Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay

00:00even here there breathing it's a sensitive it's a good stuff live already damn there's no countdown Jamie your radical your radical mr. Bogosian welcome back good thanks good to be here thank mr. Lindsey good the James or Jim depending upon preferences that's right go with Jim Jeff first of all gentlemen and there was one other person that you did this with this whole project helen pluck rose from england shout out to helen from england thanks she back across the pond she's across the pond she's fish and chips and she's making tea and managing here we go magazine right excellent all right well shout out to her as well let's explain what you guys did and what's so significant about it because when I first read it my first inclination I had two reactions one was a huge laugh I laughed really hard and then I said thank God somebody exposed this you know yeah so tell me tell me

01:04which guys the gym go for it yeah so over it let's explain who you guys are what okay okay um my background is in mathematics I bailed out on academia in 2010 though because I kind of see the writing on the wall and so now I am a renegade gender scholar and I write nonsense about genitals that's primarily what I do I mean I manage a business at home so I got academia yeah and I'm a I teach philosophy at Portland State University and I met Jim years ago we collaborated and we've written a number of things over the years and at some point it just came to be we had to do something about this it was just too ridiculous and it was translating into the real world and so we collaborated and here we are well let's explain what you did and what was ridiculous what we're talking about what was ridiculous is there's many fields of studies that you can get legitimate degrees in that are

02:06absolutely preposterous right literally filled with nonsense taught by nonsense people who these nonsense bubbles right and then they give these degrees and these people go out in the real world actly and they infect things you know they in their ridiculousness in fact certain is particularly tech industry businesses like you see it in the morning James tomorrow yeah well let's explain what you guys did yeah so we started about a year I guess a year and a half ago now is last summer we started writing a bunch of academic papers for the journals that represent these fields and so everybody understands what nekkid emic paper is getting out of the gate this isn't like an op-ed that you dash off or like Washington Post or some magazine or whatever this is a thing like academics worked their careers to write one or two of these a year yeah and so they're really hard to write

02:59they're supposed to be hard to get published so we were up 20 of them in ten months and seven of those got accepted for were actually published and then we got lost for more yeah we got busted and at least four more we're on track maybe five or six more would have gotten in what's the difference between getting accepted and getting published so the process with everything in academia is really slow and a lot of people don't know this so you send off this article the editor looks at it and the editor either gives it the thumbs up with a thumbs down if they give us a thumbs up it goes off to peer reviewers and that process takes months often as long as I mean would one paper that was eight months under peer review so the reviewers look at it they try to figure out if the arguments are good they try to figure out if the research is good they evaluate that they give extensive

03:48comments they send it back to you then you have to revise it according to whatever they say make it better is what's supposed to happen they made ours crazier and so then they did every single time we took the feedback and made the papers just the most extreme thing most extreme things and so then you send them back so now you're probably three four months in just the review process not to the writing which should also take months now and then the editor will either send it back to the reviewers to see if it was good enough or they'll just evaluate it themselves depending on where it stands and then they'll make a decision as to whether or not to accept it or reject it or ask for more revisions and then when they accept it that means the journal is ready to publish it but then the publishing process requires all the typesetting proofing all the stuff that goes into

04:34making it professional for an academic journal and then that can take months and and and publishing is the coin of the realm like that's it so the ideal is one paper every year in the humanities broadly so if you that's how you credential yourself that's how you get tenure which is a job for life that's how you get to teach people these ideas who then as you said go out into the workforce you know five six years later and infect everybody with total silliness so the it's the gold standard peer review so we saw a tremendous problem can we tell people some of the titles of these because right now they're like what the hell is going on here so we had a article the one that got the most press was about dog humping in Portland Oregon it was called how did it go was it called queer performativity and was a rape culture rape culture and queer performativity in dog parks in

05:29Portland Oregon yeah we claim to have examined under a fake name these are all fake names performativity oh yeah we have their own lingo their own you know but is that a word in the English language performativity I mean in the academic English language not in common parlance but that's like the whole thing this is huge right this goes back a long way that's Judith Butler's whole thing was that gender Butler Judith Butler is probably the most influential feminist scholar their gender scholar actually I should say that's been and maybe the last 30 years she's she's big-time and so she had this whole thing that gender is performative it's something you perform it's not something as reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland Oregon why is it retracted because there's reactions to rape culture and queer performance we claim to have closely examined the

06:26genitals of what's just under 10,000 just under 10,000 dogs and then interrogated their owners as to their sexual orientation so we checked out the dog's nuts and then said excuse me sir are you gay yeah and um if they gendered their dogs yeah well we made up these totally insane you know dogs humping incidents and how they they beat female dogs but they didn't beat male dogs so that's one of the papers that we made you know the other paper that this one also they had the whole thing like if a male dog humps another male dog especially men would freak out and break it up yeah stop that because that's the queer performativity part but then if a male dog humped a female dog they'd be like you know get her girl yeah get her get her you know get on oh you you're basically raging against hetero normative exactly correct we told them exactly what they wanted to

07:18hear and we gave them bogus statistics to fuel what they already wanted to believe yeah we started off with the idea that what we wanted to get to was a conclusion and then we made up all the crap in between you get to it and the conclusion was feminism should train men the way we train dogs so that we can get rid of rape culture you know put them on leashes you know it's right in the paper it's all there unfortunately we cannot put men on leashes it's not politically feasible to put men on leashes yeah their leashes when they misbehave yeah and this paper didn't just get published the journal said that this was exemplary scholarship and gave it an award says one of the best pieces it's this year is their 25th anniversary so this journals been doing this for 25 years and it's their 25th anniversary so they're picking out the best papers the whole year and putting them you know

08:10pride a place and some some issue of their journal and ours was gonna be in the seventh issue was so even though it is greater it's not great so it's it either is greater it's not great like why they retracting it oh yeah cuz they know we were bogus so what well it's like a broken clock yeah the clocks broken well it is actually twelve o'clock so so they were daily claim it's incorrectly that we fabricated statistics but we we wrote other papers call one was fat body building so they claim that there should be a category introduced in traditional bodybuilding called fat bodybuilding where people come and display their fat before the audience and we didn't man any statistics for that and they loved that they thought it you know one line in that paper was a fat body is a built body what the reviewers like I wholeheartedly yeah and then we wrote other papers like to Hypatia we

09:09published a got accepted not published but that one we claimed that it's it's unacceptable it's honest it's unethical to make fun of anything to do with social justice right and so if you want to make fun of things that don't have anything of social justice that's good so if we wanted to make fun of men that's great if you want to make fun of white people that's great if you want to make fun of anything to do with social justice that's a problem so he made we said that you know South Park's a huge problem the Simpsons is a huge problem we went into talking about how Steven Colbert and and John Stewart have the right idea but then the journal was like ah but there's straight white males so you have to you know nuance around that to make it clear that their position is white men even though they're on the side of social justice it's not quite good enough you know Oh publish that

09:57they post they publish that what was that what was that one called that one was called when the joke's on you yeah and we made we wrote it so that they would think the joke is on us because we cited our own work in there right but the joke was actually on them for publishing it yeah yeah yeah yeah this so it's so funny how racist you can be as long as you're racist against white people that's what we saw is as long as you are going up the river against privileged and you can really just get away with some nasty stuff yeah and you could generalize well totally gross generalization roses not treat people as individuals absolutely it's it's very strange it's very strange that this is the left you know I was a kid in San Francisco in the 1970s we lived in you know like there was the hippy times and that's I lived there from age 7 to 11 and it kind of formed a lot of my

10:56opinions about people like though who gives a part of my my my appreciation for any group whatever it is whether it's race or gender or sexual orientation and I just I don't understand it from either way I certainly don't understand it from a racist perspective but I really don't understand it from racism that's condoned because it's racism against white people oh yeah this is the left this is that these are these are the people that are preaching against hate and these are the people that used to be the people that were supposedly so open-minded and so open to ideas and now they're trying to stifle creativity and stifle dissent and stifle stifle anything that doesn't fit inside that very narrow paradigm that they're trying to push it's very strange now they co-opted the the civil rights movement the good name of the civil rights movement is kind of the brand that they

11:53ride on you know they're fighting against racism they're fighting against sexism misogyny etc and the thing is is that's not really what's going on here they've actually tapped into this to throw around the term this postmodern notion that everything in society has to do with power dynamics and the power dynamics have to be understood in terms of groups and how those groups have traditionally held power and exercise power and so immediately it becomes stuck in this idea that it's all about this group or that group and how they relate to one another and I don't mean like hey let's get along relate I mean like white people are imagined to always be over black people and therefore you know there's always as natural power dynamic of oppressor versus oppressed and this is stuff that came straight out of this weird postmodern philosophy where you saw these dissatisfied French

12:40philosophers in the 60s you know all when this all this stuff you were talking about was going down they saw this stuff and they said wow you know okay power dynamics are the thing because I should go back a step the the postmodern philosophers like Foucault and all those got all hooked up on power because they were dissatisfied with seeing what they called grand narratives Christianity capitalism Marxism they saw all these huge you know explanations for how the world works and said you know they're not working look how bad communism failed look how there's so much you know coming out of this or that from religion it's not working we need to just get rid of all of it we're gonna deconstruct this we're gonna break it down to its power dynamics and then we're gonna look at it in terms of who has master hood over over who who's oppressing what where's

13:30dominance and it's just kind of grown it got picked up in the in the academic culture in the 1960s that's how old this stuff is and then it took this huge turn in the 1990s and get really vicious and that's where it really got you know that's when it turned intersectional actually that was during the politically correct days that's that's when the political correct thing kind of blew up yes when all this stuff was coming out so that would have been you know late 1980s is really when all of this political correctness stuff started coming out of the Academy and then a few years later you see it coming all over politics which typically what happens it starts in the Academy a few years later it leaks into the culture right and politics or media or the tech sector now whatever it happens to be the stifling of creativity is the the most disturbing part about it like this that like the

14:14agreement that South Park and the Simpsons are a real problem it's so bizarre because like here's the thing if they miss the mark and it's not funny it won't work and then it'll be a bad show and no one would like it but if it's funny there has to be something about it that people find ironic satirical there has to be something about it the people are enjoying it has to point to some truth yeah and the denial of this and instead like the saying oh it's white males that are causing this problem and you shouldn't attack this or that or you know there's subjects that are off-limits and social justice should never be attacked like the two agree to that it's so it's so preposterous this is life we're talking about yeah this is literally the nuance of life all the various strange things in the spectrum of human behavior and and all the things you encounter in life and to segment and

15:08limit what is and is not what's off limits and snot off limits based on race based on things that a person can't control at all you're just born white so if you're born white you're born an oppressor all right your boy victimizer and if you're a white male you're a piece of and you can say that white in particular I mean I've seen so many tweets from people that means so many virtue signaling tweets but one of my favorite ones is this feminist who said all white a white straight men are trash and less proven otherwise I mean give or take you know how many trash yeah trash no problem prevents proven otherwise improve you're not right how do you do that that's like what do you you have to be now oh no there's a problem a ties a lie ship to you see there's power dynamics once you say hey I'm an ally now you've made it so that you have like a shield where people can't call you a

16:13white supremacist anymore mm-hm and you are acting on behalf of other people in you know you're speaking for them so you now have assumed power that we're reproducing the same power dynamics that's my mind calm flip yeah our paper that we wrote Mein Kampf was about yeah we had two two of them the did Mountain Comp one of them we just more or less replaced White's would replace Jews with white men and you you you'd literally took mine Kampf the actual words from my calm yeah and put it in this paper and replaced the word Jews with the word white men and they accept it well we had two papers that did mine comrade so that one do not get exactly where the quotes that you guys used I mean so with that one what we did was we took the whole document online and we just searched the word Jew and we just started picking sentences and paragraphs so what was it that at the

17:09end it was something like if we don't combat whiteness it's going to be the funeral wreath for mankind yet they didn't they didn't accept that paper though because that paper turns out was written from the perspective of a white lesbian who hated her own whiteness and they said that it was positioning her as a good white because she's making herself out as a good way again a lie ship isn't as all it's cracked up to be she you know was making a problem she should have really been forwarding the ideas of the black scholars that she read way more and not talking about herself so much even though as a paper designed to be talking about because that was what Hitler did so that's what we had to do yeah now the other Minecon paper was about feminism and what we did was he took the chapter it's chapter 12 we took the chapter where he says this is why we should have the Nazi Party and what is

17:58expected of people who are gonna be part of it and we took out our movement or party he didn't call it a Nazi Party in the chapter but everywhere he's like our movement took that out put it in intersectional feminism and then modified the words and added theory around it so that it would fly and yeah theory that's the color I love that word theory I love when feminist theory I love when they throw that around what are you saying but you're saying things that like once you say that you're you're good like you've said you can say something ridiculous and then say feminist theory they're like oh it's in feminist theory yeah that's the thing right there's so much of this stuff they come up with let me throw them on olive branch like so much of the stuff they come up with as a creative idea maybe there's something to some of this stuff right mm-hmm but what they're putting

18:41forward is hypotheses and then they're treating his conclusions so they're putting forward this idea I saw one on Twitter today it was something like there's a South Park how it's been laundering racism into society and making everybody comfortable with racism and that's why everything's so racist and people are shooting Jews is because South Park made it normal but that's a good but they're treating that as a conclusion but that's a hypothesis right so we could test that it's conceivable that you could actually try to parse out what variables need to be controlled see you know South Park came out it started doing these themes what how does it track statisticians can do kind of amazing things with that stuff but they're not doing that they're not testing it instead of testing it they're concluding it and they're using theory to do so and they're no no it's even

19:25bigger than that because why don't they test it well if they tested it and this is I'm not making this up you won't believe me but this is true if they tested it and the test showed that their hypothesis was wrong they would say that the test was racist right but the test is condoning racism and that's why it didn't give him the desired result would you test something because I mean I'm not a statistician I am actually a mathematician but I'm not a statistician they're two different things so I'm not exactly sure how you would test that but conceivably you could gather data survey data and see how attitudes have changed maybe you could track kind articles kinds of events that are coming out you could kind of pair that up with what's been shown on South Park who are at South Park and track that with attitudes yeah there's no effort to do this they're like Oh South Park presents

20:08these ideas which they then cherry-pick because there's other ideas that they don't talk about they're you know point the other direction these ideas are problematic that's the big word theoretically that's a problem why because they and I'm not joking they literally believe that use of language creates the power dynamics that define society so South Park's using language and imagery that creates a power dynamic that makes people more comfortable being racist boom Theory done right no tests needed no even attempt rest if the test happened the test itself would be racist unless it confirmed the hypothesis right so they start with an agenda and then you mention the word laundry which could your former gas Brett and Heather talked about ideal laundry I think that's important for the listener yeah yeah yeah yeah so what's that's what really what's going on here is they're

20:56forwarding these hypotheses they treat they don't treat them as hypotheses and then they write up a paper paper like we were saying is the absolute gold standard of academic work they send the paper off the reviewers in our cases made our papers crazier every single time so they push it further into the ideology or the madness how does a reviewer do something like that what what input they said for example that we should problematize a lie ship if we're gonna if we want our paper publish we've got a problem at eye Salish I love that word problematizing everything is everything problematized everything dog parks problem the problem with literally anything can be problematic and looked at through a feminist lens everything that's why we called it grievance studies grievances they're massively ok so then but to do the homo the transphobia yeah the trans paper so we

21:47wrote this paper saying that straight men are generally transphobic meaning in particular the the kind of niche weird definition that you see on the internet and activists sometimes that they aren't interested in having sex with trans people who have penises trans women who have a penis in particular and so we said well that's a kind of transphobia and clearly the reason that they might transphobic is because they don't practice putting things in their butts so if they start putting stuff up their butts in particular we call the paper dildos so you can imagine what we were saying that you put up the hoods paper was called dildo no that was that was a nickname we gave it the paper was called going into the back door going through the back door so we argued that that if straight men just penetrated themselves and had their girlfriends peg them through exposure therapy you know you

22:43start small and then work your way up you can remediate transphobia yeah well make them less transphobic so self penetrating and having your girlfriend peg you you can be less transphobic off of eight interviews really 13 interviews but with men and I say really a 13 there were 13 interviews documented but five of them were gay people not even straight people so they don't really apply so then we have these 8 interviews with straight men we made one of them a conservative and he's just so we could just put in like you know crazy things that a conservative might say about this and they were like why don't why weren't there more conservatives participating so I was like well I'm gonna run with this we invited six conservatives to participate and only one accepted and to kind of summarize why in the words and this is in the paper in the words of one I don't want to be a part of some stupid

23:35liberal study about shoving things up your butt going in through the back door oh my god they contact you after they retract your article they go you guys are the not wasting our time we spent hours reviewing your papers we got a couple of pretty bitter responses but mostly no mostly they've kind of put their head in the sand and kind of avoided talking to us that what I was saying before the show started that I read one article that was really diminishing the impact of what you guys have done saying like what it's not a big deal you know wrong what they were trying to make it seem as if what you guys had written was just a prank yeah that's that's no it's an absolutely false yeah there's a lot of papers that seem like parody that make it through that you guys aren't writing oh yeah we could pull up one about how hot wings like there's a TV show spicy

24:37ones or something like that about hot wings oh yeah yeah the YouTube show yeah yeah so that they had a whole one's hot ones that's what it was they had a whole there is a paper out there about that show and it's all about how you know hot sauce has everything to do with masculinity I mean manly and they didn't have enough women on the show ultimate eyes because it's sexist in the hot hot sauce I think was a sexist part and it has all these bizarre conclusions we cited that in the paper we wrote about Hooters we're put in the part that there is you know masculinity contest of eating the hot wings who can eat more hot wings and then they say oh I 20 hot wings ask out the Hooters girl besser young eating show hot ones is problematically we're oblem attact is an ally yeah that's a real paper right so we cited that paper it's real there are thousands of papers like this gender and

25:28celebrity on hot ones and so as a professor he probably teaches this stuff to students right so now everything's problematized and this is what credentials him you get seven in general you get some of these seven years oh yeah she wrote it but who's the other one tisha at the end who wrote that introduction oh it's the difference there's two people there oh it's a commentary is it is it an article about the Arctic Ocean yeah that's probably what's going on is commentary and criticism mm-hmm yeah this is it looks like I mean I haven't read this specifically oh wait a minute listen to the first statement food media have been recognized as cultural artifacts that reference culturally and historically specific ideals of gender exactly drawing on the simultaneously mundane and food as a medium for interrogating interrogating ideas about feminism and identity

26:24performance do I was telling you shut the this is there man this is not about this is such unbelievable horseshit no this person is teaching at Central Michigan University yeah this is for real this is real and so there is now a an ever-expanding group of these folks they teach do you want to read more of it criticism section the authors introduce a diverse sample of case studies that demonstrate the emergence of feminist ideas in and through food media oh yeah get a real job go out there and work do something that someone wants to pay for is anything of value agent with hot sauce this is so crazy right and this is what they're teaching our kids racial assumptions inherent to post-feminist food culture oh yeah I was gonna write a paper about how corn bread is being gentrified and that's why I will never get over racism because white people are making like pumpkin spice

27:29corn bread something that I tweeted the other day about some what Dad sad tweeted it and I retweeted it about some some woman she was taking back bone broth oh I saw that yeah it's good what in the about problematized it now only this queer woman of color wants to decolonize bone broth that is so preposterous a queer woman of color so what I'm saying man there's a thousand papers like this out there for everyone we wrote yeah thousand of them that you might as well written well you couldn't tell if we did or didn't then that's part of things people can't differentiate what we've done I'm in fact not only can they not differentiate it they give us an award so they can't differentiate it from the stuff that's already out there and the stuff that's already out there is polluting people's minds you guys you guys at least you used to work macadamia and work in

28:35academia yeah what is how are your peers treating this there are well is gonna have a lot to say about that I think but for me I've had to from academic people have had two kinds of responses but overwhelming but some of those are like you guys and then the overwhelming of them are the same thing over and over and over again and I mean a lot of people thank you so much for doing this but I can't don't tell anybody just are you trying to get a job I'm up for tenure I can't talk thank you this needs to go and that's everywhere it's everywhere you can't proceed through academia now unless you bow to this stuff tenure sounds like tyranny it did though the whole thing sounds preposterous so you can keep a job for life well the idea was supposed to be that you work your ass off for a few years and then you it was supposed to be to defend academic freedom so you get tenure then you can

29:27go forth and put out some crazy ideas really like dig into some stuff and they can't fire you for you know coming up with maybe weird stuff and then people would argue about it but now it's kind of become the situation where people get in this issue they get in their job and then you can't get rid of them right right right what is there a way to fire people well if they do something like sexual harassment and yeah that you can find a way around the tenure thing so what is it like for you now you you are absolutely uncomfortable are people upset at you yeah I'd say they're enraged you know I mean the only thing I can think of it's like you see if you taught at a Christian school and then you went in and you know took videos and post them on YouTube of defecating the Bible and then just walking into the school so I think it's kind of similar in that they

30:17they have bought hook line and sinker into microaggressions trigger warnings safe spaces diversity and initiatives there there are no there's no questioning this and it's something for me that makes me deeply uncomfortable when my students can ask questions when when they they can't they're just uncomfortable to voice their opinions about things and I think that that people to say the least a lot of people are enraged to me but exactly what Jim said some people will come in like oh thank you so much like I not but again I can't be public about this what is the ratio I mean for me it's like 95% people who are really happy it happened and can't let it be known but I'm not you know facing these people every day yeah well you know through the videos from Evergreen State you can see Brett Weinstein's interactions with not just students but also some of the professors

31:16that were there though some of these preposterous people that he had to work with oh yeah that are buying in hook line and sinker to this stuff and they live in these insulated world absolutely and they just they they create these people that also want to stay inside these insulated worlds and then it just sort of stew in these ideas and then again go out into the real world yeah and they think there are better people as a result yeah it's a big trick they're doing the good work yeah so like question this may be to look at it and say oh you know that kind of looks like but I don't know a lot of these guys are left-leaning people or outright leftists a lot of them want to do the right thing right yeah they really do these people really care about progressive agendas you know getting over any lingering discrimination that's going on racism sexism etc they really

32:06want to do the right thing good for them right that's what we want but they actually have to question or like run County you think that like is a river of morality running through them through their mind they actually have to go upstream a little bit and that's hard and it feels weird you have to say wait a minute maybe this scholarship maybe this stuff isn't the best way to do it but then the first thought you have is well these guys are these people in these disciplines grievance studies are fighting racism so if I go against them then I'm going against the people fighting racism so maybe I'm helping racism that's what we keep if we get any criticism that's what it always is you're helping racists you're a tool of the right etc etc etc you're racist yeah or we are outright racists yeah outright racist and accused of being alright if you disagree with any of this stuff

32:53doesn't well I get accused of being alright all the time I lean so far left right universal health care universal basic income right all right free schooling I think I think education should be free I think we should pay for I believe in a lot of socialist ideas totally but I'm right-wing right because I make fun of people that want to study problem ization dogs weather I'd support gay rights women's rights I'm alright I'm on board with all that yeah take more of my taxes I forget I can I can afford to pay more if I really believe the people gonna get real health care and real education we're the same totally very happy very happy nope if I thought it was all being appropriated and used correctly yeah let's make the world a better place so that's a thing right is if all this scholarship that they were doing on race and gender all this that's important stuff right so if they're doing that

33:51right why wouldn't you want to be behind it right but they're not doing it right how do I know cuz I made up papers about dog humping and made up the conclusion before I wrote the paper and then boom they publish it and give it an award if I can start with the conclusion and then work backwards to that conclusion then I'm not doing rigorous scholarship I'm making up well also there's no room for dissent and none absolutely no zero on and in in academia you can't even you have to teach whatever the moral orthodoxy is so just imagine this going into university you're trying to your young mind your young kid and I'm deeply concerned about these kids they're going and they never hear the other side of an issue about immigration they never hear the other state so they become brittle over time so when they hear it they just they don't know what to do they're shocked by it

34:38professors are terrified that they'll get a complaint they'll have to go to the diversity board I've been told that I'm not allowed to render my opinion about protected classes Jetix and I teach ethics I don't teach a contacted class yes protected classes I've also that's a great question I asked for a definition of protected class as a list of protected classes I didn't receive any I'm like yeah you can be criticized yeah I cannot I cannot offer for it yeah yeah I cannot offer this under oh no no no so so yeah I was up on a title line violation I'm not I'm Rob for a violation title line violation why that is a title 9 file title line violation is serious it's federal discrimination law in universities yeah yeah yeah what did you do I can't talk about it's local but but among the other things that came out in that meeting were I'm not allowed to render my opinion

35:31about a protected class and so for example I can't sew homosexuals I know are covered under protected classes I can't have an opinion on homosexual people I can have an opinion but I can't what if it's a positive opinion well okay so the example that was used in class was evident evidently I made a comment okay so let's take a step back okay so this is an ethics class and I was talking about how sexual choice does not fall into the realm of morality so if a guy's gay and he likes another guy that's just not a moral thing that's just preference yeah it's just is what it is like a matter of taste sure and some I don't remember the whole thing but someone in someone in the class said well you know you shouldn't have taste or something or you shouldn't have and I can't remember the exact frame because I'm getting this third hand from the from my violation you know my son came

36:28to someone else somebody said in class well what about this and I I made the comment I said everybody has something everybody has a preference like you can't say that no one had a preference I said it would be as if it was it would be as if I said well you know I don't want to date someone who's 400 pounds so that comment then got turned into something when they called somebody else in the office of diversity inclusion called someone else in and it was made that I was rendering my opinion about people who were 400 pounds when my what I was doing is saying that homosexuality itself there's no there's no reason to give that it's it's just not a moral thing but people lump it in but the main point of this whole thing is that we have situations in which professors can't talk about protected classes students are afraid to ask questions everybody's walking on eggshells and the

37:22students aren't learning and phrases are taken out of context phrases are taking out of context now now if you want a place to go to celebrate whatever the reigning moral orthodoxy is then the university is a great place for you did you explain what you meant by saying that you like saying you don't want to date people over 400 pounds did you explain the context of the use of she wasn't interested in the context of it and the trend is he didn't even say he doesn't want to date people over 400 pounds i phrasing the hypothetical right right so there are entire thing but if you had said maybe I don't like I don't want to date people over seven feet tall maybe you could have got away with that yeah I don't think people over seven feet tall or protected class you could have got away with that ya know it's still it's a preference issue so I mentioned this to

38:11one of my colleagues and he said to me all you that's you can't say that you should never have said that I said really why says well you should have said well well I don't like dating blue or green people I'm like why around and they become a protected class then someone goes blue looks at what you said ten years ago about blue agreed so that's how fired that's how that works if you look at there's all this stuff been coming out about victimhood culture and how it propagates and how it develops and that's one of the things it's called competitive victimhood right you could call it palliative competitive that's the formal term of people who study but you see it all the time it's like you see people in society it's like all the black lives matter people go nuts and then all of a sudden the white supremacists are out and they're like white people have it hard to the second

39:05they the second somebody hears Oh black people have a hard somebody's gotta be that white people have it hard to that's competitive victimhood and so then when you have like a moral economy if you will where you can kind of cash in and gain status or gain access to speaking or whatever it happens to be by holding a certain status of victimhood or grievance then you're gonna find people competing to find ways to get that for themselves yes everybody's gonna go I mean you have the infrastructure there everybody's gonna go after trying to maximize their own utility within that yeah so people over seven feet tall aren't a protected class yet but the second they realize that they might be able to cash in on it they might lobby for headed a victimhood grievance jogging it's but also yeah I've called it grievance jockeying I think gets added since you mentioned him

39:49called it the oppression Olympics yeah yeah it's wow it's wonderful times really is so if you look at the route so here's the the thing that we thought about extensively if you look at the route where is this stuff coming from all of this stuff is coming from these the canons of knowledge their bodies of literature their peer-reviewed and that's the idea laundering thing yeah so all of that stuff is coming from from this and if you want to make if you want to get back to constructive politics to get back to people having conversations and that's the thing like that's I think one of the reasons that your show has been so successful is it's a it's a combination of authenticity with you can have you're totally willing to have conversations with no-holds-barred right you can't have that in the Academy so people need to go to you to hear these thoughts and to wrestle with ideas and

40:45to engage it's just if you can do you can't really do it anywhere else other than a podcast well you can't do it in the Academy but you can't even do it on the Today Show they fired Megan Kerik right what asking why is black face races right which is a stupid question no doubt and she's not a bright woman in that regard socially right so it's a very clumsy clunky thing to say they just fire a fire what they should have done was brought in black scholars and black intellectuals for a week just actually Kirill exactly and that would have been amazing television but that attitude that you have is not what they have so they want us punished the transgression right today well the world I think they just want to stop hemorrhaging and I think they didn't like her anyway I mean that's the word is they really didn't enjoy her and that she wasn't a nice person and choose a mean but it was a

41:41learning moment right it was a teaching moment that's lost now yes but think about in terms what we were talking about earlier where the the scholarships stretching back again to the 60s you have this idea that all of society is constructed out of power dynamics that are mediated through language media imagery and so she just now became problematic and she put out ideas would be dangerous and poisonous not something to discuss the merits or dis merits of not something to work through not something as a teachable moment she put out an idea that's dangerous she can't put out ideas anymore well you know it was really interesting too she tried she was so disingenuous and how she approached is so obvious you know what a black person is it why is it wrong for a black person dressed as a white person it's not no one ever said that why are you pretending you're just

42:29setting it up so that you could say a white person wearing black made black face they think about they don't think about the other cultural moment there too so like you said they bring in black scholars and at the end of that she said you know I really listen to that and yeah I didn't know that and I was wrong and I'm changing my mind there was like woman on Twitter that said her video look i retweeted it that it looks like a hostage video yeah yeah I think that was missing was her holding up a newspaper that showed the day saw that Australian thanks so funny but that is one of the worst ways to really dissect ideas because first of all there's a studio audience that that everything up second of all you have these massive time constraints and then you have advertisers then you have a bunch of executives that are all cowards they're all just ready to pull the

43:20trigger on anything yeah yeah any time they can blame you for anything that went wrong and get rid of you or fire you fire fire him get rid of them get rid of them bring you the next person you know and then what they'll most likely do is to show they've learned they'll hire an all-black crew right for the diverse crew that's all a matter of fact I think I've read isn't aren't they doing that see see if they do that they're replacing megyn kelly with a crew of of color think about where that works right it works you said they're cowards they're afraid they're gonna you know damage their brand or whatever it is yeah where does that work or who works on that bully's right so these people why are they so pervasive in the Academy why are they so pervasive in media they know they can bully these people they know that they can go lean on this stuff and somebody's going to be

44:12cowardly and then they're gonna be able to you know make something change in the direction they want it to change you see even creeping into politics they try to do it with policymakers you see it a lot more in a lot of other countries right now we're in this massive like backlash against it in American politics how's that going you know to do the 2016 help your progressive agenda gang a holy crap well that is a part of the problem with the what are they saying so yeah look at this today as you know we're starting a new chapter in the third hour of our show as it evolves it's evolving it's a living being we want you know the entire today family will continue to bring you informative and important stories just as we always have and look to black guys and a brown chick it's a hundred percent diverse princess all divorce that's the thing in a way that a diversity is

45:05defined if you had a panel it was just black guys it would be 100% diverse yes so they've redefined the word diversity they need to find the word inclusion you know but but to people outside the Academy they they think Oh diversity it's a great thing right you know we had but that's not what it means it means kind of when everybody has the same ideas about something it it's also when you if you're enforcing diversity for what we we have to we would have to find out like ultimately the goal is to find out what what causes people to succeed and especially succeeding in something as benign is talking right you're just talking that's all you're doing so what causes someone to succeed in talking what makes their ideas valuable what makes them someone you'd enjoy listening to and then finding like what what impediments there are to that in in all the various communities and fix it

46:01at the root level what doesn't work is saying we need one Chinese lady we need one black guy and we need one white guy because if you do something like that you're not gonna get the best she'll know or you're not gonna get the best anything well you're not even guaranteed to achieve the goal you're claiming so it's again it goes back to theory in theory and I mean theory in terms of postmodern critical theory that this stuff's all based and that we studied the idea is that if you have a particular identity now you have a particular view of the world and people of other identities have different ones and in fact there's this whole thing called standpoint epistemology that says that if you have a marginalized identity you know more about the world than other people because you live in two worlds at once so the the idea is oh if we get a black guy in here he's had a different life

46:47experience therefore he can speak truly to that if you get a Chinese lady in here she can speak to that so on and so forth so the guess is that by virtue merely of bringing in people who look different with different races or genders or sexes or sexualities then you automatically get a diverse set of opinions but that doesn't work that's not how that actually works you could take people of every race educate them on the exact same social justice curriculum and they all think exactly the same thing but at least in something like the hosting of today's show you are just talking once you put these sort of diversity standards of something like mathematics oh yeah that's that's when things get super squirrely yeah they're trying to do that a little bit you retweeted that thing I wrote about mathematics and they wanted people to sign it equity which is another word that they've co-opted they

47:39wanted folks to sign an equity statement and a diversity statement and the thing is displaying that explain what they're trying to that you you have a commitment to diversity yeah you have a commitment to diversity and you have a commitment to equity and so equity does not mean treating people equally it's not like you have a commitment to equality which is we should all have assuring the to equality its equity is defined differently it's to make up for past and justices or to make up for some deficiency that has occurred somewhere along the line so yeah affirmative action is an equity movement it's to treat people differently in order to level the playing field yeah so it's not treating people it's not treating people equally and that's the same thing it sounds like it is but it's not it's a word that they've smuggled in straight out of the literature again it's again

48:31out all the stuff comes back to the literature so if you look at the word equity in the dictionary you get one definition but if you look at the word equity as they're applying it yeah and sociological definitions it's a very specific thing that means something slightly different from what people say so here's the question you should ask somebody anytime you hear someone used the word equity just ask oh I'm curious why didn't you use the word equality can can you think can you think of a it would the sentence be the same with the meaning be the same well the meaning is not the same that's why they used equity and not well acquittee is a finance word that's why it's weird is also fun yeah so they don't make up new words right they go opt yeah they coop they change and then they smuggle diversity inclusion yeah right these academic papers and they come up with

49:17these ideas they start with their conclusion they push it through it gets published and that's just like it's like the academic equivalent of Money Laundering yes right so how does money laundering work yes you take some money you got you know ill-gotten money you put it through you know this shell company or this thing or the other thing and it comes back to you and now it's had a legal trail that makes it legit right well here you take some prejudice you write it down as an academic paper you publish the thing it gets the academic standard stamp on it it's a gold standard of knowledge now and now this is this prejudice you started with now looks like legitimate knowledge that can go straight in the classroom it can go straight to activists or policy makers it's a real problem yeah and when they're really funny though yeah that's Brett Weinstein said

50:05that and that's what it comes off the other side as knowledge so then they think they have knowledge right paper about the dildoes the guy said this paper is an important contribution to knowledge yeah reviewer one I think yeah are you yeah important contribution and knowledge I would hope reviewer one was just hitting a bomb what kind of person gets attracted to wholeheartedly agreeing to these ridiculous ideas like what what are the people liked a great question I think it's people who want to save the world well I think we'd all like to save the world yeah I'm much more cynical than date yeah they've got a no they've got they've they've got this idea that I mean we talked a moment ago about about privilege and we kind of you know brushed real close the idea that it fits kind of like original sin and so they see that the the downside of privilege the opposite side

51:10discrimination or racism sexism etc hate is the big word you know fight hate they're he's he's using hate this is hate speech that's where I think they got the term that's like the evil thing you're born with privilege that's like original sin so what do they want to do they want to they want to fix the save the world by clearing out the evil of privilege by clearing out hate from the world the for them utopia means nobody hates and by hate we mean something like racism sexism etc so it's a noble idea but then when you start looking at it in this like ridiculous way like you're born with privilege and now you're just stuck with it right what can you do it's original sin you can be sorry for it you can try to be an ally and work it off you can check it whatever the hell that means you can do a lot of things but you can't actually atone for it you can't

51:57get over it you can't get rid of it then you get this situation where it's like they really really need to take desperate measures like let's lock it all down let's let's tell these people that they're wrong let's try to point out how white supremacy is in them because they're white let's point out how masculinity is an ideology that needs to be destroyed that was Lisa Wade she wrote that last year is in ideology yeah masculine because Trump and this is a thing right I think in the past couple of years of course before Trump it wasn't new they had other avatars I think there's a lot of anger and frustration just viably slow at trump and they see this and so I read so many other usually op eds not their academic pieces and it's like men are like this men are bubble and you can tell they're just talking about Trump but they can't touch them so they're pissed off and

52:45they try to take it out on all men I think that's like a huge thing they see these problems they exaggerate the problems they practice problematizing and that's a thing right they practice this stuff you go to school it's in the general ed curriculum maybe they major in this stuff you get good at finding problems I was just talking yesterday came over I never actually I got to Los Angeles a couple times before but I've never been to the Beach I never actually made it down so I went down to Santa Monica I go to one of these burger places right on the on the right by the pier and it says that this is the burger that made Santa Monica famous and immediately you saw the hot ones thing right I was like there's a paper on this here you have this manly double cheeseburger being marketed that's what made Santa Monica famous oh so manly food culture is the kind of

53:30like colonialism that goes and makes a city become a city it become it makes a place into a place and you could I could write a paper about that in three days do you have to have credentials to write a paper yep eh no technically not and that's a sad thing because that's what their response to this has been oh we're gonna screen better to see who is actually writing these papers so they can't trick us but that's possibly trick you the point is that scholarship is that it should stand on its merits at the argument solid if the research is good and they thought our research was good so my point about the dog humping thing yeah it's they should leave it the way it is if they're saying that this is such an important piece right well I mean I would walk back on that one because we did make up the data and falsifying date is not cool well what data would be incorrect like

54:17we didn't go to the dog we definitely didn't ask anybody about their dogs results we said that there's a dog crapping on another dog's head in the paper and like that didn't happen I'm sure that didn't happen and maybe it did I mean this is insane but we had other papers that didn't do that fat body building didn't do that the one that's the one that joke's on you didn't do that there's no made-up data in most of our papers and why shouldn't those stand right stand by those exactly I can get it because we can't differentiate real scholarship from because they're in this crazy ecosystem yeah in which their ability to make discerning judgments about things has been dulled because they put an agenda before the truth I keep seeing all these academics coming like they get their gotcha moment on us they're like oh I read your paper it's actually a real paper it's good how

55:08crazy is this like yeah thanks for noticing you know that's exactly what we were trying to do we weren't writing just stupid pranks the dog park papers pretty funny but we were actually trying to learn what's going on there Thanks noticing somebody finally did but that means of course they don't want to admit that we actually learned this stuff because then when we say it's they're stuck with somebody who knows what they're talking about saying it sucks and they don't want that either no when you said these people that are trying to save the world yeah like what what do you what do you really mean by that I think they're the people are trying to build the kingdom of God on the planet Earth you know to draw a metaphor a religious metaphor there are people who see an evil and they want to purge the world of that evil by any means necessary and the evil

55:50being privilege privilege and it white supremacist a new religion patriarchy anity Goes Down that's just you know that was Game of Thrones the only reason you need new gods are because people don't believe in the old gods right and so we have these religious modules or what have you in our brain and the new religion is intersectionality and we see that really is what it is that's exactly what it is now the real else we've been writing about that and talking about that for years and studies or psychology figures and it's it's all over it is it is political correctness is paralleled with blasphemy is the same parallels of heresy the parallelism that's exactly right yeah I mean it's it's so stunning how easily people sort of slide into these precondition slots here's the one difference and I think this is a key difference the reason that it's easier and I mentioned this to Penn Jillette

56:46when we did a talk and he just couldn't believe it the reason that it's easier to talk to Christian for example about faith or about their religion is because at the end of the day it comes down to faith these people don't have any faith they have knowledge quote unquote they have their bodies of scholarly literature which were ideal laundered that's what they have so they can point to these things and say oh I don't know but if I know I know how do you know well Robyn D'Angelo's white fragility there's a study there's a study there's a study there's a study I know how so some of those studies are written and I don't trust them and you shouldn't trust them either yeah yeah yeah well you see that I mean even in nutrition I mean you see it in everything this this I in terms of like almost a religious or religion like it exactly of specific ways of eating or

57:36specific ways of communicating specific ways of being it's just so strange how people seem to have this natural inclination to adopt predetermined patterns of behavior right yeah I think actually there's pretty decent understanding of that from from the perspective of moral psychology you've got this idea that somebody has has seen something as good so it elevates them it makes them better so clean eating might be good right whatever clean eating means for some people it's vegan for some people it's like all you eat is grass-fed beef who knows but you've got clean eating and you've got dirty eating and you go into the clean thing and so you've got this kind of like purity thing and eventually you take this so seriously it becomes kind of a sacred value to you well what's sacred mean you know we have this kind of vague sense oh you know holy this that that's sacred and it's

58:24something really important to somebody well what it really means is that it's taken on so much moral importance to somebody that they no longer will allow it to be questioned with something sacred it's now been removed from the the sphere of being doubted questioned or whatever and so when you have this idea like that let's say that privilege is the cause of of racism and you've elevated that the problem with everything in society even then you've elevated that to like a sacred value that can't be questioned you can't say maybe there's another dimension to it that's when you start getting these kind of religious like behaviors you're circuiting these problems because you've got a place where it can't be a question be made fun of we were talking about the comedy earlier this is killing comedy right it's absolutely killing comedy because you can't make a joke because if

59:11the joke goes a little bit wrong now you you've committed a heresy you're a blasphemer they're gonna be yes but no because people love when you go against it that's true the Zooey the weight of it is there but when you resist it people scream and yes yes yes so this is really interesting because if we take the theory about humor at face value right that you can only go against a power thing so we say okay you know what we wrote a paper one of our papers the joke's on you was about that let's say they're right why do people love it well it's because everybody knows these guys these guys have power they're trying to pretend that they don't have power that they are the victims they're the oppressed meanwhile they're bullying everybody into everything they're firing people for saying the wrong thing in class you know whatever it is that's only possible if they have power in the

59:57joke when South Park makes fun of like what was it PC principal or whatever when South Park makes fun of that the only reason people laugh if their theory is right is because they're powerful if their theory is wrong is it's just funny then we can talk about something different but if they're actually right if they're actually making a point here they're not recognizing that they're admitting that they have seized a lot of cultural power and that's why people celebrate when when you go back against so if that's why people have sent us on the emails like this is the greatest thing ever thank you so much for doing this there's all this like you guys are heroes blah blah blah why because they wanted to see you laughed why because as funny as hell is why and why because these people are there they're influencing the out of stuff yeah and if they weren't if they were just

60:42you know victims who don't have a voice who can't make any impact who aren't bullying people every room like why are you bullying those guys why are you being a dick right but everybody thinks it's funny and why because because they have real impact they have real impact yeah and that's one of the things that we really want to convey to people is that this what happens in the Academy does not stay in the Academy no it's spread it spread throughout the world now and I've read some articles about some things that we've said on this show that are just completely preposterous and taken totally out of context and presented as some evidence of you know whatever transgression that's impossible to defend it's very strange it's it's very strange time for for communication it's a very strange time for ideas no but I also think it's really exciting it's exciting that all

61:32this nonsense is going on that's one of the things that I really loved about what you guys have done it's exciting it's exciting that you guys have you've infiltrated and have these dummies public not just publish your but praise it yeah yeah and say how amazing it is that you wrote a bit about fat body building I mean exceptions is this one fat shaming and fat acceptance they're too preposterous phrases they really are you know I mean you shouldn't be mean to people that's it but fat shaming because someone's fat no your if you you can't call me fat because I'm not fat doesn't work yes so that's recent so that body of literature here's something that that I learned when I read this is they don't use the word obesity because this is really interesting because obesity it gets back to what Jim was saying obesity is a narrative it's just a story so they use the word fat excuse me so

62:31there's not obesity bodybuilding there's fat bodybuilding and there are all these narratives so why would one want to buy into one narrative rather than another narrative why is fat okay and obesity bad ah because obesity is a medicalised narrative right fat is just a description yeah so they're rejecting medicalised terms well they call it a health ism I'm not making that up what's health ism is a narrative it's a power structure where healthy and thin people are imposing their view of how body should be yes on and there's thin privilege like they'd look at you and you've got all the you know cuz your muscular too so you wouldn't just be straight white at or sexual assists yeah I mean you've got health privilege and you've got health privilege privilege probably that's not good for you yeah it falls into that so that's real that's real and they also claim to be healthy at every size

63:34movement you can be healthy at every size and obesity is just a medicalised narrative yeah and that's really important though because the the point of that is to say if your doctor tells you you're fat and it's a health concern then you don't have to listen yeah that is a I've read that before and they're read an article by this woman who was morbidly obese Charlotte Cooper I don't know what her name was but she was talking she was also using like really misusing some studies on there was some there there there have been some studies on people who are overweight and that there could possibly be some health benefits to being overweight these studies have been widely dismissed now not only dismissed but they go in direct contrast to the great volume of studies that show how terrible it is for your health to be that that fat and that heavy but this person I don't remember who it was why

64:32she was doing this but she was clinging to these one or two studies that have been dismissed these are biased epidemiological studies that have been dismissed but she was putting them in this blog as if this is some sort of evidence that not only is it not unhealthy to be fat but it might be healthy to be fat and I'll think about this person in an academic position as a professor teaching young people this particularly young girls particularly young girls who might have eating disorder ain't exactly health a white privilege yeah oh my god is this real this is a real paper they think it's a they think it's like when the doctor says you're overweight it's a concern for your health they see that as a form of fat shaming saying that they're not alright the way that they are they're not being accepted the way that they are there's a power dynamic that healthy

65:24people are imposing upon overweight people they have myriad issues that they come up with and I mean it sure some of these complaints have got to be somewhat real you know they don't make as many oversized clothes they're you know plus size clothes it's harder to get styles or there's some legit stuff you know that they might want to say hey what can we do something about this but on the other hand the whole thing that like saying that it has nothing to do with health it has nothing to do with your like triglyceride level heart it's just it runs its anti evidence it runs in the face of every conceivable piece of evidence they're teaching kids this they're in schools and there are classes fad studies classes and there's an actual well there's fats there's fat stuff at studies Jamie's gonna bring it up I told you P I told you thirty million people are waiting to find out

66:16Neri Journal of body.we ancestors and this is what yelling is like when we do this 30 million people are going to now know that there's something fat sighs now fat studies doesn't do what you think it does you probably think all fat studies you know what a triglyceride so how much have you exercised know it's a good diet how much sugar is too much sugar well that is absolutely not what this journal does frozen a fat tale of immigration what the hell crafting weight stigma hold on a second crafting weight stigma in slimming classes a case study in our home so I'm telling you you go to a slimming class you're gonna go lose weight you take a take a fitness class or something whatever slimming classes are fatness and temporary use a stigma against being fat they basically say fats bad for you this one fear rising fat oppression intersectional approaches

67:06and methodological innovations you just said a bunch of nuns the oppression of fat people is built into institutions pervades the cultural landscape in effect dude we could have written this it affects the relationship and perceptions of people of size people of size it is its introduction to the special issue people of sizes now the new people of color people of color is a problem now - yes you can what you see there's people of color and then there's bi POC which I don't know how you pronounce I know if it's by POC or what but that would be black and indigenous people of color because they have even more oppression than the other people of color and they've got a fight yeah for example or Harvard can discriminate against Asians let's tap our noses and just move on right so so but then that's even a problem because indigenous has recent recently been

67:58branded a racist term because you're not actually honoring yeah you're not hitting the actual tribal identity if you get right on the cutting edge of the stuff it's like really going into meltdown businesses because it's too random well yeah you're it's you're not you're generalizing your chair exactly yes yeah mmm yeah ok so you can see again the competitive victimhood going on who gets to claim more of the the victimhood pie and oh now we've got this thing about people of color so they get you know victimhood status but why if that goes to all color equally that's not fair because these people color are even more discriminating and so they should get more of it it's really they're fighting over a piece of a pie of victimhood Ness I love the Canadian term First Nations First Nation people it's it's a better term because really every single human being that came to North America

68:51came from somewhere else yeah so it's P which in the in the fat cents we're talking about in the fat bodybuilding paper oh yeah I put in a Star Trek reference at the end I love Star Trek I put in something like fat bodybuilding is the final frontier for fat activism Oh in like that though they didn't like that they said it was so that we couldn't use the word frontier because it evokes imagery of the genocides the American Native Americans to choose a different word yeah yeah yeah so weren't your holy yeah you're thinking about Frontier Airlines right what's up with them they're in trouble your whole worldview is so utterly distorted and twisted and the things you believe are totally untethered to reality but yet you believe there's knowledge you believe it's knowledge because it's published and think about what it does the students that pick this stuff up you go to college you pick this

69:37up you start majoring in it you could be majoring in something where you actually learn to do critical thinking to engage with ideas if your district or disadvantaged going into college that's your best chance to get out of that situation is to grapple with great critical thinking learn some great skills whether that's you know engineering and the science is something like that whether it's even if it's you want to get into like studying race and sociology soft sciences or you want to get into just literature do it honestly and you're gonna get somewhere but you get into this stuff where you can literally just make up your conclusions what are you doing you're teaching these people how to think about problems they're seeing you know the burger and the Santa Monica Pier is a problem now everywhere I see it everywhere I go after this for a year you've got the

70:19people in the habit of seeing problems everywhere are you helping them are you getting mad about this or anything you know we might one day that's a great idea for a book the hard part is we could actually probably write ten books so condensing it down to a book usually you got an idea and you got to blow it up to a book we have to condense this down to a book I think talking about the problem like just explaining what you've already explained on this pot and and actually having those studies that you did publish and in the whole thought process behind yeah creating them would be a great book we got a documentary happening about it yeah Mike naina is a documentarian from from Australia that that got hooked up with a Suzy a white male he's not he's around Black Watch I tell him how we met Mike oh yeah so um it's interesting because we were starting out this

71:11project and then we ended up talk you couldn't talk to anybody about it so hard to keep a secret this big right you just want to tell people like you weren't even believe what I'm doing tell anybody so we find a few trusted friends we're telling this one guy a buddy of ours and he's like oh my god I know a documentarian who's making who's like investigating all this going on in the universities already he's already interested would you guys be interested this would be a compelling documentary would you guys be interested in talking to him so we we get in touch with him and he's like listen you know I'll shoot this I think there's a there's a film here I think you're gonna ruin your careers that's what I'm gonna film but in any case I'll film this but here's the deal I'm only gonna shoot it if you commit a hundred percent to transparency let me tell the full story

71:56honestly what's really happening you know we don't get to sugarcoat anything and make you guys look good and of course he thought we were just gonna crash and burn yeah that's right told us later he's like we the only reason I agreed to this I was sure that you guys got torpedo your careers like positive yeah and so he thought it was a you know gonna be that and he'd have to like convince us to let him show it because we wouldn't want to but does he know that you don't work in academia anymore yeah yeah but we were doing the project so we reached out to him and said well through the mutual friend how would it ruin your career well I maybe would never get another job if I wanted to go back into academia for example or I mean I still it hasn't happened yet but you see people who do academic misconduct get banned from ever publishing academic papers again that

72:41could still come down for me I don't know what it probably won't but it might and if it does you know then if I try to get a job working for like a think-tank or university or anything that depends on that I'm locked out of that now so it especially was gonna ruin Pete's career to it's beyond he works in he worked him not just a unit over at Portland State you know exact Ramsay was over for you I don't know I don't know what's gonna happen the people when it's over for sure they're always like I'm not sure yeah I don't know what's gonna happen yeah it's best not to prognosticate too much with with all this stuff you see now we talked about Brett Weinstein and Heather hanging they got fire bombed right there thing just blew up blew the hell up and I think I pushed out of their jobs but in a sense it's like I don't know I was talking to them when we were in

73:30Portland and it feels like they kind of took the fall and people are like whoa that's too far and I don't know if that's the case or not but if so wait what's too far like pushing people out of their jobs like students patrolling the campus with bats trying to find Brett to pull him out of his car if he showed up yeah like that I don't care who you are that's too far I mean that's not even civil society I mean who would thought that was too far though the students did not there but a lot of people like people saw this enrollment is like did you think it was - alright government should come in and shut down the school yeah tons of people tons of people around I mean like everyday people who saw this story think whoa the stuffs gone too far the fact that they're allowing that guy to remain as president oh yeah absolutely absolutely when there was that scene in the where

74:14was conference room or wherever it was when the kids were telling him to put his hands down yeah cuz he's being aggressive with his hands yeah he puts his hands down and they start laughing yep it's like what in the is this it is a system set up to where you can't win is what it is deliberate but it's hilarious well it is they were laughing at him he put his hands down there like stop making hand gestures you're being aggressive he puts his hands down they start laughing at him I didn't fire fire fun a tariff on its I find it terrifying for what it means for all of us yeah if that if that can happen at a college campus I mean that's where ideas are supposed to be shared discussed explored etc if that can happen at a college campus everything's up for grabs at some point well that college campus is really strange right it's really strange they're struggling though and

74:58rewards down yeah radically radically down yeah I mean they could literally go under because of this it looks like it might happen yeah it's too bad because when it was doing well as Brett was explaining it was a wonderful place today because I do what every really cool stuff he could take them to the park and they could do a class in the park I could he could have a class where you know whatever regardless of what he's teaching he could teach about something else yeah crazy field trips somewhere you know all this stuff you know adventures with the Creator The Simpsons go there too speaking I think he was an alum from there it's such a shame because they're just such decent people yeah they're just such brine they're great they're both great they're all allow smart so really legitimately smart and fiercely progress and both really present they're decent humans of course that means

75:50they're all right adjacent right these people it's a strange strange time for ideas but I think this is a it's it's also sub it's some sort of a symptom of this culture that we live in where everyone gets to voice their opinion everyone feels entitled divorce thrive because of social media because of this instantaneous ability to post whatever you feel about anything whether it's a comment on YouTube or a tweet or a Facebook post this nature of everyone putting in input instead of earning your right to be heard you know and through merit and through your work and through people saying hey this guy is smart this girl has great ideas this person really has some good points that's Tom Nicholls ideas before we used to criticize people from a point of expertise now people who have absolutely no expertise feel that they're entitled to not only criticize but have everybody

76:52else listen to their criticisms yeah I think you're onto something with the social media right because you post something and it gets like for interactions and you're like well how come Joe Rogan's thing got like 4,000 it's not fair right right and so there's this like kind of competitive jealousy kind of thing going on and I think we've seen that a lot you know these kind of you know people who don't have a lot to bring to the table and they want to get you know maybe it's a spot on a podcast maybe they want to get on you know a conference or sometimes speaker into a conference and we've seen this for years what happens is well you know you got some big name that's come well let's just like can him and say well he's a sexist he said this terrible thing now he can't be at the conference or will protest get him out put one of our guys in or when they start to get

77:36more power it's like let's make sure half of our people are there or else we're going to make sure that we say your conference is racist then that becomes like just a hot mess nobody wants to go to the conference it's not going to be financially soluble so it falls apart I mean this stuff has been going on this seems to be what's going on and I think you're touching something where social media and Tom Nichols talks about it to generating a kind of narcissism where people feel entitled like I have a voice nobody's listening to me but they should listen to me because they of course think their ideas are great and the rise of social media coincides with shutting down speakers mm-hmm absolutely here's on campus it didn't used to happen that way he used to be even if people protested it the speech went on and people debated that person or no people got a chance during

78:20the QA section to challenge these idea that's what it's all about it's supposed to be all about yeah you know if you have a problematic person you have a person that you feel is they have ideas that are questionable you bring in a person whose ideas you feel or counter those that is and you let the audience see how these individuals discuss these things when I was in high school Barney Frank debated some guy from he was some very conservative person I forget what the there was a ridiculous conservative group that had some really funny name I forget what it was but he was like this really canned Ronald Reagan style conservative and Barney Frank was I think he was still in the closet back then but he was this like very articulate powerful left-wing guy and they they did it inside you know this court this community center in our high school whatever it was you know some

79:20auditorium and I got a chance to watch this one guy talk about all these different but you know whatever it was gay marriage or whatever his conservative ideas and values and marriage should be between a man and a woman and all these these different things that would today at a lot of college camp you'd want those shutdowns you don't want someone propagating these ideas right Barney Frank came on after him and eloquently dissected what was stupid about it and what the Constitution is all about what makes America great is our freedom and our ability to express ourselves and and by doing so me as a 16 year old kid and the audience got to see ideas dissected and ideas debated and see two people from polar opposite perspectives just battle it out you know and let the best idea win and I'm sure there was probably some people that were in that audience that came out of it

80:18with a different perspective like yeah gay people shouldn't get married and yeah marriage is supposed to be between a man and woman I'm sure of it I'm sure of it and that's what happens in a democracy yes yes you're talking about the very foundation of liberal society you're talking about John Stuart Mill here I mean you're talking about John Adams you're talking about the foundation of a liberal society here and that's what the scholarship runs there we looked at runs directly counter to this remember the idea is that if people are putting out language the idea that some people are going to come away with a heteronormative idea or a homophobic idea that's already a catastrophe yes so we can't allow we got to pull the speaker wires like Adam or vent we've got that we can't let that go on yeah that's my point it's like what happened where you know these kind of

81:08interactions between contrary ideas is so it's it's it's so dangerous that one or two people could possibly be shifted even if it's 30% of the audience I mean who the knows what what's gonna happen when people are sitting there listening and who's to say that you're right or you're wrong so the way to challenge ideas is not pulling the plug on the speakers it's better ideas if you use if you fundamentally subscribe to the idea that heteronormativity let's use it as the example if heteronormativity is the power structure that's holding down gay people and preventing them from having equal opportunities if you fundamentally believe that anybody else getting convinced anybody being reinforced under the idea of heteronormativity isn't just a few like 70% change their mind and 30% stuck with it that's just bolstering the already imagined to be completely dominant view

82:00it's really kind of anti progress right because it views the idea that power structures can't change they're always rooted in some identity whoever has you know there's more straight people than gay people or okay so therefore straight people always have power therefore anything that reinforces heteronormativity is going to be a catastrophe that reinforces the next thing you know people are going to be beating gays in the snow or something like that it's also the complete infantile ization of young adults because you're telling me these young adults aren't smart enough to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas well if they're learning all this grievance study stuff I just said their critical thinking is getting hobbled but here's my point if you were a person who's a young progressive well-read person who's got some rock-solid ideas about people being able to live their

82:49lives without discrimination and all the things that I'm sure we all agree on and you sat and listened to some right-wing alright spewing hate is it gonna change you it's gonna affect you of course it's not so who is it can affect like who are these ideas going to reach why do we assume that people are so much more easily influenced than we are what what is that about this isn't this infantile ization young adults it is a bubble wrap on kids yeah it's nerve in the world and coroners got to put a exactly and Lou cane off and hi just published that a book coddling of the American mind and yeah and and and and I think if you look at Hight's work and the heterodox Academy and he's fighting for this but we have infant infantilized people we've have infantilized students and I don't I hope that the tide is changing I don't know one of the things we wanted to do with this project is

83:50give people the opportunity to speak out and say you know they don't speak for me I want to hear what someone has to say about immigration the other side corridor I want to hear which I want to hear the best arguments because then I want to engage them myself and you know I also think that we should have people of all I think it's a problem that people who go into teaching it that I can't remember where the study I read the overwhelming percentage of people college educators are on the left I'm on the left I think that's a problem I think that they need diverse voices diversity also has to be ideological diversity and if you want people to be less brittle and if you want people to be less and Fanta lized they have to hear the other side but they have to hear this is also Mills idea they have to hear it from people who believe it yeah that's in John Stehr Mills book on

84:40liberty is it's not enough to have heard that the other side the argument from the other side exists you need to hear the best case put forward by people who really really subscribe to it yeah and then work against that if you can defeat that then it deserves to be defeated right yeah and this is the thing I think you know in general human beings we we all put forth our best ideas and we're all wrong most of the time we're all we can be a smart guy or a smart woman whatever we're all pretty stupid we put forth a lot of ideas most of them are wrong it's true for everybody true for you me everybody and what we should really be relying on is you know I put down an idea and you're like well I don't know about that and so we start cutting away the that I talked into my idea the stuff I didn't have right we do that and now the idea that survives that process is better and then

85:24somebody else comes along and says wait wait wait that part's probably a little bit but this you could add to it and you make it better and then some of that's wrong and this is the process of how we really produce knowledge right yeah and it's a culture to it that's what gives us a vibrant culture too right and as opposed to what we see here where I can we the three of us can make up the conclusion and write a paper to support it and then if you criticize it you had to have criticized it because you were sexist or because you were racist if you do a scientific test that shows that it's wrong the science must have been sexist or racist you know anything once you're doing that you're just you're really in the weeds you're not helping anybody yeah and we need to study these areas gender and race but we need to do it right yeah and we need to do it freely where you could just talk

86:09right and you don't you don't get accused of all sorts of horrible transgressions exactly and that's not that's the culture that I that we want to see in here and that's not the culture we have well I think there's you know everyone is railing against identity politics and I think we can all agree identity politics or a huge problem but another problem that goes along with it hand-in-hand is identifying personally with ideas where these ideas are connected to your ego your identity identity did you yeah that's a call everybody's wrong about God and it sounds like I'm just gonna go after religion but it's actually the culmination of my study of religious psychology and so really what it was was targeting I mean it talks about what's going on with religion and why people believe religion and what God actually stands for in terms of you know psychology as they might see it but then

87:01what it was really targeting was I saw all these people who are like you know loudmouth atheists and they were like this and that the other thing and I have this whole community and I saw a holy they're doing the same thing yes right they're doing the same thing and what are they doing they're identifying as an atheist I am an atheist yeah what does that mean well I want to be a good atheist how the do you be a good atheist that doesn't make any sense you remember atheism plus a thousand plus was exactly what I was looking at great favorite that was gold I've watched a whole speech like smoking a joint and laughing my ass off at this dork who's speaking in front of some other group of dorks that were all part of the atheism plus movement and he just kept just ranting about sexual harassment and diversity and all these different things that and attaching them to atheists

87:51exactly you're making your own religion exactly exactly exactly right hi Joe Rogan saw it straight through it because the guy was such a virtue signaling little wheel total yeah yeah a little sneaky that was trying to get girls to like him to you that you know you see what it is those I gotta be a good atheist how do I do it well I don't know cuz atheist means don't believe stuff of a certain kind so they have certain plus what social justice how did that it died off cuz it didn't work but those people are still crumbling around or whatever they think oh they got a whole blog they play murder project yeah know what they said they're still there yeah we're straight white men oh we're therefore we have bad motivations motivations that's we get all tonight because we're straight men because bad make bad white men straight white men are basically like a little arrow

88:46running around looking for vaginas and anything you say is basically just a little sneaky way for you to get inside of a vagina and although this list I use he just try making your way through society it's a little ironic when you put it that way but the truth is though if they think that I mean this is the article of faith years that privilege exists and always preserves itself so we're straight white men we criticized what's supposed to be but isn't social justice work it's bad social justice work you know capital social justice its screwed up so we criticize that therefore why we must be because we're white man motivation problem that was the depth of their their analysis given that they're you know like some of them were professors and stuff that's the best they could get and wouldn't it have been better say you know what there's a problem here yeah

89:37and we want to study this stuff and we need to clean house and thank you guys we appreciate it but you would have to step so far out of your belief system and be so objective and so self-aware that you're realizing you're in some sort of a preposterous group and very few people are willing to admit that most of their life's work has been nonsense especially when you get rewarded for that you get promoted for that you get accolades from that you carry status and privilege look I mean when people join some wacky cult like they don't join it saying that this is but it would be fun they believe it right they buy into it now and this is no different it's like what we're talking about about ideologies of people they lock into these predetermined patterns of thinking behavior and this is what's happening here yeah and it's very much like a cult it's very much like any other groupthink

90:30yep sort of environment it's like Scientology groups in the university yeah so everything they put out about thetans and volcanoes or whatever they've got all of a sudden that's not like just crazy you know l ron hubbard was at Dianetics or whatever that's gold standard knowledge Academic Press Oxford you know yeah so you get a degree yeah and then you get to teach it and as somebody somebody wrote an article criticizing US history and they're like oh they don't understand you know they think we just talked to each other in a bubble we talked to policymakers we talked to media there's like no that's why we did this you know talk to you you do talk to other people you are running into you know PR sorry HR departments you're telling them how to do the diversity officers institutionalizing their institutional and talk to policy makers I get emails yeah I don't know if you saw a year

91:18before all this we did this really you know bad attempt at occults conceptual penis as a social construct so we said that penises are a social construct can they cause climate change and this got a little bit of attention I've been getting emails ever since then from some member of EU Parliament and they're like we have another gender initiative that we're gonna try to basically foist upon you know EU and then it's gonna like dictate how Europe now works with Africa going forward about climate and so because I wrote this conceptual penis and climate change thing and it's all based on you know making fun of gender studies it was at the time anyway they were like you know you're an expert so now that you use colony you know what do we do about this gender initiative but that's real right the eu-parliament snot like nothing that's not that's not you know it's not like a meeting of some

92:04dorks at a conference that's real they're coming up with policy to dictate how they want to interact with with Africa for the next you know 20 30 years that's real and these people are emailing me saying this scholarship that you guys are criticizing is really you know it's on the agenda of the EU Parliament so help well it seems like what we're what we have here is sort of a wave of ideas right it goes in and it goes out it's going back and forth and it you you need this sort of balancing act and they're great things need to go so haywire that people step in and go well I'm pulling my kids out of Evergreen State nope this is crazy and that's a great example of a place that went too far okay and what we don't want to have happen is we don't want people to pull their kids out of the universities known as there are some not the University but these departments

93:02don't major in it exactly don't major in it but it's woods department specific gender studies critical race studies cultural studies queer theory that studies if it happens to have one I read a biography a guy who teaches critical whiteness oh yeah critical whiteness is a thing actually there was a journal and then it got it got so out there that it got criticized out of existence but it's a big thing there's some big paper I was reading just before we went public with all this and I got asked about it luckily I read it because we did the mine Kampf of course Israel's like you got mine Kampf published oh my god we need to talk to you Israel like TV you know I was on Israeli TV what the hell and so I all these Israeli journalists are calling me talking to me about it and over the mine conf and I read this one paper they're like well do you think that Jewish

93:51Studies is like this and I found this paper just before this all came out there was Jewish Studies criticizing critical whiteness studies because there's this whole thing about how the critical whiteness people accuse the Jews of being white and then there's all this you know who's where does the oppression lie cuz you know the Jews have had it pretty rough over you know the last two thousand years there abouts but then you got the critical whiteness people being like no they're white it's a white privilege blah blah blah and then the Jewish Studies people are like hold up you know don't put us up here and say that we're all white supremacists you know we were gassed by the white supremacists chill out so there's this huge like critical studies fight between the Jewish Studies people and the and the critical whiteness people over whether Jews count as white

94:38people or not and have white supremacy built in and they ask me about this Israeli Journal said and I was like well you know I have to sympathize with what their their argument is but they're still using the same broken methods and so you still want to see better methods right I think the the Jewish people have a point you know we've been pretty heavily oppressed for 2,000 years you start with like you know the Romans decimating them and then the Diaspora and then to Holocaust and every is just not good so I think they have a point that you know don't just say oh we have crazy white privilege under there for white supremacists but if you want to do that you know maybe this this methodology of complaining about it's not the best way to go it's complicated stuff but at least they're against the critical whiteness stuff this critical whiteness thing you were saying is is

95:28they have a journal they did the journal of whiteness studies are something like they're critical witness it lasted for about three years and I don't know exactly why it fell apart but it fell apart because I was really upset because I wanted to send a paper to it and it doesn't exist anymore the rewrite of mine Kampf where the woman the lesbian woman excoriates your own whiteness it was gonna send it to that journal and then it doesn't exist anymore so I had to send it to a critical race Journal who then said it's a good idea but you're you're positioning yourself as a good white and that's a problem by the way we were there all in line we would completely transparent honest with everybody you could there's a Google Drive a Google Drive with every paper all comments to everything that Mike Naina's videos everything is up there now it's totally free for everybody yeah we get accused

96:19of being grifters we don't have how how are we drifting you know there's it's it's in a Google Drive that anybody can just go download all of it I don't recall getting money for that we want it we really do think that and I'm yeah there you go Swedish professor rebels oh yeah this is new this is new yeah oh yeah a couple days ago one of Sweden's most merited into claimed political scientists and long-term critics of identity politics Bo rothenstein Rothstein has argued that identity based disciplines like grievance studies which deals with the concept of collective guilt have no place in academia yeah grievance Studies is yeah right on fired yeah we we came up with credence studies so it's delighted to see that that's caught on to start a podcast immediately and a patreon page so that you don't have to worry about losing your house whatever the they did

97:19with Jordan Peter so they created a goddamn monster oh yeah you guys up we created a multi-millionaire who's worldwide famous and my huge bestseller he was just talking to Swedish politicians on TV the other day so you know watch out they up with him boy did they up and dave was just texting me a friend Reuben was just texting me pictures they're all full it's crazy in this energy in that place is crazy he's selling out 5000 he's a rock star he's an intellectual rock star hilarious good for him yeah I mean look a lot of other guys are doing it to Sam Harris is doing that now as well yeah they're doing these gigantic huge speeches it's like good for him fine what well absolutely good for him but what I'm excited about is how many people are interested in the debate of ideas and that this is not happening on the college campuses but it's right a lot of these people that are graduated have

98:15graduated from college or or you know or in the working world they're very fascinated by this it's real it's what you were saying it's been suppressed for long enough now you know Jordan Peterson what was this thing he's like you're not gonna tell me the words I can use right when there's 78 different words for genders I can safely say you're crazy yeah that's it's it's like this desperation to try to find a unique identity that you can consider to be super special or whatever it's totally but it's you want to see even crazier as you go into like you go on these blogs I think they're mostly on tumblr or something that violates my rule never use tumblr where they talk about the different sexual sexuality identities like different kinds of you know I'm interested in this kind of person but not this kind of person under these circumstances but not under those that

99:01has like some you know 18 syllable academic word for it now and these people whose whole I don't think they're academics I think they're activists and geeks on tumblr but they come up with these crazy descriptions there's like hundreds of sexual orientations yeah it's just people wanting to be different I think it's gotta be special and they're not good at anything that's I think so that that was the other part of I guess one of the things that Jim said when I said I was more cynical I think that the in general the the critics tend to be angry and I'm not saying that their anger is legitimate or illegitimate but they send to be angry they seem to be almost universally under accomplished yeah so they're upset at you because you have whatever a big show or waterfall were there whatever they're upset about big platform audience there they're just generally disagreeable people and they

99:52found these communities of other people who are enraged who are also under accomplished who they can lat they can lash out at people together and then virtue signal you know yeah get rewarded for all you rogue in that bat whatever they want to call you or whatever they want to call us or whoever else some kind of an oppressor yeah some some prefer oppressor and there's something that it's so I don't know how we can deal with that I mean what our attempt to do this was to try to deal Ajith Imai where they get their knowledge from like what they call knowledge so what they could point to we tried to say it's not knowledge and D legitimize it but we really do need to get back to some kind of productive discussion productive politics where the far-right disowned they're lunatics and we disown are lunatics and we get back to work about whatever the oceans plastic whatever it is that we're

100:47talking about because right now the discourse is corrupted it we're not doing what we need to do in the academies these people are continuing to pump out this nonsense that's totally untethered to reality it's a huge problem I'm sick of it you're sick of it we're all sick we're all sick of it we're sick of it I'm sick of it I've had it I've had it with these folks it just doesn't seem it doesn't seem like it's sustainable I don't think it is it seems like some weird thing that's gonna run out of energy though it's eating itself yeah it constantly eats itself like we did the thing about the people of color and the black indigenous people of color that they fragmented you see when you get into the critical race literature that it's like okay so you're brown or you're black but you have slightly lighter skin slightly darker skin slightly darker than that really dark

101:30they have different levels of privilege and it's just cutting things apart the idea though that this is gonna create some kind of a coalition they can then defeat you know the plurality or something like that what do you see you see this stuff starting to blow up you see the Democrats bleed seats they've lost like a thousand legislative seats across the US since Obama got elected no.8 how are you gonna get your agenda if you don't have any legislators if you don't have anybody elected and so then what happens 2016 item I can't say that the reason that Trump got elected because there's lots of reasons had something to do no I will say I had something to do with this because every conservative person I know that's not just a reactionary is like and I in the southeast man I know some conservatives most of my friends are conservatives because I don't have a

102:17choice if I won't have friends that they're gonna be conservatives who lives there so I talked to them and they're like oh yeah they're tearing down this kind of statue oh yeah it's tough and it's not like they're tearing out Confederate Secretary I'm Thomas Jefferson you know it's like they're George Washington George Washington Halloween's a problem then I didn't know you didn't know Halloween's problem what are you going as for Halloween I'm a shark you're a shark like answer mermaids my problematic oh god if they're mermaids and you're a shark you are definitely taking like a dominant power position don't pick my outfit I have kids no they tell me what I am mmm-hmm I don't know try to figure out a paper for that yeah Halloween yes oh god culturally Shaun White apologizes for Tropic Thunder simple jack costume oh no no simple Jack is the mentally handicapped might be the last guy ever

103:19to wear blackface yeah that's true pull it off when are they gonna pull that that show one of they gotta pull Tropic Thunder is problematic I don't even show yeah it's wonderful you'll love it and it's it's special entirely politically incorrect yeah it's it's as politically active writing it down great mood is a gem it's a great movie now we're gonna be racists and and ableist for saying that's fun for sure we got real issues we deal with Halloween again Halloween is well mostly it's there's a lot of cultural appropriation going on so somebody might dress up like a put on sombrero and a poncho that's an issue yeah Tuesday we have tacos today yeah you can't be Native American you can't be a Native American there's that big stink just now about the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show where they had like their indigenous you know colors and the feathers they were

104:14wearing and walking around half-naked you can't do that so it's the idea mostly that people are going to take costumes that are insensitive to other people cultural appropriate or cultural appropriation so it's not dress up as Bruce Lee oh man I don't know maybe for a while for a Harvard maybe because he's Asian and it gets complicated but no this all blew up at Yale a few years ago I thought for sure yeah yeah yeah Christakis I think Christakis yeah he's a good guy yeah that that was hilarious those kids screaming yep mmm it was just as well put out a email saying maybe it's okay to be politically incorrect Halloween there was cheese your costume how you're going to choose it we're all adults it's probably bad to be deliberately offensive and yet it's also bad to overreact to incidental stuff oh yeah it's all this stuff you leak little girls if they're white can't dress up as

105:17Milan and problem but I think Bruce Lee is still on the menu I don't think anybody's gotten in trouble for being Bruce Lee huh you could wear I'd like the tracksuit well I get the Trax uma Thurman across my chest right footprint yeah work but a lot of people go with the like the cuts oh yeah oh yeah yeah I don't have enough apps for that that's gonna be a bad costume what is this yeah you could buy a Bruce Lee costume look for now for now for now no oh it comes with a weight too yeah dope for now Oh even a baby costume look at that look at that oh oh a Chinese a baby's Chinese it's fine yeah that guy's food guy no no not loud campy ninja no way to cultural appropriation uh boy this this mess that we're in is there a light at the end of the tunnel nothing so yeah yeah I think so the response that we've got so far has been really positive it's all like

106:23the secret positive so the feeling I get is a khadeem eeeh well from academics yeah the general public has been way more positive than that yeah for support so it the wind is changing right if they're we're getting that much we got no real blowback we got we got lots of positivity from the public even academics or reaching out there like secret positive with them it's like one more thing right we need a critical mass because what they are is they're all lined up they know the first one to step out of line and challenge the stuffs getting shot so look at the communist situation after communism fell nobody really believed it anymore but they had to go along with the party or gonna get shot but if a whole bunch of people come forward at once I can't shoot everybody so it feels like we're in that powder keg situation now right we're all it's gonna take is we hope it

107:07was gonna be this you know our thing was gonna be the trigger that let 30% of academics come forward to say you know it's and if enough people start saying it other people start feeling safe to say it we wish and where people feel safe you know we took a risk it's been fine for us we'll see what happens to P but if more people will take that risk and start speaking out then there's change coming now you work you were a mathematician and that's your background in in academia that would appear at least to be something that is beyond all this stuff because it's just dealing with numbers yeah math itself mostly has not been touched by this but there's this whole branch in there that's called the studies of Science and Technology and mostly what they go after is you know the sciences or whatever that especially they go after biology and psychology and they feel like they've

107:56got a lot of inroads into that we were at the Astronomy paper to try to push that all the way to a hard science we've said that astronomy is sexist and can only be fixed by putting in queer horoscopes they thought that was a good project they keep asking them to rewrite it yeah they were asking me to submit that I got an email yesterday asking for that one again so even though we've come public so with math mostly where you see this stuff hitting though they don't I mean some people are saying that math has inherently got sexism or racism because I guess apparently women and minorities are going to be naturally bad at numbers is what they're assuming I don't know what they're assuming this is it's ludicrous but they mostly go after education so they say oh look the scores the SAT math scores or whatever for for men white men are higher than for black men or something like that

108:43why could that be well you know maybe there are a lot of factors that go into that but they don't give a about a lot of factors it's racism so therefore math education must be racist therefore we need social justice and issues in methods education and that's exactly what they do and so then you have diversity math and I don't even know what that is but it's not something that you would see like a mathematic research level it's something that you see at junior high school elementary school that they're teaching your kids which is why it's scary as hell so is there a light at the end of the tunnel and what do you I still think there's a lot I think people hate this stuff I think people are getting hate it too though but they're afraid yeah I had this guy come up to me repeatedly last week this guy he's got two PhD he's brilliant guy he comes up to me repeatedly what you did is so

109:28important it's so necessary I can't talk about it I'm sorry I can't talk about it I wish I could talk about but I talked to a lot of academics and everybody saying the same thing they know you got them it's only a matter of time now one more event and they shake off the fear I think it's close I don't know what the next event is I don't think it's more bogus papers I think it's probably somebody getting fired that didn't deserve it or something like that one more thing and people are going to be ready to shake this off why does this ideology infect tech companies and it seems to get them more than it gets anyone else know you should ask him more though I don't know he's I know I can't get a job he just gone I just talked to him the other day he just going well don't say where he's working on they'll go after him yeah I know I don't know why it's in tech so much

110:20maybe there's some kind of Silicon Valley connection there or whatever where you know Silicon Valley is in you know the kind of Bay Area California you've got a lot of the liberal hippie stuff that started out as you were talking about in the 60s and 70s so it's kind of in the water there in general I would say that what you're seeing is that this stuff as they've the the big turn to making this applied was in the 90s right so they've had an entire generation of students that have just been really getting this stuff crammed down their throat they really have taken over the education in the last ten years it was just starting when I left academia in 2010 that you know it was like oh we're gonna focus on diversity we're never diversity commit commitments what's gonna get in the general curriculum so you're getting more and more students that are getting educated

111:04in this that is now going out to the workplace right so if half your workforce in tech because tech moves so fast I'm just guessing why this might be a thing tech moves really fast so you've got to have some fresh training mm-hmm go in there if they've been educated with diversity stuff cram down their throat the whole time and there's huge initiatives to try to you know increase representation of women in particular in in tech and these are seen as you know automatically good initiatives if there's been this is the culture that they're that they're being educated in and then they take that culture to the workplace and think this is what tech is about and then they're surrounded by like-minded people who encourage it it's totally plausible that which you've got a sort of a tech echo chamber that's bouncing these things around and keeping it and keeping it

111:49there here's another question why is it that I mean here's here's here's a scenario right the scenario is universities are almost predominantly taught by people that are on the left row its massive it's in the 90 percent range all right when you have this sort of environment of these nonsense ideas that are accepted as fact and taught and and put into published papers then you have a situation where the left routinely attacks itself all right and and and devours itself right for not being left enough you're always having people that are upset that someone's not progressive enough left wing people attacking left wing people right you do not see that on the right here you did that's kind of what the whole Tea Party movement was right but they didn't do it in the academic field because they didn't have power there because they weren't academics right well yeah that

112:47shift started in the 60s and 70s they started bringing in a field when what that was during the Obama administration yeah so that's when what was the biggest fear for every Republican congressman then was that they're going to get primary from the right so they were gonna have some populist Yahoo go screaming about whatever they scream about is going to be more to the right harder conservatism conservative movement capital C capital M kind of thing and they're gonna just drill into that you know the reason that that the conservative politics aren't succeeding is because we're not conservative enough is that's the the prevailing view where I live in the southeast it's the same thing as you see in the universities but reversed in terms of polarization so but isn't that just an excuse for the lack of success it is it's it's a it's but with it it's an excuse combined with a commitment to the

113:37ideology whether it's a conservative movement ideology whether it's social justice scholarship whatever happens to be right but you see far more of these left on left attacks and you do right on right attacks you do right now yeah certainly Hey except of course for election time certain people are trying to you know beat their opponents sure sure sure it just it seems to be that there's somehow another related I mean I would like to look at how many people on the Left will attack others for not being progressive enough not being left enough so I think it's a it's a panic right you see this is a kind of behavior you see in a panic a moral panic for example and so Helen and I the third person who worked on the project with us Helen and I wrote an essay about a year and a half ago and talking about how the extremism on both sides is really the problem and most people reject it and

114:31should fight it most of us are sensible people in the middle who hate this in fact data just came out showing that it's 80% of the population hate the fringes both sides yeah so an only 8% are on the left and 12% are on the right of the fringe however that works out and so we wrote this thing and we said that what's going on actually we called it existential polarization so you have this idea that everything's an existential crisis so the the far-right will start with them sees that if the Democrats get power oh it's open borders the terrorists are coming in our entire way of life is going to be destroyed catastrophe catastrophe oh no Judith Butler's you mean 95 genders quick stop the Democrats no matter what and then you have the left oh my god if they get power that everything's gonna be racist we're gonna be beating gays in the snow it's gonna just be the worst thing in the hell

115:22that's actually kind of a joke but it's it's for real though that they think that the world is gonna fall apart if the other side gets power yeah and so when you have that kind of a situation you have a panic and you see the slightest bit of advantage on the other side is just something to completely freak out about and then what do you do you say oh well the only possible recipe to balance the scale is to turn further our way if we go toward the middle that puts the balance say if the right goes really far right and we on the Left move toward the middle now the whole balance has moved right so the only way to keep the balance close to the middle is if they go right we go left right right see then that's gonna keep the balance but what that actually does is it this is gonna get nerdy hang on that actually puts all of the weight on the outsides and you think about a

116:06spinning thing right it's got centrifugal forces happening what's that trying to just kind of rip the spending thing apart well if you have all the weight crammed in the middle it like a wheel it doesn't come apart right now imagine if you had like two billiard balls and you have like this big long stick and there's two holes for the billiard bar so they don't go in it like locked in they're just sitting there you spin that what's gonna happen there fly right off right so if you have all the weight on the outside and you start spinning a thing so that's like the political conversations are dynamic it's gonna rip the thing apart the more weight gets to the outside so one side going to the fringe doesn't mean the other side should go to the fringe that's how you tear a nation apart that actually makes a lot of sense if you can conceptualize it like an object there's

116:46really a damn good YouTube video floating around out there where somebody takes a jet of water and spins a skateboard wheel until the centrifugal force gets so high from it's spinning so fast it rips it apart it's it's worth looking up I don't know what the hell you'd search to find it but it's a it's a powerful visual and you can see it as stuff moves to the outside the centrifugal force goes up and up and up until finally the thing the the structural integrity of the thing that's spinning can't hold itself together anyone it rips apart well listen gentlemen and shout out to your friend what is your name Mike Nina no Helen pluckers Helen Helen o'clock rows rows across the pond thank you guys for doing this appreciate it thanks for being here and appreciate your support because we need support we can't do this without support so thanks for having us my pleasure

117:32thanks for doing it where can people see these things where can they read them the best place to go is going to be to go to our filmmakers YouTube page Mike naina on the YouTube that just tiny na na y na a yn yeah so on his YouTube page is some videos he's kind of playing with the footage he's collecting for the documentary on top of that though if you go to the video we originally released which is on the page you can find it easily there's the link to the Google Drive that's linked to all of the documents we put out there we explained every what every paper does why we wrote it what we were trying to show with writing the papers what the problem is that we need to address and what you know what we think that this shows and what we can do yeah it's all accessible through his YouTube channel we're kind of making that the central hub and so people can

118:18go there and explore and watch some more videos of us and well thanks for being here this was a lot of fun yeah again I really appreciate what you guys are doing thank you thank you bye everybody