TRIGGERnometry - Social Justice Explained with James Lindsay

Episode Date: August 12, 2020

James Lindsay is an author, political commentator and co-founder of New Discourses.  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

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Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And a fascinating person we have for you today. He's a returning guest to Trigonometry. He's one of the co-authors of the grievance hoax papers. He's the man who's read all the critical race theory books so you don't have to. James Lindsay, welcome back to Trigonometry. I'm glad to be here, especially after that introduction. James, before we start, mate, I've got to say, you may have read all the books, but more importantly, did you post them to your Instagram story? No, I actually can't figure out how to use Instagram. I have one, and I, like, get these messages, and I know how to reply to people, and that's as far as I got.

I haven't figured out how to post anything yet. I have somebody else helping me do that. Well, when you do, make sure you post the black box, because that's how you stop racism. It is. That's what it means. That's what it means. symbolic action is everything. Well, listen, we spoke with you probably about a year ago, I'm guessing.

You guys were in London. We had a very interesting chat with you and Peter Bogosian. At the time, I think the interview that we posted then was called Social Justice as a Mind virus. I'd say we're all pretty fucking infected at this point. Is that fair assessment of what's going on here? Well, yeah, it's really spread pretty quickly. it's mainstreamed at an incredible rate since the death of George Floyd at the end of May. And now, I mean, I basically can't find anybody outside of kind of the old people who don't talk about it more or less all the time.

And obviously, if you look at what's going on and like the media, it's just become like a blatant circus of lies. where, you know, oh, here's a building being smashed in and on fire. And they're like, whiteness is property from Cheryl E. Harris. You know, this is a very important piece of scholarship saying why you can burn down a Starbucks or something. And so, yeah, this is a particular way of thinking. It is, in a sense, contagious. And the contagion of moral values sense, people are brought into thinking this way because it leads them to feel. like they're a good person rather than somebody who's failing to live up to goodness.

And it has very, very rapidly spread. It has very rapidly become a dominant, if not the dominant, contending moral force that's rising in the Western world and is getting exported from there as well in an astonishingly short time. So, yeah, I mean, we have like the perfect metaphor for what's going on. Like it was in these research labs and then some scientists weren't really careful with how they disposed of whatever and it got out. And then all of a sudden, you know, you have to start closing countries down. And I mean, it's odd the parallelism here.

But yeah, it has spread very much like a pandemic very rapidly. And, you know, we're now, you know, hopefully close to the peak of the wave because people are starting to talk a bit differently. And James, with every pandemic, there are a catalyst. there are things that basically speeded up. And what would you identify as a catalyst? Is COVID a catalyst or have there been other factors involved as well? I mean, yeah, COVID is probably actually a catalyst for a number of reasons. One of which is that it drove us all indoors and we stopped socializing normally

and we got kind of pent up and frustrated the fear, the uncertainty around economics that came with it, the lack of normal social interaction, the lack of being able to go out and blow off steam and the normal ways that people do, the shuttling everybody into online communication kind of constantly. It's like there's a feeling that's not wholly wrong that this change is like Twitter having just exploded into the real world. And everybody's interacting like they're on Twitter constantly in some sense. And that makes sense because everybody's been on Twitter constantly for months.

And I know that's the case because I remember when the lockdown started, people were saying, wow, I don't really have anything to do. do. It's like a break and everybody, you know, I get, I have, it's like a good chance to remember how to slow down in life. And I'm like my, my incoming crap went up by like 60% because all of the people who are now too online or who were not too online before became too online and started sending me stuff. So it's like the amount of incoming messages and emails I had went up about 60% once the lockdowns began. And I don't think that that's a coincidence. People started to act online. There are lots of other, of course, catalysts that led to this.

But I do think COVID was relevant. Obviously, there are shorter and longer term trends within kind of the sociopolitical sphere. Trump derangement has been ramping up for both good reasons and bad reasons. And I think as a huge contributor to this, and I do mean that, Trump derangement, I think there are extremely legitimate reasons to be very concerned about and unhappy about President Trump, but there are also just histrionic lunatic responses that don't match reality whatsoever. And we just mentioned symbolic action, you know, joking around.

But so much of that, like I went to New York City last summer and we ended up staying near Trump Tower in Manhattan. And so I just walked up there just to go out for a walk one day. And I told my family, you know, I walked by Trump Tower and I saw Trump Tower and I took a picture or looking up, how tall it is or whatever. And my family was like, why didn't you take a picture of your middle finger pointed at it? And I was like, why would I do that? Like, what does that accomplish in the world?

Does that like end his presidency that I flipped off a building? It's like, it doesn't make any sense. So there was a lot of stuff going on with that. And that's part of a longer current, if you look at the anger on the left in America, with feeling like the Republicans have been stealing our politics, where, of course, the Republicans, on the other hand, say they were defending our politics from the radical left stealing our politics. So now it's all kind of very fraught.

But these were all kind of antecedents and catalysts as well. But I mean, the obvious proximate cause was that there was a cause celebrate that came up with George Floyd's death at the hands of a police officer, which was pretty clearly way out of the normal, acceptable range of behavior that everybody said, this is, you know, proof that something's wrong, which very rapidly mutated into. this is proof that our entire system is bogus feeding into a narrative that's been being laid very effectively for, I don't know, seven or eight years now, if not longer. And I remember you saying, James, that these clips act as, I can remember you using them almost like religious icons was, I think, the way that you put in.

The miracle stories, yeah. Miracle stories. So would you just touch on that? Because I think it's very, very important how this miracle story then became an example. of how racism is infected all our political structures and our institutions. Yeah, when you have a kind of nascent faith coming into the picture, or even one that's well established, when you have a set of beliefs in particular that are,

I don't want to say just blatantly untrue. It's more that they're really vague. And so they're true and untrue at the same time by virtue of not really saying anything specific enough. Like, our society is systemically racist. What does that mean? Well, it means that outcomes are different. Well, that doesn't really tell you anything.

We already knew that. You know, it's very vague. Or if you talk about, you know, God's love is everywhere. Or what does that mean? I mean, God loves us and it's everywhere. You know, it doesn't tell you anything. So a lot of times the way that that, that profession of faith or the, the belief is is by people seeking out confirmatory narratives or, you know,

events that are like miracles. So you see, you know, these funny stories where, you know, Jesus appearing on a piece of toast or you see these things where they see the, you know, the sun glare off of a particular glass window looking like the Virgin Mary. And so obviously this is now a holy spot and there's a miracle and somebody's like dripping water and saying, that's your tears or something. And they cook up these ideas. And in the ancient world, you could really see, you know, oh, this amazing thing happened. And then they go tell people and there's no verification whatsoever. And so it's just the story can get bigger and bigger. And this becomes like, yeah, the faith is true because this thing happened. And in our current era, we get that primarily through mediated clips. We get a clip of

something that happened. In the case of the critical race narrative, it has mostly been clips of people acting in racist ways that are usually somewhat egregious or clips of police officers interacting with typically unarmed black people that end up in a fatality of the black, I don't know what the right word is, I don't want to say, you know, perp or suspect or whatever, but the person that they're interacting with anyway that's on the other end of the law. And the context of those, the full context of those clips doesn't matter. What matters is the way that they fit within that broader narrative. So when I went on Joe Rogan's podcast recently, I brought up Michael Brown, and I said, you know, it looks as though this was this horrendous killing if you just watched the video.

The police officers way out of line and the Black Lives Matter movement around Ferguson literally went to the point of blocking traffic and many of the same kinds of protests and riots and antics that we're seeing now. And it turned out not to be based in reality whatsoever. Right. But that never got acknowledged, James, actually. I remember at the time trying to say to people, like, what you're told about what happened isn't what happened. And that's been verified scientifically. It's been verified medically. It's been confirmed by black and white witnesses.

It's been verified by Tanya Hissie Coates, who's, like, deep in the ideology that this was not a police murder. It was his statement about it. So, yeah, that's the thing is these narratives have the power to run off and take a life of their own. I mean, when you tell somebody that the Virgin Mary appearing in the reflection of a car wash window isn't actually the Virgin Mary. It's just what the sun does when it hits glass of that shape. They tend not to accept that because it would be disconformatory. If we want to get into kind of the psychological and philosophical thinking behind it, it's because when people have adopted a mythological way of thinking, you can't pick a part of myth. to pick apart one strand of a myth is to tear the entire myth apart and to render it not true or not believable.

So you can't look at scientific validation. You can't look at the full story. You can't look at any of these kinds of things. The more important thing is this event fits within the context of the myth and gives the myth legs. And because that narrative is so powerful, people run with it and it almost can't be unseated. If you were to then go back and say, yeah, well, you have a point, you know, the Michael Brown incident. And on Joe's podcast, I didn't know. And Joe kind of pushed back on me.

I was like, actually, I don't know the details. And I come home and I get like, 5,000 emails telling me like, here's Tanya Hissy Coat saying. And I'm like, okay, that's good enough for me. I'll take that if, you know, he said it. And so it's like you can't, though, look at that and say, well, we have to now revise the entire basis for our movement. You instead have to find a way to reconcile like cognitive dissonance, either by downplaying it, ignoring it, or recasting it in some other more vague sense that still confirms the narrative. Because the point of a myth of mythological structure is that it can't be torn apart. It can't be taken apart.

And so when you think of these kinds of mediating events like are mediated stories about events, I should say, pushing these narratives, you have to think of that in terms of mythology. You have to think of that in terms of the video, the clip, the, you know, snippet of story, the picture or whatever. You have to think about that in terms of how it fits within the story that's trying to be told and that people have taken on. And nothing else is going to be allowed to matter because that's that, and that's also how you know that when there's this outright rejection of any possible criticism of the foundations of the story that you're dealing with something that's gone spiritual and it's all mythological at that point. Well, James, you talk about the mythology, and that's something I'd really like to dig into. But I wanted to ask you, first of all, just for anyone who's watching this and you've brought up Donald Trump and going to the tower and not being willing to flip it off on camera just for the sake of appearance and whatever, just very briefly, maybe in a sentence, to remind people where you are politically, just so that people who don't know you. It's really funny. It's like apparently Twitter has mediated me and I'm apparently like a famous racist now and I'm all kinds of alt-right and super conservative. I saw somebody saying, welcome, James. I appreciate the love bomb. No, so the funny thing is though, it's like I even got an email the other day from some fool saying that it's like I didn't really get my degrees from the colleges that I claim. I got them from conservative Bible college.

something like that. And it's like, what in the world is going on? No, I actually fall pretty far. I mean, my ideal, I fall pretty far to the left. So my ideal kind of government set up if I had my way about it, which I probably wouldn't because I don't like telling people what to do, would be very close to Norway, which is, you know, not exactly known as a libertarian right-wing, alt-right neo-Nazi bastion of the world. It's, you know, I would, I still think, honestly, if we want to get to a specific kind of thing, I still think that the proper highest income tax bracket should be probably just around and maybe a little bit above 50%. So it's not like I'm one of these kind of contractions, small government, you know, drown it in the bathtub people. I'm certainly

not conservative. I'm not socially conservative in any regard. Like people can do whatever they want. like, you know, if you want to have sex with a banana being well wielded by a clown and that makes you happy, good for you. Who am I to judge? I don't care. It's quite a specific fantasy you've got there, mate. Well, it's one I use as an example. I write something from Dan Savage about cakes. And so it's like, you know, I got to think of something weird. I just literally don't care.

But before we interoper, it's lovely to see that you accept me, mate. See, that's what I was really about. He does get called a banana quite regularly. But I just wanted for people to know that because I felt like the way we started the conversation. All right. So, yeah, let's make it really clear. So you're European Social Democrat, I think, is what you're saying. Yeah, that's probably right.

Most of the people in my life who are on the right call me a communist, which is strictly false. Also, it's just as false as the fact that I'd be on the, I mean, it's really not a communist, but I do actually believe I am a proper traditional liberal who thinks that in an advanced. democracy, because of the nature of what an advanced democracy is, you do have to have a very strong and stable social safety net. You do have to have strong social insurance programs. You do have to, in the sense, let's just lay them out. I'm very Keynesian in the sense that I think that that which the public sector can do most efficiently and most affordably, the public sector should do and the private sector should be able to do what it does most efficiently and affordably. And the point of economic policy discussion is to determine what the boundaries on those things are

and to figure out which thing goes in which box and how to deal with it. So, yeah, most of my positions are pretty staunchly in the left. They're just not in the, they're just not leftist, which is a different thing. So let's now turn, now that we've got that out of the way, I felt it was important for people to know that about you. Let's turn to the mythology that you're talking about, because this is, I think, really important. I'm going to take a little bit of time to set it out because I think it's important. So the mythology that you were talking about, and do correct me when you get the chance to do that if you need to, is the following.

Society is structurally unjust against minorities and women and other oppressed groups. And what that means is that different people are treated differently in the same circumstances. So a black homeless man gets treated worse than a white homeless man. a woman who is a CEO is treated less well or paid less than a man who is a CEO, etc., etc. And as a result of that, we have a society that is structurally unfair, and what we need is a movement which is called social justice, the point of which is to address some of these hidden instances of discrimination, and indeed the fact that all of us are prone to discrimination,

particularly those of us who are from the traditionally speaking privileged groups, those of us that are men, those of us that are white, those of us that are straight, those of us that are not trans, etc. That's the mythology, and the notion of this myth is that we must all look to address the biases within us to make society better and fairer for people who are historically disadvantaged, to eliminate discrimination, to make sure that people are no longer. oppressed and to make sure the power is equally distributed between the different groups, right? Now, most people listening to that, actually, I suspect, would go, well, there's an element

of truth to that. I mean, we've all got prejudices. We're all probably a little bit racist. We might have inherited sexist stereotypes from our parents and grandparents. Society is a little bit unfair. If you, you know, police probably are sometimes treating black suspects harsher than white suspects. Women have had it. bad over history. You know, slavery was definitely an evil and that surely would have left some sort of legacy. So if you were just an ordinary person who's listening to this and going, I see this guy on Twitter, James Lindsay, trying to take all this stuff apart, like, you know, if I'm an ordinary person, why should I be, why should I have a problem with, quote unquote, social justice?

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Go to avocado greenmatress.com slash trigger to check out their mattress and furniture sale. That's avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Avocado green mattress.com slash trigger. Okay, so you did a good job out lying out, not outlying, I don't know what I'm talking about, outlying counties or something. No, you did a good job laying out the very friendly, although still not without issue, understanding of the mythology. You in fact did a very good job of the social

justice aspect. I would tell you that the actual movement that we call maybe woke or whatever is a combination of three schools of thought. And one of them is social justice, which is this kind of egalitarian thing. So the mythology you laid out has a little bit of the critical aspect, but it's mostly what you laid out was one that's egalitarian and tipping occasionally into a radical egalitarianism. So that's one aspect. But wokeness is actually the intentional combination of critical theory, which has its own

mythology, postmodern theory, which has its own mythology, and doing those for the purpose of creating social justice, which has its own mythology. And you have to understand that when you just laid out like the egalitarian picture, that even tips into the radical egalitarian picture here and there, meaning that yeah, we really do need to kind of, you know, flip the script. So egalitarianism would be obviously that everybody's view gets taken seriously. Radical egalitarianism would be that we're going to make up for past injustices or even current injustices by forwarding people extra that have been historically or are currently discriminated. We're going to take those people more seriously than we otherwise would.

And so that's kind of the social justice mythology when you said that, you know, oh, so there's, you know, if you're straight, you're white, you're male, what you're talking about in general, these kind of what are classified under the critical theory school of thought as oppressor classes versus oppressed classes, which would be racial minorities, sexual minorities, gender minorities, and we can go, as Judith Butler, one of their chief theorists put it that exasperated, et cetera, of identity categories. So the critical theory school, we have to add that in. And the critical theory school has the mythology that the world is separated. This comes actually from Marx. So the world is separated into stratified groups.

That's what you were describing. And these groups, this is the key observation, are actually in zero-sum conflict for the access to resources and opportunities in society. There is no everybody's ships rise together in the critical theory view. There is instead the view that there is a relatively permanent underclass that is seeking liberation from its oppressors who are the elite status groups. As history wound on, the elite status groups became identity groups rather than, you know, the actual societal elites. Right. So we go from Marx. which is workers of the world unite, overthrow the bourgeoisie, right, and become the owners of the means of production, of capital, of whatever it is, of power. In other words, you take the power

that has been taken from you historically, and you are now owners of it because you've united as a group of oppressed people to fight off and defeat their oppressors. Right. And so the view there is that where Marx was worried about the means of economic immaterial production, the critical theorists became more interested in the means of social, cultural, information production. So they became very interested in things like education, faith, media, pop culture, elements of middle culture, and saying that those things were creating an ideology to hold down the proletariat to keep them in their place. And then that later in the 1960s, in particular 50s and 60s, fragmented into being very specific about identity

politics. As I say, the civil rights movement in the United States started to reach a peak. The identity politics aspect became very prominent. It was kind of present earlier than that. They became very prominent in the 1960s. And so it kind of changed into an identity politics thing. But the key thing there is that there's been, with critical theory, there's a shift in ethics that you have to see everything that occurs in the world through a lens of does this maintain oppression or does it provide the access to liberation from oppression? There's the belief now that people are brainwashed by society, by the elite narratives of society to accept and internalize their oppression in a form of false consciousness that they have to be awakened from. So part of the

critical mythology is that everybody doesn't know how to act in their best interests. And it's the job of the critical theorists, the awakened few, to go around in consciousness rays, as they call it, and wake people up. So this mythology, when you add in the critical element, includes the idea that all the normal people out there are asleep, that they're being brainwashed by the powerful elites of society to work against their own interests and in the interests of the elites who are going to continue to oppress them. And if you really cut down to the original critical theorists, what liberation from oppression means is liberation from anything. that's not communism. So the oppression is that which is not communism. And so you kind of have this huge shift conceptually when you start integrating the actual critical theory side of the mythology into the underlying social justice mythology that you laid out correctly. So now that radical egalitarianism starts taking on literally mind reading that everybody has, you know,

internalized the status quo and wants to maintain it for selfish reasons. It needs to be awakened to how terrible their lives are. So there's this new thought that only the elites have a good life and everybody else has a terrible life and needs to be awakened to it because they don't even realize it. That's part of the mythology. And that's where it's almost like the influence of the devil is in everybody comes into the picture. Then I know this is long and complicated. No, no, carry on. Keep going. It just is what it is.

Then you get the postmodern aspect. And postmodernists were technically not the same kind of thing as the critical theorists. If we get really formal, the critical theorists were called neo-Marxists. They were looking at Marxism in a new way. They were a critical of old original Marxism, so they became something different, but they were ultimately still Marxist at heart in terms of much of how they thought. The post-modernists are classified as post-Marxists. They were people, there were French philosophers for the ones that we're interested in,

who had basically seen communism fail everywhere it was tried and just went into this sort of despair. Nothing can be good. They also were being French, picked up with French philosophy that was very prominent at the time, you know, from just ahead of their time, I should say, which would include existentialism. So a lot of nihilism came out of that. And then structuralism, which was this view that the way that language is structured leads to how people think and how people will then build the power dynamics of society. So they got very interested in language, very interested in knowledge, very interested in what they categorizes discourses, the underlying discourses of society started to form the structures

by which society is organized and power plays out and power operates in a dynamic way. And so what the postmodernists added to the mythology is that somehow language, how we speak about things, what we consider legitimate, what we will consider true and false, are somehow central to the organization of material reality and our experience in material reality. Literally, that we don't live in a world where we have access to objective, or close to objectively understanding the world. We can't do scientific experience and really determine what's true because we are caught up in what Michelle Foucault called regimes of truth that are political apparatuses at kind of the super structural in the Marxian sense

at that level that dictate how people are going to decide to authenticate statements as true or false. So Foucault's point, a lot of people don't understand this, is that whether or not a truth claim is actually true is irrelevant. It might be, and that's fine, and it might not be, And that's also fine because the point isn't that. The point of interest and relevance is that there was a political process that determined somebody's ability to say that it's true or false. So if you say, no, no, no, it's the rigor of the experiment and the method. And no, well, that was decided by a political process too.

So for Foucault, it was politics and power games all the way down. And so humans just live in regimes of truth that shape their views of reality. And so we don't have direct access to understanding anything. outside of our own lived experience. So now you have this shift away from being able to know anything and into the personal lived experience of whatever it happens to be as being the genuine, authentic experience of the world. That's Foucault's view.

You can look at Derrida's view. We don't have to get deep into Jacques Derrida. But his general point was that meaning cannot actually be conveyed properly in language. Words, like if I say something like, you know, Zoom. meeting or computer or microphone or tree, things that I'm actually looking at right now, that those words don't actually refer to those things at all in any in any intelligible way. They only refer to the words that they are related to either in direct fashion. So if I say something like, you know, maple, because the trees outside my window are maples.

If I say maple, that words related to tree, that words related to plant, that words related to life, that words related, you know, we can get. on and on. But then also in terms of how words are related by not being a thing. So a tree is, say, not a bush, and a bush or a plant is not an animal. And so meaning is just caught up in the relationships between words and his claim, having drawn off of the structuralist school, was that power is hidden in those relationships. Those relationships between words are the discourses. They dictate how words gain meaning. But what this is is actually a removal of meaning from language. And so you can't use language to derive stable meaning. And these two

ideas combined to a new aspect of mythology that our friend Mike Naina refers to as a metaphysics of discourse. So now it's that the way we speak about things, the way that's considered legitimate to speak about things, actually shapes what is and is not true. And that's actually a political process. And so the outgrowth of postmodern mythology is that literally everything is politics. And so since literally everything is politics, it's all a matter of whose politics are on the right side of history versus who's on the wrong side of history and matters like truth and falsity. While they're not technically irrelevant, they're way down the list of importance so that you can then pick and choose. what we see with wokeness is a deliberate

combination of the critical theory mythology with this aspect of postmodern mythology about knowledge and truth and language and meaning so that you could use postmodern theory to deconstruct systems of power but not to deconstruct

the lived experience of oppression which is considered properly basic now because that's where they move everything. So you have this much more elaborate mythology where literally, and this is a postmodern contribution, literally the words that we use, the way that we think, what we consider true, infects us and makes us literal agents of the oppression that the critical theory school sees, or if we learn to take the right discourses up, literal agents of liberation. And so who we happen to be politically, not in terms of, say,

your skin color, being black isn't enough, you have to be politically black. Being gay is not enough. you have to be politically queer. When you take up the right politics, your identity itself, which is where your lived experience is, becomes the epistemological forward claim. And so that's a long ride away from that nicer, but still a little bit like, there's some questions in that, you know, mythology of social justice that you laid out. All right. So just to put that all into simple language, what you're really saying is we have been told,

or some people have been convinced, that. we are in a battle between groups of people, one of which is good and one of which is bad, right? And we have no, there is no truth. There is only a battle over words. And if you, whoever wins that battle is the one that that gets to determine what the truth is. And the argument is that the powerful bad groups have been determining what the truth is by abusing language. therefore what must now happen is we must agree that there is no truth other than what I feel. And if I feel that you are oppressing me by staring directly into the camera and I am from a minority group and you're a straight white man, that means you are oppressing me. Right. That's exactly right. In that last part, so important that the hierarchy of identity, which is really rooted in what's called ethno-historicism, so identity,

combined with how that identity has been treated both presently, but more importantly, historically, determines the valence of what directions oppression can operate in. So dominant groups, I could never, if I'm, you know, labeled as a member of a dominant group relationally to you, I could never claim oppression because you can't possibly oppress me because oppression requires systemic power. Right. So 10 people from my group were to chase you down in the street because of your skin color and beat you up and call you a white whatever,

that still wouldn't be oppression. That would be prejudice. Exactly, because there's no systemic power. So the kind of mythological object is systemic power, as it has been literally crystallized in the so-called matrix of domination laid out in the foundational documents of intersectionality in 1990. And it's set up so that that can't change because there's always the constant appeals to either A,

history, or B, that structuralist idea or post-structuralist idea from the postmodern school that says that when you create a culture, until you completely overthrow that culture, all of its biases in political power and all of those things are baked into the discourses. So we could have a system where we're literally under the boots of the most radical, say, Black Lives Matter activists that represent maybe 1% of the populace. in terms of their views. I mean, genuinely radical people who don't represent almost anybody in terms of what they think. And yet, everybody that they genuinely oppressed would not be able to consider themselves oppressed because they would have an appeal to say, well, the system we still

have to operate in was generated by cultural moors that were generated in white Western European contexts. All right, Francis, now I'd like you to please summarize what James has been talking about in three sentences. Go. Well, to me, it just proves my number one rule of life, which is you should never trust the French. But anyway, so, but what I wanted to ask you, James, is this. So what we've done is we've analyzed the structure, the way that it works, the thought processes. I'm very interested in the emotions behind this. Now, we talk about mythology. Mythology had a purpose two thousand years ago to explain things that at that time, we had no concept of or an understanding

of why certain things happen, why the sun rose, why it set, all the rest of it. Why do we have this mythology now? I think it's actually because whereas the physical sciences have matured quite successfully, so we understand why the sun rises and why the sunsets. The social sciences have not. The social sciences are still quite opaque. The methodologies are not worked out. We don't know what rigorous looks like. The rising replication crisis, especially in social psychology, has shown that the methods that we believed in were very easy to hack and to create lots of, you know, successful papers out of, out of thin air, more or less. And so the social sciences are in their infancy. That doesn't get to the emotional side of it, but the social sciences are in

their infancy. So they're not actually well-developed, very mature lines of reasoning. So in a sense, the social process is how power actually works in society when we started at the beginning talking about how these narratives run away from us. That's something that the postmodernists would been very interested in. It's very closely related to postmodern theory. And so in general, what we've seen, and we can get to the emotions in a second with this, what we've seen it through history is that there's kind of mythology leading into natural philosophy, or really philosophy leading into natural philosophy, leading into science. And so what we have is kind of a hardening up from mythology into philosophizing, where now reason becomes more important, that

hardens up into let's look at the world, to base our reason to let's actually use experimentation and falsification and get really hard rigorous methods. And it turns out that, A, human beings and human thought are very complex. And then human social behavior is, of course, another order of complexity higher than that. So it's very difficult. It's not like tracking a baseball shot out of a cannon or something like that, you know, with a projectile motion physics equation or figuring out, you know, how we're going to even send a rocket to the moon. These are very straightforward calculations using relatively hard but relatively simple underlying formulas. It's hard math, but it's the principles aren't. So social sciences are much more complex. And so we have this problem where we're still quite early on.

And so we're moving from mythology. And if you look at, say, Freud. Freud was very, and even Jung, you're talking like, those are considered the forefathers of psychology. This is 100 years ago. And they were very mythology. Like, that was just the very beginning of bringing philosophy into the picture of the social sciences. And it's just 100 years ago. And it's such a complex subject.

And now, you know, you might say that we're, in this weird phase where there's some of its philosophy, but like ethics, some of it is natural philosophy where we're very closely looking at the world, and some of it is, you know, closer to hard science where people are being very rigorous.

And there's this kind of spectrum of rigor happening. And in the process of this, first of all, a lot of it's not working out. A lot of it's not giving us the answer is when we try to do experiments like the great society where we're going to now base our societies on social scientific research,

but that social scientific research is really early. on, you're going to make some bad mistakes and it doesn't work out and people are going to get upset. But there's a second process happening besides all of this confusion from a national scientific process. And we might be still, even with the advent of AI, which will be, I think, necessary to understand psychology and sociology properly, even with the advent of that, we might still be 100 or 50 years away from a robust social science, a properly rigorous one. But in addition to this, the shift from, you know, mythology through philosophy, to more natural philosophy to actual science. This never, ever, ever, ever progresses without the people

on the weaker end of that epistemologically without them losing their shit. The turf wars get insane. So what you actually see is this rise of the prominence of the social scientists. And then you have these people who are closer to philosophers working in humanities departments, gender studies, for example, ethnic studies, African American studies. These people don't have the slightest idea about doing statistics. They don't have the slightest interest in doing statistics. And they become jealous. If you read back, C.P. Snow's the two cultures, you can see that there's this great jealousy between the philosophy side of things and the science side of things as that transition happens. Because basically, the philosophers who held themselves in high esteem and had good elite jobs,

become pretty much irrelevant. They're just people sitting in an armchair making shit up. And the scientists are finding out the real truths of the world, and nobody likes that when they're the one getting excluded. And so there's actually been in this kind of this combination of it lacking success in the application realm. And then in the sense that it's still so new, but you have the humanities people losing prestige, there was a pushback for the humanities and philosophy types to gain prestige. And they actually went backwards. Rather than applying rigorous philosophy, they started to build a more and more mythological structure. And I think the reason for that on top of their envy and hatred of the sciences that are stealing their importance and their inability to produce reliable

results rigorously and be taken seriously. On top of that, there's the problem that because they've adopted these ideas like conflict theory from Marx and these ideas about, you know, these kind of very simplistic ideas about how individuals operate within the context of identity categories, when you have something that's not true, the only thing that you can really do is start to lean more and more heavily on the force of story. And they decided to lean straight into that and started to create a very mythological view. If you follow, like in our books, Helen and I just wrote, it's about to come out, cynical theories.

We actually talk about that in a sense, which is that over the years, we just focused on postmodernism, but over the years since the 1960s, when postmodernism came into the picture, what you actually see is something that was very complex, first, getting packaged up so activists could use it and then becoming very simple and concrete so that when you read somebody like Robin DiAngelo, who obviously is a huge rock star figure right now in the field, it literally comes off like she's like a 10-year-old could read it. It's very simple. It's very straightforward. It's very condescending. And that's because the oversimplification and kind of dogmatic authoritarianism, the mythological backing becomes the thing that

makes up for the fact that they don't have rigor. So there's this, rather than them saying, oh, I'm going to learn statistics and try to do this right, they just, you know, went the other way and started to say statistics is part of the evil in the world. And so we're going to avoid that on principle and call it a master's tool and, you know, become more story driven, et cetera. And so there's this really weird kind of retrograde development and the failure of social science to be rigorous enough and to have this replication crisis and so on coming into the picture led there to be a lot of room for. Well, obviously the scientists people don't really know what they're talking about.

So we'll tell a story that fills that in. And I think that's what happened. And there's another question I wanted to ask is because it seems to be the younger generations who seem to be, you know, infected and believing these narratives. why do you think that it's the younger generation in particular and not the older generations as a result? Is it because of the college? Is it because at that age you simply know less,

therefore you tend to be more malleable? Or is it because more and more, young people are realizing that the capitalism they're being exposed to isn't really working for them when it comes to things like homeownership, the gap between rich and poor, etc., etc.? Yes. It's all of those things. It is. It is actually all of those things. So this kind of like pernicious and cynical analysis has the critical theory analysis has actually been a fundamental part of primary, secondary, and university education now for a number of years. For whatever set of reasons, our schools decided to focus, at least in the United States, on self-esteem initiatives rather than accomplishment initiatives. And this has created people that weren't, you know, if you read like Jonathan Haight and Greg Lukainoff, you see that.

this is created individuals who are not as resilient and not as capable of dealing with their lack of understanding of the world. So when you have your, you know, normally young people are very like just becoming sort of, I guess, politically conscious and they get caught up in these things. And then you can add in to what you said, all of the things you said, I don't really have to repeat them. But you can add into this one extra element, which is a general loss of meaning in a society that's bent on the idea of progress. And why I say that is because while you have this confluence of events where things are definitely not perfect and there are definitely observable problems, say with regard to race, with regard to sex, with regard to trans

issues, and so on and so forth, they're definitely observable problems. Stuff isn't figured out and perfect. Some of the stuff may never be perfect. But at the same time, the big civil rights battles were actually already fought. And those are kind of the big heroes of our of our time. You know, that's two generations removed from the world today. And so the big heroes we look back to were the civil rights giants. Oh, you know, we made life better for black people. And that was like the greatest thing possible. Martin Luther King is, and I do think that, of course, Martin Luther King did insanely good work and some of the most important work in the history of the Western world. but at the same time,

you get a bunch of people hopped, young people hopped up on this vision that creating civil rights success is the big thing to do. And then the battles are like, well, do you like add an extra bathroom for trans people? Like, what do you do?

Like, it's like, because the whole trans thing came out and people are like, some people are trans and everybody was kind of like, okay, like there was no fight. There was no drama. It was just they had to make fights about bathrooms and sports,

which genuinely create You know, there are genuine issues there. But for the most part, it's like, well, be trans if you want. It's like I remember with one of my kids, like she went through this whole series of different changes. You know, we were all atheists. And so all of a sudden she became Christian. And she was like, I'm a Christian now. And we're like, okay, you want me to go to a store and buy you a Bible?

And she was like, ah, you didn't get mad at me. That proves you don't love me. And it's like, okay, you know, you're a 14 year old girl, aren't you? And then it was like, then it was like, I'm bisexual. And we're like, yeah, we kind of always thought that. And then she's like, ah, you didn't try to disown me. You don't really love me. And it's like, it's just, you know, there has been so much successful civil rights progress

that when these new civil rights issues come up, there are like with the trans issue around say bathrooms and around sports and around a handful of other kind of concerns, there are specifics that have to be figured out and worked out and that are actually genuinely difficult in that case. Fine. But in the principle, everybody's like, yeah, okay, expand rights. Oh, yeah, gay people, normal. Okay. And so there's, there's this burning need in the young people to be civil rights heroes. There's visible problems of imperfection. And then the really like profound and meaningful fights are easy. So there's no meaning in it. You're like, we're here for gay rights. And everybody's like, okay, have a parade.

Cool. Like, let's set that up. You know, it's like there's not, nobody shows up with fire hoses or anything like this. And so they're looking for a big fight, but no one wants to fight them back. Nobody needs to fight, yeah. So it's like, and that genuinely does create a crisis of meaning. And then if you couple that with what you said, Francis, where if you couple that with the fact that the world genuinely, especially like post-2009. recession and financial crisis.

And then whatever the universities have been doing to these poor kids, and I don't mean mentally, I mean financially. Like, they're properly screwed. And so you tie into that level of resentment that the society has cheated them and stolen from them. And so you have this kind of very, I have a bunch of friends actually who are like Bernie people and they don't like the woke at all. And they think that the woke is like totally excessive and insane.

But they're like 100% Occupy Wall Street. and they're just mad as hell that Occupy Wall Street didn't work. And the Republicans are stealing our future from us and these big business interests and the corrupt corrupt politicians are stealing our future from us. And there's like a lot of kind of truth to that. And then now after this is all blown up, they don't know what to do because it's like they kind of, they're like, well, the woke are busting everything up. So we're on their side now, even though we don't like them.

You know, and so there's this weird like fight, but they don't know where the real fight is. And then there's an issue that's gaining traction. so they latch onto it and get all worked up. It's a very confusing time, I think, to be under 35, not least because the schools have literally been mind-fucking them pretty much the entire time so that they think in weird, poisonous ways to find where, you know, oppression and bad things are happening and to not trust the system or understand how the system works and so on.

So really, like, so when you ask the question, you listed a bunch of stuff, it's like, yes, it's a bunch of stuff at once. And James, we're now hit, this catalyst, which is COVID. We have now seen the Black Lives Matter movement. We've now seen, rioting, you know, destruction of property. And it's a tricky question to ask what not particularly fair. Hold on before you say rioting. We learned yesterday that the proper term is in intensified peacefulness. Okay. Fantastic. That means rioting and arson. Yeah. Courthouse burned down literally the news report said a courthouse got burned down and something else was badly damaged

and police officers were injured when a peaceful demonstration intensified. So the peacefulness intensified is the result of which property got destroyed and people got injured. So we've seen a lot of peacefulness, Francis, is what you were saying. Yeah, mate. I burnt the dinner last night, so I saw some intensified. piece to pull us at last night's dinner. But anyway, the point is, James, is where do you think this is going to end up? What do you think is a natural progression for this? That's hard and scary. People keep asking me this and it's like, it's so nonlinear. No issue. You just ask me the easy

question. Like, what's their end goal? And it's like, I don't think they have one, but somebody that's behind them probably does. So we'll see who tries to scoop up. Like, I'm starting to get the impression that the woke are the useful idiots for somebody who's not as not as politically lost and internally contradictory and they are basically the bulldozers leveling the ground so that somebody who actually wants to build something scary in the world can come in and fill that space but I don't know for sure what will happen now I think a lot of people have have been awakened to wokenness and many of them are the liberal type who need to fight back against it with reason and trying to claim the mantle of moral

and epistemological authority and high ground that comes with that and to fight for putting our society back on the track of genuine proper progress. But at the same time, there is what people kind of refer to as the sleeping giant. And last time we spoke, You asked about this and we actually talked about it. We talked about whether or not there was going to be a rise of genuine racism, a rise of genuine sexism. And that's the sleeping giant, which is our majority group is going to be awakened to full, bare zero-sum identity politics. And I genuinely think at this point that the giant is stirring and has one eye open. And that's a bad place to be.

So no reasonable person wants this. The woke's game is to claim that there's no such thing as a reasonable person. And so everybody who is against them does want that. And that's ridiculous. Which is why the three of us are all all right and blah, blah, blah, blah, because you can't oppose them without being smeared and tarnished so that no reasonable person can oppose them because, therefore, all reasonable people would agree with them. Right. That's because of the mythology, which the first tenet of which, if it's a critical race mythology, says,

that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in our society, not aberrational. And so that translated into Robin DiAngelo condescending speak is the question is no longer did racism take place, but how did racism manifest in that situation? Because the racism is to be assumed. So that's part of the mythology, that racism is in every possible interaction if you look at just that aspect. So if that infects the sleeping giant and the sleeping giant wakes up, and you start to see these like militia groups going crazy or white identity politics rising, I don't see any solution other than civil war, which will be a very nasty one, because that's a thing that's very hard to stop once it starts happening. It's very hard to get that resentment and anger back under control.

And the woke have the narrative on their own side that that resistance is to be expected. Resistance is a predictable result of doing this work, blah, blah, blah. So they think that they're genuinely unmasking people who are always alt-right, you know, evil racist lunatics, and they'll use it as evidence. You see this happening in these cities in America. These protesters know what they're doing. They're not idiots. They actually know what they're doing. Their objective, when they go and agitate it, say a federal building in Portland last night, their objective is to try to get law enforcement to react.

Their goal is to try to get the police or even better the feds to step in and try to control them, at which point, if it's the police, they'll say, look, fascists. And if it's the feds, they'll say Trump is now seizing power. He's the dictator that we've been telling you he is for four years. And it's this weird thing where there's enough people who believe that narrative. And again, this is that relevance of that trumped arrangement that I was talking about, that when they say it, a huge proportion of left-leaning under 35s are all going to believe it. Yep, that's it.

my friend, for example, recently got very upset with me on my Bernie, one of my Bernie friends, and he said, you know, what do you think is going on? And I told him, and he just got really mad at me and then said, you've shot your arrow and painted the target around it. And I was like, okay, conversation over. If that's how you're going to think about this, fine. But that's kind of what's going on. It's like you literally have people who are so convinced that Trump is a dictator in waiting. And I will admit, there are concerning signs, there are concerning possibilities around that claim. Like what, James?

So with his, the most concerning one for me is nothing to do with this policy. It's the kind of like a loyalty-based attempt to fill his government only with people who are loyalists to his cause, right? So there's like these purges happening within different government departments to try to get them on side. That stuff makes me concerned. his policies, not so much. He's not even really like gone nuts too much with the executive orders or any of these kind of things. He's not doing anything overtly like that. But when you start trying to make a purity campaign within your own government rather than an ideological diversity campaign, that's a different thing. Well, isn't that just the businessman's way of doing things? And if you run a business, you don't want people who fundamentally disagree with the mission statement of your business. Right. So something being concerning isn't the same as something being proved. right so there are there are signs that it's possible i genuinely think it's unlikely that trump is actually

dictatorial in his and his uh ambition it's more likely that he's dynastic and trump wants to try to rig the system so that say his kids become president next and you know there's this kind of that wouldn't be all that unusual for the united states let's be honest no kidding no kidding do we need another bush or clinton to come in and save the day right maybe a couple of roosevelts or something All right, James, look, just to wrap up, it's an interesting, it's a fascinating, not just interesting, fascinating, fascinating talking to you about this. But I want to make, for the last five, 10 minutes of the interview, just turn this right into the real world, which is people are now starting to see we've had it in this country, people being fired for criticizing this movement, people being ostracized, what's called cancel culture, people a lot, you know, 62% of Americans now say in the late Cato poll that they are scared to express their political's opinion publicly. 46% of people in Britain say that we have less free speech than we did a few years ago versus

20% that say we have more. So the direction of travel is this movement is taken hold of all the cultural institutions, the education system, television, news media, etc. People are feeling it. and if someone is watching the show, and they've sat through 40 minutes of us talking about critical race theory and Foucault, and they're going, okay, well, I feel all this is happening around me. What the hell do I do? Right. So, unfortunately, there's not like, oh, you know, go register with this and you're done. You know, and it's hopefully not so grammar is learned Chinese. But the long and short of what you actually do have to put in some legwork, if you want to do something.

There are two options. Do you want to take it on or do you want to do something different? And both of those things are success vectors. If you want to take it on, you have to learn some of it. You have to. The stuff that we just talked about, you have to become at least basically conversant in it. You have to learn to see the word. games, the setups, because that's what these are, it's built out of setups. I've said it over and over and

over again just as a very quick idea, but this will come into every context in your life with, say, critical race theory, it assumes racism's and everything. Therefore, say, you run a shop and a white person and a black person enter at the same time, you have to pick one customer to help first. If you pick the white person, the racism must be present. And so the reason you pick the white person is because you think white people are first-class citizens and black people are second-class citizens, and you're a racist. If you pick the black person first,

it's because you don't trust black people to be unattended in your store while you help the other customer, then you want to get them out of your store as quickly as possible, and you're racist because racism must be present in every situation. So when you start to see that the thing is playing a game with you, to set you up to keep you under heels, to make you feel stupid, to make you feel immoral, to make you feel like you're on the wrong side of history,

to make you feel like you're not part of where the crowd is going. Once you see that, then you can find your own. feet, but you do have to learn a little bit about how the ideology thinks, how it uses language, what it means by its words. There's a little bit of legwork to put it to put into that. I made new discourses to provide resources for that. You can use it. You can use other ones. I'm not like, I'm the only correct voice on this. There are people speaking up. It's good. So you have to learn something. And then you have to start talking with other people, find people

who agree with you, start to organize and actually start showing up. If you're going to be an activist, you have to show up. Activists show up. Activists show up. That's why these people are in so many like bureaucracies. They're on so many committees. They're installing policies. And that's where it's happening is they're changing the level, they're changing the world at the level of administrative policy so that people are stuck having to behave or they'll get fired or something like that.

So you have to show up and push back the other way. Get on the committee. Volunteer with your boss to help lead, you know, the diversity leadership initiative that everybody has to take up now and try to steer it away from this nonsense and toward more productive venues so that you can tackle the real problems. On the other hand, if you're like, I can't learn, like, a lot of my even very smart friends, very academic friends, like, I just can't think like that. I can't think wrong stuff. Okay, great. Maybe you should learn a little bit of it. Just to have some background, do what you can. Don't stress what you actually need to do.

You do need to understand the way that it does shakedowns on people, but other than that, you need to go build the thing. Go build the thing. If it's in our schools, people need alternatives. They need other ways to get educated or educate their kids. And the United States is going to be a godly number of people doing homeschooling. Those people are going to need resources. They're craving the reason they're doing the homeschooling is they want not woke resources, educational resources. So go build a thing that offers that. If you're going to work in law, you know, leave your current law society if it's going woke and go create one that isn't. And, you know, don't put like proudly racist since 2020 on the side, but, you know, proudly not woke is actually a thing right now, you know, you know, you'd have to find the

right wording, obviously. No, but totally. I know what you mean. I said this the other day, like if you, if your small business comes under attack from these woke people now, the best thing you can do, the best thing you can do right now is just double down and go, my Mars bars are for non-woke people. And you're going to get way more money than you would have done otherwise. It's absolutely true. So people who are looking at this world do need to understand that giving into this will not satisfy the problem. It is an unsatisfiable black hole of a problem. Giving in to something that's shaking you down or extorting you is an invitation for them to shake you down or extort you again later. And that's really what this is. It's using fancy terminology, a claim on the current of history, and agitations about people's moral standing rather than say physical intimidation to bully them. It's using administrative policies to try to get people fired. So, yeah, build the thing.

Go build the thing. We're going to be a company that's not going to be woke. We're going to get harassed and we're going to endure the harassment to give people a place they can work. And if you're going to build a company, you will out-compete your competitors because they're going to have to divert an increasing amount of resources to woke. if they let it into their company because it's not satisfiable. It just keeps coming for another shakedown. Another, as, you know, it's very

mafia logic. It's like kicking the, kicking it up to the, to the mob boss. And so do the thing. We need, like if we, if you say, oh my gosh, everything's fallen, there's two ways to look at that. That's, you know, chicken little, the sky has fallen or whatever. And there's, this is an opportunity. And I'm about to, about to blow this thing up.

So just if you don't, want to learn this and take it on head on. You don't want to be an activist. Just go do the thing. And like you said, stand strong, double down. This is what, so I know your last question is coming. It was the thing that nobody's talking about. I mean, steal your thunder and just jump right to it. Go for it. Fuck. Sike, John. Take that, Francis. Take that. I got my banana for you right here, I thought you'd never ask, mate. Yeah. No, but no, that's the thing is nobody's talking about the fact that the liberal perspective, the one that we've built our modern world out of, has the moral high ground. It is the right way to think about these issues. It's not to say that it's perfect.

It's not to say that we can't do better at listening or whatever else, but it holds the moral high ground. It has the also epistemological high ground because it actually gives a shit, what's true, which is a different. I mean, you read this paper, Alison Bailey, 2017, something about I can't remember the title, tracking, privilege, preserving epistemic pushback. So, things shadow texts and philosophy classrooms or something shit like this. And in there, she literally writes that epistemic adequacy is a master's tool. Epistemic adequacy is academic speak for knowing what you're talking about. That's all like literally knowing what you're talking about is racist.

Sounds pretty racist. Sounds racist. So you have the high ground to say no. And nobody's talking about that. Everybody's kind of like, how do we make them happy? You don't. You don't. You say, no, I'm actually in the right here.

I talked to a guy the other day, and he's, you know, we had a conversation like two hours in a podcast. And he's like, at the end, he's just kind of sitting there and he gets us to look on his face. And he's like, I think I've just come to the point where somebody's going to say, you know, hey, you're racist. And I'm just going to say, no, no, I'm not. Okay, I'm not. And that's it. Like, you do. So if you want to ask me the question, I'll make up another one, by the way, though.

Yeah, I'm going to do it purely out of spite, change. I knew you would. You would with your smile, the hides all your spite, your mask is slipping. Yeah. I'm nothing if not work. So what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we really should be? Do you mean like everybody? Because I could just say like that the lays dill pickle potato chips are like next level good.

Nobody talks about that. I never hear anybody say that at all. Yeah, they could. Well, okay, now two people are saying it and then we have a skeptic. No, so what I don't hear people talking about that I think people do need to talk about is regular stuff. Like not being political for once. Regular stuff. Like, I know that they're trying to cram it.

I saw that the opening of the baseball season, it's like everybody's on their knees and crying in the field or something. And they got Black Lives Matter on the home. run fence and all of this crap. And it's like, but nobody's just talking about the baseball game. Nobody's talking about, always going to work and just talking about how to do the job. Nobody's talk. What is, what are we not talking about that we should be? Normal stuff. Everyday stuff. Like getting together with your family and not having a political argument and just talking to each other as human beings without the politics injected. So I know that some people are doing this, but what we really all need to be doing is ratcheting down how much we're,

obsessing about what's on the news, how much we're obsessing about what's on social media, how much we're obsessing about the political valence of this, the political valence of that, and remembering that we can just be normal people with each other also. And that that's really where life is, right? That's the heart, that's the beating heart of social life. These, I might swear, fucking woke idiots, piss me off because they're like, we need to have authentic cross-racial relationships by focusing on the most divisive possible thing in the relationship constantly and bringing it up and calling each other out.

That's the least authentic way to have a relationship ever. The most authentic way to have a relationship is for me to look you in the eye and say, you're a person that I can relate to. You can look me in the eye and say, you're a person. You wouldn't really say that. It's weird. But we're people that can relate to each other. And let's just be friends on terms that have something to do with our lives. And let's not turn this into like a political argument. So the thing that people aren't talking about it should be is everything else, everything that's not what they're yelling about on Twitter that day. That's a really good point, James. And I've been trying to say this to people for some time now. It's like, racism doesn't diminish because you got admonished on TV by somebody.

It diminishes when people meet in the same space and connect and find out about each other's background and culture and just connect as people and talk about family and movies and play sports. boards together and do stuff together when they actually take a moment to not think about race, to not think about any of that stuff and just connect as human beings. And it's a really important point you make. Very bad for trigonometry. Yeah. But a good point. Don't listen to what James said basically, guys.

Yeah. Listen, everybody watch trigonometry and send them money. That's what you really. Nobody's talking about your Patreon. Right. Well, fortunately, some people are. Fans are helping us find a new studio after we lost our previous one due to not being quite woke enough.

But James, listen, it's been an absolute pleasure. People should definitely, definitely check out cynical theories. The book that you've just written with Helen Plachlow is not Heather. I do it all the time. My wife's name is Heather, and it's just a nightmare. I'm mixing them up in my head all the time. Well, there's an extra dimension to that that we're not going to do. Not as people, just the names.

I'm very clear on who's who. Yeah. So with Helen Pluckrose, who's a former guest of ours as well, also people should check out new discourses. They should follow you on Twitter if they do want to hear more about all this crazy race stuff. And is there anything else that you want people to know about that you do? No, that's pretty much all I do now. But I did if people are listening and, you know, whatever. I actually got a – I bought a domain name, Cynical theories.com.

So you don't have to remember, like, go look up the cynical theory. You can, because cynical theories.com just redirects to the Amazon link now. So now you can just go buy it. No problem. I don't think it works in the UK, though. I think it's the US one. You can only put one. All right.

Okay. Perfect. And before we finish, I've got a very one last important question. What were the name of those potato chips again? Laze dill pickle. Lays is the brand. Dill pickle flavor. They are the perfect amount of dill pickle flavor and vinegar and salt.

It's like salt and vinegar, but better with the dill. It's great. but Francis, you're not getting anywhere near crisp for the rest of your life, mate. You're on a diet. Yeah, get in shape, man. He actually did during the lockdown. This is the thing. I used to make fun of him for being fat, and now he's not fat.

Oh, very good. It's kind of disappointing. But anyway, James, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure. Make sure you check out cynical theories and the new Discourse's website as well. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

if you are in the middle of a day, enjoy your evening if you're an evening, and we'll see you very soon with another brilliant episode or a live stream. Absolutely. And our episodes and live streams go out on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, always at 7pm UK time. At 7pm UK time. See you soon, guys.