Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Toxic Taboos" with Jesse Singal

Transcript

"Toxic Taboos" with Jesse Singal · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Sometimes, in our zeal to do the right thing, to believe the right ideas, to be on the correct side of history,
• 0:08
  we actually end up doing more harm than good to the things we care about.
• 0:13
  Innocent people get hit by stray bullets fired in the fights we started to protect them.
• 0:21
  They turn out to be collateral damage in a culture war.
• 0:25
  Sometimes what's actually needed to restore sanity is less sloganeering, less certainty,
• 0:33
  less picking of fights, less demonizing of different views, less storming of the ramparts,
• 0:39
  and more humility, more conversations that are genuinely free from bullshit,
• 0:44
  from posturing, conversations that are blunt and true and sometimes yes just a little bit uncomfortable.
• 0:55
  G'day humans, fantastic chat for you today with an iconic gentleman,
• 1:06
  or a notorious gentleman, a man who is either a villain or a hero in the great 21st century saga
• 1:14
  of the cancel culture wars, Jesse single, to whom I'll get in just a moment.
• 1:20
  I'm currently in lockdown in Sydney. Sydney is in its first full-scale lockdown of the city
• 1:27
  since the early days of the pandemic, really, since May of last year.
• 1:31
  It's been more than 12 months that we've led fairly normal lives,
• 1:34
  responding to outbreaks of coronavirus from hotel quarantine with more targeted lockdowns
• 1:40
  and limited ring fencing of suburbs and aggressive contact tracing and mass testing
• 1:45
  and all those kinds of tricky epidemiological ingenuities.
• 1:50
  But unfortunately this current outbreak, because of the delta strain of the virus,
• 1:55
  it's so contagious that it was getting up ahead of the contact tracing,
• 1:59
  so they put the city into lockdown for a couple of weeks and yet and yet I am a delighted young gentleman today.
• 2:10
  I am over the moon because at last what I've been banging my head against a brick wall
• 2:17
  calling for for at least eight months now has come to pass,
• 2:22
  which is a recognition from the federal government of Australia
• 2:26
  that remaining a hermit kingdom in perpetuity is not desirable or feasible.
• 2:36
  At a meeting this morning, the first meeting after the prime minister got out of quarantine,
• 2:41
  it's a bit funny that the prime minister has to self isolate at home after he gets home,
• 2:45
  even though he's vaccinated, he's been abroad on businesses of state
• 2:50
  and I think it would just be a bad look if he didn't quarantine,
• 2:54
  even though the likelihood of one individual.
• 2:56
  I suppose it would be a bad look if he became a super spreader, wouldn't it, the prime minister?
• 2:59
  But hey, if Donald Trump could do it, why not Scott Morrison?
• 3:03
  Anyway, back to the more important issue, he's gotten out of his hotel quarantine
• 3:07
  and he's met with the leaders of the states and territories of Australia
• 3:11
  in these regular national cabinet meetings that they have,
• 3:14
  where all the leaders of the states and territories come together with the federal government
• 3:18
  and chinwag about what the best way forward is given the status of the pandemic.
• 3:23
  This was an innovation that the federal government came up with at the start of the pandemic last year.
• 3:29
  And they've come out of this saying they have a road map to get back to normal life,
• 3:36
  an open country, a country that is actually engaged with the world
• 3:40
  instead of hunkering down in terror of coronavirus coming in.
• 3:44
  I've been saying for a long time, you will have heard it on this podcast
• 3:47
  and you will have heard me talking about it on ABC radio if you listen to that,
• 3:53
  that we can't continue demonizing case numbers of coronavirus
• 3:59
  as if one single case is the same thing regardless of whether or not you have a vaccinated population
• 4:04
  or an unvaccinated population regardless of whether or not the case is in a nursing home
• 4:09
  or among young people. Australians have been sort of obsessively fixated on case numbers
• 4:14
  and making sure that case numbers remain zero because we're still in the mindset
• 4:18
  of what we were indoctrinated with in the early days of the pandemic,
• 4:21
  which is if you get one case, it's going to turn into two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64.
• 4:26
  It's going to get out of control before you know the hospitals are going to be overwhelmed.
• 4:29
  We're all going to be like Lombardy. It's going to be like the way New York City was in March of 2020.
• 4:34
  Well, it could get out of control.
• 4:38
  But finding a way to make sure that it doesn't get out of control
• 4:42
  is precisely what it's now incumbent upon us to do,
• 4:45
  rather than simply saying we're going to keep case numbers at zero forever
• 4:48
  because we're not. Not if we're going to have an economy,
• 4:51
  not if we're going to have a flourishing life,
• 4:53
  not if we're going to be wealthy and prosperous and outward looking
• 4:56
  and have relations with other countries and other family members.
• 5:00
  I mean, 30% of Australians were born abroad.
• 5:03
  A vast majority of us have close family members abroad
• 5:07
  where we just never going to visit them without rotting in a hotel room for two weeks.
• 5:11
  Every time we come back into the country, that wasn't feasible
• 5:15
  and the conversation up until today, up until this morning,
• 5:19
  which is Friday, the second of July.
• 5:23
  Up until now, the conversation has been,
• 5:25
  well, we're not going to open the borders until it's safe.
• 5:28
  And when journalists like myself ask the authorities,
• 5:31
  well, what does safe mean?
• 5:33
  They say, well, we're not going to do it until it's safe.
• 5:35
  We're going to rely on the appropriate health advice.
• 5:40
  So it becomes this infuriating totology.
• 5:43
  We're not going to open until it's safe.
• 5:44
  Well, what does safe mean?
• 5:45
  Safe is what the health authorities deemed to be safe.
• 5:48
  Well, hang on a second.
• 5:50
  If Australia had never had a case of the flu of the regular old flu
• 5:56
  and all of a sudden the flu cropped up in the rest of the world,
• 6:01
  would we just keep the borders closed to make sure that the flu never comes to Australia?
• 6:06
  Or at some point, would we look at the numbers
• 6:09
  and quite a lot of people die of the flu.
• 6:11
  Thousands of people in Australia die of the flu every year.
• 6:13
  They have been in the past few years because the borders have been closed
• 6:15
  and we've all been locked down in social distancing.
• 6:18
  But the correct question to ask moving forward for coronavirus
• 6:22
  is not how do we keep case numbers at zero,
• 6:25
  but how do we manage it as the endemic condition,
• 6:29
  the endemic virus that it will inevitably become?
• 6:33
  Because even if everyone gets vaccinated,
• 6:37
  there are going to be some people for whom the vaccine doesn't work.
• 6:42
  Not every single vaccinated person doesn't become infectious, some do.
• 6:47
  Some people get the vaccine and if they're very old or if they're immune compromised,
• 6:50
  their immune system doesn't generate sufficient antibodies,
• 6:53
  not to catch it or even to get sick.
• 6:56
  So even in an ideal scenario,
• 6:58
  if you have the kind of economy and the kind of lifestyle that Australia had gotten used to,
• 7:03
  which is an extremely open economy and extremely open society
• 7:06
  where people travel all the time, where tourism is a massive industry,
• 7:09
  where international students are a massive industry.
• 7:11
  They come in, they go to our universities, they go back to Asia,
• 7:14
  we go to the States, we go to the UK, we go to Bali,
• 7:17
  Italy's constant coming and going.
• 7:19
  If you're going to have that, then even in an ideal future scenario,
• 7:22
  given that you've got variants constantly mutating and imperfect vaccines,
• 7:28
  there's going to be a bit of coronavirus coming in.
• 7:31
  And this insistence up until now that we're not going to open the borders until it's safe
• 7:36
  with the implication being safe means zero cases.
• 7:40
  Has been absolutely infuriating to rational people like me who say,
• 7:44
  okay, and then what? And then what?
• 7:46
  Just give me some hope, give me some sense of what happens next,
• 7:49
  what is the bridge towards which we're working?
• 7:52
  And the authorities say that not enough people are getting vaccinated.
• 7:55
  Well, why would you get vaccinated if you thought that the borders were going to be closed indefinitely?
• 7:59
  I mean, give us a carrot, not a stick.
• 8:02
  Don't tell us we're not going to be allowed into places because we're not vaccinated.
• 8:05
  Tell us if you ever want to go overseas again and have a holiday,
• 8:09
  you've got to get vaccinated.
• 8:11
  And that today is what they've done.
• 8:14
  So the Prime Minister has announced a four-step plan.
• 8:17
  Step four is so far away in the future that, you know,
• 8:19
  it's not really worth thinking about at the moment,
• 8:21
  that's basically sort of a return to normality.
• 8:24
  But step one, and I quote the Prime Minister directly,
• 8:28
  he says, we've agreed to formulate a national plan to transition Australia's national
• 8:32
  COVID response from its current pre-vaccination settings,
• 8:35
  focusing on suppression of community transmission,
• 8:38
  to post-vaccination settings, focused on prevention of serious illness,
• 8:43
  hospitalization, and fatality,
• 8:46
  and the public health management of other infectious diseases.
• 8:50
  How lay bloody Leah?
• 8:53
  I feel like I've been treated like a madman bashing his head against the brick wall
• 8:58
  for the past eight months on the air with people saying,
• 9:00
  you just don't care about people, you don't care about my grandparents' lives,
• 9:03
  you just want people to die.
• 9:05
  No.
• 9:06
  I want us to have a reasonable conversation about what the trade-offs are.
• 9:11
  How many dead coronavirus victims would be acceptable in Australia?
• 9:16
  The same number of people who die of the flu every year?
• 9:19
  Less? More? Why?
• 9:21
  Why do we care about one disease?
• 9:23
  More than another? Well, because the hospital is good to get overwhelmed.
• 9:26
  No, now you're changing the subject.
• 9:28
  Let's assume that we've got enough people vaccinated that the hospitals aren't going to get overwhelmed.
• 9:31
  Let's assume that our contact traces are good enough,
• 9:33
  that they can quash outbreaks before they get out of control.
• 9:37
  Let's assume that our testing is good enough, and widespread enough,
• 9:40
  that we can identify where the outbreaks are happening, and get on top of them.
• 9:46
  Then what is the rationale for treating coronavirus any differently from any other infectious disease?
• 9:52
  And people have given the most monumental quantity of obfuscatory bullshit
• 9:58
  in that conversation up until now today, and thank God that this seems to be changing.
• 10:06
  Phase two, the first phase focuses on suppressing the virus and vaccinating the population,
• 10:12
  and only relying on lockdowns as a last resort.
• 10:16
  Phase two, which the Prime Minister says he hopes Australia will enter next year,
• 10:23
  sounds like a long way away to me, but you know, take what you can get.
• 10:27
  Phase two is that vaccinated Australians wouldn't have to undergo the two weeks of quarantine
• 10:34
  when they come back to Australia.
• 10:36
  They could do seven, they'll be able to do seven days of home quarantine.
• 10:40
  That will be the game changer for so many people, like me, who have loved ones abroad.
• 10:47
  I can put up with staying inside my house for seven days getting home,
• 10:51
  and the science now shows that the seven-day home isolation for a vaccinated person is safer than a 14-day stay in hotel quarantine
• 11:00
  for an unvaccinated person, in terms of the likelihood that an infection is going to escape into the community.
• 11:06
  Phase three, so another part of Phase two is that a certain number of international students
• 11:11
  are going to be allowed back into the country.
• 11:14
  Phase three would be a lifting of restrictions for vaccinated people to travel internationally and basically allow,
• 11:20
  so there's currently a prohibition on leaving the country and you need to apply for an exemption,
• 11:26
  which you can get if you jump through all the right hoops and have a good reason to go abroad,
• 11:31
  but Phase three would be an easing of that exemption requirement
• 11:36
  and you'd be able to go to places that are identified in an expanded sort of travel bubble.
• 11:42
  At the moment, there's a travel bubble with New Zealand.
• 11:44
  It's been put on hold because of the current Australian outbreak, but in general,
• 11:47
  there's freedom of movement between Australia and New Zealand when there are no coronavirus outbreaks,
• 11:54
  so you'd extend that to countries like Singapore and other Pacific Island countries
• 11:58
  and who knows potentially, Japan and Taiwan, countries like that.
• 12:03
  So this is all good news and I'm feeling quite chipper and proud not that I had a personal impact on it,
• 12:10
  but that I was part of a community of media commentators who refused to fear manga
• 12:16
  and insisted on pushing back not just against officials, but also against talkback callers
• 12:22
  and textures and tweeters who have been parading this kind of this Doomsday scenario
• 12:30
  as if anyone who questions the integrity of the Australian border closure is a monster
• 12:36
  who wants granny to die.
• 12:39
  So that's that.
• 12:41
  It does still infuriate me that the vaccine roll out is going so slowly in Australia.
• 12:47
  I think something like four to five percent of Australians have been vaccinated
• 12:54
  compared to 50 to 70 percent of Brits and Americans.
• 12:59
  Now, it's somewhat understandable because we don't have coronavirus here, so it's less urgent.
• 13:06
  It's not a humanitarian public health crisis the way that it is in those countries.
• 13:11
  But I've gotten into many a Twitter argument over the past week with people defending the government's acquisition of vaccines.
• 13:24
  So I just want to tell this little story so that you are well informed about the contours of this saga.
• 13:34
  Norman Swan, who is a physician and a health reporter and has become almost the sort of Anthony Fauci of Australia
• 13:43
  in terms of being a trusted and also maligned voice of health information and reason in Australia.
• 13:51
  He's the chief health reporter for the ABC, the public broadcaster, which you can think of a bit like the BBC
• 13:57
  in terms of the prominence that the prominent role that it plays in Australian intellectual life.
• 14:03
  And he reported recently that he has three good sources who've told him that when Pfizer was selling its vaccine
• 14:15
  to the countries of the world, this is last July, it was not yet tested.
• 14:20
  We didn't know which vaccines would be the good ones or the bad ones.
• 14:24
  But Pfizer basically felt that there were some good candidate countries to get a whole lot of vaccine
• 14:29
  and do a full-on vaccination in excess of what you might expect from their population.
• 14:34
  And that Pfizer felt that Australia was a good candidate as such a country
• 14:38
  because it had been so successful at eradicating the virus in the first place, so it could become a bit of a test case.
• 14:43
  This is the sort of approach that Pfizer took towards Israel, for example, where they Israel did a deal that secured it far more vaccinations,
• 14:53
  vaccine doses than any other country per capita, any other comparable country.
• 14:59
  So the claim is that Pfizer came to Australia to the Australian government offering a similar deal of 40 million doses.
• 15:07
  And at the meeting, there was an Australian junior official who nickel and dimeed Pfizer argued about the cost
• 15:20
  that the Australian government would want intellectual property control over it so that Pfizer wouldn't be able to make money out of it
• 15:26
  and just generally behaved like a bit of an immature dick.
• 15:29
  And that Pfizer went away and that was the end of that.
• 15:35
  Now, what we know is that the Australian government came back to Pfizer in October, November and asked for as much vaccine as we can have.
• 15:44
  And Pfizer said, no, you can't have 40 million doses, you can have 10 million doses.
• 15:48
  And that has subsequently caused enormous delays in Australia's vaccination rollout because Australia had doubled down on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is associated with these blood clots.
• 15:59
  Now, I don't know whether or not Dr Norman Swan's reporting is correct.
• 16:05
  I don't know who his three sources are.
• 16:08
  I trust his journalistic integrity.
• 16:11
  I don't think he's lying about those sources or that those sources would be non-equitable.
• 16:15
  I also believe that it's plausible there could be a little bit of a gray area in all of this in the sense that you wouldn't expect a multinational drug company to come to a meeting with any sovereign government
• 16:30
  and just flop its dick on the table and say, here's the offer in writing 40 million take it or leave it and then the government says, no, that's probably not how it happened.
• 16:40
  These sorts of things tend to be a little bit nuanced. There tends to be a dance. It's a kind of a flirtation, right? It's a courtship.
• 16:48
  So it's entirely possible that a lot of people are arguing that Norman Swan's incorrect and that Australia only ever stood to get 10 million doses anyway because Pfizer was committed to sending its vaccines to places that needed it the most.
• 17:05
  But what I don't quite get about that is that the US and the UK and Israel all secured their Pfizer deals in July of 2020.
• 17:17
  Canada secured its allocation on the 5th of August. Australia's was in November.
• 17:26
  So even if you don't believe the worst version of this conspiracy theory where the Australian government essentially told Pfizer to jump off a cliff and then came clambering back a few months later, you've got to ask yourself why in the middle of a global pandemic, you wouldn't throw the kitchen sink at every vaccine and just pre-order as much as you can in July and August.
• 17:49
  Why are you waiting till November?
• 17:53
  So to me it's sort of academic whether or not the whole Norman Swan story is true.
• 18:01
  What we know to be true is outrageous enough which is that nobody in the Australian government was pounding the table in July and August saying get me as much vaccine as we can acquire.
• 18:15
  Nobody had the forethought, nobody had the imagination, nobody had the kind of the empathic vision to see into the future and go okay we're currently grappling with this pandemic in all of the manners that we're trying to grapple with a pandemic for which there's no vaccine like using lockdowns and job keepers subsidies and just closing the border and hotel quarantine and all that.
• 18:39
  But clearly the next phase is going to be a vaccination phase nobody seemed to have that foresight.
• 18:47
  Now people say oh well you know it would have cost a lot of money what I mean the government would have been criticized but what if the fires of vaccine we didn't know at the time it was going to be a good one what if it turned out to be a dud and they'd spent all this money on 40 million doses.
• 19:00
  Also what you know how much vaccines costs 40 million doses of fires of vaccine costs the same amount that the government was spending on job keeper on the job keeper subsidy to prop up the economy in one week one week.
• 19:14
  Don't you think it's worth the gamble to spend one week's worth of job keeper on ensuring that your country can control its own future its own destiny as quickly as possible and get vaccinated we could be out of this our border could be open already we could be on this third phase we could have all the restrictions for vaccinated people lifted on traveling internationally because we could be at 70% vaccines if we had 40 million fires of doses if we'd signed on to that in July.
• 19:45
  And then some people come at me on Twitter for saying this saying well that's that's not very ethical of you the doses should have gone to countries that really needed them to save lives Australia didn't need them we're doing fine.
• 19:59
  To which I say okay if we had them we could give them away if I mean I'm not saying that we had to use them I'm just saying it's the job of a sovereign government to work on behalf of its people.
• 20:11
  To get the vaccines for its people and then if the people go actually you know what we instead of taking them let's give them to pop when you get any and believes then that's fine but it's the job of the government to make sure that that decision is made by us not by a multinational corporation.
• 20:29
  Why are we handing that authority to Pfizer let us make the decision about whether or not we want to be greedy or we want to be generous.
• 20:38
  And then there's the other question of sort of moral hazard like people say oh well why should Australia have got it we didn't need it well.
• 20:44
  We then reason we didn't need it is because we handled the pandemic really well.
• 20:48
  Like do you punish the places that handle it well and that are responsible in their reaction to the pandemic they then have to wait around.
• 20:59
  And rotting in their little hermit kingdom forever because they did the right thing and the places that were that lacked any kind of discipline about responding to the pandemic are the ones that get the vaccine first.
• 21:14
  I mean maybe but that's a that's a kind of a shitty ethic.
• 21:20
  Anyway those are the two things looming large in my head this week my frustration so few of us have vaccinated and my delight that at last the authorities have listened to me me let's face it it was basically just me obviously Scott Morrison listens to this podcast and to my ABC show we all know what a what a lover of the ABC the current federal government is so they've listen to me they've taken my advice they've heated it and there's been great wisdom all around not just federal government
• 21:49
  but all the state and territory governments as well so good on them for being essentially my pawns Jesse single is on the show today I mentioned that he is super villain and also super hero if you don't know him that says something about how not online you are or at least not online in the way that people who are infuriated about cancel culture are online.
• 22:13
  He has a fabulous podcast about cancel culture and public shaming and social media and the culture wars it's co-hosted by the delightful Katie Herzog who's been a guest on this very podcast you can be sure to find that episode and inhale it through your ear holes there show is called blocked and reported so subscribe to that to Jesse's new book is called the quick fix why fad psychology can't cure our social is read it listen to his podcast and listen to and enjoy.
• 22:43
  This conversation to hopefully allow you to make up your own mind about that cultural lightning rod that is the one the only Jesse single.
• 22:53
  This October I was looking at the data yesterday Australia's had three covert deaths in the past seven months.
• 23:09
  That's insane.
• 23:11
  Which and we've had less than a hundred total grand total the whole the whole thing and just you know Australia is small but it's not tiny it's like you know twenty five.
• 23:19
  It has some very big densely packed cities.
• 23:22
  Yeah incredibly impressive.
• 23:23
  Yep.
• 23:24
  Yep.
• 23:25
  So what's your book?
• 23:27
  The quick fix why fad psychology can't cure our social is in twenty fourteen I started a job as the editor of science of us at New York magazine
• 23:37
  it was basically a website under the New York magazine brand dedicated to writing about psychology about human behavior.
• 23:45
  And I ended up sort of taking on the role of a debunker because I realized a lot of university press offices among others were sending us just really half baked findings.
• 23:57
  Just this you know this this these five cool new tricks will make you more productive or whatever and then when you read the actual research these press releases were based on there was often very little there.
• 24:07
  So my book sort of hopscotch is from subject to subject from education to racism to some others to explain how especially in the twenty first century a lot of these ideas that that psychologists have sold us don't really have much evidence behind them and we have arguably wasted a lot of time and money on them.
• 24:25
  What do you care?
• 24:28
  I care because I don't know I don't like pseudoscience I don't like wasting money I think the world is a very complicated place in that we dig ourselves into holes when we pretended simple so many of these ideas.
• 24:41
  You take these like really complicated subjects and you sum them up in one catchy sentence that applies to sort of the behavioral intervention in question.
• 24:48
  And that that rarely if ever works because the world is complicated sort of multi causal outcomes are so I don't know I just I've always found this stuff fascinating and there's there's never quite enough debunkers there's always too many sort of evangelist for these ideas and too many journalists ready to just sort of echo them without enough credulity.
• 25:07
  I mean is it getting worse because I feel the clickiness of the web is is exacerbating this like there are a lot of like top 15 bloody bars that I see offered to me as links at the bottom of you know blog articles that I click on and I'm like hang on there's an ancient like homeopathic remedy that is complete nonsense which is listed as number nine and then number 10 is something really obvious and true like get enough sleep.
• 25:35
  Right and there's like I think we're we're in a moment at the moment where I'm seeing more and more of my millennial friends dabble in things like astrology and psychics and like there's a whole like a friend of mine has come out as a witch he's a witch.
• 25:55
  Oh what's that coming out like is it like a family? I wasn't invited to whatever that was I was under the stairs at the time but I don't know what no like he was like you know I want you to take it seriously it's a thing that I take seriously it has an old set of traditions and you know it's a I don't know it's a it's a faith I suppose but I feel like the there's a we're cleaving into this kind of phony
• 26:25
  binary where on the one side there's cold hard rational science that only can tell us whatever like public health officials and generally mistrusted scientific elites are willing to approve of.
• 26:40
  And then on the other side there's no holds barred witches warlocks occult 5G Bill Gates is up your ass anti-vax like this universe of like homey opathy might as well be true if it makes you feel good you might as well believe it.
• 26:57
  We don't need to use the scientific method at all and there isn't a lot of dabbling in the space that I would rather play in which is like okay what is the most reasonable thing to believe I don't necessarily need you know it doesn't I'm not going to rely entirely on deferring to the authority of scientific establishments I might sometimes think that a high dose of vitamin D is likely to be good for me because you know I there's enough anecdotal evidence even if I'm not going to rely entirely on deferring to the authority of scientific establishments I might sometimes think that a high dose of vitamin D is likely to be good for me because you know there's enough anecdotal evidence even
• 27:27
  if you can't take it to the bank scientifically but that doesn't mean that I'm going to jump off the the cliff with chiropractors and believe in like conception of the body from the 1800s that includes humors and you know whatever strange ideology the these more alternative ways of thinking promote.
• 27:48
  Yeah I mean I think there's a general problem where I think it can I don't want to make this too much of a left right thing the left in the right have different pseudoscience problems and you know the right it's it's well covered things like evolution things like hardcore COVID denialism I don't mean questioning this or that lockdown which I think we need to be able to do but some of the some of the worst conspiracy theories about the coronavirus do come from the right.
• 28:13
  I do think among liberals and on the left there's this tendency to be like those guys over there aren't scientific thinkers we over here are and in my own reporting I've seen that that's just like that general rule is violated over and over and over I think liberals are.
• 28:29
  I don't know if they're exactly equal or exactly as susceptible to misinformation but but people.
• 28:34
  Violate the laws of scientific reasoning all the time when it makes them feel good or good or when it sort of tickles their political prior so.
• 28:42
  One of the things I hope the book does is is sort of maybe depoliticize this issue of like unscientific thinking and pseudoscience because I really do think both sides are victimized by it or or all sides because there's more than two sides yeah.
• 28:55
  Yeah and I think we don't also talk enough about the political underpinnings of the world view that we're trying to uphold with our pseudoscience like we don't give enough credit maybe to people's we talk about the priors right in the ways that our minds are systematically mistaken by bullshit excuse me clearly I'm getting coronavirus here and in lockdown yeah don't die during actually that would make me pretty famous if you died during the interviews well then you then you'd have the challenge of trying to get your hands on the audience.
• 29:25
  To release it oh yeah and you want to hear it you don't want to hear it happening pretty much as close to live as possible.
• 29:33
  It's got dark sorry yeah that's all right but like so the I think let's let me just take two examples like lockdown anti being being anti mask and anti lockdown and anti-vax on the right say and being like anti GMOs on the left.
• 29:55
  On the right there's a whole world view of like we don't want governments to become overbearing and we don't want to live in states where our lives are micromanaged there's like a libertarian strain of independence that is a whole world view so you're just going to have a higher bar to cross in being cool with the government telling you that you have to stay home then someone who's more collectivist or community minded.
• 30:25
  Is there going to be like all right everybody stay home and then the virus will die out in two weeks and then we'll all go back out again whereas that's offensive to the whole world view of somebody who doesn't want to be bossed around.
• 30:34
  And similarly if you take something like genetically modified organisms where you can have whatever problems you want with big ag and like the capitalist nature of the way that seeds are.
• 30:47
  are regarded as intellectual property or whatever but on the purely scientific level of excuse me whether or not GMOs are bad for you they're not they're not that don't cause any health problems and yet on the left there is this almost quasi religious belief that you have to
• 31:07
  avoid genetically modified organisms at all at all cost and you can poop who that and say well they're just being pseudo scientific but you can also see it as again in a mirror image to the kind of libertarian right wing thing feeding into a world view of nature is supreme the world is the planet earth is complicated and beautiful and we should need a high bar for to tinker around like Frankenstein with the bounty that planet earth has provided us with.
• 31:37
  And therefore we shouldn't hastily just run into run towards those kinds of technologies and I don't know if you have any ideas about how to like situate those specific you know beliefs in bad science within a context of a world view so that you can actually have the meta conversation about the world view instead of picking the sort of leaves of bullshit off the tree that you're doing nothing to to address.
• 32:06
  Yeah I mean that's a really good point and it reminds me of a Yale researcher named Dan Cajon who basically writes about how we get anchored to our beliefs in part because those in our social and political and religious networks are too so there's a very high social costs to sort of defecting from a belief like.
• 32:24
  If you suddenly decide the conservative community you suddenly decide the coronavirus vaccine is good you're going to you know face sort of social sanction for saying so out loud I mean.
• 32:34
  You know some of this stuff reminds me a little bit of like John Hyde and moral foundations theory and I think the important point is like for the perspective of public health it might be that very different messaging should be used to target different groups and I think that's a weak point of.
• 32:51
  As someone who's on the left and all all else being equal I want left left ideas to win usually obviously it's more complicated but I think there's often like a real led footedness with regard to messaging and we think we can just like.
• 33:01
  Tell people they're morally wrong or anti-scientific I mean if I hear another liberal person say like listen to the science as though.
• 33:09
  As though things are quite so simple I just think some of the messaging we've embraced probably bounces right off the people we need to convince yeah that's right well that those people then the right wing version of listen to the science is do your own research do the research.
• 33:23
  You know what I mean like to do the yeah exactly do the research don't listen to the what the experts are trying to lead the sheeple to believe stuff being a sheeple.
• 33:31
  Do your own research that that's interesting that you mentioned John Hyte because I would love to have him on the podcast he said that he he said a couple of months ago that he was too busy but then I just heard him on Bridget Fettisies podcast so I'm going to hit him back up and go hey John you said you were too busy but he did a podcast right now but John and I did a tour of Australia and New Zealand.
• 33:54
  Uh I guess the year before the pandemic uh and I've moderated his live events and he's fascinating but can you articulate what moral foundations theory is very roughly for the listener who hasn't come across him.
• 34:05
  Yeah it's like a pop quiz for the stuff I was writing about six years ago I mean the basic ideas are these different moral foundations one of them is sort of um purity like do you with you care about things being polluted one is sort of deference to authority I'm like mainly the actual names but I'm getting the sense of them one is um
• 34:23
  care harm whether or not people are harmed and the basic my sense is that I have not checked it on this research and while I think there's been some legitimate challenges to moral foundations theory the but the basic idea is that conservatives for example value deference to authority more than liberals do
• 34:39
  liberals value
• 34:42
  care and harm and not harming innocent people more than conservatives do we all have
• 34:47
  care about them to a certain extent like there's definitely some cases where liberals will defer to authority
• 34:52
  but it's the differences in sort of the sizes of the five or six graphs that that define political differences uh
• 34:59
  and it's it's a very interesting theory his book The Righteous Mind in many ways set me down my current path of being interested in
• 35:06
  a lot of social and political psychology so yes his main insight was one of his insights was if you're trying to convince
• 35:13
  you conservative to do x or y you should attach that argument to the moral foundations they care the most about
• 35:20
  yes and that that much of what we regard as being policy conversations are actually proxies for bigger conversations because
• 35:28
  we're all we all just have our sort of personal world preferences about about these these sorts of metrics that you were just
• 35:36
  alluding to like openness or deference to authority or whatever and what we're actually what we're
• 35:40
  actually drawn towards are these kind of big deep powerful uh considerations and trying to
• 35:48
  uh try to argue about specific policies without addressing those bigger world views is is pointless and
• 35:55
  that actually John thinks that the left does the left succumbs to this floor more than the right does
• 36:01
  that the right is good quite good at articulating big ideas that punch you in the gut like you know
• 36:09
  if you just think about trumpy populism the idea that the country is going to be overrun by foreign
• 36:15
  invading impoverished hordes and who are who are doing you out of a job and rigging the system and
• 36:22
  that the country has systematically been undermined by them and corrupt people in Washington DC and
• 36:28
  on a wall street who've sold out the middle class like that's a narrative that that is appealing to
• 36:33
  Bernie Sanders supporters and to Donald Trump supporters it doesn't have a lot of details in it it
• 36:37
  doesn't have a lot of flesh on its bones but certainly grabs you whereas then coming back and saying
• 36:43
  I've got a plan to like put together a 173 point proposal which is going to you know radically reform
• 36:50
  the relationship between your state and uh and working families and their relationship to child
• 36:56
  income tax credits it's like your eyes glaze over and that's then the latter is what the left
• 37:00
  tends to do yeah I mean I do think we attempt to come up with sort of emotion driven mantras but
• 37:06
  they're often lacking I mean you know I I think American refugee policy is moral disgrace how
• 37:13
  few refugees we've taken given how many refugees we've created throughout middle east policy but
• 37:18
  when I see left wing messaging on this it's just sort of like you can almost imagine the clap
• 37:22
  emojis like no human is illegal they don't use the term illegal immigrant it's like
• 37:28
  well no I mean that the fact is they are in the country illegally we want to change that we want
• 37:32
  to normalize it to normalize their status so um with that to a certain extent with abortion with
• 37:39
  just like saying like no it's literally just like any other health procedure it's like no that
• 37:43
  isn't most people's moral intuition including a lot of liberals I think there's this like
• 37:48
  left-wing sloganering like maybe well I guess this is what sloganering does in general but my critique
• 37:53
  of my side sloganering is it wishes away complexity and it wishes away peoples like strongly felt
• 37:59
  moral intuitions it's like a lot of it seems like you're just trying to rile up people on your own
• 38:03
  side without without even attempting to persuade anyone who doesn't already feel the way you do
• 38:08
  that's really interesting and I was reading a piece recently by one of the organs of journalism
• 38:15
  that has become that has veered off into becoming increasingly I don't want to say left-wing
• 38:21
  because it's not left-wing increasingly I would just say smug about its own assumptions
• 38:26
  this could be like 20 different publications yeah and I'm not saying that to be polite I
• 38:29
  literally don't remember it was either the Atlantic uh like one of the only publications that I
• 38:35
  find still has self-awareness is which is on broadly the kind of left is the is the New Yorker
• 38:42
  which I've actually read some in I mean the New Yorker is so good if people don't read the New Yorker
• 38:46
  then just google around and just read some stuff from it and also while you're at it by the
• 38:49
  righteous mind by Jonathan Hyte and if you can't if you don't have time to read the book get the
• 38:53
  audiobook which he narrates and the quick fix by Jesse and the quick fix by Jesse's and go that
• 38:57
  goes without saying that's the whole purpose of this and of course uh but you can't get it in
• 39:01
  Australia so wait until we're out from out of the stairs and then fly to China and buy a bootleg
• 39:05
  buy a bootleg copy that uh but then you won't get a you won't get any money from a from a cop from
• 39:11
  a bootleg copy Jesse so maybe they could just send you some some Australian cash in the mail
• 39:17
  there you go I've heard it's basically it's basically worthless that's right I'm gonna fly
• 39:22
  there and I'm going to drop it into the pouches of 25,000 kangaroos copies of the book
• 39:28
  I want you guys just reaching it'll be like sort of a golden ticket type of thing
• 39:31
  right okay it you know it's not that easy to to grab a kangaroo as they bounce past us on the street
• 39:38
  that is by the way that is literally the most sophisticated satire of Australia I'm capable
• 39:44
  they're quite wily kangaroos uh but so in this article that I was that I was reading I think
• 39:49
  I might have been in the Atlantic excuse me uh they were talking about the crisis on the border
• 39:56
  the renewed crisis on the border because I think Kamala Harris has just been down to
• 40:00
  the border after she was getting a lot of heat from the right for not having visited the border
• 40:06
  and this was the personal story of uh people who were on the Mexican side of the border they were
• 40:11
  Hondurans and they were paying the coyotes and it was about how the coyotes are all managed by
• 40:16
  this huge drug cartel and the tragedy of these people who tried across over the border they get caught
• 40:24
  by border by us border security and they get deposited on the other side of the border and they
• 40:30
  try again the next day and they try again and try again and try again and I am absolutely not a
• 40:39
  defender of Australia's position on what we do with maritime arrivals which as you may know
• 40:46
  yes they just like throw them on an island I mean yeah it's the harshest response probably of
• 40:52
  any rich western democracy to unauthorized arrivals and it's a stain I think on the country's
• 41:02
  soul that yes if you arrive illegally in Australia by boat then you will never be resettled
• 41:09
  in Australia that is the policy ever and while you're being processed you won't in order to avoid
• 41:15
  Australia's sort of in order to sort of get around Australia's commitments under international
• 41:20
  refugee law that means that you have to never reach Australia so you have to be intercepted by the
• 41:24
  Navy and then placed on a third country with which Australia which Australia basically bribes
• 41:31
  most notably Papua New Guinea or Nauru and you know you're then incarcerated in perpetuity in
• 41:38
  sort of open air refugee camps and eventually hopefully someone will be able to take you and you
• 41:44
  can be resettled to a third country like they were tried to be resettled in Malaysia but then the
• 41:49
  Australian High Court struck that down because you know we couldn't guarantee that they would be safe
• 41:54
  in Malaysia some of them were sent back to were sent to the US and there was a Obama did a deal
• 42:01
  with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and this infuriated Trump when Trump got into office and he
• 42:08
  was absolutely outraged by it but he ultimately stood by it because his advisors told him not to
• 42:12
  piss off Australia and and that that was a deal where we would take an equivalent number of
• 42:18
  Central American refugees from America if America took our refugees from Nauru or PNG so that's
• 42:25
  like there's this whole subtext there but having said all of that there were only talking about
• 42:31
  hundreds of people at most thousands of people in comparison to the 100,000 plus people who Australia
• 42:39
  take in which Australia who Australia takes in every year Australia's commitment to being having
• 42:45
  one of the highest rates of refugee resettlement of any country in the world in terms of the
• 42:49
  the number of refugees that Australia takes per capita from refugee camps around the world and
• 42:55
  that's the kind of moral tradeoff when I read stories from the states about people at the border
• 43:01
  just crossing over and then the US just not doing anything with them not incarcerating them
• 43:08
  not sending not flying them all the way back to Central America not sticking them on
• 43:13
  I don't know Santa Catalina island in a prison camp or something but just putting them across the
• 43:18
  border knowing that they're going to come back and then I see that the left thinks that that is
• 43:23
  inhumane that really what should be happening is they should be welcomed with open arms
• 43:27
  then I think well hang on what kind of immigration policy do you want I mean I would want if I was
• 43:32
  American and when I was living there I would want America to have a really aggressively open-minded
• 43:38
  and open-hearted policy which would mean taking lots of people from Burma and taking lots of people
• 43:45
  from the continent of Africa and taking lots of people from all over the world not having those
• 43:51
  places those immigration places essentially displaced by people who just managed to wander across
• 43:57
  the border by paying coyotes and then try it again and again and again in the context of a border
• 44:03
  policy that does nothing to deter them that doesn't strike me as humane yeah well it's
• 44:08
  complicated because there is a subset of people who do sort of get caught in these detention centers
• 44:12
  for extended length of time and of course there's the the family separation policy which I know
• 44:17
  didn't start under Trump but but I believe was accelerated under him it's it's all legitimately
• 44:23
  complicated and and there's in some cases the people coming across via coyotes like they came
• 44:30
  from El Salvador which is a country that's like incredibly dangerous and they they just can't
• 44:34
  go back so I'm I'm not I think there's probably some utopian world in which we don't have borders
• 44:40
  I'm not an open borders guy because I just don't think that's realistic but uh yeah I my my main
• 44:47
  my main beef to the extent I follow these policy disputes is under Trump are are the number of
• 44:52
  refugees we took in really strong to horrifically low levels in my understanding is Biden has not yet
• 44:58
  really started to take that up and I think for an aging country with like we there are a lot of
• 45:04
  jobs that apparently native born citizens don't want to do I I think we could take a lot more
• 45:08
  immigrants overall but don't you think that you would be taking a lot more refugees and you would
• 45:13
  be avoiding anti immigrant populists like Donald Trump if the pop if the public had a sense that
• 45:19
  there was order this is the trade this like this is the faustian tradeoff that successive Australian
• 45:25
  governments have have kind of you know not articulated but have have held to be true that that
• 45:32
  the first immigration minister of Australia Arthur Corkwell called well right after the Second
• 45:36
  World War who oversaw the initial boom in Australian immigration which was a massive immigration
• 45:41
  influx in the 50s said as long as Australians feel that they have control over who's coming in they'll
• 45:47
  permit us to bring in huge numbers of people and the moment they feel like they've like we've lost
• 45:51
  control then there'll be a there'll be a backlash and the only way to sustain a large multi ethnic
• 45:56
  multicultural thriving country with very high levels of immigration indefinitely is going to
• 46:01
  be to have control over who's coming in and I I wonder if that would have been true in the States
• 46:06
  yeah I mean it's obviously a different political culture it's not an island I guess my again we're
• 46:12
  wandering beyond my areas of any expertise I do think there's often not a very tight correlation
• 46:18
  between what Americans think is going on with regard to immigration what actually is like I know
• 46:23
  there have been moments of sort of peak anti-immigrant sentiment that have occurred when
• 46:27
  when the crossings from on the south southern border sort of had slowed to a trickle they're back up
• 46:32
  my understanding is they're back up now but I think it's complicated and there is of course there
• 46:36
  is right-wing media where like if a million people come here and one of them commits a violent crime
• 46:41
  that will be the story and there's like half the country that I think is you know I think anti-immigrant
• 46:48
  sentiment is a bit pretty big problem so I don't know I I sometimes say it's complicated to
• 46:53
  wriggle out of things this is pretty cool all right I'll let you wriggle out of it let's let's revisit
• 46:59
  some of those those left-wing slogans that that do more to obscure than they do to highlight
• 47:05
  things that you were saying one of them you mentioned was like oh abortion is just health care
• 47:10
  when obviously that it doesn't land that way in the moral worldview of many people which
• 47:16
  doesn't mean it should be outlawed but does mean that you need to at least tip your hat to the
• 47:20
  the moral complexity the people yeah feel about it what was the other one you mentioned we can sort
• 47:26
  of go through a little yeah as I know human is illegal to say oh yeah okay we've just done
• 47:32
  that you've squirmed you've squirmed your way out of that successfully so we can park that one
• 47:36
  the other the other obvious slogan which touches on you is trans women are women which I see a lot
• 47:43
  meaning it's almost become a kind of religious catechism that you need to when you need to state
• 47:51
  that trans women are women in order to be regarded as not being transphobic and yet some people
• 47:58
  want to say that trans women are trans women and they're still women but this is like kicking
• 48:05
  the most massive hornets nest in the history of the universe and I mean I'm just raising it you can
• 48:11
  sort of dodge this if you want because your whole life is hounded by this issue although I think
• 48:17
  it'd be interesting for you to articulate to people who aren't familiar with you yet why that's
• 48:21
  been the case but I I just walk around like yesterday when I knew that I was interviewing you I was
• 48:29
  just had this I was drinking heavily I was exactly if I if I still drank which I no longer do
• 48:36
  and boy life I tell you what life is easier when you don't drink especially during lockdown during
• 48:40
  the pandemic it was like oh my god I don't know about you but I drank so I drank so much
• 48:45
  during the pen during the lockdown originally and I was like this I don't think this is helping
• 48:51
  anything I think this is improving my mood so it's been much better since I stopped but
• 48:56
  I I walked around with this kind of lead and wait in my gut because I have and my partner has
• 49:08
  so many friends who are so important to us who are trans or non-binary and I so want to be like
• 49:16
  a good ally and I so don't want this to become a culture war issue and I'm so outraged by laws
• 49:24
  that try to deprive trans men and women of their rights or and yet it's so sad to me that I feel
• 49:33
  like a portion of this is just an own goal is is being created by a certain hysteria
• 49:41
  and and doctrinaire insistence on alienating every possible ally from this I mean an
• 49:49
  insistence that comes from a certain faction of the I don't want to call it radical trans wing
• 49:55
  because some of them many of these people are not trans but there's an insistence among the
• 50:00
  virtue signaling kind of peacocks of the left that everybody take the most maximally
• 50:10
  extreme view on this issue and that if you try to have a rational conversation about biology and
• 50:17
  culture then your your persona non-grata and all of a sudden nobody can talk about it which means
• 50:25
  that everybody feels alienated from it which means that trans people are the ones who end up suffering
• 50:31
  yeah I mean I think it's an incredibly complicated and fraud issue and I think what what
• 50:37
  sort of normies are people who don't follow it closely might not realize is like there are some
• 50:41
  people making fairly radical claims that would change the way we think about sex and gender and
• 50:48
  and in some cases that's good like I think it's an important moral innovation that we recognize
• 50:54
  some people you know they're just going to live much happier better lives if they're allowed to
• 51:00
  present and be treated as the other sex or the other gender it's very easy to mix up the language
• 51:04
  here you know that there's a very very strong case to treat people in a manner that lines up with
• 51:11
  their gender identity and to give them access to hormones or surgery if they want it I think these
• 51:15
  are straightforward moral cases often in the same neighborhood as like gay marriage where it's
• 51:21
  pretty hard to come up with arguments against them if you're familiar with the issue but there's
• 51:25
  also the sort of more radical take which I don't think is actually held by that many trans people
• 51:31
  like trans people of course have very nuanced views on their own sense of identity but this is
• 51:36
  the view as you said that trans women just are women trans men just are men there's there's not
• 51:41
  really a distinction and and your sex and your gender is determined by what you say you are and I
• 51:46
  think you know 95 I forget I usually say 99 percent maybe it's 95 percent 90 percent of the time
• 51:55
  that's fine we can treat people the way they say they want to be treated with regard to sex and
• 51:59
  gender there's very clearly a set of of outlying but important cases including things like sports or
• 52:07
  what we should do the best help gender just for children versus adults where I think we really need
• 52:12
  to talk about this with some level of rigor and compassion and care but it's it's being taken
• 52:18
  over by those mantras and I also don't want to I don't want to imply that every country is dealing
• 52:23
  with this the same way like my sense from my Australian friends in queer spaces and from a friend
• 52:30
  of mine who has a trans child is that there is a there is still a fair amount of medical scrutiny
• 52:38
  on this in Australia and that you know this is not done willy-nilly like especially the prescription
• 52:44
  of hormones for for children is is not done in an unquestioning manner but one would have to assume
• 52:52
  that we would be going down the the same path that the UK and many American states have taken
• 52:59
  which is that any attempt to interrogate why a young person might have gender dysphoria or might
• 53:07
  be feeling that their gender identity is fluid any attempt to interrogate that by a psychologist
• 53:14
  is equivalent to like some kind of brutalizing anti-LGBT therapy that's trying to
• 53:21
  pervert the course of their natural gender evolution like it should be possible for a psychologist
• 53:26
  to to chat with a 15-year-old about why they're trans in order to establish that they actually are
• 53:34
  and that there's not some kind of social or cultural contagion going on but I I mean even even
• 53:39
  saying that I wonder if I'm just being the same as people in the 1970s who were saying like why
• 53:46
  don't we talk to 15-year-olds about being gay and when in actual fact that was you know a horrible
• 53:54
  a horrible thing to do to them to be like crying around in their private lives why do they have to
• 53:58
  justify to a psychologist why they're gay yeah and well and that's on its face a very
• 54:04
  winning argument why why would you ask these questions it's the same as questioning whether
• 54:07
  people are really gay my answer is just that a I'm only concerned about this stuff in so far as it
• 54:14
  involves serious medical treatments and puberty blockers are often presented as like 100%
• 54:21
  reversible we don't we don't know that's true and to the point where the national health service
• 54:25
  changed its website from these are reversible to basically we're not sure they're pretty reversible
• 54:30
  I don't think if a kid went on puberty blockers for a year went off them you would not expect
• 54:34
  like major issues but but they're serious and hormones even more so especially for younger and
• 54:39
  younger kids I just think it's a world of moral difference away from I mean a 14-year-old says
• 54:46
  he's gay okay be gay I mean what's what's the downside practice safe sacks be careful learn
• 54:52
  about consent it's just very different from a 14-year-olds who wants medical treatment and I don't
• 54:56
  think anything I've written has been about you know 14-year-olds who come out as non-binary or
• 55:01
  trans or whatever who don't want medical treatment but I in my view there's both some evidence
• 55:06
  for some kids they could use some time working the stuff out with a skilled compassionate therapist
• 55:12
  not one who's gonna coerce them into being something they're not but one who can unpack what's
• 55:17
  going on and I think a lot of the time when you're done unpacking what's left is this is a kid
• 55:21
  with gender dysphoria and and maybe the flourish if they're given access to these treatments but this
• 55:25
  idea you can't even do those unpacking do that unpacking without it being invalidated I think
• 55:31
  is really dangerous and unfortunately I think there's like in the states a growing cohort of
• 55:36
  very incompetent youth gender clinicians who just have don't understand the science of this and
• 55:41
  I'm probably delivering bad care to transgender and gender non-conforming kids so I don't know
• 55:47
  how big a problem this is I do know that when you listen to the stories of detransitioners they're
• 55:51
  pretty disturbing and a lot of them seem like they would have been very avoidable so explain detransition
• 55:55
  as to people who aren't caught up in this and to people who don't know you maybe just articulate
• 55:59
  I mean don't I rehash it a bazillion times but you wrote a very good piece which I recommend
• 56:03
  that people read which was in the Atlantic is that right thank you yeah yeah in the Atlantic
• 56:08
  I'm gonna come up on the three-year anniversary oh no we're past it already damn okay there you go
• 56:13
  and it was basically just looking at the the the case of a few detransitioners so what's a
• 56:20
  detransitioner and how did this come to your attention and what was the response
• 56:23
  yeah so the the the piece basically just is the question of what the diagnostic procedure should
• 56:29
  look like before younger kids go on puberty blockers or hormones it basically takes the view
• 56:35
  that for adults we should let them do what they want you could come up with some you know I think
• 56:39
  if a 22-year-old is having very severe other mental health issues they should think long and
• 56:43
  hard about this at the end of the day you gotta let I think you gotta let adults make their
• 56:46
  own medical decisions here um so the piece explains sort of the history of how trans people have
• 56:52
  lack access to health care and talked about how starting in 2007 puberty blockers arrived in the
• 56:59
  states and this is a protocol where kids who are gendered as far can first go on puberty blockers
• 57:05
  to prevent the development of secondary sex characteristics uh you know which are permanent
• 57:10
  and and require surgical interventions to remove so in other words if you're born male but you
• 57:17
  identify as a girl and you go through puberty and you get an Adam's apple and facial hair
• 57:22
  that's a pretty big deal if you have gendered as far that could could reduce the probability
• 57:26
  you'll ever truly pass as a woman or at least without a lot of medical care so the theory is
• 57:30
  puberty blockers um prevent that from happening and then you can go on estrogen cross-sector
• 57:35
  hormones and develop some of the features of of a woman and become um you know for like a better term
• 57:41
  more convincing um the problem is and this is where some some activists would would vehemently
• 57:50
  disagree with me if you look into the research there's strong evidence to believe that a lot of
• 57:54
  kids who are gender dysphoric at say age six will not be gender dysphoric at age nine gender dysphoria
• 58:00
  often is a sign a kid will end up being gay not transgender in other cases the gender dysphoria
• 58:05
  will stick around and and they'll need treatment so a lot of this debate comes down to some clinicians
• 58:12
  will say we can't really predict who will desist that's the terms they're desisters that the gender
• 58:16
  dysphoria assisted other clinicians are very confident that they can predict you know which kids
• 58:21
  will be trans in the long run um but to me that's what makes this a difficult issue of bioethics
• 58:27
  is what where's the right balance how do you make sure you're giving these these powerful irreversible
• 58:33
  treatments to the kids will benefit from them the most and not handing them out willy nilly to
• 58:38
  kids who might have other mental health problems going on and can I just clarify I mean I think
• 58:43
  am I mistaken in in believing that there is a a class of trans people who have exhibited
• 58:51
  trans certainty from basically day one like I mean this is the child of a friend of mine who
• 58:58
  as from from even the earliest days as a toddler has always identified as their sex you know
• 59:05
  which is different from the sex that they were assigned at birth and that in those cases
• 59:11
  there's very very low detransitioning if any at all right I mean when you're talking about people
• 59:16
  who when they were two years old three years old four years old five years old were insisting
• 59:20
  that they were they were in the wrong body and they're not gender non-binary they're gender binary
• 59:26
  people in other words they firmly believe that they are of a fixed sex it's just the different
• 59:31
  from the sex that they were born as then I don't think we're talking about those people at all
• 59:36
  I mean I think it's a slam dunk for me that those those people should be treated
• 59:41
  entirely as the sex that they feel that they are and I think where the conversation becomes more
• 59:47
  interesting or grayer is where you've got you know cohorts of of especially girls where they where
• 59:55
  you've seen the data go through the roof in in terms of identification as trans when there's
• 1:00:01
  their preteens their tweens they're in their adolescence and there are whole social cohorts of girls
• 1:00:07
  where you have extremely high numbers and a lot of these people as you say have other mental
• 1:00:12
  things going on at the time are disproportionately high number of them are on the spectrum
• 1:00:17
  on the autism spectrum and there's a certain cache in being trans and there certainly does seem
• 1:00:23
  to be some level of cultural or social contagion within peer groups where a higher than number
• 1:00:30
  a higher than expected number of say 13-year-olds in a in a social cohort at school will all
• 1:00:36
  all become trans at the same time so then the question becomes do you do you transition all of them
• 1:00:43
  with medical treatment without asking any questions or do you try to assess what's going on
• 1:00:49
  and the the mere asking of that question has basically plunged you and anyone who asks it
• 1:00:55
  into an interminable nightmare of being pilloried online and on social media not just pilloried
• 1:01:02
  but legitimately accused of being of having the blood of trans people on your hands of being a
• 1:01:08
  pervert who is fantasizing constantly about you know raping trans women I mean the kinds of things
• 1:01:16
  that get said about you for asking that question is horrendous I mean is Salem like witch hunt
• 1:01:27
  level stuff and I don't understand what's going on yeah I mean it's it's not fun I should say I
• 1:01:34
  you know I'm lucky to have a things have been working out for me in journalism lately I'm very
• 1:01:40
  fortunate that might not last so I don't want to pretend I've been like capital C cancelled but yeah
• 1:01:44
  people have said some very messed up stuff um I don't want to misrepresent the research there's
• 1:01:49
  definitely a class of cancelled go by the wayside because I think we get caught up in cancel culture
• 1:01:55
  and like who's been cancelled and everyone's like well hang on how can you say that someone's
• 1:01:59
  been cancelled they're doing well you're doing well because you're a writer and a podcast
• 1:02:04
  an independent writer and podcaster who people pay independently by subscribing to your
• 1:02:08
  sub stack and to your podcast for your content but yeah I think it would also be fair to say that any
• 1:02:14
  mainstream publication that seeks to commission you to write something for them that's completely
• 1:02:19
  unrelated to the culture wars or unrelated to this issue is gonna have a meeting before they do so
• 1:02:25
  about do we really want to kick this hornet's nest and get the backlash online from having hired
• 1:02:30
  Jesse single maybe I mean so that's my my long-term worry is like the dumbest most reactionary 25
• 1:02:37
  year olds in journalism will come to to have these gatekeeping roles as of now that hasn't yet
• 1:02:44
  happened I'm sure there's some outlets like I couldn't write for anymore they're mostly outlets that
• 1:02:49
  don't really pay well and that are struggling so far this hasn't in the case like I'm still a
• 1:02:55
  contributing writer at New York magazine I can pitch there when my book came out I you know I was
• 1:03:01
  like I had a piece in the New York Times I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal I haven't really
• 1:03:06
  it's a it's a weird time because it's actually like better for me business-wise to write stuff
• 1:03:11
  for my own newsletter anyway in terms of like what I would get per word but my sent I don't want
• 1:03:16
  to overstate the extent to which I can't write for mainstream publications there's obviously a
• 1:03:20
  subset of people with in progressive journalism who have said that I I shouldn't be allowed to
• 1:03:26
  have a career in journalism anymore right I think that's ridiculous but I don't know I'm I'm
• 1:03:31
  hovering somewhere between yeah it's okay so it's only it's only psychological torture and
• 1:03:37
  and the smearing of your name and it's not actually you know you can include a link to Jonathan
• 1:03:42
  K's piece the smearing has been very bad I don't want to discount that or underestimate that
• 1:03:46
  what's Jonathan K's piece did he write about your Jonathan is one of the editors of Quillette is he
• 1:03:51
  or yeah he wrote a piece basically about how there's been the 2018 Atlanta piece wasn't the first
• 1:03:59
  time I wrote about this ever since the first time I wrote about this there's been this like
• 1:04:02
  weird online thing where so-called sock puppet accounts will pop up and try to contrive some sort of
• 1:04:09
  like scandal about me so sometimes it is that I've sent people dick pics and I laughed because I
• 1:04:18
  I am fully aware of how little anyone including my girlfriend wants a photo of my penis when you
• 1:04:23
  said you're you're fully aware of how little and then you pause I was like tell me how little
• 1:04:30
  your penis is yeah exactly okay so and a sock puppet account is a phony account that someone has
• 1:04:35
  yeah yeah cuz they're hands up the back of a sock puppet and it's just pretending to be something
• 1:04:40
  they're not basically yeah yeah and this extended to the point where a prominent writer at
• 1:04:45
  Slate publicly said so many of my trans friends yes yes sorry I can only laugh at this as you try
• 1:04:53
  to invite them out to lunch in this creepy way which is just not something that's ever happened and
• 1:04:58
  if it had happened they would of course be screenshots of it so this is all in the KP's maybe
• 1:05:02
  you can link to it that stuff has gotten very frustrating it is a form of like you know attacking
• 1:05:07
  someone psychologically trying to ruin them their name I think it's now been years later and no
• 1:05:14
  one you know there's no there there just frustrating seeing people circulate these rumors but
• 1:05:19
  so so but back to the sort of science of this like
• 1:05:24
  traditionally the kids who showed up at gender clinics were very gendered as far from a young
• 1:05:28
  age you have two-year-old saying things like why did God give me a penis I want to go back and
• 1:05:33
  mommy's belly and come out a boy stop like really intense stuff where it suggests a very deep
• 1:05:37
  seated likely biological seat of this we don't have great evidence to suggest that none of those
• 1:05:43
  kids to assist I think sometimes they do and and a clinician once told me like even those kids
• 1:05:47
  you're not sure but yeah those are the kids were like it's it's less likely and if you have a kid
• 1:05:51
  who first expresses this view at two and still feels that way at the onset of puberty to me that's
• 1:05:56
  like a slam dunk case of like yeah put them on puberty blockers because they're I think they're
• 1:06:00
  probably gonna feel that way forever as you alluded to there's there's this newer cohort of kids who are
• 1:06:06
  12 13 14 15 it's called it's sometimes referring to as a rapid onset genders for it because seemingly
• 1:06:14
  overnight they will tell their parents their trans I don't really like using that term because like
• 1:06:19
  in some cases maybe they have felt that way for a while and haven't told their parents but there's
• 1:06:24
  definitely some cases where there appears to be peer influence going on and like you said to
• 1:06:29
  even suggest that this element of someone's identity could be influenced by peers is seen as like
• 1:06:35
  tandem out to basically murder but I mean my my response to that is like can you name any area
• 1:06:41
  of adolescent life that is not influenced by culture and peers adolescents are like sponges when
• 1:06:46
  it comes to that stuff yeah that's a good point and yet I still feel uneasy because I want to be
• 1:06:53
  on the right side of this so I don't want to say like couldn't the cultural can I have two
• 1:06:58
  thoughts couldn't your cultural contagion argument also apply to homosexuality then bisexuality
• 1:07:05
  and in fact as I say that I actually think it does and I don't think that that undermine yeah I
• 1:07:10
  don't think that that undermines gayness at all I mean I but that's that's the reason why the
• 1:07:16
  analogy fails because there's obviously a subset of kids who go to girls who go to Smith and
• 1:07:23
  the you know lesbians until graduation which I think in 2021 we can admit that that's not as offensive
• 1:07:28
  as it used to be I guess as a straight man I shouldn't say that but like don't in the gay community
• 1:07:32
  don't you isn't it known that some people dabble for a little while partly because of like
• 1:07:37
  their social milieu is not part of it well yeah I mean I look I differ a bit here because I've never
• 1:07:43
  bought I'm I'm probably the wrong person to ask because I had you know fulfilling relationships
• 1:07:50
  with girls throughout my youth and I came out late I didn't come out until I fell in love with
• 1:07:55
  another guy but I like I had dated a girl in a very authentic and and loving way in my early 20s
• 1:08:03
  and uh and so I sort of never bought into the born this way thing I kind of know for simplification
• 1:08:11
  yeah I sort of felt like I used a politically useful one but that's that's it maybe politically
• 1:08:15
  useful but I also yeah I just think when you look at the behavior of men with each other in prisons
• 1:08:22
  and private schools and historically in ancient Greece and like what guys how the the prevalence
• 1:08:29
  of bisexuality in in cultures like Paris in the 19th century and I don't know there just there's
• 1:08:35
  this seems to be a lot of evidence that there is a lot of flexibility on the dial there and you
• 1:08:41
  know whether that's football jocks who were all beating each other off over you know some girl who
• 1:08:48
  they're all coked up having a gang bang with you know they will insist that that's not homo erotic
• 1:08:54
  that the focus is the girl but there are lots of lots of blurry edges here about what it is exactly
• 1:08:59
  that's getting us off and I don't think that you deprive gay people of their rights by acknowledging
• 1:09:06
  that there that there's a blurring us at the edge so I guess yeah I guess I've just talked
• 1:09:11
  myself out of the question about that well not but but but there's a couple important things on
• 1:09:15
  pack here one is I think we feel more comfortable saying that today because at least in the
• 1:09:19
  countries we live in gay rights have been secured at the most basic level that doesn't mean there
• 1:09:24
  aren't parts of other country where it's still dangerous to be gay or or you wouldn't face trouble
• 1:09:29
  you know a guy holding hands with his boyfriend but but we can take maybe a more nuanced
• 1:09:32
  realistic view of things because it doesn't feel like the community is besieged the way it did
• 1:09:38
  you know 2004 in the stage they're debating constitutional amendments banning gay marriage which
• 1:09:44
  is insane to think about 17 years later I think there could be something similar going out with
• 1:09:48
  the trans issues we're like five years from now when maybe there's a little bit less of a sense of
• 1:09:53
  the community being under siege we can hopefully talk about it in a more realistic way because at the
• 1:09:59
  end of the day I mean you can people can make these comparisons to like anti gay talk if they want
• 1:10:05
  but if it were the case that the process was a 15 year old comes out as gay and they demand a
• 1:10:11
  permanent medical treatment because they're gay or they want one in those cases you would you
• 1:10:16
  would want to question their identity to make sure it's a stable identity because you don't want
• 1:10:19
  people to go on a permanent medication that the later regrets so I just yeah I mean I would just
• 1:10:25
  expand that from saying that it's not just about the the reticence about prescribing live altering
• 1:10:32
  treatments to young people I think part of when you say that in a few years the heat will have gone
• 1:10:38
  out of this issue and we'll be able to have a more rational conversation about it I certainly hope
• 1:10:42
  that's true for the benefit of all my trans friends but I also fear that the backlash that we're
• 1:10:49
  seeing which trans people would say is not a backlash but it's just heteronormativity and
• 1:10:56
  you know white straight privilege reasserting the same dominance that it's that it's had for millennia
• 1:11:02
  but I see the anti trans bills in US states and part of this kind of anti trans rhetoric has being
• 1:11:09
  a backlash not just it's it's certainly partly a bigoted backlash from heteronormative power structures
• 1:11:17
  but it's also partly a rejection of an extreme ideological view of gender that people are uneasy
• 1:11:27
  with being taught to their kids and with becoming the new cultural norm so it's a bit like if gay
• 1:11:34
  liberation and the gay rights movement had insisted on saying instead of saying we're here where
• 1:11:39
  queer we want to be treated the same way that you are treated we want to be able to get married
• 1:11:44
  we want to not get fired from our jobs we want to be able to rent apartments without being
• 1:11:49
  discriminated against without significant others it had also said we want we insist that you
• 1:11:56
  agree with us that nobody is straight that everybody is gay is a little bit gay you know and that you
• 1:12:03
  in fact that there is no norm about opposite sex attraction that that's all just a cultural
• 1:12:12
  artifact that's that I think is the is the level of sort of ideological overplaying of the hand
• 1:12:22
  that some conservatives feel as being undertaken by the more extreme elements of the gender
• 1:12:27
  conversation here and unfortunately it's regular trans people who are getting caught up in the
• 1:12:32
  in the crossfire because as you said earlier I don't know any trans people who think this way
• 1:12:37
  it's all most of the people who seem to be pushing this are LGBTQI plus allies or gay people
• 1:12:44
  who are speaking on behalf or just straight millennials who are speaking on behalf of trans people
• 1:12:49
  and insisting on a vision of gender that people find detached and unhinged from biological reality
• 1:12:59
  and therefore worth pushing back against and that's the kind of tragic tragic Chinese
• 1:13:05
  finger trap that we're caught in yeah I mean I think there's something that and in the states at
• 1:13:10
  least a lot of the big rights groups unfortunately have gone a little bit off the rails on this stuff
• 1:13:15
  so it's not you can't say it's like just randos on Twitter it's like some fairly powerful
• 1:13:20
  organizations in my view make arguments that aren't in line with the evidence when it comes to things
• 1:13:25
  like you know youth transition or some of the sports stuff and things like that so I think
• 1:13:32
  things will revert back to a little bit more sanity but I do think you're right that you can't
• 1:13:38
  some of the backlash is in response to like some sort of weird and wacky ideas that aren't going
• 1:13:44
  to resonate with most people whereas if you like you know in North Carolina the Republican party
• 1:13:49
  suffered a major setback because they extended too far and they tried to basically ban trans people
• 1:13:54
  from using bathrooms that line up with their gender identity I think the average person understands
• 1:13:58
  that's unfair the average person understands you know the sort of trans 101 basically born in the
• 1:14:05
  wrong body more or less it's an oversimplification but that resonates with cis people some people
• 1:14:09
  just can't really if you tell these stories in the right way I think most people get it I think
• 1:14:15
  what most people don't get is like there's no such thing as male or female there's no such thing
• 1:14:20
  as a male body or female body these really wacky sort of more academic ideas they should not be
• 1:14:26
  sort of the most visible part of the movement because people don't like them and they're not you
• 1:14:30
  don't need them to secure people their rights it also depends what the rights are like we're coming
• 1:14:35
  up to the Olympics now and the first transgender athlete to compete at the Olympics is going to
• 1:14:40
  be there and there's been a lot of hubbub online about this because this is in weightlifting
• 1:14:45
  and so there is a question about you know what is the what is the physiological advantage of
• 1:14:53
  growing up with testosterone and having male bone density and muskilature in comparison to whatever
• 1:15:03
  whatever women were born women who are not going to be able to compete at the Olympics is there
• 1:15:09
  in this in all of this or is this like a sideline distraction that conservative trolls are
• 1:15:14
  using to to try to oh I mean there's I mean I'm sorry but everyone knows there's it there there
• 1:15:22
  it depends on the level of competition so you're you're for an alloral hubbub she'll be competing
• 1:15:26
  for New Zealand I feel a little bit bad for her because I think she's been put in an impossible
• 1:15:31
  situation she followed all the rules and the International Olympic Committee said she's eligible
• 1:15:36
  um I don't know anything about weightlifting it does seem that most female weightlifters are not
• 1:15:42
  43 she's significantly older she it could be argued she took the spot of this 21 year old
• 1:15:50
  um who who would have been able to go to the Olympics it strikes me that there's probably
• 1:15:54
  some fairness issues there I think the more obvious fairness issues are some states in the US
• 1:16:01
  there's basically no physical requirements when it comes to the high school level this varies
• 1:16:05
  hugely by state but in Connecticut um some some trans girl runners have racked up a lot of records
• 1:16:13
  and I don't think that's fair at least I think it needs to be a conversation but you look at the way
• 1:16:20
  this issue is covered in most progressive outlets and it's like you're a a crazy bigoted maniac
• 1:16:26
  for suggesting there's any difference between biological males and females with regard to sports
• 1:16:31
  so I no I think it's an issue I also think it's going to be sort of um
• 1:16:37
  that's one aspect of this controversy that I think is going to burn itself out just because I
• 1:16:42
  I don't know I feel I don't want in I think some individual trans people are unfortunately
• 1:16:47
  give you the subject of a lot of unfair scrutiny because in all these cases they're following the
• 1:16:51
  rules but I just think the fairness issue is pretty evident for people who believe in women's
• 1:16:58
  sports uh the idea that this is uncomplicated and that is just bigots that that's what sort of drives
• 1:17:02
  me crazy because that is that's the the main liberal talking point right now and it's just it's
• 1:17:07
  obviously not true and I think everyone knows it's not true and it doesn't help to continue echoing
• 1:17:12
  something everyone knows is not true yeah I saw Sarah Silverman wagging her finger on her podcast
• 1:17:16
  at Caitlyn Jenner for being transphobic for say and Silverman's point was look there are lots of
• 1:17:22
  differences between within genders as we're sorry within sexes as well like you don't have to yeah
• 1:17:28
  so you know maybe having been assigned male at birth is an advantage for a now trans female weight
• 1:17:36
  lifter but you know Ian Thorpe had lots of advantages as a swimmer as well he was tall and had
• 1:17:43
  gigantic feet like are we gonna start micromanaging the advantages that people have if a trans person
• 1:17:48
  has an advantage by having had a different biology and musculature I mean that's what it means
• 1:17:53
  to be an elite athlete in the first place is that you're a freak you know you know any every
• 1:17:57
  cis every every brilliant cis athlete is also biologically irregular in some way yeah but it's
• 1:18:06
  just that that's not a serious argument because we've decided for understandable historical
• 1:18:11
  reasons that we don't want to exclude half the species from competitive sports and the dividing
• 1:18:16
  line we chose was biological sex because that is the what if you had to pick one thing to to be
• 1:18:22
  able to tell about someone just a zoomed out characteristic about whether or not they will be able
• 1:18:26
  to compete at the very highest levels of sport it's always sex I mean it's you know there's these
• 1:18:31
  websites that'll list the the top runner of each sex at different distances and oftentimes it's
• 1:18:37
  really to the point where it's like you know I make up these numbers this is the approximate
• 1:18:42
  order we're talking about the top ten or twenty thousand runner male runners are all faster
• 1:18:48
  than the top one female runner it's like that stark so when silverman and people like that make
• 1:18:54
  that argument it's it's not a real it's like yes it's true at some level sports aren't fair I
• 1:19:00
  wish I was more athletic I wish I was better at basketball but I I am visibly
• 1:19:06
  bigger and stronger by dint of testosterone and my body type than the vast majority of women
• 1:19:12
  um it's just I don't know I feel like they're trying to muddy up something where everyone knows
• 1:19:17
  why we have women sports and they're they're trying to confuse that and that's a weird thing
• 1:19:20
  for liberals to do because I thought they like women sports yeah it I mean it it also does
• 1:19:25
  it misunderstands like the distribution of extremes like that you can have two if you think of two
• 1:19:31
  bell curves and you've got a bell curve of athletic excellence excellence for men and for women biological
• 1:19:36
  men and biological women and you overlay them then they're going to be slightly offset but that
• 1:19:41
  doesn't mean that some of the men don't fall into the female category like you and I are probably
• 1:19:47
  inferior basketball players to the best female basketball players in the world you know we're
• 1:19:52
  not better just because women but but the the extremes of the male uh the tail end of the top
• 1:19:59
  male athletes are going to exceed the tail end of the top female athletes even though there's
• 1:20:03
  a bit of overlap and by a huge amount it's like it's like I'm in New York which has what 8 million
• 1:20:07
  people there's ex female basketball players who could beat me probably not a small number but the
• 1:20:14
  five best females would be beaten by tens of thousands of men that that's the way distributions work
• 1:20:21
  if you look at I'm just repeating what you said and you would be beaten you would be beaten by every
• 1:20:25
  single other male I have played every male and one on one you've all beaten me all four million
• 1:20:30
  no but I mean it's just it's crazy I just saw this argument last um raised by by Nathan Robinson of
• 1:20:38
  current affairs who is a very smart guy very smart leftist thinker and it's crazy that anyone thinks
• 1:20:44
  this is an argument he used the distribution argument for his view which is that there's not really
• 1:20:49
  a difference between males and females which basically the argument he made with regard to sports
• 1:20:53
  it's just it's crazy it does not take a lot of knowledge to understand that these are nonsensical
• 1:20:57
  arguments uh the wonderful Oliver Birkman who's the who was the second guest on this uh put this
• 1:21:03
  podcast uh who I loved you know Oliver he writes for the Guardian and there's an absolutely
• 1:21:09
  problem uh he tweeted about this I'm genuinely a bit surprised by the number of people arguing
• 1:21:15
  not this is right to celebrate it but rather this needn't be a big deal it suggests a clear
• 1:21:21
  underlying position that a moral wrong has in fact been perpetrated yeah I mean maybe there's
• 1:21:26
  been like celebrations of Laurel Harvard I what I've noticed is sort of the major rights groups I
• 1:21:31
  would have thought would celebrate that sort of laying low and and unfortunate backlash against her um
• 1:21:37
  I don't know if this can be a big issue maybe there's just not that many like trans high school
• 1:21:41
  athletes I do know that in Connecticut which is the state with among the most liberal laws on this
• 1:21:47
  to it's just an undeniable fact that two young trans women did start to dominate track there and set
• 1:21:54
  excuse me a number of records so make of that what you will but to pretend that this isn't an issue
• 1:22:00
  because like this hasn't happened yet in like Kentucky or whatever it's just sort of silly I was
• 1:22:05
  speaking with a millennial friend of mine and she was talking about JK Rowling and saying and laughing
• 1:22:12
  and saying like it's so ridiculous that these these multi-millionaire uh cultural influences
• 1:22:20
  are cherry picking and creating this sort of straw man of uh of like ideological power that
• 1:22:27
  doesn't exist in their opponents and she was saying like she doesn't read Harry Potter anymore
• 1:22:33
  when she got rid of her Harry Potter books because she doesn't want to be reading a transpose and
• 1:22:37
  like she read I don't think she actually did read JK Rowling's letter just to find her remarks
• 1:22:42
  about trans people but she was saying that someone told me that Rowling is saying that like oh you're
• 1:22:48
  not allowed to say this and you're not allowed to say that anymore is she was like who's stopping
• 1:22:52
  you from saying anything like there is no there is no none of this backlash and it was like a week
• 1:22:58
  later that I saw a couple of BBC journalists in the UK were censured and Pillar Eden had to like
• 1:23:05
  cancel their Twitter accounts and be reprimanded by their bosses for a documentary that they did
• 1:23:11
  about detransitioners and it struck me that there might just be a big uh void of ignorance amongst
• 1:23:20
  the general public about what's actually about the exact nature of the of the kind of backlash that
• 1:23:27
  we're talking about one way of articulating that might be uh just to reference the recent controversy
• 1:23:33
  with Jim Amanda Riddici the brilliant Nigerian feminist because I first saw about this saw this
• 1:23:40
  on your Twitter feed and you were retweeting a popular Nigerian American novelist is she
• 1:23:53
  a Kwaki Amizi who was saying I couldn't quite know what to make of this tweet but it said I
• 1:23:58
  trust that there are other people who pick up machetes to protect us from harm that
• 1:24:03
  transforms like a Dici and Rowling seek to perpetuate I however will be in my garden with butterflies
• 1:24:09
  trying to figure out how to befriend the neighborhood crows find me on the gram and I thought wow
• 1:24:15
  she's pick up machetes pick up machetes like I heard you on your podcast make the point that like
• 1:24:21
  if you or I said I trust there are other people who will pick up semi-automatic rifles or AR-15
• 1:24:29
  you don't have those in Australia we don't have those when I trust I think well I'm least in goes
• 1:24:35
  yeah to to like punish our political opponents for their beliefs but I'll be here in my garden
• 1:24:42
  with my butterflies counting crows or something like no one would believe us if we said that there's
• 1:24:49
  no there there and the violence like that that isn't a a tacit call to violence and this person
• 1:24:56
  was furious at a Dici if you don't know a Dici she she was at Americana her first novel that
• 1:25:05
  I don't know if it was a crazy I was her breakout novel I've never read it I've been
• 1:25:10
  putting it around for you I want to read it I'm glad you confessed to that because it's also on my
• 1:25:14
  it's on my like list of books my big stack of books that I feel guilty for not having gotten
• 1:25:20
  around to reading but she's a brilliant and celebrated novelist and so from that tweet I then
• 1:25:27
  found a vox piece which is called Shimamanda Dici's cancel culture screed is a dangerous
• 1:25:38
  distraction we're having the wrong conversation which said that basically this was a she says in
• 1:25:47
  a rush to praise the most quotable parts of a Dici's cutting essay and if the listener is
• 1:25:53
  lost here don't worry it this all will become clear many on the left have joined notorious
• 1:25:59
  transphobes terfs and their allies including signatories of the infamous 2020 Harper's Open Letter
• 1:26:04
  against the concept of cancel culture and this author in this review of another piece that I have
• 1:26:11
  as yet not read I mean in the in the trajectory and the chronology of my articulating how I came
• 1:26:17
  upon this she says or they say whoever wrote this article I'm not sure if they are they or she
• 1:26:25
  she's a she and a they she and are they okay cool they say worst of all a conversation that
• 1:26:33
  should have been about transgender identity has been reframed now it's about how difference of
• 1:26:38
  opinion doesn't mean hatred and how social media amplifies pathological and antisocial tendencies
• 1:26:43
  a Dici's essay minimizes and obscures her original actions and speech so I start thinking okay
• 1:26:50
  well her essay must be a horrendous screed and whatever she originally said must have been terrible
• 1:26:59
  so it must have been like on the order of like for example asking people to pick up a machete
• 1:27:04
  yeah yeah saying other people might have might might want to pick up a machete not that I'm
• 1:27:09
  going to do it myself but other people will yes and then I went back and I read the article
• 1:27:18
  that's being referenced and it's a beautiful heartfelt attempt to articulate a sense of betrayal
• 1:27:29
  that this novelist has at the hands of a couple of her students protege I suppose people
• 1:27:36
  who she's influenced who she feels have betrayed her by pillering her misrepresenting her attacking
• 1:27:43
  her on social media manipulating her name using her name into their advantage when it suits them
• 1:27:51
  dragging her name through the mud when it doesn't suit them and she ends up basically making a
• 1:27:56
  fairly predictable but very articulate a case against cancel culture and sort of performative
• 1:28:02
  social justice online and what motivated her to write this piece was the fact that she has been
• 1:28:11
  so roundly attacked as being a hateful transphob who deserves to be attacked with machetes
• 1:28:19
  because of saying this in a channel four interview in 2017 I just want to take a listen to
• 1:28:25
  the whole context of what she said and I'll play it all the way out in the book you you say I'm
• 1:28:30
  just quoting feminism and femininity are not mutually exclusive when there was a controversy in
• 1:28:37
  the last few days about Emma Watson the actor posing in a pretty revealing outfit in vanity fair
• 1:28:43
  was that feminism do you think oh yes of course because it was her choice and because she's a
• 1:28:48
  woman who is in a position to have a choice there are women who might do that but but if it's
• 1:28:54
  coerced or if they're doing it from a place of no power then it's questionable but clearly I mean
• 1:29:00
  it's a choice that she's made and and for me what's even more troubling is that idea there's a kind
• 1:29:04
  of puritanical strain in certain ideas of what feminism is that I find very worrying because it
• 1:29:11
  means that women cannot be sexual beings what this is really is about that a woman is either the slot
• 1:29:18
  or she's the serious person and you have to choose and I really quarrel with that I really quarrel
• 1:29:24
  with that binary women have to be allowed to be many things and so the idea that a woman has sort
• 1:29:30
  of posed in a way that's sexually provocative it means she can't be taken seriously I think is
• 1:29:35
  deeply misogynistic staying with this issue of feminism femininity does it matter how you've
• 1:29:41
  arrived at being a woman I mean for example if you're a trans woman who grew up identifying as a
• 1:29:47
  man who grew up enjoying the privileges of being a man does that take away from becoming a woman
• 1:29:56
  are you any less of a real woman so when people talk about you know our trans women women my
• 1:30:01
  feeling is trans women are trans women I think if you've been if lived in the world as a man with
• 1:30:06
  the privileges of the world accords to men and then sort of change switch gender it's
• 1:30:14
  difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman
• 1:30:20
  who has lived from the beginning in the world as a woman and who has not been accorded those
• 1:30:25
  privileges that that men are I don't think it's a good thing to conflict everything into one I don't
• 1:30:30
  think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women
• 1:30:36
  what I'm seeing is that gender is not biology gender is sociology so that's what she had to say
• 1:30:42
  in 2017 and that's what triggered this whole thing of her being dragged through the mud as being
• 1:30:49
  as having the blood of trans children on her hands and the article that she then wrote I just
• 1:30:56
  want to read a bit of the final few paragraphs of it she talks about criticizing people who
• 1:31:03
  so the social media savvy people who are choking on sanctum and ear and lacking in compassion
• 1:31:09
  who can fluidly pontificate on Twitter about kindness but are unable to actually show kindness
• 1:31:15
  people whose social media lives are case studies in emotional aridity people who don't realize
• 1:31:22
  that what they call a sophisticated take is really a simplistic mix of abstraction and orthodoxy
• 1:31:28
  sophistication in this case being a showing off of how oath they are on the current version of
• 1:31:33
  ideological orthodoxy people who wield the words violence and weaponize like tarnished pitchforks
• 1:31:41
  people who depend on obfuscation who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused
• 1:31:48
  ask them a question and you're told that the answer is to repeat a mantra ask again for clarity
• 1:31:54
  and be accused of violence how ironic speaking of violence that it's one of these two who
• 1:32:00
  encouraged Twitter followers to pick up machetes and attack me and so we have a generation of young
• 1:32:06
  people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they've robbed themselves
• 1:32:10
  of the opportunities to think and to learn and to grow I've spoken to young people who tell me
• 1:32:17
  they're terrified to tweet anything that they read and reread their tweets because they fear they'll
• 1:32:22
  be attacked by their own the assumption of good faith is dead what matters is not goodness but the
• 1:32:28
  appearance of goodness we're no longer human beings we're now angels jostling to out angel one
• 1:32:35
  another god help us it's obscene it's almost like she's a good gifted writer it is I mean if I
• 1:32:44
  wasn't gonna read americana beforehand I'm gonna I'm gonna read her prose let's tell you what
• 1:32:49
  it's incredibly powerful and completely dismissed not just by a few Twitter trolls but by the
• 1:32:57
  piece that I just read in vox a long piece calling what I just read a screed and a transphobic hate
• 1:33:05
  screed I my estimation of a lot of sort of cultural commentators has really fallen off of cliff
• 1:33:15
  in recent years but and so vox for example can still do really good policy journals and still
• 1:33:19
  has some very talented people their average piece of sort of cultural criticism or or writing on
• 1:33:24
  identity is like is really bad but this was sort of a new low for me I was I'm not it's hard for me
• 1:33:31
  to be surprised that this or that is published these days I was surprised that piece was published
• 1:33:34
  it's a really crazy piece especially given the context which involved machete talk and and it's
• 1:33:41
  just nuts but I am surprised it's published like I see the reaction to the Rowling letter and I
• 1:33:47
  encourage people to go back and read jk Rowling's letter and I see the the disjoint between that
• 1:33:56
  and my young millennial friend saying oh what the hell is she talking about and then I see what
• 1:34:01
  happened to you and then I see what the response to the 2017 channel for interview was where the
• 1:34:11
  DG and then I see that Ezra Klein has had to leave vox and go to work with the New York times and
• 1:34:19
  Matt Eglaceus has left they founded the the place he felt that the well we know we know to be fair we
• 1:34:25
  know more about we basically know that Matt left in part because of that at least I don't have any
• 1:34:32
  reason to think Ezra left for that reason I although who knows maybe I'm just not sure I would
• 1:34:38
  put Ezra in that bucket to be fair well we don't we don't know but we know what was happening
• 1:34:42
  at the time and we know and we know that he left we don't know why and we know that Andrew Sullivan
• 1:34:50
  was fired and we know that I mean there is a long list of people who we could go through Matt
• 1:34:57
  Taibe and Katie who and Barry Wise being driven out of the times oh yeah no I mean there's
• 1:35:05
  there's definitely some like really crazy stuff going on some of these publications it's it's bad
• 1:35:10
  and it you know it's why like if you wanted to really understand the the transports issue or
• 1:35:17
  the youth transition issue unfortunately you can no longer really go to most mainstream sources
• 1:35:21
  I'm not sure this is like a permanent issue because maybe the pendulum will swing back but I'm
• 1:35:26
  just like I'm I'm contradicting myself because I just said I'm often not surprised I still am
• 1:35:32
  pretty shocked by what gets published when I read a story I'm like a subject where I know a fair
• 1:35:37
  amount and just see the sorts of claims that are given airtime at shock there's there's no
• 1:35:41
  standards on any story sort of having to do with like hot button social justice issues evidence
• 1:35:47
  goes out the window it's really disturbing I did like the tweets by Phoebe Mott's Bovy about
• 1:35:53
  the Adichie essay did you see Phoebe talking about it she was sort of live tweeting as she was
• 1:35:58
  reading the vox piece so the first one was about pride month which I know that you had you
• 1:36:06
  heard address she because in the vox piece the vox piece criticizing Adichie says it's not
• 1:36:11
  precisely clear what prompted Adichie's essay though many observers have questioned her motives in
• 1:36:16
  choosing to publish it during pride month that timing along with the letters tone has made Adichie's
• 1:36:21
  post come off as a direct attack against the individual students the essay refers to and Phoebe writes
• 1:36:28
  I'll read the rest of this later but one you can't infer things based on the month they were
• 1:36:31
  written in and who the author named the individual she discusses so isn't that picking on them she
• 1:36:36
  says sorry I'm now what's that she said she named them but she didn't name them the essay she just
• 1:36:44
  made it very clear who yeah that's right yes that's true yeah and then Phoebe says that's Phoebe's
• 1:36:50
  era she says sorry but I'm now obsessed with the idea that someone might have written an otherwise
• 1:36:55
  good or even important essay but because they didn't remember which identity groups month it was
• 1:36:59
  at the time nevermind it's trash or that someone let alone a major novelist and thinker is sitting
• 1:37:04
  around deciding what to write about and so turns to the whose month is it calendar for topic inspiration
• 1:37:10
  she writes if someone was transphobic in June that have been transphobic in July if they wouldn't
• 1:37:15
  have been transphobic in July you can't be like well it was June so I'm sorry but it's such a dumb I
• 1:37:21
  mean I've gotten that because my Atlantic are the most controversial thing I wrote on this it was
• 1:37:27
  for the July August issue but it was put up like late in June it went online so it was during pride
• 1:37:32
  it's like guys it's get a little bit more substantive than that please is there a way out of this
• 1:37:41
  I do you know I do think things are gonna calm down in the long run people make fun of me for saying
• 1:37:45
  that because some people wanted to be the case that we're headed toward like a malice cultural
• 1:37:50
  revolution in the States I think there's a million reasons to think that's not the case
• 1:37:54
  not least of which is like all the backlash like just to cancel culture would everyone to call it
• 1:37:59
  a lot of which I think is a little bit overblown and don't agree with but I don't know I think there's
• 1:38:04
  huge backlash I think a larger increasing number of journalists myself included have been lucky
• 1:38:11
  enough to make a living in ways that where we're sort of uncancellable it's silly I even have to
• 1:38:17
  talk about that because I have so few opinions that are at all controversial in in a broader American
• 1:38:22
  context but yeah I just think pushing for liberal values pushing for open conversation I think
• 1:38:27
  there's a real appetite for that so yes as always capitalism will fix everything I mean I worry whether
• 1:38:34
  or not there is that much of an appetite for it I was traveling with a buddy of mine who's an
• 1:38:39
  English guy who lives in in Europe and he's a journalist and this was host Brexit post Trump and
• 1:38:47
  I was singing from the same him sheet that you just were saying look everything's going to
• 1:38:52
  sort itself out and he was like I mean has liberalism ever been that popular like liberalism
• 1:38:59
  you know traditional such losers were such losers with our principles we've we've got kind of
• 1:39:04
  lucky during the enlightenment that a cabal of influential elites brought into liberalism and
• 1:39:12
  we generated basically all of the wealth and scientific progress of the past few centuries
• 1:39:18
  but it's not the man in the street has never been crazy about like Voltaire's dictum of like I
• 1:39:24
  disagree with what you say but I'll defend to to my death you're right to say it most people are
• 1:39:29
  like shut the fuck up I don't agree with you my tribe is right and most of history is tribes
• 1:39:35
  warring against each other and and jostling in a zero sum game for zero sum power that's true
• 1:39:43
  but people are people really don't like being told that they can't say stuff is the flip side of
• 1:39:48
  that and they especially don't like being told they can't say the emperor is naked when the emperor
• 1:39:53
  is naked so I think that's a countervailing force I agree with what you just said completely
• 1:39:57
  liberalism is a tough sell of people and I think one of our major errors as liberals and Trump's
• 1:40:03
  election was sort of the best example this we just assume sort of like urban liberal cosmopolitanism
• 1:40:08
  was like this this strong and growing and stable force when I think we're always gonna have to fight
• 1:40:13
  for it but I do think people do not like being told you can't say that I'm gonna try to get you
• 1:40:18
  fired so I think we have that going for us that's true but I mean we may not we may have that
• 1:40:24
  either we have that going for us or right wing fascists also have that going for us that's
• 1:40:30
  the worry that yeah exactly that the that the left becomes so sensorious that the backlash
• 1:40:36
  against it is itself also sensorious from the other side and that's what you're seeing in some
• 1:40:39
  of these anti trans bills in some U.S. states for example where like it doesn't always default back
• 1:40:45
  to our version of open-minded progressive small L liberalism sometimes it yeah it swings back
• 1:40:52
  it sometimes the the pirate ship in my mangled metaphor gets higher and higher on
• 1:40:58
  the side and the middle gets get squeezed out all right what's what's one takeaway from your
• 1:41:04
  book that you want to leave people with to encourage them to get on a plane to China Jesse
• 1:41:10
  there's a lot of stuff that I think people might find interesting about the implicit association
• 1:41:14
  task which is like the most popular oh yeah I wanted to get that's right I'm glad you reminded me
• 1:41:18
  of that I wanted to get to that because I think that it's become a it's become another one of
• 1:41:23
  these shibboloths in on the left along with insisting that people mount the catechism trans
• 1:41:29
  women or women without interrogating what they mean by that there is also the catechism about
• 1:41:34
  implicit bias and how we're all implicitly racist without interrogating what that actually
• 1:41:42
  looks like so can you can you give us a sense of what the genesis of of the implicit bias test was
• 1:41:50
  yeah so in 1998 a pair of researchers mausoleum binaji she's at Harvard now Anthony Greenwald
• 1:41:56
  University of Washington they introduced the implicit association test the it basically it flashes
• 1:42:02
  stimuli and you know it'll say hit the i key on your keyboard if you see a good word a positive
• 1:42:11
  word or a blackface hit the e key if you see a white face or a negative word or it'll flip those
• 1:42:17
  and it it measures your reaction time to try to determine your level of implicit bias against black
• 1:42:23
  people in that version of the test there's other versions involving other marginalized groups and
• 1:42:28
  for a long time this was advertised as a test that could reveal your unconscious bias your implicit bias
• 1:42:33
  and it became and still is a darling of diversity trainings everywhere countless papers are
• 1:42:40
  in about it countless glowing instances of glowing media coverage it turns out as we've now known
• 1:42:46
  for a while that the test basically doesn't predict anything there's like a little slice of a
• 1:42:50
  there there but even the people who created the test said that it cannot be used to diagnose
• 1:42:56
  individuals as being likely to engage in racist acts and that was long their claim that was like
• 1:43:00
  this this very provocative claim that you take this test you sit at a computer it tells you how
• 1:43:05
  likely you are to act in a racist way my book chapter which was adapted from an article I wrote
• 1:43:11
  for New York magazines website about this is just explaining why Americans are so eager to believe
• 1:43:17
  that racism is this thing you can sort of diagnose in the individual soul and fix it because in my
• 1:43:23
  view our ongoing racial disparities the ones that still exist some of which are quite bad can't
• 1:43:29
  really be reduced to like individual actors they're much more structural than that but I think
• 1:43:34
  as a culture where this idea of sort of individual responsibility for addressing racism appeals to
• 1:43:40
  us I also think it appeals to powerful people because like that's a much more palatable solution
• 1:43:45
  than redistribution or changing a law or raining in the police stuff like that that's yes that's
• 1:43:51
  great and I'm going to devote an entire episode or many to what I think of as being the the way that
• 1:43:59
  progressive middle class elites ignore class and income inequality and wealth disparity as being
• 1:44:07
  the real problem here it's like it's very easy to be to go to like racial awareness workshops
• 1:44:13
  but the way that race maps onto class and and the lack of privilege is the kind of elephant in
• 1:44:19
  the room that we don't actually want to address but I won't get you to a point on that right now
• 1:44:23
  because our time is up Jesse thank you I appreciate it and I look forward to getting a beer with
• 1:44:28
  you under the stairs when we can finally emerge from lockdown yeah that'd be wonderful thank you so
• 1:44:33
  much for being here