Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The Death of the University?" with Peter Boghossian

Transcript

"The Death of the University?" with Peter Boghossian · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Good day, humans. Welcome to the space space. Dangerous ideas and this is an all-new brand-new
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  never-before-heard, flashy, exciting, instalment of permission to think, which is the collaboration
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  that we do with the University of Technology, Sydney. The Dean of Social Sciences,
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  their Professor Alan Davidson is an absolute champion who is committed to making UTS the place where
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  free thinkers feel like they can go, where it's actually fostering a climate environment in which
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  students are exposed to all ideas in which students feel like they can roll with the punches and
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  wrestle with notions that may not exactly be orthodox in terms of the most politically correct
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  or woke opinion, but it doesn't even really matter where the opinion comes from. The idea is
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  that universities have always traditionally been places where you can go out in a limb and express
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  some crazy notion and then the correct way to shut that down is to come up with a better
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  argument, a better idea and hash it out, not shout each other down and de-platform people and
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  say they can't talk and that certain ideas are sort of prejudged to be wrong before we even have
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  that conversation. And there is too much of that going on on campuses all over the Anglophone world.
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  Alan Davidson is trying to push back against that and is trying to foster an environment of
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  genuine free speech and independent thought at the University of Technology. Sydney, it's exciting
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  that I can be one small part of that collaboration and if you're finding this show through UTS,
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  then I hope you enjoy all our other episodes because one person who has a similar mission to
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  Alan Davidson's today is guest Peter Begotian who was on a previous episode of permission to think
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  here on uncomfortable conversations. He's back because he's in Australia, courtesy of the University
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  of Technology Sydney and I was excited to sit down with him in the flesh and actually meet him
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  one on one. Peter is a philosopher, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State
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  University before he resigned at the end of 2021 saying that the university had become a social
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  justice factory that he faced harassment and retaliation for trying to have recent rational
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  conversations about some of these social justice issues. He said the university creates a culture
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  where students are afraid to speak openly and honestly, sounds familiar, of training students
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  to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues and of driving intolerance of divergent beliefs and
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  opinions. Peter now goes around trying to essentially help lay people, think about things with
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  the same rigor as a professional philosopher, not to fall into epistemic traps and to be as generous
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  as possible to other people's opinions. For that, he is widely loathed and denounced. He always
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  has been, even when he got his start, I mean, he first came to public attention because he was
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  involved in what's called the Griefen's Studies Affair. He is friends with James Lindsay,
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  who is a former guest on this show. You may have heard my attempt to find some common ground
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  with young Mr. James, and we discussed James a little bit in this episode because I think Peter
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  feels that I've wrongly characterized James. But to James Lindsay and the British academic
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  Helen Pluckrose joined Peter Begozion in writing a bunch of intentionally preposterous academic
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  papers around sort of social justice issues and submitting them to peer reviewed publications
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  about things like gender studies and getting them accepted. They're by apparently showing that
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  gender studies publications will basically publish any word salad of woke nonsense if you just
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  make it sound worthy enough even if it makes absolutely no sense. And these things were written
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  intentionally to make no sense. That got that trio a lot of flak and credit a lot of enemies and
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  that pool of people have only continued to pillory Peter in the years since. Nonetheless, I hope you
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  enjoy this reflection between me and the one and only Peter Begozion for more on all the good things
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  that UTS is doing. Look up for mission to think and you can find previous episodes. Enjoy.
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  Headphones make me feel important. It's an important,
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  unimportant, desperately looking for ways to remain relevant. I mean being a white cis
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  gender straight male in 2023, am I right Peter Begozion? You certainly are. What's going on
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  with the kids these days and all their genders and their hair? Welcome to Australia. Thank you very
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  much. I love it here. What are you doing here? I have an appointment with UTS and I was a guest
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  of the Ramsey Center where I give a talk and I'm enjoying the warm weather and the friendly people
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  and the absolutely terrific food. I love it here. What's the best part about Australian food?
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  The best part. Asian food. It's a little different. The authenticity of the food is fantastic.
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  I'll tell you the worst part even though you didn't ask me that. It's very, it's very,
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  I can take it. I'm a big boy. Okay, it's, it can be a really inappropriate joke. But I won't.
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  It's, it's, it's, it's very odd to me that there's an extra cost for ice coffee.
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  Yes. Also, no free refills of anything. That was a shock to my system when I came back after
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  having been in New York for a dozen years where I lived when I, in the first half of my. I noticed
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  that. Yeah. I mean, why are they charging me for more soft drink? You know, like soft drink is
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  nothing. It's just syrup with fizzy drinks in it if it's coming out of a tap. Don't mean if,
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  like at a pub, if I go back to the bar and get a fill-up of diet coke, then they charge me a whole
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  new $3.27. It's interesting. We went to that. What's that place called Spice Alley or?
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  Yes. Spice Alley. Just across the road from UTS. Got that place. It's great. Like,
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  truly great. A bunch of different little restaurants. Yeah. All customs and things.
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  One of the things that I noticed there is, so I literally just moved out of Portland, Oregon,
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  and when I was in Spice Alley, there was a restaurant that was shared by another, a bunch of other
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  restaurants. And I wanted to, you don't call them bathrooms here. What do you call them?
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  You can call them a toilet. Yeah. So I went and there was no code on the door. Like, literally
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  anybody could just walk in. Imagine that. Imagine a public toilet. What is this called?
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  I don't know. What is it called? It's a Beijing-Brush-Nab-Brush-Nab.
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  Yeah. No. That's right. Anyone can use a public toilet. Why? In America, it would just be.
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  Well, in Portland, you could literally never have that. What happened?
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  Well, homeless people would camp out in there. People would die of overdoses in there.
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  People would defecate on the floor. They'd break the toilets. They'd destroy the whole place.
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  Brush. So that's one of the things I do is when I go around the world, this is going to sound
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  really weird. This is one of the things that people will meme out. It's like super creepy.
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  Is when I walk into, when I give lectures in high schools, one of the first things I do is I use
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  the restroom and I take a video of the boys' room and I send it to my son. Yeah, because I tell him
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  that this is how- Does he appreciate this? He does. I tell him that it's kind of inside joke.
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  This is how civilized people use the restroom. They don't defecate on the floor. They don't rip
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  the stalls off. They don't smash the toilets up. They don't throw M80s, which are just these
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  explosives down and attempt to destroy the plumbing. Ours is an empire in decline.
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  Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, it's certainly worse in some places. So the local grocery store when I
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  used to live in Portland was a safe way and I am not kidding you when I tell this. I used to do
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  my all my shopping there at night. 50% half the time that I was in the grocery store and admittedly
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  I'm a slow shopper. But half the time that I was there, there was some kind of people running out
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  with stealing things, something. Once I had to also use the restroom which has a code on it and I
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  went to the front door and I asked the person's half in the door, excuse me, can you please tell me
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  the code? And they said all the restrooms are closed and I said why? And she said someone died
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  from an overdose there. Have they not removed the body? I don't know. I can't tell you it's been
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  cleaned up. I didn't ask. I didn't ask. We haven't bothered to move the body. Now it is just a
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  mortuary. Mortuary, we just shuffling the additional bodies in there. So it gives nobody the code.
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  It is like either the frog and the boiling water. I mean, you know what you need Peter Pagotian
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  is adult diapers so that you don't ever have to use a restroom while you're out. I won't take
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  notes on that. That is free advice. I won't put that in my Amazon order. Free advice from me to you.
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  You just use it in public restrooms too much. I don't know at the last time I used to
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  public restrooms. I would not do that. I haven't even been to the public restroom. It's by Sally.
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  I wouldn't even know if it had a code on it. Well, let me say so I one of the places that I've
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  been eating. I just the sushi here is fantastic. I'm a huge sushi fan. The salmon is fresh.
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  Right here on the South Pacific. The lapping shores of the South Pacific. And it's priced about
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  half of what it would be in the US. I just love it. I mean, in fact, I eat the same thing virtually
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  every day for lunch and I have to say using the restroom and that bathroom. Why are you using
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  so much restroom? I have to pee. I have to pee. But do you have problems down there? No, no,
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  like I know I walk in and the whole you know, there's no there's no feces on the floor. There's no
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  graffiti on the wall. That's right. It's just a wonderful experience. This is a civilized land
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  and civilized island. Yeah. Correct. And land. Correct. It's both. It's a land. I'll give it
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  I'll I'll give it to you. Don't play the self-importance. But no, I I'm just found like, you know,
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  there's no there's no 10 camp. I just find it to be remarkable. What how do you diagnose that
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  problem? Because the I mean, the left would say, well, the people aren't injecting in the
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  Spice Valley restroom because there's a free injecting room in Sydney, which was very controversial
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  and conservatives didn't want. But about 30 years ago, it passed and anyone who wants to
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  to shoot up can go in a legal supervised place where they get clean needles and they can shoot up
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  and they can pass out and it's safe and it's supervised. And you know, we don't have people who
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  thrown the bomb. These little M 80 bombs or whatever it is because we have an adequate welfare
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  system, which keeps people, which gives people a leg up and gives them opportunities and enables
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  them to get jobs and hopefully aspire towards the middle class and not getting trenched in cycles
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  of poverty like they do in America. And then the conservative will say the reverse that I mean,
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  the reason why is because in the in Portland, the left has just gone crazy and has made no serious
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  attempt at cleaning up, you know, homelessness or addressing the root causes of things like
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  mental health issues and so on and pandas to bleeding heart, social justice activists who
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  will tolerate any level of kind of decline and decay in the name of humanity.
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  Yeah, and which is true. Your Highness Harry has written some fantastic stuff about that. Michael
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  Schellenberger has written some great stuff about that in San Francisco. And I think we need
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  to get away from this idea of the Republican, the conservative, the left wing, the right wing.
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  And we need to look at evidence and evidence-based policies. And there's just simply no question
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  about it that since the since the George Floyd incident, we see a dramatic increase in the
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  number of deaths in Portland. The death rate is over 300 percent. It's a wonderful little book
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  about that. Matt Thornton's The Gift of Violence. He talks about the criminogenic factors and what
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  happened since the George Floyd incident. So we we have problems. We're so people talking
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  about a national divorce, which is basically a separation of the country. We're not talking
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  across divides. We're fighting with each other against a whole about things that are frankly
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  rather ridiculous as opposed to differing to the evidence. We have authoritarian versus non-authoritarian,
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  which I think those are more helpful, more helpful access to look at the problem. But I would
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  definitely not pin it on liberals or conservatives or I think I'm more nuanced evidence-based
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  look at the problem is the way to deal with it. But I will say coming here and and going,
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  for example, to Hungary, it is absolutely striking. I mean, it's literally the first thing you know
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  coming from you notice coming from Portland, Oregon is that there's no tent camping. It's just
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  the first thing you would know. It'd be impossible coming from Portland to not notice that.
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  Right. Right. And where do you live now? I can't say for security reasons.
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  What city generally, you can't say that. No, I can't say that.
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  Are you moved to Austin? I've moved out of Portland.
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  Because I only wanted to know not to pry, but just to see what the difference is between Portland
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  and that city. In other words, is this a United States-wide problem? Or is there something to take
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  into account? No, so that's no. I'm glad you I'm glad you mentioned that. No, I do think,
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  or maybe I should say I will admit that that it's a bubble and it's certainly worse in Portland
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  than it is other places. And my buddy Reed who's here lives in Florida and the problem is
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  nowhere near as pronounced as that. So it is Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LA, San Diego.
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  And to deny the problem to say that it doesn't exist as opposed to turning the
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  to really giving thoughtful consideration about vulnerable people and what is the best evidence
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  best available evidence to help them and help the society in which they live.
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  We're not really we're not ready. That's just add that to the list of things we're not ready to
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  have a honest conversation about. Well, that's why we're here to have uncomfortable conversations.
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  It's interesting that you say that there's that that access of authoritarian versus anti-authoritarian
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  is more a more interesting one than left versus right. And then in the next breath, you said
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  when you come to a place like Australia or Hungary and I was like, well, hang on a second,
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  Australia is still deeply committed to smaller liberal ideals. Hungary is a quasi-authoritarian
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  country at this point. I would I would disagree. But I would definitely I would definitely
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  disagree with that. So it's interesting. So tell me what so tell me why you're focusing on Hungary.
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  Well, because you just mentioned it and it's the outlier in Western Europe as being a country
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  whose leader has been systematically dismantling freedom of the press installing friends in the
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  judiciary, making it harder for independent journalists to do their job and articulating a very
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  robust vision of what the executive state should be able to do. So that's not accorded with my
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  experience whatsoever. And I spent four months there last year and I found it to be one of the
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  most interesting places I have ever been. I mean, the country is fascinating. It's
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  but beautiful. It's culturally complex. But that doesn't mean that it's leaders an anti-authoritarian.
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  No, you know, well, I would take I would take issue with that. But you know, I think you should have
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  Balash Orban on your show to have a serious. He's a very thoughtful. He wrote the
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  is he related to the president? No, he's actually not related. But he's kind of Orban's right hand
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  man. He's become a friend of mine. And we've had honest thoughtful conversations. I'd love it.
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  That would be fantastic. Can you team that up? A hundred percent. I'd be more than happy to make
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  that connection to you. And you can ask him, but I will say when I went there, if you gave me a
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  wand to wave and gave me my dream job, this would be it. I could go all around the country and I
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  could talk about literally anything I wanted to. And that's exactly what I did. And I, in fact,
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  think about this. Imagine this happening. Well, maybe it's more difficult for you because you're
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  from Australia, but imagine this happening in a US context. He put me in touch with and he said,
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  listen, we want you to meet critics of Orban. We want you to talk to them and we want you to make
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  your mind up yourself. And he arranged me. He actually arranged meetings with people like Peter
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  Kreco and Martin. I can't. I can't. I can't. Hungarians. That you could make up a possible.
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  Yeah, I wouldn't know. He was the most prominent dissidents. But it's interesting that the people
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  will pick on hungry, for example, or when I go on a show, but they won't, they won't pick on
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  Singapore, right? Which is a complete nightmare. Now, you've had people on your show, like David
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  Martin Jones, who's a national, his lecture at the National University of Singapore. And no,
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  nothing came up about Singapore or the death penalty or the dictatorial status of criticism
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  of the judiciary or like free speech. And so I do think that there is a particular analyst and
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  I'm not necessarily accusing you of this. No, go ahead and you can. But the difference there is
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  that Singapore, no one has ever had any illusions that Singapore is a democracy. I mean,
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  Singapore has been Singapore and has been just as authoritarian a country as it is today.
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  Yeah. Since, you know, since it's in postcolonial inception. So I think it just, it's just taken
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  as a given, you know, what would be the point in me talking to someone who works in China and
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  me talk, well, actually, in the case of China, it would be worthwhile because China is changing. But
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  like, you know, taking someone from a country that we all understand is autocratic and like
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  needling them about the autocracy of that country. What's interesting about hungry is that you've
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  got a country that is within the European Union, who's supposedly abiding by all of the smaller
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  liberal democratic principles that we believe in and is nonetheless engaging in a kind of a
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  bombastic swaggering, some would say, show vanistik sort of nationalistic. So I don't think that's
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  what it is. I posture. I think that that it's enough that like Germany and France have held
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  high level talks about whether they should be booted out of the EU. That will never happen.
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  No, I don't think that's why I think to understand hungry, it's not and orabon, it's not
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  conservative in a sense, it's a traditional. And the criticisms that I hear of hungry are just
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  completely false. For example, you know, you would you would think from the rhetoric about hungry
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  that there'd be Nazis go stepping up and down the streets. Whereas where I lived there,
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  well, if you would think that, no, two synagogue, who I think that. But who would think that?
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  Well, that's what I hear the criticism all the time that that, you know, what I know,
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  orabon, personally, I know that he has Jewish friends. I know that the synagogues are active. I know
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  that, you know, they had a Holocaust moral. I just think that there's a lot of misunderstanding.
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  And rather than get it from me, who's an outsider, why don't you actually have a conversation with
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  somebody in the government who can you can talk to intelligently? Well, I've had many conversations.
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  Well, the simple answer to that would be that I'm not going to know when they're bullshitting
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  me as well as someone who studies hungry will. So it's probably better for me to talk to
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  international experts who understand. Well, that's not me. No, that's true. Let's move on then.
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  I liked the tweet that you tweeted earlier today is we're in the very early stages of epic
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  and unprecedented gas lighting. Yeah, yeah. What does that mean? Well, in the two photos there,
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  it was normally people I don't pay any attention to them whatsoever. But they do have a wildly
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  popular. In fact, I think one of your episodes, I listened to one of your guests claim the
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  journalist was about Dave Rubin. And I think that he said in that episode that the young Turks
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  was the most had the most with the most popular. It's wildly popular. I think it might be. Yeah,
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  if it's not right now, then it certainly has been the most popular. Yeah. So YouTube news show.
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  It's a left wing. Correct. Extremely left wing. What news show? Yeah, even before it was
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  woke, it was just very left in terms of economic sort of Bernie Sanders style leftism. And they used
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  to have me on their show occasionally. They were no more about no more. Look, it's a bizarre thing.
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  I mean, they were also there are particular individuals there who are not Jank or Anna who are
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  the people who you who you retweeted who were very just condescending and I specifically left out
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  their Twitter handles because I didn't want to get them to get bombed. That's not what this is
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  about. So to answer your question directly, some of this, and I mean, you'd have to break it down
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  into individual propositions in the suite of woke beliefs, if you will. Some of this stuff is so
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  fucking insane. It's just so crazy that these positions, not only are they not sustainable,
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  anybody who's given serious consideration to these, you know, transitioning women in men's
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  prisons, a lot of the trans issues. And you've spoken about that on your show as well.
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  The consequence of this must be, and I've said this for years,
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  people are not going to say, oh, wow, you know, we thought this, but we were hoodwinked by the
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  ideology. We just were all bamboozled. We were condensed. I'm kind of a a strange cultural moment.
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  No, the consequence of this will be, I never believe that. I predicted that from day one. And I
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  think we're now at the beginning of seeing this epic untruely, genuinely unprecedented gas
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  lighting. Oh, I see. I know. And just to find a gaslighting for people who aren't as in
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  eyes online as we are. A total denial. Like, denial of something that's literally right in front
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  of you. I never believe that even 50 tweets later, 100 videos, no, I never believe that.
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  Right. Right. And there's a lot of this that goes on in the sense that, you know, I'll
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  I'll make a criticism. Let's just run with the transgender angle. Since you just raised it,
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  I will say I was in a long text message argument over the weekend with a good friend of mine,
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  who's one of the most prominent LGBTQIA plus activists in Australia. And he was he was listening
• 22:48
  back to my episode about JK Rowling. Oh, yeah. And he was saying, like, your outrage outrages me.
• 22:55
  I'm so infuriated at you, Josh, because I don't. All of the things that you're saying that we do,
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  we don't do. Like, who is who are these people who can't have open conversations about this? It's
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  all over the place. Look at Fox News, look at Sky News after dark in Australia, look at the
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  Murdoch press. Like, there's look at the parliamentarians who are and look at the anti-trans bills and
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  everything. Like, this is in the culture at the moment. This is not something that you can't say.
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  And I was trying to sort of be a bit more nuanced and go, like, I don't want those outlets to be
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  the ones who are speaking on my behalf or on behalf of anybody who questions the extremes of of
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  transgender ideology at the moment. I want us to be able to have a compassion and a nuanced
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  conversation that those outlets and are not doing. And his response was the only time that I hear
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  people saying the things that you claim they're saying is when people like you, Josh, are saying
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  that they're saying them. I never actually hear people in the transgender activist community
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  saying the things that you claim that they do. So then it becomes almost a factual question about
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  who's gaslighting who, right? Like, I would have to go back and find documentary evidence of every
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  time. Yeah, hold on. Let me pause you. So as a as a conversational strategy, I'd like to make a
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  suggestion. Please. So instead of going back and finding the evidence, I would first say to him,
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  what evidence could I present you with that would cause you to change your mind about that?
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  And then listen to what he says. And only then find the evidence. Because if you just find the
• 24:32
  evidence first, he'll say that that's not enough evidence, right? That's insufficient evidence.
• 24:36
  Right. So ask to his satisfaction, you know, what sources would you accept, what kind of figures?
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  So get as much detail and granularity on that as you can and then present that evidence and say,
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  but you know, in tandem with that, are you willing to change your mind about this? Like, is this
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  something that if you were presented evidence to your satisfaction, you would change your mind only
• 24:56
  then what I prefernish the evidence. That's interesting. That's interesting. Because yes,
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  what would constitute evidence that there is a chilling effect on the conversation around some
• 25:07
  of these controversial issues? I mean, for some people, I don't think there is enough evidence.
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  I don't think there will ever be enough evidence. Well, then they'll just say, then you need to get
• 25:16
  you need to have them say that to you. Right. Well, they won't. I mean, they'll say, I guess,
• 25:21
  yeah, it's interesting. It would be interesting to hear what they say. I think they would rule
• 25:24
  out of bounds a Twitter pile on or people being, you know, having their shows canceled. Let's see,
• 25:31
  we're doing it again. Let's not do that. Let's not say what they would say. Let's actually ask them.
• 25:36
  Even they're not here. Well, I know, but that's that's what you would do because even us saying what
• 25:40
  they would say, they would say that's mischaracterization of what they would say. Right. So you have to
• 25:44
  ask people who believe that's one of the things I have a YouTube show I did with a buddy of mine on
• 25:51
  the ideological capture of NPR and one of the things that I noticed from listening to countless
• 25:56
  hours of that is when they want to their woke far left news station or at the very least a woke
• 26:03
  left news station. And when they want to articulate a position of someone on the right or a green
• 26:10
  or a libertarian or what have you, they always find someone on the left and ask them, what do these
• 26:16
  people think? And that so I want to make sure that we're not those people. I'm just suggesting a
• 26:22
  strategy for how to deal with that. Now, if they say to you, well, there is no evidence, I would be
• 26:27
  very surprised. They won't say that. Okay. They won't say that. Nobody would, nobody would say that.
• 26:31
  But yeah, I just fear that there would be shifting goalposts. Well, yeah, well, that's why you have
• 26:35
  to articulate with the goalpost or beforehand by asking them what the evidence would be.
• 26:40
  What's your, what is your evidence for the existence? Let's suppose that they turn the tables
• 26:45
  and say, all right, well, whatever it is to, you know, do you want to marshal for the claim that
• 26:50
  there is a chilling effect on speech at the moment? So I, I'm sure you were told to never ask
• 26:59
  answer a question with a question. I would ask the question, well, what would you consider to be
• 27:04
  good evidence? So I think a lot of times these conversations devolve into that's evidence. Yes,
• 27:11
  it is. No, it isn't. And I think it's really important to clarify what the evidence would look
• 27:17
  like before any evidence was presented. I think that's one of the main mistakes in conversations.
• 27:22
  And I did a, an event with read at UTS recently. And one of the first things we do when we put
• 27:28
  people in a Likert scale in lines from strongly agree, agree, slightly agree neutral with the rest
• 27:36
  on the disagree. And one of the first orders of business is to ask them to clarify the terms.
• 27:42
  And when we did this recently, people meant completely different, we had to claim, is there a God?
• 27:50
  And people had completely different definitions of God. So they were talking past each other.
• 27:55
  It wasn't that the beliefs were incommensurable. They could have been, but that they were talking past
• 27:59
  each other. And so I think it's really important in these conversations to clarify what do you mean by
• 28:05
  that? Well, what's evidence look like to lay the ground the foundations because it just conversations
• 28:10
  are so toxic. And people simply aren't listening to each other and they're accusing each other of
• 28:16
  horrible things. So I think setting that groundwork is extremely important. So that's how I'd have
• 28:20
  the conversation. That's interesting. I mean, and there's so much talking past each other at the
• 28:24
  moment. It's one of the things that I'm trying to do with this show that I'm trying to remedy
• 28:28
  and try to actually butt heads. Or I mean, even if I agree with someone, at least agree with each
• 28:34
  other in a way that is that has a common framework and has a common ground rules, right? Right. So
• 28:41
  that's the philosopher, Hobberlost. You're going to Hobberlost. What he says, it's really important.
• 28:44
  You don't communicate to persuade its mutual understanding. So you have a belief. I have a belief
• 28:50
  I think your belief is way out of bounds, but I understand why you believe it. So I know what the
• 28:56
  belief is. I know your claim. I know your epistemology, how you came to the belief. I got it. Only then
• 29:04
  are you situated. So so mute. If you look at the conversations from mutual understanding,
• 29:09
  you're then situated to act either democratically if it's with a large number of people or to
• 29:15
  proceed productively. But if you don't do that, that's how you ruin friendships. That's how you
• 29:20
  corrode establishments. And how you destroy a culture and a policy and a demos because nobody
• 29:27
  understands what everybody else is saying. I mean, this is one of the great liabilities and fears
• 29:31
  of not having a vibrant town square where everybody can sort of say their stupid opinions freely,
• 29:36
  right? Because otherwise, you don't even know why you believe what you believe. You become
• 29:40
  worse at articulating the beliefs of your opponents. It's tricky. So here in Sydney, there is
• 29:48
  Speaker's Corner, which is next to the Art Machine Museum. Yeah, I saw a photo of you on
• 29:53
  social out there. Oh, you follow me social. Yeah. And it was an amazing experience reading I went
• 29:59
  there. And the first thought I had beside, you know, this I was kind of excited to be there.
• 30:06
  This is cool. The first thought I had was you could never do this in Portland, Oregon.
• 30:10
  You could simply never do that in Portland, Oregon. Meaning you couldn't have people randomly
• 30:15
  standing up and starting whatever they believe. And Tifa would be there. They'd be destroying
• 30:19
  the place. They'd be saying that Nazis everywhere. Then that would bring in elements on the other
• 30:24
  side. It would be the police would have to be come, but the police are defunded. You could just
• 30:29
  it would be defaced like it's a it's a symbol of the health of the democracy. You simply,
• 30:38
  but you know what, I would love to be proven wrong. People would I bet you that they would bring
• 30:41
  in a truck with a chain to just to rip the thing out of the ground. I just don't see that
• 30:46
  in Portland, Oregon, now in Florida, that might be a different case.
• 30:51
  So I do think that if we want to solve this problem of incivility, of hostility, I think that
• 30:59
  we need more listening. I think we need more clarifying up front what people
• 31:04
  mean by things. I think we need more of an honest conversation about what what would it take
• 31:10
  you to change your mind? What evidence would you need? And when you have those things, then you can
• 31:15
  proceed civilly with the conversation. And if you don't have those things, if somebody is unwilling
• 31:20
  to furnish them, that doesn't mean that you should be an asshole to them. Right. So you want
• 31:24
  to model the behavior that you want to see. If you don't want something to be addicted to you,
• 31:27
  then don't be addicted to them. Yeah. Yeah. So that calls for more listening, you know,
• 31:32
  at the event that we did recently at UTS, there was, first of all, people bought up the seats.
• 31:39
  They purchased the seats, so nobody else could come and see the event. Wait, really?
• 31:43
  Oh, yeah, yeah. That happens. I have my DeMore event that happens frequently at DeMore. People
• 31:46
  who hate you buy it, buy it out. Yeah. Well, there's no one else can come and say, yeah, they're
• 31:51
  free. It's free, you know, it's free to open to the public. So I think you can get around that by
• 31:56
  just charging a dollar. But then when you charge a dollar, you know, somebody said, well, why aren't
• 32:00
  there more homeless people here? Well, I mean, the event is free and open to the public. But also,
• 32:04
  if someone really hates you, they can probably drop 50 bucks on, you know, taking up 50 seats. Yeah.
• 32:08
  Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Sure. So, so yeah, so they bought out the seats, but kidding me. I mean,
• 32:14
  what infants? Seriously. Yeah. And it was, it was to teach people how to speak across divides,
• 32:22
  to teach people how to have civil conversations. And the, and they're gripe. So these would be
• 32:27
  what you would call sort of work type. And they're gripe with you is what's your most generous.
• 32:33
  Here's the good time. So that's how you're going to say your opponents point of view in the
• 32:37
  most generous possible way. Yeah. So my first thing I'd like to say is I'd like to ask them and
• 32:42
  have them, but they don't believe in dialogue discourse or conversation. So that's out. I think
• 32:46
  that they would think I see my most generous interpretation that I am using eggs and structures
• 32:56
  of power to uphold power. I'm using language, university structures, my situatedness as a white
• 33:07
  cis heterosexual male to maintain my privilege and the dominant discourse in society. And this
• 33:14
  is just window dressing that does not address the actual problem, but keeps systemic inequalities
• 33:21
  being perpetuated because people think that something is being done. But the very active discourse
• 33:26
  itself is a form of epistemic violence. I think that would be the most charitable. That's
• 33:30
  pretty good. And are there specific things that you believe that they would point to as evidence of
• 33:35
  this? Again, I am extremely hesitant to say what any what other people believe. I much rather
• 33:40
  have them comment. But if you're asking what I think it would be, I think some things, well, I'll
• 33:48
  just throw out some I don't believe unless you've had bottom surgery that you and you're convicted
• 33:54
  of a crime and you're born a male, you should go into a woman's prison. I do believe that there
• 33:59
  should be women's only spaces, rape crisis centers. For example, sporting events, for example,
• 34:07
  I think that could be construed as a form of transphobia. I think challenging what are now dominant
• 34:14
  not narratives, challenging the idea that one needs to develop a critical consciousness to
• 34:19
  understand how racism and structural inequalities are embedded in the system. I think challenging
• 34:26
  that worldview itself would be seen as inherently problematic and it has to be silenced
• 34:35
  in order for there to be they wouldn't use the word human flourishing. But this is again you've
• 34:40
  asked me to be a hermeneutic of charity. The most charitable I could be in order to provide
• 34:45
  the flourishing for people whose ancestors suffer from historical oppression and whose
• 34:51
  embedded within the power structure are still keeping these people from achieving parity with
• 34:57
  whites as heterosexual men. It's very good. It's very impressive. What is? It's impressive your
• 35:04
  ability to be that generous, like to be that self-aware. Oh, well, for a start. Well, thanks.
• 35:12
  Yeah, and to not put as put spin on, I like I didn't detect much spin there on in terms of
• 35:19
  you could throw you could add little things into throw them under the bus a bit. And I was listening
• 35:23
  after those things and I didn't hear them. Well, if I'm wrong, I want to know that I'm wrong.
• 35:27
  But the only way that I would be wrong is not talking to you because you and I pretty much
• 35:31
  have, I mean, when you find two of those, please, they may be different at a level.
• 35:37
  Yeah, we'd have some differences, but we don't differ on the fundamental principle. The only
• 35:41
  way for a civilization to survive and flourish is for people to talk to each other in
• 35:46
  unself-sensitive ways and as reason and rationality as the guiding principle. I couldn't
• 35:52
  I couldn't possibly agree more. And I think the best book, and this is a quite a statement,
• 35:57
  is your former guest and our my friend Tim Urban came on your show. I loved him. I loved him.
• 36:02
  I mean, one of the best people in the best minds, amazing human, amazing human. Everybody should
• 36:07
  read his work. Yeah, and listen to the two. There are two. He's one of the few people who's
• 36:11
  been on the show twice. Well, you know, in the illustrious pantheon. Is it my friend of the show?
• 36:19
  You're a friend of the show now officially. I'll give you a little key to like a key to the city.
• 36:25
  Wow. That won't help me because I still can't get into it. They're like four security
• 36:28
  doors that I have to get into the building. Now, one of the other things that you said before we
• 36:33
  started was that you wanted to tease out some areas of disagreement, which is fantastic by me.
• 36:38
  So when this doesn't just become a mutual jerk off session, you flag James Lindsay,
• 36:42
  with whom you wrote a book and who's a friend of yours, and a previous guest on this show
• 36:46
  as being one possible error. I don't necessarily, I don't talk too much about a guy,
• 36:52
  not in his absence. But what bothered you about my remarks about James?
• 36:56
  Well, for the schools of James, a very, very close friend of Jim is a very, very close friend of mine.
• 37:01
  It's a collaborator. I'll call him Mr. Lindsay. He is a, he's a, he's in a remarkable person
• 37:09
  to work with because you could literally say anything to him and he does not take it personally.
• 37:14
  So he really, truly only wants to create the best stuff. And we had, we have had a genuinely
• 37:19
  extraordinary collaborative partnership across peer-reviewed things, actual peer-reviewed,
• 37:25
  popular pieces, et cetera. So I've, I've, so this, so this is bothering me and I'll,
• 37:31
  I'll tell you it's bothering me. Yeah. So you've mentioned a few times on the show in a few
• 37:38
  different episodes. So it wasn't just a one off that you think Jim is a conspiracy theorist.
• 37:45
  Now, to your favor, you have had Jim on your show to talk to him directly about this. So already
• 37:52
  this puts you in another category. Now, he was telling me that one of the episodes you did,
• 37:57
  there was some kind of recording problem. It was, it was such a shame. It was fantastic.
• 38:01
  The first time I spoke to him was in, I think February of 2022. And we, he didn't know me from
• 38:09
  a bar or so, but I didn't know much about him. He just had this great experience of kind of
• 38:13
  sniffing each other's butts like dogs at the park, not knowing what to make of each other, right?
• 38:17
  Yeah. And, you know, it went for two hours, I think. Yeah. And then when we went to upload his
• 38:24
  side of the conversation, his audio file was 90 seconds long. Yeah, he told me there was a mistake.
• 38:29
  And he went back into his system and he tried to, he's the only person with whom that's happened.
• 38:34
  Yeah, he told me he told me it's a one is like an amazing car. It was such a shame. And there
• 38:38
  was no point. And we were both like, you know, we're not even going to reschedule this because
• 38:42
  what's the point in trying to recapture lightning in a bottle, right? And then we came back like
• 38:45
  nine months later and we had the conversation. And I heard that conversation. But needless to say
• 38:50
  it's less, there's less sparkle, but I also think he'd changed. And I do, I wouldn't have
• 38:55
  characterized him as a conspiracy theorist during the first conversation, but after hanging up on
• 39:00
  him the second time, I mean, I wouldn't, I wouldn't use that term. Okay. So I'm going to
• 39:08
  instead of pick issue that I'm going to make some suggestions, which I hope you find productive.
• 39:13
  Please. So I think instead of labeling someone as a conspiracy theorist, it might be helpful to say
• 39:21
  Jim said this in this venue. Well, I think I don't, I don't go around banding about that.
• 39:26
  Well, you said that term. So I'm certain I was like put on the back foot and I was like,
• 39:30
  hang on, do I actually do what I wanted to? Well, you have in some of your episodes that I've
• 39:33
  listened to with the, well, maybe in the context where I'm not going to go off on a 15 minute side
• 39:38
  tangent about precisely what I mean, but I think I've been fairly generous with James about, I mean,
• 39:43
  the main, the main moment that I had a comment that went viral about James was when Sam Harris
• 39:49
  was on my show and we were talking about. I heard that as well. I mean, I, I think I said that
• 39:53
  I listen to your podcasts. This is great. I think I think I said that James is a genius. He is
• 39:58
  a genius, which I absolutely believe. He is a genius. And then I think we were talking about
• 40:03
  whether or not the, and actually he did what you're just saying, which is like what would constitute
• 40:09
  proof, like well, you know, and I think it was something along the lines of if the New South Wales
• 40:16
  Department of Education started introducing, for example, policies in public schools that
• 40:24
  aligned with something that the United Nations UNESCO had developed, that would be evidence
• 40:30
  for his belief that there is what I would call a conspiracy of, and I think kind of world
• 40:36
  government types who want to indoctrinate youth. I would regard that as being evidence that
• 40:41
  educators talk to each other among public policy, so that would be my, my suggestion for,
• 40:47
  because we don't want to contribute to this problem, right? We don't want to contribute to,
• 40:52
  so we want to position ourselves and I know because I've spoken to you and we've spoken,
• 40:59
  we want to make sure that we don't contribute to the problem. And one way to do that is to say,
• 41:04
  okay, this would be evidence if this person said this, it's true. And you know, the other thing,
• 41:09
  of course, is in what time frame. So we've got to wait. But I, I, I have heard you mentioned Jim
• 41:14
  a few times on the show, and I will say it did bother me because I did feel that it was unfair.
• 41:22
  Is there more to say on this issue? No. Because that's not a very interesting disagreement,
• 41:26
  Peter. I mean, that's just like, well, I have a friend. No, it's bother me. And well, no,
• 41:31
  he's not me thing about him. And so apart, apart from it being interesting, it did bother me.
• 41:36
  And I did want to get her off my chest. And I do want to tell you, you can delete the whole,
• 41:39
  you can delete that. No, I mean, I think it's interesting. Yeah. So I was trying to think of what other
• 41:45
  disagreements we might have. I'm not really sure what they would be. Because we, on the broad
• 41:53
  issues, we certainly feel the same about liberty, freedom of speech, democracy, people, you know,
• 42:00
  pro-trans in that people can kind of live any kind of life they want without harassment. They
• 42:04
  should be free to assemble with who they want to. So let me just, well, then, let me just try
• 42:09
  to milk the most out of this before we move on because there are other things that I want to
• 42:12
  pick your brain on, which you're more knowledgeable than I am on, like academia or the state of the,
• 42:16
  of institutions that I want to, I want to hear your thoughts on. But is there a, so what's the
• 42:21
  most useful way, if you see a phenomenon happen, right, such as very smart people going through a
• 42:29
  period of immense global trauma and coming out the other side with beliefs that you regard as being
• 42:37
  unjustified by the evidence, is it worth having a term to characterize that phenomenon?
• 42:45
  Well, if that's a roundabout way of asking me if it's conspiracy theory, no. And the reason is
• 42:53
  that belief isn't binary, right? There are degrees of freedom, if you will, of belief, and there
• 42:58
  are confidences. And actually, that's one of the things we do. And when Reed and I go around,
• 43:03
  we help people calibrate the confidence in their belief to the reason and evidence they have
• 43:08
  for that belief. So in an ideal situation, I'm sure you're degree, we would have a conversation
• 43:13
  with them, we would ask them how confident they are if they could put it on a scale, that would
• 43:16
  be even better. But just because you don't see the reasons for why Jim or the Vec Ramaswami or what
• 43:25
  have you would look at ESG or would look at social emotional learning or look at any of these other
• 43:30
  problems, that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Maybe they have access to a vein of information
• 43:34
  that you don't have access to. Of course. Yeah. But this is, but the same could be said of
• 43:38
  Marjid Noah's or Brett Weinstein or a whole bunch of characters who to me form an interesting
• 43:44
  pattern, even though each of them has very different reasons for believing their particular brand
• 43:49
  of whatever it is that they believe. Like I think that many rational people would regard their
• 43:56
  inferences as being over the top. And yet those inferences are stemming from very different
• 44:02
  sets of data and reaching very different sets of conclusions, sometimes in completely unrelated
• 44:07
  fields, biology in one case, a political economy in another case, education in another case,
• 44:14
  gender theory in another case, or whatever it might be. But if you see a trend of like all of
• 44:20
  a sudden a world, the world goes into a pressure cooker with COVID, something's happening with
• 44:24
  social media and then things are starting to pop and break and the stresses seem to be coming out
• 44:30
  in ways that are unexpected. Then that is a phenomenon that I'm trying to put my finger on when I
• 44:37
  clumsily use a messy term like conspiracy theorists, maybe as far as I say, someone who has become
• 44:46
  perhaps unjustifiably interested in a particular hypothesis.
• 44:52
  Okay, I was with you right up into the end. That the end through me. So if the ideas, for example,
• 45:02
  use a term phrase you've used on your show, the IDW, if people who were broadly in this category,
• 45:10
  and I never considered myself in that category, if people were broadly in this category,
• 45:14
  had certain beliefs or beliefs that came off the rails, I think it's very legitimate to ask
• 45:19
  what happened. And I don't think you think that about Eric.
• 45:25
  Again, I mean, coming back to what you were saying about degrees, right? I mean, I think it's
• 45:29
  I think Eric's a five percenter. Well, Lindsay, Lindsay for you would be a paradigmatic example.
• 45:34
  Oh, no, I don't think he's by any means the worst, not at all. Not at all. No.
• 45:38
  Majid is, that would be getting there. That would be getting there. Okay. Okay.
• 45:48
  Reward read is just intervening here reforming. What is this? What is this a suggest prompt?
• 45:56
  Reforming? Oh, reforming versus abandoning legacy institutions. I need a read. I know, right?
• 46:03
  I need a person's awesome. I know. I know.
• 46:08
  To jog my mind about interesting areas of disagreement.
• 46:13
  Yeah. Okay. That's interesting. Isn't it? So you've got
• 46:16
  read, why don't you come up to a mic read? Come here. Why are we talking about you without you being
• 46:21
  now? Let me tell you a good question. Tell on your microphone. We should be able to hear that.
• 46:26
  Tell us who you are. Read. Read is awesome. Hello. Yes. Read a nice one here.
• 46:32
  Let's go for it. Read. The floor is yours. Yeah. President of Street Epistemology International.
• 46:37
  Street Epistemology International. What's Street Epistemology International?
• 46:41
  Street Epistemology coined from Peter's first book. It's the way of having conversation.
• 46:45
  We like to have with people that civil and health people reflect on the quality of their reasoning.
• 46:49
  And yeah, I've been working with Peter since last summer on his videos that he's doing for his YouTube channel.
• 46:56
  And we're now doing a bunch of spectrum Street Epistemology videos around the world.
• 47:01
  We go around the world. We just in Puerto Rico, Florida. We had two in U.S.
• 47:05
  We're probably going to go to the U.K. after this. We're in Australia. We're doing some here.
• 47:08
  Fantastic. And what was your suggestion there, Reed?
• 47:12
  Yeah, my suggestion was potentially talking about reforming or abandoning like,
• 47:18
  legacy educational institutions. Reforming or abandoning, you mean, I mean, would there be a,
• 47:24
  is anyone proposing that we would abandon universities? I might know someone.
• 47:27
  Yeah, good. Up goes Peter Begozion's hand. All right. Thank you, Reed.
• 47:32
  Back in the corner. Back in the box, Reed. I'm going back. Get back in the box, Reed.
• 47:36
  And rethink of some more things. So, I mean, I do think it's good that even jokingly,
• 47:41
  that we are thinking about some disagreements that we have. So I do believe, in fact,
• 47:46
  I was just in a meeting today. We're talked about this. Sorry, let me just check.
• 47:50
  A university is paying for you to come out here to argue for the abolition of universities.
• 47:56
  Let me be crystal clear about something I'm not getting paid for this. I do this for my non-profit.
• 48:01
  Okay. I'm not getting paid for this. But did you pay for the airfare?
• 48:04
  No, no, no. They pay for my airfare. I do not get paid for this. All of our events that we do,
• 48:11
  they're free and open to the public. We do them on sidewalks. I've done my work in the prisons.
• 48:15
  I literally make these tools accessible. Anybody can use them. So this is not, you know,
• 48:21
  a million people are grifting. There's no grifting. Like, I'm, we could go to the grifting.
• 48:26
  No, I'm just making a lot of the fact. No, I know, but we could go to the corporate world and
• 48:29
  do this and make money. But we're doing this as a service. I genuinely believe this is a service
• 48:33
  to humanity. And so, you know, somebody the other fairly recently at one of these events said,
• 48:37
  oh, you know, you why aren't there homeless people here? Look, this is free and open to the public.
• 48:41
  It's you folks who brought up all the tickets so that nobody could come. What are they saying?
• 48:45
  Why aren't there homeless people at your university speech? Correct.
• 48:50
  Free speech. Correct. Maybe homeless people have better things to do with their time. I mean,
• 48:54
  no offense. But like, you know, they're busy. Nothing is preventing anybody from
• 48:59
  home or any station in life to come to any of my events. Right. They're, I try to make as many
• 49:03
  of them as possible. In fact, almost all of them are free and open to the public. It just gets so
• 49:08
  exhausting, Peter, because as you can imagine, when you're hosting a radio show for three hours a day,
• 49:12
  you get a lot of text messages from people. And every time we talk about anything,
• 49:16
  there's a text message from someone saying, yeah, but what about people who can't xyz? I'm like,
• 49:21
  well, that's sad. You know, that's bad that there are some people who don't have legs while I'm
• 49:26
  doing this segment about skiing. Not everyone can ski. I get it. But like some, yeah, well, what
• 49:31
  I don't dare you do this segment when there are people born without a face. Well, some people don't
• 49:36
  have faces. I'm sorry. I look, my first thing that I wanted to say last night was, well, why didn't
• 49:42
  you bring homeless people with you? Right. But if I said that, that would create an adversarial
• 49:47
  relationship. So my goal in those events, given that we have a certain, I don't know what the
• 49:52
  percentage is, but a certain percentage of people who truly genuinely despise me.
• 49:57
  The first order of business of something I want to do is use that as a possibility of a cognitive
• 50:03
  and epistemological intervention. So to use the event itself to intervene in their cognitions.
• 50:08
  And so my goal last night was to, in order to do that, you make sure you don't have any adversarial
• 50:13
  relationships. And I wanted every single person walking out of that to say, wow, that, that,
• 50:18
  that was, I could actually use that. That was awful. This, this guy is not trying to like,
• 50:24
  I don't do whatever crazy thing I thought when I walked in and any comment that, you know,
• 50:28
  well, why didn't you bring homeless people here? Anything that you do like that that might
• 50:31
  be a good own. Yeah, but so that's the thing. I'm not looking for clicks. I'm not looking for views.
• 50:36
  I'm looking for to help people be more rationally and think through issues more clearly. And
• 50:40
  that's the only way we're going to get out of this epistemic sewer that we're in. There's just
• 50:44
  no other way to do it. And you see all these people trying to own people and you know, they just,
• 50:48
  that's not, that's not how we move society forward. It's, when someone's a dick to you,
• 50:53
  you just being a dick to them isn't helping anything. No, it depends who the audience is.
• 51:00
  Even I'm still not going to be a dick to somebody. You know, I mean, if he's physically
• 51:04
  assaulting me, that's something definitely had to defend yourself. But what do you mean by being
• 51:07
  a dick? Because I'm just thinking of examples where someone tries to own a person on a social
• 51:12
  media platform, for example. And then they get slapped back in a way that shows them out, shows
• 51:16
  them up for being a hypocrite or, you know, or just an asshole. And that doesn't convince that
• 51:22
  person, obviously, but for the onlookers, it's a win. No, I disagree for the, for the onlookers,
• 51:28
  they get a little joy and a gigalot of it for a few seconds and they move on. But how is the
• 51:33
  situation helped from that? How did that, that person's epistemic life for more alive or belief life?
• 51:39
  How was that helped? Well, that person's wasn't, but the hypocrisy was showing up in a way
• 51:44
  that could help others. See, I think those things are illusory. There's only a gotcha if somebody
• 51:49
  buys into the system in which there could be a gotcha. So, you know, when I see something like
• 51:54
  someone says something and then someone provides them a piece of evidence, and they're using that
• 51:59
  evidence as a gotcha, but it's only a gotcha if they buy into the fact that evidence
• 52:03
  should be used in the formation of beliefs. It's not a gotcha to them. No, but I said it's not,
• 52:07
  you're not convincing the person. You're convincing the onlookers. But no, I don't think you're
• 52:11
  convincing the onlookers. You're giving the onlookers a momentary jolt of Shadenfreude,
• 52:16
  of the delight and the suffering of somebody else. But you're not advancing the conversation,
• 52:21
  you're not helping anything. Well, I guess we'd need to be specific about specifics, I suppose.
• 52:25
  But I should imagine scenarios in which there's someone who's on the fence about something.
• 52:29
  One person makes a claim. I don't know whether to believe it. Another person dunks in a way
• 52:33
  that completely annihilates the first person's claim, and then the onlooker who was on the fence
• 52:37
  goes, oh, okay. Yeah, and my argument to that would be, I think that it's a kind of
• 52:44
  reprobble, not irreparable damage to the person who got dunked on. If they buy into the system of
• 52:50
  facts and evidence, you know, I think that that kind causes a kind of micro trauma that makes them
• 52:55
  worse people. Oh, definitely, which is why we're all becoming worse people. Who's the premier?
• 53:00
  Media. 100%. It's a it's a noxious dynamic, but I'm just not I don't believe that it's without
• 53:05
  its utility. 100%. Yeah. How do we get out of that spiral if we're living in a world of algorithms
• 53:11
  that favor things that get us to comment on them? Well, some of the things we're doing today,
• 53:18
  civilly talking about disagreements, you know, we talked about hunger, you're going to have someone
• 53:23
  who actually is in the government come on and have a conversation with you about that. And
• 53:27
  speaking across divide, speaking, and that's one thing that frankly that the right has been far
• 53:35
  better at than the left, particularly in the US, we have to learn to talk to each other again.
• 53:40
  There's just simply no other way. It's the conversation is already on hard mode because you get
• 53:45
  likes, you get, you know, thumbs up or what have you when you do dunk on somebody.
• 53:51
  So there's a kind of self righteousness to that as well. And I fully admit that I
• 53:56
  I feel it myself and I do the best that I can to quench that urge, but it's certainly there
• 54:01
  like to be sure. Do you think we can get to a place where like reasoned discourse is the dominant
• 54:09
  kind of cultural trend without a total overhaul of social media? 100%. Yeah, there's no question about
• 54:15
  it. I think we can do it even with social media the way it is. Yeah, you have to be super hopeful
• 54:19
  about these things because I think it's true. You know, Jim again will ask something like, well,
• 54:25
  Mr. Lindsay. Mr. Lindsay to you, what is your breaking point? What is your, what is the,
• 54:31
  what is your woke breaking point? What is the point? And I think the testimonies our brains are
• 54:35
  wired for testimony. I think the testimony of the D chair and practitioners is one thing.
• 54:40
  I think individuals have, there's just a line for some people. They just won't cross it.
• 54:48
  And once it is crossed and like holy shit, like what has been going on? What have been thinking
• 54:52
  about? What have I been? But I do think so. And I don't know how social media will evolve. I don't
• 54:59
  know. Look, we know how to get out of this and that it all comes back to the same thing. I'm
• 55:06
  completely convinced at 56 years old that this is the key to life. This is the secret to the whole
• 55:10
  thing. It's what people value. And some people value things that will not lead to their well-being.
• 55:22
  And if certain individuals fail to admit that or certain individuals will have standpoint
• 55:28
  of epistemology, the idea that that you know something is just true for me or not true for you
• 55:33
  or because of your immutable characteristics, you can't latch onto something that's true or what
• 55:38
  have you. Do you mean by that, do you mean the kind of rhetoric around like it's my lived,
• 55:44
  this something is my lived experience? You can't sort of, you know, use reason to contradict
• 55:50
  my claim because it's my lived experience. Yeah. And you you've demeaned truth by saying that.
• 55:54
  You've demeaned objectivity. You've demeaned not to use a big word, but epistemic adequacy. You've
• 56:00
  demeaned the tools that democratic societies use to come to knowledge and thus form a consensus
• 56:07
  on beliefs. The consensus may be different, but that's democracies are messy. That's one of the
• 56:14
  prices, but I do think that look, we were in a kind of myopia. Every generation thinks the one
• 56:22
  that comes after it, this has been going on for instance, Aristotle is problematic or the worst
• 56:27
  or they're going to and this is a momentary blip. This arrangement is simply not sustainable.
• 56:33
  I think we're seeing, we're peeking out right now and seeing it and the tools that we enact
• 56:40
  and the way that we move forward and the way that we treat each other now, I think is indispensable
• 56:46
  to the road ahead. So we may need some kind of truth and reconciliation. I don't know. I do know that
• 56:56
  that not only is there hope, but I think that there's we're going to see a sea shift in a very
• 57:02
  short period of time. Now there are things I don't know. I don't know the damage or institutions,
• 57:06
  et cetera, and I'm also extremely hopeful in the building of new things, the building of new
• 57:12
  institutions, perhaps new platforms. So I think that what is the expression my death has been over.
• 57:20
  My premature death has been over. It's something like that. So the death of civilization has been
• 57:25
  ruined. Well, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Yeah, rumors of the
• 57:28
  civilizations demise have been greatly over exaggerated. Although don't come wrong, it's sick,
• 57:34
  perhaps even in certain places in the US, on hospice, but it's not. I mean, that's such a good
• 57:40
  and positive articulation that I hesitate to continue, but I do want to get to read a suggestion
• 57:45
  there. So does that mean that does that mean that universities aren't up to the task of being
• 57:51
  part of that? No, they're part of the problem. Yeah, they're part of the problem. That's why
• 57:55
  your podcast is popular, Rogan, other people. It doesn't sound like a very, you know, expansive and
• 58:02
  generous and pro-diologue attitude to take to say that the universities are irredeemable.
• 58:10
  Doesn't matter if it's pro-diologue or not, it's just true. I mean, well, okay, so you've got a
• 58:15
  lot, you've got a bunch of variables here. You've got a geographical context. So I'm in the United
• 58:20
  States. It's very different. I'm just in a meeting with a woman from Germany and then I talked
• 58:24
  about building new things that we can't build new things because we don't build private institutions,
• 58:28
  private academic institutions, Germany. And she explained the system and the structure of which
• 58:32
  I was only marginally familiar. So the year about six months to a year here behind the trend for
• 58:40
  what we see in the United States, I do think that the academy, we know that this is the source of
• 58:45
  the problem. We know that comes from certain departments. We know DEI is gone crazy. We know
• 58:50
  that diversity, equity and inclusion sort of mandates, right? The very kind of work.
• 58:56
  Right. We know trends. We know that these litmus tests, diversity statements. We know.
• 59:02
  So this is a whole can of worms. We could unpack or rabbit hole. We couldn't go down.
• 59:07
  But this has been talked about to death. So I'm not sure that's productive for me to sit here and
• 59:12
  tell you exactly what the problem is because we both agree in the problem. What we may not agree
• 59:16
  upon is what to do about it. I do not think you articulate the problem. We have a bunch of
• 59:22
  pretentious charlatans, ideologues who hold jobs for life and who teach our kids,
• 59:27
  quote unquote, facts that are utterly untethered to reality and those facts are divisive and dangerous.
• 59:32
  Like what sort of facts? Well, there are two things. One, they teach the methods,
• 59:39
  ways of reasoning about the world that are actually less likely to help them come to
• 59:44
  conclusions upon which they can rely and two, a suite of facts, almost anything coming out of
• 59:49
  a discipline with a word like gender studies. For example, starting assumptions.
• 59:54
  The starting assumption that racism is baked into the society, the starting assumption from
• 59:58
  Derek Bell on that if whites, for example, gave blacks the right to vote, it's not because
• 1:00:06
  they looked at them as human. It's because they wanted to preserve their power. Facts about
• 1:00:11
  trans issues, facts about the papers that we wrote, things that we played on. Facts about those
• 1:00:17
  with those fake funny fake papers that you would submit to peer-reviewed journals would get
• 1:00:24
  accepted because there was pretentious sort of university philosophies. Just parenthetically,
• 1:00:31
  Jim and I wrote a few papers on our own subsequent to that, but we both got busy and didn't
• 1:00:35
  submit them. One of those papers, he posted the abstract to sort of, one of those papers was
• 1:00:43
  that the Hippocratic O's should be done away with and instead we should have an equity oath.
• 1:00:47
  Sure enough, it is now reality like people are pledging to equity. So the stuff that,
• 1:00:51
  so the overt and window keep shifting and the derangement just becomes deeper and deeper and
• 1:00:57
  again, it's causal to the university. The other thing is ideal-ondering, right? We have a problem
• 1:01:02
  with people entire disciplines that have been made up. So people have a moral impulse. They
• 1:01:08
  discharge it in a journal. It comes out as not quote-unquote knowledge and then public policies are
• 1:01:14
  based upon those articles and pieces of quote-unquote information and how do you, how do you even,
• 1:01:22
  I mean, if you articulated that to someone, it would seem like, okay, there's a conspiracy for you.
• 1:01:27
  They would think it's a vast conspiracy, but it's not a conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy. It's just,
• 1:01:32
  we have a bunch of really smart people who are, well, brackets, everything. We have a bunch,
• 1:01:38
  in one sense, we have a bunch of really smart people who are better at coming up with good reasons
• 1:01:44
  for bad conclusions and when they get together in a group, what that does is it reinforces the
• 1:01:50
  dominant moral orthodoxy. And if there ever were gay keepers of reason and philosophers of what
• 1:01:56
  have you, it's not that they're fallen, it's that they're in service to a new masters. So their
• 1:02:01
  their masters are what's morally fashionable right now and that we know that these things
• 1:02:05
  from the academy, but in another sense, you know, make no mistake about it, these are very mediocre
• 1:02:10
  minds. So what do you replace the the academy with? It's a fantastic question. A few things,
• 1:02:17
  first I just so that you know people believe what they're willing to act on. I told my daughter
• 1:02:24
  who's about to go to college. I suggested she do not go to college and I'd suggest that she be
• 1:02:30
  an electrician. It's it's better to this is it took me a long time to figure this out and then
• 1:02:36
  I'll answer your question directly. It is better to look at a wall for five hours a day than to
• 1:02:43
  learn something for five hours a day that will take you away from reality. Almost anything that
• 1:02:48
  ends in studies will take you away from reality. There are things in the wood studies, right?
• 1:02:52
  There are fake martial arts that will take you away from reality too and read and I have been
• 1:02:56
  doing jiu-jitsu and here I take my a ghee everywhere we I go and read is now six lessons in.
• 1:03:02
  He's doing he's doing fantastic. Very very happy for that. But the second part of the question was
• 1:03:10
  also what is it? Well, I said what do you replace the academy? Oh, oh yeah, thanks, thanks.
• 1:03:13
  Because I mean I'm all for having electricians. Electricians are great. At some point people
• 1:03:19
  also need to learn literature and history and you know whatever else they might be learning and
• 1:03:24
  doctors have to learn. Well, you the answer is simply you build new things like the University of
• 1:03:28
  Austin is a new thing that we're building but still got the university in the name. Well, yeah,
• 1:03:33
  you so so look you're not telling somebody not to go or I personally don't think anybody should
• 1:03:37
  go to the university at this point but the solution to left wing ideological capture is not a
• 1:03:43
  right wing institution. The solution is ideological diversity. It's a you have to think about what
• 1:03:50
  the metrics are and that's actually super interesting. We're doing the University of Austin is we're
• 1:03:55
  thinking about we're building a university from scratch. What would that look like? What are the
• 1:03:58
  best practices? How do we prevent ideological capture of those institutions? So and it's not just
• 1:04:04
  the University of Austin. It's Ralston College, Jordan Peterson. The chancellor of Peterson has
• 1:04:08
  Peterson Academy that's coming online. There's a going through the traditional regulatory apparatus
• 1:04:13
  in being credentialed by you know so those degrees and as credits will actually mean something so
• 1:04:20
  you can't completely build it from scratch but my my answer to that question is you need to build
• 1:04:28
  new institutions and one of the main reasons is that any effort that you put into salvaging the
• 1:04:36
  institutions be it the traditional academic architecture or the infrastructure that we have now
• 1:04:42
  either the physical or the way that we've disciplines have been institutionalized any attempt to salvage
• 1:04:51
  that through Chicago statement Chicago principles free speech it's a waste of time. You'd be much
• 1:04:58
  better off spending that time building new things because we know exactly if you really want those
• 1:05:03
  things to work they have fundamental incompatibilities with diversity office of diversity equity
• 1:05:09
  inclusion you cannot have an office of diversity equity inclusion. Well not just abolish the office
• 1:05:13
  I mean some of these institutions have been around for 500 years. Well let's see if that happens you
• 1:05:18
  think that's going to happen no because you might be easy at a keep an institution that's been around
• 1:05:22
  for 500 years and just abolish the office that was set up 12 years ago than to build an entirely new
• 1:05:26
  institution. Remember I told you that's I don't know if I used the word secret but the secret to life
• 1:05:30
  is it's what people value people some people value the wrong thing the offices of diversity equity
• 1:05:36
  and inclusion who are offices looking for tasks to their enforcers they're the the Gestapo if you
• 1:05:42
  will of the dominant moral orthodoxy the only that those would disappear tomorrow if people not only
• 1:05:48
  stop valuing them but value the opposite of truth based institution but they're not going to go
• 1:05:52
  away tomorrow they're just simply not and then you have I just learned today actually in a meeting
• 1:05:58
  that you don't have legacy enrollments here in Australia right so in the United States. What's a
• 1:06:04
  legacy enrollment see that's fascinating to me that just it's amazing to me so in the United States
• 1:06:09
  a legacy admission is if you went to Stanford and you had a kid and your kid grows up he has
• 1:06:15
  he gets points for you have no yeah okay but the same people this is the antithesis of equity the
• 1:06:21
  same people screaming at their top of their lungs for equity they haven't done away with legacy
• 1:06:28
  and a lot of these people are white cisgender cisgender heterosexual male but they refuse
• 1:06:34
  to be the quit-nequity they're not quitting and giving their position up to a marginalized person
• 1:06:38
  no because they don't believe these I thought that was informal I didn't know there was a formalized
• 1:06:42
  way in which we get a kid gets together my universe yeah no no no no get a certain number of points
• 1:06:49
  on your so incredibly hypocritical isn't it so that's a thing so they don't believe it it's too stupid
• 1:06:59
  but when you articulate this to someone who's genuinely in favor of diversity and equity and
• 1:07:04
  inclusion say like that's just evidence of the kind of lip service that that the white patriarchy
• 1:07:10
  gives to all of this you you think well don't they well I don't again that's the thing that we
• 1:07:17
  start off the interview but do you have to ask them I don't stand for doesn't I don't like to
• 1:07:21
  speak for other people you'd have to ask them well I'm sure that uh I don't know uh you know
• 1:07:27
  Akazio Cortez or some other prominent person who's known for being pro-diversity would be critical
• 1:07:32
  of those practices wouldn't I certainly hope so yeah so that the person the people that
• 1:07:39
  consider me their ideological enemy you would have to ask those people with their positions are
• 1:07:43
  but there is a profound hypocrisy and that's why I think getting back to what you said before
• 1:07:48
  we have to see epic gaslighting there's just no two ways about it we have to see I never believe that
• 1:07:54
  you mean there's just inevitably we're gonna be a phase of a lot of people who believe the craziest
• 1:07:59
  parts of this denying that they ever did correct it's an utterly inevitable I'm unshakably
• 1:08:04
  concerned of that yeah pita it's fantastic to talk to you I could talk to you forever uh thanks
• 1:08:12
  for stopping by thanks for having having read now I appreciate it thank you Reid come on monkey
• 1:08:19
  boys say bye bye thank you Josh my pleasure