the reason is it's endemic of what, you know, I'm trying to pick up bits of your, of the stories you covered that reflect things that concern me about society. One was, so the indigenous thing that was, again, the media and politics sort of

taking faith over fact. I cover social parents. I tend to cover social parents. Yeah, yeah. And, and here is someone who, who finds the imperialist. evidence and the scientific community should laud him. And then what you find out is, is you've got to begin to worry about some factors of the scientific community. Because instead, I mean, the whole point of science, as he and I discussed, is scientists love in principle to find out the wrong. Yeah, because that's what science is all about, because it means science has progressed.

You know, you want to, first of all, prove your colleagues wrong when you go into work every day. And you want to often find out you're wrong because it means, hey, there's a whole new things to discover. So you'd think the scientific community who would promulgated this, this, what turns out to be a myth, would say, wow, this is amazing. But instead, they dug in harder, which is the signature of a dogmatist and an ideologue. And so one, it just raises your intent to be worried about when a fraction of the scientific community will react so strongly against it that not only do they disagree. agree with it and refuse to accept it, which is again, like we talked about climate change or, or, you know, when people refuse to accept the evidence because they so strongly believe it, but then begin to attack the messenger, which is a really even a worse problem.

Well, yeah, I mean, part of this is careerism. If you're an administrator, it doesn't matter to have to be in physics or any other field. You can advance your reputation by saying, I discovered that X is racist and I will dedicate only efforts to eradicating X. Yeah, by virtue signaling. In fact, you don't have to say you discovered. All you have to say is that social media has discovered it. And now I will get ahead of the group by somebody then comes and says, that's fantastic. Just so you know, we checked it out and it turns out X isn't so bad.

If you're that administrator, at Butler, Lawrence, I would say if you, if you're, you or I were in that situation, we might come to the same conclusion. Do you really want to be the person at the meeting of, you know, the university board of governors or, you know, your weekly brunch with the university president saying, hey, remember that long lecture I gave you about how he had to strip X's name off all the institutions at the university? Yeah, it turns out I was wrong. And let's just like put the cabosh and all that. Who wants to have that conversation? Well, it's even more. Yeah.

Who wants to have the conversation, but it's actually, and I think people of integrity and you should have that conversation. But it's worse. It's ridiculous. It's like saying, no, but I actually think, having seen this, that it's a calculated decision. Let me, let me see what, what, you know, what the, where is my red buttered? What's the, what's the percentage in just in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in, in being unfair at person X versus the percentage in being in front in front of a social issue

even if you know even if and I see this happen in universities all the time they knowingly are willing to throw people under their bus because there's no percentage in in doing the opposite also James Webb is dead you can't rival the dead which is it that principle is as operative in the culture war as it is in and to show how bad it was yeah there were journals who are now unfortunately becoming old, who bigly said, when this first was promoted with, again, without doing any research, we will not, we'll use the term word, the initials, J-W-S-T, in our journal, but we will not allow people to say the word James Webb.

And that's like, it's sort of like, don't say Voldemort. Yeah. Like there's this idea that like certain cursed words, like, will summon the withering of crops and the barrenness of women. Yeah. Like it really does revert to a kind of pre-modern form of thinking that words become magic spells. It's medieval. It's you hit the word. It really. It really is medieval. And it comes from people who say we should follow the evidence in every aspect of our lives, which is true. And they abide by that when it comes to, you know, when it's in there.

And vaccines and stuff that I agree with. Yeah. But then it's like, again, they go back in time 400 years. in their thinking what it comes to. I don't want to be like we're casting stone because the point is we're all that way. We're all hardwired to want to believe. And it's really hard. And that one of the, you know, I promote science for a variety of reasons,

but it is a good training to discover on how to react when you're wrong. It's, and it's, and I, you know, so it happens all the time in science. It's really hard when you believe something to be true. You did that. You did that in your most recent article. So in passing, you described how there are at least two methods of determining the existence of exoplanets. And one is based on the interruption of light, based on when exoplanets travel in front of a star.

And the other is based on the perturbations, orbital perturbations that take place in the star itself. due to the movement, the deflections based on the minute gravitational effect of the planet. And you, I forget which of those two methods, you admit it said, plainly said, I didn't think this method would work. And it did work. And it did work. So I liked that. In fact, I didn't believe either method would work.

So there you go. Oh, okay. Wow. So what are I doing on this podcast? No, I was, I just, that's why, you know, I admire people are willing to spend the 20 years of their life at a fruitless effort. That's what experiment us often do. But I said, well, it's just not going to, I can't see how you could,

how you could measure a star moving. And roughly, I mean, if you really want to detect Earth-like planets around our sun, you'd have to look at the motion of the sun at a speed that's not much faster than you walk. And it's amazing that people could do that. And I was shocked. And I'm never, I never ceased to be. in awe of the ability of experimentalists to exceed my wildest expectations about what's possible. And yeah, and I love it, but you know, I love it. I mean, right? I mean, because then it means

you can do things you didn't think you'd do before. And anyway, it worries me and it's a worrisome about science. And then the last thing I want to, I want to cover was your, I think a masterpiece of, of investigative reporting about this McMaster, this imaginary sex ring. You know, one of, one of of the earliest you may not know her and her name was on the tip of my tongue a second ago Elizabeth um oh my god i was Elizabeth Weiss no no not Elizabeth Weiss who's an anthropologist do I know um oh my god i was just going to tell you and now we're got but what an amazing psychologist who's been it reminded me she was instrumental in these you may remember these court cases of people beginning to be by theorists, by therapists, beginning to have recovered memories.

Elizabeth Loftus. Elizabeth Loftus. Yeah, and Elizabeth is a hero of mine and always has been and she was one of her earliest podcasts. And Elizabeth Loftus plays, I'm not sure if I name checked her in my article, but she indirectly played an important role, which we can discuss in the McMaster story. Well, that'd be great because, yeah, let's talk about that, because it reminded me of that of this, of therapists giving these imagined memories and this whole there were people who were tried or the people who lost their whole careers their kids and it was all

imagine yeah yeah it was just I know from personal anecdotal knowledge of family that was broken up by an unsubstantiated quote unquote recovered memory of sexual abuse that was weaponized and to

completely innocent parents became estranged from a child. And then the rest of the family had to essentially choose sides about who to believe because you can't, it's a sort of thing you can't say, well, you know, maybe there's truth. Like if you're saying, oh, you sexually abused your five-year-old, you either believe it or you don't. Yeah. And so it destroyed the whole family. Yeah, yeah. And Elizabeth, that's why she is a hero. Because, you know, a lot of people have done significant academic work. and I know, I mean, I like to think I have, but it hasn't, you know, as I like to say, it has had no, no, no, she's a great school. Impact whatsoever on the, on the, on building better toasters or cars.

People tried to cancel her too. Yeah, yeah. And so she actually, her work, and by appearing in these court cases, yeah, she got vilified. Because by the way, she did, she did agree to be, you know, listen to the O.J. Simpson, you know, her attitude was, oh, you know, let me just see what, what this is. and yeah, you get vilified if you're if you're on the wrong side. But she's a hero and I'm happy to mention her name many times. But the McMaster, your story here reminded me of that a lot.

And so why don't you give us a brief, Tracy, of what the story is about. As you said, it says, it's a 13,000-word story, although I did subsequently on Quillette published a 2,000-word piece that summarized the story. Yeah, in fact, it's a nice story. Summary, I was going to, I looked at that. And maybe not everybody's going to read 13,000 words, but if you Google McMaster and Quillette, you'll find both stories. But McMaster University is a prestigious research university in Hamilton, Ontario, which is about an hour and change west of Toronto. And the psychology department is quite well known there.

It's technically referred to as P&B, which is psychology, neuroscience, and behavior. And it was rocked by scandal in 2020 when it was alleged that a professor there, his name of Scott Water, was sexually abusing graduate students, female graduate students. and then subsequently it was alleged that there was a whole sex ring. The allegation was that this included his wife and included even more oddly the long-term girlfriend of the main complainant. So the allegation was that there was a whole conspiracy of people. both the main complainant and the main complainant's girlfriend were grad students in the psychology department. So all of the main players here are either grad students or professors. And then there were these other, as it turned out, completely innocent professors who were dragged in.

And, you know, posters were put up in certain parts of the campus. Like if you see this professor, if you see this woman, you know, call security, the suggestion being that these were dangerous sex criminals. Everyone was suspended. These ominous warnings were sent out to the whole university community. We have received unsettling reports of blah, blah, blah. It turned out all of the sex ring stuff was just absolutely complete fabricated nonsense. It's absolutely true that one of the professors, Scott Water, was having a consensual, I don't even want to call it an affair because that term isn't used. It's not even clear they had sex. but there was a sexual component to their relationship.

It was, I should say, a very unwholesome type of thing. And he was subsequently disciplined by the university, but not on the basis that it was any kind of sex ring, but on the basis that he had used his authority as a professor to purport to give mental health advice to this grad student, who herself was in the throes of depression and had a lot of other issues. She was cutting herself,

and he had this kind of sexual relationship with her and was sort of, as I said, purporting to give her mental health advice. The whole thing was very unseemly, but it had nothing to do with any kind of, like, sex ring. All of that was a social panic. But it was a social panic that destroyed the reputations of about a half dozen scholars. They were thrown off campus.

Their offices were ransacked. they were completely shamed in front of their peers and the department itself fell into chaos because they all of the scholars represented a substantial fraction of the PNB department and so there were just dozens of people whose their thesis work had to be reassigned it affected

the knock-on effects affected probably more than 100 people and what was interesting was a lot of these social panics get debunked I should say there was a second main accuser who impressed me greatly because the second accuser basically supported a lot of the things that the first accuser, who turned out to be a fabulous, had said. But this second accuser later admitted that she had been in the throes of a psychiatric episode and that she was in crisis and very suggestible. She had just watched Netflix's document.

on Jeffrey Epstein and imagined that a lot of this had happened at McMaster. But as awful as that sounds, to her great credit, she stepped forward, I mean, not publicly, but stepped forward to those who were investigating it and said, I'm really sorry and I'm ashamed, but this, this didn't happen. Which is we're talking about admitting you're wrong. I mean, imagine the stakes in admitting that. That's just a huge thing. I was very impressed.

But it also says something that university officials didn't detect the fact that this was a person in crisis and used her testimony and say, oh, look, we have a second source on this. And it was on that basis. In fact, just days after this woman formalized her complaint to the university that many of these people were suspended. So that was an incredible thing. And one thing that I say in the article is that it had a sort of unusual ending because a lot of the time you hear about these social panics and there's no consequences. What was interesting about this is that the P&B department at McMaster fought by it and not just the people who had been shamed and wrongly accused. In fact, they were under instruction, as is often the case, that they couldn't say anything. It's sort of like the Title IX investigations of United States.

I mean, obviously we don't have Title IX in Canada, but it was something similar where they were kind of, they weren't allowed to say anything. They weren't even allowed to contact their colleagues. They weren't allowed to continue their academic research. Yeah. In one case, a woman, the wife of Scott Water, who was completely innocent woman, her name Dragg Through the Mud for a year, she was told by the University of administration she couldn't complete an economic project with her dying father. It was also a psychologist. Yeah. On the other side of the world, he lived in Australia, he ended up passing away.

the whole thing was absolutely nuts. However, because it was so nuts, the P&B department as a whole fought back. And again, not just those who were attacked. And in part, this was because a man who was at the time, the chair of the department, his name is Bruce McMillan, if I'm getting the name right, is an expert on among other things memory.

and I got a whole trove of documents, internal correspondence involving all of this, which just made, the documents made my jaw drop. And some of them that I didn't even reproduce because it was just by reproducing them, I would have out at some of my sources and some completely innocent people. But in some of his correspondence, Bruce McMillan, again, the chair, then the chair of the PMB department, in warning the university, in mid-2020, you are embarking on something, really dangerous and misguided here, appended four attachments which consisted of peer-reviewed academic studies of recovered memory syndrome, including if I think they were articles by

Elizabeth Loftus. And he said, there was a two-page letter for I remember in not so many words, you should learn from history here because both of the main complainants were offering what were claimed to be a recovered memory because the primary complaint had come forward in early 2020 and said, oh, you know, I was sexually abused by by Scottwater. And then months later, came back and said, oh, I have all these recovered memories. It turns out those of all sex were involved. And I think a layperson could ask themselves whether it's plausible that those recovered memories would assert themselves in that way, especially in a way that as, you know, sort of mirrors a lot of those stuff from Jeffrey Epstein stuff that was then in the news.

And, and I said in the article, you know, if this had been the geology department or the botany department, I don't know if my master has a botany department. I don't know if anyone has a botany department. But it seems like an antique word. But, you know, or the mathematics department, I think the university administration would not have been called out for their, complete mismanagement of this. But because it was psychologists, because it was people to study human behavior and the fallibility of memory,

they came forward and I have, you know, recordings of them confronting university officials over Zoom because a lot of this played out in the first months of the pandemic. Basically saying, you know, how are you presuming to lecture us about things like, you know, sexual trauma? things like, you know, when people are being honest and when they're lying, about memories, about witness recollections, like a lot of these people studied,

I've studied these things for decades. And the university president, who's a chemist by the name of David Farrar, inorganic chemist, I think he deals with metallic compounds or something like that. You know, he started spouting all this mumbo-jumbo about, like, trauma-informed discourse. I mean, it's just like this complete clamp trap that had clearly been provided for him as a sort of a set of lines to be read out by his DEI people. Yeah, I mean, the whole thing was mortifying, but it wouldn't have ended up on my desk, and it wouldn't have ended up in my article had it not been for the fact that these were,

you know, world-class scholars in the field of psychology who felt, and also the fact that there were women involved. You know, it's one thing to say, this guy, Scottwater, did all this stuff. We have seen examples of this. You know, if someone, you know, 10 years ago came and said, oh, there's this guy named Harvey Weinstein. You know, he did all this horrible stuff and no one's been talking about it for 20 years. You know, you'd be skeptical. Really, no one's been talking about it? He did all this stuff to all this women's shirt, like, you know, sure, pal, like that's the BS.

But it was true. And I acknowledged that in the article. So that's all sorts of examples of stuff like this being hushed up. Even as I was publishing the article, it was an example of the UK press. of an esteemed columnist who, it turns out for years, has been sexually harassing people. And there were efforts to turf him out.

He was an alcoholic by his own admission. But those efforts have been stymie. But that was one guy. In the case of McMaster, it was alleged there was an entire sex ring that included at least two female members. And I think, you know, sort of the equivalent of Giseland,

Maxwell types based on Jeffrey Epstein president. And I think people are like, wait a sec, this is kind of like Hollywood movie stuff. And it made people skeptical. So I think it was the sheer scope of the false allegations. Okay. Okay. But let me point. I mean, this is a fascinating story.

But I didn't bring it up because it's salacious, although it is. And it's, you know, people are always interested in salacious news. And this is a clear example. What I wanted to do actually was based on your second article, which I think is more, I mean, I think what's more important is what do we learn from this? The first one was the reporting. My 13,000 words of the reporting, but then as you say, a second article was based on like what are the policy results? Yeah. I mean, my reason for bringing up all of these things is ultimately to lead us to the question of how can we, what can we do as journalists, as scientists, as members of the public, to try and ensure that these ideological abuses or dogmatic abuses or psychologically. sick abuses, you know, are dealt with correctly. And so, yeah, in your second piece, the lessons, which is entitled, I think, the lessons

from an academic social panic, I found particularly worth talking about. And it's those lessons because I will say, you know, you're probably even less, I'm less susceptible to being suspicious of the university bureaucracy, of the university bureaucracy that is, that is, in my opinion, like a cancer has taken over universities in terms of forbidding, in terms of requiring obeance to ideas that may or may not be relevant, right? And totally without control of the, I mean, universities, I happen to think universities should be run by academics. And in this case, uniroocracies are now run by people who are not academics who are not part of the mission of university but are controlling what's happening there

and that's a you know my view and it may be extreme but it's i i see it more and more and you and i and in this thing you talk about exactly how some of the fact that this that these that this panic could be could take on such an official role first of all and secondly such a role which was harmful to the people involved are things we should look at. And you talk about ways to try and ensure that might not happen again. So I wanted to walk you through some of that. Sure. Well, one of the conclusions that I came to was that there has to be some way for university officials. And I realize the standards differ from university to university, but there has to be some way for university officials to dismiss complaints on a summary basis that just don't make sense or are crazy.

That doesn't rely on a one-year process involving an external investigator. Because at the center of this controversy was the fact that you had women who came forward to something called the SVPRO, which is sexual violence prevention and response office. which essentially was run by one person at this time. And this one person was in charge of educating members of the university community about sexual abuse. If you thought you'd been sexually abused at the university, you came forward to this person.

This person would then coach you and how to do a proper complaint. It's not unusual. It's the norm, by the way. This person was then the intake official for the complaint. The judge is also the prosecutor. It's also, yeah. This person would then decide if your complaint met intake

requirements and then this person would also serve on a mandatory basis based on university protocols which were then in place on something called the response team which would judge for instance so-called interim measures including interim suspensions so you had one person who naturally not to cast aspersions on this who this one person was this person became very highly vested in the narratives of the people she was helping and you know to be fair people do get sexually abused. And, you know, McMask universities, tens of thousands of members of the university community,

it would be unusual if a community that large didn't have legitimate instances of sexual abuse. When people come forward, they deserve to be treated with respect. And it is not unpredictable that this person would become vested in what she regards is the truth of these complaints that come forward and then respond accordingly when she, she's wearing a different hand and she has to judge, you know, interim measures or impose and stuff like this.

I talk about how there absolutely has to be checks and balances. And in the same way, like obviously we're not dealing with protocols of real criminal justice and all the constitutional safeguards that attacks there too. But even in the administrative campus setting, you can't just have one person be judge and jury. Like it just, it absolutely makes no sense. the other thing is as I wrote there has to be some way to dismiss completely complaints that are just untethered from reality one thing that emerged from my research is that the reason that even when it was clear that these sex ring accusations made no sense the university didn't seem to have any formal protocols that allowed its officials to say this is crazy like he's dismissed once it's yeah once you reach the nominal theoretical intake requirements for a sexual violence complaint, you have to call on an external investigator with all, you know, that could take a year. And meanwhile, you're thrown off campus. And, and I put the question to the university officials, they answered some of my questions, as I detailed me articles, but not all of them. I said, you know, this was a case where you had five or six academics who were accused of like being in a sex ring. And they got, and five of them got suspended from university. And your response is, well, we take this trauma-informed approach and trauma can mess with your brain. So you could say, well, the person had two heads.

So, but, you know, that could be the result of trauma. That's why they got the facts mixed up. And we're going to, as long as you are accusing somebody of sexual violence and you meet that basic nominal intake threshold for the complaint, we're going to, we're going to unroll all of this machinery of justice, including apparently, they'd be hiring an external investigator. And I put the question to them and says, well, in this case, I think it's unfair to call it machinery of justice. But any case, go on.

We're going to enroll this bureaucratic machinery. It lies somewhere between machine of justice and inquisition. Let's say there's some continuum. Yeah. But even let's say, but this investigator, by the way, was highly competent. Sure. I mean, that's one thing I acknowledged in the article. It was a woman named Catherine Montpetit,

who at least in regard to the individual cases, she was ruthless in getting after the facts. And at least one complainant, this woman who was used to everybody at the university treating what she was saying as gospel, suddenly Mopati was having none of it, and she actually withdrew from the process because she was like, wait a sec, this was satisfying when people believe my story, but now they're asking me hard questions. But I put the questions to university. What if instead of five people, what if 50 people had been accused? What if the university president had been accused?

what if the woman running the SVPRO herself had been accused of sexual abuse? Would she have been suspended? Would the university president have been suspended? Would the board of governors have been suspended? Like, because that kind of would have made as much sense as a lot of the elements in the science fiction Epstein-like narrative that we're seeing. They wouldn't answer those questions. They just kept repeating ranchers about how, you know, were trauma-informed.

And again, there's a grain of truth to all this. Is it true that people sometimes garble their recollections of actual events based on suffering trauma? Of course it's true. You know, there's famous examples of Holocaust survivors who say wrong things. They say, oh, you know, there was a factory that made soap out of our bone and stuff like this. This is a famous case. This is 30, 40 years ago. That was on Donahue, of all things.

And no one is saying, well, this survivor got the fact wrong. So therefore, the Holocaust didn't happen. You'd have, you know, only anti-Semitic lunatics are saying things like that. However, to extrapolate from that and say, well, you know, we want to be trauma informed, so we're going to strip ourselves of the ability to dismiss on a summary basis even the most far-fetched claims means you're going to get a lot of false positives. And at some point, you have to be able to do that or you're just going to ruin lives. Well, let me let me come back. I mean, I think you've made an extremely important point. And I think I will come back at you and say, I think the, as long as there's no, as long as these other offices do not report to ultimately an academic administration, but run independently, then the academic administration will feel like they have, well, they'll be terrified of, of responding and saying, this case should be just dismissed.

And so it's this independent bureau infrastructure that's occurring, obviously, in McMaster, but I've seen it happen in many other institutions where literally they're not answerable. And it would be the same to say, hold on, this doesn't pass muster, as it would be to say that the indigenous graves might not be, might not be, it's almost exactly the same. To be viewed as saying you are a, you're enabling rather than, rather than helping. To be fair, because I realize that the organizational architecture is different at all universities. And at some universities, the DEI department operates as a kind of power unto itself. However, at McMaster, the architecture has changed somewhat, but the SVPRO, which was then part of something called the EIO, answered to the provost, VP Academic, who then is now, is a woman named Susan Ty, TIG, H.E.

And so it was, at least if you look at the org chart, within the power of the provost, to ask hard questions about all this. I don't think it would have been in Susan Tye's remit to simply walk in and say, well, I dismiss this case, that case, and the other case. It's often in org charts, but, you know, but, morally speaking, it's a different. And I have to say, by the way, one has to give credit to McMaster, because I've also seen most universities don't even hire an external investigator. It's right. The investigation is also done by the person who takes the original data or somewhere other thing. And I've seen it over and over happen. So yeah.

Where there's no one thing McMaster, or at least this investigator got right. The other thing that I say is that to some extent, this is a case of university administrators being overresourced. Because at every important decision point where leadership was required and you had Susan Ty Provost, David Farrar as the University President, they didn't want to make a decision. So they just, they hired a law. I think I cataloged there's like three or four different law firms that were brought in to investigate or, you know, to facilitate a listening session or, you know, to advise and best practices.

They brought in a communications firm when they screwed up the original messaging and essentially leaked the names of all the people they had suspended despite the fact that They didn't actually say their names, but instead they just leaked all this information that allowed everybody, including student journalists, to figure out who had been suspended. Millions of dollars have been paid out to various third parties. They had a guy from Baker McKenzie, sort of gold-plated Bay Street law firm, multinational law firm who was on speed dial whenever they needed. His name was George Avram, memory serves. you know, as their fixer essentially during this entire crisis, millions and millions of dollars in legal costs.

And whenever they were presented with any kind of opportunity to nip this thing in the bud, it was just like, let's kick the ball down the field for another six months or 12 months and have another investigation and bring in a consultant. But you can understand, I mean, I think the point is, we need to understand that that's a natural response. Why would you want to nip?

If you nip in the bud, suddenly, you're seen on social media as protecting potential. It's so much easier to pass the buck or to just even more aggressively get in front and say we're going to devote all the resources of this institution to make sure that, because it plays well to the public, it plays well to the media,

it plays well social media, and to students and families. And so the question, and you know, to come down to these issues of how can we what can we do it's it's a generic case of of of how can we encourage a system that doesn't encourage people to do the easy or or popular especially media popular thing whether it's vaccines or from china or or indigenous or or in this case it's a deep problem that and that's the reason i'm bringing it up you know it's a huge problem in terms of system

incentives because when the university did essentially, they didn't say as much, but effectively these suspended academics, all but one of them, all but Scott Water himself, who, as he said, was censured and is still fighting for to keep his job through internal tribunal mechanisms, all of them were exonerated, effectively exonerated and brought back to work. when the university through gridded teeth I should say announced as much and actually gave what I think was a deceptive

a school-wide announcement which it's like they were they couldn't bring themselves to say they were wrong yeah it was just pathetic and one of the main bones of contention that remains among

the grievers within PNB they were at least able to say hey this wasn't our decision and this was this independent investigator named Catherine Montpetit, although I don't think they used her name, and they were able to strip themselves of any moral agency and say, hey, we got complaints, there's this investigator.

And this is part of a theme where if you look on the McMaster website, they make this big song and dance of like our leadership team, our leaders who provide leadership in things like in leaderology. Like they can't shut up about how they, They're these great grandees who preside over the campus with their wonderful leadership. But then when you actually look at a case study like this, the absolute last thing any single one of them wants to do is lead. They attach their name to exactly the kind of decision that any real leader would do and say, what? Our university is being, our tired department is being destroyed by these bat-shit accusations about a sex ring that everyone here knows is crazy.

but no one in this room will say so. And so we're going to let a half dozen people have their reputations get trashed and we're going to spend $10 million and let an entire department suffer for reasons that we know, or BS, I'm a leader, this ends now. That's what leadership looks like. Well, now you've hit nail in the head. I mean, again, it's been a theme for me, but it requires leadership and integrity. And we're not seeing it in almost every area from government,

which, well, we're used to governments, perhaps not having leadership or integrity. But in academia, in scientific, I mean, for example, I'll give you an example, which I've talked, I may have talked about, Colette, but, you know, we see scientific leaders, the former Francis Collins, who was someone I know, I've known for a long time, and I guess I consider a friend in some ways, when he was head of the National Institutes of Health, said, we are the field, you know, biomedical research, NIH is systemically racist and has always been that way. Now, the point is, if you really believe that, he should have resigned, right? I mean, I mean, you know, it's just, it's just lip service. No, because he doesn't really believe it.

It's just, it's not leadership. It's not saying, hold on, we're going to, let's look and see, let's do a study. Let's try and, let's try and take this carefully. No, we, we understand that the tide of public opinion is that academia is racist or academia is this or science is this. It's systemically racist because that's now the thing of the moment. And I'll get out in front of it. So leaders, and you can understand because so much of government support, public support, donor support depends upon the public perception rather than reality. So one of the things I guess I want to hit with you as a journalist, I don't want to put all of the blame on journalists, but it's some sense.

The question is how can we assist, how can journalism, how can media assist leaders and other people to have integrity and backbone, instead of jumping on every salacious story and then never writing up a story about it when it's wrong later on, at the New York Times. I mean, I've seen it so many examples because it's so much easier to get clicks

if you jump on the on the on the on the on the on the on the obviously salacious aspect of whatever it is and then never is it in your interest to then step back and say we're wrong or you know it just let's move on to the next next thing so is there is there a solution in an area where journalists are where journalism is so under attack financially that every that every journalistic group in some sense is vying to get attention, instead of saying we're going to, you know, we're going to just, you know, it doesn't sound as nice, but we're going to try and be rational and reasonable? Well, look, this is not a new problem. Yeah.

You know, the old expression, I forget whether it was attributed to Winston Churchill or Mark Twain, who they get attributed, you know, every famous expression. You know, a lie travels around the world while while the truth is putting on on shoes, words to that effect. You know, someone made this complaint, you know,

generations ago, and it's still somewhat the case. I like to think my own journalism provides some antidote to that, but to some extent, the problem in journalism might be getting worse. In Canada, at least, and maybe this is the case in the United States,

there is a strong symbiotic relationship between university administrators and especially local media. Yeah. So, you know, McMaster is a world-class university, as a world class university, you know, they might recruit famous scientists or whatnot. And if you're covering the academic beat or like the Hamilton Spectator newspaper or, you know, the St. Catherine's standard or, you know, the Toronto Star, like you, a lot of your bread and butter stories are going to be like interviews or profiles on, on famous academics or like, you know,

discoveries that are made in the universities or you know there's some scandal that takes place the university and you want the comms official to return your call and um and it's the case that journalism is hemorrhaging jobs and let's face it a lot of the good jobs you can get as an ex-journalist are like assistant communications department you know assistant communications manager a place like my past McMaster runs its own in-house publication i think it's called the daily news or something and sometimes when i look at the org charts it's like like 15 people who run the communication which is like more than some

Canadian magazines. Majorian newspapers, yeah. Yeah. And a lot of these people because there's a lot of money involved. I mean, it's money, right? I mean, you're trying to... It's not corruption. I don't want to say it's like... No, it's not corruption. It's just we want to get donors. I mean, the point is universities are relying on government funding and external donors and they have to therefore play to that audience.

But the same is true. But I would also say, you know, again, as someone who looks at journalism, that same connection that you're talking about. Yeah, journalists have to be pals in some sense with the university that they're covering. Same thing has been true in politics for the longest while as well. You have to have sources. The whole is oppositional. So politics, at least in the United States, you have, if you're, if you're at the Daily Caller or if you're at, I don't know, the Daily Beast or whatever,

like, you know, there's a natural oppositional thing where you've got people from both sides leaking stuff. Maybe. Except you see that, you know, if you, on the other hand, if you want to have sources, you can see that the pressure on institutions, well, I mean, in case, say, Fox News or whatever, you want to have access to the highest levels, in some sense, you have to play ball. University, so going back to McMaster, this is actually something I mentioned in the story, the local newspaper is the Hamilton Spectator. And the Hamilton Spectator covered this a ton when it was still thought that all these

allegations were real. So I went by detail. There was a reporter there. She's no longer there anymore. He was named Catherine Clark. she did a 5,400 word story detailing in every salacious, credulous, molecular level detail of the accusation, what the first complainant against Scottwater, her name, the court called her S.L. Like, every single detail is right. 5,400 is a huge story. That's a huge story for newspaper.

For a newspaper, for a newspaper. And so, and there were numerous other stories about, you know, the horrors inflicted on the school community by Scott Water. But then Scottwater was cleared of criminal wrongdoing in a 22, in open court. And then university, on top of that, university investigator determined that none of the sex ring stuff was true. And guess what?

The Hamilton Spectator lost interest. in the story real quick. This isn't a conspiracy, but imagine yourself, you know, you're Catherine Clark or any of the reporters, and if you write this tell-all about the horrors allegedly inflicted on this poor woman by this Jeffrey Epstein-like sex criminal, you can win awards in Canadian journalism. Yeah, yeah, and you don't get awards for saying this is wrong.

I'm an Australian, so I'm based in Toronto, but what does it tell you that this is three years after the McMaster, this imaginary sex scandal unfolded at McMaster University that the outlet that ended up finally writing about, because the people involved in this were shopping the story around

the Canadian outlets. I have to imagine. I mean, I don't know that for a fact, but it'd be shocking that they weren't trying to interest. I had so many sources on this story. It's just clear that people at McMaster were waiting for three years for someone to write the definitive story.

story on this, the fact that they had to come to an Australian outlet, albeit, you know, I'm a Canadian journalist, think about that, that they couldn't get anyone at the Toronto Star interested. They couldn't get anyone at the Hamilton Spectator interested. They couldn't get anyone interested local radio, CBC, my God, like this, the CBC would treat this story as radioactive. It's the opposite of believe the victim. That's, this is not something I got into because I don't want, you know, I didn't want the focus story to be. It's what I want to get into. It's the problem that we have a real issue yeah there's main there's obviously no easy solution but i want to raise it because i think the only way to change these things is get the public more aware of the situation

and and and and and that's why i think you know that's why part of the reason why we do this is we're trying to get people aware of wonderful things about the world and other things that people should be concerned with this brings us back full circle to your introduction because and by the way we've been doing this for three hours so i i think i'm going to collapse but i want to bring it like like you know the classic shape in antiquity was always the circle and I want to bring that. Yeah, that's what I was trying to do just now too. So the full circle, when you introduced me, you said, en-p-p-so, you said, oh, you write for Colette and, you know, you write for Colette and like, Colette is considered like a

bet noir among, you know, many people. It's like they call it conservative, even though it's not conservative. The reason Quillette is so controversial in certain circles is that we're not particularly conservative, but we do tell the truth about stories like this. And the story that I wrote about McMaster would be so much easier to dismiss because I know it's been making around. I get emails from people at McMaster thanking me for writing the story. If this story had appeared in like the Canadian equivalent of the Daily Caller or the Canadian equivalent of like Breitbart, people would just say, ah, you know, it's this conservative culture war trash. But because like, Quillette is absolutely not an anti-vax or publication and like, you know, half my writers are.

or LGBT and we're read mostly by liberals and academics and people in tech. Like we're not a particularly conservative publication. Quillette is regarded as all the more dangerous because we cannot be dismissed as serving a political agenda. Yeah. Like we don't write about politics typically. Like I don't, we talked before about Pierre Pueuil ever. It feels like a day ago, but it was probably a couple hours ago.

I don't write articles about how great Pierre Poliéver is. I don't write articles about how great Pierre Poli is. I don't write articles. articles about how terrible shrewdo is we don't really deal with partisan politics we deal with trends in science and academia and that's why you know that's why i've personally been attracted to writing and always amazes me that when i'm then i'm now you know people call you know right-wing conservative pundit because i write for quillette every now and then it always amuse me or for the wall street journal for that matter um but it saddens me at the same time i mean i love i'm i enjoy my

interactions with both you and claire and i really like being able to the able to write about virtually anything that I think is on this line of promoting science, reason, etc. And all I think all of the stuff I try and write in one way or another is that way, whether it's pure science or not. But it saddens me that, that, you know, I used to write all the time for the New York Times, but it's harder to get, it's just you can't, it saddens me that things have become so politicized that those stories that don't appear anymore in that Let me show you about the New York Times. It just so happens that I was looking.

So as we're having this conversation, the New York Times has been going full court press on how evil the U.S. Supreme Court is because they struck down a for rent of action. Yeah. This is at Harvard and UNC. Yeah. And then I don't know if you can see it, but this is actual survey data. Yeah. That was published today.

It turns out 69% of American survey respondents, including 58% of Democratic survey respondents agreed with the proposition race conscious admissions at Harvard a private school in the University of North Carolina a public school were unlawful. 69% of all respondents agreed with the court including 58% of Democrats.

And I was reading this. I'm a seven-day-a-week New York Times subscribers. I like the New York Times despite the politics. Me too. And I was like, wait a sec. So you just ran like 175 op-ed pieces about how the Supreme Court had been taken over by these right-wing wing-nuts who were setting us back to, you know, the days before the U.S. Civil War.

And now you're telling me, like, who are the real extremists here? You know, the 69% of people who disagree with you or the 31% of people who agree with you. And so it doesn't surprise me that your op-eds aren't being published in your... Well, I know. it saddens me because I think that's the way I want to end you know coming back to this at the beginning that's data and that should be the basis of journalism politics our society and generally if we try to base our decision making ultimately on evidence and so that i mean you know it sounds

trite to say that but that's the i mean ultimately that's the solution but how we can get there is a long is a long haul and i think we need to all be aware and not just pointing fingers at others but ourselves as well. And that's what, you know, Richard Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself. And so you have to try and prove equally hard if you're a scientist that what you, your theory is wrong as well as right. And it wouldn't be great if all of us did that more, more generally. And, and, yeah, although I'm, I'm kind of mildly shocked that Richard Feynman hasn't been canceled yet. I mean, yeah, well, he, you know, give it time. Okay. Give it time. And, and in some places he has been. I can give you some examples, but we won't go there.

I think we've had enough hot button topics. Thanks for doing this. And I think that the moral, I mean, we talked about a lot of, I think, interesting subjects, but the idea of trying to get that I think is flows through all of our discussion, including your training as an engineer, is that it's really important for all of us, journalists, academics, everyone, to question ourselves, be, willing to say we're wrong and and be open about it and base our decisions on evidence and be willing to change our mind when the evidence shows us we're wrong and wouldn't it be a great world if we

had that way and let's hope we can be in a better world and it's a better world for you having agreed to take three hours of your life to talk to me on this subject and I really appreciate it well my theory was that it would be time we'll spend and this this n equals one experiment has confirmed that I was correct thank you I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. This podcast is produced by the Origins Project Foundation, a non-profit organization whose goal is to enrich your perspective of your place in the cosmos by providing access to the people who are driving the future of society in the 21st century

and to the ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world. To learn more, please visit Origins Project Foundation. org.