Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Untangling Wokeness" with Sarah Haider

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"Untangling Wokeness" with Sarah Haider · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas, I love it when I get to have
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  my ideas tested and challenged and disentangled when I get to wrestle with somebody who's wrestling
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  on the same turf as I am who doesn't necessarily disagree with me but has different angles
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  on things that I hadn't thought of. Ah, there is no greater juice than the intellectual
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  juice of noticing things that you hadn't noticed before hearing arguments you hadn't
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  quite heard before or hearing someone put their finger on something that you kind of vaguely
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  felt but hadn't quite identified. In this crazy culture war that we call modern civilization,
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  Sarah Hader is such a refreshing voice. It's also lovely to reconnect with someone who you only
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  know peripherally and whose work you've only vaguely kept an eye on and find that they have grown
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  into someone even more sophisticated and nuanced and ferocious in their insights than when you
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  last met them. Sarah initially came to my attention as a sort of a skeptic, a dissident of Islam
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  and ex-Muslim. She's a Pakistani American writer and political activist who created a group called
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  ex-Muslims of North America which was trying to encourage religious dissent and make it okay
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  to blaspheme and just to help former Muslims leave the religion by linking them into support
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  networks and so on. I didn't want to talk to her about that. That's not the focus of her career
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  anymore. She's much more focused on the bigger Western cultural battles and the fate of small
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  liberalism. In this conversation we talk about liberal and liberalism, I'm nervous to say,
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  not in the Australian political context where the liberal party is the conservative party,
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  but in the traditional classical liberal ideal of respecting one another and encouraging
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  vibrant debate and having uncomfortable conversations and being open to other people's ideas
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  and believing that you reach truth through dialogue and that only by fostering the freedom of
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  the individual do we reach tolerance for everybody and we're contrasting that school of thought
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  to a prevailing school of thought which we just agree to call wokeness for want to be better term
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  even though of course there are all kinds of problems with that word that has sort of become a
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  lazy slur in many environments, but we're using it. We're trying to have some fealty towards its
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  original meaning of describing a particular social justice phenomenon that's taking place that
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  is not necessarily small or liberal. If you want to find Sarah, we talk about a fascinating email
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  exchange that she had with Ion Hersey Ali, the other, well probably most famous,
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  ex-Muslim, intellectual, and you can find that on Sarah Hader's substack, which is Sarah Hader.substack.com.
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  It's called Hold That Thought. I encourage you to read the full text of that exchange, although
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  you'll get bits of it from this conversation as well. But Sarah's main gig at the moment is a
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  special place in hell, a hilarious podcast that she does with another friend of this show, Megan Downe.
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  It's a feminist podcast that does not tow the feminist line if that's one way of putting it.
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  This is a conversation about wokeness, about the fate of liberalism, the fate of civilization,
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  the clash of the generations in terms of wokeness and social justice, the future of the left,
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  why we fall for conspiracy theories where there are differences between men and women.
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  We've got it all, ladies and general persons. I hope you enjoy. The one and only, Sarah Hader.
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  What's been going on, and how was your pandemic? My pandemic, it was, I mean, I spent it at home,
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  and it didn't do anything except for reproduced, so that was, that's nice. Oh great, congratulations.
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  Yeah, a lot of people, I think, chose that time to have babies or very, very young babies. It's
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  a good time for young babies because you're just at home anyway. That's right. I mean, it's fine.
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  Yeah, you're at home going crazy when you have small children either way, so you're a paranoid,
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  sleep deprived, and hysterical, whether or not there's a pandemic. Right, so it was a good time.
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  I had some health problems too, which wasn't great, but again, good time to have them.
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  Is it a good time to have them because you can't see a doctor?
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  Well, the kind of problems I had, it was more like rest up and don't do certain things,
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  and so I wasn't doing those things, and it was great. Right. Where were you living?
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  I'm in the DC area, and so I'm still around. It's good. I'm in the suburbs, which is,
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  it's great, you know, we're at home bodies anyway and have like a backyard so you can go outside.
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  Yeah, and I'm not in an area that went super duper insane about it, although I did get
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  mask-shamed once, and it was very frustrating because by then we were outside. I was outside,
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  and not wearing a mask, and some guy came up and said something about how he believed the
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  science, and it was a really aggressive way of saying it. And he said, he's cruel,
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  mask. Yeah, I mean, I just don't understand what was going through his head, but yeah,
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  I was outside in a parking lot, and I got yelled at by some guy. It's just crazy.
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  I call them castles of hysteria. These artifices that we're building that we're increasingly
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  inhabiting where we just become hysterical with each other and against the other. It's like,
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  you know, he's in his little castle of hysteria, and he's quite certain that you're the bad guy
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  in the castle in the other hill, doing your nasty things, and spreading all your diseases.
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  Right, it was, I mean, it was a very peculiar, I mean, viruses are, they're bad for morale,
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  and like public trust, you know, I mean, so if you have, if you have just a nuclear war threat,
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  it's, it brings us together at least, you know, but this, it's a, the enemy is you, and you're
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  snot or whatever. Yeah, I love, I'm literally riding that down, and I'm going to make a t-shirt.
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  Viruses are bad for morale. Yeah. I'll just wet it down. That's a kind of insight and wisdom.
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  You can expect from me. I'll attribute it to you, it'll stop my
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  t-shirt, it says, viruses are bad. People who know you will be like, Sarah, why would Sarah,
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  isn't she mostly on about like, you know, liberalism and like secularism? Why would she be talking
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  about that? I'll be like, I've got audio tape, but like I'm going, she said it, viruses are bad for
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  morale. Yeah, I remember the mask, I was masked shamed on, it was the same trip where I was,
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  where I saw your friend Megan, and I was in LA, and Omokron was going bananas. This was January
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  of 2022, and I had to go to Austin, because I was going to talk to, to Rogan again, and then
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  in texting Joe, and he was like, oh, come on down, I've got a slot, you can do the show,
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  and I was like, okay, so I hop on a flight, and the people opposite me, and it was one of those
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  things where, because I was booking it the last minute, like it was $40 more to fly first class
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  from LA to Austin than it was to just book a, you know, a normal seat. So I've been like,
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  cheap, I'll cheap, both first class on Alaska Airlines, and sitting opposite me are these two very,
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  you know, the very clean, prim, proper, fussy gay couple that you sometimes see, who are perfectly
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  manicured, like literally manicured. Yeah, and they smell nice, they're the kind of gay that I always
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  wish I were, and have not got the chops to, to, to become, and they were sitting opposite me,
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  triple masked. Triple my shit, you're not Sarah, I'd heard, I'd heard people talk about it,
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  I'd never seen it out in the wild. I was trying to take our optitious photos for my, for my husband,
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  and on my phone while I was like just sitting there pretending to be, to be feeling with my phone.
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  They had a surgical mask over an N95 with an N95 on top of the surgical mask, on top of the
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  N95, like a surgical mask sandwich. I was like the virus gets through that, that is it deserves
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  to win. I don't want to kill anyone except for you. I want this particular specific gay couple
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  on this specific flight to die of COVID. That's the, oh, there's the only people in the world
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  who I want to die of COVID. Anyway, let's talk, let's talk about wokeness. One thing I thought was
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  very interesting from your life at the moment, and also can we just agree that we'll just call
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  the phenomenon of wokeness, or do you, have you, what do you call it? I have no problem with calling
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  it that. I think the, you know, definition of wars are, well, we can talk about it, we can talk
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  about how we might define it. What is it? We'll start with defining it, right? Yeah, it's tough.
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  Yes, how do you define, I have a workable, I had a workable definition of culture, no,
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  of cancel culture specifically, but I've never found a good one of wokeness. What do you,
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  I mean, it is, it is a tough thing to pin down actually. So I get kind of frustrated when this is
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  like, this is a kind of a gotcha thing, or well, well, how do you even, how do you know
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  what wokeness is if you can't even define it, and it's like, you know, there's a lot of things
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  that I know about, and I, you know, if you, if you asked me to verbalize very clearly, and, you know,
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  put up all these, you know, boundaries of what it is, or isn't, there's going to be that one
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  example that doesn't fit exactly, and then you're going to say, I'm an idiot because it,
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  what about that and what about the, you know, so it can be, it's a difficult thing for the average
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  person, but wokeness is one of those things where you, you, you know, when you see it, right,
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  like pornography, it was not, yeah, wasn't, or obscenity. That's what it was obscenity. I know,
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  I know it when I see it. But I think that there is something to it as well. In my, so I,
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  I posted on my sub stack a conversation with, I on here, CLI, that I had two years ago, or
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  three years ago, almost actually, it was, end of 2020. And we were approached by the founders of,
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  a now defunct website called Letter Wiki, which was really interesting. I don't know if you remember
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  that, but people would write letters to each other back and forth, and they were kind of,
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  their idea was to break away from the Twitter, you know, yelling in each other through tweets
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  that doesn't get anybody's point to cross kind of thing, and stay away from the mob, and just
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  to smart people have, you know, write a letter to each other. Yeah, I knew those guys a bit,
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  and those individuals who founded that announced sub stack, is that right? Yeah, they're at sub stack,
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  they're, I think it, sub stack swallowed it up. There are, there are, there are these
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  slash South African slash, they're part of them, they might, they're from my hemisphere.
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  So I couldn't, they have an accent that sounds a little bit like yours.
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  That's what I know. Okay. Now that I've pissed on my territory, and I named ownership of the,
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  of the geniuses behind your, your conversation with Ion, carry on. Right, right, yeah. So they,
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  they reach out to me, and there were like, who do you want to, you know, speak to, and I,
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  whatever we, we had all these discussions about what might be interesting, and they brought it by
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  on. They said, Ion is interested in having a conversation. Like, would you want to make this happen?
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  And so we, we chatted on like Zoom, the founders and Ion and myself, and we talked about what we
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  might talk about, like, what, you know, what are we wanting to discuss? And it was interesting,
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  because everybody assumed, I think, there were like five people in the call, and like, everybody
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  was assuming that we would talk about a song. But within, you know, minutes, the conversation
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  shifted so fast. And what is going on with this woke stuff? And it, because this was, I mean,
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  2020, which was George Floyd era. So everything was on fire all the time. And we found that we couldn't,
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  it felt bizarre almost to shift our attention and, you know, unnaturally into something that we didn't,
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  we didn't feel like was the, the, the dumpster fire right in front of us. So in our conversation,
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  we, we were just discussing how we felt about things. And I said that, you know, I,
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  I think the woke have already won. Like, I don't think, I don't even think this is a battle.
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  It's not a culture word. It's nothing we've already lost. And she was very, she was very surprised
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  by this. So we decided that we wanted to talk about this in our letters. And we had this exchange.
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  Ion's point was essentially that liberalism is strong. And liberals are strong. Like, there's these,
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  you know, warriors of, with enlightenment values. And they'll stand up. And they will persuade people.
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  And it was actually very optimistic perspective. Mine was different.
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  And I feel, I felt then, now I think I've, I've changed a little bit, but in a, in a more
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  nihilistic direction, actually. But yeah, so at the time though, I said that it's not the case that
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  we, like, we aren't defending the gates, you know, against the barbarians. Like, they've,
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  they've already won. And we need to recognize that. That it's already too late. Not from the
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  perspective of it's too late to work, it's too late to do something about it, but that we have to
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  recognize the battle in front of us. We have to recognize how far long things have gotten,
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  to fully, you know, be able to accurately prepare for what lies ahead of us and what we will need to
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  do about it. And if it was frustrating to me, because at that time, this was a very unpopular
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  attitude, you know, it's just, I still heard quite a bit back then. I hear less of this now,
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  from a fellow, you know, liberal heterodox thinker types, but this is sort of just,
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  you know, a fever, you know, we're just going to shake it off. We're just going to, we just have
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  to get people to recognize what's going on and they'll snap out of it. And I, I think that's
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  very clearly a naive attitude. And it doesn't really, it's not fully grappling with what's going on.
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  And it's interesting. I mean, I had hoped that that we would talk today and you would say, well,
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  2020 was sort of like, that was the flashpoint. I mean, everyone had been locked inside for months,
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  only tapping away on their computers during the pandemic. And, you know, then you had this viral
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  moment and the racial reckoning and race riots. And so, of course, I was at my, I was
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  maximally pessimistic, speaking as Sarah Haider in 2020. And now I feel like there's the pendulum
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  is swinging a bit back and people are becoming a bit more reasonable. But no, you're full.
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  So it's, it is true that we saw a lot of the most extreme elements back then when emotions
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  were running very high. But there's, so there's, you know, it can become confusing because when you see
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  most of the streamists like come out of the woodworks, you think, okay, this is the worst aspect.
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  But, but I think something is bad or it has gained a lot of ground when it takes over kind of
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  the foundations of something. And I think that it has taken over the fundamental assumptions of
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  at least American institutions. I might say western institutions, but I'm less familiar with
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  anything outside of America. As, as Americans, we're famous for, famous for this.
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  Yes, so I think that the assumptions of wokeism and the drives of wokeism have been fully
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  incorporated at the most, you know, basic levels in American institutions and society.
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  So no, we're not seeing like the most fun extreme edges of it at the moment because emotions
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  are not so high. But we're seeing something else. And I think we, it's not that I'm pessimistic.
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  It's that I have started just to look at this thing from a more historical perspective.
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  And it is clear that we've been walking down this road for a very, very long time.
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  And I don't know if it was inevitable that we would have something like wokeism,
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  but you can, you know, follow, you can follow the line, you can follow the path,
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  and you can see how we got here. And you can see the kinds of, I guess, ideologies or even
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  assumptions about human nature or the world that we started to accept and pull in into, you know,
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  public consciousness. And now now it's kind of come together into this monster, we call wokeism.
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  But I wouldn't call it wokeism anymore. I think I would just call it, I think this is just
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  the state of the left. Right. Yeah. That may be a clear, a cleaner way of putting it when it's
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  this ubiquitous. I mean, one point that you and I on her CLE make is the analogy to religion.
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  And both of you come from dog, dogmatic faith background and have then repudiated that. And so
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  you see commonalities between the sort of secular religiosity of the, the social justice
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  fervor and formal dogmatic religions. And I mean, maybe it sounds like what you're saying is that
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  in the, if this movement does have an analogy to a faith, then 2020 is like the extreme like
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  jihadist outbursts. And now we don't have the conditions that make that kind of an upburst
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  necessary. But we're all sort of, we've all just become nominal Catholics as nominal
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  wokesters. Like we're all just walking around the way that, the way that, you know, most religious
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  people are not that religious, but they just sort of carry the assumptions of their faith.
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  Yeah. Maybe we're all just walking around, not that work, but carrying the assumptions of
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  wokeism. And you'll notice that the, the assumptions are actually not questioned even within
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  heterodox spaces. And I find myself saying things like this actually.
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  We do need to get definitional now. What are those assumptions, for example? And then we can talk
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  because I think in your exchange with iron, you do a great job of actually defining this. And
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  I'll bring you some of your definitions in a second. But what are the assumptions that you're
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  talking about that we're walking around with? Yeah. Well, let's talk about a, just a, I guess,
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  a less important assumption, but it is an assumption that diversity, racial diversity,
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  specifically, is valuable in and of itself. And that's an assumption. That's an assumption
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  that's critical to something like DEI, you know, the institution of DEI, and to the acceptance
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  of something like DEI. And you'll see heterodox thinkers and, you know, including myself,
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  say things like, well, of course, we like, of course diversity is good. But these guys are just
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  taking it a little bit too far. But I think we need to stop and think about whether it makes sense
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  to have that as a foundational value, you know, to have diversity in and of its, just by that,
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  I mean, specifically racial diversity, that that in itself is an important value. And so important
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  that we will sacrifice other things for this value in order to achieve this value versus, you know,
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  intellectual diversity or some other kind of diversity if we want to stick to diversity in itself.
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  Hmm, interesting. Some of the hallmarks of what you kind of define,
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  work in this as in your exchange are, well, you basically say it to de-legitimization project
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  that basically it wants to de-legitimize humanist enlightenment values. And you point to a few
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  characteristics. You point to circular logic, appeals to the authority of identity as an idea,
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  the privileging of lived experience over objective analysis. And the exploitation of language
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  like harm and safety and trauma to rule out discussion and end rational debate before it begins.
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  I thought those characteristics were a good place to start for trying to understand what we're
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  talking about when we use the term. And you notice that they're all about, they're kind of,
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  they're focused on what, how it does what it does, and not the ends that it sees.
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  Yeah. Now that I'm looking back at that definition, which I thought was, you know, at the time I was
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  writing it, I was very impressed with myself for, you know, I'm tangled what's going on.
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  I think it was good. And I think it does capture one element of it, which is
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  how it goes about its business. The tactics that it utilizes and finds legitimate,
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  liberals, traditional liberals would not find those tactics legitimate, but what stirs do?
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  But towards what end, you know, that's the question. And I think that that question needs to be
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  answered for a fuller definition, a complete definition of what wokeism is. And in my, you know,
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  and I haven't fully formulated this. So, you know, let's, with a grain of salt, let's discuss
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  that continued this discussion. I can't find a value that is unique to wokeists that I wouldn't
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  also say is very prevalent among the left in general. Right.
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  Well, only to the extent that wokeism can bump up against traditional left-wing values
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  about economic justice. And so, like, I do think there's a rift between traditional Bernie Sanders
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  style leftists who want to see a, you know, a significant overhaul of the way that Western
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  capitalism functions to make to bring it more in line with, for example, Scandinavian capitalism,
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  where the emphasis really of the whole project has to be on high taxation and redistribution
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  and empowering workers and quality of life. That does seem to me to be at least, if not absent from,
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  then certainly the volume turned down on those aspirations amongst wokesters who would,
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  who would rather reframe things around identity groups. And if there were to be a redistribution,
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  it would be a financial restitution of traditionally disenfranchised ethnic groups,
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  rather than, you know, a class war. Yeah. I think, I guess, my response to that, and I partially
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  agree with you. But I think that there's something that's changing, at least in the United States,
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  don't know if it has, you know, parallels in the rest of the Western world. But in the United
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  States, we're seeing the emergence of a new democratic party that it has a, you know, strong core
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  of affluent Americans. And this is not historically been the base of the democratic party,
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  or even a substantial amount of such Americans as Democrats. But it's shifting. And it's very
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  interesting. I think leading the, leading the charge or college-educated Americans that are
• 24:34
  shifting over to the democratic party, particularly whites. So college-educated whites are, you know,
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  the, they are Democrats. They are solidly Democrat. They have money and they have power.
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  So there's, I think it, so it started beginning from the, in the 90s, where you started to see
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  the democratic party in the United States increasingly, you know, getting more and more,
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  or increasing shares in upper middle to, you know, rich income levels and high income occupations,
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  that kind of thing. And now this is just, this is the dominant party among a certain class of
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  Americans. So I think that following that, because the base of the democratic party is changing,
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  it makes sense to me that the trend of the long term is going to be that the Bernie Sanders
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  economic, economic justice guys are about to just, you know, disappear or shift parties,
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  because it is not the case, I think, that the American democratic party cares very much about
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  these things, unless you, unless you tie it down to race. Yeah, no, that's true. But I mean, I just
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  think that historically there's a waxing and waning between these two, these two pools. Both
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  parties have this tug of war, by the way. I mean, there, there is a historical tug of war on the left
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  between, sort of social justice issues, civil rights in one basket and economic justice,
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  slash socialism in another basket. And on the right, there's a, there's a mirror image war
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  between the economic elites and the cultural warriors. There's always been this, well, not always.
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  But those economic elites are, you know, less and less likely to be Republicans.
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  No, I think at the top, there's a, so the, there's the middle class latte sipping,
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  shard and they're swilling lefty who use your Democrat, right, in big urban centres. But the
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  Davos, like global power elite are still deeply concerned and almost solely concerned with economic
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  matters. And they will co-opt cultural matters to enact their, their international regime of free
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  trade and low taxation and low corporate taxation and high profits and low environmental regulation.
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  But those, like, I think that this, that is, there is still a, they didn't, they are not,
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  if you write a list of the things that they want out of government, it's not the same as your
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  trailer trash in Tennessee who always votes Republican, right? So there is that tug of war on the
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  right as well. And, you know, sometimes you go through periods where the right is populist and
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  sometimes you go through periods where the left is populist. So I guess my, my hope is that this
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  is a, this is a moment at the moment where the left has been distracted and, and hoodwinked.
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  And largely, I mean, when you talk to people on the left who, and this is a generational thing
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  that I'd also love your thoughts on, when you talk to people on the left who are over the age of
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  35, they know they can see all this happening. And they think that it's corrosive, but they
• 27:48
  dare not talk about it because the 22-year-olds who don't have agenda are going to hound them out
• 27:55
  of the public square if they speak up about it. The question is, do those 22-year-olds end up
• 28:02
  taking over the whole asylum or do they grow gradually more liberal as they age?
• 28:09
  I think that we're already seeing, we're already seeing some of those people who, who, who,
• 28:15
  I mean, I wouldn't say it's 35 anymore. I would, I would, I would now say it's like 40 or 45
• 28:20
  or above that that might be a traditional liberal and everybody under that kind of is a little bit
• 28:25
  woke to very woke. And I, and I just think that it's, if it's an unquestioned assumption,
• 28:34
  because of, for, for any reason, right? And, and for now, it's, it's because the old school
• 28:39
  liberals are staying silent. But one day becomes an unquestioned assumption over time. It's, it's
• 28:44
  not going to be challenged by anyone. And it's, it's, we're seeing that happen now. And we're seeing
• 28:49
  these institutions from, it's, it's really interesting because I work in, or work to, in,
• 28:58
  activism for a very long time. And that's been like, that's been my experience in the workplace,
• 29:03
  really, has been, with, in progressive aligned activism space, non-profit world. And it's amazing
• 29:13
  what's happened. And had the transformation from when I first got on board, in which, you know,
• 29:18
  the wokeism was just beginning to become a real thing. But everybody kind of under felt like,
• 29:24
  well, they had a point, you know, women do have, we've been do struggle in minorities and blah, blah.
• 29:28
  And we need to, we need to worry about racism. We need to worry about all this. And, and everybody was
• 29:34
  listening to, to the SJWs as we like called them then. But, but you could also, you could,
• 29:42
  there was a, there was a segment that could push back. And they weren't going to be immediately
• 29:48
  vilified for pushing back. Now there's no space. There's no space for an opposition at all.
• 29:55
  And that's, I think that's an, it's an incredible change that I've seen in, in 10 years.
• 30:00
  And I don't know how you walk back from that. I think the, the idea that this is just a,
• 30:06
  this is just a fever that we need to sweat out. It holds if you can then tell me how, how are we
• 30:14
  going to sweat it out, right? Like, well, so maybe, maybe the analogy of a fever that we sweat out
• 30:19
  isn't quite right, but maybe a better analogy is like a hagelian kind of pendulum that, with the,
• 30:26
  the thing that you end up with is a reincorporation of the best bits of the two warring
• 30:31
  feces that you went in with. Like, it's not, it's not the case that there's nothing that
• 30:36
  workness has brought to the table or has put on the table that's, that, that's worth paying
• 30:41
  attention to. I mean, I'm sort of walking a bit when you talk about unquestioned assumptions,
• 30:45
  because I think you're, you're pointing to something true that is truly dysfunctional,
• 30:53
  intellectually, to have this huge mosaic of different assumptions that we're not allowed to question
• 31:00
  that everyone has to go into conversations sort of tacitly agreeing with. But on the other hand,
• 31:06
  I don't think it's necessarily true to say that we're evolving into that scenario from a situation
• 31:13
  where there were fewer unquestioned assumptions. I mean, the, the, the workster, the articulate
• 31:18
  workster would say, we used to have just as many unquestioned assumptions. And that's what
• 31:23
  this whole social justice revolution of the past 10 to 15 years has been trying to address,
• 31:28
  because the unquestioned assumptions in the 80s were that trans people are degenerates and
• 31:35
  queers a perverts and Jews can't be trusted. And Muslims are fanatics and women are
• 31:40
  woolly headed and emotional and you can't trust them in CEO positions. And in a boardroom,
• 31:46
  a trans woman of color is certainly not to be listened to. And those assumptions were governing
• 31:51
  all of us. We were all agreed with those. And there has to be, you know, a cultural revolution of
• 31:56
  sorts to overturn those assumptions and put in place new assumptions that whenever, whenever
• 32:01
  not going to have any assumptions that are all agreed upon, otherwise we don't have a demos and
• 32:05
  we don't have a culture. Yeah, I mean, I agree that that I agree with the general claim that
• 32:11
  there's always assumptions in any given, in any given society for any, and those are good actually.
• 32:16
  You need you need to have a set of assumptions, those are those are otherwise called values.
• 32:24
  And I would agree that the 80s were bad when it came to marginalized groups.
• 32:30
  But I would also add that some of the other assumptions were simply liberal assumptions that
• 32:36
  in order to get past our ugliness, we need to have conversations, we need to be open with each other,
• 32:42
  we need to, you know, respect each other's individual rights, that we thought we would
• 32:52
  discover the truth through, you know, academic freedom, through free discourse, that this would be,
• 33:00
  this is the path towards a more tolerant society, that assumption has been, I think, fully overturned.
• 33:07
  By, you know, anybody younger than 30 doesn't assume this at all, that, you know, the marketplace
• 33:12
  of ideas is kind of not just a cliche, which was in my time, now it's like, it's a hate indicator of
• 33:20
  a status as a hateful person, really. So I think that the assumptions I think go deeper than simply
• 33:30
  liberalism is a way, liberal discourse will bring us to a more tolerant society. I think it's
• 33:36
  also an evolution in other respects. I think that there used to be a left that prized, as you said,
• 33:46
  you know, economic redistribution, or let's just say material equality, you know, this idea that we,
• 33:53
  we should have some kind of equalization of redistribution or whatever because the system itself
• 33:59
  is unfair, but you might have called that, you know, socialism or whatever. And that's
• 34:04
  evolved, that we don't, I don't think much of the left holds that anymore, but there's still this
• 34:08
  idea of some kind of equality or egalitarianism, it evolved into some kind of social equality,
• 34:14
  social egalitarianism, egalitarianism. And now I think the focus is on morally affirming
• 34:23
  everyone equally. And I think there's something incredibly insidious about that actually.
• 34:31
  But what do you mean morally affirming everyone equally?
• 34:36
  I mean, I mean, a lot of things with it actually, but one of the things is to say that
• 34:44
  what you choose to be, what you are, is just as, you know, valid to use one of those terms,
• 34:50
  is what I choose to be and what I am. Is that not true?
• 34:54
  I mean, it depends on your values. It depends on your values, right?
• 34:59
  It depends on your values, right? That sounds to me like a very old school. That sounds like
• 35:02
  something John Hume. I mean, no, no, no, no, because I don't think, I don't think liberals would say
• 35:08
  you have the right to make a choice, even a bad one. They wouldn't say that it is morally equal.
• 35:14
  Right. And I think that that's, that's an interesting evolution really of, you know, you have the idea
• 35:22
  of a free choice. They took that from liberals. And that's a, I like that idea. I like that value.
• 35:30
  But then they expanded it and they say, well, I, you know, I have all these choices in this
• 35:34
  society in front of me, but these choices are not truly free. If society stigmatizes one and, you
• 35:40
  know, normalize, quote, unquote, normalizes the other. And so we need a, we need an equality on a
• 35:48
  level that's, that's more social than it is economic. Right. Right. I see. And I mean, I think you're
• 35:59
  doing a good job of bringing back in this question of process rather than outcome that, that it's
• 36:05
  misguided to think about diagnosing workness as a set of beliefs. It's better to think about it as
• 36:10
  as a way of behaving a way of conducting oneself. And the, the liberal approach, which as,
• 36:19
  which does all of the things that you just articulated, like respecting rights and having
• 36:22
  conversations and being open and being generous of mind and discovering truth through dialogue and
• 36:28
  believing that freedom will lead to tolerance rather than lack of freedom leading to tolerance,
• 36:32
  that that's a whole set of processes rather than outcomes or conclusions. Yeah.
• 36:38
  But just to clarify, it is the case that also, I think that's where I changed from what I said
• 36:45
  when my letter to Ayan that I focused on justice process. And I thought that that was the only
• 36:49
  difference that mattered. And now I feel that the processes is different, but also the values
• 36:57
  and assumptions of the broader left have shifted just enough to make the old process
• 37:04
  you know, unpalatable. And the new process, more intriguing, more interesting, and almost seem
• 37:13
  like a shortcut to, you know, this moral affirmative equality that they want. And I think that puts
• 37:21
  us into an interesting place in terms of how do we deal with this thing. That's fascinating.
• 37:27
  Because I was going to, you've sort of headed me off at the past because I was going to talk,
• 37:31
  I was going to ask you about, there's always been a field on which acceptable discourse takes place.
• 37:39
  And when you step beyond that field, you got slapped back into line. There have always been things
• 37:43
  that you can and can't say. And some of the things that you could say as recently as, you know,
• 37:51
  when we were born, are now considered rightly to be beyond the pale. And there are certain things
• 37:58
  that you won't be able to say in the future that you currently can, that it's probably good that
• 38:02
  we will have gotten rid of. The argument about like you can't say anything these days, you can't
• 38:10
  tell a joke, oh, there's this chilling of speech, cancel culture, et cetera, you can sometimes
• 38:14
  respond to that by saying, well, it's just a changing definition of what the things are that you
• 38:19
  can't say. There are all kinds of things that you couldn't say in polite society in the 1970s
• 38:24
  about Christ our Lord or something that you can say now. And there are all kinds of things that you
• 38:29
  can't say now about trans people that you could say back then. It's not that it's not the nature of
• 38:36
  the prohibition that's changing. It's just the things that we're putting in the basket of OKness.
• 38:42
  But when you say that there are certain values and assumptions that make the process of liberalism
• 38:49
  harder, I think you're also onto something that is a potential refutation of the point that I
• 38:54
  just made, which is if your worldview is that people are vulnerable and fragile and oppressed and
• 39:00
  that it does with them real harm to subject them to debate, then how can you advocate for a process
• 39:07
  like liberalism where debate is its founding virtue? Right, right. So it forced all's future
• 39:14
  progress and in a way that 80s liberalism as ugly as it was didn't. Exactly. That's right,
• 39:23
  at least there was still at least in the bad old days, there was still a recognition that the way
• 39:29
  to get towards a better future was to hash it out. Yeah, together. All right, on that pessimistic
• 39:38
  note, where to from here then? Yeah, I don't. I'm not quite sure. Well, let's look at how we got here
• 39:46
  then because you alluded to that earlier and it may provide some pointers. You said that you've
• 39:51
  been looking at the kind of long-term trends and you've been asking yourself, how did we get here?
• 39:55
  And you've been looking at the assumptions about human nature and the world that got us here.
• 40:01
  What are those? Yeah, well, let me take the long road to answer the question. So I don't have a
• 40:06
  full answer to that question. That's the first that's the first way to start. I'm looking into it
• 40:10
  now and I'm trying to figure I'm trying to walk back as far as I need to go to see how this could
• 40:20
  be possible. But I got started. I think you know because I was into ex-Muslim activism and I had
• 40:32
  this was my awakening, I guess. I wouldn't call it. Not awakening is now a term ruined because of
• 40:40
  the woke, but this is when I was a good little progressive liberal and I started advocating for
• 40:52
  for the rights to leave Islam, the religion of Islam and for protections, speech protections.
• 41:00
  In the Muslim world, for the abolishment of blasphemy laws, apostasy laws, and general acceptance
• 41:08
  of dissent within Muslim communities. And I found that I was not actually at home in the left.
• 41:15
  And this was very surprising to me and this was the first time I ran into something like this.
• 41:22
  But as everybody who's been in the space long enough recognizes it, there were lots of confusing
• 41:28
  behaviors. There were lots of ways in which the liberal left didn't behave as if the way that it
• 41:34
  should, if it ran according to the rules that we thought it ran according to. And if it was the
• 41:42
  case, which this was my assumption for a very long time, that this was, there were only wrong on
• 41:48
  the question of Islam. And if I could just, it was because of, they were misinformed and if I could
• 41:54
  give them the right information, if I could tell them about the stakes of it, if I could give them,
• 41:59
  you know, the testimonies of all these ex-Muslims and blah, blah, blah, and the stats on what's
• 42:03
  going on in the Muslim world, they would agree with me. And then I found that that didn't work.
• 42:10
  So I started looking around and thinking about what might be actually going on here and what
• 42:16
  were my assumptions that, in fact, were unwarranted. And I think I just, I thought that we were still
• 42:25
  in this enlightenment era liberalism. And I, you know, looking back, I don't know why I assumed this
• 42:33
  because I'm young enough that I started to see the changes in college when I was in college.
• 42:39
  I'd started to see the shift then and there. But I just thought, you know, it's just a small
• 42:45
  strain of it. I didn't think that the, the project as a whole was in jeopardy in some serious way.
• 42:52
  And I had, you know, I had a great college experience too. So it was, I just didn't see, I didn't see
• 42:58
  it coming that. And now I feel as if I just, I missed all the signs and I'm trying to see how badly
• 43:08
  did I miss them. And what would, what do I need to question that I didn't question before?
• 43:15
  I think to some degree, this, this marriage between old school, you know,
• 43:19
  socialist type progressives and liberals was a bad one. And liberals gave too much ground.
• 43:27
  And they thought that, that the, the, the values of the progressive and socialist-ish
• 43:33
  left and liberal values could be merged in a way that was good for everybody. And I think it was
• 43:39
  good for a short period of time. But I think that it's, it's clear now that this is been not
• 43:48
  wonderful for you, arguably for either, you know, I think it's been, both have been deformed by
• 43:55
  the other in a way that, that towards the thing that they are best at doing, you know, the thing
• 44:02
  that they each do that is actually valuable to society. Well, it's been catastrophic for economic
• 44:07
  justice. And the more conspiratorially-minded of us, like my buddy Russell Brand, will say that
• 44:14
  there are reasons for this and that it's not an accident that you've got, you know, people being
• 44:20
  infuriated and inflamed by identity politics on the left. And you've got people inflamed by the
• 44:27
  culture wars on the right voting for, and, and the result is that an economic elite in both parties
• 44:33
  can continue to run the show. And, and, you know, tangent, tangent. But I, I, I think it's so
• 44:39
  interesting how, how everybody seems to be gravitating towards this conspiratorial thinking.
• 44:46
  It's, it's bizarre to me. It's against my nature. But I also see what, why people get pulled into
• 44:53
  it so much. It's a, it's a, it's comforting to think that really we just need to defeat these,
• 44:59
  these bad guys at the top. We need to find a way to get them and then the whole thing collapses,
• 45:04
  like a house of cards, because they're pulling the strings the whole time. But something stranger
• 45:09
  is happening, I think. Yeah. But also to make another analogy to religion, I think we are just
• 45:14
  hardwired to see the hand of purpose behind patterns. And, you know, things can, things can be
• 45:21
  emergent. Incredibly complicated systems can emerge from nothing. I mean, look at natural
• 45:26
  selection. It's almost impossible to believe that natural selection is a more plausible story
• 45:32
  than that we were created by the hand of a deity. And yet nonetheless is the true, it is the true
• 45:37
  explanation as far as we know. And, and, and, you know, similarly, there can be incentives embedded
• 45:44
  in a system that nudge things in a certain direction such that powerful, wealthy people tend to get
• 45:49
  their way. And you don't actually need to have them all meeting in, you know, in a cabin carved
• 45:55
  into a mountain in Dr. Evil's Lair, figuring out how this is going to happen, the way that,
• 46:00
  you know, some conspiracists might might think. But nonetheless, the outcome can seem to our minds
• 46:06
  that are hardwired to find purpose and agency and things quite suspicious. Right. And I,
• 46:13
  I always wonder, like, what do the, they think that these people who already have all this power
• 46:18
  and money, what else do they want, more power, more money? Like, what, what did they gain from
• 46:23
  impoverishing us? Yeah. I think they want more of it. I think they've always, I think the idea is
• 46:29
  that these people have always ruled the world. And the, and the boys shout on everybody else. And
• 46:34
  they want to have been trench their own, they want to feather their own nest. Yeah. And in a way is
• 46:39
  actually, it's more frightening to think about it as, you know, a body without a head. Yeah.
• 46:49
  I can see it's almost comforting to imagine that, that they know exactly what they're doing. And
• 46:54
  they're doing it because they have bad intentions and not because they have very good intentions,
• 46:59
  but just some strange ideologies. But, you know, more interestingly, you were talking about
• 47:06
  incentives, but there's also just the idea that the human mind and the human rationality
• 47:13
  is extremely flawed. And we are, we are very, very good at picking up things in our social
• 47:22
  contexts and just absorbing them through our skin and justifying them and rationalizing them
• 47:27
  later. And that's happening on every level. And it is happening to the elites everywhere.
• 47:32
  You know, they are moving around like lemmings. They don't think that they are, but, but they are.
• 47:38
  They're adopting a world view that acts like a religion. And thinking, you know, when they,
• 47:45
  when they use their rational rationalizing powers, they can make sense of it. But ultimately,
• 47:51
  that's not why they're adopting it. Which I think is, is, that's, that's a way in which I think I've
• 47:58
  moved away from the kind of person that I was maybe 10 years ago as a young activist that's
• 48:03
  advocating towards, you know, for, for more secularism, for less religion in the world. And now I kind
• 48:09
  of feel like, well, is this something that we can really turn off? Is the, the, can we just hope for
• 48:21
  at the best of times a, a religion that doesn't cause too much harm? Because that's the best thing
• 48:28
  that we can, we can work towards. That's depressing. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. What can I, what can I do?
• 48:39
  It's, look, I'm just to put a button on the, on the question of liberalism versus economic
• 48:44
  justice. I, you know, if it's any consolation to your younger self who became jaded at the
• 48:50
  liberalism of the left on questions of Islam, it's, I was reminded by a very, very clever
• 48:58
  colleague of mine who lives in Europe, who's a journalist and, you know, a very well-educated kind
• 49:04
  of oxbridge, floppy head, um, Englishman, that the left has not traditionally been terribly liberal.
• 49:12
  Like, it's, in our lifetimes, we associate those two things as going together because when we grew
• 49:16
  up, uh, the left was the side of politics that was more small-l liberal and fair-minded and very
• 49:22
  inter, um, having debates and, you know, puffing on pipes and talking things through. But
• 49:28
  traditionally, that was a conservative approach. And, you know, my grandmother was a communist
• 49:33
  and in Europe because she was an anti-fascist. And that was the only, that was the only thing
• 49:39
  that you could choose to be in the 40s. Like, there was no liberalism. There was communism versus
• 49:45
  fascism and you chose aside and she certainly wasn't a fascist, so she was a communist. It's a very
• 49:51
  sort of post-war, even maybe post-1960s idea that the left is the other, whether, but, you know,
• 49:58
  in the 50s, the left loved Stalin. In the 50s, leftism was about, you know,
• 50:04
  talentarianism, the power of the people, conformism, the worker, as a widget, as a unit of,
• 50:10
  you know, strength only insofar as the individual is subsumed by the larger group. It was lack of
• 50:16
  agency. It was absence of descent. The, you know, the left is not, is not necessarily the
• 50:21
  friend of the, of the liberal. So maybe it's just swings and roundabouts and, you know, the other
• 50:26
  thing this friend says is, with liberals, have to remember, liberalism has never been terribly
• 50:30
  popular. It's a triumph that we managed to take over the world during the enlightenment and
• 50:36
  provide the world with the bounty that it has seen in the past couple of centuries, but it's
• 50:42
  highly unusual and highly irregular. And when you actually poll people about their beliefs,
• 50:47
  beyond the lip service, most people aren't very crazy about small liberalism. 70-80s people
• 50:53
  would rather just be around people who think like them and not be too bothered having arguments
• 50:58
  all the time and, you know, trying to be too nice to outsiders. And I think you touch on this
• 51:04
  as well in your exchange with Iron, where you talk about liberalism being a brilliant philosophy,
• 51:09
  but kind of counterintuitive psychologically. And by contrast, wokeism has no real good philosophical
• 51:16
  grounding, but gee, it's, it's nice. It sort of touches all the right buttons psychologically.
• 51:21
  Yeah, yeah, it does. It, it leans right in. So what we want to do anyway, you know,
• 51:27
  what we want to, I know, justifies it. But I do think, I mean, not to get too, like deep
• 51:32
  into, into this, but I wonder if, you know, liberalism is an incomplete philosophy too, you know,
• 51:41
  what you were saying about the fact that it wasn't always a friend of the last or the left wasn't
• 51:46
  always a friend of liberalism. And I'm wondering if small, that liberalism and small sea
• 51:51
  conservatism are just the better thought of as attitudes or biases, you know, in terms of how
• 51:59
  we accomplish certain things, but the, the, the what still has to be something else.
• 52:06
  Right. Yeah, what do you don't get? You mean biases in a good way? Yeah, I mean, biases towards
• 52:14
  like we're always a liberal might be biased to say more freedom, more choice, and a conservative
• 52:19
  might be biased to say, no, let's restrict it or no, let's think about what are, you know,
• 52:24
  parents didn't why they did it or yeah, but a bias towards a certain kind of action.
• 52:30
  Yeah, yeah, this now you're channeling Jonathan Height sort of in like, well, yeah, he's a
• 52:36
  social psychologist and, you know, he, he's brilliant in the sense that he sort of, he says,
• 52:41
  all of our political arguments are fundamentally us trying to make post-hoc rationalizations
• 52:48
  for something we feel in our gut because there are particular kinds of people's instincts or
• 52:53
  biases that, you know, there are, there are types of people and you can measure this, psychologist
• 52:57
  measure this. There are like five metrics or seven metrics along which human personalities can
• 53:02
  be measured, you know, one of which is openness to new experience, one of which is respect for
• 53:07
  authority, one of which is like revulsion towards the other or something, you know, whatever these
• 53:12
  things are and you can pretty closely test people without them knowing it, you know,
• 53:18
  knowing what you're testing for and then you can make predictions about what their political
• 53:22
  arguments are going to be and they'll have all the reasons in the world why they believe
• 53:24
  their political arguments, but at the end of the day, they're just, they're just inventing
• 53:27
  reasons to do the bidding of what they got, their moral intuition tells them.
• 53:32
  Yeah, yeah, and I, I love that kind of analysis, it's kind of frightening in its implications,
• 53:41
  because it's like, can we really, like, what's the point of, of talking about it?
• 53:44
  And, you know, what's the point of this, of political discourse that fundamentally,
• 53:48
  well, yeah, we're prone to certain things anyway. Yeah, we're prone, but you can override them,
• 53:53
  he's not a fatalist about it. He's like, yeah, he finds him powering. He's like, once you can
• 53:57
  notice that the reason why you're attracted towards, you know, closing the borders is because of a
• 54:03
  very natural aversion that your type of personality has towards, you know, dirty otherness or something,
• 54:11
  then you can, you can sort of invoke your higher consciousness to make rational arguments to try
• 54:16
  to find a common ground with people who don't share that intuition. Yeah, I, I took that framework
• 54:22
  into a really problematic place in a podcast I did, but they like put that for the, you know,
• 54:28
  paying subscribers or something. What was it? Okay, so I thought about, I was thinking about
• 54:39
  what Jordan Peterson has been saying about
• 54:43
  we haven't had women in the workplace for a very, you know, this is a new thing that women
• 54:47
  and men are working together in the workplace, and we don't actually know if it'll work. So it
• 54:52
  was a kind of a, I'm paraphrasing it in a, this is not what he said, look it up. But
• 55:00
  the essence of the argument was just that this is a new, unique environment, and we don't actually
• 55:06
  know how we work, how we will work together, whether we will work together, and what are the,
• 55:11
  you know, what are the consequences for society that that we are working together? I don't know whether
• 55:16
  the, the, in that specific scenario, he's right, because I think that you could, you could go back
• 55:23
  in time, you know, hundreds of years before anybody went to work anywhere, and we were working on
• 55:30
  family farms or whatever, men and women did work together actually. Perhaps not strange men with
• 55:35
  strange women, but it, but I thought about the, the, just, you know, the implications of
• 55:46
  a certain kind of psychology overtaking a field or an institution. And I thought about that in
• 55:56
  conjunction with what Richard Reeds has been talking about in his, he has his book about, I think
• 56:02
  it's called like on boys and men or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. And he talks about how boys are
• 56:08
  just being left behind in education. And then I was looking into this myself, and it's just like,
• 56:13
  yeah, there's just like no boys in K through 12, but then it continues on forward. They don't go to
• 56:17
  college, and they don't become, like, there's no boys in K through 12, what does that mean?
• 56:23
  Not no, sorry. But they start, they start dropping out, they start dropping out, like flies,
• 56:29
  or they start disengaging. They're allowed to after like 10th grade. Yeah, the second,
• 56:36
  the, when they're allowed to, you see less of, you see less of boys almost instantly,
• 56:40
  but you see them disengage far quicker than that actually. So we're just failing, we're failing
• 56:46
  boys at a very, we start, we start failing them very early, and then they, we continue to fail.
• 56:50
  And but anyway, I'm getting beside the point, the point is that he was pointing to all these
• 56:57
  women who are now graduating with these higher education degrees, and we can expect to see certain
• 57:01
  fields being basically dominated by women. And we have seen that in certain fields already,
• 57:06
  that's already the case. It's true of, you know, psychology, which is, I think what Jonathan
• 57:12
  hate first pointed, like I think he pointed it out at some point that it was, there's a lot of women
• 57:17
  in this field. And I'm wondering, you know, we're seeing academia, we're seeing journalism,
• 57:25
  like media companies and corporations, we're seeing, well, corporations as a whole, right? Like
• 57:29
  Fortune 500 companies become more and more susceptible to woke thinking. And I'm wondering
• 57:35
  how much of it is simply due to the fact that they have more of the kinds of person that is,
• 57:43
  like due to their own, you know, psychology that they, that they are biased towards, more likely
• 57:50
  to accept woke precepts. And by that, I mean more women. That women are more susceptible to
• 57:56
  what conservatives call the woke mind virus? Well, women are more susceptible to being, you know,
• 58:02
  having to finding smears like bigot, very troubling for a whole number of reasons. But the kinds of
• 58:12
  the way that the, the woke pull us in one direction or another socially, I think is more effective on women.
• 58:22
  I think that's pretty fairly clear actually, but even by the way that women behave.
• 58:30
  And to what extent is what we're seeing in institutions, simply a secondary effect of the fact
• 58:35
  that the kind of person that is more likely to say, I care about the fact, I care, I care that everyone
• 58:42
  here feels, you know, equally respected and that their dignity is, you know, upheld by everybody,
• 58:51
  of everybody, their colleagues and their, and their superiors and whatever. And I care about
• 58:57
  that more than I care about free speech. Right. In other words, if you got women out of the workforce,
• 59:03
  they wouldn't be so, we wouldn't be so woke. Well, I mean, so it's a very, it's, it's messed up from,
• 59:09
  if you think about it just from purely the implications. So trying to think about it, let's see if it's
• 59:16
  right, like if it actually has grounding, because I think that how would we see? How would we
• 59:21
  what? How would we see whether it's right? I mean, I guess you'd have to look at workplaces where
• 59:27
  there's an underrepresentation of women and see whether it's less woke. Yeah, actually. And I think
• 59:31
  we would find that that's true. I think that's pretty, I mean, I'm not sure. Can you, can you,
• 59:38
  can you think of a workplace that's that's very male and also very woke? Maybe not, but I can certainly
• 59:46
  think of reverse. I can think of fields that are very female and not woke, like teaching and
• 59:54
  and not woke. I don't know about that. Yeah, I think teaching is pretty woke. At the higher levels,
• 59:59
  it certainly woke. Yeah, just the qualities are extremely woke. It's less female at the higher
• 1:00:04
  levels. Like the most, probably the most female dominated occupation would be a primary school
• 1:00:09
  teacher. And I don't think, I don't think schools, I don't hear of like hysterical cancel culture
• 1:00:13
  outbreaks in primary schools. No, I don't. I think it's, that's a, that's a tough one because it's
• 1:00:20
  not quite an institution is just like, you know, one teacher working with, with kids, it would be
• 1:00:26
  hard to measure if it weren't super woke anyway. Well, you might have scenarios where a teacher
• 1:00:31
  expresses something in the break room about, you know, an opinion about, I don't know,
• 1:00:36
  transgender politics or something like that and then gets fired from the primary school. I don't
• 1:00:40
  hear instances like that. I think teachers are woke-ish. I think teachers are more woke than the
• 1:00:46
  communities that they are that they are a part of reliably, but maybe not too far apart from
• 1:00:52
  the communities because they are a part, they are deeply embedded in their local community. So it's
• 1:00:56
  kind of a teachers are kind of tough, but I think if you do look at the higher levels of teaching,
• 1:01:01
  I think if you look at teachers like colleges anywhere, they're the most, they're the most woke
• 1:01:07
  institutions. Oh yeah. But the male, the male college professors, I mean, is so woke.
• 1:01:13
  No, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not saying that men have no part in, part to play here. I'm just
• 1:01:20
  saying that if, you know, if you, if, just from the Jonathan Hate framework, if you mess with
• 1:01:28
  the, you know, the percentages of a population and you increase one that is more susceptible
• 1:01:35
  to a certain kind of thinking and decrease the other even a little bit, that, you know, gives
• 1:01:42
  an incentive to one kind of framework and a disincentive to another one.
• 1:01:47
  I mean, it's possible, yeah. I mean, it's possible if you had a more masculinized workforce
• 1:01:52
  than there would be more, there would be less fragility or like less complaints if the boss would
• 1:01:58
  say, like, come on, let's just get back to work. Let's stop talking about justice and let's stop
• 1:02:04
  feeling bad about the fact that someone made a remark about our clothes or something. But, you know,
• 1:02:10
  the more fundamentally, I think, and I'm not going, I don't want to speak too out of turn,
• 1:02:17
  but I think this is something that is well established that women are less comfortable with
• 1:02:21
  hierarchies in general, social hierarchies. So you can see that as being in itself problematic
• 1:02:27
  in the workplace and you can also see it indirectly play out when it comes to, you know, a revolutionary,
• 1:02:39
  like a struggle to hold power to account, you know, and tell the, make the boss feel as if they're
• 1:02:50
  not, they can't tell us what, they can't just boss us around, they can't force us to do one thing
• 1:02:58
  or another. And I think that in the context of, at the very least, the workplaces that I'm very
• 1:03:05
  familiar with, which is, again, the progressive-ish non-profit world, it's really bad. There was a
• 1:03:13
  really interesting piece that was published by, I think it was Ryan Graham in the intercept. I don't
• 1:03:17
  know if that's exactly who, but there was this really interesting piece about how hard it is for
• 1:03:24
  progressive and non-profit institutions to find an executive director. It's like you can't get
• 1:03:30
  anyone to take the job because it's a horrible job. You'll just be, you will be putting on fires
• 1:03:35
  all the time. You are on trial all the time. And it is a nightmare position for anyone, even if
• 1:03:44
  you're, even if you're a minority, even if you're like a black woman, you don't want to be in that
• 1:03:47
  job. You don't want to be the person at the top, which is a really interesting reversal of the way
• 1:03:52
  that it should be, right? You should be, you should want to be ED, you should be want to be the
• 1:03:57
  person in power. But in these work environments, the somehow the power has been, you know,
• 1:04:05
  enversed. I mean, my intuition about hierarchy and the sexes, whilst I take the grain of truth in
• 1:04:14
  what you're saying, that men can be comfortable with hierarchy, you look at the military and so on,
• 1:04:19
  highly masculinized structures, I don't get the sense that women are likely to upset the
• 1:04:27
  apple cart and push back against bosses being inappropriate. I mean, if anything, my intuition
• 1:04:34
  runs more along the traditional feminist criticism of the patriarchy, which is that women are expected
• 1:04:41
  to be compliant and go along and get along and say, yes, okay, I'll do it. And men are the
• 1:04:45
  trouble makers that women are underpaid because they're less aggressive in negotiations and men
• 1:04:50
  are more willing to challenge their superiors. That there are more male CEOs because males
• 1:04:56
  jostle more against the system and try to upset things and strategize. I think we're confusing
• 1:05:03
  two different things, which is there's the preference for how you want your social environment to be
• 1:05:11
  and how you behave when confronted with a particular situation. So you can be the case that women
• 1:05:21
  are less likely to be confrontational, but also that they prefer a workplace in which confrontation
• 1:05:28
  is heavily discouraged and look down upon or whatever. And then when you have a certain percentage
• 1:05:36
  of people with that preference, you see the work environment shift. And I don't say this to
• 1:05:42
  me like kick women out of the workforce. I know that's what's going to happen. That's not what I
• 1:05:47
  mean. I meant in the sense that of how you brought it up, which is, you know, now that you know,
• 1:05:54
  and now that we know that maybe this is what's going on, we can talk about it, we can address it.
• 1:06:01
  I mean, it's fascinating. And I will have this final conversation about sex, gender, and the
• 1:06:08
  differences between men and women just for our subscribers, Sarah. So I'll bid farewell to
• 1:06:13
  to the the freebies. And I hope they've enjoyed this conversation with you. And I thank you for
• 1:06:16
  being part of the conversation. But I want to I want to drill in on.
• 1:06:22
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