Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Cancel Culture at the NY Times” with Andy Mills

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“Cancel Culture at the NY Times” with Andy Mills · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and during those heady days
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  of 2020 and 2021 when the world was reeling from the pandemic and the streets were ablaze
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  with race riots, at least in the United States, it was a tricky time to express dangerous
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  ideas as today's guests found out. Andy Mills had been a podcast producer on Radio Lab,
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  the terrific science show, and he was working at The New York Times in the job that he'd
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  always dreamed of. He actually helped to create arguably the most successful and groundbreaking
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  podcast of all times so far are the daily The New York Times's attempt to get into the
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  podcast space with wild success. Andy found himself embroiled in something of a MeToo
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  slash cancel culture slash woke in Brollio, which he did not survive. And the tale is amazing.
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  He's very open and frank here about exactly what did and didn't happen and about the extent
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  to which he does or does not blame the legacy media for the scenario he found himself
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  in and whether or not it would pan out the same way today. I'll keep my own feelings
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  about that particular question private. Andy's gone on to continue great success independently.
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  He did the podcast caliphate that was while he was still at The New York Times. He did the
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  podcast rabbit hole, which is excellent and investigation into what the internet is doing to us
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  all. And he produced the podcast, The Witch Trial of JK, The Witch Trial's rather of JK Rowling,
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  which is an amazing podcast if you haven't yet heard it. And if you're ever tempted to check out
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  our YouTube page and he was actually in Sydney for the festival of dangerous ideas where he and I
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  were on a panel together. So we get to sit together in a pretty new studio on a pretty new couch.
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  So if it takes your fancy search for uncomfortable conversations on YouTube and you can watch us there.
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  His new show is called Reflector. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did the one the only Andy Mills.
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  All right. So don't say anything about black people. Don't say all the stuff about Jews that you
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  were saying beforehand. So you got canceled but you weren't famous enough to get canceled,
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  actually. Yes. I mean, in the woods of one of your colleagues, I think that puts it succinct.
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  I mean, what happened though? Who are you? Where were you from? What were you doing? Tell me.
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  Where do we begin? Yeah. I mean, doc and stool. I mean, I ended up in the world of journalism
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  in a weird route. I started off as a aspiring minister in the kind of American evangelical
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  Billy Graham mold. I didn't exactly know if I was going to be standing behind a pulpit,
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  telling people to come and accept Jesus Christ, although I did plenty of that when I was
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  showing my evangelical family. Yeah. My family background is definitely there. And then I also had
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  kind of my own moment in high school of feeling what people often will call a calling, right?
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  This moment where you're going through puberty and you wonder about your life, you're wondering
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  about your identity. And Christianity was definitely one of my identities.
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  Wait, is that because of a specific transcendent experience or for sure? Yeah. I mean,
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  I don't know how what the equivalent is in Australia, but especially transcendent experiences.
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  Well, I'm saying of somewhat organized moments to give young people these transit. I'm not trying
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  to be too cynical about it. No, I know. I know you're a church camp. Do you guys have church
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  camp here? Well, I'm sure that there are churches that have camps. I think what you're trying to say
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  is that you were raped by a priest. And then it was the best thing that ever happened to you.
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  And ever since then, you've never looked back. That's fascinating, Andy. Tell me more. Well, first off,
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  we got to see it's a Protestant. It's no priests. We were, we were more anti-catholic. Okay,
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  sorry. In my little white, what do you call priests in the evangelical church? Don't have priests.
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  Well, what are they called? I'm sure there are priests, but you just want to call them that. Ministers,
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  I can preachers, big into preaching. Yep. That would be a priest in Leimann's terms, but yes,
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  carry on with you. Well, back of just one more step. Sure. To understand that the US is
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  more religious than most of our allies, even now. Yes. And right now, even as so many of the
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  institutions in the US and in the Western world are losing some of their trust, some of their
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  gusto, some of their credibility, the US church is also going through a version of this.
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  And there's a lot of similarities. What's happening inside of the Christian worlds? Because there's
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  many different kinds of them in the US to the kind of loss of trust happening in everything from
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  the CDC, our Center for Disease Control of Congress or the media, the New York Times, where I
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  used to work. It's having its own version of that. And in some ways, when you talk about the
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  American church, what does that mean? I'm talking generally just about christened them in American
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  Christianity, which has had all these different permeantations and all these different chapters.
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  Okay. So you would include Catholicism as part of that? I would historically say yes. And I do
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  mean that in this context, well, obviously the scandals of the Catholic church have made headlines.
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  I think less likely to make headlines is what's happening in almost every branch of American
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  christened them. These days, I don't know how familiar you are with Hillsong. They're in
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  Australia and church. Right. And they've had a version of these scandals, kind of political
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  polarization happening inside of the pulpit. So I'm interested in Christianity in part because
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  it's the roots of my own kind of self-discovery. And so people who don't know Hillsong, it's a
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  Pentecostal kind of aspirational church, would you say? It's Protestant and it is probably the closest
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  thing to the sort of upbringing I had that there's a lot on your personal relationship with Jesus.
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  There's not the kind of hierarchy of the Catholic or even the Anglican church. It's more about
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  a relate you one-on-one grappling with God, your church community being there for you to help
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  facilitate your relationship with God. And would you say that it's a gospel of prosperity and
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  abundance rather than guilt and shame and sin is probably how it's a little to mad. It's a
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  grab bag of all. Okay. Yeah. I mean, this church that I was reading was a rural church and so
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  it's going to be a little bit more hellfire and brimstone. Because I've been going to I went
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  to a sermon at a church, a mega church in Southern California that I was really struck by when
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  I was still in my teens and I was backpacking around. And it was just so incredibly alien to me,
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  but this was before the era of Hillsong in Australia. And what was alien about it was how uplifting
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  and materialistic and kind of prosaic its aspirations were comparison to this to the sort of
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  religiosity that I had seen here, which were much more traditional old school Catholic or Anglican
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  and much more focused on repentance, humility and those kinds of virtues rather than lots of
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  singing about about how great it will be to get a widescreen TV. Yeah. I mean, the abundance and
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  the prosperity gospel aspect of it. I think it can be a little bit of a dismal. It doesn't feel like
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  that when you're inside of it, at least for a lot of the people who find great meaning and
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  that thing we're talking about, that transcendence. Yeah. It's definitely not as transactional as
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  maybe that description would make it sound. I'll just say from my own experience. Yeah. Okay.
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  So the preachers and the ministers and the non-priests managed to convince adolescent Andy that what,
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  that the past of fulfillment is a life of the cloth? It's, once again, it's almost to get a
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  deep understanding of it. The church provides a few bits of stability that are very attractive
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  to people who maybe lack that stability in their home life and they provide opportunities
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  for you to find your own place in a society where maybe you're having a harder time with that.
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  For me, growing up in a very small town, being someone who like to read a lot, who like to talk a lot,
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  who like to think deeply about philosophical things, really in a small town, the only place
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  you're going to do that is going to be the church. You wrestle with these big ideas and you're
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  encouraged to read your Bible and in the Protestant tradition, God doesn't just speak through
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  the anointed. Everyone is the anointed, right? Christ is in you and it was an amazing thing to
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  believe growing up that God, the creator of everything created me, loved me, and had a plan and
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  a purpose for me in my life. And you mix that in with the fact that I didn't have the greatest
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  home life. I wasn't getting a lot of encouragement or love in some of those maybe more traditional
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  senses. And I did there. You know, a lot of hugs, a lot of people made me feel as if I was
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  important, even outside of all the religiosity, but the religiosity, the fact that there was this
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  larger story bigger than my own life, bigger than my town, bigger than anything we could even imagine,
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  and then I had a role in that and that I might be able to do some kind of good. It meant a lot
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  to me. Do you still carry that narrative? I try to keep the parts I've left, you know, the faith,
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  as I say, I'm no longer affiliated. I'm pretty much an atheist, although I try, I was so sure for
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  so long that I had the right answers to the big questions about who is God and what should you
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  do to live a godly life and the importance of the eternal life and making sure that this life
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  will get you there. Because I was so certain there for so long that after I stopped believing in
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  those things, I made a kind of intellectual commitment to more humility, which I think is one of
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  the reasons I ended up being a journalist is that I still care about what human beings believe.
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  I think there's maybe nothing more powerful on this planet for better for worse than what
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  we homo sapiens think is true and what our beliefs inspire us to do or not to do. I just
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  felt this calling when I was young in part because of these spiritual moments I had where I
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  thought that the creator of the universe was speaking to me and telling me to go preach the word,
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  right? I still, sorry, I almost lost my, I was remembering it, I suddenly got lost in the,
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  and I'm thinking like that must sound so strange to Josh, to be talking about this so weird,
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  but I love it because the path that I thought I was being called to was to tell people
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  what is true to preach to them the gospel of Christ that they might not just live a better life
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  here on earth, but more importantly that they might live an eternal life with their god in heaven.
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  And when I started to have doubts when I was in Christian college and I was learning more
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  about Christianity, I was learning more about church history, you know, it starts up in layers.
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  I suddenly realized that my kind of Christianity, which I thought was the only kind of Christianity
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  that had it all figured out in the Catholics, they were wrong and the Anglicans were wrong and the
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  seventh day Adventists were wrong and boy, the Mormons were wrong. We spent a lot of time on that in the US.
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  I started to see that even my own kind of, my own branch of Christianity had gone through a lot of
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  changes and that the Christians who I thought of as, you know, my ancestors in the faith,
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  just 70, a hundred years previous would have judged my kind of Christianity as being
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  way to left wing or way to liberal, way to out there and that it's always changing and then I
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  learned more about other faiths and saw that we shared a lot more in common than I had been led to
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  believe by the Christians who raised me and I suddenly realized that something more interesting
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  was happening here than I just so happened to find the one true God and the one true faith.
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  One of the one should believe what I believe or else. One of the crazy things about
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  religiosity is that the people who are most in favor of teaching lots of religion in schools
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  tend to be secular people and people who are opposed to teaching about children about religions
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  are the religious people for exactly that reason. I mean religious people know that if you teach
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  kids about all the different religions, they're going to start realizing that the one that they
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  happen to be born into is probably not the only one, the only game in town, but I mean as far as
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  I'm concerned, I want my kids to learn about Islam and about Zoroastrianism and about atheism
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  and Catholicism and everything because, right, but I mean just think not to jump too far ahead
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  into the moment we're in now, but a lot of what I do now in the stories that I tell as a journalist
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  or a lot of the stories I'm compelled to and curious about pursuing our stories where people who
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  on the surface seem as if they couldn't be more different and their politics are maybe very
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  different, but that when you spend time with them and you learn more about their motivations and
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  their beliefs and how they came to hold those beliefs, you often can see a reflection of
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  the same human nature running through them. And this was a profound thing for me to discover as a
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  young Christian college student trying to figure out what kind of ministry was for me to see that,
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  oh, maybe there's not such a distance between me and a Muslim, between me and a Jew, between me and
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  I mean, even I think it was kind of radical for me to go, wow, these Catholics aren't that different
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  for me, right? It sounds silly, but I didn't even know that you didn't have priests. Yeah,
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  and that's how similarly you ought to me to a Catholic. I mean, it's yeah, I can be, I should say,
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  it can be a dangerous thing and it's why I think some people, you mentioned that some religious
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  people don't want their kids learning too much about other faiths, but we're seeing it happen
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  in the world of our polarized politics as well. And one of the problems that I started to notice
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  in the New York journalism world that I came into in 2011, 2012, right around 2014, 2015,
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  I started to see that a similar thing was happening in that subculture than what I had seen
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  happening in the fundamentalist Christian subculture that I had been immersed in in my youth,
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  where it could be dangerous to your career, to be curious about a story that might
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  shed some kind of nuance on a particular political group or a political issue that a handful of
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  your colleagues think is settled or think should go one way. What's an example of that? I mean,
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  the most potent example of it, late in 2014, I was working for a show called Radio Lab,
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  and I stumbled on a story that I thought was a perfect Radio Lab story. Now, keep in mind that
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  it was 2014, to some of what I'm going to say now, you'll realize why this story never air,
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  but I did not realize what was to come. Go on, tell us how naive you were in 2014, Andy. So,
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  I had met this mother who had a very young transgender child, and when I was asking her, I'd never
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  met someone who had a young child who had transitioned. At the time, her child was six.
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  Well, I thought that's really young. And she was like, actually, we started the transition
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  when the child was just three. And so I became very curious like, well, how do you make the decision?
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  And it was interesting. She wasn't from an activist background or anything like that.
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  She just had a child who presented in more of the stereotypical female ways. And then
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  pretty much as soon as that child could speak, was saying that they were a girl. And this
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  mother didn't know quite what to do, went looking for resources, talked to different therapists
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  with different ideas, and came to believe that even though she knew it was going to be seen as
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  strange by some of her family members and that the what felt like the healthiest thing for her
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  child was to do a social transition, which involved changing the name, sending out an email to
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  friends and family going from now on, it's a she and from now on. And of course, she suffered
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  some social blowback from that. There were people who thought she was doing the wrong thing,
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  but she was trying to do what was right for her child. And it appeared as if that was the right
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  thing. And her child was flourishing. And really, it seemed that the issue was somewhat settled
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  until this transgender girl was six years old was in, I believe, the first grade. And
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  started to go through a lot of changes. First, it was no longer wanted long hair,
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  when it short hair, then it was no longer wanted to wear dresses, wanted to dress more in a
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  typically masculine way, was becoming friends with the boys in school, far more than the girls in
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  school. And this mother was telling me they had a moment of thinking, oh, did I make a mistake?
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  Or maybe it wasn't a mistake, but maybe it was the right thing for the right time. And so
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  she had a conversation with her transgender daughter, where she essentially was saying,
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  do you want to go back? We could use the other name. And told me that her daughter said, nah,
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  I'm still a girl. None of those things matter. I know I'm a girl. And the question that this
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  mother was asking me and that I thought would be great for radio lab was, okay, what is a girl?
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  Because nothing about her transgender daughter looked like a girl anymore, including the anatomy,
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  right? And yet wanted to continue to identify as a girl. And I thought, well, I don't know the
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  answer to that. But it feels consequential. And it feels like I could shed light on an experience
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  that, especially in 2014, we were starting to hear more and more about. And so I pitched it,
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  radio lab was excited about it. We interviewed the mother. It was a very moving interview,
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  very thoughtful. We started talking to neurologists at Columbia University about, you know,
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  what's happening in the brain and all the lines between male and female and had we drawn them to
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  firmly before. And yet, you know, a few weeks into this reporting, just a handful of younger staffers
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  on the team said, I don't think this is Andy's story to tell. Essentially, that because I was a
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  straight white cisgendered man, as they said, this wasn't my story to tell. And in fact,
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  me saying, what is a girl? Let's try and figure out what science has about it, what personal
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  experience has about it. They saw it as suspect. They saw it as I must have some reason,
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  some down deep I must have some nefarious reason why I'm doing this. And that was enough to kill
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  the story because bosses and everyone else was like, oh, this might be too sensitive. We're going
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  to walk away from it. And that is one of, that's an overt example of something that was happening
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  more and more just throughout different newsrooms, not just in, you know, the public radio world
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  in America where I was, but all the different corners of the New York media. And then in 2016,
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  I started at the New York Times. And even some of the most powerful, like popular pullitzer prize
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  winning reporters that I was meeting at the times had so many issues like this. Well, I can make
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  a lot of reports about the New York Times. She definitely has a lot of issues.
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  We could go get beers. And though, you know, whatever it is, they'll say, oh, I'd love to
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  report on this. Oh, I didn't interview years ago. But, you know, we couldn't do that because
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  and these aren't like wrong. These aren't people who were contrarians who had some take. And
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  I don't want to get the impression that, you know, number one, I have no bone to pick with trans
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  identities. I, you know, don't have, I'm not, I just thought that my, I just thought that
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  my job as a journalist, like when I left Christianity, I thought I was making a firm move away
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  from a vocation where I told people what they should believe or else. And I'd move towards a
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  vocation where I tried to understand why anyone believes anything and what holding those beliefs
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  like does to our world. Like what actions come from those beliefs and
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  that we are to be curious that we as journalists are to bear witness. But just a quick question
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  about the pushback and the, so when you say that it wasn't your story to tell, do you think that
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  the people who objected to the story were genuinely concerned about it being your own,
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  about it not being your own story? And would have been enthusiastic about the story being told
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  if or a trans person telling the story. Or are they using the idea that it's not your story to
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  tell us a pretext to suppress the question of what is a girl? I think it's both. Number one,
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  if I were a trans identifying person, I don't think that they would have felt they had the
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  standing to say something like that. Of course, they couldn't. Because this was 2014, this was the
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  beginning of a linguistic change that happened rather quickly. In 2014, it got worse in 2015,
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  and a little worse in 2016, and it had its peak in 2020, which is that certain kind of language
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  that was popular on certain social media websites like Tumblr, and eventually Tumblr would influence
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  kind of the norms of language on Twitter, where you could be disparaging about people because of
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  their identity, as long as they were white, what often became known as cis, cis hats, right,
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  that became a thing where people would openly say cis heads, meaning a cisgender heterosexual
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  person. But we were getting to a point in 2014. It was still a little bit scandalous, but
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  where people would openly say in a newsroom meeting stuff like, oh, that's such a white guy thing
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  to say. Oh, yeah. Do they not say that anymore? I think that moment has largely passed.
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  I mean, it never really was the norm in the New York Times. That was still being said
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  as recently as last year in big media organizations that I was working for here. Really?
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  I mean, not in a threatening way, but just like, oh my god, you know, pale style males,
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  like always with their, you know, story about this or like one more, you know, content so male,
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  or that's such a white, such a white guy story, like things like that are totally normalized.
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  Yeah, and I would say like, I want to live in a world where that joke is fine to make,
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  and we can maybe, you just want to be able to have too much sensitivity around
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  the story, a black woman story as well, if you need to. If you're really black woman story,
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  if it's a black chick story, you should be able to say, I mean, I'm serious. That's such a black
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  chick story. I do think that there is a version of that that happens, which is, you know,
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  this comes around the DEI revolution that I was a witness to in the New York media scene where
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  that went from kind of a side issue to really front and center, especially in 2021. You would see
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  the stereotyping starting to happen maybe with the best of intentions, but that there would be
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  certain beats, and there would be certain members of your team who happen to have certain
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  political views that you were well aware of, because they feel comfortable to say them,
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  and often assuming everyone else agreed with them, where a story would come up,
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  and then they'd be like, oh, that should be Robert's story.
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  Right, because like, person comes from some specific. They wouldn't say it, but yeah, exactly.
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  Part of it goes, I know. It's totally condescending. I mean, we also have that here where,
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  you know, there'll be an indigenous reporter who is assigned to indigenous stories,
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  or, you know, a person who overtly lives with a disability who always covers disability stories,
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  and you're like, isn't that a little condescending? I can't be indigenous reporter.
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  Also report on crime. I mean, I think it's, I don't know where it stands exactly now, but I will
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  say that in 2018, I spoke at an event at UC Berkeley's College for Investigative Studies,
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  which is one of the most storied institutions in American Journalistic Education, and
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  during the Q&A portion of both the talks that I gave, well, I was there.
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  So this is students asking questions to a panel of journalists.
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  So many of the questions from the students were a version of, how did you report on that story
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  when that's not your identity? Or did you, when you did that story,
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  did you hire somebody with that identity because some of your subjects had that identity?
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  And they're, it really seemed to these students that we had lanes that we had to stay.
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  And that was a worrying sign that it's not just a few people in the newsroom,
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  but that these people who are going to be at the, the, like, the front and center for the next
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  generation of American Journalism saw that. And yet it wasn't yet in 2018. It wasn't yet that
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  scandalist for me to say to them, guys, there's no lane here. Like the reason, I mean,
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  they came a journalist in part was to meet people and interview people and know people deeply
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  who are not like me, but also within the community themselves, there's such diversity.
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  This is what I don't understand. Like I recently had a younger colleague express, like,
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  outrage and bafflement to me that they'd been invited to speak on a panel and it had something
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  to do with indigenous issues and other subjects on which there was not an indigenous person.
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  And they were like, of course, I declined. Like I'm not going to be on a panel talking about
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  indigenous issues when they're not even inviting an indigenous person. I was like, I understand
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  the optics of that, but I can gather together a panel of 10 indigenous people who will all
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  argue about completely have different opinions about things. Of course, because they're intelligent
• 27:23
  people who think for themselves, the idea that you have to tokenistically grab one of them who
• 27:28
  suits your agenda and prop them up there. Like they're a, you know, like they're a puppet who's
• 27:34
  going to reinforce whatever the organizer of the panel wants them to say and do it with great
• 27:39
  credibility because of the color of their skin. It's like, I don't know. I don't get it. Like,
• 27:45
  I do think that you're putting your finger on the fact that these DEI initiatives or diversity
• 27:51
  initiatives that they do run the risk of reestablishing certain stereotypes if they're seen
• 28:03
  shallowly in human nature as human nature. So we often overreact instead of react, you know,
• 28:10
  then if there's some thing happening with DEI that clearly isn't maybe achieving the goals we
• 28:17
  want, there's a DEI, by the way, is diversity, equity and inclusion, right? This is kind of an
• 28:21
  American acronym for you guys not to see only through inheritance to from from America. Yeah, no,
• 28:26
  it's all each of those ideas has currency in Australia, but it doesn't have that same that same slogan.
• 28:34
  We would just call it that yeah, diversity and right. Well, the diversity initiatives that,
• 28:38
  especially those that became popular in 2020 in the wake of the George Floyd protests and riots,
• 28:47
  they didn't work very well and they created a kind of niche economy of angry Americans who hate
• 28:55
  anything DEI or anything diversity. Yeah. And I'm not a part of that. I actually think that diversity,
• 29:02
  especially when you live in a country like the US, that you would you want diversity. Yes.
• 29:07
  Like you're as a reporter who's been a part of some big reporting teams, it's helpful to have people
• 29:13
  with different backgrounds with different life experiences. Yeah, and sometimes DEI is used
• 29:18
  increasingly in the States as a way for racists to just hide from being racist. I find, I mean,
• 29:23
  they'll talk about Kamala Harris being a DEI candidate or something, which basically
• 29:27
  is a coded way of saying that she's black. Well, let's put a pin in that because I want to ask you,
• 29:32
  I think I definitely have seen people using it that way, but there are other times where
• 29:37
  I think it gets almost used for the divert. The flip side of that coin I think can also be true,
• 29:42
  which is trying to use that what we have DEI as a way to signal so we're not racist.
• 29:48
  Oh, I see. You mean like an organization will hide behind its DEI policy. And I think that this is
• 29:54
  not an uncontroversial opinion, even among the American left at this point, that the big DEI
• 29:59
  statements from Coca-Cola and Johnson and Johnson and Lockheed Martin that maybe some of that was
• 30:07
  often called virtue signaling or attempts to not be on the wrong side of a consumer base
• 30:14
  and not exactly a sole searching of, you know, for the people who historically were not included or
• 30:21
  were not a part of this newsroom or were not a part of this boardroom, how do we try to maybe rectify
• 30:29
  an imperfect past. I think that that goal could be worth it, but then it becomes, it's two things.
• 30:36
  One is that you do have these opportunities where sometimes you just fall into stereotyping,
• 30:42
  where just because someone looks different, they make all these assumptions. And I mean, I've literally
• 30:46
  heard in the New York Times newsroom from one of the younger reporters who she had a very privileged
• 30:53
  life and went to private schools and her parents paid tuition for her Ivy League education. And
• 30:59
  this New York Times job is one of the first times she's ever had a job in her whole life. And she
• 31:04
  sees me and sees that our skin color is similar and she makes assumptions that she and I are a lot
• 31:09
  of like, and we are not. I have not had any of that in the background. And then she sees our new
• 31:14
  hire who has darker skin. And she makes the assumption like, oh, the barriers of entry that must have
• 31:21
  been there for you to get here. And that's not doing anyone any favors. And it's in fact maybe
• 31:26
  reinforcing some stereotypes, especially because in this case, this person who she was making those
• 31:30
  assumptions about like went to the same school she did. I'm sure there are a lot of things are
• 31:37
  different. Yeah. On the flip side, though, what can become awkward? And I've seen this around the
• 31:41
  Kamala Harris as the DEI president. I get the ways in which that can be a kind of way of just saying,
• 31:48
  she only got the job because she's black. But at the same time,
• 31:54
  she is kind of a DEI candidate in the sense that
• 32:00
  Biden picked her in part because of her identity. Yes. In her story, maybe she was the wrong
• 32:08
  example. But I think it's because it's the open one. People will share like a clip of like a black
• 32:13
  mayor or something. And they'll say, you know, like Baltimore's DEI mayor is out of control.
• 32:17
  What they mean is that it's a black person. And the implication is that the person is only in
• 32:22
  that position because they're black. In her case, yes, you're right. There is that wrinkle that
• 32:27
  obviously she was picked for the vice presidency in addition to being accomplished because she was a
• 32:33
  female of color. That being said, she didn't have to be the presidential candidate right now.
• 32:40
  They could have been other. Absolutely. But this is what I say, like trying to I want to live in a
• 32:45
  world where we can have the nuance conversation and where we can, but that's not the, you know,
• 32:50
  those social norms are having a hard time right now because in the world that I wish it was
• 32:55
  people who support DEI initiatives can say, well, let me show you the ways that she is
• 33:00
  kind of like a DEI pick because we're proud of if you want DEI, you should be able to explain,
• 33:07
  yes, this is what a DEI hire or this is what a DEI pick looks like. But I think that they're
• 33:14
  unable to do that in part because maybe they haven't thought deeply about what exactly a DEI.
• 33:19
  I think you might be able to say something there. And then on the other side,
• 33:21
  thinking deeply about it. And then I think on the other side, there's this, well, we're all
• 33:26
  having a fight and it's all about winning and not winning. And I don't know how to win on that
• 33:30
  issue. So instead, I'll just attack you. I mean, also, I mean, if you want to talk nuance,
• 33:35
  let's break apart DEI. Okay. So diversity, equity and inclusion. Inclusion.
• 33:43
  I mean, my instinct is that inclusion is just silly, right? That is the silliest of the three
• 33:49
  parts because how are you interpreting it? I'm interpreting inclusion as meaning that everybody
• 33:54
  should be very careful what they say because they might make someone feel left out in a workplace
• 34:00
  and they might make someone feel like they're not part of the club, which means that you have to
• 34:04
  monitor your own microaggressions monitor your, you know, speech codes and try to and that everything
• 34:11
  will get turned it down into the most banal and corporatized kind of HR version of
• 34:19
  right in offensive Pablo, so that we can all be in this on the same level of corporate speak
• 34:23
  without having any personality or color to office life. That's what included. I think about
• 34:28
  the, those like memes of it was Microsoft where it went viral during the pandemic years of them
• 34:34
  introducing themselves like, hi, my name is Bill Miller. I'm white skinned, blonde hair,
• 34:41
  blue eyes, six foot two, pronouns he, him, they were just, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, they
• 34:49
  they became a punching bag for I think the silliest parts of inclusion. I mean, for me, I think
• 34:54
  the good side of inclusion is that and once again, the world I want to live in is that
• 35:00
  a person should be judged in their job by their ability to do that job well and it shouldn't
• 35:11
  matter what they look like and it shouldn't matter who their dad was and it shouldn't matter how
• 35:15
  their family came to be in this country that if we're, you know, say you're in a journalistic
• 35:21
  enterprise, you're in a newsroom, you should be judged solely on your ability to be a great
• 35:27
  journalist, to have good ideas, to be accurate, to write with clear, whatever it is. And for far
• 35:33
  too long in our history, that wasn't where you were judged on completely. It was in part,
• 35:39
  are you a woman? And then how do you look as a woman? It was part of well, you're a man, but what
• 35:44
  kind of man are you? Right. And there are other people who had to hide the fact that they may be gay
• 35:48
  or they may, you know, I would put that kind of lack of bias under the equity.
• 35:54
  Bana is that I was thinking of as inclusive in a sense of we want to make this place one that
• 36:01
  welcomes all those people and that they're the phrase you hear is that they're free to be their
• 36:06
  whole self at work. Right. Now the trouble is I don't think we should be our whole selves at work
• 36:13
  all the time. No. I think maybe you should be your work self at work and you're your whole self
• 36:17
  with your blood. It's bullshit that people who want, who people who say that they want you to be
• 36:21
  your whole self at work actually want you to be your whole self at work. What they want is that
• 36:26
  people who they, whose, whose whole selves they like, they want them to be their whole selves at work.
• 36:32
  They're fine for the trans person to be their whole selves at work. They're fine for the gay person
• 36:36
  to be their whole self at work. They're fine for the person of color to be their whole self at work.
• 36:39
  Are they fine for the religious Muslim who objects to homosexuality? To be their whole self at work?
• 36:46
  Right. Of course not. Right. And then you've just started to break it down. You know, I've covered
• 36:50
  the trans issues and debates for several years and some of the, you know, some of the trans
• 37:01
  advocates of the 1990s and early 2000s are now seen as disfavored by some of the younger
• 37:11
  more online trans activists. So it wouldn't just matter the kind of Muslim.
• 37:16
  Right. It would also matter the kind of trans. Absolutely. It also matter. Once again,
• 37:20
  I mean, we're friends with Camille Foster and he talks a lot about the fact that in certain
• 37:25
  circles, there's like an assumption made that black Americans, you know, have one mind or
• 37:32
  monolithic in some ways, but of course they're not. And yeah, I think you're right. And that's
• 37:36
  maybe the bullshit of the inclusion part is, you know, check this book. I mean, I saw it in
• 37:43
  the newsrooms. I worked and they send you like a yearly evaluation of your job and you talk
• 37:47
  about, do I feel supported? Do I know these things? And one of the boxes is like, do I feel like
• 37:50
  I can bring my whole self to work? And it's just, it's laughable because like people know that
• 37:55
  you don't really mean that. Like no one wants you to say, hey guys, check out the group's red
• 37:59
  with my college friends. Yeah. No one wants to see that group. I mean, also, no matter who you are,
• 38:04
  what if you have concerns about the ability of South Asians to integrate into British society?
• 38:10
  You know, do you do, do you know, does the BBC want you to bring those concerns to work? Of course
• 38:15
  not. What they mean is that you can bring the ideas that they like to work in the parts of your
• 38:20
  identity that they like to work. So that's inclusion, diversity, equity. Well, maybe we should just
• 38:27
  do diversity first because diversity, I think, is something that is pretty uncontroversially good.
• 38:33
  I mean, as far as I'm concerned, diversity and actual diversity, but it's just that we've got
• 38:37
  the metrics wrong because we're just looking at a few superficial metrics like what your sex is
• 38:42
  and what your sexuality is and what your skin color is. Yeah. But if we actually included
• 38:47
  what your economic background is, you know, whether you came from a small town or a big city,
• 38:52
  you know, whether or not you went to a private school or a public school,
• 38:56
  then you'd probably get it. Then you do want more diversity. Right. I mean, when I talk to people
• 39:01
  who are really skeptical about diversity having any place in the calculation of building a team,
• 39:10
  one thing I'll tell them is I was kind of a diversity hire at Radio Lab. Right. Because I grew up
• 39:16
  thinking that the world was created in six days by God and he rested on the seventh. And it was
• 39:23
  until later in life that I really learned about the evolutionary theory. And I was bringing that
• 39:29
  that new convert enthusiasm to science because there were so many things. Right.
• 39:33
  Then I'm like, wait, when did we figure that? Yeah. You mean there's whale fossils from between
• 39:39
  one and the other? You know, like going to the Smithsonian's weekend is more than just something
• 39:45
  God created. Right. And I think that that helped in a competitive field. One of the reasons they
• 39:51
  wanted me on the team over some of the people who also wanted we were applying for the job at that
• 39:55
  time. Yeah. I think was that they saw, well, he'll bring an interesting perspective. Yeah.
• 39:58
  I mean, I think the reason why people, why reasonable people would object to diversity would be if
• 40:03
  there is a rigid kind of quota system where, you know, you have to hit a certain metric and therefore
• 40:08
  you're going to elevate an inferior person of color and, you know, not give the job to a superior or
• 40:14
  harder working white person or something like that. But I think those are just silly applications.
• 40:19
  True. But let's forget about the silly. Let's get to the difficult ones, which is coming back
• 40:26
  to like the world I want to live in is where someone could say actually blank is a DEI higher,
• 40:32
  and here's why it's good. And we're not in that world yet. And some of it comes down to a thing like
• 40:39
  discomfort and a lack of being able to think deeply about what it is that is the base value
• 40:46
  of the policy to what they're able to be such a case. Well, I mean, I'll say this, you know,
• 40:50
  one of the issues that eventually got me years later would get me into some controversial waters
• 40:58
  was the fact that when I was at, you know, radio lab, this very popular podcast at the time.
• 41:03
  And we had, you know, been working very hard and we were excited because we started to get a
• 41:08
  little bit larger budget and we had some room to hire a new producer and we really wanted to
• 41:13
  hire a producer who could help carry the weight of our ambitious show. And in the hiring,
• 41:19
  we narrowed it down to two qualified candidates. But one of them, most of us agreed was just more
• 41:25
  qualified, had already been working there for a while as a temp and it would be a great relief
• 41:32
  if they were full time to carry some of this weight. The other candidate we liked, but wasn't,
• 41:37
  as qualified, wasn't as ready to show up day one and do the job. But we had more men on the team
• 41:43
  than women and one of the higher that was my preferred hire was a man and the other one was a woman.
• 41:49
  And then in the hiring meeting, we had a conversation about, well, if we hire X,
• 41:54
  we're going to have, we're going to be even more dude heavy than we are right now. So maybe we
• 41:59
  should hire, you know, why? And I was just saying, well, does that, it doesn't that then mean that
• 42:05
  you can't look that person in the eye and say, we hired you because you're the best person for
• 42:08
  the job. We hired you, you are the best person for job, but you were the best one who helped to
• 42:13
  diversify our team. As long as we can own that, then I say we hire her. But if not, then I don't
• 42:19
  think we should. I see what you're saying. And then years later, it, that got translated into,
• 42:23
  you think she just got this job because she was a woman, which is a very ungenerous way of,
• 42:29
  of articulating what it was for. And in some ways, because it's like, it wasn't the only reason
• 42:35
  she wouldn't have gotten to be the second candidate on the list. Yeah. If it was just because she
• 42:40
  was a woman. But in the end, at the end of the day, she was hired over this person because
• 42:45
  she was a woman. And we should just be able to own that. But I guess that we're fighting for.
• 42:49
  Wouldn't the retort to that be that for decades or centuries, there's been an implicit bias that
• 42:55
  is unacknowledged towards male candidates. But nobody at the time ever said, if we can look
• 43:03
  this guy in the eye and say the reason you got over the line is because you're a man, then we should
• 43:07
  hire him. No one needed to say that. Right. So why should we have to say that now about women?
• 43:13
  If you're going to, I mean, I'm not an advocate for DEI initiatives. I'm just an advocate for
• 43:19
  trying to have better conversations by trying to see the best faith versions of what people are
• 43:25
  disagreeing about. And then starting from there, we can talk about the policies and the issue
• 43:29
  we want to fight for. But I think a best case version for Kamala Harris as the DEI presidential
• 43:35
  choice, right? If I were trying to make that, I could make that. And I would say that for many years,
• 43:40
  we have had brilliant presidential hopefuls in our country. But because they were women with
• 43:48
  darker skin or women who had immigrant parents or whatever reason, identity markers that are
• 43:54
  bullshit that don't actually mean you would or wouldn't be a good president, that held them back
• 44:00
  four years. And we are doing a small thing today to try and empower them to kind of correct
• 44:07
  history as much as you can. You can't ever go back. And do you think the honest and to say, do you
• 44:12
  think the honest narrative would work as well as the fiction? What do you mean? Do you think that saying
• 44:17
  that and being open about the left being open about the fact that she's there because she's a
• 44:21
  woman of color would be as electorally advantageous as just sort of trying to sweep it under the rug
• 44:27
  and be like, no, she's just the best person. Yeah, I think it would help because I think
• 44:32
  people are smarter than politicians and people in the media often make them out to be.
• 44:38
  Now, do I think it's a hard thing to retake? I mean, I'm struggling even to articulate it now.
• 44:44
  Yeah, it's hard because you set yourself up to bad faith attacks. Oh, so you're saying she only
• 44:49
  got the job because she was a woman with a background. And it's no, that's not like
• 44:57
  Ronald Reagan wasn't chosen just because he was a guy. But it's not surprising that there were
• 45:03
  a lot of women governors at the time that Ronald Reagan was a governor of California and became
• 45:07
  the Republican candidate for president, right? And that's not because there weren't qualified
• 45:12
  women to be the governor of California or the Republican edition because they were being held
• 45:16
  back by a lot of issues, but there was no. I'm saying the DEI argument that I think is most
• 45:23
  compelling and I do think is at the base of what they're arguing for. I just wish they would say it
• 45:27
  is saying that there, of course, there's a lot of qualified candidates that the Democrats could
• 45:33
  have chosen to be at the top of their ticket. But we're going with one who comes from a background
• 45:39
  that historically wasn't allowed to be in there. And yeah, maybe we're giving her a little bit
• 45:43
  of a leg up because the identity that she embraces had more than just a leg back for years.
• 45:51
  And what do you think about Biden having said that he was intentionally, you know,
• 45:57
  shopping for a woman? And then I think he said woman of color for his presidential pick. And then
• 46:03
  before appointing the Supreme Court justice. Yeah. Yeah. Judge Jackson, he was able to say that,
• 46:13
  you know, he was looking specifically for a diversity. Like at the time, there was a lot of
• 46:17
  conversation about like, why not just say you're going for the best person and then just happen to
• 46:22
  pick a black woman. But he seems to have been following the Andy playbook in the sense that he
• 46:27
  was actually, he did say it. I mean, he, well, I'm just, yeah, he almost got the worst of both
• 46:32
  worlds because he said it. But then he didn't explain what he meant. Right. And so it leads people
• 46:37
  to, and I don't know, it could have been that he was doing the thing that his critics said he was
• 46:43
  doing, which is, you know, trying to make this kind of cynical play. Or maybe he doesn't
• 46:49
  make an understand why he's doing it. You know, at this point, I don't think he would, you know,
• 46:52
  he may even explain it. His advice is to all him that he should, he had to be a woman of color.
• 46:55
  But even like, even just an explain this to you now, there's a part of me that thinks that
• 46:59
  there's going to be a segment of your audience that hears this. And the whole time they're going to
• 47:03
  be trying to figure out, does this guy Andy support DEI initiatives or not? Right. But I'm just
• 47:10
  saying, forget about if I support them or if I don't because I don't think that way as a journalist
• 47:14
  right now. That's not my job. I'm not into the opinions world. I'm glad there isn't opinions
• 47:18
  world. I like not, I like being the kind of person who's trying to understand the world.
• 47:22
  He was trying to report accurately on it and reflect it with clarity so that we can understand
• 47:26
  better. But people just want to know what team are you on and is it mine or is it not mine?
• 47:33
  That's not everybody. But I think that that isn't impulse that the internet has been pushing
• 47:36
  us towards, especially in this kind of social media decade of the internet that we've been living
• 47:41
  through. And what I'm advocating for is to own your statements, own your values, own your beliefs,
• 47:50
  and argue for them. Just argue this. If Biden's going to come out and say, I want to pick
• 47:57
  a black woman supreme court justice, come out and say why? Right. Because there are good arguments
• 48:03
  to be made about why. Just as there are good arguments to be made as a rebuttal of why you shouldn't.
• 48:09
  People were both friends of Coleman Hughes. He has a very persuasive argument. He makes about
• 48:15
  how a colorblind society, colorblind laws, can bring about the sort of just world that a lot of
• 48:22
  progressives want. I just think that we need to be willing to make these arguments. And that
• 48:27
  what ends up happening in the end is that it becomes just a way to another bludgeon, another tool
• 48:33
  that we bludgeon each side with. Instead of having a good deeper, quite frankly interesting
• 48:38
  conversation, whether it's about DEI or whether it's about trans identities, whether it's about,
• 48:45
  you see this around what is a woman? That's an interesting, I'm sorry, that's an interesting
• 48:50
  question that our societies around the world are grappling with right now. I wouldn't have guessed it.
• 48:55
  Yeah. But it's interesting in it. And some people's, oh, it's so clear what a woman is. And just
• 49:00
  think, well, dig around. Yeah. People have some compelling arguments. They're making you say it's
• 49:06
  so clear what a woman is. I mean, that's just, it's just like saying that it's so clear who's
• 49:11
  right in the Israel Gaza war. It's like, I know that it's not, I know that that isn't true,
• 49:16
  because there's so much, there's so much good and bad argumentation on both sides. It can't
• 49:22
  be that simple. If you, if you claim to know quite easily who's right and who's wrong on an issue,
• 49:27
  which is one of the most intractable ones that is racking our culture or our politics, then by
• 49:32
  definition, you're wrong, because obviously there are multiple sides to this. So after you've,
• 49:37
  you've had your trans story shot down and, and you've, you've lost the fight about no gender bias
• 49:46
  in hiring. How do you end up, what, what, what becomes of your time at Radio Lab and how do you
• 49:50
  end up at the New York Times? Well, I had a good tenure at Radio Lab, but I think increasingly,
• 49:56
  especially after that moment, I think there was a, kind of a defeating moment in some ways.
• 50:01
  And in 2015, 2016, the stories that I wanted to tell, Radio Lab was just becoming a different
• 50:07
  show. And the story, like, one of the reasons I was drawn to it in the first place was because in
• 50:14
  some of those early episodes, they were thinking very deeply and they were challenging our assumptions
• 50:19
  about everything from how memory works, how time works. And so that's the Radio Lab chapter that
• 50:23
  I joined in on to say, I want to understand, you know, like, what would it mean for our justice
• 50:29
  system if there's no such thing as free will? How, and how is a reporter? Do you report stories
• 50:35
  that help people think deeply in challenge assumptions? Radio Lab was like a lot of American public
• 50:41
  radio, like, moving away from that and into something else. And luckily for me, the New York Times
• 50:48
  was looking to build an audio team. And so my old boss, Lisa Tobin had just gotten the job as the
• 50:55
  executive producer of this new audio team. And I was the first hire at the, I never thought I
• 51:01
  would never work in the New York Times. I was super intimidated. The first time I showed up at
• 51:05
  the skyscraper of like my long hair and my tank top. And I was like, oh, no, what do you guys do?
• 51:11
  But we started the summer of 2016 trying to think of what will the New York Times audio world
• 51:22
  sound like? What kind of podcast? What should we do? And had the Daily Bin commissioned at this
• 51:25
  point? No, we thought maybe one day there would be a daily show. But it really wasn't until
• 51:32
  Donald Trump surprised America by suddenly winning the election. He wasn't supposed to win.
• 51:39
  That we started to think, well, what if we, the news became so interesting every day? I mean,
• 51:45
  I don't know if you're a big podcast listener, you know, you make it. But there was this thing that
• 51:49
  happened. I am a pod. Believe it or not. I'm a consumer of my own content. Yes. This interesting
• 51:53
  thing happened in 2016 because there was so much interest in this US presidential election in the
• 52:01
  United States that weekly political podcasts started having like emergency episodes in the middle
• 52:07
  of the week. And then they would do a third episode because there was a big news story. So
• 52:12
  yes. So they were doing three episodes in a week. And I would talk to my friends who were
• 52:17
  producers or executives at these political podcasts. And I'd say, what are your numbers like
• 52:22
  when you do three in a week versus one? And they're like, our numbers are exactly the same.
• 52:26
  And you mean triple? Yeah. If we put out three, that's three times what we had if it was just one.
• 52:34
  And so there was a business argument to be made that people would show up every day if it was
• 52:40
  especially with the resources of the times. Right. And then two is after Trump was elected,
• 52:46
  there just was suddenly a lot of interest in a number of directions. Number one, people were scared.
• 52:53
  There's a lot of people were like, what's going to happen? Because everyone told me this guy was
• 52:56
  going to be terrible. There's everything about to go to hell. Two, there are people felt like,
• 53:00
  oh, man, I don't know my country. Like I thought I did. And now I want to tune in to learn more about
• 53:05
  it. There were some people who thought they had never really gotten into politics. But maybe the
• 53:10
  almost like reality TV or something, they just wanted to tune into the new season of, you know,
• 53:16
  like this entertaining thing. But we tried to use the tools of the New York Times and take
• 53:23
  advantage of the fact that people were interested to Lisa Tobin, Theobalcom, me and the host Michael
• 53:29
  Barbaro was the four of us originally. We really wanted to do a daily news show that was truly
• 53:37
  worth your time. It didn't just tell you what was happening, but try to tell you a story that
• 53:42
  showed, you know, why people disagree, like why we're having these debates in society.
• 53:51
  Because since Sear People have been led to believe things are true, that maybe you haven't been.
• 53:56
  And this debate is truly difficult. And we tried to use that as a vehicle to do the kind of
• 54:04
  journalism that we really believe in. And it was a huge hit. And it was awesome. It was an amazing
• 54:09
  thing. It was, it was like a band who's putting out album after album. And finally, do you have that
• 54:15
  album that finally sells? And yeah, that was, it was amazing feeling. And also it just felt as if
• 54:22
  this calling that I felt to be a journalist had been realized, like, oh, I'm actually doing a
• 54:27
  version of this thing that I've been wanting to do since I lost, you know, my faith. And what I
• 54:32
  thought was going to be my life's trajectory. Back then, it was very affirming. It was very exciting.
• 54:37
  I found a real priest. And that priest's name is the Daily. His name is Michael Babbara.
• 54:43
  Although the one thing that I need Michael Babbara to tell me one day when I finally meet him is
• 54:49
  who calculates the number of milliseconds between his saying, here's what else. And when he says,
• 54:56
  you need another day. That's really an evolution. You need another day.
• 55:01
  Because at every and every episode, instead of saying, here's what else you need to know today.
• 55:06
  He says, here's what else. You need another day. Yeah, well, it's gotten worse over there. I made
• 55:11
  as a as a gift to him some years ago. I took him saying, here's what else you need to know today
• 55:18
  from like the first two weeks of the show, the next few months of the show. And then you just
• 55:24
  hear the aggression of it. It's like he's just gotten so bored. Here's what else.
• 55:33
  I will. You're taking me back to that time, though, in November of 2016 when you know what's
• 55:37
  an interesting listen, which I think I'll drop at some point around the election is my first
• 55:44
  episode of the precursor to this show at the time, which was called We The People Live.
• 55:50
  My first episode after Trump won was with David Plott's. Do you know David?
• 55:56
  I mean, not on personally, but you know who he is from the social gap first podcast history right
• 56:02
  there. Yeah. And to hear him and me in shell shock, trying to prognosticate about what the next
• 56:10
  four years is going to be like, like, we're talking about war with North Korea. Like, really?
• 56:15
  You know, who know? Because who knew you remember that time? Like when Trump was just elected,
• 56:18
  you're like, what the hell's going to happen? Would I have no idea? It's just like everyone's
• 56:22
  walking around ash and face like this. Yeah. I think Andrew Sullivan wrote a piece entitled The
• 56:29
  Republic Repeals Itself or something. It was like everyone was just going bonkers. So anyway,
• 56:35
  yeah, so the Daily Starts Happening take us through your tenure at the Times and when warning flags
• 56:40
  begin to emerge. I mean, it's not that juicy of a story because I mean, my five years at the
• 56:47
  New York Times were amazing. I found the institution to be largely the what you wish it would be,
• 56:57
  what you want it to be. And that includes like, I, you know, I'm not left or right. I'm kind of
• 57:03
  proudly. I really take seriously the identity of the journalist. Some people think it's a cop out
• 57:08
  to not have to come up with some of my own views. They're right. Sometimes it is. But I was critical of
• 57:14
  some of our coverage in the way that we use language that I was like, do you not want conservatives?
• 57:20
  It's like your goal to make conservatives not read. What's an example of that?
• 57:25
  It could even just be the way that we talk about, you know, issues of race, issues of gender.
• 57:31
  I mean, even the decision to use for a while, there was a thing happening in public radio
• 57:39
  when it's still happening, but where they say undocumented immigrants, when you say undocumented
• 57:44
  immigrants, you are using the preferred language of the left, which is totally fine. But it's not,
• 57:49
  it's neither the clearest way to talk about it. It's not that, oh my gosh, what are you doing
• 57:54
  around here? I can't find your papers. Yeah. The reason it's an issue is because they came in illegally
• 57:58
  or they overstayed their visa and they're here now illegally. Right. It's the legal part that's
• 58:03
  worth the debate. No one's upset that they just don't have the misplaced there. Exactly. Yeah,
• 58:08
  their visa. But it's a way, it's seen as more humane and it's a preferred term.
• 58:12
  Well, it is also complicated because I used to call them illegal immigrants and then it was
• 58:15
  pointed out to me that it's not actually against the law to seek asylum. So the ones who are,
• 58:22
  saying that they're seeking asylum haven't broken the law until the cases are
• 58:28
  adjudicated and they obviously they're visas in which point they would be illegal if they were
• 58:31
  here. But so it's, yeah, it's messy. It is messy. But this is a good example. The times is the kind
• 58:37
  of place that at least in my tenure there always welcomed that conversation. Right. Wasn't like
• 58:44
  how dare you fall in line or shut up. Yeah. No, they had a certain amount, especially after
• 58:51
  Trump was elected, there was some real soul searching going on from some of the top brass there
• 58:57
  because they hate to miss a story. They and they missed it. And they felt like they missed one of
• 59:03
  the, I mean, just before we leave, before we leave undocumented workers, I mean undocumented migrants,
• 59:09
  what do you, how do you say that now? Because I've just written an article for a newspaper here
• 59:13
  where I had to make that decision about illegal. I was talking about boat arrivals in the UK,
• 59:18
  right? Who come across the channel, which is now like 40,000 people a year. And I didn't want to
• 59:23
  say illegal because they're not tech, it's not technically illegal if they're potentially refugees.
• 59:28
  I didn't want to say undocumented because for the reasons you just articulated, it sounds like
• 59:33
  a paperwork snappled. I said unannounced, go to wrong. I said unannounced boat arrivals. And then I
• 59:40
  was like, oh, that's, like unannounced, I mean, I just think be specific. That's always, it's just
• 59:49
  always the answer is that if you can just be like, for example, I never use the term people of color.
• 59:54
  And it's solely because like the way I was raised in the American South and the Midwest,
• 1:00:00
  it was my life overlapped with the life of people who still referred to the world as white people
• 1:00:07
  and colored people. And it was just brought into me growing up that we don't think of people that way.
• 1:00:14
  And if I had said, you know, colored people to my parents growing up, they would,
• 1:00:18
  they would have reprimanded me, right? And it's, to me, it's just too much, it's too much like colored
• 1:00:23
  people to say people of color. I understand people mean by it. I'm not offended by it. I'm not
• 1:00:29
  policing other people's language, but I just have chosen not to have you refer to groups of people
• 1:00:36
  who aren't watched or do you know? I mean, I rarely need to refer to everyone in the world
• 1:00:41
  as not white. So I just, whatever people I'm talking about, I tried to be specific. So I
• 1:00:45
  would say the same thing if I'm talking about the illegal immigration problem in the US,
• 1:00:51
  you know, I'll talk about the illegal immigration. But if I'm also trying to throw into that,
• 1:00:55
  the massive amount of asylum seekers who've, you know, been showing up at the border and
• 1:01:01
  causing a very big political problem for the Democrats. Then I'll mention that. Yeah, I'll try,
• 1:01:07
  I'll try to, because they are different groups of people that, the, you know, the huge amount
• 1:01:12
  of illegal immigration laws that are being broken around the world, not just in the US,
• 1:01:17
  are people who just overstay their visas. I think a lot of people understand this.
• 1:01:21
  Most illegal. And even when you talk about immigration numbers, when people talk about,
• 1:01:26
  you know, so many hundred thousand new migrants came to the country in any year,
• 1:01:30
  the majority of those people are people who were already in the country who were issued a new visa.
• 1:01:36
  Yeah, right. So it's like, you know, you say, what? You know, 500,000 people arrived last year.
• 1:01:41
  Yeah, 350,000 of them already here. They got a new visa issued. And the reason that it becomes
• 1:01:49
  a waste of our culture war attention is because people weren't as specific as they could.
• 1:01:55
  Yeah, I see. And I just think that, I mean, once it comes down to the kind of journalism
• 1:01:58
  that I'm an advocate for, and the kind of mission that I'm like trying to get more journalists
• 1:02:04
  on board with, and I understand there should be room in a diverse landscape of journalism
• 1:02:08
  for plenty of like, polimics and hot takes like, I want the end to Sullivan's of the world to keep
• 1:02:12
  doing Andrew Sullivan stuff. I love to read, I love to read him. I love to read, you know,
• 1:02:17
  Freddie DeBoer on the left. I love to read Michelle Goldberg at the Times is someone who's a very good
• 1:02:22
  opinions reporter on the left, but kind of her counterpart, Ross Douthid, who's a very good
• 1:02:27
  opinions reporter at the Times on the right. I wanted both to keep doing their things, but I think
• 1:02:31
  there should be all of the people you mentioned are actually very nuanced. I mean,
• 1:02:35
  I love reading Andrew as well. These are, you know, but they'll maybe engage as an occasional
• 1:02:39
  polimics, but yeah, but what she does, she does a good, is incredibly specific. Like no one
• 1:02:46
  is, no one is as careful with his, with their words than Ross Douthid. And they're in, I mean,
• 1:02:51
  he's really good writer as well as a smart thinker. I just bring it up to say that these people
• 1:02:58
  are engaging in a story tradition in the journalism world of persuasion and making arguments,
• 1:03:05
  and occasionally using their skills to, as Sullivan can do, you know, really tear down an idea
• 1:03:14
  or a movement that he's critical of. But there should be some of us who put aside whatever politics
• 1:03:21
  we have to try and just show the world with more accuracy, report about the debates and the
• 1:03:26
  issues that we face with as much clarity as we can. And it's imperfect as we will be at it to
• 1:03:31
  try to put our own biases to the side so that we can present people with information about the
• 1:03:36
  world that they can then make their own decisions on based on their values and their politics.
• 1:03:42
  And I think that one of the enemies of that is speaking in vagaries. I mean, even hear this with
• 1:03:49
  even just a little things like Republicans say this. How many Republicans? Yeah. Some Republicans
• 1:03:57
  say like be more specific. And one of the great things about it is that it also will help you
• 1:04:03
  grow your audience because right now there's people on the right who are constantly trying to
• 1:04:07
  gin up people on the right people on the left. But you know, the most people I think want to just
• 1:04:15
  trust what's being said to them and have their own time to make their own views. I still want to
• 1:04:21
  check in with people who hold strong opinions and there's kind of a taste about you. But I think
• 1:04:28
  you're conflating strong opinions with clumsy stride and see. Like I don't think you need to do
• 1:04:34
  as much equivocation as you're doing to qualify your point of view. The you can be strident and
• 1:04:41
  well argued and specific, you know, Christopher Hitchens, Andrew Sullivan, Rost Outher,
• 1:04:48
  and you can be centrist and waffly and vague. Thomas Friedman, you know, like you can be it's not
• 1:04:57
  about where you're at on the political sphere. I think it's the kind of journalism you engage
• 1:05:01
  in. And it's honestly, it's like, I mean, we want to pull back for a second from the media world
• 1:05:07
  and just think about life in general. You are living by values right now. Everyone is.
• 1:05:17
  But I fear that people aren't taking enough time in our day and age to name their values
• 1:05:24
  and say, here's what I'm actually living for. These are the values that I live for.
• 1:05:29
  And name them. Write them down. I think I'd encourage people to do this. Write those down and
• 1:05:33
  then look at your life and say, is this true? Am I actually living by the values that I hold
• 1:05:39
  the values that I keep? And if not, you know, grab the steering wheel and get to work. And then I think
• 1:05:47
  similarly in journalism journalism is not taking seriously the question, what is this all for?
• 1:05:55
  Is it just for likes? Is it just for shares? Is it just for the attention? Or is there a higher
• 1:06:01
  purpose to this? Is there some reason, is some social good that comes from this thing?
• 1:06:09
  And truthfully, one of the reason that the ideologs in journalism have had a heyday is because
• 1:06:14
  of the algorithms and stuff on social media that boosts them. But some of them know the answer to
• 1:06:18
  that. And it's, I want my ideas to flourish. This is what people talk about. Well, what was the
• 1:06:24
  coalition of the New York Times like how many of them were there compared to the old school
• 1:06:31
  journalism? I'll say there weren't that many of them in comparison. But one of the things they
• 1:06:37
  had going for them is that a lot of this contingency knew what they were there for. They want to use
• 1:06:44
  the power of the media to police what is acceptable in society to push for their politics.
• 1:06:53
  And to essentially change the institutional underpinnings of this newsroom.
• 1:07:03
  And some of the old school journalists didn't quite know what they were there for suddenly.
• 1:07:09
  And they couldn't or they couldn't articulate it or they lacked the courage to stand up and to say
• 1:07:13
  actually the values of, you know, accuracy, objectivity, independence, fair mindedness, those are
• 1:07:22
  better. And that's what this institutions for. And now it's engaged into the debate and see who
• 1:07:27
  wins in the end. I mean, that's the world I want to live in. But everything is it's like a cold
• 1:07:31
  war. It's like all proxy wars. And everyone's afraid to openly say the thing that clearly is
• 1:07:39
  happening in the room because the issue we've been talking about.
• 1:07:42
  Yeah. I mean, to be generous to the activist journalists, I don't think it's that they're reluctant
• 1:07:49
  to say that they want their ideas to win. I honestly don't believe that they know that their ideas
• 1:07:55
  are ideas. They think that their ideas are the truth. Right. Which is a sign of fundamentalism.
• 1:08:01
  The people asked this to me a lot about my past like, did you really believe that everyone
• 1:08:08
  who didn't follow exactly the kind of Christianity that you did that you really believed that
• 1:08:13
  all of them went to hell? And the answer is yes. But also no, I never thought of it. I just didn't
• 1:08:21
  know any one who was in that camp for so long. And it became harder as I grew up and lived in
• 1:08:29
  this globalized world. I mean, I was in college when social media like my space first came out,
• 1:08:34
  the 2006 when YouTube came out. I suddenly was seeing a larger slice of the world than my parents
• 1:08:41
  or grandparents ever did. And it was hard to believe that those families, those people who died
• 1:08:48
  in Indonesia in that terrible tsunami, that that was the best day of the rest of their existence
• 1:08:55
  because every one of them that wasn't an evangelical Christian who believed the six-step salvation
• 1:09:00
  that I had been taught, they went to hell forever. And as soon as I had to confront that thought,
• 1:09:07
  I thought, I don't want to think that. You know, where's this even coming from? This doesn't feel
• 1:09:11
  loving. This doesn't feel like all the values I think I'm living by. And I see versions of that
• 1:09:16
  happening inside of so many political ideologies. And in some ways, that's the, you know,
• 1:09:21
  what do we call them? Woke. I don't, that always sounds like I don't mean to be disrespectful.
• 1:09:26
  I just, they haven't come up with a name and that seems to be the name that stuck. But
• 1:09:30
  I do think there's a kind of fundamentalism that can happen there where they're not even prepared
• 1:09:35
  to make the arguments. And once again, to bring it back to the coverage around, this is one of the
• 1:09:39
  reasons I wanted to look into the trends debates more is because you will see it there. Yeah.
• 1:09:46
  How dare you even ask the question? Well, I mean, one reason, actually, this is a pretty one
• 1:09:50
  reason why it happens. Well, one reason why it's very difficult for them to make the argument is
• 1:09:55
  because they haven't been flexing their muscles because for a good, you know, four or five years at
• 1:10:01
  least, it's been taboo to challenge them. And therefore, they're not good at knowing why they
• 1:10:09
  believe what they believe. So on, you know, on an issue, like on anything that touches a social
• 1:10:13
  justice question, like, I don't know, the question of why we have certain taboos and, you know,
• 1:10:18
  why is why can you not, you know, say the N word when you're talking about how terrible the word
• 1:10:24
  is or, you know, what is a woman? Some of these things that are questions that are currently beyond
• 1:10:31
  the pale, they're, they're actually not very good at answering them because they haven't been
• 1:10:38
  asked them for so long. And some of the people who believe this stuff are so young that they've never
• 1:10:43
  been asked them in their entire lives. So they just regard the idea as being primacy true, almost like,
• 1:10:49
  you know, all humans are born with inalienable rights. Like why? I don't know why. That's just
• 1:10:55
  something I believe. You know, like, that's just basic. That's gravity. This is John Stuart Mill
• 1:10:59
  and all those enlightenment thinkers. And it's why we know their names today is that they were able
• 1:11:04
  to tap into a social wisdom that has lived far beyond their time. And yet we keep turning back
• 1:11:15
  to it because there's something in our human nature. I mean, this is where the conversation started
• 1:11:19
  often part is the danger of teaching a young religious person too much about another religion.
• 1:11:25
  And they might go, oh, this is sounding like our religion. What if they're having a similar
• 1:11:31
  human experience, but with a different cultural story? I do think it's fascinating that the
• 1:11:37
  religiosity in childhood gives you this insight. I mean, it's the same with Megan Feltz-Ropa,
• 1:11:42
  who with whom you worked on the witch trials of JK Rowling, that that experience of being in
• 1:11:49
  a cult, which is something that I've never had. And I'm using cult broadly to include all
• 1:11:54
  formal religion here, makes you more tuned to being able to understand the downsides of group
• 1:12:01
  think. Yeah, I think it does a few things for you. One is that it's an interesting kind of humiliation
• 1:12:09
  to realize that you are wrong about something that you were so publicly certain about. You went
• 1:12:19
  around telling everyone that you had it figured out and they should believe what you believe
• 1:12:25
  or else. And in your or else is like the worst consequence imaginable. And then to have that
• 1:12:30
  humiliation of saying, wow, I'm wrong. I'm the close-minded one. And there's something good that
• 1:12:38
  can come from that. There's a humility that you could be committed to that says, okay, it's an
• 1:12:43
  easier to be totally wrong than most people realize because I was sincerely in. And I know myself,
• 1:12:51
  my heart was in the right place. It wasn't like I'm some kind of sociopath. And yet I was so blind
• 1:12:57
  to all these alternative ways of saying the world. So that's helpful. Two is that you have to ask
• 1:13:02
  yourself, well, if there wasn't a God there at that church camp that gave me that insanely
• 1:13:09
  important experience that made me change my whole trajectory of my life. What was going on
• 1:13:17
  at that church camp? And the answer is interesting. Well, some of it is the story and how we are a
• 1:13:23
  social species and we understand ourselves in a series of stories and tribes. And it was a way of,
• 1:13:30
  you know, in some ways, it's like a tribal ritual that I was going through. And of course,
• 1:13:35
  it was powerful. It's like how I go from a boy to a man and in this tradition. And then you
• 1:13:41
  start to see that there's versions of this experience happening all over our, you know, human existence.
• 1:13:48
  And again, that can be a nice humbling thing. So when you encounter people who hold strongly
• 1:13:55
  different views than you, you can be gracious instead of going, how dare you? It's like, well,
• 1:14:02
  in what world would you have all the same views? You've been you this whole time. And I've been me,
• 1:14:08
  it would be remarkable if we had everything lining up. And then yeah, back to this idea of the
• 1:14:14
  John Stuart Milley, you brought up Megan Phelps-Roper. She's the one who articulates this the best,
• 1:14:19
  and especially since I work on the witch trials of JK Rowling, a lot of people have said,
• 1:14:25
  you know, you guys were too pro-rolling or you were secretly all pro-rolling in this whole
• 1:14:32
  witch trials of JK Rowling series. You know, you were pretending to be curious journalists,
• 1:14:36
  but really it was a mask and really you were, you know, trying the whole time to say that
• 1:14:42
  she's good and everyone who's against her is just caught up. And anyone who listens to the whole
• 1:14:46
  series could come away thinking that. Thank you. I do feel that by the end of the series,
• 1:14:52
  one of the, you know, narrative arcs is that it's hard to know, you know, unless you're like
• 1:14:59
  super into it, but is there's a way in which Rowling is the victim of a witch hunt? And there is
• 1:15:04
  a way in which you could see Rowling as maybe getting caught up in the perpetuation of each hunt.
• 1:15:09
  No, it's very well done. And that's what I was bouncing back and forth and back and forth with
• 1:15:12
  each episode. Yeah, but one of the things that, you know, Megan often will say to these critics is
• 1:15:17
  just to say that even if all you want is to win this debate on behalf of the trans rights movement,
• 1:15:27
  knowing what she really believes and being able to have a deeper understanding of how she came
• 1:15:36
  to hold these beliefs, it will make you better at the inevitable debate that you want to win.
• 1:15:43
  And I do think that they don't want that to be a debate. Well, they don't want to have to win it.
• 1:15:48
  But this is the thing. It's getting in some people and they have sadly the loudest voices on
• 1:15:53
  social media. They just want to skip the debate and get straight to the bit where they're right and
• 1:15:59
  they win. Exactly. But I don't think that that's most, you know, in my reporting and in my life,
• 1:16:06
  just knowing people who are trans and people who have, you know, who maybe aren't trans, but who
• 1:16:12
  are a part of this kind of, I totally agree that it's not most trans people, but I do think it's
• 1:16:17
  most of the people who police the conversations, namely, you know, the people who are the best at
• 1:16:27
  setting the contours of what gets discussed on in youth paper columns and on television panel shows
• 1:16:34
  and things like that. Right. But I do think that those people are losing some of their power.
• 1:16:37
  I think that their peak power came in 2020. Yeah. Since then, they've been losing their power.
• 1:16:43
  I mean, you asked me about what happened with my own career. I was saying the times was great.
• 1:16:47
  I loved working there. My favorite job in many ways. Great colleagues. Obviously, you know,
• 1:16:55
  it's a big place. There's plenty of things happened and tons of disagreements. But even then,
• 1:16:59
  when I, you know, I had a somewhat high level job inside of one of the most powerful newspapers
• 1:17:05
  in the country. And I never had to pretend that I held some political view that I didn't hold.
• 1:17:11
  I didn't have to police myself. And when I had disagreements, I could talk to my boss and
• 1:17:17
  my boss's boss. And they would say, tell me more. Right. It wasn't some, there's all these conspiracy
• 1:17:23
  theories about what happened. And also, I did a lot of reporting about QAnon. And once I,
• 1:17:28
  I, I'm not one of the people who thinks that those QAnon believers are bunch of nuts and crazy.
• 1:17:33
  I think that they're fascinating. And I think there's a lot of what they're going through that's
• 1:17:37
  just a very overt and very overt part of like what's happening. People who spend too much time
• 1:17:47
  on Twitter and get caught up in the culture wars of Twitter. There's people like to make fun of
• 1:17:52
  because it's a little more absurd. Some of their beliefs. But I, you know, just breathe it up to say
• 1:17:57
  that they have very strong views about the New York Times and that we're all being run on this.
• 1:18:03
  Okay. So fair enough. That's not your qualified that it was a good place to work. Why were you
• 1:18:07
  booted out? 2020 was a tough year for everybody, including the New York Times. And I think that they
• 1:18:15
  fell victim a little bit to this kind of cultural revolution moment that we went through in a way
• 1:18:24
  that I now believe that they regret. And I was a part of that. I was the maybe least interesting,
• 1:18:31
  least famous part of that. It started in the summer of 2020 when, you know, famous, I don't know how
• 1:18:37
  if your audience is aware of the dramas of the New York Times in the summer of 2020. But tell us
• 1:18:44
  do tell. All right. The shortest version is that few months into the pandemic, certain celebrities
• 1:18:51
  started going down for social sins. One of those celebrities happened to be a famous New York Times
• 1:18:58
  cooking columnist named Allison, Allison Roman, who had become just a minor celebrity during the
• 1:19:06
  pandemic because everyone was loving her nothing fancy cookbook. And she was on coal bears, you know,
• 1:19:13
  remote via Zoom's that late night show. But then made some off comment to some small magazine.
• 1:19:23
  It started a Twitter mob. Someone found photos of her dressed as some people say she was dressed
• 1:19:31
  as Amy Winehouse. Other people say she was dressed as a cholo. But that was seen as she had made some
• 1:19:37
  kind of even know what a cholo is. It was a ethnicity, not her own. I guess it's the shortest way
• 1:19:45
  of saying it. And then no, it was quite sure what cholo referred to a specific ethnic group.
• 1:19:50
  Or is that show that I understand it is like a Latino woman on fingernails often gold rings.
• 1:19:57
  It's a cool fashion. But the accusation as I remember was that, you know, she had been
• 1:20:05
  Halloween dressing and culturally appropriated. She said something about like cooking by
• 1:20:11
  women of color or something. She just said that she was having a moment where she was kind of
• 1:20:15
  becoming famous. Right. And was interviewed by a magazine asking if she was going to have a whole
• 1:20:21
  Allison Roman brand. And she said, I'm not going to do like the Maria Condo or and I can't remember
• 1:20:28
  the other person. She signed it a couple of people who it sounded like she was saying
• 1:20:33
  was sell outs. And those two people happened to be women of color. And someone pointed this out.
• 1:20:38
  That's my recollection. That's the beginning. Yes. And the snowball started. And before
• 1:20:43
  you knew it, she no longer had a column of the New York Times. And she was quote unquote,
• 1:20:47
  canceled. This was, you know, around the same time that a lot of this was going on. You know,
• 1:20:52
  the maybe the most famous one was Amy Cooper, often known as the Central Park Karen, who made a
• 1:20:59
  video in Central Park of a dog walker who had their dog off the leash. And she was, I'm sorry,
• 1:21:06
  she had her dog off the leash. This bird watcher saw her. They had a confrontation. And she called
• 1:21:12
  the police and said, there's a black man here threatening me come get him. And you know,
• 1:21:18
  the video goes viral. And it was a way that like white women are using their accusation was that
• 1:21:23
  this is like white women using their tears to get the police to kill a black man. It was a time
• 1:21:30
  the assumption was, uh, if the police responded to that call, that black man would die. Because
• 1:21:37
  the police would shoot. Yeah, that's the accusations. That's what she would like. The idea was that
• 1:21:42
  if the any time the police encounter a black person, it ends with the black person dead, right?
• 1:21:49
  That's it was which statistically is not is not entirely true. There are many people in America
• 1:21:57
  who are black, who have survived encounters with the police. Well, leave it on. And honestly,
• 1:22:03
  you know, two years after this event, Camille Foster and I, um, both, uh, made a investigation
• 1:22:11
  and interviewed Amy Cooper and looked deeper into this. I remember that. I didn't realize that
• 1:22:16
  you and Camille did that together. I remember it was excellent. I remember Camille. Where did Camille
• 1:22:20
  release that? That was, uh, on, uh, the free presses, uh, podcast. Yeah. It was really interesting.
• 1:22:26
  It's worth listening to make up. I also edited that. Okay. Right. The whole team was together
• 1:22:31
  and look back at that. Okay. So there was a lot of incident happening. Karen, you've got the
• 1:22:36
  Allison Roman. And then we hit the moment of the times as own James Bennett controversy.
• 1:22:43
  With the, and Bennett was the op-ed. He was the head of the op-ed section. At a time. Yeah.
• 1:22:49
  But it had been rumored for years that he was next in line to take over the helm for Dean
• 1:22:54
  Bequet and be the editor in chief of the New York Times, which is like the big job. The biggest
• 1:23:00
  journalism job in the world. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, he, yeah, during the height of the riotous
• 1:23:10
  aspect of the George Floyd protests, um, especially in New York, it was pretty intense.
• 1:23:16
  I think people forget like a lot of people died and a lot of stores were broken into and there
• 1:23:21
  was a lot of unrest and Tom Cotton, who's a very provocative lawmaker in the US,
• 1:23:28
  pinned the op-ed for the New York Times that was titled Send in the Troops.
• 1:23:33
  And he made the argument that we should send in the National Guard that the police were
• 1:23:37
  overwhelmed and that we needed to bring back law in order to the streets.
• 1:23:41
  And in a very 2020 kind of move, a number of New York Times journalists started a Twitter
• 1:23:50
  campaign saying that this op-ed had put New York Times journalists of colors lives at risk.
• 1:23:57
  They were saying that it wasn't just a opinion that they disagreed with that we shouldn't put
• 1:24:01
  in the New York Times, which happened regularly to pieces we would publish at the times.
• 1:24:05
  But they made an issue of safety, a more place safety, that this makes their,
• 1:24:10
  this is going to lead to violence and lead to harm, physical harm of New York Times employees.
• 1:24:19
  And just to clarify, Cotton is a senator at this point. I mean, it's not like he's some,
• 1:24:24
  you know, some junior state, you know, representative from Albany or something. He's like a senator
• 1:24:30
  of the United States. Yes. So he has some standing to be published in the paper of record.
• 1:24:37
  He's not a whack job, in other words. Yeah. And it wasn't a contrarian, heart-take kind of piece.
• 1:24:44
  It was cities are burning, shops are being smashed, people are dying. It's time for a ramping
• 1:24:51
  up of law enforcement. The safety thing is really interesting because it strikes me that this is
• 1:24:55
  a particularly clever chess move on the part of activists to take it out of the realm of speech.
• 1:25:00
  And into the realm of physical safety because all of a sudden organizations basically have a
• 1:25:06
  duty of care to take you seriously. If you're not saying like these ideas offend me,
• 1:25:12
  which they can always say, well, you know, crime or river. But if you say these ideas make
• 1:25:16
  me unsafe, like they endanger my physical safety. Well, now you've got kind of a question of
• 1:25:21
  criminal liability on your hands if you don't work. Please say it seriously. And these are union
• 1:25:26
  employees. So now the unions, I mean, this is people don't know this if you're not in the New York
• 1:25:31
  media world. But this becomes a union workplace dispute now. That's not a safety has been
• 1:25:38
  invoked. And so it just creates a different kind of problem for the New York Times, rather than,
• 1:25:45
  oh, well, some people including some of our employees are saying mean things about us on Twitter.
• 1:25:49
  It actually becomes a more serious situation. And I don't actually, yes, I don't know how organic
• 1:25:56
  versus how strategic this we're not seeing.
• 1:26:26
  And so it's run comfortable conversations with some sort of