Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Is Free Thought Dead?" with Claire Lehmann

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"Is Free Thought Dead?" with Claire Lehmann · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans! Welcome to the show that doesn't deal in absolutes, that doesn't deal in blacks and whites.
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  So many shows, so many politicians, so many commentators, so much of your social media feed,
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  expect either your agreement or disagreement, either your furious love or your furious anger.
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  I do not. I ask only that we give each other the benefit of the doubt, that we wrestle with ideas,
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  we reject, as well as those we think are right. Let's escape the dogmas of conventional wisdom,
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  let's have conversations that straddle the cultural divide, and make us all just a little uncomfortable fun.
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  Today on the show, a fascinating individual, she is a journalist, but really a publisher,
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  but really a psychologist, but really a thinker. Claire Lehman is the founder of the online magazine
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  which she founded five years ago to push back against what she saw as a certain stuffiness and
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  kind of rigidity of thought in a lot of mainstream publications. That online publication has since
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  become huge in certain circles in the United States, probably bigger there than it is in her
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  home country of Australia, especially amongst a certain type of sort of Silicon Valley, Libertarian
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  adjacent intellectual dark web type of American tycoon who is somewhat fed up really with the
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  stuffiness, dullness, predictability of the mainstream media. Claire had written for publications like
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  the Guardian, Harvard's Kennedy School Review, Scientific American, ABC News, and the city
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  Morning Herald is called her one of their ten Aussies who shook the world in tech and media,
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  but really what she's about is trying to find new ways to have conversations about the most
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  important things that confront us. Since that's what this show is about, I thought I would sit down
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  with Claire and talk about how we can have a conversation about having conversations. Ladies and
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  gentlemen, enjoy Claire Lehman. A big example that happened a couple of years ago, a few years ago
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  now, was James DeMoore at Google. He attended a diversity workshop for inside Google and he was
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  asked to write reflections on this workshop, diversity training workshops, something like that.
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  And he wrote a memo and it was critical of the diversity training and it included a whole bunch
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  of scientific references about psychological differences between men and women.
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  Now a very famous finding in psychology, in sex differences, that men and women on average
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  tend to have different preferences for their careers. So women are more interested in careers
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  that involve people and men are more interested in careers that involve systems. Now this is on
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  average. There are of course exceptions to the rule, but on average there is that tendency.
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  So his memo, in parts it may have been clumsily written, but in general it was scientifically
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  valid and relied on peer-reviewed evidence. He was fired for writing that memo.
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  And before he was fired, people were talking about this internal memo at Google and
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  engineer had written an anti-diversity memo. It wasn't anti-diversity, it was just anti-orthodox
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  anti-diversity in terms of having the attitude that unless we have 50% women, we're
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  failures in terms of promoting diversity in the workplace. And he emphasized things like having
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  what about diversity of viewpoint, what about diversity of class, what about diversity of political
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  perspectives and that type of thing. So before he was fired, I sent out his memo to a range of
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  psychologists and scientists that I knew and I got their feedback on whether the memo was
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  scientifically valid and all of them said it was and they disagreed with a few points here and
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  there, but overall their feedback was that it was a defensible memo from a scientific point of
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  view, but he was still fired and he was described as anti-diversity, anti-women, anti-feminist.
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  And so that occurred a few years ago and that was an episode that really stood out for me
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  because it underscored the reality that you can actually be censured or get into trouble in the
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  workplace for citing scientific studies. And that happened again recently, as you say, with the
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  person who was ostensibly fired, apparently just for retweeting this academic paper by an African
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  American scholar about how violent protests are less effective than peaceful protests.
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  Yes, yes. How widespread do you think it is? Do you think it's widespread in normal mainstream
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  society, but I think in certain institutions it's very widespread. So in academia and to some extent
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  the media, particularly in the United States, certainly I have friends in media institutions in
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  America and they are terrified of being cancelled for saying something that is perceived as
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  not even bigoted, just not going along with the current trends.
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  Well, I think you're touching on, I think, one of the central cruxes that I want to dig into
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  today, which is that turns like bigoted are changing underneath our feet and it's hard to keep
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  up with. So I was saying to Stan Grant a few weeks ago that there's a rhetoric that you learn
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  in talking about things like race and gender, if you're privileged and well-educated and you
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  study your critical race theory and critical gender studies and so on at university that
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  codifies what tolerance and enlightenment means in certain sort of ways of talking.
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  Yeah. And if you don't abide by those ways of talking, you are now not just a bigot,
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  but I mean some people would say a white supremacist, if you talk in the ways that a farmer in
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  Western New South Wales might talk, even if he's really not a bigoted person, it's like genuinely
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  not racist and hence racism, but he's not woken up to understand that he's supposed to acknowledge
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  that we live in a white supremacist superstructure and that everything is imbued with dominant
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  narratives and things like that. It's just not a language that he communicates in. So I think
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  you're pointing to the inflation of sins from being personal animus, I suppose, to an ignorance
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  of or a rejection of a kind of way of talking and thinking about these issues.
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  Yeah. And there's two books that have come out in the United States recently that have
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  rocketed up to not being number one on the Amazon best-selling list. One is White Fragility
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  by Robin DiAngelo and one is How to Be Anti-Racist by Abraham Kendi. The How to Be Anti-Racist
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  one is very disconcerting because the thesis is so simple and his thesis is basically that
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  you're either a racist or you are an anti-racist. And so we used to believe that racism was
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  a something that you did, something that you would call someone, you would discriminate
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  against someone actively, you would be horrible to another person, you would demean someone,
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  you would do hateful things to another person or another group of people. Now it's defined
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  not as an act of commission but an act of omission. So if you're not constantly signaling on
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  Instagram or Twitter or Facebook that you're an anti-racist, then you'll complicit in white
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  supremacy. So I think that's what you're getting at, that it's these definitions are shifting
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  under our feet and we're finding that more and more people are not being able to keep up with how
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  definitions are moving and you know it's these theories are sort of designed in a way to capture
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  a lot of people. Yeah I mean there's there are a couple of things going on there in the anti-fragile
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  it's sorry in the white fragility and how to be an anti-racist books. One is you need to pick a
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  side yeah right and to some extent I think that's a separate question you might be able to make
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  an argument like take a take something take an issue that's less volatile like say the environment
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  I can understand you making a logical case that to do nothing about the environment is to be
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  complicit in a system that is destroying the environment. So if you care about the environment
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  like it's not good enough to just say oh look I'm on the fence side I'm not a pro green or anti-green
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  if you do that then you're anti-green like I can understand that logic but where it falls down in
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  this particular case is that the definition of what it means to be anti-racist this loops back to
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  my previous comment about like sort of critical gender studies and critical race theory. Yeah
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  is not actually to oppose racism is not actually to try to to rise above differences in melanon
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  yeah but is to perform a certain style of credibility garnering in a way it's funny you
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  mentioned ibram kendi because I happen to have a review of his book it says how to be an anti-racist
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  by ibram kendi review a brilliantly simple argument we are either racist or anti-racist there's
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  nothing in between argues this powerful memoir and political guide once you get caught in that trap
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  then there's no escaping it it's sort of like a religion because the only source of confession is
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  from the people who are who have created the dogma in the first place. Yeah I mean it politicizes
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  absolutely everything if everything is either racist or anti-racist I mean where does it end is my
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  coffee racist or anti-racist is you know going to a wedding racist or anti like it's totalitarian
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  coffee is definitely racist because do you know the color of the skin of the people who picked those
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  coffee beans. I saw do you know who filipasu is no a famous actor and performer broadway star
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  apparently a blue check mark person and she tweeted cancel culture if you're canceled but don't
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  wish to be you must work to earn back people's respect by owning up to the thing that cancelled you
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  in the first place listening to others educating yourself and advocating on behalf of the people that
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  you've offended or harmed and I retweeted that and said if you don't want to be burned at the
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  stake you simply need to own up to being a witch and listen to which someone responded why is
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  listening scary. Well I think you made a really good point before and that is that this vocabulary
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  that's being popularized online and that's associated with anti-racism is is new and it is
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  it's coming from universities and elite universities in the United States and who goes to elite
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  universities in the United States while it's rich people or at least upper middle class people
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  and so there's a there is a class element here where upper middle class people doesn't matter
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  what color they are are using a language that is inaccessible to the rest of us or to people who
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  aren't necessarily university educated or aren't of that class milieu and so this idea that unless
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  you know all of the right words unless you know the language and the theory that goes along with
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  anti-racism this idea that unless you know you can keep up with the lingo that you're automatically
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  erases it's incredibly classist it puts all of the working class people who haven't gone to university
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  into the box of being racist and so it's incredibly self-serving for these well-educated people to
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  basically define themselves as being the morally superior group and everybody else
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  morally inferior. Incredible thing is that the people who are imposing these strictures are
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  quite often white people who are simply signaling to each other how virtuous they are for
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  being on the bandwagon. I mean white fragility is written by a white woman talking about how
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  white people can never escape their own toxic racism. I sometimes wonder maybe she's just racist
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  deep down and she's projecting it onto all the rest of us. It's like Freud is like everybody
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  wants to fuck their mother and maybe you just you do dude. Well I think she's made a lot of money
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  from anti-racist training in workplaces. Yeah she charges many thousands of dollars doesn't
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  she should have to go into big companies and tell them all how racist they are. Yeah and you know
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  there's not a whole lot of scientific evidence that shows anti-racist training or implicit bias
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  training or any of these corporate training programs do anything. Yeah can you dig into that? What
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  do we know about implicit bias? Because I think it's become so what this is one of those things
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  that's leaked out of the academy into the world and I think everybody who has read any newspaper
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  in the past five years is probably now aware quote unquote that every decision that we make when
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  we're dealing with people of other races is subtly contaminated by our preconceptions about them
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  and even if you think we're not racist we actually are in our dealings with them. Is that
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  born out? Not really so the implicit bias test comes from social psychology department in Harvard
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  and it's a very famous test and it's been taken by millions of people all over the world.
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  However it's always been a a working progress so even the academics who designed the test
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  themselves have said this test shouldn't be used for any diagnostic purposes so you shouldn't
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  be giving this test to people to determine whether or not they're racist and the reason for that
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  is because the same person can take the test at a different time in the day or come back and take
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  the test a week later and get a wildly different result. In psychological terms or psychometric terms
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  the test doesn't have a lot of validity or reliability that they're the sort of the metrics that
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  psychologists used to see how robust the measure is. It's a quite weak on those scales
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  and then on top of that it doesn't predict much so someone can have a bad score or a perceived
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  bad score on the implicit bias test but never exhibit any discrimination in their lives or in
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  the workplace and presumably vice versa so there's very little I think that the strongest
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  effect size they've found for the test having any correlation to real world behaviour as point
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  two which is minuscule. That's not going to predict anything in the real world so
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  it's a test that isn't very reliable and it doesn't predict much in the real world but it's
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  become incredibly popular because it seems to be an easy way to tell people that they are racist
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  and I think a lot of this comes back to an issue that I briefly mentioned with regards to James
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  the Moore because we don't see equal numbers of different demographic groups across society
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  we have assumed that racism or sexism must be the reason behind their being discrepant
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  representations so because we don't see 50% of women as CEOs or fortune 500 companies it
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  must be because of sexism because there aren't equal numbers of women going into computer science
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  it must be because they've been subconsciously discriminated against in math classes and that
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  kind of thing so we're trying to attribute gaps in representation to nefarious social processes
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  but it's just not worn out by the science what is the science though because I think you're you
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  might be mixing different examples that don't belong together so there'll be some situations where
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  you know I'll face this all the time when I was presenting the the weekend breakfast show on
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  ABC TV we'd often have panels and so if you're doing a putting panel together it's important to have
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  some kind of diversity on the panel you don't want a bunch of men all sitting there talking about
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  things because there are going to be things that are raised by you know that relate to women that
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  have women have more insight into in particular fields yeah I also did a show on radio national where
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  we would be sort of seeking the global expert in a particular area and they're the reverse
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  word to hold because if you're looking for you know the world's greatest moral philosopher you're
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  going to go to Peter Singer or like it's a very rarefied place to be yeah it's just it may be the
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  case that there are structural sexist reasons why there are fewer women as the world's most elite
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  ex but you can't change that if you're going for the world's most elite ex yeah but I do think
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  that there are different scenarios so the panel is different from the world expert and the
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  Fortune 500 company might be different from computer science like them they may actually be it
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  maybe to the case that fortune 500 CEOs in a perfectly egalitarian world would be roughly half
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  half yeah men and women because the absolute top people well maybe that maybe women would be
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  doing doing yeah but it might also be the case that there are reasons why went why girls are
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  a bit less interested in computer science than boys are yeah yeah you know what I mean
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  absolutely I think what you're getting at though is this is all very complex and it is complex
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  and there are lots of factors that go into how people are represented in different fields and
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  social factors have a lot to do with it but what gets overlooked I mean so we're aware of social
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  factors and we're aware of cultural factors but what often gets overlooked is people's own
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  preferences and people's own sort of psychology or their human nature so when we look at discrepancies
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  among kindergarten teachers or childcare workers I mean the majority of childcare workers are
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  female we don't automatically assume that men are not in that industry because of sexism I mean
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  sexism could be part of it but often men just don't have that preference they're not going into
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  childcare because they don't want to and that's one of the explanations that I think we miss or
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  that is missed in popular discussions around discrepancies is that you know people have choices
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  people have agency people choose to do what they want to do and and one of the reasons why I test
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  like the implicit bias test has become so popular is because it's very fashionable to explain gaps
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  in representation as being entirely culturally constructed or entirely socially constructed
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  and having any kind of explanation that is about personal preferences or psychology or human
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  nature is sort of shunned or not even considered right so you think we should just inject a bit more
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  of that back in yeah but at least if it's where the data leads us yeah the James Demore example at
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  Google is a funny one because it was literally just raised a few days ago on social media to
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  meet as an example of a correct instance of cancel culture because someone was saying you know
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  in Australia people like people can spit columnists for the Murdoch press for example we'll say
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  this is not me speaking this is the person on on social media speaking we'll say vile things
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  and they'll retain their jobs but in a decent world someone who says that women are biologically
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  inferior to men like James Demore did would be dismissed like he was so the James Demore
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  Google memo has turned has gone from women and men might have different interests so we shouldn't
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  obsess about perfect equality in every single field of computer engineering because sometimes
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  bloats might be better at that yeah to he believes that women are genetically inferior to men
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  yeah well that's that's a misrepresentation or a mischaracterization of what he actually wrote
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  I don't have the memo right in front of me but I mean this happens again and again
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  yeah you could go to the recent bruhaha with JK Rowling and trans issues and so on where
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  it's now an article of faith amongst my queer friends that she's a rabid transphob
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  yes and when you say what she said that is actually transphobic they say well it's just her
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  her overall outlaw to mention yeah exactly to what extent do you think men and women are
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  different then biologically speaking rather than culturally in terms of our psychology well
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  you know I think there's a there's a great deal of overlap so in psychology we look at overlapping
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  distributions and although the averages might be slightly apart um majority of women almost
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  traits the majority of women and the majority of men overlap but there are some there are some
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  traits and there are some domains where men and women are quite different and obvious one is
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  sexuality so men generally report having interest in a greater variety or a greater
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  having a greater number of partners than women do and men generally report thinking about sex more
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  often in the day and of course there's going to be women who can who are you know more total horn
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  bags of course there's going to be women who are who are you know hornier than men and vice versa
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  but on average we all know it's common sense that you know the interest in sex is slightly different
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  between men and women another difference is one that I mentioned before is interest in
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  career preference so men tend to be more interested in systems or anything relating to mechanics
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  engineering that type of thing and women you know so we hear all the time that men are
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  dominate STEM fields science technology engineering mathematics but that's not actually true if you
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  take a look at psychology biology medicine and vet science women by far outnumber the amount of
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  men particularly in at the college level the university level so women dominating medicine biology
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  psychology for sure and uh more and more even the law so a great there's greater numbers of women
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  going to law compartments anything to do with language anything to do with people
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  women gravitate towards whereas men have have that interest in systems and quantitative
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  reasoning but that I've obviously I'm just talking in averages and I'm not meaning to
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  minimize the fact that there's always going to be individuals who buck the trend and that's
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  really important that's what feminism was meant to be about feminism was originally allowing women
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  who didn't fit the feminine stereotypes to be themselves to go out and pursue their dreams and
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  do what they wanted to do and and compete with men in traditionally masculine fields and so
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  we always have to remember that just because we're talking about averages that exist among a group
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  individuals themselves uh you know we can never take a group average and apply it to an individual
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  because an individual might be completely different than most of the people in their group I mean
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  it's funny because part of what feminism was was that was allowing women who don't want to be
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  girly to go and do think quite unquote masculine professions yeah but another part of second wave
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  feminism that is in sort of crisis at the moment I feel is the the ownership of womanhood as being
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  a powerful thing in its own right yeah and the the need not to conform to masculine ideas about what
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  is okay and what is not okay that actually being a woman is a really kick-ass thing to be and you
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  know yeah and that it has its own power yes and the diminishment or the dilution of that at the
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  moment in kind of modern gender queer feminists like 2020 is like I don't quite understand what's
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  going on but this is what the kids seem to be talking about the moment where there is no there are no
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  biological gender traits and so the whole thing is just a grab bag where anyone can pluck from
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  whatever yeah part of the concern and I wonder if you share it of feminists of a certain age is
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  that you actually lose womanness yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah well and and that's what some of
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  the people like JK Rowling are worried about I think I think they're concerned that womanhood is
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  being erased by this they call it gender ideology this is this concept that you can basically
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  self-identify a man or a woman just whenever you feel like it so I mean it used to be that being
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  transgender or transsexual would was a process and people were quite you know very serious about it
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  and it would take time to transition and then you would be you might go through a trans
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  operation that kind of thing and then you would be transgender or transsexual now there's this
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  it's become more fashionable to be non-binary queer that type of thing not that there's a problem
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  with that but what people like JK Rowling are concerned about is being a biological woman being
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  trivialized or minimized and they are so because they are second-wave feminists they associate
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  being a biological woman with being subjugated and I said I think there's some merit in the argument I
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  don't fully agree with that but for the second-wave feminists they feel very strongly that to be a woman
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  to be socialized as a girl to have you know all of the biological processes that go along with being
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  a female that does make you different and that needs to be recognized and protected I mean I agree
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  with it up to some up to a point like I think sports in sports it's reasonable to separate by biological
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  females from biological males but I sit somewhere in the middle like I see I think the second-wave
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  feminists probably take it too far yeah I've heard and I should preface this conversation because
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  it's such a toxic topic that can so easily be misinterpreted that I am with thousand percent
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  supportive of trans people and I absolutely love and adore a great number of them who I know
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  and I think we should recognize that the vast majority of them take it very seriously
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  yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah but when the questions come to what does gender
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  actually mean yeah how does it intersect with sex I have heard the case that you're making put
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  for example by Jermaine Greer as well where she says if you haven't grown up as a girl
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  if you haven't had the patriarchy judging you pushing putting you into a box treating you the way
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  that society treats girls then you have a different experience from someone who's growing up as a
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  biological girl and I can understand that I can understand a desire to retain some some link
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  between the experience of having a female physiology and the experience of being female and even
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  rallying herself you know not to bang on about her in her absence says that she is a thousand
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  percent supportive of trans people but she just doesn't necessarily say that every single person
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  who identifies as a trans woman is the same as a yeah as a biological woman and that in itself
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  is now enough to make you a transphobic bigot her books you shouldn't read I think it's also
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  important to point out that transgender people and transsexual people aren't necessarily on board
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  with all of the demands of the activists of the trans activists someone I follow and I admire
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  on Twitter is Buck Angel actually just spoke to Buck last week and I put on this podcast yes
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  and I haven't released it but he's fantastic but explain to people who Buck is
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  well I don't know his story as well as you probably do but he he's a pioneer and he
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  and by the way don't worry if you're a listener and you haven't heard it I haven't dropped it
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  but we were I'm going to do a proper more fully fully fledged thing on trans issues I'll include
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  Buck in that bucket he was born a female biological female and I don't know how old he was when
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  he transitioned but he was a client yeah he was a pioneer in trans awareness and he's a porn star
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  porn actor actor and a famous one you almost just mischended him my goodness I heard
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  and I heard a civil and s in the word actor actor I mean actor oh god they're coming for me
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  yeah he's a and he's a big bearded like you know very masculine bear yeah but physiologically
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  sexually he he's still he's still biologically female yeah yeah and he doesn't buy into any of
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  this he pushes back a lot on the trans activism and he'll talk about how you know when he goes to
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  the doctor he has to be very frank with his biological issues you know he has to take
• 31:58
  medication that kind of thing and he's just I think he I mean he he just pushes back against the
• 32:06
  idea that we can't have disagreement we can't have debate on some of these issues around biological
• 32:11
  sex and gender identity and I think that's very enough I mean we should never we should never
• 32:16
  subscribe to an idea that one size fits all I mean we're all different we're all individuals we
• 32:21
  have different approaches and different needs and just having these blanket dogmas that we have
• 32:28
  to support and subscribe to it's it's it's going to be unfair for a lot of people what about the
• 32:35
  idea that people who aren't trans shouldn't talk about it and people who aren't women shouldn't
• 32:41
  talk about feminism and guys shouldn't be you know there is a sense an increasing sense and it
• 32:47
  applies to race as well that we shouldn't really be even having the conversations like this like
• 32:54
  if we want to talk about trans issues then trans people should be talking about trans issues and if
• 32:57
  we want to talk about indigenous issues then indigenous people can talk about indigenous issues
• 33:02
  where do we get off so we should segregate conversation is basically the argument I think I think
• 33:08
  it's limiting and it doesn't necessarily encourage empathy if we're going to put boundaries around
• 33:17
  topics of conversation I mean I think there's some validity to that argument for sure
• 33:22
  but in general you know part of being a human being is empathizing with other people who are not
• 33:29
  yourself and you know we used to encourage perspective taking putting it putting ourselves in
• 33:35
  another person's shoes and I mean that's one of the issues that people in fiction and the arts
• 33:42
  are having problems with at the moment or even actors being told that they can't play
• 33:47
  you know like actresses like Scarlett Johansson not being able she's not allowed to play or she's
• 33:53
  been criticized for playing you know a trans character in a film well she was going to and then
• 34:01
  she had to pull out and the latest version of that is Halle Berry Halle Berry had gave her an
• 34:06
  interview in which she said that she was considering a movie and I've got the quote here actually
• 34:12
  the film was about a character where the woman is a trans character so she's a woman that
• 34:16
  transitioned into a man Halle Berry told the reporter and of course the fact that she said that
• 34:21
  she's a woman who's transitioned into a man rather than the person the character is a man
• 34:27
  it happened to be a signed female at birth but was always actually a man even though they had
• 34:31
  female biology has gotten into her that's transphobic in itself so she was attacked and she pulled
• 34:37
  out and it was actually yeah that's right she pulled out of the running at all and she said I
• 34:42
  vowed to be an ally and I'm so sorry and all of the usual genuflexion that you have to do when
• 34:47
  the ball comes comes for you so yes I assume that you think that that puts that that constraints
• 34:54
  art yeah yeah and it's just a different conception of what we used to think art was about we used
• 35:01
  to think that art promoted empathy and was bridge building and required imagination and now
• 35:12
  putting these strictures around actors and fiction writers it seems like we're
• 35:20
  limiting possibilities and I think the ultimate result will just be art of a lower quality
• 35:28
  isn't there a case though that like I mean yeah back in the 1950s it was it in one of those old
• 35:33
  movies like Mickey Rooney would play like a Chinese person and they'd put his they'd put his eyes
• 35:39
  they'd make his eyes go slanty and they'd put brown boot boot polish on his face and he go oh
• 35:43
  me so Chinese and you go oh my goodness couldn't they find a single Asian American actor
• 35:47
  yeah to do that isn't this just part of the kind of swinging back in the other direction and maybe
• 35:52
  it's a little bit of an overreaction but we'll find a a middle ground yeah look I'm not arguing
• 35:58
  that white people should be playing people of color in the movie so that you know I'm not I'm not
• 36:06
  saying that you know works of art need to be you know these issues don't matter but ultimately
• 36:14
  it's up to the artist and whether or not a good work of art is produced personally I think that
• 36:22
  we should judge works of art by their merit their aesthetic qualities as opposed to their
• 36:27
  political messages like I I think the politicization of art is really unfortunate because I think
• 36:33
  it just leads to boring repetitive uninteresting art what about the personal conduct of the artist
• 36:42
  uh uh open another can of words the Louis CK Woody Allen question uh similarly I I try to
• 36:53
  appreciate an artist's work as being separate from them as an individual and I think we'll be
• 37:00
  hard pressed to find artists great artists who don't have some demons in their closet I mean look
• 37:08
  at what's happening to Kanye West right now I mean it's very common for artists to be
• 37:16
  psychologically you know fragile or unstable or to have some kind of demons in their past I mean
• 37:25
  that that just their human beings just like the rest of us and I think that's the wonderful thing
• 37:30
  about art is that it um allows people to express things that we wouldn't ordinarily you know
• 37:38
  here and it's I think I think one of the uh regrettable things that's happening in our culture at
• 37:45
  the moment is we're moving away from this idea that people can redeem themselves so yes I think
• 37:51
  someone like Louis CK from what I've read about what he's apparently done like it yeah it's creepy
• 37:57
  and it's gross but that doesn't mean that people should never have an opportunity for redemption
• 38:04
  and to um be forgiven uh and you know with all of this talk about people being problematic and people
• 38:13
  not you know uh transgressing it's like well when do we forget like what how many years have to go
• 38:20
  past when we can just say okay so you did a bad thing now we forgive you and let's move on like I
• 38:25
  think we're missing that part of the conversation also even if we wanted to exclude him from polite
• 38:31
  society forever yeah can't we still watch his old part like if he doesn't get paid like okay let's
• 38:39
  make him not get paid okay let's like strip him of all his copyright yeah yeah but can't I still
• 38:43
  watch an old comedy special yeah it's all been removed from online you can't watch it anyway yeah
• 38:48
  all of his stuff it's been removed the moment the moment that happened this is part of the whole
• 38:53
  problem is like it's not just moving forward and like what y'all and still has a movie in the can
• 38:58
  that hasn't been released right really like to see because I like Timothy Shalamay who's in it
• 39:03
  yeah yeah and and I mean just confidentially I like I'm now speaking publicly I suppose um a very
• 39:10
  famous um celebrity who's an interviewer was talking to me the other week and saying that he'd
• 39:17
  actually gotten a call and had been offered Woody Allen as an interview yeah here in Australia
• 39:21
  yeah um because Woody's biography that autobiography is coming out yeah yeah and um he thought about
• 39:28
  it for a few days and we chatted about it and I said I you should do it and he eventually declined
• 39:32
  and um so you know Australian Australian audiences will not be hearing what I think could have been a
• 39:37
  really interesting central lighting interview with one of the most important and whatever you think
• 39:43
  of its personal conduct frankly brilliant uh comedians of the 20th century yeah yeah that's what I
• 39:49
  mean that put this politicization of art leads to more boring art because if you're going to get
• 39:56
  rid of anybody who has a troubled past or is flawed or has behaved in a weird or creepy manner
• 40:02
  and I'm not talking about like actual criminal I'm not talking about the Harvey Weinstein
• 40:06
  no sure yes yeah you know there's there's lots of shades great creepy guys I mean the thing is we're
• 40:12
  not doing it to everyone I almost wish we were I wish there was more consistency in a way like
• 40:17
  if you want to make the rule yeah the people who behave in nasty bourish uh or you know un or
• 40:25
  weird way is uh or you know if the that people for whom there's a question mark about whether
• 40:30
  or not they did something worse than that in the case of Woody Allen that they even though he's
• 40:35
  been exonerated by the two investigations that looked into the actual yeah the actual bad
• 40:39
  allegation which is that you know he inappropriately touched um me a phara's daughter while she was
• 40:45
  little I think the most people just think with it his sin was that he fell in love with Sunyee who
• 40:50
  was uh he was me a phara's stepdaughter but they weren't living together he was not the father figure
• 40:55
  and they've been married for 25 years now so yeah at what point do we say well she's a grown woman
• 40:58
  she's allowed to like anyway putting all of that aside if that was the rule and it was applied
• 41:04
  equally I'd go okay well then let's apply it equally and you'll see that we're living in a
• 41:08
  totalitarian dystopia yeah because no one in rock and roll would be like the weird thing is this
• 41:13
  person who was speaking to me about rejecting Woody Allen interview if Mick Jagger had asked we
• 41:19
  would have said he would have said yes yeah yeah I mean how many underage girls did Mick Jagger
• 41:24
  sleep within the 1970s I don't know yeah that would be yes if it was zero I mean the whole thing
• 41:32
  is like I wonder whether it's that we're so connected and there are so many stories that are
• 41:36
  circulating that we are sort of pawns to a narrative and whatever comes across our desk is the
• 41:43
  one that lights up and we see so we go back guys no good but the problem is that the line keeps
• 41:48
  shifting and so we don't know what's going to be considered problematic in two three four five
• 41:56
  years from now so it was as recently as 2011 or 2012 that Barack Obama was against same-sex
• 42:04
  marriage for example but if you were to be against same-sex marriage now you're a fascist
• 42:09
  and you're a bigot so the line shifts right and people who were you know positions that were
• 42:17
  considered reasonable 10 years ago are considered completely you know prejudice then backwards
• 42:23
  and regressive now and so we just don't we just don't know in terms of you know in the 70s maybe
• 42:31
  it was okay to sleep with 18 year old groupies but now we wouldn't consider that to be okay so
• 42:36
  what where where are we going to be in five years from now we don't know and some and some behavior
• 42:41
  that we think is perfectly acceptable and perfectly normal will be completely beyond the pale
• 42:46
  I do worry about that a bit about what I call outrage archaeology yeah where you go hunting
• 42:53
  for things to get angry about and people's past so you know Winston Churchill was persona
• 42:57
  non-grata now because he's a racist against bangle dashes yeah John Wayne is is has to be shunned
• 43:04
  because he said something that was politically incorrect in a 1950s interview with Playboy I saw
• 43:09
  people dredging up there was circulating online that way I was like he was John Wayne of course
• 43:13
  he wasn't worth it was my the 1950s then people were like yeah but I mean even if he was around
• 43:18
  now he'd be a Trump supporter I was like no if he was around now he'd be Chris Pratt who was also
• 43:24
  a Christian and you know keeps his political cards close to his chest but probably holds all kinds
• 43:29
  of ideas that you don't that aren't don't subscribe to the the full work orthodoxy and is sensible
• 43:36
  enough not to not to say anything how do you feel about well let's talk about quillette and how it
• 43:41
  came about because we can transition now to talking about our ability to talk about things
• 43:45
  and let's have a conversation about having conversations okay what sparked it well explain to
• 43:51
  people by the way the weird thing is that you're probably better known to our US listeners than
• 43:54
  you are to our Australian let's just know you're here so tell people what quillette is if they don't
• 43:58
  know okay so quillette is an online magazine it's at quillette.com it's double l double t and I
• 44:05
  founded that at the end of 2015 when I left my postgraduate education in university what did you
• 44:12
  study I was studying psychology and I just created a website because those quite active on social
• 44:20
  media and I had in my circle I knew some very talented writers and thinkers who weren't
• 44:28
  didn't have big platforms and I saw that this talent was being underutilized so I thought I'm
• 44:36
  going to create my own website and get these people to write for me so on quillette we have a
• 44:41
  when I started it I had this tagline that we were a platform for ideas even dangerous ones and I
• 44:49
  wanted to publish essays that were relied on evidence and that were very well reason but which
• 44:58
  questions some of the orthodox narratives that I saw being popular in mainstream press and so one of
• 45:06
  these narratives that I wanted to challenge was that was one that I was talking about earlier and
• 45:13
  that is that you know just because there aren't 50% of women in you know fortune 500 boards or just
• 45:21
  because there aren't 50% of women on the Google engineering team does that mean it's because of
• 45:27
  sexism because studying sex differences was an interest of mine and I just knew that there was all
• 45:34
  of this literature that was really interesting that people the general public is not aware of this
• 45:40
  literature around men and women having different career preferences for example so I created the
• 45:45
  platform and invited scientists and academics to write for me about some of these thorny topics
• 45:55
  because I just saw the the narratives being promoted in mainstream media just becoming more and
• 46:02
  more simple and less well reasoned and less reliant on evidence and I thought that was worrying
• 46:09
  trend and I still think it's a worrying trend so now when you Google Quillette and you look at the
• 46:14
  critiques of it of course there's always like why racists conservatives and quote unquote liberals
• 46:22
  write for Quillette and you know they'll be they'll be hot smackdowns from Vox about
• 46:28
  Quillette peddling race science or phrenology or something like like that what do you make of being
• 46:35
  in that grouping oh it's very it's very sad it's very unfortunate and it's because
• 46:42
  because I studied psychology there's some areas of psychology that are just extremely taboo like
• 46:47
  intelligence research is extremely taboo and I didn't quite realize and just to put some flesh
• 46:54
  on those bones the the point that they're making when they say that your guilty of publishing race
• 46:59
  science is any any conversation about whether or not there are what IQ differences between
• 47:04
  different populations between different ethnic different ethnic populations is that right
• 47:08
  yeah so when I did my undergraduate study I was at the University of Adelaide and the chair
• 47:15
  of psychology at the University of Adelaide was an intelligence researcher and so I was exposed
• 47:21
  to all of this research that is taboo I didn't realize how taboo was when I was studying
• 47:29
  at university but intelligent it's not just intelligent group differences in intelligence that's
• 47:35
  taboo but at any kind of individual differences research is is basically taboo now it's been
• 47:42
  associated with eugenics and all sorts of different areas I mean even within the one race talking
• 47:49
  about people's different IQ levels oh if you if you want to have a conversation about that online
• 47:55
  or on social media I mean there was a study that came out recently that showed that exposure
• 48:01
  to lead in children growing up lowered the their IQ so that's an environmental input it's not genetic
• 48:08
  or anything like that and people were just going nuts on social media calling it a eugenicist
• 48:15
  study eugenics study because just the notion that one can have an IQ score is just considered
• 48:22
  extremely nefarious by certain groups of people is it because they're worried that certain ethnic
• 48:29
  groups are likely to have to live in areas where they're exposed to high lead or is it even without
• 48:34
  overlaying ethnicity onto it I think it's this idea of of a score being a kind of a ranking having
• 48:41
  a rank and so as soon as you put an IQ score on a person it's like limiting and putting them
• 48:48
  into a box I mean population differences are extremely taboo and they're it's not just because
• 48:54
  it's a controversial area but the methods aren't as highly developed as other areas so I I can see
• 49:02
  why people don't want scientific studies and scientific research into population differences
• 49:08
  I think that's reasonable yeah however the opposition to intelligence research goes beyond that
• 49:16
  and it's basically opposed to it in its entirety it sounds like there's a lot of blank
• 49:22
  slatism going on right it sounds like the common thread between a lot of the things that
• 49:27
  book you whether it's like intelligence research or gender or whatever is your antipathy
• 49:34
  and tell me if I'm overgeneralizing to the idea that humans are infinitely malleable and come
• 49:40
  out of the oven as blank slate so that actually you're saying that's not true yeah and for
• 49:48
  people who aren't aware of the term blank slate that comes from a 2002 book by Stephen Pinker and
• 49:54
  it was hugely influential on me in the way I think and and you're right a big a common thread
• 50:01
  that unites a lot of the topics that I'm interested in and a lot of the themes and collect is
• 50:06
  antipathy towards blank slateism and what we would call cultural determinism so we've all heard
• 50:13
  I mean most of us has probably heard the term biological determinism which is which is this
• 50:22
  idea that 100% of what we do and who we are is determined by our genetics now no one really
• 50:29
  believes that that's just not a viewpoint held by any serious person however there are
• 50:37
  quite a few people who seem to believe that who we are and what we do is almost 100% determined
• 50:44
  by our culture or by our social environment and so where I'm coming from is just saying hold on
• 50:53
  guys what if it's like a bit of both like what if it's you know on average 50 50 what if
• 51:00
  our environment matters a lot but what if also the human nature that we bring with us
• 51:07
  it is also a big player the funny thing is clear that there seem to be two tracks one running in
• 51:14
  the scientific community and the other running in the cultural community cultural studies
• 51:19
  academic community yeah and they're going in opposite directions yeah because actually the more
• 51:24
  I understand about the science like the cutting edge of science is finding genetic components to
• 51:28
  all kinds of things that we didn't think we had you know twins studies are incredible when you
• 51:33
  look at the similarities between between identical twins who were separated at birth you know
• 51:39
  studies are on siblings who are genetically different yeah but raised in the same environment
• 51:44
  still show large differences look I've got twins so I can tell you from like a personal experience
• 51:48
  just my end of one or rather two is that they they came out different like they were different
• 51:53
  they were different from day one and they've been persistent over time in their differences
• 51:57
  even before even when they were too young to be subject to environmental factors and I think
• 52:02
  most parents will say that even if you have one kid then you have a second kid oh this one's
• 52:07
  absolutely different right yeah you realize how limited your environmental inputs are in changing
• 52:13
  who they are because yeah there are certain certain traits that they that that are intrinsic to
• 52:18
  them and yet at the same time you've got this parallel track of cultural studies gender studies
• 52:24
  rare critical race theory yeah where it seems to all be there's no difference between any
• 52:31
  of us at all yeah we're infinitely malleable and all of the world's problems are caused by power
• 52:37
  structures and power dynamics yeah with white straight males at the apex essentially ruining life
• 52:42
  for everybody else yeah below them and it's I think you that's a very perceptive common and I
• 52:49
  think that's true and and the strange thing is that one of those tracks is more influential
• 52:57
  at the moment particularly in our cultural institutions then the other and it's the one that
• 53:04
  doesn't have the evidence behind it and that is you know this all of this material that's coming
• 53:11
  out of cultural studies and critical race theory and gender studies and it's it's very strange to
• 53:18
  me that the fields that are most that are the weakest in terms of their methodology are the most
• 53:25
  influential in our broader culture and I think it's I think it's worrying but yeah I mean I'm just
• 53:32
  trying to do my bit with colette in bringing a bit of balance to the conversation but it's not easy
• 53:38
  and like you said before I've been smeared and described as a racist and all sorts of horrible name
• 53:43
  called all sorts of horrible names but you just have to keep going why do you think the cultural
• 53:48
  theory is becoming more dominant in and it's not just in cultural conversations but everywhere in
• 53:52
  the media and you know what is and isn't okay to say at your neighbor's dinner party then the
• 53:59
  scientific one because a few years ago I remember having conversations so when like Brett Weinstein
• 54:06
  for example lost his job or Nicholas Christakis do you want to just do you remember those situations
• 54:12
  and do you want to articulate for people what sort of happened in that in I suppose the campus
• 54:17
  uprisings of whenever that was five years ago well Nicholas Christakis who's a sociologist and
• 54:24
  also a physician at he was formally at Yale he's not anymore I think he's at still at Yale sorry
• 54:31
  but he doesn't have an administrative position uh he was sort of stalked by a mob and shouted
• 54:39
  down in a quadrangle on the Yale campus because he defended an email that his wife had written
• 54:47
  now he and his wife had admin positions and they were sort of like the master of a house
• 54:52
  where students go and live anyway the master is a word that's been erased now from Yale hasn't
• 54:58
  because yeah what kind of slavery could it was like slavery even though obviously it comes from
• 55:02
  the old English idea of masters and so on but yeah so his so what happened was uh Halloween was
• 55:10
  coming up and they had you know people were sending emails around saying you can't dress as
• 55:18
  this and that you can't be you can't engage in cultural appropriation during Halloween
• 55:23
  and Nicholas Christakis so for people who are outside of the states you know sometimes college
• 55:28
  students might dress up as Native American Indians or something and you know we're somewhere
• 55:33
  or have yeah or as a Mexican or something like that and this was saying make sure that whatever
• 55:37
  you dress up as is not couldn't be interpreted as being offensive yeah and uh Nicholas Christakis's
• 55:45
  wife sent an email back or to the student saying let's not uh she didn't think it was
• 55:52
  the role of the academics the faculty or the administrators to police students Halloween costumes
• 56:00
  and she wanted to sort of underscore the fact that they were adults and it wasn't the role of
• 56:07
  the administrators or the faculty or the people in authority positions to go around policing
• 56:12
  other students um or policing the students Halloween costumes which is you know completely
• 56:18
  we would consider that completely reasonable anyway there was a bit of a meltdown on the Yale
• 56:23
  Yale campus and there's this incredible footage of Nicholas Christakis being um shouted down
• 56:33
  by a mob and he's been incredibly calm and uh non-threatening and listening to the students and
• 56:40
  they're screaming in his face telling him to resign and that he should lose his job
• 56:46
  all because of this dust up over Halloween costumes
• 57:04
  what happened on every at Evergreen State College was worse and there's a documentary about it
• 57:10
  and there's a few there's articles about it uh students basically took over the campus
• 57:16
  there was an incident where or there was there was a day where all white staff and white
• 57:25
  students were asked to leave to stay stay away from campus and Brett Weinstein and his wife
• 57:31
  protested that they thought that it was racist this was an inversion of a traditional day of absence
• 57:37
  that had taken place where African-American uh faculty and students would stay away for a day
• 57:42
  as a way of sort of indicating to the non-black uh staff and students that how important they were
• 57:49
  and so this year uh they decided to invert that and instead of staying away they wanted all
• 57:55
  all white people to stay off campus and he regarded that inversion as being a perversion of the
• 58:00
  spirit of Martin Luther King and and Brett is an old lefty I mean he was a Bernie Sanders supporter
• 58:05
  that's not like you know he was racist but this ended up coming in an intolerable situation for him
• 58:11
  yeah and he's also Jewish and so he's aware of where this kind of racial antagonism can lead
• 58:19
  and I think he's brought that up a few times in his discussions about what happened at Evergreen
• 58:25
  anyway the things sort of spiraled out of control on Evergreen and there is I mean I can't
• 58:34
  recount you know the blow by blow of exactly what happened but it culminated in in groups of
• 58:39
  students walking around with baseball bats and Brett having to flee the university and being
• 58:46
  protected by police and at one point the president of the university was basically imprisoned in a
• 58:54
  library and there's footage of him asking the students to let him go to the toilet and they decline
• 59:01
  so they're basically took over the university the worst thing about that scene is what a complete
• 59:08
  woose he is and how how he has owned he is so co-opted yeah and been inculcated with the ideologies
• 59:17
  of the work racial justice students that he can't even see that he is literally being held hostage
• 59:25
  okay yeah well I'm totally you know he's just tap him with a feather and he buckles yeah it's
• 59:33
  there's this you can I've seen it just yesterday or this morning with there's footage of Ted
• 59:38
  Wheeler who's this very progressive mayor of a very progressive city in the United States called
• 59:44
  Portland and there's been lots of protests in Portland it's like the 56th day of protests
• 59:51
  and he's there's this footage of him going out and talking to the protesters and they start
• 59:57
  bullying him like you know swearing at him and calling him a fascist and there's there seems
• 1:00:04
  to be little awareness I mean look I can't mind read but it seems like some of these leaders
• 1:00:10
  just can't appreciate that they might be getting bullied like all of the grievances of the protesters
• 1:00:17
  or the aggrieved students or the people who are upset are almost they're considered just valid
• 1:00:25
  just by default yeah I mean this is one of the great one of the things that really alarms me about
• 1:00:30
  our political and cultural moment is that the only people who are doing any vocal standing up
• 1:00:36
  to any of this are people who are quasi fascists themselves like Donald Trump for example I think
• 1:00:42
  is the worst president ever and is cynically manipulating this stuff in order to tub a thump
• 1:00:51
  and and intentionally engineer a far right backlash against it and a white identitarian backlash
• 1:00:58
  which is the worst possible thing I mean the reason why people sometimes say well Josh why
• 1:01:02
  you concerned about all this stuff like there's so much more important stuff to focus on why
• 1:01:06
  you focus on all of the transgressions about Trump and the things that the far right is doing
• 1:01:10
  why you criticize your own side on the left and I say because I think that we are giving them fuel
• 1:01:14
  because I think we are creating an environment that empowers them and you only have to look
• 1:01:20
  at how feckless people like the people you're talking about are in the mayor of Portland or
• 1:01:26
  you know the administrator of Brett Weinstein's university university to see that we've lost a
• 1:01:32
  place of moral clarity or moral courage in liberalism in small liberalism we don't have a they
• 1:01:40
  don't feel that they have standing to be able to say no shut the fuck up this is my university sit
• 1:01:45
  your ass down get out there we're going to deal with this democratically you'll be able to have
• 1:01:49
  your voice you'll be able to have whatever submissions you want to but you're not keeping me hostage
• 1:01:52
  in here I'm going to the fucking toilet right now and if you try to stop me then you can run
• 1:01:56
  up in jail like that has to be something that can be said without you feeling like oh my god am I
• 1:02:01
  bit of an authoritarian no you're not an authoritarian you just don't want to be held hostage
• 1:02:06
  by mobs no I completely agree and you know the people who really have that kind of strength and
• 1:02:12
  leadership I mean there are people there are leaders like that in the United States but they're
• 1:02:18
  few and far between and one thing I've learned over the over the past few years is that courage is
• 1:02:26
  is quite rare and for leaders to have courage it's like it's more rare for a person to have courage
• 1:02:33
  than intelligence like there's lots of smart people there's lots of really talented people
• 1:02:38
  who are good at their jobs but having a leader with courage that's rare what does courage look like to
• 1:02:44
  you well I an example of courage that I saw recently was this letter that Barry white Barry
• 1:02:51
  wrote when she left the New York Times now Barry was she's a centrist and she was working at the
• 1:03:00
  New York Times in the opinion section and she was subject to all sorts of bullying by her colleagues
• 1:03:06
  and and this continued over a number of years she gets she gets bullied online on Twitter now her
• 1:03:13
  opinions are really mainstream they're really middle of the road she's anti-Trump she's you know
• 1:03:20
  open like pro immigration she just has a few positions that you would describe as heterodox like
• 1:03:26
  she wrote she wrote the article on the intellectual dark web a few years ago and she she pushes back
• 1:03:33
  against you know Marxism and that kind of you know over kind of critical theory type stuff and she's
• 1:03:40
  published you know stories written by Iranian migrants and refugees who are critical of their regime
• 1:03:48
  and she's pro-Israel and that type of thing so she's she's an independent thinker but her
• 1:03:54
  her viewpoints are very centrist but she but she was subject to the worst kinds of bullying in her
• 1:04:00
  workplace and the letter she wrote the owner of the New York Times as she left as she resigned I
• 1:04:08
  thought was very brave and had that moral clarity that you're talking about where she wasn't
• 1:04:14
  not afraid to call it out to call out the the toxic behavior that she was subjected to and she
• 1:04:21
  wasn't apologetic about her support of liberalism small liberal liberal liberalism and I just
• 1:04:29
  I thought that was very brave what are the big threats let's just wrap with your kind of if you
• 1:04:34
  want to put on your prognosticators hat what are the big threats and the big opportunities for us
• 1:04:38
  culturally at the moment I think the threat the the threat that I see I mean look in the United
• 1:04:46
  States who knows what's going to happen I think you're you're spot on when you say that the far
• 1:04:52
  right and the far left are giving fuel to each other and I don't see how these trends are going
• 1:04:58
  to de-escalate anytime soon so I'm pessimistic about America I think in Australia we have to be
• 1:05:05
  careful that trendy theories like critical race theory don't infiltrate the justice system
• 1:05:12
  because I think things like colorblind colorblind humanism and treating people equally and not
• 1:05:21
  giving special treatment to people just because of their gender or skin color or anything like that
• 1:05:26
  that's really that's a really important aspect of our legal system that must be protected and even
• 1:05:32
  though these theories might become popular in circles in the media we have to be very careful
• 1:05:38
  that they don't become enshrined into law so that I think protecting the justice system would be
• 1:05:45
  the most important and also I mean also capitalist organizations as well and I'll come back to you
• 1:05:53
  about what opportunities you see but I forgot that the reason why I raised Brett Weinstein and
• 1:05:58
  Nicholas Chris Tarkas before was because when all of that was going down five years ago a lot of
• 1:06:03
  people were saying why focus on these campus like there are a few campus flare-ups but they're not
• 1:06:09
  indicative of anything broader than just American universities being a little bit weird which has
• 1:06:13
  always been the case you know universities are hotbeds of strange ideas and people like and I
• 1:06:19
  think Barry Weiss made this point if not in her departure letter in a recent column that
• 1:06:25
  what happens in universities spreads everywhere because the students graduate from universities so
• 1:06:33
  at the moment when you were talking about the shifting more rays of what's acceptable and what's
• 1:06:37
  not acceptable to say yeah right now in an organization in a media organization in Australia for
• 1:06:44
  example there'll be quite a lot of latitude about what you can't say yeah but that's because the
• 1:06:50
  people who run media organizations in Australia didn't go to university in the 2000s yeah yeah when
• 1:06:56
  the people who went to university graduated from university in the 2000s are running big media
• 1:07:02
  organizations it's totally unclear to me whether or not conversations like the one that we're having
• 1:07:07
  yeah are going to be tolerable yes yeah and it might just be the case that people are going to have
• 1:07:14
  to set up their own institutions if they want to preserve the more traditional values of small
• 1:07:20
  well that's right and that's what you've done and that's what I that's what I've done but it's
• 1:07:24
  so what are the opportunities here because they must they must be there there must be diamonds in
• 1:07:28
  the rough yeah yeah so I mean Collette has been pop like we are successful you know our own small
• 1:07:36
  way because we've got a niche readership of people who are very passionate about the issues that
• 1:07:43
  we explore and because there is such a vacuum of courage and leadership particularly in the
• 1:07:50
  United States around these issues it is actually quite easy to build an audience and find an
• 1:07:56
  audience if one is engaging in sort of sincere earnest debate around some of these thorny topics
• 1:08:05
  because it is rare and so yeah I mean I do I definitely think there are opportunities for anybody
• 1:08:14
  wanting to engage in the culture like even artists who are doing non-work like I got a submission
• 1:08:23
  from a cartoonist yesterday full of these hilarious cartoons that are non-work you know and it's
• 1:08:30
  because everything because the legacy institutions are becoming more and more homogenized
• 1:08:37
  their output is becoming more boring and so I think there's tremendous opportunity for anybody
• 1:08:42
  doing something different and I don't think it needs to be like anti-PC or conservative or anything
• 1:08:49
  like that I just think there's more space to be unique and original like if you're not if you're
• 1:08:56
  not towing the work line there's just more space in that area all right the eclectic
• 1:09:02
  heterodox revolution join us join Claire thank you Claire Greg Storch thanks Josh thanks for having me