Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “What Even Is the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Today?” with Dr Jamie Roberts

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“What Even Is the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ Today?” with Dr Jamie Roberts · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
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• 0:32
  G'day humans. Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. And dangerous ideas,
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  what the Intellectual Dark Web was originally all about. This gaggle of folks of independent
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  media personalities, of journalists, of academics who sort of coalesced, what, about 10 years ago,
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  around an idea of talking about taboo subjects in a fearless way. That grouping may have
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  collapsed into ashes and sometimes acrimony, but the phenomenon warrants some kind of examination,
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  which is what today's guest has done in a new book. He's an academic himself, Dr. Jamie Roberts.
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  He's a lecturer in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University
• 1:14
  of Sydney, a position which is increasingly fraught as he gets censured and sanctioned
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  for trying to wrestle through some of the same sorts of hot-button cultural
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  cultural issues that the IDW was known for. His book is called The Way of the Intellectual Dark Web,
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  what Joe Rogan and his associates can teach us about political dialogue. He's a political
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  philosopher himself, and if you're looking forward to reading the book, you can't, because it's
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  currently embroiled in a controversy about some of the ideas that it contains. There's been
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  something of a backlash at the publisher who is not selling the book at the moment and is about
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  to haul him in front of some kind of presumably kangaroo court to try to answer for the ideas that
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  he is exploring for having the temerity, the audacity to kick the hornets nest. I hope you enjoy
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  this conversation with the unique academic Dr. Jamie Roberts. Do you ever run? Yeah, I was like,
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  well, I do caffeine, I'm like, I have a cup of green tea and then just like do 10Ks, you know,
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  suck up the natural way. That's so annoyingly healthy. That's disgusting. Yes, disgusting, yeah.
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  I feel morally inferior. I'm sucking on my caffeine and you've just been for a 10K.
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  Yeah, yeah, I could talk about running for two hours, but I wouldn't. Let's not, but yeah. Wow.
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  Running all your life? Since my mid 30s, since my mid 30s, when I was like, you know, you do
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  nothing in your 20s and you get fat and then like started running and it's been so great.
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  Do you listen to anything? When I run. No, totally zan. Try to run as like free as possible.
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  You know, just shorts, shoes, just that's good. I feel like I get bored. Yeah, but if you want to
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  like, that's because my mind is chattering too much. No, no, like I know the feeling and I'm like
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  that when I drive, but there's like, there's like, there's like a rule with running. You know,
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  the man is like, well, if you're going to drink your fucking green tea and go for a run,
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  you have to be all holistic about it. Yeah, you don't want your mind to be. But at the same time,
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  it's actually nice because you know, you meet people or if you're in the bush, you know,
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  your animals smell, it's kind of like, yeah, you can still see the animals and smell the smells
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  and listen to a podcast. Oh, okay. I don't know what podcasts you're consuming, but if they're like
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  a full sensory VR headset with smell of vision as well, then you're ahead of the game.
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  So this book is fascinating. The way of the intellectual dark web, what Joe Rogan and his
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  associates can teach us about political dialogue. That's the hell of a sub. I like, I love us,
• 3:56
  I love a long subtitle. I had to fight for it. Did you? What was it? What were they pushing back on?
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  You know, I can't remember what they suggested, but it was something horrifically dull. But I'm
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  like, I'm like, I have to, I wanted to jam as many names into the subtitle. I was trying to get
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  Joe Rogan and Sam Harris and the other. But yeah, I thought I've got to at least get Joe Rogan in
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  this. Yeah, that's good. I think my, if I write a book, it'll just be all subtitle. Like,
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  there'll be a title and then the subtitle will be 160 pages and then the book will just be a
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  coder and a blog. You call the intellectual dark web a massive but decentralized popular
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  intellectual movement. What is it for people who aren't quite as online as we are? Okay. So
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  the intellectual dark web was a funny term cooked up by Eric Weinstein to describe what he,
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  like a phenomenon, I guess, that he'd observed in the previous, you know, this was, I guess,
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  around 2018, maybe from 2015, 16, 17 onwards that there was a bunch of people who were talking about
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  ideas that were somewhat taboo within universities, mainstream media, and it was taking place online.
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  It was an intellectual movement because it was very much based in psychology, philosophy,
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  reasoning, enlightenment values, that kind of thing. What were they saying that was taboo that
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  mainstream outlets weren't? So it's a lot of the familiar topics. The trans topic is always the
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  most taboo, but talking about, you know, there's an edge at the moment, which is anti-male,
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  which, you know, I mean, I can talk forever about this stuff, which in some ways is fair enough,
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  because, you know, God knows men do terrible things, but it's not all hashtag, not all men.
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  Not all men. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's become a punchline that you can say that, but it is true.
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  Yeah, I mean, it's about trying to understand the nature of populations and, you know,
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  so I mean, the one thing you do in the book is, like, break down each of the individual,
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  sort of, taboos that were of interest to this group of people. Yeah, so that stuff, masculinity,
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  biological sex, race, and police violence, the West, the West. You know, hating the West is under attack.
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  Yeah, which is true. I mean, it's been like that since I started uni in the late 90s,
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  and, you know, it's been going on before then. And again, it's like everything. It's like,
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  yeah, there's a reasonable critique to be made, but as with everything, it's almost obvious,
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  it's painfully obvious, you weigh things. What are the good things? What are the bad things? But,
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  you know, the vote at the moment is to not weigh, but to just denounce. And so, yeah,
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  so the intellectual dark webs more like, well, pros and cons. A lot of it's like painfully obvious,
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  but it just doesn't, it's taboo. Has the movement spiraled off the rails, though? That's a great question.
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  And yeah, I mean, Eric Weinstein, actually, you mentioned this even on Chris Williams,
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  and I did you? I think you did anyway. Audience capture. So, you know, he was conscious of that
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  from the get-go, you know, the idea that once you become successful, there's, if you're a little
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  bit more extreme and a little bit more one-sided and, you know, not, and if you lose your nuance,
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  and if you lose your caution, you are then heavily rewarded by, because the people like blood,
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  they like you to be more extreme. And so, you can spiral. So, yeah, I mean, basically every
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  figure in the IDW of which there's, you know, what, eight or nine at the core, another 10 or 15,
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  and then, you know, 30, 40, I mean, you know, you're in it. I've never been more flattered not to be
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  mentioned in a book. You know what? I felt kind of bad, because I say, because if I was, if I was
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  redoing the book now, I'd put you, I'd put you in there. Well, I'm glad that I wasn't. I'm glad you were,
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  I mean, because maybe you've come, you've come to it a bit later, though. Yes, that's true. I mean,
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  I don't think it's a flattering, I don't think the term is used in a positive way. Really? Ever since,
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  I feel like ever since Sam Harris last year said if there ever was such a thing as an IDW, I hear
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  by formally handing my card. That's interesting. I think that was the end. I think it's now regarded as
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  something that ended up being a pathway for crackpots to end up in crack pottery. I mean, the
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  Bret Weinstein, like nobody thinks that today, Bret Weinstein, and even Jordan Peterson,
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  and even Joe Rogan, are more temperate-minded and reasonable people than they were when the
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  IDW started. Okay, that's interesting six years ago. Yeah, so I was going to say, yeah, that for all
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  of the figures, I've kind of got my own little tally in my head of who I think's gone off the rails,
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  more or less. So it's interesting. Yeah, so you think, do you think Joe Rogan's got worse,
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  Bret Weinstein's got worse? I wouldn't say worse, because, but more. Well, further to the right?
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  Yeah, maybe more now, more captured in particular ideas that they would once have been open-minded,
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  too. I'm thinking specifically about vaccines in the pandemic, right? Yeah, see, I didn't actually
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  even touch the pandemic in the book, because I just thought, look, that's passed the IDW heyday,
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  but at the same time, yeah, that's sort of a major shift for it. I mean, I still love Joe, and I
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  have huge affection for him as a person and huge gratitude to him. And I think on the whole,
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  on balance, what he does is a good thing. And yet, again, coming back to the question of sort of
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  temperance, moderation, curiosity, open-mindedness, I think there's less of that now than there was
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  six years ago, little on 10. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that.
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  I mean, got the pandemic such an unbelievably difficult topic to talk about. I mean,
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  I'm constantly running it through in my mind and trying to think, what do I know? What do I know?
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  Don't know. What do I know about the vaccines? What do I know about the lockdowns? And I'm,
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  you know, I'm no expert, but we all have to ask these questions. Yeah. And then I think,
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  dear, did Joe go too far with having some of his guests on and with not maybe pushing some of them
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  hard enough? Yeah. I mean, there's clearly a counterpoint to that, which is that at least there
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  is a reckoning, I think, on most of the moderate people on the right, that there was an argument
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  to be had around what we were doing and what they were believing. Whereas there's, I don't
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  think there's much soul-searching in a place like Australia about whether or not the lockdowns
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  went too far. I think everyone in Australia just generally thinks, well, it worked and we saved
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  lots of lives. Why critique the edges? I mean, I think Eric Weinstein's come through it all pretty
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  well. Yeah. I mean, Eric thinks he manages to, you know, not lose his step is my sense.
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  He does pretty, pretty damn well. And it can't be easy for him, given his family.
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  But I mean, yeah, but I mean, I agree with the names that you mentioned. Those are people I would
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  think, yeah, Joe, Brad, Jordan, maybe you have slid a bit more. Eric's held on. Sam,
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  I mean, they got Sam with the whole, what is it, Trump derangement syndrome. Yeah, I mean,
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  I'm sure he seemed like a cheap shot. I thought so too. He still has my respect.
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  Yeah. I mean, when you talk a lot, people can take you out of context. Well, that's the problem
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  isn't as charitable possible way. That's the problem. I mean, once you've got thousands upon
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  thousands of hours or hundreds of hours, isn't it? You're always going to say something stupid.
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  It's like that because you know, I lecture at uni and so, you know, and I do it on my,
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  on my feet. I mean, what am I trying to say? You know, like, I don't read. And so something's
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  always going to slip out. Has it? Has it? That's interesting. No, I think the, if I have a problem,
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  it's not getting the tone right every now and then. That's really hard because when you're
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  sort of up against it and you know, you're talking about the taboo things, how do you talk about
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  the taboo things in like a university environment? You have to, if you're too nervous,
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  they smell blood in the water and they come for you. So I've had, I've had that kind of experience,
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  especially back in like Zoom, hey, day of COVID teaching. And that was, but that was still sporting.
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  I mean, it's okay when they come for you because at least if they're having a discussion,
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  you're like, I remember one lecture broke down at about the hour mark and then the whole second
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  hour was just, what was it about? Do you remember? I was about the intellectual dark web.
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  So I try to talk about this stuff in one of my units. Not just the intellectual dark web,
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  but free speech, cancel culture. That's the intellectual dark web. But yeah, free speech.
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  And so what was the content of the disagreement in the, what am I trying to, yeah, I'm trying to
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  remember, this was a couple of years back. No, I was just, I was just raising, I was just
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  raising issues, like I already mentioned, like saying, you know, at university, if you say,
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  you know, I hate the West, you know, it's like high distinction. Colonialism, postcolonialism,
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  decolonizing, decolonized, high distinction. And so, you know, and so my approach is not even to
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  say, you know, to have a definitive position. But as I said before, it's just like, you know,
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  let's weigh these things. Let's just get a free pass by saying, you know, the politically
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  expedient thing. But then even saying that marks you as on the other side. Right. Because you're
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  implying that there is a politically expedient thing, or that there was a bias in the institution.
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  Oh, yeah, maybe I wouldn't, maybe I would say politically expedient. Well, you said it. Yeah,
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  no, I didn't say it. I know I have to hypothesize here about whether you would say it, Jamie.
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  Yeah, you literally just would I say, did I say it? Yeah, no, I know what you mean. I mean,
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  so is the, and are you finding that there's a, that there's a bias in academia towards one set
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  of ideas versus another set of ideas? I mean, you're supposed to, in an ideal world in academia,
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  they would just reward the clarity of thought, regardless of where they're thought. You think so,
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  wouldn't you? Honestly, I think that what so many people say around the world about academia is
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  true. I think it's largely broken, not completely broken. There are so many, I mean, I can tell you
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  various anecdotes and whatnot. I mean, there is just, there are so many just diverse flaws in it,
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  which prevent just open free discussion based on reasoning and evidence, all the stuff.
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  Like what? What are so many anecdotes?
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  Okay, this first one that comes to mind, one of the things that pisses me off, I mean,
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  so many things piss me off so many. One of the things that pisses me off is the use of theory.
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  Now, what happens is people will go and study something and that's fine and they'll maybe do
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  some interviews or read about it and that's all good and well because that's your data and then
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  in the ideal world, you then you'd have a question. Who is this group? What do they want? Are
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  they good or bad? What should be done about them? You know, usual, typical, because I mean,
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  politics, usual, typical questions. But what happens at uni is you have a thing called a theoretical
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  framework, even just saying it triggers me so much. So triggered right now. You snowflake.
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  It's interesting. I think about that. I think I am a bit of a snowflake, but maybe we can get to
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  that later. I don't disown that. I don't disown that. But yeah, so what the theoretical framework,
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  what you do is you essentially pick the broad way you're going to interpret your data or whatever
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  beforehand and you lay it out at the start. My theoretical framework is such and such and people
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  invariably pick something like constructivism, which basically means everything is the social
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  construction and everything is about power or whatever. And so essentially, you select how you will
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  interpret your material before you interpret your material. It's obviously wrong. You know, like you
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  don't, it's system legitimized confirmation bias, but because it's wrapped up in, you know,
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  theory, it sounds kind of intelligent and uni-like. When you read, say a good article in foreign policy
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  or foreign affairs, they don't do any of that. You know, they'll just like analyze a political
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  phenomenon and talk about it cogently, whatever. But yeah, uni do that, but then you wrap it all up in
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  this kind of theoretical framework. So it's almost like a starting with a bias. Exactly. And
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  the explicit bias. Exactly. And it's totally legit. And why is it legit? Because the system's broken.
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  It's legit because like, I mean, it's legit within the system. Yeah, you wouldn't regard it as
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  legit. No, no, it's totally broken. Right. But yeah, it comes down, I mean, Peter Begosian and
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  James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, I mean, when they, when they, my plan on Pluckrose wasn't on
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  Rogan, but when those guys were on Rogan several years back, yeah, they talked about all of this.
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  So it's been going on forever, really, for decades. But yeah, wait, it's all, you know, Peterson's
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  always, you know, postmodernism, postmodern Marxist. And look, he's not that wrong.
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  Postmodernism basically, I mean, everyone knows, but yeah, it says that there is no truth. There's
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  only power and power determines what we understand to be meant as truth. And so that's a great weapon
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  for attacking the powerful enemy. So rather than attacking them with arguments or reason or whatever
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  you just give them the atomic bomb of postmodernism and say, there is no truth. There is only power.
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  And so you get rid of them. And, you know, it's not the way to do it, but it is a way. And often
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  it's right because often the powerful do use their power to manipulate truth. So there's a very large
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  grain of salt to it. But then what happens is then the academics are like, ah, actually this is
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  kind of an interesting point. Ha, there is no truth. There's only power and you throw in
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  intersectionality or what Nietzsche would call slave morality where the less power you have,
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  I mean, everyone knows this, the impression Olympics, whatever, the less power you have,
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  the more right you are. So you mix in postmodern relativism and a lack of power. And then basically
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  you can say whatever you want. And so as long as you're punching up, as long as you're bringing down
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  the powerful, as long as you're exposing power structures that may not be apparent.
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  Yeah. And so even even as I'm starting to talk, I feel my brain starting to go to jelly.
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  But then all of this stuff is built on paradoxes and things which make no sense, but which are never
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  really explicitly articulated. But it's just they're all just sort of simmers beneath the
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  surface. It's a lot easier when you can actually have some text in front of you and you go,
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  okay, look, they say this, they say that. Well, let me give you an example of I remember from
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  university in the early 2000s when I was doing a class about Asia Pacific politics. And the tutor
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  was, you know, someone who she really thought it was fabulous just to bring down the straight white
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  male population of the class as much as possible. Yeah, that hasn't changed. And so we were talking
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  about Tiananmen Square. And she was saying that like consider that democracy is an idea that
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  the West imposes as being a true a fact or a truth about the way that human beings want to live,
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  like liberalism and democracy. But in actual fact, big discussion there. Those are culturally
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  contingent ideas, right? That you only agree with because you were born in this society. And if
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  you were born in China, you would have very different ideas about them. All of that's true. But I
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  being so much true. I being the smart hour so much true that I was said, I'm sure that that would
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  have come as some great consolation to the people who are being moaned down by tanks in Tiananmen
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  Square. Nonetheless, their bodies were still smeared across the square and they probably didn't like
• 20:18
  that very much. I didn't get a good grade in that in that class. But like it struck me that that
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  was probably a particular moment in time. You know, 20th century French philosophy was still
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  influential in the 90s and 2000s. It hasn't gone away. Nothing has shifted. It's um,
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  yeah, I mean, I first noticed this, yeah, early 2000s. I mean, I think I was a convert in 99,
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  when I was an undergrad. I think they kind of got to me. But then by the time I was started thinking
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  for myself a little bit more in my early mid 20s, yeah, I started asking questions and you know,
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  learned that you weren't meant to. But yeah, this stuff hasn't changed this kind of relativistic soup
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  that the university swims in. That's what I think theoretical frameworks are a version of that
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  because there isn't exactly truth. You can start with your conclusion by wrapping everything in
• 21:19
  your theoretical framework. And when you poke at it, it makes no sense at all. But you're allowed
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  to do it because there's like a background of relativism, just that just sort of
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  would there be a non-relativistic theoretical framework that you could come in with and write
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  your thesis saying, all right, I'm starting from this alternative position. Okay, it's really
• 21:36
  interesting that you ask that. I mean, okay, so I'm in politics, but you can sort of do this
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  anywhere. I mean, they're all sort of similar. People would say, yeah, constructivism is like
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  the highly relativistic one. If you're in politics or international relations, you know, people would
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  say realism, which is the more pessimistic account that states are destined to have conflict
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  because there isn't an overarching power or liberalism, which you mentioned, which assumes
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  human nature like classical realism, but it's more optimistic. It thinks, you know, by trading,
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  by sharing knowledge, development, you know, the world will become more peaceful. So these are
• 22:20
  different, you might call theoretical frameworks. And I suppose you could take one of those and start
• 22:26
  with that. But I don't like that either. I mean, it's the same problem. If you just begin by
• 22:30
  assuming realism's correct, and then you interpret everything in that light, it's the same flaw.
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  So would supporters of a theoretical framework model say, you need to do that because you need to
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  make explicit the framework that you're coming in with because there is no such thing as coming to
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  anything neutrally. Like you're not going to be a tabular rassa. You're not coming from nowhere.
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  There's no view. There's no objective place to stand on the moon where you can look back at the
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  world and you know, depict it impartially. Is that the that's the kind of that's the kind of
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  argument that would be made. And that's, I suppose, why postmodernism and the like in jua.
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  I mean, what's wrong with that argument? What's wrong with that argument? I suppose is that
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  yeah, getting to the truth is difficult. And yes, we do bring biases with us. But the answer to that
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  is not to then just go the whole hog and important entire world view. What you need, what you
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  would ought to do in the long scientific tradition is, you know, recognize that we all, you know,
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  have biases and to the, this is so much harder in the social sciences, but still we must do it.
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  To the best of our ability, consider, present as many possible reasonable interpretations of what
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  we're looking at, explore each one in turn, weigh them up judiciously and then come to a conclusion.
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  Now, a realist position or a liberal position or a constructivist position, they're all just
• 24:04
  one interpretation, each one is an interpretation amongst many. So what you ought to do is say, well,
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  a constructivist would say this, how, you know, how well would that be supported? A liberal might
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  say this, a realist might say this, and there might be a range of other interpretations as well.
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  I mean, good scholarship for me would be just considering the range of perspectives to the best
• 24:23
  of our ability, weighing them up and then trying to derive a conclusion. I mean, you're still going
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  in with the question, you know, what's going on? Should it be happening? How can we fix things?
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  These are the basic questions. And so yeah, you bring in as many perspectives as you can. I mean,
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  that's the approach that I'd encourage, but yeah, like it's just, and I mean, that's, that's the best
• 24:46
  we can do. It strikes me that there's an analogy here to journalism as well, to my profession,
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  where there's an older guard of people who acknowledge that there is bias, but strive to eliminate
• 24:56
  bias as much as possible and to provide as many as rigorous a fidelity to the truth as possible.
• 25:03
  And then there's a young guard of people who are, you know, who are more activists, who believe that
• 25:08
  the fact that it bias exists means you might as well lean into it and tell your own story and your
• 25:13
  own truth from your own perspective. Yeah. And there's a place for that. Like, I'm not opposed to
• 25:18
  people sort of passionately telling their own truth from their own perspective, but when it becomes
• 25:22
  sensorious, then you're in trouble, you know, when you start getting punished for talking about
• 25:28
  things, then it becomes bad. But look, I mean, this is, this is, this is the staggering challenge
• 25:34
  of the enlightenment tradition. I mean, it's, it's hard enough in the sciences. What is
• 25:40
  Feynman says, I always quote this to the students, the first rule is don't fool yourself and you're
• 25:46
  the easiest person to fool. That's good. He was talking about that in the physics realm,
• 25:51
  the social sciences and the arts are so much harder or journalism, same sort of thing.
• 25:56
  But yeah, you still try. So as you say, the old guard, I don't see what other option we have
• 26:01
  really. I don't see what other option we have. One instance of that sensorial
• 26:07
  when people are just trying to explore the truth, you mentioned in the book, which is the James
• 26:11
  De Moore episode, Google, where Google invited employees to, well, do you want to tell the story of
• 26:18
  remind people of it? Most people probably heard about it at the time. Yeah, so the James De Moore
• 26:22
  story is, people's like, yeah, here's another martyr for the for the right wing. And it is a bit
• 26:29
  like that. But at the same time, it's a reasonable point. What did they have diversity training
• 26:37
  or something like that in Google? And then they asked for feedback. So De Moore, I don't know,
• 26:42
  a bit to a bit on the spectrum or whatever they say. And he's like, all right, okay, he's obviously,
• 26:48
  I could see you could tell he'd been getting into the intellectual dark web type stuff. And so he
• 26:53
  done a whole lot of research into sex, characteristics, intelligence, and how all these things
• 27:03
  play out in complex ways. And he put together quite a thoughtful memo, which was quite balanced.
• 27:09
  And he said, look, I don't believe in stereotypes. And I really want to solve this problem.
• 27:12
  The problem being the dominance of men. I didn't explain that well. Like Google engineering
• 27:17
  positions and stuff. Too many men in aspects of tech. And so the question would be, what is the
• 27:24
  cause of that? Sorry. Is it sexism or is it preference? And it's difficult to get to the
• 27:34
  bottom of it. There's probably an aspect of sexism. Although, when I look at the spread of the
• 27:40
  sexes across professions, it seems like women are doing very well in law now. Why is it that tech
• 27:45
  sexist but law isn't? And I mean, these are all difficult questions to answer.
• 27:50
  They're overrepresented in medicine. They're overrepresented.
• 27:52
  Yeah. And so women are overrepresented in a lot of areas. Men are overrepresented as
• 27:56
  forklift drivers and truck drivers. I mean, it could be sexism or it could be preference,
• 28:01
  which relates to different types of intelligence. And the idea that the intellectual dark web
• 28:07
  often talk about, which is a good one, is that when you have populations, men and women,
• 28:15
  and you have like a certain type of intelligence, say spatial intelligence, even though the two
• 28:18
  populations are actually very similar, there's a slight difference in mean, meaning that men
• 28:23
  from what I can, what I've read, have a slightly higher spatial intelligence. But what that
• 28:29
  means is there's a big overrepresentation of men right out of the tail. And so when you're going
• 28:34
  to choose a job, generally, you're going to choose something which is, you know, you're really
• 28:38
  strong at. So that'd be the kind of argument, I guess, that I can't remember all the did-as,
• 28:43
  but the do-more would be making that there are reasons why men are overrepresented.
• 28:47
  And because the tail of the bell curve, the edge of the bell curve, which is where you would be
• 28:54
  picking the world's greatest engineers from. The world's greatest engineers from. Yeah, it's just
• 28:59
  happens to have more men in it. Right. And if you were talking about the mediation of family
• 29:03
  disputes or something like that, then you have more women in that. Perhaps because women are more
• 29:08
  linguistically intelligent, I mean, these, these are all very, very small differences at the
• 29:13
  population level. But yeah, at the tails. Isn't it also true that the tails are longer in men?
• 29:18
  I don't know. No, I've heard Peterson talk about this and say that like there are, yes,
• 29:23
  there are more. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right.
• 29:26
  You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right. I've looked into
• 29:28
  this. You're more male, homeless drug addicts than women as well. I think it depends,
• 29:34
  it depends on what you're measuring. Sorry. Yeah, it depends what you're measuring. But when I was
• 29:38
  looking into, you know, intelligence, yeah, women tend to be a bit more bunched. So you get more
• 29:43
  men who do well and more men who do worse. You know, I'm not an expert on this. I've just read a
• 29:49
  few studies and it seems to, seems to be like this and there might be the case with a range of
• 29:53
  other characteristics as well. And the upshot is if we didn't mention it, the James Demore got fired
• 29:57
  for writing their memo at Google after Google had invited people to, yeah, yeah, to chime in. But
• 30:04
  simply hinting at or arguing for the existence of a difference in preferences. Yeah.
• 30:11
  It was enough to have him show in the door. Yeah, because it's, yeah, once you went, I suppose it's,
• 30:20
  yeah, the paradigm people want, which again, the intellectual dark web talk a lot about is,
• 30:25
  you know, a quality of outcome versus a quality of opportunity, which is a, you know, a classic
• 30:30
  tension. I'm a huge fan of pushing for a quality of opportunity. Is it a phony dichotomy?
• 30:38
  I've never quite liked it. It seems this sounds interesting. It seems lazy to me because it seems
• 30:43
  like no one wants only either. I don't think. I mean, a quality of, true quality of opportunity
• 30:52
  would be so dramatically different from the world we live in that it would entail a kind of
• 30:58
  a bit of a quality of outcome in the sense that like, no, nobody who I know is arguing for
• 31:05
  fuller quality of outcome. Nobody who I know thinks that everybody should make exactly the same
• 31:10
  amount of money regardless of what they do. Yeah, I know. And yet, yeah, the thing is, but this is
• 31:15
  the way a lot of this stuff works is that when you push people, it's always like, you know,
• 31:20
  it's the Motten Bailey fallacy, which is also in the book that Eric Weinstein talked about.
• 31:24
  Now, but see, this is very important, which is why I'm such a fan of the IDW because they
• 31:30
  cover a lot of these, you know, these maneuvers. So what happens is when you're, when you're with
• 31:34
  your buddies, you say all kinds of crazy extreme stuff, which is very, very hard to support,
• 31:40
  but then when you're pushed in a more moderate environment, you pull back and make a more moderate
• 31:45
  defensible claim. And so as you say, no one would really support a quality of outcome. I'm like,
• 31:50
  yeah, they wouldn't. And yet at the same time, you know, when I look at university policies that
• 31:57
  are creeping in and, you know, the rhetoric that people use sometimes, it does very much draw on
• 32:03
  a quality of outcome. And then you push people and they say, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, I didn't mean
• 32:07
  that at all. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Right. I mean, there could be
• 32:10
  a specific, it's like a shifting that people do in different environments. There could be a specific
• 32:14
  equality of outcome that you might be looking for, such as the undergraduate class should
• 32:19
  racially represent the racial makeup of the country, right? You could make that as a, I do know
• 32:24
  people who would argue for that. That would be an equality of outcome. I just mean as a general
• 32:30
  principle of morality, I don't think you can universalize a quality of outcome. Yeah, I don't know,
• 32:37
  there's, I need to, I need to think through more clearly what I object to about that. But, but
• 32:41
  I like your point, though. I mean, of course, I mean, all of these things, uh, broad brushstrokes
• 32:46
  and yeah, like to, you've got to look at individual statements and you have to look at
• 32:51
  individual cases and look what people said and look what people are trying to achieve and then
• 32:55
  you can break it down and go, oh, I see why there's a problem here. Just take a quality of
• 33:00
  opportunity. Let's just say that you all you want is equality of opportunity. The world you would
• 33:05
  have to create for a person living with a horrendously debilitating physical condition, physical
• 33:13
  disability, uh, who is a trans woman of color at the same time and like has no arms or legs.
• 33:24
  For that person to have the same equality of opportunity as a beautiful handsome six foot
• 33:31
  two, you know, white male is going to be so many, so many resources that it would be almost
• 33:37
  indistinguishable from equality of outcome. It's a really, it's a deep point. I like it. I like it.
• 33:44
  Yeah. Like what would the opportunity, what would the, what would the equality of opportunity
• 33:47
  even mean if you weren't measuring it by the yardstick of the outcome? You know what I mean,
• 33:53
  you'd have to look at the outcomes and sort of see whether the outcomes are reasonably fair
• 33:58
  because then what is fair? Is it fair for the person who's born with an IQ of 150 to do better
• 34:05
  than the person who's born with an IQ of 70? Like is that a quality of opportunity? There's no
• 34:11
  opportunity in being born with an IQ of 70. Yeah. And all right. Yeah. So it's there's much
• 34:17
  complexity in subtlety that we need to, we need to work through. We need to do answer all
• 34:20
  questions for me, Jamie. Immediately. No, I love it though. Keep them coming. So, but, um, yeah,
• 34:25
  so, so yeah, I mean, obviously, it's, yeah, it's not like a, this, this broad policy that you
• 34:30
  put in. It's, it's, it's a tendency. Right. It's where do your sympathies lie? Yeah, it's a tendency.
• 34:36
  And as I say, when you look at particular problems, sometimes you can say, oh, yeah, this is a problem
• 34:41
  because, you know, like back to the Demore point, if there is not equality of outcome,
• 34:49
  therefore, egregious discrimination, rather than some other cause, which we could call a
• 34:57
  quality of opportunity or something else entirely. It could just, yeah, be preferences or whatever.
• 35:04
  So, so that's, that's a case of putting too much weight on a quality of outcome and not just
• 35:12
  to quality, not just wanting it, but assuming that inequality of outcome has specific causes,
• 35:18
  namely, egregious discrimination. Right. So that, so putting, in that context, it makes a bit
• 35:24
  more sense. Yes. And this has become an article of faith in progressive social justice circles,
• 35:30
  that the evidence of a disparity means that there's some kind of systemic discrimination that's
• 35:35
  going on. Yeah. So, Pinkham, I mean, there's a lot of people say this year. I mean, you know,
• 35:39
  it's, I mean, I've heard common hearsay recently. These are all ADW talking points. Yeah.
• 35:43
  In a quality of outcome is not proof of discrimination. Right. Sometimes it is. Yeah.
• 35:48
  Sometimes it isn't. You got to look at it closely. Right. You got to weigh it up.
• 35:52
  The, the underrepresentation of Jews in basket, professional basketball is not, yeah,
• 35:58
  evidence of discrimination, anti-Semitism in basketball. Yeah. I mean, there's discrimination
• 36:02
  in a sense. They're not good enough. Right. But, I mean, yeah. But, you know, it's, it's not,
• 36:07
  when I say, well, I think what I said before, egregious discrimination, it's, you know,
• 36:10
  it's not like the kind of discrimination where you'd say, oh, that's, that's not right.
• 36:15
  It's just not discriminatory, but it may be discriminating in some way.
• 36:19
  The Motten Bailey thing, you, there's a passage in the book where I think you give a good example
• 36:23
  without, you don't call it a Motten Bailey, but it is the same move where Jordan Peterson is doing
• 36:27
  that famous interview. The Kathie Newman with, is it? No. Is it Kathie Newman? Is it?
• 36:32
  I don't know. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, it is. And, and he says there's no disparity in income
• 36:40
  between men and women when you adjust for all the variables that you would want to adjust for.
• 36:46
  She says, but there still is. Like, even when you were just for everything, there's 9%.
• 36:51
  I don't think she was saying, I don't think she was saying, even when you adjust for everything,
• 36:55
  I think she was just saying there's, it's a fact. Oh, okay. He then says, but it's not obvious to
• 37:00
  me that you can attribute that disparity to discrimination. Yeah, yeah. That's a good example
• 37:05
  of a Motten Bailey switch where he starts by saying there's no disparity. Then he gets pushed on it
• 37:13
  and he retreats to the more defensible position of, there may be a disparity, but it's not for
• 37:18
  the reasons that you think it is. Yeah, I think at that point, he, he had a flourish which was
• 37:22
  overly strong. And so, but I mean, look, I mean, in a way, that's also the way discussion works and
• 37:28
  it's not a bad thing. I mean, look, you know, I start with a, a bit of a, what was it? What's the
• 37:34
  one? The, the strong statement, the Mott? Yeah, where I'm like, yeah, a quality of opportunity versus
• 37:39
  a quality of outcome. And then you push me a bit and then I walk it back a little bit. I mean,
• 37:43
  that is also in the nature of discussion. We often start with an overly strong point to bring
• 37:47
  clarity to the discussion. Right. And then when you're pushed in good faith, you then walk it
• 37:52
  back a little bit and bring nuance to it. So I feel like that's, that's something that happens.
• 37:56
  You'll get them a pass on it. Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe, I have to go back and look at the
• 38:03
  transcript again. Which I won't did, did, did, did what, how did the issue of race and police
• 38:11
  violence and the protests in 2020? What did that do to this movement of heterodox intellectuals
• 38:19
  online? I don't think it did anything bad. I think it was, I think it was just a classic opportunity
• 38:29
  for, for people to try to think clearly about, about all of this. You know, I had in the book,
• 38:35
  Sam Harris, what is it? Stepping back from the edge, which was interesting too. I think I heard
• 38:41
  on some of the podcasts recently, some people praising it. So yeah, I think this was an episode of
• 38:45
  his podcast. Yeah, this is when everything was going up. Yeah, when everything was going to,
• 38:48
  going to hell and, and you also talk about John McWater and Glenn Lowry who were useful voices
• 38:54
  of sanity. Yeah, yeah, I feel like they're part of the IDW as well. But no, I think it's just,
• 39:00
  I mean, God, black lives matter is so I'm trying to talk about it with my students a bit and it's
• 39:04
  so damn risky. It's like almost impossible. But why is that? It's just yet another taboo subject.
• 39:11
  I mean, God, white person raising questions about race. But yeah, but I mean, I feel like I have to
• 39:18
  because I mean across all of this is the whole, the concern that I own the one hand, not on the one
• 39:26
  hand, you know, from my point of view, we ought to be trying to pursue truth. We ought to be trying
• 39:30
  to understand reality to the best of our ability. And against that, there is always a sort of
• 39:37
  cultishness that can spring up on the left or the right, which then prevents you from talking about
• 39:43
  certain things. And I mean, that's the eternal battle sort of truth versus power or cultishness.
• 39:49
  And so I feel like, you know, at universities is exactly what we should be talking about in politics.
• 39:53
  These are the issues of the day. And yet there's a huge, yeah, taboo against trying to understand
• 40:00
  the truth of, I mean, God, we're talking about America. I'm not even talking about Australia.
• 40:05
  But you know, the truth of police violence in America, you know, how many black people are killed,
• 40:10
  how many white people are killed? What's the nature of the, you know, how many interactions are there
• 40:14
  with police? What's the crime level within the black community? What's the crime level in the white
• 40:19
  community? And these are all the kind of questions you have to ask, you know, before you can kind
• 40:25
  of understand whether there's whether the police are excessively violent towards black people or not.
• 40:29
  And I can't sit here and tell you all the answers because I don't have them off the top of my head.
• 40:34
  But these are the, you know, some of the questions that IDW types were talking about. And then the other
• 40:38
  immense taboo is, well, let's say black communities are doing worse in various measures.
• 40:48
  What's the cause? And the popular response is, you know, like white racism in one form or another,
• 40:56
  whereas like Maccorder and Lowry would say, yeah, sure, but there are also cultural problems.
• 41:05
  And this is really, really hard to say because I'm pretty confident those cultural problems exist
• 41:10
  because of the horrific past. And so this is a really difficult position that we end up in
• 41:17
  around the world when you have a particular group that has been persecuted and then you have
• 41:22
  generations of trauma or whatever leading to them, you know, cultural problems later on.
• 41:29
  So, you know, you've got a very deep problem within a culture, but yeah, so it's then it's not
• 41:37
  like really a good idea to say, well, it's just racism now, which is the problem. And yet it's
• 41:43
  totally unpalatable to say, well, the culture has a problem because it was caused by earlier racism.
• 41:49
  It's that kind of subtle thinking, which is just, it's very difficult to even now, like I'm, you know,
• 41:56
  but like, is that kind of nuanced thinking, which needs to occur? I mean, if we're going to solve
• 42:01
  what you've said sounds controversial to me, it's controversial enough that if I talk about
• 42:08
  this stuff at uni, I mean, look, it depends on the class, depends on, I sometimes.
• 42:14
  I mean, where it gets controversial and where I think it gets dangerous and worrying is when
• 42:20
  it goes a step further and you get into the territory of, well, what are the IQ differences
• 42:25
  between various populations? Maybe there are, you know, this is, this is an issue that has become
• 42:31
  more interesting than to some people on the right than I would necessarily want it.
• 42:36
  Maybe a little too interesting. A lot of people focusing on whether or not there are IQ
• 42:42
  differences between whites and blacks and Asians and whatever. But we're also talking at the
• 42:46
  population level, which means if there is an IQ difference between races, we're talking about a
• 42:51
  small difference between means. It doesn't, you know, obviously, it doesn't mean everyone's
• 42:57
  individual. It doesn't tell you anything about it. That also seems like a cop out to me when
• 43:00
  people say that because, I mean, of course, we're talking about the population level. It's still a
• 43:04
  it's still a devastating thing to say about a population. If it's true that they're all stupid,
• 43:09
  not comparatively, like for like, more stupid. That would be, yeah, it's savage. It's savage.
• 43:16
  And just in, I mean, in the same way that if you say that, men are more violent than women,
• 43:20
  we all understand that you're not saying that every single man is violent. It's easy to say that,
• 43:24
  though, isn't it? I would say that, you know, that's right. Men can be real. Yeah, that's right.
• 43:29
  So men are more violent than women, but we don't always feel a need to say, well, of course,
• 43:32
  we're talking about a population level that you can't infer the violence of an individual on the
• 43:37
  basis of the population. I mean, you can a bit because you can take a Bayesian prior and say,
• 43:41
  or well, right, I mean, you can sort of, whatever you're coming in with, your assumptions about
• 43:47
  probability, you can say, well, I know that men on average are more violent than women. Therefore,
• 43:51
  when I meet a stranger who's a male, you're right to be cautious. I'm more right to be cautious.
• 43:56
  It's funny that you can say that about men and that's fine. I'm fine with that, but yeah,
• 44:00
  you weighed into other population statements. Right. If you said it about black people,
• 44:03
  and it becomes, or even about violence, or even if it's, or criminality, for example, if you say
• 44:07
  that, yeah, I can feel it. Like I can feel, you know, we have a very, very, very keen sense of taboos.
• 44:12
  You can feel that that discussion is absolutely fine. Yeah, that one's taboo. But yeah, um,
• 44:18
  what have I heard people say about the intelligence one? Some discussions are best left alone,
• 44:23
  but then on the other hand, we should be pursuing truth. It's a savage problem. Where do you land on that?
• 44:28
  The intelligence question is so difficult. I don't know. Ultimately, we should pursue truth,
• 44:40
  but God, things get used badly. If there was a, if there was a reasonable solution,
• 44:47
  like if I thought that the truth was being pursued because on the other side of the hill,
• 44:53
  there's this land of milk and honey and pleasure and plenty where we could solve the problem if
• 44:58
  only we knew that it had helped. Yeah, if it would help, then maybe I'd be more sympathetic to it.
• 45:03
  But in the absence of knowing exactly what, like, let's suppose that it were true that there was
• 45:09
  a five point IQ difference on average between blacks and whites. It's not clear to me what
• 45:16
  that would assist with except for providing some kind of moral rationale for white people to
• 45:22
  feel smug and superior in some way. And yet there has been a long study of intelligence across
• 45:28
  men and women, and that's a little, I mean, that's still vexed, but it's not as vexed. And women
• 45:33
  are smarter. No, I'm not kidding. From what I can gather, general intelligence when you mash it
• 45:38
  all together is close to indistinguishable, but on specific intelligences, women do a little better,
• 45:46
  maybe unlinguistic stuff, men do a little bit spatially. And so, you know, then the stereotypes
• 45:53
  flow, men hunt, women sit round campfire, gossip. Right, right, right, with stereo type voice.
• 46:03
  Okay, man. Yeah, okay, man voice. Yeah, but yeah, we seem to have less, that's still less of a problem.
• 46:11
  But then maybe, maybe, maybe it's because the, but then, but then at the same time, what you
• 46:15
  mentioned before, men being more spread and women being more bunch, which seems to be the case
• 46:20
  from what I've seen. That's a little concerning because it means that there's a reason why men
• 46:28
  keep getting Nobel prizes, you know, and if that's the case, then it's not necessarily,
• 46:36
  it's not going to be in a quality of outcome that's going to be easy to fix. So that's a case where,
• 46:42
  yeah, intelligence measures make us feel pretty uncomfortable. Yeah, maybe. But I mean,
• 46:48
  then you can also go back to our pipeline problem and say, well, of course, men win the majority
• 46:54
  of the Nobel prizes because they are raised, or they were historically at least raised in
• 46:59
  societies where boys could grow up and go to university. In a quality of opportunity. Yeah,
• 47:04
  yeah, so it's very difficult to untangle all of that. But the point is if that intelligence
• 47:08
  reading is correct, then that will provide part of the explanation. Yes, but yeah, but I know,
• 47:14
  back on the race thing with God, it's just, it's so much worse. Yeah, even as you say, when we talk
• 47:20
  about it, I mean, but the thing is with men and women, it does, it does make sense to think about
• 47:24
  it because if you're trying to understand back to Demore, why are there more men in certain professions?
• 47:29
  Why are there more, you know, men in the trades could be because they're sexist or it could be
• 47:34
  because men, certain, certain men tend to be inclined towards working with their hands more.
• 47:40
  Yeah, it is funny. And so, but so that's the thing. If we want to then say, we need 50%,
• 47:44
  you know, this is the old joke, you know, if we need 50% female brick layers, we need that,
• 47:48
  you know, a quality of outcome. And people just say, I don't know. Yeah, do you need 50% of offshore
• 47:56
  oil rig and workers being women? Yeah. And so, so the thing is is that in those cases, maybe
• 48:01
  understanding the way different, you know, intelligence attributes then feed into preferences,
• 48:09
  then make us, you know, chill out a little about pushing for a quality of outcome. Maybe, you know,
• 48:15
  cautious because of course there are social issues. But in that case, you know, it makes sense.
• 48:19
  But yeah, you move into the race realm and it's just grotesque. I mean, I don't want to touch it.
• 48:22
  I don't want to talk about it. It's still an article of faith among many people that women earn
• 48:27
  70 cents on the dollar. I mean, there's even a day of the year in like March or April, right,
• 48:33
  where they say, this is the day which women are starting to get paid for their work because all
• 48:38
  the days up until now have been paid, have been unpaid in comparison to what a male would make.
• 48:45
  That dogma is impervious to everything that you've been talking about, about male and female
• 48:51
  interests because once you adjust for the fact that they take time off to have babies, once you
• 48:54
  adjust for the types of jobs that they like to do, then the gap goes from, you know, 70 cents up to
• 49:00
  what 92 cents become smaller. Yeah. But how does it, why, why does it persist then? I don't know.
• 49:07
  Why do we, why do we struggle to reason about so many things? I'm not sure because there's a
• 49:14
  a cultish aspect to society which resists discussion of certain difficult topics. I don't know. It's
• 49:21
  like, what do we do about the universities? There was some, I don't know, again, podcast was
• 49:25
  it unheard or something and Peter Begozing says, yeah, we just burn them down. Oh, yeah, he's an
• 49:31
  absolutist. Yeah, just burn them down. Kathleen stocks a bit softer. But I mean, yeah, I don't know
• 49:37
  why these things persist. I mean, what's, again, in the book, it's like maybe we're in the phase
• 49:43
  of over correction, which is I think a reasonable argument where a lot, you know, so much of the
• 49:49
  low hanging fruit of sort of the civil rights era, era was plucked and rightly so, you know,
• 49:57
  equal pay, for equal work, trying to do away with racism, all that sort of thing. And so
• 50:03
  a huge amount of these movements which needed to exist and did very good things in our liberal
• 50:08
  society, you know, what does pinker say? I mean, pinker, I don't know. But anyway, you know,
• 50:12
  they don't go out of business. Yeah. So the activists groups need new demons.
• 50:17
  Finding new stuff. And so then you start, you start kind of seeing phantoms or you, yeah,
• 50:23
  stuff which is it's like, yeah, there is an inequality there, but the cause of it is not entirely
• 50:29
  obvious. And yeah, and yeah, and yeah, rather than saying it's not entirely obvious, they go,
• 50:33
  it is obvious. And so it's about just overplaying certain things over correcting. And so then,
• 50:40
  you know, that's, that's my sense, you know, we're in an era of, yeah, over correction. I mean,
• 50:46
  it's quite a familiar idea. I think it's, I think it was Bill Mah who says that there's a problem
• 50:50
  that racism has a supply and demand problem. Like there are, there aren't enough racists for
• 50:56
  the anti-racists to be happy about the fight that they're fighting. I think that's true. There are
• 51:00
  more people, there are too many people angry about racism than there are racists to satisfy
• 51:05
  their demand. So they keep inventing new definitions of what racism is in order to create a greater
• 51:10
  supply of racists than actually exists. Yeah, I know that's, yeah, I think that's, that's definitely
• 51:16
  the case. It's an over, it's an over correction. Yeah. And I look, I mean, it's, when that horrible
• 51:21
  bond I stuff went down, you know, last week, the stabbings. Yeah, the stabbings. And I mean,
• 51:26
  I really avoid social media, even though I've just got my Twitter account up and running,
• 51:30
  seeing as I'm on a podcast and started a sub-stack. Oh, God, welcome. Yeah, I don't know. I've
• 51:36
  got to try to make the moves somehow. But, um, but yeah, what the hell was I saying? Yeah, I had a
• 51:40
  brief glimpse, you know, look at Twitter, which I so don't do. Yeah. And I was just filled with,
• 51:46
  this is why the country shouldn't let in Muslims. And I'm like, what? Oh, you're on the wrong
• 51:52
  Twitter. My Twitter was all about this is why women can't feel safe because he the stabber attacked
• 51:59
  five women and only one. Okay. Okay. So the Muslim thing's stupid. And so I'm looking and thinking,
• 52:05
  okay, yeah, there's, there's, you know, that kind of racist problem in Australia is clearly
• 52:10
  still present. So, you know, it's not, not there. Well, women feeling safe. Yeah. Yeah. And
• 52:15
  then that's an issue. Yeah. That's the tip. As I said, I, you know, I started out my life.
• 52:21
  I started out my life. I'm just pretty, really cool feminist back on that. Women feeling safe
• 52:25
  or not feeling safe. I'm sorry. It has nothing to do with whether or not a, uh, uh,
• 52:30
  I'm very sorry. Stabs. So I missed your angle. I missed your angle. It was trying to work with you.
• 52:36
  It was being interpreted. It was being interpreted on my Twitter, Twitter circles as being evidence
• 52:42
  of the daily reality that women have to face that men will never understand. I'm sorry.
• 52:46
  It's not a daily reality. Yeah. So the shopping center getting stabbed by somebody. It's like
• 52:50
  so once in 20 year occurrence. Right. And even then it happens for five people. And it's an
• 52:54
  absolute tragedy. Not for the remaining. Sorry. You know, I get your angle. There are a million
• 52:59
  women in Australia. Um, nonetheless. So do you, when you say that these things are taboo, like you
• 53:05
  talk about these things, you've written a book about these things. I try to analyze these things.
• 53:09
  Yes. You lecture. I try to bring them out. So do you get punished for that?
• 53:14
  It's also complex because the whole punishment scheme within the university is so distributed.
• 53:19
  And it's not, it's not centralized. It's more that I know that the more I move into certain areas.
• 53:25
  And as I say, I believe we have a very, very, all of us. I think we have a very precise and clear
• 53:29
  understanding of the taboos in our society. So the more I'll move into a particular space,
• 53:34
  the more I know I'm increasing the probability that something will happen. And some maybe even
• 53:40
  the majority of classes, it's fine. And the majority of students want to talk or discuss.
• 53:46
  Or at least they maybe they don't want to talk either because they know it's a taboo. But they
• 53:50
  kind of get that we should bring these things up. But then at other times, um, yeah. You get a
• 53:59
  small cabal of students who, you know, decide that you're the devil and get some, you know, abusive
• 54:07
  messages and whatnot. But can they do anything in terms of formal sanction?
• 54:11
  See, this is this is what's so interesting too. I mean, get back to the snowflake point.
• 54:16
  Right. Probably not, not really, you know, because hopefully even now I feel like I'm picking
• 54:23
  through my words reasonably carefully. Do you have tenure? Yes. So there's not not a lot can
• 54:29
  happen. But what happens is I, you know, your units then get a bad rating. And then if your units
• 54:37
  get a bad rating, then people upstairs start asking questions. And then the people who are not always,
• 54:44
  but sometimes then assigned to, you know, investigate your units are often the very people who are
• 54:50
  the greatest, um, I don't know, there's no other way to say it bullies in the university because
• 54:56
  they're often the ones in the position of power. And so, you know, there are sort of nice
• 55:02
  woke people. And then there are the people who really do use it as career advancement or for
• 55:07
  cruelty. And so then, you know, you then have to interact with more of a certain class of people.
• 55:16
  And the whole thing becomes extremely unpleasant because you then have to explain to the person
• 55:22
  who is a huge fan of intersectionality, how the students don't like you because you were trying
• 55:29
  to point out the political or philosophical flaws and the concept of intersectionality. So,
• 55:35
  you end up in these sort of investigations. I mean, it sounds McCarthyite or Stalinist. It sounds
• 55:42
  like, you know, you're trying to argue for freedom of thought and expression against
• 55:48
  without offending the ideologue who presides over your fate.
• 55:53
  Yeah. And the thing is is that even then it's, you know, I don't really, you know, I'm not going
• 55:59
  to get fired or anything. It's just, it's just a really unpleasant environment to have to work in.
• 56:04
  And some people, because, you know, I've been going through, like, holding out with the book
• 56:08
  troubles. And then, you know, you need trouble. There's been quite a bit in the last several months.
• 56:13
  And, yeah, and I talk to some people, I say, you know, there's very, very, I mean, I'm not even
• 56:19
  a conservative. I mean, I shouldn't even have to say that. But, you know, I mean, there are
• 56:23
  pretty much no conservatives where I work, maybe one or two. And I sort of, one of them, I speak,
• 56:29
  I'm like, how do you, how do you deal with this? Like, how do you, how do you cope with it?
• 56:34
  He said some very interesting things. He says, yeah, they know they can't fire you.
• 56:38
  So they bully you and hope you leave. Um, he says, I've, you know, disengaged from it all.
• 56:45
  And I just kind of do my work and, you know, my psychological, my philosophical, whatever
• 56:50
  existence is, is elsewhere. Um, but this is basically, it just becomes a, it's just a difficult
• 56:57
  environment to work in. And like, I'm a personable person. Like, I'm into all of this stuff, I think,
• 57:03
  because I, you know, I like people, I care about people. And, uh, but yeah, so when you're,
• 57:11
  yeah, when you just keep getting grief at work, it's just, yeah, it's just a difficult
• 57:15
  work environment. After a while, he's just like, oh, my God, seriously, fuck this shit.
• 57:19
  You know, work is not meant to be this, you know, you're constantly waiting for the next email,
• 57:24
  the next battle looking over your shoulder, you know, just grinds you down eventually.
• 57:28
  So you decided that the solution was to write an entire book about Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.
• 57:33
  Lately, you dumbed them. What, what did you do?
• 57:37
  I know what's going on. Like, I just, it just makes me angry. Like, I feel like, I think,
• 57:41
  I think, I think was the book of fuck you. Yeah, but yeah, total, but I've been, I've been
• 57:46
  fighting this shit since 2002. I can, I can go through all the years and just go, oh, that was
• 57:51
  the year I battled that academic and got, you know, didn't go well. Oh, that was the year I
• 57:56
  battled that academic and I didn't go well. Oh, that was, you know, like, there's just,
• 58:01
  you know, or it's just, it's just an endless stream of battling wacky postmodern ideology,
• 58:08
  identity politics, bad scholarship, theoretical frameworks, bullshit methods, and it just goes,
• 58:16
  you know, but you can still say all this. I mean, like, is this podcast going to get you in trouble?
• 58:20
  Yeah, me. I don't know. I'm doing it anyway. Um, I don't know. Um, but yeah, why would I,
• 58:27
  why would I say it or I, my girlfriend reckoned that maybe I have a sort of autistic commitment
• 58:31
  to truth or something, but then that thing, I've had that set of, but then I'm, but then,
• 58:36
  maybe what, what, I mean, am I just like an arrogant person for thinking, like, I'm the special
• 58:41
  truth-seeking guy, you know what I mean? Like it's no, I mean, I think that could be said
• 58:44
  of people who, who seek truth at all times and places. I mean, I'm sure people, you know,
• 58:49
  in the 1950s in the United States and, you know, under Mao or whatever, the ones who dissented
• 58:57
  were regarded as being, you know, I mean, we had you superimpose the, the psychological mental
• 59:03
  health model on those people. You could have said that they were all asberg as a truth-seeking
• 59:08
  crazy as well. But doesn't the other, this is one of my questions always, wouldn't the other
• 59:12
  side say they're the truth-seekers as well? No, I don't think they would. This is the,
• 59:15
  this is the big question. I mean, maybe not because they're post-modernists, but maybe. Well,
• 59:18
  I don't think you can, I don't think you can honestly say you're, you're a truth-seeker if all of
• 59:23
  your conclusions about everything align perfectly with the party line. But anyway, that's the thing.
• 59:31
  Part of me is just like, does not deal well with conflict at all. I mean, I'll be honest,
• 59:35
  why lie? Like it doesn't deal well with it. And the other part of me is like, if not me,
• 59:39
  then who? You know, you know, someone has to run horseback riding into battle. It's a,
• 59:45
  it's a really, really annoying combination. It really is. Because it's like, no, must keep
• 59:51
  fighting. And then like, oh, must keep the fight. Hate the fight. Hate the fight. Want to run away.
• 59:56
  So what were you saying on Chris Williamsson? Like the five stages of, I can't remember what you're
• 1:00:00
  saying at the start, but like the one of them was Goham events posts? Yeah, that's right. I think
• 1:00:05
  Chris was saying that. I think I was on Chris Williamsson's Modern Wisdom show on YouTube and
• 1:00:11
  podcasts. All good. We're all good podcasts can be found. And yeah, no, he, that's right. He was
• 1:00:16
  talking about the stages of, of a social media shits norm, basically. Yeah. So some stupid thing
• 1:00:22
  happens. Yeah. And then his reaction to him. And what's his name, Matt? What's his name?
• 1:00:26
  Matt. Anyway, this daily wire guy with the beard. Oh, Matt Walsh. Matt Walsh, you're here.
• 1:00:31
  Then Matt Walsh gets on to it. And then there's a reaction. But anyway, the final stage is like,
• 1:00:35
  you give up and you go, ham a fence post. Yeah, which is a great alternative, which is what,
• 1:00:39
  which is I'm genuinely working on that. Well, you ran to 10 kilometers. That's pretty good.
• 1:00:43
  That's your tent post. You're green tea and your 10 kilometer run. So lastly, the book that the
• 1:00:48
  book is being held up. Oh, yeah, from publication. No, it got published. But what's happened to it now?
• 1:00:54
  It got published. It was out for about two weeks. And then I got a message saying it was suspended
• 1:01:00
  from sales, pending an investigation into the book. They didn't tell me why. But I'll probably
• 1:01:09
  find out next week. It's all coming to the pointy end now. But you know, they're not going to
• 1:01:14
  republish it unless they make changes. And so I have to see what's going on with all of that. But
• 1:01:21
  yeah, I mean, my publisher is an academic publisher. And I'm surprised I got as far as I did
• 1:01:26
  with an academic publisher. But why are you surprised if they signed off on the book and had
• 1:01:31
  you arrived in the first place? They knew what it was about. Yeah, but not everyone in an
• 1:01:36
  institution in an organization is the same. Some are a little bit more open-minded. I think
• 1:01:41
  committed to the right causes. And so, you know, I think perhaps my original editor was,
• 1:01:46
  you know, he was a good guy and he's still there. Maybe somewhere else. He's moved on a bit. But
• 1:01:53
  but yeah, so maybe he was, you know, recognized that it was writing about the intellectual
• 1:01:57
  dark web's important. Seeing as these people have tens of millions of followers. And it's a
• 1:02:03
  major cultural moment. And so to record it and try to give an overview of it with a bit of analysis
• 1:02:08
  is actually an important, you know, scholarly task. But then yeah, other people in the organization
• 1:02:14
  probably have a look at it and just think, it's a way too many taboo discussions in here.
• 1:02:20
  Yeah. And there's probably a specific, I mean, if I was a betting man, I bet there's a specific
• 1:02:27
  thing. I think of certainly transgender stuff. Probably transient. I think of certain things I
• 1:02:32
  wrote, which pops, paps, I could, you know, moderate them a little. But there's only things that
• 1:02:36
  you're writing about other people saying these things. There's not a three in my own two-cent
• 1:02:40
  occasion. But I mean, that's because it's, you know, you don't want it to be unreadable. It's
• 1:02:44
  not a, it's not a, it's not a screed. You know, it's not a tirade. No, I try to be considered,
• 1:02:51
  I try to be considered. Not good enough anymore. We'll see. We'll see what happens. We'll see what
• 1:02:57
  happens. Let's see what happens. Yeah, this, this has got a way to run yet. All right, fascinating.
• 1:03:03
  Well, do you think the IDW has a way to run? Like, where do you see the whole independent
• 1:03:08
  heterodox, like, media sphere ending up? Yeah, it's interesting whether it's, I ponder it all
• 1:03:14
  the time. I mean, my sense early last year was it was as strong as ever in many ways, even though
• 1:03:21
  a bunch of people have maybe lost their step. I still, I still have a fair amount of hope for
• 1:03:28
  things like YouTube. I mean, here we are. It's pretty good. I mean, I feel, I mean, I'm speaking my
• 1:03:36
  mind here. I feel touch nervous, but not nearly as scared as I do in the university. So it's,
• 1:03:43
  it's a great, yeah, I think it's a great place where free speech does actually kick on and
• 1:03:50
  difficult issues can be explored. I think so. I think that will happen unless, I don't know,
• 1:03:56
  it's just a question of how many people would get captured. Yeah, because I think, I didn't really,
• 1:04:00
  like early on, it wasn't, it was far from clear that the IDW was politically aligned. Like, it was,
• 1:04:06
  there's a bunch of people who are sort of left or center left, you know, the Weinstein's,
• 1:04:10
  Rogan, Sam Harris, you know, there's other people which were right, center right, you know,
• 1:04:15
  Peterson Shapiro. And now the IDW IDs have kind of just spun off to the right. You know, the rights
• 1:04:23
  kind of got hold of them. And so maybe, maybe now that it's all, not in the case of Sam Harris or
• 1:04:30
  Weinstein, I wouldn't say. But even still the whole anti woke thing, the right is so onto it now.
• 1:04:35
  And they would have got a lot of those ideas from IDW types and podcasts. So, you know,
• 1:04:41
  the anti postmodernism type stuff, the anti woke stuff, you know, a lot of the trans discussions
• 1:04:47
  that the right now take up were first raised like on Rogan's podcast. So yeah, in some ways,
• 1:04:54
  I wonder whether it's just become an aspect of the right now. But I don't even know if that's
• 1:05:00
  necessarily a bad thing. I mean, isn't there some argument? I mean, what was an Abraham,
• 1:05:06
  Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. And you know, you know, there was a sort of a reversal sometime
• 1:05:11
  30s, 40s when the Republicans, Democrats kind of flipped in the United States. And so it is
• 1:05:17
  actually possible for the left. Well, I mean, yeah, it was LBJ, really resigning civil rights,
• 1:05:22
  more than that. I mean, I can sometimes talk more authoritatively on it, but I haven't,
• 1:05:28
  you know, been reading up on it lately. So I mean, I would be, well, all I want to say is that
• 1:05:33
  it's possible that left and right do flip a little. It's possible that, you know, so maybe
• 1:05:38
  we're in that face. I would be worried if all of the heterodox independent media content got
• 1:05:45
  co-opted by the right. I mean, I think you're talking about a phenomenon that is happening and
• 1:05:49
  has happened to some of the figures. But I think we're only going to, I'm deeply worried about
• 1:05:55
  audience capture around about the monotony of the same, you know, concerns being
• 1:06:00
  patched doing that now, aren't we? Well, you're a guest who's just written a book about it.
• 1:06:05
  Okay. So that's right. We're allowed to do it here. All right. I wouldn't want it to become
• 1:06:09
  monotony to it. I wouldn't want it to become, you know, a majority of my content. And if I,
• 1:06:15
  if it were, I would want to be exploring it in ways that are unusual and interested and nuanced and
• 1:06:20
  like, you know, steel manning my opponents rather than just banging on, I'm at Walsh or the daily
• 1:06:28
  wire about the threat that transgender activists pose to our children. Like, that's yawn. So boring.
• 1:06:34
  It goes on. Anyway, yeah, watch this space. Good luck with the book. I hope it turns out okay,
• 1:06:40
  and I hope you don't copy me much for that. Thanks for joining us, Jamie. Thanks for the rover.