The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 41 ｜ James A. Lindsay & Peter Boghossian

00:00:00.000 We constantly hear about activism on campuses. We have gotten familiar with the stories of the

00:00:05.680 far-left ideologies and ideologues and activists that claim to be professors. These days, a

00:00:11.780 professor with a conservative belief or anything right of Marxist is about as rare as a polka-dot

00:00:17.400 rhino. Academics have gotten so extreme that they're increasingly turning on fellow liberals.

00:00:23.180 So it's a big deal when you hear about some academics fighting against the system. It's even

00:00:28.320 a bigger deal when they use the left's own insane words and ideas as a postmodern Trojan horse.

00:00:35.840 Today's guests are unique. They are among the handful of academics brave enough to challenge

00:00:41.480 the corrupt system and the pernicious ideas that it forces and force feeds on college students.

00:00:48.340 Best of all, they're doing it in a very funny and clever way. Along with their associate,

00:00:53.680 Helen Pluckrose, who couldn't make it today, they're responsible for the grievance affair.

00:00:59.140 They wrote articles that translated passages from Hitler's Mein Kampf into postmodern feminist

00:01:04.680 terminology and submitted them to peer-reviewed academic journals in fields including gender studies,

00:01:11.060 queer studies, and fat studies. That's a quote. If you're worried about the state of culture in this

00:01:17.500 country, you're curious about the inner workings of academia, you're fed up with increasingly

00:01:22.740 authoritarian ideology from the left or from the right, this podcast is for you. This is a very

00:01:31.320 rare conversation and an important one for the future.

00:01:47.500 I grew up, uh, I didn't go to college. I skated through school. Um, and I, I realized when I was 30

00:01:58.200 alcoholic, I don't know anything. I don't know anything. And it's not that I wasn't smart. It was

00:02:08.520 that I didn't, everything I believed had been taught to me. You know what I mean? I believed in God because

00:02:15.620 everybody around me taught me about God. I believed in whatever my worldview was, it was shaped by other

00:02:21.900 people. And so I wasn't me. Um, uh, something that changed my life was I read a letter from

00:02:31.560 Thomas Jefferson to Peter Carr. It was his nephew. And in this letter, it said, um, he was, he was trying

00:02:40.960 to educate him and to line up all the basic things you had to do to be an educated man at the time.

00:02:46.980 The last one was religion. And this changed my life. Jefferson said above all things, when it comes

00:02:55.860 to religion, fix reason firmly in her seat and question with boldness, even the very existence of

00:03:03.540 God. For if there be a God, he must surely rather honest questioning over blindfolded fear that gave

00:03:11.880 me permission that I had never thought of before on every front question with boldness, but there is

00:03:20.340 no bad question and there is no dangerous answer. Does that make sense? Oh yeah. Yeah, totally.

00:03:28.580 So I, Peter, you want to go ahead? Well, I was thinking that there are certain, well, first,

00:03:34.300 thank you for having us on. Sure. I think that there are certain questions that are better than

00:03:39.120 other questions. Daniel Dennett writes an article in which he talks about if it's not worth doing,

00:03:45.620 it's not worth doing well. And I think that the first thing you need to figure out is it's certainly

00:03:51.060 true that we're taught things in our society, in our culture, in our university systems,

00:03:55.660 and we have to be able to question those. We have to have, we have to construct institutions

00:04:02.620 and systems that allow us at the most fundamental level, not only to question, but to teach us that

00:04:08.220 questioning is a virtue. But we also need to kind of find our own way in, in terms of thinking about

00:04:14.520 what should I start to think about? If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing well.

00:04:19.780 So I would agree with you. And that's why at 30, I went, I went back to school because I didn't want

00:04:26.260 to learn what to think. I needed to learn how to think. And our universities are not teaching that

00:04:33.800 now. Nobody's teaching critical thinking. And in fact, the exact opposite is happening. We're being

00:04:40.740 told, don't question this. So I want to, I want to start with just this, this framework first. There's

00:04:49.560 kind of a two part question. What created the world we're living in was the dark ages going into the

00:04:57.080 age of enlightenment and reason science, weigh it, measure it, show it, prove it out. It's that's all

00:05:05.520 being dismantled now. Right. So where would you put us if you looked in the history of man?

00:05:12.340 Where would you, what would you compare this time to? Where are we? Where are we headed?

00:05:18.300 I mean, it's probably clear as to say that it's sliding back toward a kind of feudalism,

00:05:23.200 but not an economic feudalism. It's a feudalism of ideas of thought. So tell me, explain feudalism.

00:05:30.480 Yeah. So feudalism, you know, you have kind of each little area has its Lord who's in charge and

00:05:36.920 everybody does what the Lord says and they work on the Lord's fields and they produce crops for the

00:05:42.480 Lord and the Lord gets his share. And in return, he provides some kind of governance protection for

00:05:47.480 that group of people. And so that's kind of an economic system where you kind of have these

00:05:52.060 little fiefdoms that are, that are led by, you know, some kind of a royal figure or sub-royal figure

00:05:58.640 or whatever. And it's got this, this idea basically that everything's kind of like, okay, here's this

00:06:05.460 little one and here's this little one and this little one. And they all kind of, you know, trade

00:06:09.160 with each other and fight with each other and whatever. And it's all done by the elites at the

00:06:12.740 top of that. And so I don't think we're sliding to an economic type of system like that, but an

00:06:17.780 intellectual one where you have, you know, so-and-so's thought leader. And then there's

00:06:23.040 this other thought leader that other people follow and people are in these little groups.

00:06:26.760 They say, oh, well, you know, I kind of follow Glenn Beck or I kind of follow Judith Butler or I

00:06:31.740 kind of follow, you know, whoever it happens to be, they have their, their way of thinking, their preferred

00:06:36.060 way of, of interacting with the world. And everybody can kind of find their own little, if you want to

00:06:41.800 call it a tribe, their own little fiefdom or whatever. And we're losing the common ground,

00:06:47.780 that you mentioned that came from the Enlightenment, which would ultimately be the correspondence

00:06:50.880 theory of truth. But you can, the truth somehow corresponds to, to an objective reality that we

00:06:57.260 can, can look at, observe, measure way out, as you were saying, and have some kind of external to any

00:07:03.840 particular person standard by which we can, we can say, okay, this is true because if you do the

00:07:09.960 experiment, you get the result. If I do the experiment, I get the same result. If a robot with no mind does the

00:07:15.720 experiment, it gets the same result. If a dog could do the experiment, it would get the same result. So something

00:07:20.040 that makes the same result keep happening is fundamental here. And we're kind of erasing that. It's, you know,

00:07:24.960 it's kind of an age of, of prejudice and opinion and people get to follow whose prejudices and opinions they like

00:07:31.080 best. And so you see this kind of fracturing and, and even, you know, balkanizing where these, these little groups are

00:07:37.960 kind of at war with one another and they don't agree and they can't see eye to eye and they can't

00:07:42.360 get along and tribalism. It's, it's very tribal in a sense. Yeah. So I see that's where we're, we're

00:07:48.300 headed. If this kind of very, as they call it postmodern, you know, modern would be the

00:07:53.620 enlightenment idea that there's some science and reason, science and reason, uh, democracy and

00:07:59.740 capitalism and so on. And then we're, we're kind of heading to this place where we're fracturing it out

00:08:04.820 and making it be about your truth versus my truth. And that was, that was the, that was the

00:08:10.080 question that I wanted to ask next was define truth. What is truth? We're now living in a place

00:08:17.980 where it's, well, that's your truth, right? Yeah. Speak your truth. Right. Yeah. So, so I think people

00:08:24.740 confuse the external world and the internal world, like subjective states. So if it's a mat, so here's

00:08:30.900 the question for your audience. If two people have conflicting beliefs about the same thing,

00:08:37.600 must someone be wrong? And the answer to that is it depends if it's a matter of taste. No,

00:08:44.260 you like pepperoni on your pizza. I hate pepperoni on my pizza. You like Beethoven. I can't stand

00:08:50.660 Beethoven. I don't know if you like any of these things. Um, so there are different types of truths.

00:08:55.680 There are truths within language. Seven plus five is 12. A bachelor's unmarried man. There are truths

00:09:00.840 about the world. Something falls at 9.8 meters per second squared. Speed of light is 186,000 miles.

00:09:06.260 So there are truths. And what's happening now is in, to go back to what you said about the academy,

00:09:11.820 I teach critical thing for a living, that professors are increasingly looking at the university system as

00:09:17.820 an ideology mill. And the goal is not to find the truth. It's to place an agenda. It's to, it's an

00:09:24.020 agenda driven kind of activism in which they want people to go to their own truths. And we can talk

00:09:31.560 about this thing called standpoint epistemology, which is a big driver in this. I think I said no,

00:09:36.240 no use of the word epistemology. Oh, did you? No. Okay. Okay. It just, it's a, it's just,

00:09:41.660 it's not, all it means is how, you know, what, you know, it's just a process that people use to

00:09:47.340 knowledge. So some people use, and not, so here's the thing, not all, and I think, so we have,

00:09:53.920 obviously you and I have different political beliefs. We have different metaphysical beliefs

00:09:58.460 about God and, and, and that's why this conversation is so important. And it's why the tragedy of this

00:10:07.360 whole thing is that we have to come here to Dallas to talk to you because this, this is not happening

00:10:11.940 in our academies and people don't, our kids are not welcome. I'm, I'm less welcome in on university

00:10:18.920 campuses than you guys are. That's an astonishing statement. Correct. Yeah. Correct. Yeah. And

00:10:24.900 there's, this is the kind of conversation that I think should be happening on college campus.

00:10:29.400 And it's not right. Right. And, and not even the most contentious conversations like, well,

00:10:34.160 we need to get black lives matter with police officers who actually teach and train people in

00:10:39.100 tactics because if you don't, more dead bodies keep piling up, right? There are direct consequences

00:10:43.800 for not having these conversations. But so, so think about it like this. You have your reasons for

00:10:51.380 belief. I have my reasons that I don't think God belief that there's not sufficient evidence for that.

00:10:57.300 We can have that conversation, but what you're not saying is, and I'm sure you're not saying this is,

00:11:02.880 if I'm wrong, I'm sure you'll correct me. That's just true for me. Like you're not saying that this is

00:11:08.060 just some highly subjective thing that people participate in. And what we're seeing now is

00:11:14.260 this torrent of subjectivity, this demeaning the objective. So hang on just a second. Yeah. Sure.

00:11:21.200 I have faith. Yeah. Okay. There's a difference to me and I, I could be the, the one guy who reads

00:11:28.540 it this way. Okay. But I can't prove God to anything. There's no proof. Right. There's no proof.

00:11:33.320 So I have faith. What my father used to say to me all the time when I was growing up is don't talk

00:11:37.400 to me about God. Talk to me about first cause. What was first cause second before the big bang?

00:11:44.720 He, it could be a big bang. Could not be a big bang. We have no idea. Sounds like big bang is it for

00:11:50.920 not right now. Good. What happened the second before? And that's where I can't prove what, I mean,

00:11:58.460 it could have been Wile E. Coyote lighting the fuse of a giant bomb. I don't think so, but it could

00:12:03.460 have been, we don't know. So those who say they're atheist, aren't you more of an agnostic because you

00:12:10.840 don't know what first cause is. I don't know what first cause was. Right. So I kind of think that it,

00:12:17.420 it is, is, is God. It might be just a mathematical equation, but where'd that come from?

00:12:24.220 Right. So this will take our conversation down a different road. I want to, can we keep it brief?

00:12:30.060 Cause I, I'd love to have you talk about that, but I want to make sure we keep on track. Okay. So

00:12:35.360 the, the principle there is their bottom line. Victor Stringer said the universe could have always

00:12:39.980 existed. It could have been caused by a big bang. Krauss says the universe could have come from

00:12:44.400 nothing, could have been God, could have been any one of a number of things now. And I agree with all

00:12:48.500 those things. Right. So, so if we don't know what it is, that doesn't mean we should believe

00:12:54.460 something. It means we should calibrate our confidence accordingly. And so the key there

00:12:59.920 of this whole thing in the same thing you learned when you were questioning at the beginning, you

00:13:04.080 started saying this is if you, and then you asked me what truth was, I think that the key to this whole

00:13:09.080 discussion is, are you willing to revise your beliefs? Yes. Are you willing? Okay. So, okay. So right now

00:13:15.640 this is the rule of engagement that we have. You are a sincere inquirer. I am a sincere inquirer. I

00:13:22.540 know him. He is sincere inquirer. We're all willing to sit down and have a conversation. We agree on the

00:13:27.980 rules of engagement. Now let's have that conversation. The problem is that we are acting, we are engaging

00:13:34.160 with people primarily in university systems that are not good faith actors, as you'll say, they're not

00:13:41.320 willing to revise their beliefs. Correct. They look at speech as a form of violence. They do not

00:13:45.620 want you to come on campus. What are you going to do on campus? Are you going to start

00:13:49.720 lobbing grenades? No, they don't want you to come on campus because they think that there's something

00:13:54.560 in two reasons. One, intrinsically dangerous about your ideology. But, and coupled with that is this

00:14:00.620 idea, and Jim can speak to this, is they look at truth as a form, they look at speech as a form of violence.

00:14:06.260 Speech is not a form of violence. And the moment you start thinking that speech and violence are

00:14:12.120 synonymous, you destroy the enlightenment project. You give up any possibility you have to leading a

00:14:18.840 better life. That's the death of hope. It is the failure to be an honest broker in conversations with

00:14:26.980 people with whom you have substantive political, moral, and moral disagreements.

00:14:31.200 Yeah. To wheel it back a bit, this subjective turn, as Pete was calling it, this is a rise of

00:14:38.140 subjectivity. What is truth? And he talked about there being the objective world, and then we have

00:14:43.000 ways to know, usually science, what's going on in the objective world. And then you have this

00:14:47.520 subjective world. So he doesn't like pepperoni on his pizza. He said that's a subjective truth.

00:14:52.340 That is his truth. Yes. It is, in fact, a real fact about the entity of Peter Boghossian.

00:14:57.700 So whenever that happens, I don't know if you really like pepperoni or not. I thought you did.

00:15:01.160 I'm trying not to eat meat.

00:15:02.320 We've got a lot. He doesn't like pepperoni, and he hates Beethoven.

00:15:06.560 We're narrowing you down.

00:15:08.480 That's right. We've got a finger on you now. But when people speak about their subjective truths,

00:15:14.620 what they are speaking about is something that they know about themselves that they cannot possibly

00:15:21.260 be wrong about, because it's about themselves.

00:15:23.300 Correct.

00:15:23.540 And so at that point, there is no conversation to be had. Now, the problem is, is when you

00:15:27.660 start blurring those two worlds, when you start saying that one subjective truth, one's experience

00:15:32.900 in the world, and your own interpretation of that experience somehow trumps the ability

00:15:39.480 to do an outside measurement of that or to take another view of it. And that's where we're seeing

00:15:45.560 the breakdown in conversation. People believe that their truth is the truth.

00:15:49.640 So doesn't this come down to, like, Pendulat's a good friend of mine. He's an atheist. And I

00:15:55.500 really think he's a good man. Really good man. I've never tried to sell him religion or anything

00:16:04.180 else. He's happy in his life. Isn't it where it breaks down? Sometimes I feel like Jimmy Swaggart

00:16:12.560 and Bill Maher are kind of the same. They're both saying, you don't believe this. You're

00:16:18.900 bad. You're just stupid. You're just whatever. And I'm like, dude, I don't. Isn't that where

00:16:25.340 the problem is? If you don't believe this, this and this that I believe you're just a bad

00:16:31.720 person or you're just stupid. And it's like, I don't care. Are you or worse? It's even worse

00:16:37.380 is that if you don't believe what I believe, you're an existential threat. Yep. That's where

00:16:41.320 we're at. Yes. You're an existential threat. You are. You are the cause of the doom of society.

00:16:46.500 Right. And it's the rare person. I think you guys are in this category. And and Penn is

00:16:53.860 again, I hate to keep going back to atheism. But when he stood up at the big atheist meeting

00:17:00.980 on the mall a few years ago, he stood up and said, let's not be the people that the Christians

00:17:07.780 have always said we were or that they were to us. Let's not be those people. That's not

00:17:12.740 that that is that's what the country needs. That's what the world needs. I agree. The part

00:17:19.920 that's particularly grotesque about this is that if you you ought not to be friends with

00:17:25.400 someone who holds a certain set of beliefs. And if you are, you too are a bad person.

00:17:30.460 Even if you hold the beliefs of your own tribe and there's no currency to be gained by crossing

00:17:36.000 the political aisle right now, there's no currency to be a lot of currency to lose. And

00:17:40.240 there's a lot of currency to lose. And we've seen it happen. And I'm sure you've seen it

00:17:44.240 happen when you can think of specific examples when you've sided with a Democrat or you've

00:17:48.560 sided with somebody because you think it's the right thing to do. And it's not that you

00:17:52.060 have an ax to grind against something like I don't have an ax to grind about the metaphysical

00:17:56.740 world. I just I just don't think that there's sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God.

00:18:00.900 But if I would show that evidence, I would believe. And if someone doesn't happen to have

00:18:04.980 that right belief, right, you know, when when my parents died, you know, I've I got the privilege

00:18:11.940 of holding both of my parents hand hands when they died. And the the dads are my young Armenian.

00:18:18.440 And so the dead high, they call the priest came in and the the religious folks came in.

00:18:23.640 And these are just look, I don't agree with them about metaphysics or God, but these are

00:18:28.140 just fundamentally decent people. They're kind people. And when I was in Las Vegas for this

00:18:33.860 happening, I brought my daughter. I don't usually talk about my daughter. I get very emotional,

00:18:38.380 but we adopted her from China. And the whole community that he lived in, in Sun City, everybody

00:18:46.080 was a Trump supporter. The whole place was a Trump supporter. And I truly dislike Donald

00:18:52.180 Trump. I legitimately dislike this man on every level. But to say that his followers are somehow

00:18:58.840 racist. Now, that doesn't mean he doesn't have some racist followers. It's just it's a

00:19:06.360 misapplication. Who who says who says you voted for Obama? I did. Jeez, I'm not. I didn't

00:19:14.180 realize I was sitting with somebody who just approves of drone strikes on citizens. Are you

00:19:20.180 talking about? You could have voted for him, but you weren't necessarily for the drone strikes

00:19:25.020 who were not these one dimensional people. If you think, you know, if you think that you're

00:19:32.460 when did we become the group of people that you have to buy all of it or none of it? 1994.

00:19:38.600 1994. That was a joke. You said it with conviction. I was like, wow, that's great. It's going to be a

00:19:46.600 big podcast. It's also the death of nuance, right? That's what happens when you have these tight net

00:19:53.440 ecosystems and you constantly chuck people out of the sphere. You're chucking people out of the

00:19:58.740 sphere and nuance dies with that. 144 characters. 144 characters. Yeah. I mean, you can't make any point

00:20:05.480 in that, right? You can't, I mean, no, you can only slam dunk on somebody. And you were just talking to me

00:20:11.020 about the social media today. Yeah. I've actually reflected pretty heavily on social media over

00:20:16.620 breakfast and the influence I had. I sat down, I was waiting for breakfast and I didn't pull out my

00:20:22.080 phone. And then I got bored and I pulled out my phone and looked at Twitter. And almost as soon as I

00:20:26.680 did, it was like, I lost the train of thought that I'd had in that moment of boredom. I had started to

00:20:31.540 become creative. I started to think, I started to, you know, be curious about people around me and

00:20:36.640 things that are happening and just my own thoughts. And the second I pulled it out, now social media is

00:20:40.680 directing my thought. It's either, you know, people speaking to me, my feed or, and then it's the

00:20:46.040 things that I've subscribed to follow. And now it's directing my thought. And I figured out that,

00:20:50.320 you know, a little moment of self-reflection, I put my phone back in my pocket and I reflected on this.

00:20:55.060 And I feel like I've been kind of sucked into a trap on this for the last couple of years

00:21:00.460 where I get bored and I'm work a lot. So I'm tired. And so I don't want to go do something

00:21:05.980 difficult. I want to just relax. So what do I do? I turn to social media. I don't watch TV really.

00:21:10.240 So I pull out social media and it never struck me quite as profoundly as it did. I mean, I've known

00:21:15.400 there are problems like psychic problems with, with engaging too much with social media, but it just

00:21:20.900 immediately in that instant took away all of my creative thought and directed it into whatever noise

00:21:26.700 was being thrown in front of me. And so much of that becomes because 140 characters or whatever,

00:21:32.100 it's so easy to just put that like, you know, a little slap out there or that, that slam dunk or

00:21:36.720 just whatever it happens to be that it's partisan baloney. Right. And there's currency to be gained.

00:21:42.280 There's a lot of social currency. There's only, there's, there's, there's only two in social media.

00:21:47.320 It's either tear down or build up. Yeah. And it's a lot more profitable to tear down and easier.

00:21:52.980 Yeah. It's very difficult to put out a thing to build something positive in the world because

00:21:58.320 a, it's really easy to be wrong. So you probably are on some level, even if you're doing something

00:22:03.640 really great and positive and you thought about it a lot, something's probably wrong with it. So

00:22:07.540 there's places for B millions of people who see it or thousands or whatever your reach is to start

00:22:12.780 trying to grab with their claws and pull that down and tear it apart. And it's the, there's a million

00:22:18.160 problems with everything. It's very difficult to be right. This is something I talk about a lot,

00:22:21.980 but you want to talk about science, you know, it's very difficult to, to be right. I think

00:22:25.760 Carl Sagan talked about it as crying truth from the fabric of the universe, like diamonds or

00:22:30.460 something. It's very difficult to pull out a truth. So we put out, we're smart people. We put

00:22:34.180 out ideas. Maybe we're 90% wrong. Most of the time, it's kind of Sturgeon's law, right? 90% of

00:22:39.400 everything is crap. And so most of what we think we're smart. We put out an idea. We think,

00:22:43.860 we think we're on it. And when it's 90% wrong. And so what do we do? We have to whittle that

00:22:47.480 wrong stuff away. And when that process is collaborative, rather than, you know,

00:22:52.500 you get this kind of social credit for just trashing somebody, then you have science happening.

00:22:57.700 Or if you say, I'm sorry, you know, I made a mistake. I thought this way. People will meme

00:23:01.620 it out a hundred times. Oh yeah. Put your face on it. And then, and so there's a mechanism in place,

00:23:08.580 a social mechanism. And I don't know if this dysfunction exists independent of social media

00:23:13.000 or social media just amplifies it. There's a mechanism in place to make you not want to say,

00:23:19.000 you know what? I made a mistake. Yeah. Yeah. And we need to create a culture. How do we fix this?

00:23:25.520 Well, beside the conversations, we need to create cultures when it's lauded when people say, I don't

00:23:31.220 know, when it's lauded when people say, you know, I made a mistake. We need to stop. Yeah. We need to

00:23:36.180 stop this idea that, oh, he flip flopped. Well, you know what? Maybe he had different evidence.

00:23:40.220 Well, there's a difference, but I've always said, as I've talked to politicians

00:23:43.440 for 40 years, that's why my hair is white. I don't know why your hair is white, but my hair is white

00:23:49.240 from talking to politicians. And I've always said to the audience, there's a difference between

00:23:56.500 flip flopping and growth. Right. That's right. If you're not changing your mind over 10, 5, 10,

00:24:03.160 15, 20 years, you're not alive anymore. Right. You know, if you can tell me, you know,

00:24:09.460 Mitt Romney said I was for abortion and, or I was against abortion and now I'm for it. And I'm like,

00:24:14.720 uh-huh. If he can't tell me what room he was in, what the wallpaper or the color looked like,

00:24:21.660 he's lying to you because you don't go from life to no life or whatever it is. You don't make a

00:24:28.440 change that big without something profound. So I asked him the question and I said, tell me that

00:24:36.020 moment, he had the moment he was sitting in Harvard. They, I mean, he knew everything about

00:24:42.680 it. That's not a flip flop. That's an honest, that was the key to Jefferson. Right. Honest

00:24:49.220 questioning. Right. Honest, not gotcha, not trying to win here, but honest questioning.

00:24:54.760 And, and the interesting thing about that to me is that that's an attitude and the attitude is,

00:25:01.420 are you willing to revise your beliefs? So the, the idea then, well, how do you formulate your

00:25:06.460 beliefs? My, my guess is that, well, how do you formulate beliefs on the basis of evidence?

00:25:12.140 Yeah. Right. So if you formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence and some, that must mean by

00:25:17.940 definition that some piece of evidence could come in to make you question the belief you already have,

00:25:23.120 then you'd have to revise it. Correct. Now, if you're unwilling to revise your beliefs on the

00:25:27.740 base of evidence, then you don't formulate your beliefs on the basis of evidence. You formulate

00:25:31.680 your beliefs on the basis of something else, which is fine. Then just say so. Right. Don't lie to me

00:25:36.440 and certainly don't lie to yourself. Correct. And that's the, you know, like you mentioned the God

00:25:40.900 thing again, like you can have a conversation with people when they say, you know what, you're going to

00:25:45.640 go to hell. Like, I like having conversations with these people. These are honest people. They're

00:25:49.020 honest, bro. I might disagree with them, but okay. Now we were honest. You know what I think. I know

00:25:53.400 you think now we're going to have a conversation, right? The problem is that when either people make

00:25:58.740 these unbelievable subjective moves about my truth, your truth, or the thing that I see that

00:26:04.960 is so despicable right now is that they reduce you to some characteristic that you have. You're

00:26:10.660 white, you're male, you're heterosexual, you're able bodied, you're privileged. Privilege is the

00:26:15.800 original sin. This is the new religion, right? And so situated truth. So they demean any claim

00:26:21.960 that you have about the world because of something, some characteristic you possess.

00:26:27.500 Martin Luther King would not be welcome in today's academia, I don't think.

00:26:31.920 Oh, no, no. In fact, one of the universities, I think in the University of Oregon a few years ago,

00:26:36.400 tried to problematize him. They had that bust of Martin Luther King, and I think they were doing

00:26:40.720 some renovation, so they had to do something. There's the plaque, and it has the section from

00:26:44.460 the I Have a Dream speech. And they were saying, ah, well, Martin Luther King wasn't sufficiently

00:26:48.300 inclusive to sexual minorities and trans people, so he's problematic. It's like, holy crap.

00:26:55.360 Where are we, you know?

00:27:07.380 We hold these truths to be self-evident.

00:27:10.260 What truth does this collection of 350 million people hold self-evident? Can you think of

00:27:20.640 anything?

00:27:23.560 Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech. I mean, these are things that are-

00:27:27.740 I think that still is- I think those are on the ropes.

00:27:30.300 I think they are on the ropes, but I think- Oh, I took your question to mean originally.

00:27:34.320 No, no, no. I mean today. What is it that you could say? I could wake every American up in

00:27:39.880 the middle of the night and say, hey, what do you think about? And they'd be like, what?

00:27:44.480 Of course not. Or, of course. What is the self-evident truth?

00:27:50.440 Yeah, and I don't know the answer to that. I know that that's one of the reasons for the-

00:27:54.600 That's a strong conservative message that we've kind of lost something there, and we've lost-

00:27:59.480 What we've lost in not having self-evident truth is we've lost a kind of social cohesion-

00:28:04.520 Yeah.

00:28:04.760 Which prevents us from looking at each other like people and having compassion.

00:28:09.020 The important part of that is all men are created equal. And I mean, I'm stressed created,

00:28:15.160 not just because of God, but created as that you're created equal. You don't end up equal.

00:28:20.800 Right.

00:28:20.980 You know what I mean? You got to bring something to the table.

00:28:23.720 Yeah.

00:28:23.940 And we don't have that anymore. And we don't, you know, we separated church and state for a very good

00:28:32.760 reason. But I contend we are back with church and state. The church is just academia.

00:28:39.040 I fully concur.

00:28:40.660 I've written on this extensively.

00:28:42.060 You've written extensively about this.

00:28:43.440 If I don't graduate from the right college or even go to college, I don't have a place at a table

00:28:49.740 at all. I have nothing. Yeah. I can create anything in my own life and I can do it without

00:28:55.880 the education. It means nothing. And so they're closing all those doors. And if you're not in

00:29:01.360 that group and then groups beyond that one, you're toast. We've got a papacy.

00:29:09.360 There's a bit of that going on. Yeah.

00:29:10.800 Yeah. We can speak to how to solve or address some of those problems. You know, legacy entitlements

00:29:16.480 and the college scandal thing. We have to do away with legacy entitlements. So if you

00:29:21.060 went to Stanford, like my wife went to Stanford, if you went to Stanford, your kids get more

00:29:24.940 points. That's anti-meritocratic, has to be done away with. So I think, so here's another

00:29:31.740 example. I think we're in a broad agreement on the principles, the rules of engagement,

00:29:36.380 how to have civil conversations, why we need to open up the universities, why, you know, we

00:29:41.660 haven't talked about diversity of opinion.

00:29:43.160 Wait, wait, wait, wait. When you say open up the universities, I, I think I agree with

00:29:47.760 that. I just wanted to define this. That may mean that more Asians are.

00:29:52.060 That's not what I mean. No, I mean that specifically we need diversity of opinion in the university

00:29:58.220 system. Okay.

00:29:59.240 So I actually, I'm not a Marxist. I actually think we need someone, somebody teaching Marxist

00:30:05.580 economics in a university system and I'm not a Marxist. And I think that we need a diversity

00:30:11.540 of opinion to give people and we, we give students the critical thinking, the infrastructure,

00:30:16.140 we teach them how to talk about this. And Mill spoke about this. You need someone who

00:30:20.680 actually believes this stuff. So I teach an ethics, atheism class. I teach arguments for

00:30:26.880 the existence of God, but I don't believe them. So it's, and I tell people all the time,

00:30:31.180 that's why I try to have guest lecturers come in who believe this. So Robbie George and

00:30:36.100 Cornell West, Robbie George and Cornell West all the time and their friends, right? And

00:30:41.100 they get along and they don't agree on anything. And Phil Fisher from veggie tales and myself

00:30:44.920 and other people. So when you hear diversity, which what people think normal people on the

00:30:50.640 street think, Oh, diversity, that must mean some kind of under that moniker is diversity

00:30:54.860 of opinion. That's just not true. Right. It means in the most superficial way. And so the

00:30:59.280 folks inhabiting the universities right now, they're changing the meanings of ordinary words,

00:31:04.120 equality, equity, et cetera. And they're doing it from a, from a theoretical perspective that

00:31:08.960 if, if you actually look into and come to understand where these people are coming from,

00:31:13.780 it sort of makes sense. So why would you assume that, you know, two people of different demographic

00:31:19.920 qualifications automatically have different opinions? Well, that's where we go back to the

00:31:25.760 standpoint, then epistemology is the word we can't say standpoint way of knowing things that you,

00:31:31.280 uh, that, you know, so it turns out that, um, when you believe fundamentally as these people truly

00:31:37.020 do, the people, and these people have taken over academia, the educational system that to have

00:31:43.020 lived a particular experience as a particular race, sexual orientation, et cetera, confers special

00:31:48.680 knowledge that other people can't possibly have. You automatically see that diversity of

00:31:55.100 identity implies diversity of, uh, thought, but that's the wrong kind of diversity. And I think

00:32:02.080 there was a study, didn't we just see this? There's a study just the other day that came out that showed

00:32:05.820 that diversity training, for example, isn't working. They force people to do this multi-billion

00:32:12.220 dollar industry and it's not working. It doesn't actually achieve anything. So I think because

00:32:16.660 they're focused on the wrong thing. What should they be focused on? They should be focusing on,

00:32:20.620 on differences of opinion, differences of perspective. Um, so if it's in a kind of an

00:32:27.320 extreme example, but you may, for example, have a philosophy department and they have a particular

00:32:31.920 problem that, you know, they're hashing out, bring a mathematician in. They have a completely

00:32:36.700 different way to look at it. Does it matter if the mathematicians white, black, Asian? No,

00:32:40.600 it doesn't matter. Bring a mathematician in. They have a different way of thinking about it.

00:32:44.460 Now you're looking at something in the political sphere. You're looking at immigration or you're

00:32:48.000 looking at, you know, anything guns, you're looking at any topic. You need somebody who's

00:32:53.220 representing the different perspectives. So what's the conservative perspective? What's

00:32:57.180 the libertarian perspective? What's a liberal perspective? What's a, what's a progressive

00:33:00.740 diversity? That's diversity. I'm a self-educated guy. I couldn't afford to go to college for very

00:33:06.840 long. Okay. So I went to the library and I read Alan Dershowitz and Adolf Hitler. I mean,

00:33:14.920 I would go for the, I'd look for the people who had the most diverse possible viewpoints on things

00:33:24.120 and read them and knew that if they intersect anywhere, if there's anything there, okay,

00:33:30.420 we know that one line is true because they both agree. And then you just kind of whittle yourself in.

00:33:36.560 Yeah. It's why we don't burn books and yet we're burning people and burning thoughts and,

00:33:42.800 and they're racing their legacy. So that it's a simple, yeah, a cancel culture. It's the same

00:33:46.980 as burning. What's a cancel culture? Well, if you're too problematic, you get canceled. Like

00:33:51.700 you'd cancel a TV show, but then you make sure that all of the, you know, it's not available on

00:33:55.280 Netflix anymore. You can't get the old, you know, DVDs even gone. I've called that digital

00:34:02.060 ghettoization. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, you put them behind a wall. That's today's Jews can

00:34:08.000 talk all you want behind that wall. No one's going to see you or hear you, but yeah, yeah,

00:34:12.460 sure. You're behind that wall. That's, I mean, that's what's happening. There's a lot of that.

00:34:15.720 Yeah. This is the modern book burning. That's what, this is modern book burning. When you take,

00:34:20.640 say a body of work from somebody who you've deemed problematic, and then you erase that problem,

00:34:25.360 that the body of work to where people can't access it anymore. People can't engage with it.

00:34:29.200 You de-platform them and don't let them speak. You deny them their, you know, you erase their

00:34:35.300 Patreon or something. So if they had that, so they, now they can't make money doing what they're

00:34:39.240 doing and they have to go find something else to do. It's the equivalent of book burning. So we are

00:34:43.120 there and that needs to be stopped. I don't know any other way to say it. It just needs to be stopped.

00:34:49.000 We need to have, you know, we need to welcome a diversity of opinion. You know, one of the most

00:34:54.440 interesting thoughts that crossed my mind this year is a guy I was talking to in February.

00:34:59.200 He told me he sets aside one month a year. It's usually August. I think he said, but it's

00:35:03.580 arbitrary. He sets aside one month a year to read opinions. He explicitly disagrees with.

00:35:09.240 That's all he reads. So he's a libertarian guy. So for an entire month, all he does is he digs

00:35:14.860 into the kind of either conservative or liberal or progressive or whatever thought he doesn't

00:35:19.220 agree with. And what he tries to do is tries to find, and this is the key, tries to find the most

00:35:24.940 sense he can make out of that. And then bring that back to his own worldview the next month.

00:35:29.820 Yeah. I think more of that.

00:35:30.960 I think what's key in that creates empathy.

00:35:33.580 It creates empathy.

00:35:34.320 It does.

00:35:34.640 Yeah. I think what's key in that is that that is an attitude. That's an attitude that that

00:35:39.380 guy has. And the more 52, the more I think about this stuff, the more I realized that it's all about

00:35:46.280 values. Like if people value certain things, we have to help people value diversity of opinion.

00:35:52.220 We have to help people value revising their beliefs. We have to help people value what's

00:35:57.480 true. So here's the problem. Here's the problem because you're right about that. But here's the

00:36:03.860 problem as I see it. Let me give you two examples. One, I don't think the border wall has anything

00:36:10.240 to do with Mexico. I think it has everything to do with the conservatives who have been saying,

00:36:16.060 look, we've got a problem. We have people coming across our border. We don't have any idea who

00:36:20.220 they are. We have safety issues. We have companies that are abusing these people, et cetera,

00:36:25.740 et cetera. And we got to have a secure border. We have to know our visa program. That was the

00:36:31.600 problem in the first place. We haven't done any of that stuff. And you people in Washington,

00:36:35.940 both sides keep saying you're going to do something. The reason why I think people want

00:36:40.640 the border is they don't trust Washington. It's not about Mexicans. It's about, I want a border

00:36:47.520 and I want a wall because you're going to tell me one thing while you're trying to get elected.

00:36:52.640 And then you're going to do the exact opposite. You can't tear down the wall. I don't trust you

00:36:57.080 anymore. It is a clear, tangible symbol. Correct. Now let me give you the next example.

00:37:01.640 Um, trans hysteria, uh, the female penis. You wrote a paper about that. I know you did. Okay.

00:37:09.760 So you throw all this crap at people. I mean, when did we all of a sudden where we expected to know

00:37:16.820 what a cisgender male was all of a sudden it just appeared one day and everybody was like, well,

00:37:23.160 you don't know what a cisgendered male is. And like, no, I I've lived 48 years and I've never heard that

00:37:28.440 before. Where did it come from? People are printing up words. 2014. And I'm not joking this time. I think

00:37:34.200 I know. So Donald Trump would not be president if people hadn't in academia and people in power

00:37:45.060 hadn't all of a sudden saying, well, you're a cisgendered male. And so you don't, and nobody,

00:37:51.280 nobody could stand up to that's a bunch of crap. I keep trying to find things to disagree with you.

00:37:57.300 Yeah. And I failing. That's a hundred percent. That is absolutely true. We wrote a thing about that,

00:38:03.040 like almost a year before the election. Uh, Peter and I together wrote a thing saying,

00:38:08.300 yeah, for Quillette saying that, um, basically that kind of the exact point that the left is

00:38:13.860 driving people nuts. And they don't see it. And I, I'm utterly baffled by why they don't see it.

00:38:21.080 And they'll say to me, people like, well, don't you realize the bigger threat is in the white house?

00:38:25.240 And I'm like, can I swear on your show? Yes. Go ahead. Do you think put in there?

00:38:29.960 The far left, put in there. Yeah. People call us tools for the right. And I'm like,

00:38:34.180 you want to talk about a tool for the right? An article in the Washington post that says,

00:38:38.700 why can't we hate men? What better tool could you give the right than that? Yes. I mean,

00:38:44.060 come on. We're not the tools for the right. All this reparations talk and everything.

00:38:48.060 The whole thing is, Oh my God, just hand it over. And you know, just give them the election.

00:38:51.520 And, uh, who is, uh, the, the guy, I can't even remember his name. He's the mayor, uh, uh, of,

00:38:58.960 of like some small town in Indiana. Uh, he's running for president. He, Buttigieg. Yeah. Yeah.

00:39:05.820 Okay. So here's a guy who's gay, who says, I don't have a problem with Chick-fil-A. Right. Thank you.

00:39:13.040 Yeah. Oh my gosh. Thank you. Now this guy might be the most radical Marxist ever,

00:39:17.440 but there, I know conservatives who are like, Oh, I could talk to that guy all day. Right.

00:39:24.340 Now that will work against him, but it's just because he's normal. Right. He's not getting up

00:39:32.180 every day going, who can I destroy? Or who am I pissed about? Outrage culture. Right. Virtue signaling.

00:39:39.480 Correct. Yeah. And I think that guy, and there's another one that is also really a Chang or yeah,

00:39:45.740 yeah, yeah, yeah. Yang. Yang. Right. Andrew Yang. Yeah. Andrew. Yeah. Who also, you can,

00:39:50.540 you can listen to and go, I don't agree with, with universal basic income. However,

00:39:55.340 he's being eviscerated by the far left, by the way. Correct. Right. And, and you listen to,

00:40:00.380 I mean, I've been saying this to my audience for years. You don't know what the future is bringing

00:40:05.240 in the next 10 years. Right. We got, we have to talk. We can't just go, I'm against universal income.

00:40:11.320 Right. Wait. Well, do you know all the problems that are coming down the road? Right. This guy

00:40:17.320 is articulating, talking about problems, has intelligence behind it. He's not eviscerating

00:40:23.380 people. Okay. So I think those two guys could win. I think we need to have a conversation about that.

00:40:28.560 So I think, well, about what do you criticize? Like there are so many things to criticize about Trump,

00:40:36.140 but how he likes his steak is not one of them. Right. I mean, we have a failure to understand,

00:40:44.620 and it doesn't even, I would go so far as say, it doesn't even matter what somebody thinks.

00:40:48.380 It's totally irrelevant. All that matters is what they, what are they going to do? And when we

00:40:52.800 find we, so this whole Biden, they're trying to paint him as some creepy dude or whatever.

00:40:58.280 Doesn't matter. And nobody's made a charge. That is a total distraction. Yes. It is a distraction

00:41:03.780 from what we need to be taught. What is he going to do? What are his policy positions? Does he have

00:41:09.540 sufficient evidence for those? Let's take a look at those. Anything else? We're not doing the

00:41:14.680 republic justice. We are, we are cakes and circuses right now. Totally. Absolutely. Cakes and circuses.

00:41:22.540 There's there. And this is what really concerns me. And I, I'd like to talk to you guys about,

00:41:27.780 I don't know the deep thinkers. I don't know who's out there. I don't know who even in Silicon Valley

00:41:34.160 who's, we are just taking a cell phone and then putting our thumbprint on it where we all said,

00:41:41.040 I'm not giving anybody my thumbprint. How dare you have my thumbprint? Now I remember 20 years ago,

00:41:46.500 we're like facial, facial recognition technology in the hands of the government. That's not good.

00:41:51.060 Okay. But it'll open my phone. It'll open my phone. Yeah. We're in a surveillance capitalist

00:41:57.620 system that with people who are in bed with fricking China. Right. And we're talking about

00:42:04.140 Joe Biden. Right. And creepy pictures. Right. Who are the deep thinkers? And what are the questions we

00:42:10.300 should be asking ourselves? Cause it's coming whether we like it or not, it's coming. Yeah. Problems are

00:42:17.480 coming. Yeah. But, but the technologies, like, yeah, let me ask you this. My theory is the

00:42:24.120 industrial revolution, 150 years, that kind of change is coming in the next 10. Oh, totally.

00:42:29.680 That's Kurzweil's idea. Totally. Yeah. It's based upon the, uh, Moore's law. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

00:42:36.780 That technology, the, the, the world in the next 50 years will be more different than the world in

00:42:43.460 the last hundred. Like it's, it's the changes coming at exponential paces. And the problem is

00:42:48.160 that we don't have a moral infrastructure to deal with that. Like abortion would be a great example

00:42:51.820 of that. How the, um, what are those amniocentesis and to detect certain. So we're changing our

00:43:00.600 technology, but our moral infrastructure hasn't been brought up. So now this is probably my own

00:43:05.620 hobby horse, but that's why we need to have the conversation, right? Yes. If you do not have

00:43:10.280 conversations about these things, we know for a fact, the problem will not solve itself.

00:43:15.180 So we need to talk about this, the surveillance state, we need to talk about this. And I would

00:43:19.820 argue that the place that we need to talk about this is the universities, but I've utterly given

00:43:24.240 up on that. I know like, maybe this is where our, I disagree. I think it needs to happen in the public

00:43:30.300 square. Everywhere. But, but, but the problem is when people go to college, they need to see those

00:43:35.700 behaviors modeled for them. Like this is what civil, so I, you know, it needs to return to what

00:43:41.340 it's supposed to be. And I'll give a talk and I'll have an associate professor stand up and start

00:43:46.180 screaming at me with, I was with Brett, uh, Brett and Heather and Christina Hoff Summers. And they'll,

00:43:51.320 she stands up and she starts screaming at us in the middle of the talk. I mean, that's the thing is

00:43:56.040 that they're actually teaching to focus on cakes and circuses. They're teaching to focus on, and

00:43:59.820 they're, and then, so this is the key thing too, that's so, this is an important deliverable.

00:44:04.900 When you ask them, why do you do that? They'll point to the literature that they have made up

00:44:10.880 in the first place. The whole thing is bullshit. And they'll say, well, it's Judith, Judith Butler's

00:44:16.180 disruption, performative disruption, disruption. We need to disrupt this.

00:44:19.740 The key difference. We asked you, you said, you know, or you actually just said, why do you believe

00:44:23.960 in God? It's faith. Okay. So you, however you want to take that, you admit there's this,

00:44:28.540 there's no way to measure it. Yeah. Yeah. They, on the other hand, how do you know this? Well,

00:44:33.560 here's 50 years of scholarly literature that he has, we cooked up. Correct. I know how to cook it

00:44:38.500 up. It's like, I'm good at cooking it up. There's a very famous painting of, I can't remember which

00:44:44.480 battle it is in the revolutionary war. And there is full of white guys, full of white guys. There's

00:44:49.120 one black guy in it. Oh, uh, and he was the hero of that battle. Okay. And he's standing behind

00:44:56.000 another guy and he's kind of holding him like this. And the, the, the painter who painted it

00:45:02.600 at the time said, this is who this was. He was the hero, blah, blah, blah. Now paper after paper

00:45:09.760 after paper has come out. And all of a sudden he's the slave of that guy who was holding the horse and

00:45:16.520 was shown cowering behind the white guy. No, that's not what the artist said. And the brilliance that

00:45:22.920 these folks, the brilliance that these folks have done, it's postmodernism, right? Is,

00:45:27.980 is what our friend Brett Weinstein calls ideal laundering. So they have this idea, like they

00:45:32.420 have this moral urge and they don't know how to discharge the surge. They don't know what

00:45:37.360 to do. So they get a bunch of other people who have this urge together, who have some kind

00:45:42.080 of deep moral feeling about something and they write a journal or they publish a journal

00:45:46.100 and then they idea launder. They start publishing their, their, I think they're insane ideas,

00:45:52.080 but they start publishing these ideas in journals. And then those journals inform public policy.

00:45:56.920 So when someone says, how do you know the trigger warnings? How do you know safe spaces? How do you

00:46:00.060 know microaggressions? Well, they point to the journal article.

00:46:02.580 It's the same thing.

00:46:03.160 Do you know that observing or training men like you train dogs will prevent rape culture?

00:46:06.880 Well, you push it through a journal. Now it's, now it's knowledge.

00:46:10.240 Now it's knowledge.

00:46:10.580 Yeah. You have, you have the same thing. This is how they distorted history. We have,

00:46:15.060 for instance, George Washington, all of the stories written by the guys at the time in that knew him

00:46:21.220 were next to him. Right. Those have all been erased and new professors come in with new studies.

00:46:27.260 It's their opinion. And they start quoting the next book quotes that guy and the next book quotes

00:46:32.340 the two guys. And then all of a sudden it's done. And what you're probably looking at there is coming

00:46:37.360 out of what they call critical race theory and critical race theory is openly historically

00:46:41.180 revisionist. What's it supposed to do? It's supposed to show that the white power has always

00:46:46.340 been trying to maintain itself. So somehow, no matter what happened, like the civil rights

00:46:50.880 successes, for example, that was white people trying to make themselves look good by giving

00:46:55.980 black people rights. That's it was a means for white supremacy to maintain itself. So they rewrite

00:47:00.740 history in a sense that always serves the narrative that they're trying to spin. And then if it gets

00:47:05.980 any legs behind it, once it gets published and they teach your knowledge, this and then they

00:47:09.760 assign their papers. Go ahead. So how do we, two things, how do we solve this? You're in trouble

00:47:16.340 with your university. So I'd like to talk about that. And then second, I'm raising two teenagers

00:47:22.960 now. My first two, uh, went, went to university. Um, my next two, I, I, I, I'm not comfortable with

00:47:32.680 that. I mean, you want to, if you knew it actually went on in the university, you'd really not be

00:47:37.520 comfortable with that. Right. Yeah. But you know, my wife keeps saying if they don't have the

00:47:42.860 certificate, she's right. I mean, we're kind of in this, this crunch period where I don't know what

00:47:49.000 to do. So let's first address, how do you change it when you guys were, were exposing academia for

00:47:57.660 what it was and you get in trouble because you didn't alert academia that you were trying to

00:48:02.600 expose academia. Right. Right. So the question is, how do we, we, we change it? If you want to

00:48:07.880 change academia, uh, I mean, I think we've got a plan actually, and not to tout too much, but of

00:48:14.300 course people know, a lot of people know that there's a documentary film being made about the

00:48:18.400 work we did should come out early next year or late this year. Mike Naina's N-A-Y-N-A, he has a

00:48:23.980 YouTube channel in which he shows, he documents this. So we're, the film is a thing of course,

00:48:29.480 but aside from that, we're working with Mike now to start going in a new direction. And we think

00:48:36.420 that there's, there's three dimensions to what we need to do to fix this. First, we need to continue

00:48:41.560 to expose the problem, let people see it. I mean, in a sense, I feel like we've already detonated a

00:48:47.180 bomb under the dam and the cracks are there. It just hasn't broken yet.

00:48:53.980 I have tried to get people like you to sit at this table for a very long time.

00:49:05.860 No, it's not easy. It's not easy. Even the guys who I am, I'm cheering for, I'm vocally

00:49:13.420 cheering for, and I'm taking bullets. They won't sit down and do it. So who has, do you have the

00:49:21.980 volume of people that have the courage to break through and say, I don't care who I sit with?

00:49:29.260 It's coming. Okay. I have faith. It's coming. All right, good. I don't have the evidence.

00:49:33.220 Actually, I kind of do. I get a lot of emails of, shh, don't tell anybody, but I fully agree

00:49:37.720 with you. I think the wind is changing. At the same time, the other side is gaining strength.

00:49:44.720 I mean, when Zuckerberg says, you know what? We invite the government in to kind of help.

00:49:50.120 Oh, dear God, help us. That's not good. No, no. So hurry. Continue to expose. Second thing

00:49:58.880 is that we, and this is where our expertise has landed us because we immersed ourselves

00:50:04.420 in this. We explain exactly what we're kind of doing here. How did this happen? How did

00:50:08.120 we get here? And we just keep disseminating that message. And why does it matter? Why

00:50:12.100 does it matter? And then the third thing is we start to articulate a different vision.

00:50:16.300 Right. And so I get asked this question a lot, and I should be doing a show with somebody

00:50:21.780 soon about this, I think, a podcast. And I get this question all the time. I'm a liberal.

00:50:26.940 I care about social justice issues. I'm worried about racism, et cetera. But I think the social

00:50:32.060 justice warriors, as they're called, are nuts. What do I do? We start answering those questions.

00:50:37.280 We start articulating what the founders of the U.S. articulated in the first place about

00:50:43.120 liberalism. We go back to the liberal foundations. Are you a conservative? Okay. But are you also

00:50:48.520 a liberal in the sense of- No, I'm a classic liberal.

00:50:50.420 That's what I mean. I'm a classic liberal.

00:50:52.020 Are you, do you subscribe to the, as Pete called them, the rules of engagement? Okay. Let's

00:50:57.120 rearticulate those and let's talk about why they matter, what they mean, what they do.

00:51:01.140 So you have to, to be able to do that, you have to reverse what Roosevelt did to us by taking

00:51:08.000 liberal and changing the meaning of it. And blending it with progressive, yeah.

00:51:12.940 Right. I, you're a conservative, so they put you on this European left and right scale. No,

00:51:18.380 what made America different is we said no to that scale. Yeah, exactly. We're on a different scale.

00:51:24.820 We are on this freedom scale. And that is not even considered. So when-

00:51:30.400 Different axis, that's right.

00:51:31.820 It is. Like I'm a conservative. I'm a constitutionalist. I, I would love to live next door to you and we

00:51:38.160 would be best friends. And on Sundays, I'm, I might meet you for a barbecue after I go to church and

00:51:44.320 you don't go to church and we're going to be fine. That's, that's real liberalism.

00:51:49.180 I'm a liberal atheist in the South. That's like all my friends.

00:51:53.800 Right. It's true. Right. So totally.

00:51:56.480 And we've lost that.

00:51:57.500 We're losing it. And if you, and I'm, I'm not even concerned anymore. I'm actually worried at

00:52:03.020 this point.

00:52:05.540 It's, it's, it's really interesting because I spend a lot of time with conservatives because I live in

00:52:10.140 the South. A lot of my friends are, are conservatives and libertarian conservatives, classical liberals

00:52:14.020 at heart with conservative views. And I am actually encouraged by what I'm seeing there.

00:52:20.900 Again and again, I hear the same thing and I don't know what the reasons are. Maybe it's just

00:52:24.320 cause Trump's in power and all of this. But I do know that I keep hearing again and again,

00:52:29.300 I'm tired of all the fighting. I'm tired of it being, you know, daggers against daggers. I'm

00:52:35.180 tired of it being that I can't be your friend because our politics differ. Let's go back to

00:52:39.600 what Jefferson said, where matters of religion, politics, and philosophy don't separate friends.

00:52:44.600 Right.

00:52:44.780 And I hear this so consistently from conservatives that I do have hope that there is at least a

00:52:49.880 sea change going on. There is. I do think that because I did not experience that living as a

00:52:54.840 liberal in the South for the last decade. This is new to see this as the main voice that I'm hearing.

00:53:00.900 There's a hunger to have a converse, an adult conversation with people who has a different

00:53:05.380 view without being called a racist or a bigot or a homophobe.

00:53:08.840 Because what I see is people reaching across the table with an open hand.

00:53:11.440 Right.

00:53:11.820 And some people on the other side are going to slap it, but other people are going to take it.

00:53:15.080 And the more people who take that hand, whether it's a liberal reaching to a conservative or

00:53:19.340 there's a conservative reaching to a liberal, the more people who take that hand, the faster

00:53:22.840 this problem gets.

00:53:23.500 And you probably find you have far more in common. One has far more in common if they're

00:53:27.360 conservative with a liberal. And part of the reason is, I think, I was telling Jim, I think

00:53:33.420 last night at dinner, it's really weird. Like, here we are, two liberal atheists. We're on your

00:53:37.740 show. We're hanging out. I'm having a good time. Your staff was fantastic to me. It's really

00:53:42.440 interesting. It was, it's almost like that there have been, there were two tribes that

00:53:46.840 were at war with each other for millennia.

00:53:49.260 Do you remember how we felt after the fall of the Soviet Union?

00:53:53.260 I remember that.

00:53:53.900 Remember? And we all went, these people are just like us.

00:53:56.740 I thought they were behind the wall plotting our death.

00:53:59.840 And they thought the same thing about us. And all of a sudden it was like, oh, it was

00:54:04.440 the leadership. You know, the leadership on both sides making us feel like you were this

00:54:11.240 great enemy. No, no, no. It was the systems warring and we were pawns.

00:54:16.300 Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. I'll finish the thought. So we're sitting, we have fundamentally

00:54:25.040 different views about things. You're not calling the university, telling them I beat my family,

00:54:31.940 which is what people do to me. You're not calling the university, telling them that I'm

00:54:35.380 a rapist, which is what people do to me. You're not, you know, when, when Jerry Coyne or Dawkins

00:54:40.260 or whoever, they had a difference of opinion with creationists about age of the earth or

00:54:45.120 whatever, speciation, whatever it was. There were certain, they didn't call, Bruce Gilley

00:54:49.840 from my university wrote a piece called The Case for Colonialism. They wanted his PhD.

00:54:54.660 The journal editors had to retract it because he had death, a death sentence, a death.

00:54:59.220 Yeah. The journal editor got.

00:55:01.200 The journal editor. They wanted to take his PhD from Princeton. So think about this.

00:55:05.900 I was, so you're sitting there, I'm sitting there. There was an intense tribalism up until

00:55:11.940 about three years ago. And then all of a sudden the aliens came down. The crazy, crazy aliens

00:55:18.640 came down, the intersectional maniacos on the left. And they're just randomly torturing everybody.

00:55:23.820 They're imprisoning people. They're not engaging in the rules of engagement. They're not sitting,

00:55:28.920 they don't value civility. They don't value discourse. They don't value dialogue. I don't know.

00:55:33.740 They're out. It is. It's scaring my tribe. It is scaring my tribe. I mean, my listeners have been

00:55:43.300 with me for a very long time, you know, a lot of them since 9-11 and, and we've gone through an

00:55:49.400 awful lot of stuff and we've thought things and we're wrong on things. We were right on some things,

00:55:53.580 but we've seen this coming for a long time. And it wasn't Obama. If, I mean, if, when I was on Fox,

00:56:00.420 I was like, it's Democrats. Right. Please don't do this because the pendulum is going to swing

00:56:07.520 just as hard. And now we have people throwing that pendulum the other way. The next guy,

00:56:13.180 I'm worried about the next guy. So, right. So we've kind of been through this, but I'm having,

00:56:19.700 for the very first time, people come up to me and say, Glenn, I am terrified because this is happening.

00:56:29.080 It's like you said, aliens. I said it, Fox, at some point there, they want to tell you they're

00:56:35.580 Marxist. They want to tell you you're wrong. And they, at some point we'll take the masks off and

00:56:41.820 say, yeah, I do believe I should be in charge. And we've got this. I think what's, what's happening.

00:56:49.020 Some of these people, it's like a culture of death. It just is not anything. The average American

00:56:56.220 recognized. It's the absolute denigration of truth. How are we going to solve our problems?

00:57:00.620 So the one, one thing that you, one commonality among these extremists is biology denialism.

00:57:06.240 All right. I totally believe in trans rights, a hundred percent, but that doesn't mean that I need

00:57:10.840 to deny biology. That doesn't mean that I need to make up my own canon of literature and basically

00:57:17.720 make stuff up. And say that everybody who disagrees is morally defunct. And people are good. I can't

00:57:24.040 speak for other people around the world, but I think we're all the same. I'm worried

00:57:27.760 about good. How are we?

00:57:29.220 There are very few evil people.

00:57:30.600 Yeah.

00:57:31.200 Core maxim of light.

00:57:32.300 Right. And I don't know of a person who says, oh, we're in a dress. I think they should

00:57:37.600 be executed.

00:57:38.440 Right.

00:57:38.780 Nobody wants that.

00:57:39.900 Nobody wants that.

00:57:41.000 No, we can all live next to each other.

00:57:43.980 Yeah. And just as an asides, parenthetically, these people are utterly obsessed with other

00:57:49.660 people's sex lives, utterly obsessed. That's why our paper about sex toys going in the butt

00:57:54.280 to change people's political views. Thank you for that. Was a shoe in. He at least asked

00:57:59.720 and I swear sex toys in the butt. Why not? Just throw it out.

00:58:03.540 Let's not swearing. Remediate your transphobia. That's right. Tell me, tell me the difference

00:58:13.100 between postmodernism, you know, Marxism, socialism. Well, this is a great time to have

00:58:22.400 Helen. I was going to say, this is Helen. So socialism, as far as I understand, is an

00:58:26.240 economic system that was born out of Marxist philosophy. So socialism is ultimately an economic

00:58:31.060 policy where the means of production are owned by the government, ultimately, as contrasted

00:58:39.320 with communism, where it should be ideally owned by everybody equally. Right. By the

00:58:44.400 people, the commune. Right. Right. But somebody has to manage the commune. Correct.

00:58:48.440 So stuff breaks down. Marxism is a philosophy that was ultimately looking at the winners

00:58:55.060 and losers of capitalist society and saying that the fact that it generates winners and

00:58:58.420 losers, in particular losers, is not fair. And therefore, it needs to be overthrown.

00:59:03.960 And I mean, in its kind of simplest brass tacks, that's really what Marx was getting at. And

00:59:10.080 that it was unstable and will eventually stimulate its own revolution, is what he was pointing

00:59:14.860 at. What you have with postmodernism is something completely different. Postmodernism, in the general

00:59:21.320 sense, was a rejection that these grand sweeping explanations like Marxism, like science, like

00:59:28.960 Christianity. There's no gods out of you. Any such big story could tell the truth. And in fact, this

00:59:37.120 got more and more what they call deconstructive. Take apart the big story. See where it fails. See

00:59:41.820 where it's problematic, where it doesn't work. Take it apart. Break it down until there's nothing

00:59:46.580 left. And also then use it and put a new set of... That came later. Okay, that came later.

00:59:53.640 That came later. And so postmodernism, in its first place, was just this skepticism that these

00:59:58.360 big stories we told ourselves through the modern era and the pre-modern era, which would be

01:00:02.440 religion, you know, kind of the middle ages. Grand narratives. Yeah, these grand narratives.

01:00:06.160 We should just be totally, and they say skeptical, but cynically skeptical of them to the point

01:00:11.320 where we just break them down entirely. Then in the 80s and 90s, people who were steeped in

01:00:16.340 postmodern scholarship started to realize you can't really achieve anything if all you're doing

01:00:21.920 is breaking it down. Helen calls that period the high deconstructive phase. And then in the late

01:00:26.960 80s going into the 90s, something new happened. We now call that applied postmodernism or even

01:00:32.160 grievance studies. And those are kind of synonyms that we've used. Grievance studies sticks better.

01:00:37.800 People kind of get a feel for it. So applied postmodernism took the view that we can't

01:00:43.580 deconstruct the idea of truth and be purely subjective because if we say that nothing is

01:00:48.920 true, we can't do anything. So they decided that two things, precisely two things are true.

01:00:53.940 And one of those things is that there is oppression that's based on power dynamics

01:00:59.040 rooted in society. And the other is that that is tied to intrinsically tied to identity. So your

01:01:06.100 identity, not like Marx now wears, you know, bourgeoisie versus the proletariat, rich versus

01:01:12.140 poor, if you will, or owners versus workers. Now it's people with privilege have the power and the

01:01:19.460 privilege that run society and everybody else is a loser. And so you see this parallel that came up

01:01:25.540 in the 80s and 90s with what we've called applied postmodernism, that language and identity and

01:01:32.720 representation all modulates what we can know about society. But the one fundamental thing that's true

01:01:38.440 is that oppression based on identity exists and is a problem and must be overthrown very much in line

01:01:45.480 with the same kind of thinking that Marx was doing. And of course, these thinkers were informed by

01:01:50.400 Marxism. But being that they're also informed by postmodernism, they're very skeptical of Marxism. And as we've

01:01:55.440 had many Marxists reach out to us and thinking we're great. I think it's been confirmed that Marxism, Marxism

01:02:01.240 actually sees this social justice stuff as an attempt by the bourgeois left to steal the working or steal the

01:02:09.340 still the left away from the working class and create a new elite and a new bourgeoisie that that's

01:02:14.140 separate. So it'd be better to say a Leninist as opposed to a Marxist is a more of a danger to free

01:02:24.340 freedom, free thought. I don't know. I don't know that much about it to speak to it. Yeah, not sure

01:02:30.280 exactly what the specifics on that. Yeah, that's when you Helen is our expert on that. We each have our

01:02:35.000 expert. Ultimately, the most important thing here is that you do have this idea that certain people

01:02:41.100 are oppressed. And by virtue of their oppression, they have special knowledge, right? And they also

01:02:46.540 have a right to try to overthrow whatever is oppressing them. So meanwhile, the people who have

01:02:52.900 power and privilege, and this is key, this is the most key point, always, whether intentionally or not,

01:02:59.340 always work to maintain their power and privilege, everything they do. Preserving epistemic pushback is

01:03:04.860 one of the things it's called what our founders knew. That's why they created all the systems that

01:03:10.960 they did that are now being either ignored or dismantled to yeah, to minimize the impact of that. And so

01:03:17.840 that's the difference between equality and equity. I get all these emails from the Portland public schools

01:03:23.600 where they always use the word equity. Have you heard the word equity is thrown around and not just in

01:03:28.100 everywhere in the realm of finance. And it doesn't mean what you think it means. Well, I don't know. Maybe you

01:03:32.680 know what it means, but, but people, they, they make terms, they either smuggle in to change the

01:03:39.620 meaning of words like racism, or they, they smuggle in new words that have other meanings. And when,

01:03:45.620 if you just ask someone on the street, well, you know, do you want to be equitable to people?

01:03:49.260 Well, sure. It sounds pretty good to me. Equitable is a positive word. I want to be,

01:03:53.200 who doesn't want to be equitable? Who doesn't want diversity? I don't want equity. But the problem is that it,

01:03:57.580 that it means that you have to address past injustices. And by definition, that can't be

01:04:04.960 equal. Yeah. Equity means adjusting shares. It's equality of outcome, including as, as a

01:04:12.040 mathematician, I would say, integrated over history. So that's why if you say, they say, oh, this, you

01:04:17.540 know, women don't have it fair. And then you point out some statistic where it's like, oh, well, women

01:04:22.200 actually have 70% representation there. They're actually dominant in, in, in that sense. Now

01:04:26.320 demographically, they'll say, oh, but historically they weren't. Right. So equity means make up that

01:04:31.960 injustice, right? Yeah. So it's, it's adjusting shares in order to make things equal. So this is one

01:04:39.500 of the big, um, blocks in our way. Right. Because I, I really, in Abraham Lincoln, um, great guy,

01:04:51.680 halfway through we're losing every battle. And he's like, okay, what do I do? And he called the

01:05:00.180 country to a day of humiliation, you know, Hey, let's recognize what we've done here. And, and he,

01:05:08.780 at that point said, this is about slavery. It's not about the union. It is about slavery. And if we

01:05:15.540 need to heap all of the treasure up and we lose it all, we lose it all. But this is right.

01:05:21.060 And that's when we started to win the war, uh, for the North. Um, he shot right after,

01:05:29.880 you know, we win the war and he shot right after he says charity toward all malice toward none. Uh,

01:05:39.840 we have the same thing happen. It just festers. Then gets worse again. We have Martin Luther King

01:05:46.300 shot Malcolm X shot RFK shot. And the response both times from Americans was the same. We took

01:05:56.020 care of that. We spent enough blood. We took care of that. Okay. We, we freed the slaves,

01:06:00.860 so we don't need to deal with it. The next time we, we, we, we went through the sixties and those guys

01:06:06.480 were shot and we have the civil rights movement. So we never sat down and just bled, you know what I

01:06:12.820 mean? And that's a very human thing. We have to bleed as a nation, but nobody's willing to bleed

01:06:19.200 because you're going to take stuff. You're going to now make me pay for things I didn't do.

01:06:27.380 So we stopped talking to each other because we have all these roadblocks where we have to talk to

01:06:35.480 each other. We have to. So how do we get there? Yeah. I was thinking about what you said. If you wake up

01:06:41.740 Americans, you know, in the middle of the night, what would they say? And I was thinking when you

01:06:46.860 were telling that story of a few things about how important it is to be across from a sincere,

01:06:53.620 earnest person and how, how much of a difference that makes in the quality of dialogue and honest

01:07:01.700 questioning over blindfolded fear and social reward for people who change their mind, social reward,

01:07:11.300 wow, he changed. He said he didn't know. Wow. Fantastic. We laud that. We don't go on social

01:07:16.520 media and call the guy a moron for the next 10 months and meme him out. How do we get back to

01:07:22.820 the idea that we should have, we, that, that we need spaces where we broker honest conversation

01:07:30.860 among people who have substantive disagreements and why do we need to do that? And what are our

01:07:35.640 common values? I think the thing we got to do is drop blame. Blame's cheap. Blame is easy.

01:07:41.160 You guys, you conservatives, you dah, dah, dah, you know, whatever. It's easy. I don't care.

01:07:45.860 The thing is I care. We got power that we look at it and say, you know, it's like,

01:07:50.300 you don't make a decision when an event is happening. That's the worst time to make a

01:07:59.460 decision. Took my kids to Auschwitz. I believe, you know, what I say is coming. And I know that

01:08:05.660 there is, there is persecution of somebody that is very possible. Six years, seven years ago,

01:08:11.820 I took my kids to Auschwitz and I said, this is the day we decide who we are. There's no problems.

01:08:17.160 Totally. Today is the day we decide who we are. And I get hammered for bringing up the seeds.

01:08:24.280 These were the seeds that the national socialists were planting. These were the seeds that were

01:08:28.740 planted 30 years before Hitler. Who hammered you? People, who hammered you? The left and Jewish,

01:08:36.720 Jewish organizations, very left Jewish organizations. And they hammered you because why? You're bringing

01:08:41.980 up Nazism. How dare you bring up Nazism? And my, my point was, what does never forget mean if you

01:08:49.780 can't talk about, I'm not saying you're a Nazi. I'm saying this kind of thinking is planting the seed

01:08:56.880 and in the wrong soil, that seed will grow. You know what I mean? So you, you, you get the wrong.

01:09:06.700 So I'll, I'll, I'll throw something out. What do you think about this? Do you think that extending

01:09:11.880 that metaphor onward, the wrong soil means not being able to talk about our problems? Yeah.

01:09:18.920 So I, and, and, and, um, uh, uh, enmity. Yeah. Yeah. Hatred. Hatred. Hatred. You are my enemy and

01:09:29.020 I'm going to win. Right. That soil. Yeah. You start planting certain seeds in there at your growing

01:09:35.640 blame. I'll throw it. Blame. Yeah. Blame. These people did this to us. Correct. These people are

01:09:41.120 doing this. And it was a Jews that did this. It was those bankers that did this. Now you can,

01:09:45.960 you round up, you round up anybody you want. Yep. I'll throw out something, something to you

01:09:50.780 that I, I think this is right. I'm not sure, but I think that I, I think part of the problem

01:09:56.780 was we're so polarized. I don't think debates are doing us any good. I remember years ago,

01:10:02.480 I saw John Stewart and crossfire and I didn't get what he was talking about, but I think slowly

01:10:06.800 over time, I, I, I think we need to move towards the conversational model. Everybody is so interested

01:10:12.400 in winning, but what are you winning? Yeah. How do you win a conversation?

01:10:15.640 Yeah. No, no. When you, you think you're winning, but you're actually losing, right?

01:10:20.840 It's honestly, this is honestly why I started here with nothing in this giant room, no, nothing,

01:10:28.060 just a table and a conversation. And I want to have thinking conversations where somebody

01:10:33.740 goes, no, I don't know if that's quite right. I mean, you know what I mean? Where you're allowed

01:10:39.400 to think you're allowed to say something maybe that you haven't really formulated entirely

01:10:45.620 where you're being a little risky. Yeah. The, the, the thing is, is that, um,

01:10:50.820 and that's an attitude, right? Yeah. That's an attitude. And how do we get people to, how do

01:10:56.280 we get people to adopt that attitude? I don't know if you'd market it as cool or I don't know

01:11:00.480 how you do it. It is marketed as cool. We all saw merchants of cool and how MTV manufactured

01:11:05.380 a whole, uh, generation of, uh, cool kids.

01:11:08.160 So I remember reading Das Kapital and thinking, and I'm sorry, I'm not the brains you guys are,

01:11:15.800 but I read that and I went, that's nuts. I just don't, I can't make heads or tails. Most

01:11:21.100 of that. Um, and I thought, yeah, this is cool, but Jefferson is not. Why? Yeah. Because it

01:11:32.040 was underground. Yeah. And I, I remember thinking 20 years ago, someday Jefferson's going to be

01:11:38.780 underground and it will just become cool because it's the forbidden thought. That was 2015.

01:11:46.620 Since I'm tracking dates for us and kind of making them up as I go. It's true though. I mean,

01:11:51.640 they started tearing down statues of him. So it was around 2015. Jefferson's gone underground.

01:11:56.800 Everybody should go read some biographies and read some of his letters. They're good.

01:12:00.220 They're really good. They're really good.

01:12:21.480 Let me, let me go to the future. Facebook, Google,

01:12:28.800 they terrify me because I know China 2025 and China 2020. They terrify you. Why?

01:12:36.500 They terrify me. They both excite me and terrify me. I am both. I think the future

01:12:43.460 is the brightest or the darkest of all mankind. And we're just, Hey, let's go. We're not thinking

01:12:51.940 this through yet between AI, AGI, ASI. Um, yeah, we wrote a paper about that too. I love you guys.

01:13:01.200 We said that if, um, we were to, uh, keep on the path we are, we're making AI, AGI in particular into

01:13:09.020 a masculine force. And that's why it'll destroy the world. And the solution to that is to make it

01:13:14.000 an irrational feminist. And that will solve all of our problems. And they, it was just, we got busted by

01:13:19.380 the wall street journal before the paper came up, but it was a shoe in. It was a shoe in. They gave

01:13:23.100 us no editorial remarks on it. They thought it was a great idea. Not to interrupt. Okay. Anyway,

01:13:29.720 but go ahead. So, um, uh, we are, we are playing with things that people may not even hear, but

01:13:38.800 around the world are just like, they want to be first and they're willing to play with things that

01:13:45.300 is an alien life force. Oh yeah. Just thinking that fakes, uh, facial recognition that, and that

01:13:51.380 is all of that's in tracking. Yeah. With, with social scores, 20, we're doing social scores right

01:13:57.540 now. We're doing them here. You know what I mean? In a, just in a different, different way,

01:14:02.100 but we're doing the same thing. They were brave new world. They're 1984. And that's a good way to put

01:14:08.420 it. And no one is thinking this way. We have politicians who are acting like it's 1955.

01:14:17.020 I mean, I talked to them about AI and they're like, well, we should, maybe we should look at

01:14:22.100 some laws. Are you kidding me? By the time you guys do anything, it's way beyond that. Um, so

01:14:29.000 they're acting like it's 1955 and they're talking about, we're going to bring jobs back. No, you're

01:14:33.620 not. No, you're not because you're trying to get the unemployment rate to zero and Silicon Valley

01:14:40.400 is trying to get it to 100%. One of you guys is going to win and I don't think it's you.

01:14:46.400 So at some point, Washington realizes they either have to turn on Silicon Valley and blame all this

01:14:54.160 job against those evil guys with the Frankenstein kind of stuff or, or Silicon Valley, which I would

01:15:02.580 count on is smart enough to say, if we get in bed with them, we can partner because then they can

01:15:11.020 control people. We'll have control of markets, et cetera, et cetera. It is a nightmare waiting to

01:15:19.320 happen. So what are you proposing? Oh, I'm not necessarily proposing anything. I don't know if

01:15:24.560 I'm smart enough. Um, it's a problem out of, out of many people's depth. Yeah. I mean, I don't,

01:15:31.200 I am a libertarian. I don't like the idea of, of, uh, breaking up country companies. I, I've, I'm very

01:15:40.540 much into AGI and ASI and I feel like we need a Manhattan project, but I don't trust it with the

01:15:48.240 government and I don't trust it with Google. I don't trust it with really anybody. Um, and if,

01:15:54.020 if you, I think DARPA has the right idea if this is what they're really doing, which is let's be

01:16:01.320 second, but let's take our time to get, uh, you know, AGI that likes man. You know, now I don't

01:16:10.160 know how you can, I mean, we'll be a fly, you know, our, just our day will drive AI or ASI insane

01:16:18.100 earthworm. Yeah. Right. So I don't know what to do. I just think we, we, we should be having a

01:16:26.300 conversation and a realistic conversation, not where you take Stephen Hawking's words. I think

01:16:32.480 out of context, he wasn't saying that mankind will, there won't be any humans on the planet. He was

01:16:39.580 saying you're going to merge with machines. So homo sapien, as you know, it won't be around.

01:16:46.600 That's what he was saying. We should have those kinds of conversations. So the people in the middle

01:16:53.360 of the country and around the world start to get an idea. Maybe we should stop talking about Joe Biden's

01:17:02.340 pictures and start talking about this because this is coming in the next term or two or three terms.

01:17:11.360 Yeah. Great. So what do we do? I have, that's way beyond my area of expertise. I have not even a

01:17:18.780 remote clue about what we would do about this. You know, Ray Kurzweil? No, I've read all this stuff.

01:17:27.640 I don't know him. I know him. I've, I've interviewed him a couple of times. He is both exhilarating

01:17:33.640 and terrifying because he doesn't believe in, he believes that man is just a collection of

01:17:44.240 thoughts and patterns. Right. So once you can duplicate that pattern, when you take the ghost

01:17:49.680 out of the machine, all that's left is the machine. Right. So, so he believes by 2030 time,

01:17:56.660 you know, he's whatever, but he believes by 2030, I can, I can copy you. And so I don't

01:18:02.940 have to worry about, you don't have to worry about death. Right. He told me one time, this

01:18:06.260 is 2004 maybe. He said, Glenn, you just have to stay alive until 2030. Yeah. He's, he's

01:18:12.640 overestimated those timelines. And if a few years ago, Moore's law fell off the rail, so

01:18:17.660 it's no longer a law. It was just operative for a period of time. But, but the principle

01:18:22.040 is it that for singularity, it just extends that range out. So instead of 2030, it's 2040.

01:18:28.400 Yeah. So it's how time doesn't, I mean, time, more time we have the better. Right. But we're,

01:18:34.960 we're in a society right now that says, uh, it used to be arguing abortion in the womb.

01:18:43.580 Mm-hmm. Now we have a baby. Now we're into Peter Singer territory. Right. Now we have

01:18:48.440 a baby. Mm-hmm. Do I let that live or die? We've seen that play out before. That's exactly

01:18:53.860 what Peter Singer's argument. And also. And that has been crazy for 30 years. Yeah. And,

01:18:59.220 and also they don't like him on college campuses either. What? So we, so if it's, what's the,

01:19:06.000 if it's good for the goose, it's good for the gantle. Like if we're letting everybody on,

01:19:09.820 or we just say, you know what, new policy, no external speakers. But the point is that it's,

01:19:14.500 it's not just people like you and me that they don't want on campus. It's the, right. So,

01:19:20.300 so we're now entering a territory where a baby, a doctor can look at a baby outside of the womb and

01:19:28.580 say, eh, well, mom didn't want it. So I don't have to, I don't have to give it anything. You know,

01:19:34.940 it could just, it could just be neglected and died and die. So, so there are a few things

01:19:40.400 operative here. One is what to do about these encroaching technologies and, you know, there's

01:19:45.780 no constitutional right to privacy. And how do we navigate that technologically and politically?

01:19:51.740 I'm the wrong guest for that. I don't think you're the right guest for that either. I have

01:19:55.660 absolutely no idea. I don't. Can you, but you. Yeah. Ethics. Yeah. You see the point I'm making

01:20:01.840 from, I can copy you. Yeah. So if you have cancer and it's really expensive, you know what? We're

01:20:07.300 just going to put you down, but we're going to download you because you're going to live forever

01:20:10.500 right here. The body is too expensive. That's okay. Um, to, to that, when you, you, when we don't

01:20:19.360 have, um, some sort of sanctity of life at this point with the coming technology, shouldn't we be

01:20:28.160 having these ethical questions right now? Yeah, we should be having those conversations.

01:20:33.780 We need to develop a moral infrastructure. We need to get the diversity of voices again,

01:20:38.640 and we need to figure out what the best arguments are against the position. So I'll bring it back

01:20:46.380 around to something that I've been thinking about. Part of that is, and I think you share my belief

01:20:52.780 with this, that we should be able to rationally derive our values. And we have a whole bunch of

01:20:58.620 folks in there thinking in the academy, thinking that there is no rational derivation of values.

01:21:04.680 There are these immutable starting points that have nothing to do with fraction power dynamics and

01:21:09.240 race and oppression variables that, that Jim was mentioning. So I think the larger picture of this

01:21:17.500 is if we don't like, for example, you know, Jordan Peterson's pronoun thing and the Lindsay Shepard

01:21:23.540 case where she wasn't even allowed to present the other side, we need to teach our kids that they

01:21:29.820 need to hear the best arguments from people on the other side. So we make them in Jonathan Haidt and

01:21:36.240 the Heterodox Academy and Greg Lucanoff, I've talked about this. We make them resilient, right? We make them

01:21:41.800 resilient to these ideas. And so they don't crumble. So right now we really do have a type of

01:21:47.300 epistemological fragility. People are completely fragile and they fall apart once you start looking

01:21:52.740 at their epistemology. How do you know that? Why do you know that? Again, as you said, and you're

01:21:58.240 absolutely correct, there were no questions allowed in this framework, right? And we're lazy. We don't

01:22:03.200 ask questions. And I think we don't ask deep questions because we're afraid of the answer.

01:22:07.060 And so we need to create values that we need to create systems in which people value these things.

01:22:14.100 They value intellectual engagement. They value emotional resilience. They value talking to

01:22:20.400 someone across the aisle. They value a friendship. And if all of your friends believe the same things,

01:22:25.680 man, you need to get a new set of friends. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So that would, I mean, obviously we can,

01:22:32.040 we can talk like this and we can try to reach people in the culture and hopefully something will

01:22:35.780 happen. But I mean, from what we've seen in our work, it's utterly critical that we do something

01:22:42.800 to deal with the problem that this ideology has taken over education and is doing so at every

01:22:48.560 level. How can you best foster these kinds of values and attitudes? I, I, I mean, in the past,

01:22:56.720 that has been the proper role of the best of religion. Not to say that religion, I mean,

01:23:03.680 religion goes off, like everything goes way off the rails. Sure. But in its proper role where it's not

01:23:10.400 bigoted, it's not hated. It is teaching you to love one another. It's teaching you to be charitable

01:23:16.080 and decent and don't lie and don't steal and blah, blah, blah. That is your house of, of values.

01:23:23.580 That's gone. So where do you see those values coming from? Yeah. So the only reason people believe

01:23:31.520 in the new religion is because they stopped believing in the old, right? It's Nietzsche.

01:23:35.520 Uh, it's, uh, kind of, I was thinking about game of thrones, but yeah, uh,

01:23:41.200 now I have the new gods and the old gods. Uh, and so Jim and I have written extensively about how

01:23:47.640 there's a new religion and then this new religion is it's, I don't know if it's a religion or a

01:23:52.160 worldview or a cult. We're still almost a religion. It is a faith tradition or not tradition. Really.

01:23:56.760 It is a faith system for certain social justice, uh, is a faith system at this point,

01:24:02.440 but they won't admit it because they don't have to, because their canon looks like knowledge.

01:24:06.740 They aren't pointing to scripture. They're pointing to, but it is their scripture.

01:24:10.480 It is. It is. Functionally it is.

01:24:12.180 We have the peril, we have the parallels that you can speak to privilege being original sin,

01:24:16.320 political quickness being blasphemy.

01:24:18.380 Yeah. Privilege also being depravity. Uh, it corrupts you totally and makes it so that you can't do

01:24:23.740 anything, but in, in, in depravity in the religious sense or Calvinist sense, it's that you are depraved in

01:24:29.800 the sense that you seek to sin and here it's your privilege. So you seek to maintain your

01:24:34.280 privilege. It's a perfect parallel, uh, concept and they go all the way down. Wokeness is being born

01:24:40.400 again and you can just go down the list. Have you written this yet? Yeah. Yeah. I wrote it just

01:24:44.840 before Christmas. Aereo magazine. Helen Pluckrose is our third contributor. It's in Aereo magazine.

01:24:49.500 It's 15,000 words. So enjoy your time. Oh, I will. It's a solid hour. And I think so. Part of this is,

01:24:55.620 you know, we hosted the James Damore event at Portland state university and it was going to be

01:24:59.280 James Damore myself. And we invited the women's studies department on stage. They said, no,

01:25:03.420 two days later, James and Helen Pluckrose and I did an event at Portland state and we invited the

01:25:08.760 women's studies again, nothing. We have consistently invited people to have conversations with us.

01:25:14.720 And it's incredibly difficult when you want to have a conversation with us. That's why it's,

01:25:20.160 it's so interesting to me that the people on the right have been so welcoming to us.

01:25:25.620 Right. I mean, I've never lied to anybody. You know, I'm an atheist. You know, I'm a liberal. I've

01:25:29.320 never lied to anybody, but you've never lied to anybody about what you believe. And I've been

01:25:34.620 totally taken aback by how welcoming people are. Because you, because perhaps you have bought into

01:25:42.580 the narrative that the right and some on the right are this way, are a progressive right,

01:25:51.420 are a big government, big control, you know, that there are those Christians who are like

01:25:56.700 my way on the highway. Good. We can get everybody baptized or whatever that there are. There is

01:26:01.460 that sliver, but the right generally, the strength still is this constitutional. I don't hate my

01:26:09.800 neighbor. I don't mind. We, I want to work together. We're, we're here because we see this vision

01:26:15.460 that people can do something great with their life. That's different than mine. Right. Right.

01:26:21.880 That's that, that's, it's a small group of people, but I think it's actually getting bigger because

01:26:29.040 it's, it's in the American DNA. I think it's in the American DNA. Yeah. And that sliver is the same

01:26:36.120 as the social justice sliver. Yeah. So they're the same. Yes. In the sense that they feel like they

01:26:41.120 have some special access to truth that everybody has to get on board with. Yes. And this has all

01:26:45.680 been described in the literature about authoritarianism. You get to a certain point

01:26:48.880 of conviction and certainty in your views. And then it's called conventionalism. That's the name of

01:26:54.580 the, of the phenomenon where you believe that your views are conventional for you and must be for

01:26:59.420 everyone else. And so you start to try to impose those on other people and claim special knowledge

01:27:03.340 to do it. And we've already eaten up 90 minutes and I could talk to you guys for a long

01:27:11.080 time. It'd be fun. We'd love to have you back.

01:27:13.040 We really appreciate the fact that, and I say this with total sincerity, that you are

01:27:20.140 a sincere broker of conversation. I appreciate you having us on, even though, you know, we

01:27:26.340 have differences of opinion and that's fantastic. Well, I mean, you don't understand how, I mean,

01:27:31.420 you're making a big deal out of this. Is this not happening anywhere?

01:27:34.760 Because nobody, not in our lives, not in our lives. I mean, since we've come out with people

01:27:38.540 on quote, whatever our side should be, aren't inviting us on their shows. They're not talking

01:27:43.380 to us. They're keeping two left wing outlets since October. They're heaping derision on us.

01:27:48.320 Like, you know, so when we did the atheist thing, everyone was like, Oh, you know, you guys are just

01:27:52.540 liberals or whatever. Well, they were right. But now that we've done this and that we've attacked

01:27:57.660 kind of our own tribe or our own side. And the reason is, even though I share a lot of those impulses,

01:28:03.460 that doesn't mean you get to make stuff up. That doesn't mean you get to pretend that something

01:28:08.180 is knowledge. Like we really need to have something we can count on, something we can go

01:28:14.880 to, something we can point to, and then we can squabble over public policy. But we need

01:28:19.540 to have things that we can point to and say, Hey, you know what? We know this. This has been,

01:28:23.840 we've come about this. The integrity of this process is intact. You don't have to worry about it.

01:28:29.460 The process needs to be defended. Yeah. The process needs to be defended. And that's the

01:28:33.240 other thing that we've lost. So I really do appreciate you inviting us on, you having a

01:28:39.060 sincere and honest conversation with us. And that's exactly what we need. And we're not having

01:28:44.060 it. Yep. So can I tell you something? Yeah. I feel exactly the same way. Thank you for coming

01:28:49.900 on. I've, I've wanted to have a conversation with Bernie Sanders forever. And, and the reason

01:28:56.740 why he's honest about what he is. Yeah. Generally speaking, you know, for a politician, he's like,

01:29:02.480 he's been forever. Yeah. I'm a socialist. Yeah. I honeymoon in, in the Soviet union. I can have

01:29:07.920 a conversation with a guy like that. You're going to go, same thing. You're going to go

01:29:10.980 to hell. Same kind of a thing. Like people are honest about what they believe. They're forthright

01:29:15.320 in their speech. The Greeks call it parahesia, speaking truth in the face of danger. If you said

01:29:20.600 something that there shouldn't, I don't think there should be danger when you're exploring

01:29:26.380 truth. I agree. If you're honest brokers, totally agree. And you know, when you, when you said you,

01:29:32.620 you mentioned Dershowitz and Hitler, and then I thought the first thing I thought was, Oh God,

01:29:35.700 is, you know, people, 5,000 people are going to say, you know, Glenn loves Hitler now. So,

01:29:39.320 but there is a danger. And the danger is that, you know, like I'll, I'll be around Portland State

01:29:43.980 University and I'll walk around and I'll see a picture of me with this huge grotesque villain nose

01:29:49.600 saying, you know, with the little thought bubbles saying, you know, I'm pro-life, uh, Republican,

01:29:55.600 love Trump. None of those things are actually true. And so the dangers that, that they, they

01:30:01.940 attack our motivations. They attack me for things that I don't even believe. There's something that

01:30:07.460 is dangerous also that we let them get away with something we should all be standing up and saying

01:30:11.980 no to, which is let's suppose even that they're a hundred percent morally right. Okay. Let's just

01:30:16.760 pretend that their views are a hundred percent morally right. If they can't actually articulate

01:30:20.480 that, if they have to force it upon us, then they're still wrong. They should be able to

01:30:25.880 articulate it. They must be able to articulate it in a way that's convincing. That's the rules of

01:30:29.920 engagement. Right. After Trump was elected, I said, can we, can we stop now for a second? Because,

01:30:36.320 uh, half the country does not like him and they're not going along. And when it flips the other half

01:30:44.280 will not go along. So we either have to change people's hearts or we just might as well start

01:30:49.520 building gas chambers because you're going to have to liquidate. There will be bad things coming down

01:30:55.600 the pike. Yeah. And none of us want that. And one way to solve that is through dialogue, conversation,

01:31:01.660 reach across the table. Yep. Keep reaching across the table.

01:31:10.080 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it

01:31:16.120 can be discovered by other people.

01:31:31.660 Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast. I'll see you next time. I'll see you next time.

01:31:36.080 Bye.

01:31:38.080 Bye.

01:31:40.080 Bye.

01:31:42.080 Bye.

01:31:44.080 Bye.

01:31:46.080 Bye.

01:31:48.080 Bye.

01:31:50.080 Bye.

01:31:52.080 Bye.

01:31:54.080 Bye.

01:31:56.080 Bye.

01:31:58.080 Bye.

01:32:00.080 Bye.

The Glenn Beck Program - June 15, 2019

Ep 41 ｜ James A. Lindsay & Peter Boghossian ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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