TRIGGERnometry - James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian: Social Justice is a Mind Virus

Episode Date: November 24, 2019

James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian - have recently published their co-authored book 'How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide' We got to sit with them for this fascinating chat. Enjoy! Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. You may remember that a few months ago we had Helen Pluckrose on the show, who was one of the co-authors of the grievance studies papers. And I'm pleased to say today we have her co-conspirators, James Lindsay and Peter Bogossian. Welcome to Trigonometry. Just to interrupt on a very special secret location. Oh, yeah, I forgot to say.

Different location. Well, here we are. Social Justice. You guys have just been speaking at a social justice, speaking truth to social justice conference. That's correct. We were there. We enjoyed it.

Most of our audience know what social justice is about, but for anyone who doesn't, just give us a quick lowdown before we get into the meat of it. What is social justice? And isn't that a great thing, social justice? I mean, that's a good thing, isn't it, James? Social justice is two things at once, and that's the trick. So you have this nice thing that's about trying to overcome disenfranchisement and discrimination and racism, sexism, so on.

So try to make society actually more fair to treat people with respect based on mostly their immutable characteristics, although they dip into things like class a little bit. Hopefully class is still mutable. And then you have this ideology that's gone in service to this goal and kind of just upended the thing. Like to give you an idea of how upended it is, you can take some of it. There's a fellow on Twitter who has gone through some of the biggest books of the kind of the social justice academic pantheon. And it's seen like Judith Butler, for example, and starts listing, who does Judith Butler cite? And it's, you know, this postmodern philosopher, that postmodern philosopher, this lunatic, that lunatic. And then you have this guy, John Rawls, this philosopher who has this very famous book called Theory of Justice and really lays out what a socially just society would look like from a liberal perspective.

many times as he cited, hope is zero. They almost never talk about the other side of what social justice means, which is what most people think social justice means, which is what most people actually agree with and support, whether they're on the right, whether they're on the left, whether they're somewhere in the center, whether they're, you know, whatever their politics, most people agree that a more fair society is better and something worth trying to generate. And so you've got this kind of two things, like in my talk yesterday, I pointed out that, you know, even in their own books, they admit we're doing something different than what most people think. They say, you know, we do, we call ours critical social justice to distinguish it from mainstream

standpoints. And, you know, some people call it social justice to try to tap into its true commitments, but we mean something else. So there are two things. There's, there's this idea that society can be more fair. And then there's an ideology that claims to be working for that in a very specific way that's basically postmodernism, the philosophy of postmodernism and grievance as we took. And the argument you made yesterday is that essentially they're trying to have a revolution. Yeah, they're revolutionary, social revolutionaries. The goal is, don't take my word for it, go look, it's like everything they write. They want to take the current system, which would be liberal systems, advanced democracies, tear down how they work, and replace them with a social justice

system which is rooted in critical theory, which is openly not liberal, anti-liberal, in fact. And so you're saying you're talking about anti-liberal, they are not keen on freedom of speech. They tend to see freedom of speech as a right-wing issue, or my favorite term, as a racist dog whistle. I never knew what a dog whistle was, and now all I hear are dog whistles. Why is it the freedom of speech issue seen as right-wing to social justice people? That's a good question. Can I linger on something? Linger away, Peter.

Linger away. So James mentioned John Rawls, who's an American philosopher, contemporary American philosopher, recently died. The thing about John Rawls and the theory of justice is that he says that these ideas for what a just society is are rationally derivable. And he gives you experiments that you can do that are very easy to construct. You can do it in five minutes if you want. But the basic idea there is that every single individual is able to use. There's a univocality of reason. Excuse me, reason speaks in one voice.

So we're able to rationally derive principles of social justice. I don't think that the social justice advocates with an uppercase S and J. I don't think their principles are rationally derivable at all. I don't think they're univocal. I don't think an independent rational inquirer could come to the same principles. They're explicitly irrational. I mean, that's exactly right. Explicitly irrational.

And I think that's a fact. fundamental difference, but that leads into your question is if the problem with speech or the idea of speech is that you could take this in many different directions. But one is if your principles are not rationally derivable, then you need some way to enforce them. You need some mechanism there to pick up the slack between whatever the belief is and the reason that you have for believing that. And part of that is you just don't allow speech, you don't allow debates. You consider debates platforming. I think Judith Butler in an article she co-authored called it non-consensual co-platforming. It's like it sounds like some kind of sexual assault is.

Yeah, so the idea is that one person's article was put up beside another person's article and one was a pro and one was a con, which is normally. Does debate. It's how we, I'm not saying it's the best way to do it, but that's the traditional way to do it. There's no violence there. And in my talk, I spoke about how they conceptualize speech as violence, which is part of the problem.

And so they have... So they have mechanisms to enforce, but she doesn't actually mean speech as violence. He just doesn't like it. Yeah, that's all. Okay. Well, then maybe there's a different recipe for that. So they have all these mechanisms.

They have biased response teams. And then these mechanisms act to limit not just freedom of speech, but what they're really limiting is cognitive liberty. Yeah. Yeah. And so the way that I view it, it comes down to how you are free to pursue your truth. And in the social justice universe,

there is a certain truth that is an ideologically driven truth. It is a dogma. and that's just what it is. And anything that prevents you from thinking in one way, so if we can limit speech so you won't think this way, that's a good thing. But it's even more than that, and this is something you guys talked about. I remember we had Douglas Meyer in the show about two or three weeks ago, and he was talking about, I asked him,

do you feel like we live in a society where it's now dangerous to say the truth? But actually what you guys were talking about is that the whole point of social justice is to erode the concept of truth. That's correct. As an idea at all, to teach us all that there is no such thing as truth. That's correct. Truth is this invention of the patriarchy because this is who had power. And truth is a negotiation or a combat or a piece of combat essentially between competing power structures.

Right. So there is no truth anymore according to the people. Truth is, it's not quite no truth. It's the truth is relative to who's saying it and why they're saying it. And so truth is a contrivance of power. And truth is a political construct is the way they see it. So there's no truth in the sense that, you know, the correspondence theory of truth as it's called what we call true somehow corresponds to reality.

There's no truth in that regard within this. Or as, you know, some of the more moderate, even the old postmodern thinkers like Richard already put it, the truth might be out there, but we can't get it. It was kind of the idea. We're stuck in our biases and everybody has biases and everybody's biases are basically equally bad. So if there's truth out there, fine. but we can't get to it.

So it's kind of to give them as much credit as they deserve is that the truth is inaccessible. So all we have left are politics, which... So if we run with our idea for a second, let me just finish this thing, Francis. And I put this question to Helen when we had her on the show. If we were living in Nazi Germany right now,

there would be some scientific truths. that would be the product of the power structures of the time, right? We would believe scientifically that black people are inferior. Phrenology. Right. So is there not some truth to this idea that what we believe to be true, including scientifically, is a product of the power structures of the day? Is there not some truth to that?

So it's possible to call things scientific truths that don't qualify. What you often find, and this is kind of a norm that's breaking down, and maybe it needs to break down, I don't know. But I always think back in times like this to Carl Sagan, who's very famous, you know, science, he's a scientist and also a science popularizer. And unfortunately, he's mostly known for being the latter. Somebody who spoke about science very eloquently, wrote about science very beautifully. And Carl was not particularly well received for doing this. So within scientific communities, most scientists, I mean, you do have your arrogant git here and there.

But there are lots of them actually. But there's this overarching kind of norm or understanding that everything that it's doing is provisional. And I mean, when I was doing physics, physics is sort of special because physics is really hard. Anything that's not, you know, 20 or 30 years old is kind of, you know, maybe unless it has something like 5, 6 sigma confirmation levels, extremely high confirmation levels. So there's sort of this attitude that the science, which is this very cautious. self-doubting process. And then you have kind of the image of science or almost like some people call it, Scientism is like science going too far.

It's like what you would see out of a science journalist that barely understands the science. And, you know, it's like they figure out some chemical can inhibit the growth of a cancer cell or something like that and a petri dish and the cell happened to be for like a turtle or something like that. And then they write, you know, like bananas cure cancer. And science says. So the thing that gets called science may not actually be science. Once you acknowledge that, then you can say, yeah, they had a point. Things that were recognized as carrying scientific authority and promoted as such and still are promoted as such can be used as tools of power because, well, you'd be a fool to argue with science.

Therefore, it's right. Therefore, you have to defer to that. And that's actually kind of a power. Yeah. And go ahead. I think there are a few keys there. One is the provisional nature, which he just, Jim just talked about. And the other is there's the science and then there's the policy implications from that science. So there are just data points.

And I'm just talking to Michael Shermer about this, about how, if you look at global climate change, the vast majority of beliefs about global climate change fall along party lines. But that shouldn't be the case. Those are just factual. What you do about it should maybe even, of course, fall along party lines. So there are facts. Those facts are just, you know, does, does, is global warming anthropogenic, for example. It's a very complicated question, but we seem to have a convergence among people who have PhDs in climate science.

The answer to that is yes. And what we do about it is a different question. So, you know, the whole Nazi Germany thing, you take that as provisionally true, and then you ask what political inferences one can draw from that. And that is a function of the preexisting ideology and the framework in which that fits. Right. So these postmodern thinkers, you know, they were looking accurately. Well, not according to their critics at the time that their scholarship was a bit sloppy, apparently. But we'll give them a lot of credit. We'll say they were looking fairly accurately at ways that the history.

of how science was being used and, of course, finding wrong answers. The idea of science, of course, is that you go from wrong answers to less wrong answers to less wrong answers. It's not that you go to right answers. It's less wrong all the way down. And so this is happening, but if the answer is just less wrong, it's still wrong. And so you had these theorists like Foucault in particular, and Michelle Foucaulte was very interested in saying, oh, well, we thought about homosexuality this way and this era,

and that was wrong and it caused all these problems. and then we got a little bit more knowledge, and we thought about homosexuality in this other way, or it was also madness. He did homosexuality and madness, where it was two big things that he investigated like that. And now, you know, we thought about this way, and it still caused all these problems.

Then we thought about it this way later, and it still caused all these problems. But if you look, it's like the scale of the problems actually just keeps getting smaller. It does cause problems, but the scale of the problems is shrinking. But he doesn't say that. He says, oh, well, there were problems, and then there were still problems, and then there were still problems.

So it's just a cynical read on the history of progress. Look, I spend a lot of time telling you what's wrong with the world, so let me tell you about something that's actually right. Sleep, specifically getting more of it, better quality, the kind where you wake up and feel like a human being, rather than someone who's been thrown down a staircase. Most mattresses are just layers of synthetic foam and crossed fingers. You're spending a third of your life on the thing,

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slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. And touching on science as well, you were talking in both your speeches, some very exciting developments that the social justice movement has done in science, including woke engineering. Walk engineering. Yeah, which I thought I'm particularly brilliant actually,

because driving over a bridge isn't exciting enough. You want to make it more excited. I was thinking of woke helicopters. So what is woke science and how is it actually infected the scientific community? So the idea there is that, again, who is asking the questions and for what purpose? So science asks questions, tries to answer them. Who is asking those questions and for what purpose are they asking them? That's what's at the heart of what's going on.

And so it is a realignment of the commitments of who's going to get to ask the questions and what the purposes are. and their purposes are going to be social justice, emancipation or liberation, which means following their rules. So something like woke engineering would, first of all, prioritize changing the way the engineering is taught, the way the engineering is engaged, and maybe there's something to this in some degree, so that more women are interested, particularly women, would be interested in becoming engineers. Is that not quite a sexist concept, this idea that you have to be. to change engineering to get women to be interested. Yeah, Helen Pluckrose is really keen to say that what this actually does is just continues

the old sexist idea that men are the default human. And if women aren't making choices in the same proportions as men, then they must be, something must be wrong. It used to be the view. So this is really common, is to get the same thing backwards and kind of go the opposite direction with it. They used to be that, you know, women didn't have access or something like that or were told that they couldn't, you know, you're not good at math because you're a girl kind of attitude. And now it's the system itself must be the thing that's keeping women out.

Oh, we socialize women to think that they're bad at math or we socialize women not to be interested in working with bridges and helicopters or, you know, city streets or whatever it happens to be. And if we just change how we educate people, especially women, but also boys so that they don't get too encouraged, you know, however, then we can kind of twist the system so that more and more women will become interested. See, in other words, they think that it's this weird social forces, systemic social forces. Like Slatism. Right. It can't possibly be that there's some psychological difference on average, not in any specific individual. Because they're all biology analysts. Right.

Well, the evidence, I mean, the Baron-Cohen studies on infants and stuff. it's very clear. Right. There are fundamental. That's a few value evidence. Yeah. So on average, there seem to be some differences. And of course, now we're talking in statistics and people freak out when you talk in

statistics because they see, oh, on average, it's different. That means you think that they're different. Well, not for most people. Most people land in the overlapping zone in the middle. When you get out on the end, which is where you have in particular your high performers in any given field, who's going to become an engineer, the people who are worse at it? No, the people who are best at it. And so the highest performing,

people with engineering talent are likely to become engineers in many cases. And if it happens that the averages are even slightly different, the statistical bell curves, you're going to end up having more men, say, than women who are interested. Same reason why prisons are filled with men, right? The most violent people are men, therefore that's who fills the prisons, right? And so this approach to thinking about the world that's taken up by social justice is what's called social constructivist.

And so what it believes is that that can't possibly be the result of anything innate to biology and men and women. That has to be the result of how society treats men and women. And so if we can just shatter society and rebuild it to where we don't treat men and women different in any way. Yeah, we should probably linger on that because I'm sure you have a question because that's such a weird idea. It's properly weird. I mean, it is. It's almost like the term for its defamiliarization. They often use that concept.

It's almost like Helen describes it really well. It was like an alien came down and has never seen a sexually reproducing species before, a sexually dimorphic species before, and is trying to, without interacting and not reading, you know, the science or anything, just watching from above trying to figure out why is this happening. And all they can see are the social interactions. They say, oh, well, boys tend to play with trucks and Legos or whatever, and girls tend to play with these other, you know, dolls and whatever.

And so clearly the parents are giving them the dolls and their grandparents are buying them this kind of toy versus that kind of toy. And they're being told, this is what it's like, these are a boy. You know, there's a viral video in around if you guys watch it. If you haven't, you should watch it like 30 times with the kids or two little boys are stepping on the trash pan lid and it pops up, hit them in the face and they laugh and laugh. It's like, everybody's like boys. Yeah.

No, so they would, they would look at this and say, well, someone has, clearly taught those boys that violence is fun and funny. And so we have to figure out who's teaching them that. And they think that it's not just that their parents or grandparents, but it's a thing that's pervasive through all of us.

We're all complicit, they say, in this system of socialization. And so basically imagine that every possible behavior you can imagine is somehow learned by being taught that by society. There's nothing innate. We're the only, you're the only,

animal without any kind of instinct. Right. And if you can somehow change the institutions in society, you can create an equality of outcome. Right. And so this isn't, let me be fair, this isn't totally crazy because we are in a species that's like a hypersocial, ultra social, I think is a phrase for it. So there is a lot of actual, you know, social influence in these things. And if you look at history, it's very clear. You can mold and bend that. The thing is, if there's an underlying in biology, which shouldn't be a controversial point, then there are also limits to how far that can be molded and bent, and that's where they cross off the rails. Almost everybody, people, when we get into this conversation, think, oh, there's the biology

people, and then there's the social construction people. That's an incorrect characterization. There's the social construction people, and then there are the biology plus social constructive people, and then you have a handful of weirdos that are like, no, it's all biology. A handful of weirdos that basically nobody respects. almost everybody that's reasonable on the topic recognizes that biology plays some influence. Covariant.

Yeah. And socialization plays some role and those interact somehow. And then you have these social constructionists who are like, nope. They're the way there's on the other end. You're the way there's on the other end, but there's not a few of them. There's a lot of them.

And so we're talking about this. And there are some merits to what they're saying, not a lot, but there's some merits. Why is it so dangerous? Why can't we just say, look, you know, if these people have these ideas, that's fine, and they're more than welcome to them. And it's a broad church. You should read some of the accounts.

They're charming online where somebody is, you know, talking about the challenges and trials and tribulations of raising a gender neutral child. They decide that they're going to raise their child without any reference to gender identity. They're, you know, they're always going to, not going to put them in blue or pink or whatever, the different thing, the trucks into it. And they're like, why is my little girl always choosing dolls, no matter how many times I can buy her a truck? Or why is she putting a dress on the truck? You know, we try not to have gendered behavior, and she just keeps choosing it. What do I do? She must be picking it up from society everywhere.

So when you start to, how is it so dangerous? I don't know how trying to force something on somebody that doesn't match whatever their proclivities are doesn't result in something. that's at least suboptimal. Psychologically alien. Like, I grew up in the southeastern U.S., which is a little bit behind the times. And so in the Bible, maybe I don't know if you've read that book, it's an interesting. Hey, man, I'm from Russia. We're still living in there.

Yeah. Well, in the Bible, you may know that they mention, it's like 27 times that being left-handed is a sin. It's something that the devil is sinister or whatever. So I actually know one person who, because he was born left-handed, had his left-hand tied to his body until he was something like seven years old for most things, especially when he was at school or having to do writing tasks. So we had to learn how to use his right hand, even though he's left-handed. And there's been some study.

There's enough people that have gone through this to where there's been some studies on these people. And what you find out is that they're almost always as adults ambidextrous. So they can use both hands very well. The thing is that all the evidence we have points to the idea that they will never be as good with either of their hands as they would have been with their left hand if you had just leaned into what their natural proclivity was. And so there's the threat there of... Well, you're limiting people. Limiting people.

There are further threats, of course, which is if you think that the mechanism for something is if you have the wrong diagnosis for the disease, the prescription you give is probably going to be wrong. So if the prescription, if you believe that, oh, well, my child won't conform to the non-gender roles that I'm trying to force upon him or her. What do I do? It must be society. Now you have this mission. Well, I have to break society because it's perverting my child. And so at that point, you're limiting your child potentially, which you also get bent on this mission that tries to break apart the structures of society. But if the structures of society have some correlation to

the same underlying problems that you're seeing in your child, you can't break them without forcing it on people. And when you start forcing it on people, all kinds of weird stuff happens. So let me ask you this, Peter, because I found it very interesting. You talked about social justice as being a mind virus or an occult, I think you also.

Is that, was that you that? Oh, I was the virus guy. Oh, we both said the ideas before. It's a pretty obvious idea. And they said that they're a virus. Yeah, they said that. Okay, even more. So these ideas are dangerous, right?

let's take it as given. How has this mind virus spread so quickly and so contagiously? That is a great question. Well, this is the thing is, I'm afraid no one really talks about this, but is it that they found a way to weaponize our empathy? Is it something that Douglas Maria would say, in a world without God, we have found in your religion? is a

mystical thing that you have a craving for why is it so powerful in spreading? That's a great question I've thought about it quite a bit Thank you. He's never going to stop that

I ask the best question there Same as every week I can't come to a Russian I ask best question It is best question No question One thing we should probably talk about is the substitution hypothesis

Why don't you take a step at that and then I'll... Oh, yeah, so that's the Douglas Murray idea. So the substitution hypothesis, this is idea that, you know, people have left traditional religion, so now they're looking for to get those psychological and social needs met by a not-traditional religion, in this case, by politics for most people. I think that there's something to that, but not a lot to that. Because the way that normally gets approached is, well, people need meaning in their lives. They're looking for meaning, and they used to find meaning in God,

Now they can't find meaning in God. So they're going to find meaning in social activism or whatever happens to be. Their political stuff. And I don't want to say, well, that's not it because it's one of these things. There are multiple factors involved in why people turn to religions, if you look at the psychology of religion. And one of them is that. And that's certainly going to be an issue. I think that you're going to find more of an issue there because as their economies go increasingly towards service,

those are less fulfilling jobs. And people are looking to find meaning not so much because they lost God. but because they're losing meaning in their careers. But what I ultimately think is the root of this is the problem of feeling out of control, which is a result of a polarization. And so we're so polarized, we're so afraid, Helen and I have called this existential polarization, that we're so afraid that the other side will get power and misuse it, that it'll cause existential threats.

That's what we see this extinction rebellion going on right now is it's extinction, no kidding, that we can't possibly let the other side have any power. and that's a crisis of feeling out of control. And so when you feel a crisis of feeling out of control, then you want to reassert control. Now we can add in another element, our fourth companion, Mike Nena, that's doing the film about us in our work.

He has this really interesting hypothesis right now that video clips work kind of like miracles in today's social media economy. So when did all of this blow up and spread so quickly? just right after, really right after the Black Lives Matter thing blew up. Yeah, Ferguson. Right? So you have these videos, a minute and a half long, or a minute long, or 30 seconds long, you don't really know what happened. And then the narrative is attached to it.

Turns out later, apparently that the narrative that was spun widely was not correct. No. Not at all correct. And so, but this spreads like wildfire. So now you have many people who feel like society is out of control. They feel like there's probably a lot of race issues, especially after coming out of in the United States, Obama's presidency. The conservatives today in the U.S. like to pretend that they weren't racist as hell during that. And I'm like, what? I was, what? And some of them weren't. I'm not all of them, of course, but holy shit. I mean, they were burning black effigies. And, you know, I saw people

with bumper stickers driving around where I live that said stuff like it's called the White House for a reason. And the Confederate flag, I mean, there's Confederate flags everywhere. And they were really bad during Obama his presidency all through the South. So there's a lot of people who are aware that there's still this racist resentment. And that is, that's racist resentment. There's nothing else to call it. And then all of a sudden you see racist cops. And that's the narrative that spun off of the miracle story video.

And boom, that crisis of control just goes nuts to everybody. And all of a sudden, you have these people, critical race theorists, who since the 1980s have been writing. down exactly the explanation for this. Society is hidden racism. Racism never got better from Jim Crow era. It never got better even from slavery. It just kept putting on a nicer and nicer white mask. They literally call it that. So it's all still there. All the same resentment, all the same inequality, all the same racism as during slavery. Jim Crow are still there. They just present themselves nicer. And then all of a sudden you have proof. You have this miracle video. that's proof of that theory.

And people very rapidly turned to the critical theory to start, people on the left in particular who are most worried about these issues, to start getting an explanation. And so these critical race theorists and in gender, you have the equivalence with queer theory, post-colonials, and just right across the board, all of these different approaches, they all of a sudden had the answers that a panicking left was looking for, and then you'd had the condition, which was that shooting in Ferguson, that was then cast as a racist event.

Of course, you also had the Trayvon Martin shooting, which I don't know if that was racist or not. That one's really morally ugly. So you have this kind of series of events, and so you have lots of people, all of a sudden, saying, we finally have an explanation. And genuinely, I think a lot of the people on the left in general, and certainly all of the social justice reactionary type people, firmly believe that things like critical race theory and the rest of this social justice scholarship is like having discovered the germ theory of disease but for bigotry. And so they think we now have the diagnosis and this is the thing we have to fix. And in many ways, it's a simple solution to an incredibly complex problem in society.

It's an over-simple solution. Yeah, and that's why it won't work. I mean, it completely gets, again, it gets everything backwards. It starts by, well, we're going to reify differences in identity. We're going to make differences in identity matter more. We're going to get more difficult for people with different races to talk to one another and find common ground because we have to be constantly aware of the eggshells or landmines you might step on when you interact across any line. Because, as Robin DiAngelo tells us, racial dynamics are always present between people of different races. And the question is not, did racism manifest in the situation?

how racism manifests in the situation. It's assumed that the racism's there. So if we speak across any racial line, the racism's there, and it's just a matter of time or a matter of digging to discover how it actually... Every time you do joke about me, it's because I'm brown. Well, that is actually true.

Yeah. Now we have created a generation of people, or almost a generation of people, who, for whom everything is a problem, everything, there's racism in every interaction, there's racism in every film, there's racism, and if you don't see it, it's because you're a racist. I'll give you an idea of how ridiculous it is.

Last night, during one of the panels, now I'm going to admit this, and somebody's going to go looking for it, and I'm just totally, I'm canceled. I was sitting there kind of like this with my hands between my legs, and my index finger and thumb were close together while the other three fingers were resting on the chair, and it suddenly became, I was just kind of like out of it. It's like a long day, and I suddenly realized, because I'd been holding my own finger like this,

And I just kind of let them fall apart. And I suddenly realized, oh, no, I'm doing the OK symbol between my legs at this. Which is now the white nationalist symbol because 4chan. Because 4chan, because there's some stupid thing. And so it's like I accidentally ended up in that somehow. And then I realized I was in it. And then I was like, we're in the middle of a panel. And all I can think about is, shit.

How do I undo this smoothly? how what's going to happen if somebody notices this and it's like it's taken up it's ridiculous and now I'm I'm devoting cognitive energy to this that I didn't even have to give to anything at that point and so now multiple not me but multiply this by you know everybody that's constantly got to be aware of frankly stupid bullshit all the time yeah I can't negotiate these kinds of things I want to add to that because there was a video I think it was an MSNBC guy is a black guy, and someone made the symbol behind him. And even if it was manufactured by 4chan, what a horrible thing for that guy.

He's just a guy who happens to be black who some, can I swear on your show? Yep, I already did. Some fucking asshole, some racist prick is making a symbol, even though these other idiots made the whole thing up. in the meeting. Like, how horrible. He's just a guy doing his job and then he has to deal with all this bullshit. So even though, and this is part of the problem, even though they manufactured it, if you're constantly looking for things like that, excuse me, what happens is when you're in a situation in which someone does it intentionally and there's a black guy there, like that's obviously a problem. Well, that's the thing, though. It's not obviously a problem. And

here's what I mean. And this is a real, this does create a real problem. How do you know that that guy wasn't just cashing in on the joke knowing he's going to go viral? Maybe he's not, no, no, no, no, listen. But even if you were. No, because this is really freaking important. Because if it's just a troll and everybody wants to be a troll now, because you can go viral. Now we've lost the ability to tell. Is this guy being racist? Is it just sticking up? So now we're losing the ability to detect genuine racism where it occurs because we have to pay attention to stupid shit. Yeah, that's certainly true.

And from the book, that's certainly true. And how horrible for that guy. I mean, what's horrible for the guy is that he has to, it's not even the symbol or even if necessarily the guy was a racist. It's that he no longer can tell. And he has to go through this whole ordeal now. He's now the subject. This now goes viral over something ridiculous. Yeah, with his face in it.

And so now he has to deal with, well, was it racist? Wasn't it racist people talking? Oh, my gosh. people saying, oh, that was horrible, just like people was doing just now. And then other people saying, oh, downplay it kind of like I was doing just now. And it's like everything just becomes morally ambiguous. And something that should be relatively clear and easy to pick out. Is this something racist happening or not?

Sometimes it's a little ambiguous. But it's usually fairly easy, used to be fairly easy to tell a lot of times. Now it's kind of, as you were mentioned, the dog whistles. Now it's like this universe of ambiguous dog whistles. You don't know if somebody's pulling a joke. You don't know if somebody's just being stupid. You don't know if it's genuinely racist. You don't know if it's like racist joke at the same time.

It's impossible to tell. So when you destroy the ability to detect genuine racism and you make it all ambiguous, you start attacking the wrong targets, you start going after the wrong things, you start just wasting resources. If the guy was a troll and they start wasting resources trying to fix his racism, he's having a laugh. He's just laughing the whole way through it. And it made him famous, maybe infamous, but at the same time,

the whole thing is a tragedy. The thing that bothers me about it on it, on a broader level as well at the level of societies, this hyper-racialization of society forces us to think in terms of race all the time. That's the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do. That's exactly right. And I catch myself doing it. I was driving to one of our interviews a couple of weeks back,

and there was a black girl waiting to cross the road, and I literally found myself thinking, I better stop and let her pass because she's black. Correct. Now, there is no more racist thinking than that, that you have to treat people doing. differently because of their skin color. And we've imbibed it.

We've imbibed it because of all this bullshit. Yeah, that's exactly right. They get everything backwards. And so the real threat there, Helen talks about this frequently, is that we're going to see as a pushback continues to mount, because it is already mounting. As it continues to mount, we run a real risk now of actually resurrecting, and this is their biggest fear, resurrecting genuine racism.

That's correct. And I mean, I wanted to talk about it, but the conversation went away, honest last night on one of the panel, so I can mention it here. There's a great talk I watched a long time ago on YouTube by Dan Arely. And he's talking about, frankly, though, it's a psychological mechanism. And he's talking about why is Catholic confession exist. What's it for?

And so psychologically what they figured out is probably the root of that is that people sort of have on their moral calibration. They kind of have a kind of a fuck it line. You know, like I'm trying to be a good person or it's hard. I'm trying to be a good person. You can think about this with people trying to stick to their diet. I'm eating clean. I'm eating clean. I'm eating good.

I'm not eating crap. And then you have a couple days where you travel and you had too many beers and you're eating cake and you, wow, that rib eye looked good or whatever happens to be, depending on what you're into. And you overeat and you eat badly. And you try to get back on track. And eventually you cross the line and you just go bad enough. And then you're off your diet completely. And this turns out to be with all moral behaviors.

You have a line where, oh, well, I'm not a good person anymore. So fuck it. I'll just not be a good person. And what Aureli was discussing was that the discovery was like confession gets you in front of a mechanism that resets you above the line. So then you're trying to be good again. Wow. Which is really interesting. Yeah.

Well, here's the thing. You're a racist. You're a racist. You have to think in racial ways. Sooner or later, people are like, well, fuck it. I'm a racist. And then where are they going? And there's no mechanism to come back to the other side.

There is no, the mechanism they offer is awful. So most, it's not like, you know, the Catholic confession. I grew up Catholic. It's not that painful. you go in there, you talk to the priest, hopefully nothing weird happened. You know, you're like, forgive me. It's funny.

Someone else makes a pedophile joke from the show for instance. Yeah, yeah. You're like, forgive me, Father, for I have sin. It has been like two years since I was here. He's supposed to be every two weeks. And it's like, I know I'm going to have to say a rosary for that. Shit. And so, you know, but you do the whole thing.

It's not really that difficult of a process. And boom, you're back over the line. With this, it's you have to sign up for a lifelong commitment to soul searching. political activism. And if you step out of line so much as ever, we're going to remind you of what a terrible person you are forever. So you have no way to get back over the line. So now we're in this real risk where, you know, traditional gender norms are starting to

become cool again on certain parts of the, that's horrifying. And then genuine racism, you're going to get people below that fuck-it line and like, oh, yeah, well, let's do the symbol everywhere, you know, whatever it is. Let's just go nuts. And why can't I say the N-word to whoever I want? And it's just you really don't want to break whatever. societal to taunt exist that keeps most people above those lines

trying to do it right even if they don't always measure up you really don't want lots of people to start falling below that line or decide that that line doesn't matter anymore fuck it okay I'm a racist so you're talking about forgiveness really that's why you're talking about

redemption for redemption or forgiveness and those things I mean if you can cancel somebody for tweets they made 20 years ago even when they were a teen as a teenager like they wrote some stupid thing when they were 16 years older now in like their 30s or whatever, I guess they couldn't have written a tweet that long ago, but you know, you get this, they uncover some dire entry or something. Oh, you wrote this or that. If you can cancel somebody for that, you deny their ability to

grow, their ability to change, their ability to try to get on the right track and stay above the bad line. And you offer them no, what forgiveness is in that? There's no, oh, well, you messed up because you were a teenager. We're all stupid when we're teenagers. We all did stupid stuff or teenagers, whatever it is. Even me saying we all did stupid stuff when we were teenagers, somebody will clip this out of context possibly and say, oh, this is a guy with something to hide. Well, if you're going to do that, please make it go viral for us. So thank you very much. Yes. But I was going to say as well, James, you know, there's, you know, what you're talking about, but it's the impact on your mental health as well. If you were going to look through every

single thing that you were saying and analyze it at every single moment, I mean, that's just a fast-track to getting anxiety and an inevitable break. And not only that, that assumes that there's some kind of moral stability. Right. So for all you know, the moral norms could change. I mean, the moral norms have changed. I'm 53. The moral norms have changed very radically.

Give you an example. I was taught when I was a kid and I've asked other people my age and similar experiences that when you shook hands of the woman, you're supposed to shake, you're just supposed to offer your hand like this. All right. And you weren't supposed to, you know. with a guy that was a different kind of. Now, today that could possibly be interpreted as sexist.

Right. And so because you're treating people, you know, even something as little as a handshake. But that could be today the zeitgeist is race and gender and things with an identity level salience. But maybe tomorrow it's either something we can't imagine. My own prediction for this has been that we'll start, if a vestige of cancel culture exists,

the next moral frontier will be factory farming. Oh, that guy ate factory farm meat, cancel him, or that woman, that person. So the moral norms always change. So as I said before about the tying the left hand down, there's something that's incredibly psychologically alienating because you're not allowed to speak because your first question about censorship. And thus, as I said in my talk, you can't form those authentic relationships because you don't know what anybody means and everybody's walking on eggshells

and you're not looking at people as people. Oh, there's a black woman across the street. I have to let her go. And I catch myself doing that too. And I have to just rub that out because I'm in that milieu where I'm just constantly bombarded by that. Like, this is how we have to look. This is how we have to think of people.

It's a really toxic way to think. Instead of just a person, oh, it's a black person. Oh, there's a gay person. Right. And you talked about the way that that's anxiety inducing. and yeah, I don't know if that's by design or not, but we were just talking a few moments ago about how you can have a, I think that the root of this

is feeling people in a crisis of control. Yeah. They feel out of control. We'll give them anxiety, and now they feel even more out of control. And that becomes kind of a problem that just kind of keeps going. From the perspective of having studied religious psychology

before getting into all of this business, that's what I really got into before I got swept up in woke land, I was learning that one of the, I got really interested in conversion mechanisms. How do people convert to a religion or a cult? How do they get induced? And the mechanism is nearly always the same, whether you do it with a child or whether you do it with some adult. With children, it's obviously much easier is that you induce a state of vulnerability and then you give them a pathway out of the vulnerability through the ideology or the cult. So here, you give them identities still leaning into, oh, well, you have anxiety, you know,

well, you're an anxious person. You're not a person with anxiety. that's something they could be treated. They'd be medicalizing it. That's the Fucodian idea that you can't do that. So you're an anxious person. So now this is who you are. You are anxiety. And so you give them, and then, you know, the way to do it is to lean into that victim,

but just lean into it and come with us and be activists. And we can fight this problem that makes you an anxious person, even though that's the thing that's causing them to be anxious. So you give somebody a, you induce vulnerability, you manipulate their vulnerability, make them feel usually bad or guilty or something, or afraid, fear of hell, for example, you might think about. And then you give them a path out of that. Oh, well, isn't hell scary?

Blah, blah, blah. If you just believe in Jesus, then you don't go to hell. Free paths away from that. He died for you. You don't have to go. And so it's a way to create, anytime you have this kind of emotional manipulation that taps into some path of vulnerability, Oh, have you been complicit in racism? Don't you feel guilty about that because you're white?

And that means you're comfortable and you don't have to think about what it's like to be a racial minority and what they have, all the crap they have to put up. But there's a matter. Well, did you know that if you take up anti-racism, you know, you can do something about that? It's not even, you're not allowed to do it to make yourself feel better. So it's like constantly self-flagellating. That'd be positioning yourself or myself, I guess, as a good white if I did it. And that's for voting. You can't do that.

But you give people, you say, oh, well, you can end the system. creating this problem. All you have to do is sign up for a lifelong commitment of soul searching for how you're complicit in it and spread it to all your friends. I think it makes a paustasy more difficult. Yeah. Oh, sure. Well, we've got about 15 minutes left and I want to end on a more positive note if we can. You guys... This wasn't positive? You guys haven't spent like two years living in critical. Right. Right. But we need someone to dive into it and take the hit for the rest of us to maybe look for a way out. And

You guys have just written a book which is How to Have Impossible Conversations. I've had a good look at it. It's a very interesting book. So chart for us some of the paths out of this because I put it to you that the vast majority of the public intuitively agree with what we're talking about here. The exhausted majority. Yeah, I talked about it in my comedy show in Edinburgh Festival this year, I talked about the fact that most people are terrified to say what they think. And they are.

I mean, that is a fact, right? So most people get this, but I feel like on an individual level, none of us really know what to do about it. How do we get out of it? I mean, the show we try and do is about trying to create something that gives an out to all these feelings and a solution. So tell us, how do we get out of it? Well, the solution that I advocated yesterday is harkening back to the Greek value of Parahesia, which means speaking truth in the face of danger, speaking boldly and speaking bluntly and speaking honestly. But before we can even do that, we need to.

think about how to speak to people again because we're losing that because as you said I agree completely we're walking on eggshells people are afraid to say what's on their mind so they need some basic tools for how to have a conversation so the for example really listen to someone try to figure out what they're saying if you don't understand ask place the burden of understanding in yourself don't say oh that wasn't clear say oh I'm not sure I understand that to place the burden of understanding on yourself. But hold on, Peter. Sorry to interrupt, but I just, I'm listening

through the prism of an ordinary person and I'm going, well, look at you. You did your parodiesia. You spoke the truth. Look what happened to me. Right. Look at what happened to me. Look at what happened to us.

We get called Nazis because we have a conversation with people like you, right? We're all right adjacent, all this crap, right? How many people, we had a guy who was fired from his job in a supermarket because he shared a comedy routine about religion from Billy Connolly, one of the greatest comedians in the history of this country, on his Facebook. He got fired.

So don't tell me about Parahisia. Sorry, let's take a step back. So Socrates had Parahesia. They killed him. The state killed him. I mentioned Matamalala. She was shot in the head. There is...

You're not telling this one. I'm being honest. I'm being honest about the nature of the solution. There's no wand that you can give and we're going to get out of this mess. This is a catastrophe. Yeah. And so, you know, if you look at what they do to us and the fact that you guys painted as Nazis for talking to us.

I'm Jewish, by the way. He's a Jewish kind of Nazi. That doesn't protect you, right? Because you've seen what happens to Brett Weinstein and Ben Shapiro, et cetera. That's not a prophylactic against being. It's good that you don't deny your Nazi nature because it would be Nazi fragility and I would be Nazi fragility. But we have to be honest that if you want to dig your way on of this, you're going to pay a price for this.

There's just no way you can't sugarcoat this to people. In fact, that itself is periseal. You're not selling it, man. That's horrible. So that was kind of my point. So, like, go get shot, guys. The argument there, before you jump in, is 400 years ago, the four of us, and there's a few more of us in this room right now, who would, we'd all be burned at the stake, right?

Right. Right now. I have our tongues pulled out. Right. You've lost your job. I have my job, but I've lost considerable. Right. We, you know, the whole comedy industry in this country hates us because we are right wing or whatever, right.

You know, all of us have paid some price. But we're not burned at the stake. No. We haven't been kicked off YouTube. We can still make a living from doing this. You know, isn't isn't it kind of all right? I mean, we can actually. It is kind of all right, actually.

So people reach out to me with this. all the time. Like, what do I do? I'm terrified that my friends and my family. That I hear that more, I hear my, the two things I hear a lot are my job and my friends and my family are going to get rid of me, one or the other. And what do I do? Well, you mentioned 400 years ago people being burned at the stake. You know how that ended is people getting together and having conversations like this, but not with cameras. They got together actually in small groups, often in bars, where there's a lot of ambient noise or pubs or whatever in spoke and low voices. And so what I tell people thinking back to that, they created the reformation, they created liberal movements,

liberalism itself, and out of those conversations, and they couldn't be overheard because it was treason to speak against the monarchy or the Episcopate. And so I tell people all the time, reach out to people, pay attention. I mean, we all have social media right now, unless you get banned from it, and pay attention. If you're small, you're not going to get banned, probably, as you say something pretty ridiculous. Pay attention. Find people who are speaking out against this. Follow them.

Pay attention who interacts with them. Reach out to those people and start making your own social network. Speak in direct message behind the scenes. Get on WhatsApp, which is encrypted. You know, meet up with each other, whether it's virtually, whether it's in person, and start having the conversation so that you guys can find your feet. Understand what you need to understand. Realize that you have, you're not alone, you're not crazy, you're, you're, there's lots

That's a more hopeful message in the morning. Once you found your feet, then you can start to speak with that courage. Because you know you have a fallback. You have a group who's going to back you up. You know you're coming from a place where you've kind of figured some things out and you're not just shooting in the dark. So I tell people to do that all the time. The thing is, there is safety in numbers.

If more and more and more people start speaking up, then it's not as risky for any of us who are speaking up. And there really is something to, you just have to know whose voice not to listen to. Yeah, yeah. You know, you just have to know, we are obviously not Nazis. We're not even Nazi adjacent. It's ludicrous. And for someone to call you that, they kind of opt out of an adult conversation.

So there's no reason we ought to listen to them. I mean, there's already a norm on Twitter that started that if somebody, I mean, I don't necessarily advocate for this, of course. but it's got some weight behind it. If somebody has pronouns on their bio, you pretty much disregard whatever they say. Instantly. Every time I see some vitriol, some particular nastiness, click on the profile, invariably pronouns. And it doesn't have to be that. I mean, anybody who slings abuse at you on Twitter, do what I do.

Mute them right away. They gave abuse or they give abuse to other people. Like if you respond to me and somebody abuses you, that person's never, I'm never going to see that person again. I don't care if they're like you. disagreed with me and they're on my side. If they sling abuse, mute, gone. And if enough people are doing this long enough, it will create a norm to where slinging abuse isn't getting people what they want and they'll burn themselves out and it just won't go anywhere. So I really

encourage liberal use of that as well. And then you just have to endure the fact that people are going to say, oh, you don't have a conversation, blah, blah, blah. No, I won't have conversations in the wrong forum with people whose goal is to sling abuse at me. That's not a conversation. Or, and I'll add to that, if my golden rule is if someone has harassed me and there's a considerable number of people or is currently harassing me, I will not have a conversation with them. That is, that's just not an option anymore. But we talked about the road out of this just to kind of finish when we say, I said, find your feet, you know, get with people and find your feet. There are three things really that have to be done. That's what we tried to do yesterday.

And each of us kind of spoke to it differently. But we've got to expose what's going on here. That's where I was talking about that the picture on. the social justice box, the diversity and treat everybody with respect doesn't match the contents, which is this kind of totalitarian ideology. They're different. So expose that. Make it clear how.

Go read some other stuff and then share it in context. It's horrifying. People don't, like you said, most people won't agree with it once they see what it really is. You just have to get past that branding, which is really good. Second is, if you have the time and energy, maybe not everybody does try to explain it. If you guys have a show, have people on who can explain it. If you can read a few of their books or key papers or articles that people are writing on, you know, outlets like Ariel Magazine or Quillette or whatever happens to be, learn to explain what's going on with some of this. Again, people don't really agree with it.

And then if you can start looking for alternatives. Can you, if you care about social justice, I get asked this a lot. I care about social justice, but I don't like social justice warriors. What do I do? Look for and start articulating other ways. How can you do the right thing? Like you're saying, it's like maybe we shouldn't be thinking about race all the time. Maybe this whole thing like putting race first, maybe we should ratchet that back down.

Maybe we should ignore people who tell us that we have to pay attention to that all the time. And so you want to look for, but you know, we still have to care and take people seriously. So maybe the lesson out of that is let's listen a little more than we did before. Let's take it a little more seriously and not be so quick to dismiss if that's still a problem. I'm not sure if that's even still a huge problem. Maybe it is. But fine, it's good advice in any case. And then let's investigate, but not just listen and believe crap, not shut up your story's been told.

No. Well, we'll listen. We'll check it out. And you can help us check it out. And it's all fine. So look for alternatives that aren't just coming from this place of ideology that the liberal approaches. So that's what Helen was talking about. Like, let's just find ways to do the thing.

Let's take their complaints seriously. Figure out what's real inside their complaints. And let's address those things and steal the whole thing from them. And what advice for you? would you give to somebody who's working in a particular industry or a company that is overtly work? That's a great question. So I don't ever tell anybody to put it. You guys.

I don't ever advocate anybody. Stick out their neck. If you have the ability to do it. What I often tell people when they ask me that is, oh, I have to go to diversity training. What should I do? Blah, blah, blah. I say take notes. Take very detailed notes and understand exactly what they're saying.

try to get a very clear picture. If you try to challenge it on the spot, they're just going to make life difficult for you. It was no mistake that one of the papers we started to write but didn't have time to finish was things like if you go to diversity training, we'll give you a survey, did you like diversity training? If you say no, you have to take more diversity training. Or you get sent to diversity training and he gets called in as a character witness

and you think he needed diversity training. He's a great guy. It was misunderstood. Now you need diversity training. So if you call it out on the spot once this stuff's been institutionalized, you're just really causing yourself. Yeah, there's nothing you can do with that way. In a work environment.

Start to understand it. Go out for drinks with your colleagues who also don't like it. Start talking. Because they won't talk either. I have another idea for you guys. As you know, someone recently bought all our video equipment for us. That is actually someone who works in the very work industry. So if you want to change things, she's got a Patreon page.

Yeah, I'm saying that too. Yeah, just to give them money. Sounds good to us. Yeah, that will solve the problem. The magic one piece is to give them money. But no, seriously, start talking to each other. And if you challenge it directly, it's the wrong way, start understanding it. So you can explain it.

You can expose it. And then you can start articulating alternatives. Yeah. And we just wrote a piece about how important it is to listen. And it really does start with listening because people will either say, well, they don't actually believe that. Well, actually, they do. Yeah. And you should listen to them.

And our piece argued that you should listen to them and believe them, not believe the content of their speech, but believe that they believe it. And then once you do that, you can say, okay, now I have a much more clear understanding of this. In a professional context, the idea is the same when you have to go to these trainees. Just take really good notes and listen and really understand what it is the, what is this ideology. Once you really get it, then you can start speaking up because you're coming from a place where it can't, you can't easily be shut down or refuted. So start paying attention. Look into what they're saying. Oh, well, this comes from this book.

Go read that book. See what's there. Well, that's been one of the great things of doing the show for us is we've educated ourselves on these issues. So when we get invited to write or speak about it, we are very comfortable that we actually know what we're talking about. Right. That's key. Speaking of which, did you like our book, how to have impossible conversations? Yes, we did. Very much so. And we recommend that people get it. Yeah, definitely give them money. We set all that up in advance, just recommending each other stuff. Listen, guys, the one question in the spirit of educating ourselves and having an opportunity for our audience to do the same is we always like to give our guests an opportunity to talk about. something that's left field. So the last question we ask, and we'll ask it of each of you separately,

is what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we should be talking about? In the area of social justice? In any area whatsoever. Anything in the whole world. Anything in the whole world. I mean, some people are talking about the thing that I would say, this isn't what anybody would expect. A nuclear power. There should be a lot more conversation on nuclear power. I hear all this stuff about renewables and green energy and, you know, great, you know. But there's so much resistance, especially from environmentalists, which is so strange to nuclear power. I think we need lots more open-ended, clear discussion that defers to the science. You've got to, again, educate yourself a little bit.

People need to get more clear on actually in general how safe and clean nuclear power is and how it actually is something implementable on large scale rather quickly. And if we're looking at environmental problems and taking them seriously, as I think we should, it's something that just keeps falling in this crack because everybody doesn't like to talk about nuclear. So you probably didn't expect that. We are not talking enough about nuclear power, and we should be. Well, it's one of the safest forms of energy, and I say this is someone whose wife grew up right next to Chernobyl. So, yeah, it is very, very safe.

What about you, Peter? I'll throw you a curveball. One of the best things I've done as a parent is I've placed my kids in an immersion program at the age of three. A language immersion program. A language immersion program. Right. Thanks. Mandarin.

So if someone has a child, when I was in school, you got it in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. That's way too late. It's got to be as young as possible. So that they don't even know that they're learning. They don't even have an awareness that they're learning it. So that's been a gift that's paid a remarkable dividends since I've done that. People thought I was insane too. But that's one thing I would suggest if someone's a parent is to put their kid as early as possible in an immersion program, language immersion.

And you've picked the right language as well. You're really feature-proofing there on Mandarin. Well, you know, it's been a good, it was a good decision. Let me add on my nuclear thing. Nuclear boats. I don't remember what the number is of big tankerships or carrier ships, not like, aircraft carriers, those are already nuclear. But, you know, cargo ships and cruise liners and things like that. I don't remember what the number is of the biggest ships that we run, but it's something

like seven equals in the amount of exhaust pollution that they put out from burning diesel is equal to all of cars on the planet or something like that. But boats are the easiest thing to put nuclear reactors in to drive them of pretty much anything. We already have all the technology. So not just even nuclear power, but nuclear powered vehicles. All of our big scale sea transport can be done with nuclear power and cut down. If you're worried about atmospheric commissions, there are actually workable solutions if you just go nuclear. You'll never win a Nobel Peace Prize with that kind of talk. I should win a Nobel Peace Prize from my role in exposing the crap in the universities.

Well, there you go. The campaign begins here. Well, listen, guys, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate your time and your thoughts. Follow both Peter and James on Twitter. They're very good, and if you do follow them, it's a very kind of mentally healthy contribution to your intake if you follow you guys. So we'll put the links in below. Get the book, How to Have Impossible Conversations.

It's absolutely fantastic. And we will see you again in a week's time. See you later, guys.