Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The New Gurus" with Helen Lewis

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"The New Gurus" with Helen Lewis · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Can I hear them? Welcome to the same case for dangerous ideas. There are two videos of Jordan
• 0:08
  Peterson, the controversial psychologist who came to fame when he refused to be objected
• 0:16
  to a Canadian law that was going to require him to use transgender pronouns. And that
• 0:21
  caused a kerfuffle. He subsequently went on Joe Rogan's show and became something of
• 0:26
  a mentor to mostly young men all over the world in ways that were overwhelmingly constructive
• 0:33
  for some and potentially deleterious to others. He's become a figure in the kind of pushback
• 0:40
  against woke cancel culture cultural fads. And there are two video interviews with him,
• 0:49
  each by a female British journalist that have bazillions of views on YouTube and that
• 0:56
  you may have caught sometime in the past five years. The most notorious one is the one
• 1:03
  where the interviewer is completely demolished and owned by Jordan Peterson. It's one of
• 1:07
  the most fascinating 20 minutes of interview TV you will ever see as he plays with her
• 1:14
  like a cat with a mouse and she just sort of stammers around and says so what you're saying
• 1:20
  is that you don't think women are as good as men and he just laughs and says that's not
• 1:26
  what I'm saying at all. The other of the two sort of viral Jordan Peterson interviews
• 1:32
  with English female journalists is a very different kettle of fish because he's up against
• 1:40
  a much more powerful and intellectually ferocious foe in the form of Helen Lewis. And that
• 1:50
  interview is one in which you cannot say that Jordan Peterson wins at all. And Helen
• 1:56
  is not the woke cardboard cut out angry feminist that Jordan comes in thinking she will be.
• 2:04
  But actually a very nuanced and fiercely independent minded individual who has some thoughtful
• 2:13
  objections to Jordan Peterson that sounded a bit like this. The doctrines that I'm opposed to
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  are predicated on well one assumption that predicated on it's probably the primary assumption
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  is that the best way to view history is as the domination of a tyrannical male patriarchy
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  and that's true also particularly of the West which is a doctrine I find absolutely unpalatable
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  and historically observed biologically ridiculous and ungrateful among other things. Who's ungrateful,
• 2:42
  sorry, and who is being ungrateful? Look at what you have when you live in the best society that's
• 2:49
  ever been created. You know, I was reading about some engineers. Do you mean me as a woman or me
• 2:54
  as a 21st century person in the world? I mean us. I mean I'm incredibly grateful what I have but
• 3:00
  to me the point of construction of a tyrannical patriarchy. You're grateful for the productions of a
• 3:06
  tyrannical patriarchy. How does that make sense? Because I think life is good. I think it could be better.
• 3:11
  That's probably reasonable proposition. But that isn't commensurate with your claim that you're
• 3:17
  the beneficiary of a tyrannical patriarchy. Why not? How can it be good if it's the consequence of a
• 3:24
  tyrannical patriarchy? Tyranny isn't good, isn't it? I mean that's the definition of tyranny.
• 3:29
  Something that isn't good. And yet it's produced all these things that you're grateful for.
• 3:34
  Doesn't that contradiction bother you? Where did what was good come from?
• 3:39
  Well, I think I'm benefiting actually from a lot of things that I don't support that are
• 3:44
  unearned privileges in my life. I think that's absolutely true. Like your job?
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  Like I have a very good job. I had a loving family. I don't think that's going to do the world
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  any good is it? That's a hell of a fine rationalization for your privileged position.
• 3:56
  Well, fair enough. But you could trade it off with someone who's less privileged.
• 4:00
  I could. I could. I could do that. But I don't want to. And I won't. And I don't make it
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  expected to. Why not? Is it okay for you to occupy a position of privilege in the patriarchy?
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  And if it is, is it because of your female or is it just because it's convenient?
• 4:15
  Let me tell you my political philosophy. I guess I'm a social democrat. So what I believe is that
• 4:19
  you should, if you have a good life, you should try and pass that on. I believe in a progressive
• 4:24
  redistributive tax system, for example. It was once said by Lord Mandelson and British politics,
• 4:28
  you know, but new labour was okay with people being filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes.
• 4:32
  Now, I'm kind of less okay with people being filthy rich. This is not a filthy rich.
• 4:36
  Well, I think I would leave that to you. You're probably in the top one tenth of one
• 4:39
  percent of people who've ever lived on the planet. That would constitute filthy rich by historical
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  standards. Okay, but I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to help the Andertals at this point
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  really by giving up some money. So that's Helen Lewis and Jordan Peterson. That's where she first
• 4:54
  really came to my attention. She's now a staff writer at The Atlantic. Her book is called Difficult
• 5:01
  Women, The History of Feminism in 11 Fights. And I've also just listened to her BBC Radio show The
• 5:08
  Spark, which is available as a single audio book on Audible if you want to hear it. It was a long
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  form interview series about creativity. She's now doing another one called Guru's, which looks at,
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  you know, people and movements that can mislead the lay person into particular ways of thinking.
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  And she has another book coming out next year called The Selfish Genius. I'd love to have it back
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  on the show. Look, this is a very, very wide-ranging conversation. She's an absolute joy to talk to
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  because she's just so thoughtful about so many things and comes from things at a very similar
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  perspective to mind. This is not a fiery interview at all. It's not at all uncomfortable because I
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  can't find things to fault her with. But we explore a whole lot of uncomfortable territory and we
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  explore a whole lot of issues that will you to raise them at a cocktail party or at a barbecue
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  or on television would certainly stoke some uncomfortable reactions. So I hope you enjoy as much as
• 6:03
  I did to want to know the hell of Lewis.
• 6:16
  Yeah, I've been working on a piece about Florida as a kind of
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  incredible of American politics, which I guess I thought it'd be interesting to send somebody
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  not just British, but so British that I took my own tea bags with me.
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  Made tea in a saucepan in my apartment. Have you seen the American videos teaching people how to
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  make British tea? Oh, I saw some micro-waving one. That's right, everything is wrong.
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  Another of these here's how to make your, you know, your true English tea in 60 seconds.
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  First, you get a tea bag, then you get a cold cup of water. You put the tea bag in the water,
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  you put it in the microwave for 90 seconds. Now, I think they put the milk in first. So I think
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  they had a cold milk water broth with a tea bag in it that they're micro-waving. And there was
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  this long Twitter argument with Americans like going, but what's the difference? What difference
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  is it make? Like, it doesn't make any difference. Why would I buy a whole kettle? When I moved to New
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  York, I tried to buy a kettle. And you know, they're huge electronics stores, Helen, where they're,
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  you know, they'll have four store-it-stories. And every single imaginable type of air fryer
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  and everything, I couldn't get a kettle. They use, when they do boil water, they have a kettle that
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  goes on the stove, an old-fashioned kettle like your nanomite have had. And way up the back,
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  like I asked, about four salespeople. And way up the back of one corner of one store in a dusty,
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  like underneath a bunch of other stuff, there were two electric kettles, which I bought.
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  I respect that. Do you know what I respect? Even more. When I got to Gatwick on my way out,
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  I was checking in behind a guy who was taking his nispressing machine on holiday with him.
• 8:01
  Oh, good for him. Yeah.
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  Guess where he was going on holiday. Where? Italy.
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  That's peak breakfast. It's just like, oh, I want to probably have to get a cup of coffee in Italy.
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  Italian, you can't get coffee. Yeah, I mean, if you, when you leave home in Australia,
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  and I'm sure it's the same in the UK, if you only have two things, before you even have a bed mattress,
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  you will have a toaster and a kettle. That's all you need in life.
• 8:32
  Yeah, I think when I went to university, I think I probably took my own kettle.
• 8:35
  Yeah. Actually, I did because I tried to boil pasta in it. That was an error. I don't do that.
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  It's just you really can't do that. That was as bad as bad as the American white gravy and their tea to be honest.
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  But that's the only internet.
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  And were you at the time?
• 8:48
  Yes. That means a fair point. Actually, now I come to think of it.
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  And they've been fighters that made that seem a better idea than it.
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  I have been wishing that I had you by my side helping me to write something this morning,
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  because I've been just been asked to deliver an award next week in only a few days time,
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  which seems quite, I suppose someone must have dropped out or something and they were like,
• 9:09
  all right, what's the V-list? We'll go to Josh at the Australian podcast awards.
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  And it's an award that this podcast has been snubbed for two years in a row, right?
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  So this podcast has won a number of awards and has a lot of listeners and is the kind of thing
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  that people listen to guiltily in the halls of power in Australia and in media organizations where
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  they don't otherwise hear conversations that don't really give a shit about whether or not they
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  break taboos, because everything's so bloody conformist in the mainstream.
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  And the Australian podcast awards at the risk of criticizing the hand that's about to feed me
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  can be a little bit backslapy, white middle class people congratulating ourselves on how
• 9:55
  sort of diverse and work we are. And so this show gets overlooked and then they invite me to
• 10:05
  deliver an award. That's hilarious, that has happened to me. I've been invited to judge a book prize
• 10:10
  for which my book was not short. It's one of the great things about journalism, right?
• 10:15
  It's the repeated kicks in the teeth that you get to remind you that you're not the talent.
• 10:20
  The kind of version of that that I get is there's obviously a kind of hierarchy of UK feminist
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  commentators. And when some anti-feminism happens, some sort of bat signal goes up and the BBC
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  start phoning around to see you'll commentate on it. And you can, because obviously I know
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  almost all the other feminists and therefore we can see the order in which we get phoned.
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  You are extremely aware of your place in the hierarchy. Yes.
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  Cat them around wasn't available. Oh, I see. Thanks.
• 10:44
  Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So I guess it's probably going to be about 13 minutes past four and
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  I'll get the phone call. Yep. There I go. Right on time in between those other two.
• 10:53
  Yeah. I've only leavened, of course, by the occasional fact that sometimes you've just turned
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  something down and someone will pop up in your WhatsApp group being like, oh, I've been invited
• 11:00
  to go on this and you have that. Oh, I'm about you. Yes, excellent. Yeah. So part of me wanted to
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  say, no, I'm not going to do you deliver your stupid award. And then part of me thought,
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  maybe it's an opportunity to shit on them a little bit and just, you know, just write a,
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  because also the award that I'm giving is, I won't go into details, but it is almost certain
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  to be won by an absolutely beloved Australian media personality who is the toast of the left.
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  Oh, good. I can, I look up and just get, I'll just shit on him because he's a friend of mine.
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  And he, I don't think I'll think he'll take it in good in the spirit in which it's intended,
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  but Mark Fonell is a great broadcaster and a great bloke, but his bread and butter is basically,
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  like he has a TV show and a podcast called What the British Stole. And it follows, it's very good.
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  It follows the stories of things at the British Empire, pilfered from around the world and the
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  amazing tales of how they ended up back in Britain. And so it's a sort of a, it's a work critic of
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  colonialism, but also an entertaining story about a history of things. And it works very well on
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  the latter and on the former. It's been insufferable. So he's the one who's nominated in the award
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  category that I'm delivering. So exactly how much shit I pour on him before he's about to win his
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  award is the moral conundrum. Right. You can be like, what did the Australian steal? They stole this
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  award from me. They stuff the Australian podcast awards stole. Yes, my mission, my dream.
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  Not even a nomination, Helen. It's not that I lost in the category, not a nomination.
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  You weren't even not, yeah, not even like two years in a row, not not the other a big award in
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  Australia. Now I'm like, I've got sour grapes. Maybe I do. But the other the other big award in
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  podcast award in Australia, the radio today podcast awards are one last year. So you would
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  think that if you win one of them, you might get nominated for the other on one of the two years.
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  I mean, I would say this because every so often someone describes me as an award-winning journalist
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  and I have to tell them that the only literally any award ever won was at a 2013 at the British
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  video games awards. I won best mainstream games writer of the year literally anything I've ever won.
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  But they are just about the most corrupt saying in the world and journalism is absolutely addicted
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  to awards because it's five grand for a table and it's like the only business model in journalism
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  that still reliably brings in action. Yes, it's fascinating. I mean, the other thing that marked
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  us and now I'm just well and truly throwing you under the vast mark. Sorry, I love you mate, but
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  this is one one quirk of your personality that you could fix is he'll go and submit himself to
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  exotic sounding awards that are actually just money-making mills that charge so much for the entry
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  that they are self-perpetuating. So there's and there's things that Australians will never have
• 13:58
  heard of like something called the New York podcast awards. Sounds very important, Helen. The New
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  York podcast New York. Big city. Important media hub. The New York podcast awards. But is it New York
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  Western Australia? It's like a summer first. Is that what you're going to tell me? No, it's not
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  that bad. It is in New York. So someone in New York has a PO box in the Bronx and they're commuting
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  from Staten Island to the PO box where they where they collect the 400 US dollar entry fee.
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  400 US dollar entry fee on however many awards submissions they get and suffice it to say,
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  Mark Finnell is very popular at the New York podcast awards because he fronts up that money reliably
• 14:42
  every year and comes home with a gleaming statuette. And then it's great. And then on his Instagram,
• 14:51
  you know, people are like, wow, I mean, he's kicking all these goals overseas. Did you hear him?
• 14:56
  He won a New York podcast award. What's a New York podcast award? I don't know, but it sounds
• 15:01
  incredible. Right? It does to me. So congratulations, Mark.
• 15:08
  I'm really happy with you. It was a great goal for dial thing. It's like when one of my friends
• 15:13
  succeeds, a little part of me dies. That's right. But that's not actually true for me.
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  I do rejoice in my friend's success. I just want the success to be legit.
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  You know, they got actually do it out and do good stuff. And then, you know,
• 15:31
  I'll all praise to you, but don't don't as as the great judge Judy says, Helen, don't piss on
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  my leg and tell me it's raining. It's very true. Well, I'm sure that was very relatable to
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  everybody listening. And now we can begin the question. Helen's list of grievances. All the
• 15:48
  slides I have received in my career. Oh, dear. So, where is your career and your ambitions
• 15:55
  out at the moment? Like, what are you most interested in digging into? Tell us about the thing
• 15:59
  that's about to come up, because I've seen the evolution of what seemed to be your interest in
• 16:06
  the things that you're covering, expand somewhat from, I suppose, what may originally have been
• 16:12
  straight journalism to, I don't know if you'd call it commentary, but certainly an interest
• 16:17
  in in a field of bullshit that's going on in society that you feel compelled to take down
• 16:23
  with that be fair. Yeah, I think I have a sort of tendency, which journalism is very good for
• 16:28
  if I just want to stick my fingers in the plug socket to see what happens. And therefore, I was,
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  you know, when Twitter was in its heyday, I used to stick my fingers in that plug socket a lot.
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  And now I tend to do it over many more thousands of words, but it's always interesting to write
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  the intersection of cultural cross-currents where there isn't a right answer. And I just the thing
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  that upsets me more than anything is the idea of writing just conventional wisdom, repeating back
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  to a kind of audience of people who will then applaud me for telling them back to them what they
• 16:59
  already want to hear. So, I think that's probably my motto, my career so far. I'm really enjoying the
• 17:05
  Atlantic because I get to go out and do proper reporting, which has been fantastic. I hated being
• 17:11
  stuck at home during the pandemic and just being it just being in weird places doing weird things.
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  So I when I was in Florida in the last couple of weeks, for example, you know, I've done everything
• 17:22
  from going to Disneyland to the biggest retirement village in America, which is, which you can get
• 17:29
  everywhere in it by golf cart. And they sell these sort of semi-souped up golf carts, one of them I
• 17:35
  got to sit in, which was called the limousine, which is a six-seater and you can fit your clubs in
• 17:39
  the back and like a cooler. And like everything is configured so that you can drive around. We
• 17:44
  know where other places would have bike lanes, they have golf cart lanes. It's just this kind of,
• 17:50
  it's like a sort of vision of the world that what would happen if only 75-year-old survived.
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  And I just love that. That was just completely like nothing I'd ever experienced before. And that's
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  what I like doing. Going just looking at things and sort of prodding them and going, that's weird,
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  isn't it? Coming back and telling people about them. How do you figure out what things to prod?
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  I think now I have tuned myself into the fact that things that I find interesting and weird
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  to trust that that judgment. And that I guess that sounds very basic, but it's not in the sense that
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  I think a lot of journalism is very status-seeking and you want to pretend that you're willing to,
• 18:27
  as my old colleague used to use his short-hand was Korean films with subtitles. And some people
• 18:32
  genuinely do love Korean films with subtitles, but there is actually nothing wrong as well with
• 18:37
  like loving Marvel, Marvel films or whatever it might be. And I think just acknowledging the
• 18:42
  stuff that genuinely interests you, rather than the stuff that you'd like to look like,
• 18:45
  interests you is quite an important habit to embrace.
• 18:48
  What about being on the, I mean, is part of that status thing being seen to be on the right
• 18:54
  team increasingly? I mean, this sort of comes back to what we're talking about there that I often
• 18:58
  find myself being diverted into fields of inquiry or conversations on my radio show
• 19:07
  that are paths of least resistance because there's a kind of climate that's constructed by
• 19:13
  my producers and the institution that values certain concerns over other concerns.
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  So, you know, if there's anything to do with the plight of Indigenous Australians, for example,
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  that's going to be a story towards which we just naturally gravitate.
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  And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that I'm definitely not going to be the only
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  journalist who's gravitating there because that's the cool place to be gravitating. And I always
• 19:38
  find myself having to tug against the gravitational pull towards the stories that everybody thinks
• 19:42
  are worthwhile. And I'm never quite sure how to adjudicate whether they actually are.
• 19:47
  Yeah, but that's a bit like when, you know, when Charlize Theron put the ugly makeup on that made
• 19:53
  her look basically like sort of me at 8.30am in the morning and then wins an Oscar for it because
• 19:57
  it's incredibly brave. You know, there's a bit of, yeah, exactly where she played I only warn us
• 20:02
  the serial killer, you know, and just, oh, she's so mottled, look at her, how brave. But, you know,
• 20:08
  but that's there is a tendency like that of journalism too. And I think one of the biggest
• 20:12
  points when I really fell out of love with Twitter was the realisation that people weren't
• 20:16
  really tweeting information. They were tweeting facts about themselves. You know, they were
• 20:20
  tweeting, they were tweeting, they were kind of constructing a, like a hermit crab shell of ideas
• 20:26
  about them. So it wasn't like, so there was a big phenomenon when I was at the New States,
• 20:30
  which was a left-wing magazine of the story that you would put out. It would be about something
• 20:33
  like a very worthy subject like benefits, for example, or, you know, cutting and for that social
• 20:39
  security type support. And people would tweet it, but not read it. And what they wanted to do is say,
• 20:43
  hey, I'm the kind of person who cares about this, but without actually really actually caring about
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  it, which is one of the great experiences of journalism, right? Like you get to see under the bonnet
• 20:52
  of what people actually care about. And it's not what they say that they care about. And then can I
• 20:57
  think send you into quite a spiral of despair or it can do hopefully the other thing, which is to
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  say there are some things I think are really unglamorous, but I really care about. And I'm going
• 21:07
  to have to work extra hard to try and work out what are the ways that I can make people
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  read this story, despite the fact that their natural instinct is that this is porridge. And this
• 21:16
  will be good for me, but I'm not necessarily going to enjoy it. Yes. And then at the other end of
• 21:20
  the extreme hell and there are, there's a journalism, a Twitter commentary journalism that will
• 21:26
  pander to what people find it very easy to consume. So, you know, on the one hand, you've got
• 21:34
  your 40,000 word piece about the the future of the NHS or of Medicare in Australia. And people
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  will tweet it around without ever reading it because they want to be seen to be the type of person
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  who cares deeply about that sort of thing. And then at the other end, you've got people writing
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  endlessly about the culture wars or now about trans issues or about, you know, some particular hot
• 21:56
  button thing where people are so divided, they've got their team. And it's going to be very, very
• 22:02
  easy to get both clicks and also reads by writing something that flares up passions on one side
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  or another. So you sort of need to escape both, don't you? Yeah, that's just as much of a prison
• 22:15
  as well of the prison of a kind of major contrarianism because it's exciting and people are paying
• 22:20
  attention to and you're getting feedback whereas, you know, just laboring away breaking some long
• 22:24
  running investigative story isn't, you know, just it's so much it's so tragic that you will spend
• 22:29
  months and months on something and it will get less attention than something that you knocked out
• 22:32
  in half an hour. That is definitely an experience of modern journalism. But yeah, I had exactly
• 22:36
  that conversation myself when I wrote difficult women, which is my first book about how much I would
• 22:40
  include the kind of modern gender wars in it. And the conclusion I came to was not very much
• 22:45
  because it's not really relevant and I don't want it to eat what is a history of feminism
• 22:50
  through the vote and, you know, the fight for divorce, the fight for equal pay, all of that stuff
• 22:56
  that is sort of bread and butter, you know, that's the bit the challenges to make that stuff that
• 23:00
  everyone will go, oh, that's been written about before, to make it interesting and fresh for people
• 23:03
  who are coming to it for the first time. So yeah, sometimes you do have to put down the confetti
• 23:09
  canon of contrarianism and just try and slowly work away at something a bit more sort of satisfying.
• 23:15
  And what, I mean, so in the grand arc of feminism, and I don't want to dwell on on trends issues,
• 23:20
  I want to get onto feminism, but just to put a button on trends issues, how impactful do you
• 23:25
  think that this moment of hysteria, should we say, around the impact of trans women on cis women,
• 23:32
  the, you know, the arguments about whether or not there should be safe spaces that are only
• 23:37
  for cis women and that exclude trans women. How, how, I suppose, meaningful will this end up
• 23:43
  being when we look back with the gaze of history on the overall quest for women's rights? Because
• 23:48
  my inclination, just to frame it, my inclination is to say, probably not very, we'll just sort it out
• 23:54
  in the dust will settle and we'll go back to some, not back to, we'll evolve a new status quo in
• 24:00
  which there are both rights and acceptance for trans people and also some way in which cis women
• 24:05
  are able to articulate their womanhood that does not undermine them and we're just currently
• 24:10
  flailing around trying to figure out exactly what that looks like, but shouldn't take more than a
• 24:14
  few decades. And then I've also speak to people who, you know, I was speaking to a very senior
• 24:20
  and well-informed Wall Street Journal reporter in Europe who's a floppy head Englishman who might
• 24:26
  respect very much, but who's quite woke, which is funny working at the journal, but he's a reporter.
• 24:30
  And he was saying, look, the whole thing I'll sort itself out because trans women will join the
• 24:35
  club of womanhood and so it will no longer be meaningful to say something like, oh, you know,
• 24:41
  women aren't winning sports events anymore because we'll all accept that trans women are women
• 24:46
  and so therefore the class of women will be winning sports events. And I said, but what if, what if
• 24:51
  those, you know, what if those are disproportionately all trans women? He was like, well then that won't
• 24:55
  matter because we will have absorbed trans women into the group of women and women will
• 25:00
  be winning sports events. And I thought to myself, that's not a very satisfying, that's almost just a
• 25:05
  total logical begging the question way out of the argument and probably not very satisfying to
• 25:12
  feminists. So, yeah, hello. Male person, male person, very unbothered by other male people succeeding in
• 25:19
  life. Shock, right? But I don't mean to be rude or misgender anybody. I'm talking purely
• 25:26
  biologically, but then is one of the great things that's happening here, particularly in sport,
• 25:29
  is that men are being asked to give up absolutely nothing. It's not like a load of trans men,
• 25:33
  are you biologically female people are going to suddenly muscle in and take over the premier leak,
• 25:37
  right? It's just not going to happen. So they're being asked absolutely nothing. So, of course,
• 25:41
  some of those men love the kind of look, which should just be kind, you know, the further with which
• 25:45
  they're giving away stuff that isn't theirs to begin with, this is kind of astonishing to me.
• 25:51
  But I think I'd probably basically say you're view but bleaker, which is that there have been some
• 25:55
  incredibly important advances for trans people in the last 20 years. You know, I can remember a
• 26:00
  political climate and Sean Fey writes about this very well in her book, The Transgender Issue,
• 26:04
  you know, the kind of cruelty of kind of 90s, naughtys, tabloid journalism was was really kind of
• 26:10
  intrusive and kind of gross. And I think it's really good that we've moved past that. But I think
• 26:16
  it's very smug to kind of talk about the right side of history, you know, in things are not in
• 26:23
  this smooth arc towards a kind of one particular destination. That's really not how it works.
• 26:28
  But I also think what will probably happen is that you say it will shake it into some kind of
• 26:31
  compromise. Maybe not everybody will be happy, but you know, some things will settle down.
• 26:35
  But I have a feeling that the people like me have been emulated on the bonfire of questioning it
• 26:39
  will be kind of gently tidied away. And it will be assumed that if only we'd asked for things in a
• 26:45
  more nice way somehow, a more objective way, if only we'd had testicles while doing so, then
• 26:50
  people would have listened to us. And it was only because we were so unreasonable that actually
• 26:53
  all this huge fire and outrage happened. And that is basically the story of feminism. It's the
• 26:58
  story of the suffragette movement. You know, the suffragette's a terrorist throwing bombs around
• 27:01
  the place. They would have killed people had the first world war not intervened in the UK.
• 27:06
  And then a concerted effort is made in the 1920s to rewrite the story as if it was inevitable.
• 27:12
  And they were always going to get the vote. And it was just merely being a bit, you know, delayed and
• 27:15
  everyone would have got around to it eventually. And that happens, I think, a lot particularly
• 27:19
  in the story of feminism. There's a sort of, no, no, we would have done this anyway. You just,
• 27:22
  you know, you should have asked nicely or whatever it might be. And so I think that will probably
• 27:26
  happen with the gender wars too. I don't think we'll end up in a situation where
• 27:32
  my hunch is the way that it's going is that every individual sporting authority is looking at
• 27:35
  the evidence, you know, world rugby being a very good example and saying, putting people who've
• 27:39
  been through a male puberty into female sport categories is not even unfair. It's actually unsafe.
• 27:45
  And so we can't do that. And I think that's where more and more sporting associations are getting to.
• 27:52
  Now, that might have some really good outcomes, right? And that people might start talking about
• 27:55
  maybe we'll have some mixed non-competitive leagues, maybe we'll have third categories, maybe we'll
• 27:59
  have, I, my preferred suggestion is always, I think I call this A and non-A. So basically anybody
• 28:05
  whose body has been androgenized is in one category and anyone else is in the other. So it's
• 28:10
  completely taken away from ideas of gender identity. It's purely about whether or not you've had that
• 28:14
  huge surge of testosterone that comes through male puberty either because that's your natal puberty
• 28:19
  or by taking the hormones later in life. And then you create two categories on that basis.
• 28:25
  Right. So just tease that out for me. I'm trying to understand that. So, so it's for trans men
• 28:31
  and this men would be on one side, but where would... Well, only if trans men have gone on hormones.
• 28:37
  So one of the really interesting things about the Lea Thomas case in the US who is the trans
• 28:41
  woman's swimmer who transitioned and then was swimming on the women's team. In the same season
• 28:46
  that she did really well, there was a trans man also competing in the women's league, a guy
• 28:50
  called Isaac Henning. And he had had a double mastectomy, so he'd had some surgical inventions,
• 28:55
  but he had not gone on testosterone. So he was somebody with the biochemistry of a natal female
• 29:00
  body. And that meant that for him competing in the women's league was entirely appropriate. And
• 29:05
  guess what? Not even the wildest, angriest turf in the world was upset about that because that
• 29:11
  was somebody in the competitive class of females, even though they were a man and they define
• 29:16
  themselves as a man. So, you know, if you have somebody who has got a disorder of sexual development
• 29:21
  that means that they've got levels of testosterone and a female range, then they could compete as a
• 29:26
  female. If they've got levels in the male range, that is a huge advantage of strength and power
• 29:30
  and they have to compete in the angriest and highest category. I see, you got it. So,
• 29:34
  the trans, the primary people would go, yeah, could go either way depending on which type of,
• 29:38
  you know, bodies they have to start with and what hormones they want to take. And you know,
• 29:42
  what I think the thing that's fascinating to me about that is, Isaac Henning was absolutely
• 29:46
  happy. It did not apparently invalidate him or make him feel suicidal or, you know, misgendered
• 29:52
  to compete in the women's category as a man. And I think that's really interesting. Yeah,
• 29:57
  that there was no problem for him there. So, if you just take those categories of men and women
• 30:01
  in the way, he was likely at a win. Well, he was likely at a win. He didn't do as well as
• 30:07
  yeah, he might not have sure, but he wouldn't have done, he wouldn't even have done that,
• 30:11
  that well if he was against other cis men. Yeah, I think that's the, I think that's the
• 30:15
  interesting thing is that in his case, he clearly made quite a good assessment of where was the
• 30:20
  best place for them to do, which as you imagine any athlete would do. When you put it like that,
• 30:24
  it sounds so cynical. It's like, you know, oh, you're discriminating against us if you don't
• 30:29
  let us compete in the competition in which we have an advantage, but you're not discriminating
• 30:32
  against us if you allow us to compete in the category in which we're going to underperform.
• 30:38
  Well, I mean, who knows? I can't look into his heart, but I do think there is a sort of,
• 30:42
  yeah, I think if you took the labels off them of men and women, it might help with the argument
• 30:47
  that is, it's a, you know, it's a denial of my very internal essence not to let me compete in
• 30:52
  the category I want to compete in, which I mean, look, some people say we should just get rid
• 30:55
  of the sex categories altogether and that, you know, everyone should just compete.
• 31:00
  I know, I'm sorry, but those people ask you, but that means that men will win everything.
• 31:04
  I mean, that's the attitude of someone in the 1900s and women's categories were created in
• 31:09
  order, taking America where you win sporting scholarships that can affect one that you can go
• 31:14
  to university, right? That is just excluding women from public life. Yeah, on this question of,
• 31:21
  you know, being being the extreme attempt to reform society and culture versus the quiet,
• 31:29
  quiet approach just tease that out for me because the the many people would regard the analogue
• 31:35
  today of the suffragettes to be the trans activists. In other words, people who are trying to
• 31:41
  disrupt a cultural status quo in order to get rights for a minority that has traditionally been
• 31:46
  shut up on. So they would take your analogy about, I mean, I would know many trans and queer
• 31:51
  activists who would take your analogy about the suffragettes and say precisely, that's why we can't
• 31:56
  just hope that we're going to sort of incrementally get accepted. We need to be quite extreme
• 32:01
  in what we're asking for so that society and culture will push back and we'll meet at some kind
• 32:06
  of status quo. Yeah, and I think that's a perfectly reasonable argument to make if you're
• 32:12
  from that group that there is a value in radicalism and having a kind of extreme wing that
• 32:19
  really pushes stuff so that the kind of troops, everybody else fills in behind them and you actually
• 32:24
  wait the final position you end up is it's having moved your front line forward. You might say
• 32:28
  exactly the same about the kind of extinction rebellion and climate activists chucking paint or
• 32:32
  over, you know, oil paintings, which is that while they get individually condemned, they have
• 32:39
  certainly raised the salience of that issue and they've made it a kind of debating point and maybe
• 32:43
  what happens is some, you move the moderate compromise two inches to the left. I think it's,
• 32:49
  and I think if you look at trans activism, it has been in the last 10 years, it has been
• 32:52
  phenomenally successful. Its tactics have, although I think in some cases, anyway, and I felt
• 32:57
  the brunt of them been quite unfair, it has certainly drastically changed people's attitudes or
• 33:03
  drastically changed the elite attitudes to that issue. And when you say that in the future,
• 33:09
  you think that people are going to look at people like yourself who've been pilloried as
• 33:14
  turfs, as, oh, they should just went a little bit too far and they should have been nicer in what
• 33:19
  they were asking for, just unpack that analysis for us because now I'm confused about whether or not
• 33:25
  when we're talking about the extremes of trans activists asking for us to change the way that we
• 33:31
  think about gender, or whether we're talking about the extremes of feminists who are pushing back
• 33:37
  against that worldview in favor of what one might say is an understanding of gender rights that
• 33:43
  comports more with what we had 15 years ago. Well, the difficulty about that is that there are two
• 33:49
  different strands of pushback to contemporary trans activism. One is the British strain of gender
• 33:57
  critical feminism and then all the kind of allied bits off that. I know you've got a version
• 34:02
  of your own in Australia and the US has got versions of it saying, and one is the reactionary
• 34:06
  right which in America is incredibly powerful. And in the last and mid-term elections,
• 34:11
  you saw a huge number of candidates running essentially on what someone think of the children,
• 34:16
  you know, protect women's sports. All these people who would never have given previously a
• 34:19
  suddenly shared about women's sports suddenly saying your daughters would go to transports.
• 34:24
  So there has been a huge co-optation, I think, of the feminist movement. And it's been really
• 34:28
  unhelpful for feminists trying to make arguments because, you know, when I write for people in
• 34:32
  America, they don't want liberals, do not want to think that they have the same attitudes as
• 34:37
  Ben Shapiro or Matt Welsh or whoever it might be. So they just take a very polarised view of the
• 34:43
  issue and go, but this is what liberals think. And so, and I'm a liberal, so this is what I must think.
• 34:47
  I don't want to be on the other side of it. And the nuances of the debate, and you know,
• 34:50
  there are plenty of trans activists in the middle making interesting arguments from
• 34:54
  contra points to Buck Angel to, you know, some of the older transsexuals, as they would describe
• 35:00
  themselves, who just get completely left out of that. But yeah, I mean, I think you're right in
• 35:05
  the sense that both sides have seen the virtue of radicalism in different ways. And then both
• 35:11
  have been radical in their demands or in their tactics. And that will always be something that
• 35:16
  is always discussed in any kind of protest movement or social rights movement is, how much do you do
• 35:21
  boring legislative grind behind the scenes? And how much do you do eye-catching stunts and protests
• 35:27
  and cultural war raising the salience of the issue? Mm. On eye-catching stunts, I've been asked
• 35:32
  about the extinction rebellion thing. And I'm often sort of asked about my opinion about,
• 35:37
  oh, did this go too far? Or did that go too far on some particular issue of the culture wars?
• 35:42
  And I must say my instinct, although I regard myself as a good feminist, does not align with
• 35:48
  yours. And I want you to explain to me why you're right in the sense that I sometimes I sometimes
• 35:54
  look at, for example, the gay rights movement. I mean, I'm married to a bloke and we've got kids
• 35:59
  and it's so normal now as to be boring and, you know, completely uninteresting. We're not the
• 36:04
  eye of anyone outside of, you know, some random pastor in Alabama. And I look at the trajectory
• 36:12
  of that movement, probably the swiftest and most successful civil rights movement, perhaps in
• 36:18
  history. I mean, when you look at how long feminism took and how long black civil rights took
• 36:25
  and all of the ups and downs, it's quite amazing that as recently as when I was born, being gay was
• 36:32
  not just a crime, but just widely understood to be a true perversion. And we've come in just a
• 36:39
  matter of decades to such acceptance that it's completely normalized. And so I look at that and
• 36:46
  I think, okay, well, in the 60s, we had the big fiery extinction rebellion style suffragettes
• 36:52
  killing people type protests in around the world, this kind of stonewall era. And that made
• 36:59
  people very uncomfortable. But quite quickly, that changed into a conciliatory approach. Andrew
• 37:07
  Sullivan wrote his book, arguing for gay marriage in the 90s, which was absolutely ridiculous. It
• 37:13
  was a notion that even gay activists weren't pushing for at the time because they thought it would
• 37:17
  so alienate people. But he didn't throw any fire bombs. He wrote a book and he did a lot of talk
• 37:24
  shows and people tried to persuade. Once they'd got attention, then they said, our ambitions are
• 37:31
  actually very simple and they conform to ideals that you already hold, small liberal ideals of
• 37:37
  family, community, equality, egalitarianism. We're here, we're queer, we want what you want. We
• 37:43
  want to not get fired from our jobs. We want to be able to have families and we want to be able
• 37:47
  to rent houses without being discriminated against and get loans and things like that. That's
• 37:51
  all we're asking for. And that sounded reasonable enough that the body, the cultural center of gravity
• 37:59
  went, all right. And we weren't, I suppose we weren't, we didn't give the mainstream any reason
• 38:09
  to fear us or exclude us. And my worry now is that the trend in leftist activism is to constantly
• 38:18
  provide middle Americans and middle Australians and middle Brits if you use that term with reasons
• 38:24
  to fear that what we're actually on about is destroying everything you hold dear and destroying
• 38:29
  Western civilization because look at these freaks out here who are asking for that much. What do you
• 38:35
  make of that? Yeah, I mean, I think I think I agree with you. I'm, I'm, you know, I think I
• 38:41
  probably would have been a suffragist not least because I'm, you know, I just have a overactive
• 38:46
  moral court rather than a suffragette. But I think one, the first thing to think about studying
• 38:52
  the history of the gay rights movement is to kind of look at it as it matures through different
• 38:56
  stages. And I think the same thing happened with suffrajectivism, right? There was decades and
• 39:00
  decades of people doing marches, holding petitions, doing the groundwork, making these national suffrage
• 39:05
  societies so that all the infrastructure was there when the suffragettes came along and raised
• 39:10
  the salience to the issue, made it something that was unenorable because the problem was always
• 39:15
  all actually, no, maybe we think women should get the vote, but we need to get around to,
• 39:19
  we need to Irish home rule first or we need to get around to giving all men the vote first.
• 39:24
  Right. So what the suffragette did is moved it up the agenda so it was unenorable as a political
• 39:28
  issue, which was deeply radical as for a women's issue because the constant trend with women's
• 39:33
  issues is always, oh, we agree with you, but it's not a priority. And they made it a priority.
• 39:38
  And you could only be a suffragette. You could only do women's votes campaigning. So
• 39:42
  Sylvia Pankhurst gets chucked out by her mum and sister because she also wants to do poverty
• 39:46
  campaigning and anti-colonialism. So no, they were mono-miniacal. That was the thing they
• 39:50
  drummed away at. So I think there is a kind of way in which political movements mature
• 39:55
  and what might be appropriate one stage isn't appropriate at the next stage. So in the history,
• 39:59
  as you say, the gay rights movement, there is stonewall. There's things like outrage in Britain,
• 40:02
  you know, Peter Tatchel's campaign of forced outing, which I think is something that's really
• 40:07
  fascinating and morally complex. But one of the things it did is it stopped the kind of hypocritical
• 40:12
  people who were happy to, you know, be gay in private or tolerate people being gay in private,
• 40:17
  as long as it was always said, quote unquote, shove it down our throats. And that made people,
• 40:22
  a lot of people realised that they knew a lot more gay people than they had thought that it wasn't
• 40:27
  a kind of weird thing that, you know, it was only been done by deviants far away. It was their
• 40:31
  uncle or their, you know, guy they met down the pub or whatever it was. And for me, the kind of
• 40:35
  classic moment of that arc came in Britain when David Cameron's conservative leader said, I don't
• 40:41
  support gay marriage in spite of being a conservative, I suppose it because I am a conservative.
• 40:45
  So you're right, there had been a refiguring and deciding who are the people who've got the
• 40:48
  power that can give us what we want. And what do we need to present this as an order to appeal to them?
• 40:53
  And as you say, saying we want families and we want to, you know, we fall in love just like you do
• 40:58
  and therefore we should be able to make commitments to each other just like you do, was a complete
• 41:01
  normification. And that wouldn't have succeeded had the arse been, you know, we want, we want
• 41:08
  leather bars on every corner. That's right. Glory holds up the wazoo, right? Like in some respects
• 41:13
  actually the kind of success of the gay rights movement depended on desexing it, which exactly
• 41:18
  yes, and taking it. Yeah, yeah, no, it's absolutely right. And I mean, I often say that, you don't
• 41:23
  want, you don't want old art, you know, birth art in, you know, in some country town just putting
• 41:30
  on the kettle and thinking about penises going into anises, you know, that's not what you want.
• 41:35
  You want her thinking about normal things, about normal, isn't it nice that my grand nephew and
• 41:40
  his boyfriend, like such a lovely young couple. Yeah, yeah. And who, I mean, because we've done
• 41:46
  that with romance throughout history anyway, I mean, when we see a young couple falling in love or
• 41:51
  we think about our children going out on dates, we're generally not thinking about one of them
• 41:56
  licking the other one's asshole, which is what young, straight, you know, people do as well,
• 42:01
  you know, we're not thinking about our beautiful, beautiful, beautiful boy, you know, even if it's
• 42:07
  just kind of lingers, Helen, I mean, whatever it is, you know, these are not things. It's just a little bit
• 42:12
  just a little finger on the side. This is not something that you want Nana thinking about. And
• 42:17
  that's why abortion has always been a very difficult one. And people said this to me in Ireland,
• 42:21
  when I went over to cover the repeal, the eighth referendum, which was the idea you get a
• 42:24
  abortion up to 12 weeks. And a country where it had previously been basically entirely outlawed
• 42:28
  was that we don't have a field good argument. We don't have pictures of happy people at weddings.
• 42:33
  You can't do that with abortion campaigning because it is for many people an incredibly
• 42:39
  complicated, morally murky question that involves, you know, two lives or the taking of life to
• 42:44
  people. So again, it's not what works for one social movement might not necessarily work for another.
• 42:51
  And then, you know, the thing that's been most useful in abortion terms is the idea of bodily
• 42:56
  autonomy. And that comes from earlier campaigning about contraception that was done by people like
• 43:01
  Mary Stokes. And the idea that a woman can control her fertility through contraception,
• 43:06
  once that principle was established, that that was something that was up to the woman not her
• 43:10
  husband, frankly, that made the abortion arguments then easier to make on that premise.
• 43:16
  And you know, get your laws off my body. And all that rhetoric that surrounds abortion is,
• 43:20
  is based around that. Rather than, I love having abortions. I can't wait to murder a baby.
• 43:26
  You know, you know, I mean, every time you get a sort of abortion hipster who's like, I mean,
• 43:30
  like, Leonard Dunham once famously was like, I wish I'd had an abortion. And you know, what do you say?
• 43:34
  Why are you saying these words out loud? Well, it is getting, I mean, it's interesting that you
• 43:38
  call it morally complex issue because I have been struck by how many Americans in this debate
• 43:45
  regarded as not morally complex and morally black and white. And I mean, even when you say,
• 43:52
  you know, get your laws off my body, that immediately alienates half of the country because they'll
• 43:57
  say it was not your body. It's not your body that our laws are governing. And I wonder what you
• 44:02
  think about the disjunct there. I mean, I say particularly in America because I think in Australia
• 44:07
  and I assume in the UK and Europe, there's just more of a, can we not talk about this terribly
• 44:13
  much? Like, can we take a clintonian approach of safe legal and rare? Yeah. Like, it's the thing
• 44:19
  that happens and we shouldn't really be wildly celebrating and in that Lena Dunham-esque way.
• 44:25
  But it strikes me that all of my friends in America who are on the left really do talk about it
• 44:32
  in a completely morally unproblematic way. I mean, and so did I actually until I had kids and
• 44:37
  was looking at ultrasounds and things and sort of started thinking for the first time about
• 44:41
  what do I believe about life and about, I don't know, the destiny and fate of a human,
• 44:48
  of the human experience. And whilst I am still firmly on the side of that needs to be a decision
• 44:53
  made at the most local possible level, which is the individual woman and then, you know, her doctor.
• 44:58
  I nonetheless don't think that there's nothing morally complicated about that decision,
• 45:04
  and that that's a decision that should be taken with some gravitas. And that complete,
• 45:08
  that seems to be completely absent from the left in America, where it's just like this is just
• 45:12
  a medical procedure. Yeah, and the idea that some women might regret it, you know, and that's
• 45:17
  that's okay. You know, that's what is going to happen when you give people choices that
• 45:21
  sometimes they make might that choice and they might not feel, you know, uncomplicated about it later.
• 45:27
  But having that choice is the thing that's important. I agree with you on that. It's very strange,
• 45:31
  isn't it? In Britain, still, we have the fig leaf of two doctors having to sign off an abortion.
• 45:36
  Ah, really? Right. Which, every so often, there's a talk about removing. And I think the
• 45:40
  general feeling is don't open the box, because a British apportionals are pretty liberal by
• 45:47
  by European standards, particularly the Southern Catholic Europe. So there is a sense of
• 45:52
  just don't let's not have this argument. This is, you know, this is the fig leaf include
• 45:57
  that there's supposed to be a medical reason, Helen? Right. So the idea is that you have to have
• 46:02
  the certification that you're it would be more dangerous to have the pregnancy, right? And it
• 46:06
  is always more dangerous to carry a pregnancy to them. It's about the most dangerous thing you
• 46:10
  can do as a woman pretty much in your life, unless you're a kind of bombed disposal expert. It's
• 46:16
  maternal mortality is, you know, for young women is just more risky than almost anything else.
• 46:22
  So it is always safer to have an abortion and therefore there is no reason for a doctor to deny
• 46:26
  you one. And there are ways in which that procedure could be reformed. But yeah, I agree with you
• 46:32
  about America. It's a it's a real shame, I think, that again, it's that thing of like it goes back
• 46:37
  to the transgender issue, right? That it's kind of you can't say anything that would give
• 46:41
  sucker to the enemy. There are two bright lines and there's no space between them whatsoever.
• 46:48
  And I think that's not where most people live. Just to assuage your concern about opening the
• 46:53
  Pandora's box, that was the legal position of abortion in New South Wales, the most popular
• 46:59
  Australian state until the end of last year, actually. And finally, parliament thought,
• 47:05
  oh, we need to do something about this. Again, coming back to the question of how do you do reform?
• 47:10
  This was not a big thing that people were on the streets marching about. It was one of those
• 47:14
  things where everyone knew it was a little bit ridiculous. And so at some point one parliamentarian
• 47:19
  said, look, she'll probably, you know, I'll just table a motion about this. And then the premier
• 47:24
  of the state said, you're right, we can all have a conscience vote about this even though it's
• 47:28
  something that I oppose. And the conscience vote went through. And now abortion is formally legalised
• 47:34
  without having to go through the, you know, the the pretense of there being a medical reason for it.
• 47:40
  So that can be done. Well, that's interesting because actually the way that abortion has been made
• 47:44
  legal in Northern Ireland was by a similar kind of bit of technical shenanigans. So there was
• 47:49
  always this anomaly that Northern Ireland was excluded from the 1967, 1968, abortion act because of
• 47:56
  the kind of religious tensions over there. And then an MP slipped through a couple of years ago,
• 48:02
  this idea that if the power-sharing arrangement there lapsed, then the act would be brought and
• 48:09
  enacted over there. And because that happened, it was going to be an automatic mechanism. So no,
• 48:14
  I'm going to vote on it really in the role of an island. It just sort of slipped it through. And
• 48:18
  unfortunately, I think that is a way that the social change happens slightly more often than you
• 48:21
  might think is that everyone's paying attention to something else and someone puts through a slightly
• 48:25
  technical change and then yeah, yeah, exactly. And then everyone decides that they were okay with it.
• 48:30
  That's right. And just to correct myself was 2019, I said last year that feels the entire
• 48:36
  pandemic is just compressed everything that felt like last year was 2019. How did you, how did the
• 48:42
  interview with Jordan and Peterson come about? I was working at the New Statesman at the time,
• 48:48
  but I was doing some bits and pieces for other places. And then GQ Magazine, the Men's Magazine,
• 48:53
  phoned me up, got done something for them before and said we're doing a 30th anniversary issue,
• 48:59
  and it's about the future of masculinity. And we've got someone we'd like you to interview.
• 49:04
  And I thought it's going to be someone really hot. This is amazing. This is going to be,
• 49:09
  come on, George Cleaney, your time is up. You've invaded me for too long. We're going to have
• 49:15
  a big chat about what it means to be a heartthrob in the modern age. And then they said,
• 49:19
  no, it's Jordan Peterson. And I thought, oh dear, because I'd written a column in which I'd
• 49:22
  called him a cargo cult intellectual. I said he had all the, you know, like cargo cult religions.
• 49:27
  He and had all the explaining explain what a cargo cult is. I mean, it's the idea that you
• 49:32
  have remote islanders who were brought food drops and stuff like that by like American planes
• 49:38
  during the Second World War. And so they thought that that was what brought the large s down. And so
• 49:43
  made sort of little, you know, traffic control ones and stuff like that. And they hope that it
• 49:47
  would once again bring the large s from the skies. So the idea is essentially that he looks and
• 49:53
  talks like somebody who is our idea of a smart person. But the content is actually often
• 49:59
  sort of not really there, like not all that intellectually nutritious. And I think when you
• 50:04
  read 12 rules for life, you know, I would describe it as more like science, e than science. And they
• 50:09
  very always from the start, very invested in the idea of mythology and religion and spirituality.
• 50:15
  But was, but was being treated like, I don't think he's treated like this now, but the time he's
• 50:19
  being treated like rational man. And particularly in regards to gender, right? The idea that look,
• 50:24
  I'm sorry, ladies, but we've had, you know, biology is ruled on this and you're just not as
• 50:28
  smart as we are. So, you know, don't fight it. And I think why did it to be fair to him? I don't
• 50:34
  think he was saying that. No, he didn't say that. But you know, his take didn't his take seem to be
• 50:40
  that that the bell curve is more stretched with men. So there are more men in prison. There are more
• 50:45
  men who are insane and homeless. And there are also more male geniuses and psychopaths who want to
• 50:50
  be CEOs than women. And there's a biological reason for that, not just a cultural one. Yeah, no,
• 50:55
  I'm unfairly paraphrasing him there. But you know what I mean, the feeling was just that whatever
• 51:01
  the kind of current state or his assumed slightly nostalgic ideal state of gender roles was,
• 51:06
  was actually natural. You know, that was the bit that was and that was a bit that was annoying to
• 51:11
  me was the sort of, you know, whatever it is is right kind of idea to it rather than acknowledging
• 51:16
  the fact that, for example, you know, now we have a majority of female undergraduates as doctors
• 51:23
  versus the fact that, you know, women weren't allowed in the universities in Britain till 1870.
• 51:27
  And so what seemed very natural to somebody in 1870, I that women with their little tiny brains
• 51:31
  couldn't candle university has now been completely upended. And we might now need to have to talk
• 51:36
  about how do we deal with the problems of men falling behind education. So I am just very wary
• 51:41
  always about making big proclamations about men are ex and women are why when those things are
• 51:47
  often much more fluid than that. And that I think that was initially kind of got my go to about some
• 51:51
  of his writings. I mean, the problem is that if, so I think his, his response to that surely
• 51:58
  would be that it has become fashionable now to claim that there are no differences between the
• 52:04
  biological sexes in terms of the way that our brains are hardwired. And so I, what I found
• 52:09
  fresh about him in the early days and why I loved your exchange with him so much was that he
• 52:14
  was making some points that had become very taboo such as if you get a thousand women in a room
• 52:22
  and a thousand men in a room and you invite them to spend their day in one of two ways. They can
• 52:29
  either get a machine full of widgets and take it apart and then put it back together again
• 52:34
  or they can meet with a family that is having arguments with itself and try to mediate the
• 52:41
  conversations between them. Okay, I'm just to say I'm on team widget. You're not selling
• 52:45
  team and empath on this one but go on. Then statistically you'll just find that more women do tend
• 52:53
  to want to mediate things through conversation then put take the widgets about and put it back
• 52:57
  together again. And his assertion is that that's not just culturally constructed that there are
• 53:02
  biological differences between men and women. And that at the time and perhaps still was a very
• 53:09
  unpopular thing to say and it was often interpreted as meaning that all of the differences that we
• 53:16
  see between the genders can come down to biology but I don't think he was being that black or white
• 53:21
  about it. I don't think he was being that silly about it. And the problem seems to me to be
• 53:25
  if you were ever to stand astride a cultural group think and say okay stick a fork in it this
• 53:32
  turkey is roasted it's kind of done like we're sort of we already have women graduating as you say
• 53:38
  at higher rates doing better in school outperforming males in medicine and all these other disciplines.
• 53:44
  So the narrative that women are an eternally oppressed class and that we don't have to worry
• 53:48
  about men and boys has become a little bit tiresome then the person who would be articulating that
• 53:53
  would sound very much like a dinosaur who's just waiting their arms at history and saying
• 53:59
  are the status quo is perfect. So but how do you tell the difference between the two?
• 54:04
  Yeah I mean this gets my go as well but slightly because there's a chapter in
• 54:07
  difficult women on education and quite a lot of that is about the difficulties of boys in schools
• 54:11
  and the fact that male primary school teachers only make up 15% of that workforce and I would argue
• 54:18
  there is a kind of so I talked to a guy it's amazing it was male primary school teacher said
• 54:22
  I got a bursary to train it was the first time you know as a white man I was a beneficiary
• 54:26
  of affirmative action because the government recognised it was a social good to have more male
• 54:31
  primary school teachers and I think that is sort of part of the where we're getting to now with
• 54:36
  gender relations it's not always a sort of simple up down in terms of who needs the help or needs
• 54:42
  services to be tailored towards them. So I do kind of take that point but people I just I kind
• 54:48
  of actually know is that I'm not the first feminist to say that and people have been saying that
• 54:52
  for quite a long time and it's like why aren't feminists ever talking about the problems with men
• 54:55
  meanwhile feminists going hello we need to talk about the problems with men and I just can't hear
• 55:01
  them where are they what's going on so yeah his position is not as black or white as I think it
• 55:06
  was painted but you know neither was mine I would never argue that all differences are purely
• 55:11
  socially constructed you know we just know that particularly testosterone has effects both on
• 55:15
  strength and on aggression and on risk taking and a couple of other things I just I always put a
• 55:21
  little asterisk about the fact that I just wouldn't want to render a final judgment on
• 55:26
  what exactly the limits of that are because sometimes they can what the claims we're making
• 55:31
  can have shrunk considerably over time about what things are innate to men and women or just have
• 55:36
  changed over time you know there was a whole time when it evolution psychology was obsessed with the
• 55:40
  idea that women like pink because they were the gatherers and they therefore they could see the
• 55:46
  berries do you remember that that was a bad I'm sorry that never I know that never crossed my path
• 55:53
  yeah you got a lot of stuff like that and then of course the fact the thing that's fascinating
• 55:56
  about that is that pink only becomes a girl's color in the 1900s well that's right how do they
• 56:00
  explain the fact that boys in Victorian days boys were pinked in that right exactly we've seen
• 56:05
  as a derivation of red which was a strong color whereas blue was for the Virgin Mary that was a
• 56:09
  soft of a feminine color and so you know Adam Rutherford is very interesting about this the genetic
• 56:14
  system writer that you end up with these just so stories you know like how the leopard got its
• 56:17
  spots where you take what is today and then you try and retrofit some explanation for it and it's
• 56:22
  why a lot of feminists particularly are very skeptical of evolutionary psychology which is a
• 56:26
  discipline that has some really interesting insights but also has quite a bit in it that doesn't
• 56:30
  replicate or just seem to be kind of yeah reverse engineered from the status quo yeah I mean there's
• 56:37
  that you know the analogy about conservatives and the you know coming across a fence in a field
• 56:43
  now Chesterton's fence essence fence that's what it is I had an argument this is weird I
• 56:48
  don't know I give it what's about about some circumcision with Eric and Brett Weinstein
• 56:58
  how many which so which side do you want because I am on the firmly on the anti-circumcision
• 57:04
  I'm on the anti-circumcision side even though I'm circumcised I'm not I'm not a huge
• 57:07
  activist about it I don't you know doesn't bother me massively but I didn't circumcise my son
• 57:11
  and I think you know why would you engage in a medical procedure that's not necessary and
• 57:16
  so you're ready to say I didn't circumcise myself and I was like that's I didn't do that you
• 57:22
  could you could make money out of that I only go around circumcising other people other grown
• 57:26
  adults and no and it was I was Brett and Eric Weinstein and Douglas Murray and Marjord Nawaz and
• 57:34
  Sam Harris like my dinner party and we're all having breakfast at the park I had in Sydney they're
• 57:45
  out here for an event that I was moderating and and they and so there's a big argument about
• 57:51
  the circumcision and the brits on the panel and the Aussie are against it so Douglas and Marjord
• 57:59
  and Marjord is very active in this space he's very very fired up about it he thinks it's real
• 58:04
  mutilation and real child abuse and and Eric and and Brett starts pulling out the chested
• 58:11
  fence thank God I'm pulling out what I wish I was the story can I okay pull out his dick and wave it
• 58:19
  around at him look at that baby surely you want to pace her that look at that head no it's it
• 58:26
  pulls out the chested fence good yeah it pulls that chested fence and says you know until I was
• 58:32
  going to get rid of some of some widespread cultural norm I would want to know very clearly exactly
• 58:39
  why we're we're doing this yeah but you could apply that to the foreskin could be the fence I mean
• 58:44
  I can't believe I've just said those words in that order but you know what I mean like it's not
• 58:47
  it's not doing you any harm so why not keep the body part like that's my general approach to
• 58:52
  body parts if I'm not really sure what therefore I'll probably not remove them until I find out
• 58:56
  well it's I look so the chested fence for people who don't know is if you're walking through the
• 59:01
  countryside and there's an old fence there then you know you might have an instinct to oh let's
• 59:06
  just bash down the fence because it's obviously not doing any good but the precautionary
• 59:11
  principle says look if you don't know until you understand why the fence was built you shouldn't
• 59:15
  knock it down you should leave it there because you have no idea what the what the people who built
• 59:20
  it were thinking and it may still have the purpose so this is used by conservatives to justify
• 59:25
  the retention of things that might otherwise seem to be useless and they say that progressives are
• 59:31
  going around smashing down all these fences clueless as to their actual import because now all
• 59:36
  of the sheep are going to go wandering to the wrong paddock or something but that it just struck me
• 59:41
  as a weird invocation of that because you could sort of use it again about anything and it was
• 59:47
  actually Sam Harris I think who said well the but we do know what the fence is in this context it's
• 59:53
  just a bunch of medieval superstitions and a lack of hygiene in in you know long dead civilizations
• 1:00:01
  that's why it would have started you know as a as a sacrifice complete sense if you live in the desert
• 1:00:08
  and you ride camels horses whatever it might be all day and you don't have a you know access to
• 1:00:13
  a shower then it probably doesn't make sense however if you live in London and you wash every day
• 1:00:18
  then it's it's not quite the same isn't that that's very I mean there's lots of things I think
• 1:00:22
  like that it's a good useful exercise to think if we didn't have the cultural apparatus about this
• 1:00:28
  what things would seem weird like if people didn't eat animals the first person who suggested eating
• 1:00:33
  an animal would be looked at like you're a monster oh yeah yeah lovely cow what does the lovely
• 1:00:38
  cow ever done for us and I say that to somebody who eats animals so I have no moral high ground on
• 1:00:42
  this one but you have to be open to the fact that it is objectively probably weird to be you know
• 1:00:48
  if aliens met you and they didn't know it you'd have to try and explain that and then you'd
• 1:00:52
  kind of murder all the boy chickens because they used for laying eggs right yes yeah no it's
• 1:00:58
  funny that you say aliens because I had a whole bit in in 2019 I did a show at the Melbourne
• 1:01:03
  Comedy Festival about why social media was ruining everything and I and I had a whole
• 1:01:09
  whole screed against sort of social justice warriors and the group think of the kind of
• 1:01:14
  intersectional hierarchies that we currently engage in and just the kind of moral sanctimoniousness
• 1:01:19
  of people who think that they're on the right side of history because they go around performing
• 1:01:24
  outrage archaeology and digging up things that people said in the past that don't conform perfectly
• 1:01:30
  with what our current moral preconceptions are and I was just making the point that we know that
• 1:01:37
  these people are not you know would not have been the moral pioneers of the past they think
• 1:01:42
  they would have been because they're not currently moral pioneers on any controversial issues
• 1:01:47
  that we currently regard that the rest of us regard as being settled and my example was eating
• 1:01:53
  meat I mean I think it's quite likely that in a hundred years people will look back on the way
• 1:01:58
  that we factory farm yeah the way that we look back on slavery and go how did they all engage in
• 1:02:04
  basically knowing that what they were doing was evil but not standing up to it yeah exactly you
• 1:02:10
  cared more about the fact the bacon was delicious than the fact that you were inflicting suffering
• 1:02:14
  on sentient animals yeah what I like of moral courage did you have not to defy that norm and if you
• 1:02:20
  don't defy some not it doesn't have to be that norm it could be I mean I'm just sort of thinking
• 1:02:24
  outside the box I sometimes wonder if people will look back on our entertainment now and the way
• 1:02:30
  that we casually use fossil fuels and that we'll have movies in which people just decide to go on a
• 1:02:36
  holiday and then they get on a plane and they don't even have a conversation about whether or not
• 1:02:39
  it's responsible to be getting on that plane you know if the if the planet in 50 years is sort of
• 1:02:44
  being racked by huge climate disasters that we're all just having to endure and we look back on those
• 1:02:51
  will that be like well we need warnings like we do currently on Disney movies that depict smoking
• 1:02:57
  or depict racial stereotypes going like this film contains depictions of an attitude towards
• 1:03:03
  carbon emissions that that we no longer that we you know that we're wrong then and are wrong now
• 1:03:09
  and if you're not having those kinds of conversations and though if you're not trying to think
• 1:03:12
  outside the box of morality like that then I will not waste any time listening to your moral
• 1:03:18
  pronouncements about how terrible people were in the past for owning slaves because you would have
• 1:03:23
  been owning them too yeah I think there's a certain humility that you have to have that we're all
• 1:03:27
  innately conformist and that actually most likely had you been born in different circumstances you
• 1:03:34
  would have just ended up unthinkingly adopting the moors of that time and culture and don't kid yourself
• 1:03:38
  otherwise I mean it happens more recently than that too my friend Sarah Dytum is writing a book
• 1:03:44
  tends to be called toxic which I wanted to call the upskirt decade but it's about the 20 yeah
• 1:03:49
  2000s in the 2010s and just the celebrity culture around women around Amy Winehouse around
• 1:03:54
  Britney Spears around China from WWE you know the days of the Paris Hilton blog where he would just
• 1:04:01
  take pictures of people and draw jizzing cocks all over them now just seems like this incredible
• 1:04:06
  theater of cruelty but like you I think we've moved to a sort of theater of moral cruelty well
• 1:04:10
  instead of saying that people are disgusting because they're fat or spotty or they've allowed
• 1:04:16
  themselves to get a bit old we kind of instead we pick through their souls and find them wanting
• 1:04:20
  we do I don't want the kind of you know sort of spiritual equivalent of drawing a jizzing
• 1:04:25
  cock on people is but that's what that's what we do now can I just say talking as we're dwelling
• 1:04:29
  on genitals but I am delighted to hear that off the books the intellectual dark web is not having
• 1:04:35
  these angolquin ground tables about the meaning of lives but you're just getting down to some solid
• 1:04:39
  knob chat when you get six men with podcasts together talking inevitably turns to knobs as I had
• 1:04:45
  always suspected that's all we've got at the end of the day when we come together it's the only
• 1:04:51
  thing we share in common where do you think all of that moral thing the wagging ends I think the tide
• 1:04:58
  is going out of it on it and I've been wrong many times about things before so but I think there
• 1:05:03
  is a level of kind of exhaustion with it I think a lot of it was driven by the new forums of social
• 1:05:10
  media particularly the way that Twitter acted as a little crucible although it wasn't very big
• 1:05:14
  in social media terms it had all the journalists on it so it was a kind of panopticon as everyone
• 1:05:19
  looked at each other and I just think there's a certain weariness about those dynamics and you see
• 1:05:24
  people making jokes about some of the kind of you know sort of doctrinal statements that people
• 1:05:30
  would say a lot more now and I just finished reporting a story about 2020 about a kind of quote
• 1:05:36
  unquote cancel culture story and already it now seems like this kind of you know the terror phase
• 1:05:42
  of the French Revolution the kind of I think that COVID it's been interesting as I've been doing
• 1:05:47
  this new documentary that's about gurus the number of people who COVID sent a bit
• 1:05:51
  random bend particularly in America where I think lots of liberal sort the government wasn't going
• 1:05:56
  to come and save them there was no confidence at all that there was anybody I'd got a grip
• 1:06:01
  and where people were really worse stuck at home in some places their kids were homeschooled
• 1:06:06
  for a really long time I think some people did go to the dark side I mean you mentioned
• 1:06:10
  much and I was before I think he's somebody who COVID affected incredibly bad absolutely and
• 1:06:15
  I mean you know he has subsequently lashed out at me for having called him out on that I think I
• 1:06:20
  was on Rogan's show and I named checked him and I mean even the other people there I mean Brett Weinstein
• 1:06:26
  and Marjord you know Sam and Eric have kept their heads some to some degree but yeah it's
• 1:06:33
  been amazing to see people who I had previously consulted with them thought oh they seem like
• 1:06:38
  reasonable chaps even if I don't agree with them become something quite different and crypto is
• 1:06:42
  another example of that you know someone put it to me that people in Britain you know and furlough
• 1:06:46
  their incomes dropped by 20 percent but they're outgoing struck by 40 percent so lots of people
• 1:06:51
  were suddenly stuck at home incredibly bored with a little bit more spare cash than they were
• 1:06:55
  expecting and that is this time to where a lot of people got into crypto right which is now you
• 1:07:00
  know turned into this huge collapse in a way that I think so let me tell you about so the series
• 1:07:07
  I'm making for the BBC is about about the new gurus and we've looked at everything from kind of
• 1:07:11
  wellness to productivity to the IDW to diversity trainers to crypto to people who sort of think they
• 1:07:17
  can predict the future whether scientifically or kind of astrologically and one of the things that
• 1:07:21
  comes up all the way through is that the entire ecosystem is kind of based on podcasts which I
• 1:07:26
  already thought of you but the entire monetary system behind that is either wellness supplements or
• 1:07:31
  crypto and it's because it's too unregulated things it's unregulated medicine and it's unregulated
• 1:07:36
  money and you come up against that again and again and again that the engine for a lot of what's
• 1:07:42
  happening in the kind of alternative media is often yeah crypto or wellness like Alex James is
• 1:07:47
  selling his wellness pills his instant hard pills Nigel Farage who is now sort of reinvented himself
• 1:07:54
  as his alternative media figure you know is it's chilling crypto that's the UKIP leader here in
• 1:07:58
  Britain yeah for me UKIP leader here in Britain and that was that was one of the bigger surprises
• 1:08:04
  to me but the other consistent theme of that is that lots of people covid just made them spend hours
• 1:08:11
  and hours and hours online and that's when they started falling down a rabbit hole and they just
• 1:08:16
  became untethered from a whole system of knowledge that I feel in the middle of and feel confident about
• 1:08:22
  and you know it's firm foundations for me and they just took one step to the side and they were
• 1:08:27
  in a completely kind of parallel reality and I think spending a lot of time at home bored during
• 1:08:32
  covid did that for a lot of people that's fascinating yeah I am interested to hear you but you
• 1:08:39
  bring crypto into that group of superstitions if you want to call them that because I got hooked by
• 1:08:47
  the logic of crypto last year not hooked in a way that caused me any permanent financial catastrophe
• 1:08:56
  or anything put your life savings into do you know what there was a there was a moment at which I
• 1:09:02
  considered putting more of my retirement into it than would have than I would have been comfortable
• 1:09:07
  with not those coin but into the two into the two biggies of Bitcoin and the and Ethereum because
• 1:09:12
  there's a whole philosophy about the next generation of what the world will look like like the next
• 1:09:20
  era of of IT you know web 3 and all this and and the idea that in a networked future there are going
• 1:09:28
  to be systems that have built upon blockchain that you know we'll need to use especially Ethereum
• 1:09:34
  Bitcoin might just be a Ponzi scheme but it seems like Ethereum like the blockchain that gives rise
• 1:09:40
  to it to Ether the currency it's actually useful for various things and like you know contracts
• 1:09:45
  and stuff like that and that you might be able to sort of get your home loan without having to go
• 1:09:48
  through banks and lawyers and stuff and so it's sort of a you don't quite know what it's going to be
• 1:09:54
  but it's probably going to be something so I put about you know 10% of not a very large amount
• 1:09:59
  of money in but at one point I considered putting about 50% in and thank god I didn't and I don't
• 1:10:04
  know whether or not that was being I don't think I was suckered in because none of the none of the
• 1:10:09
  sources that I was getting information about this from were people who had a stake in boosting crypto
• 1:10:14
  I wasn't listening I wasn't reading stuff that was being published by crypto exchanges or by
• 1:10:18
  Nigel Farage selling some crypto thing it was more I suppose if if there was a Hucksterish guru
• 1:10:26
  element to it was the futurist type techno utopian vision of he is a whole brand new thing
• 1:10:34
  don't miss the boat while we still don't know what it's going to be does that make sense?
• 1:10:40
  No that makes complete no sense and you know I I start the documentary by talking to a guy
• 1:10:45
  called Alex Hernandez now the UK Guardian technology editor who used to work for me at the
• 1:10:49
  New Statesman and I say to him in 2013 Alex I said to you what's his spit coin all about
• 1:10:54
  lunch? I buy some of that and you said no no no it's all the scam and that's why we're here not
• 1:10:58
  sitting on our yachts because you gave me bad advice because at that point how I invested in
• 1:11:03
  you know in Bitcoin it would have I would have lived through the enormous price spike of it and
• 1:11:07
  it would be worth far more than it is I mean yeah my basic attitude to that is the same as yours
• 1:11:10
  which is that there is no intrinsic value to it except more people buying into it when there is
• 1:11:14
  only a limited amount of it and that is a classic description of a pyramid scheme but you're
• 1:11:20
  right the decentralized finance has got some interesting ideas in it although I feel like everybody
• 1:11:24
  is on a very slow train to understanding like and an ordinary consumer level everyone is at a very
• 1:11:28
  slow train to understanding why deposit guarantees and financial regulations and lenders of last
• 1:11:34
  resort and bailouts and all the stuff that comes with the modern financial system while that was
• 1:11:38
  created because before that people got ripped off yeah but there are you know there are interesting
• 1:11:44
  things from it one of the people interviewed you lost some money this was really interesting to me
• 1:11:48
  so Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky who founded the discipline essentially behavioral economics
• 1:11:54
  to work out all the ways in which classical economics failed because it didn't take into account
• 1:11:58
  the fact that humans work in incredibly logical ways one of the things that they wrote about was
• 1:12:02
  loss aversion so the idea when you're gambling you're more worried about losing stuff than you are
• 1:12:07
  motivated by winning and you you kind of therefore are quite defensive and this guy said the
• 1:12:12
  opposite to me he'd already lost money on crypto and I said would you invest in it again and he said
• 1:12:17
  yes because you know I'm more bothered by the thought of missing out you know FOMO fear of missing
• 1:12:22
  out than I am losing some money and I wonder if that's a bit what you're describing too
• 1:12:26
  it's like buying a lottery ticket to some extent yes I don't think I'm really going to win this but
• 1:12:30
  if I do win this then by god it's a life changing amount of money and I was actually pretty confident
• 1:12:35
  that I would win because I mean if I actually if I thought that way I would have gone into some
• 1:12:39
  of the alternative coins that really were speculative I didn't actually didn't think that I just
• 1:12:43
  thought I couldn't see a future I still can't see a future in which Ethereum isn't worth a lot
• 1:12:50
  more than in which ether isn't worth a lot more than it is now that was my basic premise I can't
• 1:12:56
  see a future in which we go from a fairly low tech internet and financial base to a very high
• 1:13:05
  tech one in which some version let's say let's say not ether some version of blockchain technology
• 1:13:11
  isn't much more fundamentally a part of our technological world and our life every day lives
• 1:13:17
  than it is right now so between here and there there's going to be some appreciation of that
• 1:13:21
  technology and maybe maybe Ethereum will piggyback on that evolution and it's quite likely too
• 1:13:28
  because I think it's probably more likely by the end of our lifetimes that will be trading conchels
• 1:13:33
  in the kind of new platforms ruins of our former cities so maybe yeah maybe I'll stick with
• 1:13:39
  your vision of the future around me so much better we've got we've we're showing our penises
• 1:13:44
  to Eric Weinstein it's going to be great fun come with us help I've always long to show my
• 1:13:49
  penis don't wife so maybe in the next life yeah you mentioned that one of the other gurus
• 1:13:54
  topics in your in your upcoming series is about diversity trainers and before I let you go I want
• 1:13:59
  to get your thoughts about race and identity politics and diversity because when you say that
• 1:14:04
  you think that the the kind of cult cancel culture hysteria has waned and that it already feels a
• 1:14:11
  little bit passe I agree I hopefully agree that that's true of the sorts of you know academic gets
• 1:14:22
  defenestrated because you made a joke you know about women's lingerie in an elevator
• 1:14:29
  where a feminist overheard it or something like that that may be true of that and the kind of
• 1:14:33
  outrage archaeology of going back and finding a tweet that someone tweeted that seemed homophobic
• 1:14:37
  in 2009 and you know therefore uninviting them from the Academy Awards but it may also be the case
• 1:14:45
  that the overarching worldview about how to arrange ourselves as a society that's been articulated
• 1:14:56
  by the woke has now become sufficiently accepted that we no longer even regarded as being
• 1:15:01
  controversial and we almost don't even notice the win so the old school smaller liberal values
• 1:15:09
  cherishing the individual regarding the individual as having some sort of sanctity and autonomy
• 1:15:17
  and I guess giving a giving our cultural props and our our respect to individuals who buck the
• 1:15:25
  tribe and who think differently the volume on that has been turned down and the volume has been
• 1:15:30
  turned up on treating ourselves as a bunch of tribes competing over a finite pie and we're in a
• 1:15:39
  timeless struggle of a power play basically between racial and sexual and whatever national
• 1:15:47
  tribes and you know we have to support decent tribes that have been traditionally disenfranchised
• 1:15:54
  and put them above tribes that have been traditionally powerful and that that now is just so
• 1:15:59
  much part of woven into the fabric of how we think about things that we don't even notice it but
• 1:16:04
  do you agree and if so what will become of that is that just the new normal? I think there is a
• 1:16:09
  reasonable point to that one of the things I did last year was I went to Albania to interview the
• 1:16:12
  Crown Prince long story but you know that was a country that was under a completely vicious
• 1:16:19
  communist regime under a dictator called Envojo throughout the second half of the 20th century and
• 1:16:26
  it was interesting to go around the museum of surveillance which is just shows you how incredibly
• 1:16:30
  that had penetrated into everyone's homes you know these people with the broom handles that
• 1:16:34
  had got listening devices into and listening to their neighbor's walls and we have created
• 1:16:38
  something sort of even like a volunteer star I think that comedians certainly has called it
• 1:16:43
  that we have essentially created that for ourselves voluntarily through the social media and the
• 1:16:46
  internet but Leopie who wrote a brilliant book called free about her time growing up in Albania you
• 1:16:53
  know talked about the fact that her family had got all these codes you know somebody had gone to
• 1:16:57
  university which meant they'd been sent to a labor camp and then they'd graduated which meant
• 1:17:01
  they'd been released or you know they'd flunked out which meant they'd been executed and I think
• 1:17:05
  some of that has kind of crept into the way that I hear people talking now that there is a certain
• 1:17:09
  sense of like we know that there are code words that you can say and there's a level of kind of
• 1:17:14
  camouflage but my main worry about it all is the fact that I just think that issues that I deeply
• 1:17:20
  really care about are like feminism anti-racism whatever it might be have been co-opted as
• 1:17:26
  office politics essentially and not just office politics but also a kind of Versailles like
• 1:17:33
  etiquette so the idea of basically you know having to sign diversity act inclusion statements when
• 1:17:38
  you're proposing your academic research does is that actually a useful just way of making your
• 1:17:44
  teams more diverse or is it the essentially the equivalent of knowing what the fishwalk does
• 1:17:50
  and which cut the retie use and I think there is definitely a version of that that there is a
• 1:17:55
  there it has just been kind of turned into a kind of corporate hierarchy and state-of-seeking
• 1:18:00
  in a way kind of killing off your enemies and I felt that we're very strongly with the piece that
• 1:18:04
  I reported for the Atlantic that was out last month about called the Guggenheim scapegoat was that
• 1:18:09
  the person who got differentiated in that case wasn't necessarily the person who actually
• 1:18:14
  done the most role if she done anything wrong at all it was that she was the most convenient victim
• 1:18:18
  to make the mob go away and that's the bit where I think will persist because big powerful institutions
• 1:18:26
  will always want to perpetuate themselves and people will always get thrown overboard and your
• 1:18:31
  point about that you know someone's old tweets being dug up so they can't host the Oscars you
• 1:18:37
  know that's just the Oscars who want to have no you know stigma attached to their brand so why not
• 1:18:44
  cut someone loose why make that why make that defense it's a PR problem for them and they
• 1:18:48
  solve the PR problem by being cowards and as long as that is the dynamic that will go on the
• 1:18:53
  bit that gives me hope and I think this I definitely see this in terms of UK feminism is there is
• 1:18:57
  now a counterweight which is that if you are a coward as a company or an institution you also get a
• 1:19:02
  huge backlash and people think less badly of you and for several years all the downside risk was
• 1:19:08
  on you know would have made you make the decision effectively to be a coward and now actually it's
• 1:19:15
  much more more balanced and you might get in trouble either way and that more than anything else
• 1:19:18
  more than some great awakening of conscience or principles has readjusted where I think some
• 1:19:24
  institutions and corporations have ended up on that yeah that's interesting and I mean I've sort of
• 1:19:31
  the counterpoint to that is that you need the diversity statements so you need this kind of
• 1:19:35
  etiquette and where do the you know what fork do I use for my entree you need those things to be
• 1:19:42
  embedded in big companies and in government it just not as the solution to racism and sexism
• 1:19:49
  but as part of the framework for addressing them do you buy that I think I'm well I'm I maybe I'm
• 1:19:59
  poisoned by cynicism but I really worry that it becomes a kind of you know box ticking
• 1:20:06
  PR HR thing rather than a genuine commitment so why does feminism have so many problems
• 1:20:11
  getting it achieving its aims right compared with say even gay rights activism gay rights activism
• 1:20:16
  wasn't I don't think making any economic demands on anyone else what was the challenge to power in
• 1:20:21
  that now tell me if I tell me if I'm wrong because I'm not an expert on that but I think the idea
• 1:20:27
  that people should be allowed to marry who they want is not the same as saying we should have
• 1:20:31
  free universal childcare in terms of the demand it's making on capital and power and that's where I
• 1:20:37
  think you have class issues and I put feminism as a class issue because I think we're talking about
• 1:20:41
  women as a reproductive class who are providing both unpaid housework unpaid caring for children
• 1:20:47
  unpaid elderly care and you know not all women and lots of men do that stuff too but but those are
• 1:20:51
  things are still at the moment pretty heavily gendered and so assigning a financial value to
• 1:20:57
  them would have huge consequences for everybody who's currently free loading off all that stuff and
• 1:21:02
  so it is a much harder ask than putting you know universal signs on the toilets or making everyone put
• 1:21:08
  their pronouns in their email signature or whatever it might be all these sort of splashy things that
• 1:21:13
  make you look good but don't actually demand that anybody gives anything up at a really senior level
• 1:21:21
  so that's the bit that makes me feel quite cynical about all that stuff I'm afraid
• 1:21:24
  yeah yeah so I share the cynicism yeah I just think it's a way for for white middle class
• 1:21:30
  comfortable people to feel like they're doing something about big issues that they don't really
• 1:21:34
  need to address um how would you put in this how would you logistically I haven't looked
• 1:21:39
  into this enough so forgive me put a price on for example unpaid housework I mean I understand the
• 1:21:44
  justice argument for doing so and then I also understand the economic argument sort of dry
• 1:21:50
  economic argument of look well the market puts values on things automatically so people pay for
• 1:21:55
  things that they want and they do things for free when they want to do those things for free and
• 1:22:00
  parents want to raise children for free and they don't want to abuse those children so let's change
• 1:22:05
  the cultural dynamic perhaps between how this is gendered but the idea that you need to put a
• 1:22:10
  monetary value on things that people are doing for their own love of their family I mean we don't
• 1:22:16
  I don't get paid to go to the gym and you know survive so that my children said I won't die
• 1:22:22
  before my my children grow up I don't get paid to quit smoking I don't get paid not to drink too much
• 1:22:28
  there are all kinds of lifestyle things that I do that that impose a burden on me and raising
• 1:22:33
  my children is one of those things that shouldn't be drawn into the economic domain well there are
• 1:22:38
  effectively you are being paid not to smoke in the sense that most western countries have ramped
• 1:22:44
  tobacco taxes to the extent where they are now incredibly high and every packet of cigarettes you
• 1:22:48
  buy is a huge percentage of that is actually going in tax revenue rather than the cost of manufacturing
• 1:22:53
  which is essentially a way of the state saying if you're going to do this we're going to make you pay
• 1:22:57
  for it because it's a it's bad for you and it's imposing costs on the health system.
• 1:23:00
  There's an analog to that to be being single I mean single people pay more and you know
• 1:23:05
  people who have babies get baby where you get paid to have a baby in Australia they're baby bonuses
• 1:23:09
  and you get tax cuts for having a family and so on single single people pay more.
• 1:23:13
  Yeah and and so those are the kind of policies that I think are the way to do that so
• 1:23:17
  parental leave particularly share parental leave and a particularly a portion that can only be taken
• 1:23:21
  by the father non-birth parents same sex couple partner that is reserved precisely for that person
• 1:23:30
  because otherwise what tends to happen is that you end up with women taking it and getting
• 1:23:34
  penalised for it and then men feeling that they can't take it I'm talking about straight
• 1:23:37
  couples obviously but they will be penalised at work if they're taking this sort of voluntary
• 1:23:41
  whereas if it seems this is free money that you only get if you take the parental leave
• 1:23:46
  that is that drastically reduces drastically increases in straight couples they might have
• 1:23:50
  men who take it up so there were there were all kinds of policies like that I mean Karen
• 1:23:54
  I cried a pair of his book in his woman has some of this that when they were initially laying out
• 1:23:58
  GDP there was discussion about whether or not what things they would come to it and there are all
• 1:24:04
  sorts of problems with GDP as a measure for anything so I did an episode of my BBC podcast
• 1:24:09
  the spark with a guy called Ehhan Masoud who's written a book against GDP because essentially if
• 1:24:13
  you're a country if you're a developing country you should to boost your GDP you should chop down
• 1:24:18
  all your forests burn all your natural resources in the pursuit of productivity yeah it is you know
• 1:24:24
  when a measure becomes a target it's easy to be useful measure basically so the problem with
• 1:24:28
  increasing your GDP is that you would you know it's like the great paperclip simulation right with
• 1:24:32
  the heavy AI that makes the paper clips and if you run it long enough it turns the entire world into
• 1:24:35
  paper clips that's basically the problem with GDP is that you should do all these things that
• 1:24:39
  objectively terrible with huge negative externalities for the planet in order to boost your GDP so
• 1:24:45
  that's a you know sorry that's a very long-winded way of saying I'm not sure you can ever entirely
• 1:24:50
  quantify love but what you can do is provide the government assistance for the way that you think
• 1:24:59
  means having a good life and what being you know having a good citizen should do and we do that
• 1:25:03
  already in loads of different ways and so I'm not I don't think it's a great qualitative leap
• 1:25:10
  to do it to encourage family-friendly policies let's will you will you play first eight questions
• 1:25:16
  with me our subscribers who who get bonus content are able to hear me pep at the guest with a
• 1:25:23
  few random sort of Rorschach questions that you can answer very very briefly should we play that
• 1:25:29
  now okay wonderful so if if you're a subscriber then continue listening and and if not you can
• 1:25:35
  always subscribe at uncomfortable conversations dot substack dot com what's getting worse and
• 1:25:41
  worse as you get older and what's getting better and better as you get older and let's start
• 1:25:52
  with getting better just to be optimistic bring brings it brings us back to the flopping out of
• 1:25:57
  right yeah no I really have trouble maintaining a direction that was just a little taste of our
• 1:26:03
  first eight questions which you'll be able to hear all of if you subscribe to uncomfortable
• 1:26:08
  conversations not just the questions but of course all of our banter around them which become
• 1:26:12
  a subsequent little episode of themselves if you do subscribe you will not only hear that but
• 1:26:17
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  opportunities to connect directly with me you can subscribe at uncomfortable conversations dot
• 1:26:28
  substack dot com or follow the links in the the podcast description otherwise I'll see you next time