The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 175. Journalist or Heretic？

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00:00:51.060 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. This is season four, episode 29, featuring Barry Weiss.

00:01:00.560 Barry Weiss is a journalist and author and a fiery human being.

00:01:04.660 She's worked as an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times.

00:01:08.380 Before that, she was a book reviewer at the Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

00:01:13.020 Barry now writes for herself on Substack.

00:01:15.360 Jordan and Barry discussed her career, the circumstances surrounding her resignation from the New York Times,

00:01:22.360 the aftermath of her famous resignation letter, which criticized the New York Times,

00:01:27.080 Twitter and social media, the phrase systemic racism, the work she's doing now, and much more.

00:01:32.860 She's just started her own podcast called Honestly with Barry Weiss that is definitely worth checking out.

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00:03:24.700 Hello, everyone.

00:03:44.260 I'm pleased today to have as my guest Ms. Barry Weiss, whom I haven't seen since she interviewed me for the Aspen Ideas Fair, and that was, I think, three years ago.

00:03:57.180 Something like that.

00:03:58.860 Barry is a journalist and the author of How to Fight Antisemitism, which won a 2019 National Jewish Book Award from 2017 to 2020.

00:04:09.000 Weiss was an opinion writer and editor at the New York Times.

00:04:12.840 Before that, she was an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal and a senior editor at Tablet Magazine.

00:04:20.260 She's the winner of the inaugural Pair Allmark Award in recognition of her moral courage and the winner of the Reason Foundation's 2018 Bastiat Prize,

00:04:29.700 which honors writing that best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.

00:04:36.760 That's a lovely combination.

00:04:37.960 In 2019, Vanity Fair called Weiss the Times star opinion writer.

00:04:44.020 Despite that, Barry now writes on Substack.

00:04:47.340 Follow her work at barryweiss.substack.com.

00:04:50.980 Thanks very much for agreeing to talk to me today, Barry.

00:04:54.860 It's a pleasure to have you here.

00:04:56.540 It's a pleasure to see you, Jordan.

00:04:57.760 I've been exceptionally curious about exactly what happened with you since I was out of sync with the entire world for a good long time,

00:05:06.820 but I did know that you left the New York Times to start on your own, start as an independent journalist on Substack,

00:05:15.680 and that's quite the turn of events that say, especially given that Vanity Fair called you the Times star opinion writer.

00:05:22.900 That feels like 100 years ago.

00:05:24.440 Yeah, it's not so long ago, though, is it?

00:05:27.860 But many things have happened in the interim.

00:05:29.620 So should we start with something easy, like just exactly what the hell happened at the New York Times?

00:05:34.900 Sure.

00:05:35.680 Okay.

00:05:36.440 Sure.

00:05:37.060 Well, I guess I should start with what drove me to come to the New York Times in the first place.

00:05:44.580 I came to the New York Times following, you know, the, well, it was shocking in the context of the New York Times,

00:05:50.940 the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

00:05:54.720 There was a brief period of soul searching that happened after Trump won, I would say inside the New York Times,

00:06:01.100 but inside the legacy media in general.

00:06:03.180 And there was a sense of, wow, you know, our job is to hold up a mirror to the country as it is.

00:06:09.020 And we sort of failed our readers.

00:06:11.940 You know, we haven't exposed them, let's say, to views or to the zeitgeist outside of places like, you know, the Upper West Side and Berkeley.

00:06:21.140 And so in a way, I was an intellectual diversity hire along with Brett Stevens.

00:06:25.880 I had been at the Wall Street Journal editorial page for years in two different stints.

00:06:32.140 And as viewers may or may not know, I, you know, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is conservative.

00:06:37.940 Its motto is free people, free markets.

00:06:39.760 And I was always the squish in the context of the journal's editorial page.

00:06:45.000 I was always like on the leftmost flank.

00:06:47.620 So you were a diversity hire at the Wall Street Journal as well.

00:06:50.520 I've always just been on a fringe in one place or another.

00:06:54.760 And I think it's weird to be fringe and in the center.

00:06:58.000 Well, not weird.

00:06:59.240 I feel like that's increasingly where anyone who's in the center is these days.

00:07:03.740 You're politically homeless and you're sort of forced to choose between one side or another.

00:07:10.220 It's maybe unique insofar as, you know, the kind of jobs that I had.

00:07:14.480 But the number of people I know who feel that way, who feel politically homeless,

00:07:19.940 who feel like they have to sort of contort themselves to fit into one of these two tribes is growing by the second.

00:07:29.280 And so in that sense, I don't think my experience was that unique.

00:07:33.240 So anyway, I get to the New York Times and I want to be clear, like I didn't go into the New York Times naive.

00:07:42.240 You know, I read the paper for years.

00:07:45.180 I saw, you know, what's obviously it's liberal bias, but I felt fundamentally like the paper was still trying to adhere to what it claims to be all about in its mission statement.

00:07:58.240 You know, pursuing the truth, even when it's hard.

00:08:00.760 You know, the famous ad that the Times has, the truth is hard.

00:08:03.400 It's all it's all over tote bags.

00:08:05.760 Striving for.

00:08:06.460 That tells you how hard it is.

00:08:07.900 Right.

00:08:08.320 Right.

00:08:08.640 Exactly.

00:08:09.300 Striving for objectivity, even though we know none of us are objective.

00:08:14.380 You know, telling people the truth, even when it's inconvenient.

00:08:18.400 So right, still nested inside this idea that journalists, for example, could represent a viewpoint that was actually objectively true rather than expressing, inevitably expressing their, their association with an arbitrary power structure.

00:08:32.500 I mean, it was still an enlightenment idea, as far as you were concerned, that reigned at the Times.

00:08:37.900 Right.

00:08:38.600 And specifically on the editorial page, you know, I was an op-ed editor.

00:08:43.360 So, you know, what the public saw that I did was write columns.

00:08:46.760 But the majority of what my job was, was to commission and edit op-eds from people who wouldn't otherwise think of the New York Times as their natural political home.

00:08:56.800 So that meant conservatives.

00:08:58.380 God forbid, it meant libertarians, it meant heterodox thinkers, it meant high schoolers and first time writers and dissidents, you know, across the Arab world, which is a subject I'm particularly passionate about.

00:09:10.280 So my job was specifically to expose our readers to views that would not otherwise naturally appear on the op-ed page of the New York Times.

00:09:18.920 Okay. And that was an explicit condition of your hiring.

00:09:21.680 Everyone knew that to begin with.

00:09:24.140 That was my job description.

00:09:25.680 Very much.

00:09:26.220 Okay. So you weren't a fifth column.

00:09:28.360 Or if you were, it was something that everybody had agreed upon.

00:09:31.420 Yeah. The goal was for me to, to bring in pieces that would otherwise make maybe my, even my desk mates uncomfortable.

00:09:38.620 And so, and why did they pick you, do you think?

00:09:42.540 And why did the Wall Street Journal pick you to begin with?

00:09:44.540 Those are very difficult positions to attain.

00:09:46.460 And how old were you when you started with the Wall Street Journal?

00:09:49.180 So I started at the Wall Street Journal.

00:09:51.140 I had a fellowship there the summer that I graduated from Columbia University.

00:09:56.580 The way that I got to the Wall Street Journal is very serendipitous.

00:10:00.360 I, you know, was very much a, I would say center left liberal when I was a student in college and, but I was very passionate on the subject of Israel and fighting anti-Semitism, which is the book that I ended up writing.

00:10:15.160 I sort of had been writing that book for a very long time.

00:10:17.480 And I would frequently host debates on campus with the socialist group or the sort of anti-Zionist group.

00:10:24.100 And there was an, an older gentleman that would come to some of my events.

00:10:28.040 And one day, you know, he definitely was not an undergraduate.

00:10:31.620 And one day he came up to me and said, you know, my name is Charles Stevens.

00:10:34.960 You need to meet my son, Brett Stevens.

00:10:36.980 He works at the Wall Street Journal and they have this amazing summer internship.

00:10:40.580 I had never really heard of Brett.

00:10:42.180 I had never heard of the Wall Street Journal, but that was how I ended up getting there.

00:10:45.820 It started with a summer internship called the Bartley Fellowship that's still in existence today.

00:10:50.700 And like anything, you know, I worked really hard and worked my way up into, into a job.

00:10:56.680 And so that internship became, became my first job.

00:11:00.560 What did you study at Columbia?

00:11:02.840 I studied history.

00:11:03.660 I wanted to be a Middle East studies major, but found that what was happening in classrooms was not, was not, was not conducive to exploration.

00:11:15.460 It was more about indoctrination.

00:11:16.600 Okay, so I want to, I want to do a little, a little divergence here.

00:11:19.580 So I want to tell you a story.

00:11:21.760 I spoke with Yanmi Park about three weeks ago and she wrote, um, in order to live.

00:11:29.280 Now she wrote in order to live, well, because she had a horrendous life.

00:11:33.920 That's one reason, even though one of the things she told me while I interviewed her was that she'd met people who, whose life was so much worse than hers that she felt blessed, which was quite the bloody catastrophe of a statement.

00:11:45.780 I'll tell you when, anyways, um, her book ends in 2015.

00:11:52.500 So I asked her what she had been doing since 2015 and she went to Columbia to take a humanities degree.

00:12:01.020 I talked to her about this recently too.

00:12:03.120 Oh, okay.

00:12:03.660 No, but go ahead.

00:12:04.620 Go ahead.

00:12:04.920 She told me.

00:12:06.060 Yeah.

00:12:06.360 Well, she said, I mean, I thought that was quite remarkable.

00:12:09.560 You had this young woman who was raised under the most horrifying totalitarian conditions.

00:12:15.260 Well, not the most because that's a deep hell hole, but bad enough.

00:12:18.900 And then was a slave in China along with her mother.

00:12:21.680 And then, you know, managed to get to South Korea and then did all her pre-university education, basically in one year, virtually hospitalized herself with effort.

00:12:33.080 And during that time, she read, um, Animal Farm by George Orwell, and that sort of motivated her to write.

00:12:40.160 But, and then she went to university in South Korea, which is no joke.

00:12:43.320 It's very competitive place.

00:12:44.700 And, and, and then she went to Columbia to take humanities degree, which in her words was part of her father's wish that she become educated.

00:12:52.820 And so she went to this stellar institution in the center of what's arguably the greatest city on earth to pursue the sort of enlightenment, to pursue the spark that had been lit in there by Orwell, let's say, and by her introduction to freedom.

00:13:09.800 And I said, well, how was it at Columbia?

00:13:11.600 And she said, it was a complete waste of time and money.

00:13:14.980 And like, she's a reasonable person.

00:13:16.760 She's not actually prone to statements like that.

00:13:19.620 It quite surprised me.

00:13:20.780 And I said, surely that can't be the case.

00:13:24.780 I mean, you know, that's a damning global statement.

00:13:28.160 You must have had one professor, one course that spoke to you.

00:13:32.160 And she said, well, there was a human biology course where I studied evolution, but even it got politically correct by the end.

00:13:38.640 And I felt that I was never able to say anything I actually thought.

00:13:43.240 And I pushed her and she was adamant.

00:13:45.680 It was that it was a catastrophe going to Columbia and that she felt, I hope I'm not exaggerating.

00:13:50.780 But I do believe that this is what she was attempting to put forward.

00:13:55.780 She didn't feel any freer in her speech and actions at Columbia than she did in bloody North Korea.

00:14:01.300 And I didn't wasn't dancing with glee hearing that, you know, noting that my prognostications about political correctness and universities had manifested themselves.

00:14:10.560 It's terribly shocking to me and terribly saddening that that's actually the case.

00:14:15.460 And I've interviewed some older people recently, they'd be my age, who look back on their humanities education with nothing but nostalgia and the fondest of memories for the professors that opened up their lives and started them on their careers.

00:14:30.680 Great journalists in Canada and businessmen as well.

00:14:34.100 Jocko Willink as well, who took an English literature degree and was was illuminated by it.

00:14:38.840 What was it like for you at Columbia?

00:14:41.620 You know, Jordan, it was a mix.

00:14:44.960 On the one hand, Columbia has and who knows how much longer this will be around, but it has what's called the core curriculum.

00:14:51.660 It's basically a study of the classics.

00:14:53.820 Freshman year, you read classical literature.

00:14:57.060 Sophomore year, you study classical philosophy.

00:14:59.760 Those that was the reason that I went to Columbia and those classes for me were exactly what you describe, that spark that you and me felt when she read George Orwell.

00:15:10.400 I absolutely.

00:15:11.440 Why were they that for you?

00:15:13.780 Well, first of all, I had never read those books before and, you know, knew who Plato was vaguely new Socrates was, you know, new.

00:15:24.940 Go down the line, you know, had heard who Virginia Woolf was, all of these books, like they were soul expanding.

00:15:34.420 And it happened to be that I got extremely lucky, especially in that second year course that I described, the philosophy course, to have a teacher who was genuinely committed to, I think, what education is supposed to be about at its best.

00:15:50.140 And what is it supposed to be about at its best as far as you're concerned?

00:15:53.520 What did it do for you?

00:15:54.940 Teaching me how to think and think critically and read a text and allow it, I mean, at the deepest moments, have it transform me, rather than what I encountered, for example, in the Middle East Studies Department, which was like, more like hearing a preacher.

00:16:14.320 I mean, it was more just propaganda.

00:16:17.480 And what do you think the difference is between propaganda and education?

00:16:20.520 I mean, especially, I'm asking you this, because the claim, one of the claims that is splitting our culture down the middle, is that there is no, there is nothing but propaganda, essentially.

00:16:33.460 And you just think the propaganda on your side is the truth, because it serves your purposes to believe that.

00:16:39.260 So it's very, very important to make a distinction between propaganda and education.

00:16:43.780 Now, you had two different kinds of classes, as far as you're concerned.

00:16:48.160 One of them you describe as opening yourself up, and the other you describe as being preached at.

00:16:52.900 Okay, so what's the difference there?

00:16:57.320 Why didn't I just describe the difference?

00:16:59.480 Well, I, I, not so much on the preaching side.

00:17:04.600 What were you being compelled to think in the Middle East?

00:17:07.740 Okay, first of all, you're making the case that you were compelled to think in one set of classes.

00:17:12.220 What were you compelled to think?

00:17:14.320 Well, let me give you an example.

00:17:16.380 The course that I was thinking about in my mind, as I just described this, was a course called, you know, Topics in Middle East Studies.

00:17:24.580 So it's the entire region of the Middle East for going back thousands of years in a sort of general 101 course, was part of a requirement if you wanted to be, to continue on in the major.

00:17:36.880 And that course, basically, you, here's what you had to accept, that the sole sort of source of maladies in what I think we all can agree is a very complicated and blood-soaked region of the world,

00:17:57.640 are all the result of essentially European or American colonialism, that everything goes back to that core idea.

00:18:08.280 And that even things like, let's say in India, you know, widow burning could be connected to colonialism.

00:18:15.360 Even things like honor killing could be connected to colonialism.

00:18:18.880 Everything had to do with this sort of one lens with which you could understand an extremely complicated thing.

00:18:27.720 And then the second part, and this is, again, like, I think oftentimes this is the case.

00:18:33.860 If you know something about one particular topic, like let's say a lot about it, and you don't know a lot about Saudi Arabia or Iran or any of the other places you're studying,

00:18:44.420 but you know a lot about this one place, and for me, that was Israel, and you hear that what you're being taught about it is so out of line with reality,

00:18:52.920 then you start being skeptical about everything else the person is saying.

00:18:57.660 And that was very much the case with me, that, you know, first of all, Israel's one of, you know, dozens of countries in the Middle East,

00:19:04.320 but it was obsessed on in the course.

00:19:06.820 And the one text we were asked to read about this complicated, very interesting place with a history that goes back thousands of years,

00:19:15.680 which is the cradle of Western civilization, was a book by a guy called Maxime Rodinson.

00:19:22.480 I recommend people look it up, called Israel, colon, a Zionist colonial settler state, question mark.

00:19:29.320 And suffice it to say, the question mark was superfluous.

00:19:31.660 And everything was just sort of driving toward the, I felt, the political view of the professor that was teaching the course,

00:19:40.960 whereas, you know, in contrast, the philosophy course that I was describing to you,

00:19:47.360 or even I'm thinking about an intellectual history class that I took, I didn't really know what my professor thought.

00:19:53.260 And we were always obsessed with, like, what do they really think?

00:19:56.820 And that made it, it just felt like they were trying to, as much as possible, remove their own views to teach texts and ideas to us

00:20:08.520 in the most capacious way possible.

00:20:10.660 Now, it turns out, with the intellectual history course, you know, that professor is now on Twitter,

00:20:15.760 and I see what he thinks, and it's very much, you know, not my view of the world.

00:20:20.820 But I really admire the fact that he, that I didn't know that when I took his class,

00:20:26.140 and that I was able to sort of come to my own positions without feeling like,

00:20:30.520 if I wasn't parroting what he said, that I would somehow be punished,

00:20:35.480 whether it was, you know, in my, in the grade that I received,

00:20:39.640 or in the seminar section part of the lecture course.

00:20:43.440 So to me, that's a really important distinction.

00:20:45.040 Okay, so there's a couple of things there that I think might be worth highlighting,

00:20:49.140 or they strike me as worth highlighting anyways,

00:20:52.060 is I wrote a chapter in my last book, which is Beyond Order, called Abandoned Ideology.

00:20:57.940 And one of the propositions that makes up the argument in that chapter is that

00:21:05.240 you have to be aware of unifactorial explanations for complex phenomena,

00:21:10.980 is that if you look at anything, perhaps you might look at the wage gap,

00:21:14.600 say between men and women, the purported wage gap.

00:21:16.980 Well, the probability that there's one reason that that occurs.

00:21:23.440 Well, first of all, you have to ask the question to begin with, is the gap real?

00:21:27.640 There's a measurement issue there.

00:21:28.880 And so you can take that apart, because you don't have to accept the proposition

00:21:31.600 that the phenomena even exists to begin with.

00:21:33.740 That happens in psychology all the time, where people will use a term in common parlance,

00:21:39.740 but not necessarily be able to translate that into some objective reality.

00:21:45.380 Like, for example, we experience an emotion, the emotion of shame.

00:21:49.760 But it isn't obvious that there's a shame system neurobiologically.

00:21:54.280 Maybe it's the interaction of a variety of neurobiological systems.

00:21:57.520 Whereas for anxiety, there looks like there's a neurobiological system.

00:22:01.360 And for play, there's a neurobiological system.

00:22:03.540 And so there's not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between a word and the objective

00:22:07.920 world.

00:22:08.480 So you can always question that.

00:22:10.100 But then when you look at a complicated phenomena, the probability that there's multiple reasons

00:22:14.660 for its existence, or even if there isn't, that there's multiple theories about the single

00:22:19.860 thing that's the cause of its existence.

00:22:22.060 That's a necessary part of sophisticated thinking.

00:22:26.320 And so maybe one thing for people to be aware of is a totalizing viewpoint.

00:22:33.360 All of this plethora of complexity is a consequence of this one thing.

00:22:39.840 And that's the hallmark.

00:22:41.040 That's one of the hallmarks, perhaps one of the hallmarks of propaganda, when it's not

00:22:45.180 utilizing just outright deceit.

00:22:47.440 And so, and then I think there's another something that you pointed to more implicitly, which is

00:22:55.380 that maybe it's also necessary to cast an extraordinarily skeptical eye on totalizing

00:23:02.020 theories that identify a convenient enemy.

00:23:06.000 And a convenient enemy would be someone that you're clearly not.

00:23:11.020 Because it's, and so I've become very leery of conversations, for example, where people

00:23:15.640 rely on the word they, and I don't mean that as a gender neutral pronoun.

00:23:20.700 I mean, when you talk about the they that are at fault when they're doing the things they're

00:23:25.280 doing, you think, well, it's kind of convenient that that doesn't include you, because a lot

00:23:30.080 of the really complex problems that we face are all our problems and all our doing in some

00:23:35.500 sense, in some broad sense, or at least all our responsibility.

00:23:38.300 So there's the totalizing element, there's the oversimple, and it's so psychologically

00:23:43.560 rewarding also to do, in some sense, to develop a totalizing theory, that means that you have

00:23:50.660 an explanation for absolutely everything, because with minimal cognitive effort, you have a map

00:23:55.420 of the entire world.

00:23:56.760 And it means you have a community.

00:23:58.540 I mean, I don't think we can overstate how comforting it is to feel like you're part of

00:24:04.380 a tribe, and that you're aligned against those people over there.

00:24:08.600 Yeah, well, the first part of that might be beneficial and positive.

00:24:11.900 But the second part, which tends to go along with it is the danger of that communal drive.

00:24:18.280 You know, there is evidence, for example, that people who are high in empathy are much harsher

00:24:23.780 in their outgroup evaluations than people who are low in empathy, because, you know, we think

00:24:27.540 of empathy as an untrammeled good.

00:24:29.100 Well, it unites people, and it unites them with love, essentially.

00:24:32.360 It's, biologically speaking, it's a manifestation of the affiliative circuit that bonds mother

00:24:38.400 and child, and that's elaborated up into pair bonding for adult humans, but then it extends

00:24:43.140 out to those who are your kin.

00:24:45.320 That all sounds lovely and positive, but, you know, you don't want to get between a mother

00:24:50.080 grizzly and her cubs.

00:24:51.940 So there's that side of it.

00:24:54.580 So now the distinction between the propaganda, let's say, and a real exploration,

00:25:02.360 exploration, or a real class, or a real education, I think, hinges on something like exploration.

00:25:08.460 So let's think about these podcasts as an example.

00:25:11.980 I mean, I find a podcast discussion particularly useful when the two people who are involved

00:25:19.100 in the discussion are exploring at the fringes of their knowledge and trying to further what

00:25:24.380 they already know instead of trying to hammer home a point to convince the person they're

00:25:29.760 talking to or themselves or the listener.

00:25:32.380 And in my classes, you know, when they were going well, I stepped through a variety of

00:25:37.060 psychological theories in my personality class, right?

00:25:39.760 So it started with Freud and Jung and Adler and Rogers and all the great clinicians, and

00:25:45.200 I would put forward their case as strongly as possible and trying to explore what they

00:25:50.480 meant.

00:25:50.780 But that wasn't my viewpoint.

00:25:53.340 It was an attempt to explore, and then I could pull the students along with it.

00:25:57.120 And that seems to be much different than here's the problem, here's the perpetrators, it's

00:26:03.860 a soul.

00:26:05.220 And you experienced, like, there was a phenomenological experience that you had that made you contrast

00:26:10.600 those two approaches.

00:26:12.880 Yeah.

00:26:13.180 And it was also, I mean, this connects it back to your initial question, which is what the

00:26:17.760 hell happened at the New York Times, in a way, that answer to that begins in college, because

00:26:26.140 that was the first time that I started to encounter what has been called critical social justice

00:26:32.980 or critical race theory or wokeness or what Rod Dreyer's called soft totalitarianism or really

00:26:39.300 cultural and moral relativism, to put it more simply.

00:26:42.200 I remember very, very clearly getting into an argument with another friend, also identified

00:26:49.960 as a feminist, and she was justifying female genital mutilation to me, because that's other

00:26:56.160 people's culture and we need to respect it.

00:26:58.260 I'm being crude, but that was the basic argument.

00:27:01.020 And I remember thinking, what the hell?

00:27:05.300 How can you possibly call yourself a feminist and believe in defending the rights of women and

00:27:10.960 believe that women should be safe and have equality of opportunity to men and also believe

00:27:16.800 that female genital mutilation can be justified in any universe?

00:27:20.900 And so it was the first time and it was very uncomfortable, but in a way, I'm grateful for

00:27:26.620 it because the ideas that I started to encounter both in classes and also socially at school, those

00:27:33.980 are the ideas that have now swallowed the culture and have swallowed the institutions that are meant

00:27:39.820 to uphold the liberal order.

00:27:41.640 Okay.

00:27:41.780 And now let's talk about that for a minute, because why are you so convinced that that's

00:27:46.760 true?

00:27:47.480 Like, I mean, I...

00:27:48.800 What's true?

00:27:49.660 That they swallowed everything?

00:27:51.140 Yes, exactly.

00:27:51.800 Exactly.

00:27:52.400 Right.

00:27:52.640 Because this is a major question.

00:27:55.460 So our culture is facing this extreme division or that's what it appears.

00:27:59.780 And, but the question is, is it as serious as it, as, as you might perceive it to be,

00:28:05.500 or is that a consequence of the information sources that you're availing yourself of?

00:28:09.300 And of course, this exactly the same thing applies to me.

00:28:11.620 I mean, I saw this coming as far as I'm concerned, you know, well, 20 years ago, 25 years ago,

00:28:17.140 but more particularly five years ago.

00:28:19.380 And, you know, that's got me in all sorts of trouble.

00:28:21.660 But it seems to me to be something real and something dangerous.

00:28:25.700 And I'm trying to put my finger on exactly what it is and to warn people about it.

00:28:29.520 But it's not like I don't have my doubts about, you know, whether this is just my conspiratorial

00:28:34.400 idiosyncrasy making itself known in the world.

00:28:37.280 And so...

00:28:38.180 I don't think it's a conspiracy.

00:28:39.560 I think the question is whether or not the optimists are right.

00:28:43.100 And this thing is a moral panic and it will burn itself out just like, you know, panic

00:28:48.440 around satanic, you know, child molesters burned them that, that burned out in the 1980s

00:28:55.600 in this country and maybe in Canada too.

00:28:57.740 I'm not sure.

00:28:58.320 Yes, definitely.

00:28:59.760 Well, we always do things a little less extremely, but we follow along in your wake.

00:29:04.160 Right.

00:29:04.400 So the question is like, are those people right?

00:29:07.600 You know, will wokeness, I hate that word, but I don't know what else to call it.

00:29:11.760 Will it recede on its own, like a fever that burns itself out?

00:29:15.640 Or will it only sort of, let's say, lose the battle over the culture and over sensemaking

00:29:25.200 and over the elite institutions in America and more broadly in the West if it meets another

00:29:32.380 force that pushes against it?

00:29:33.860 I don't see it receding on its own.

00:29:36.420 And the more I look inside, you know, certainly the press, I have the front row seat to witness

00:29:43.220 that and we can talk about it.

00:29:44.680 Let's talk about it.

00:29:45.740 But education, science, big tech, the HR departments of major corporations in this country, like

00:29:54.520 it's touching everything.

00:29:56.500 Yeah, well, I got a notification from my university department today.

00:30:00.980 They developed a contract for undergraduates who are going to work in labs, which seems

00:30:05.260 to me to be completely unnecessary anyways, because that was something that was always

00:30:09.140 handled by individual professors.

00:30:10.620 But most of it's just, you know, care of data and the sorts of things that you might

00:30:15.720 expect that might be made explicit if you were going to work in a lab.

00:30:18.760 But of course, two thirds of the way in it, there's a huge statement about all the groups

00:30:24.040 that you're not allowed to be prejudiced against in your conduct and so and so forth.

00:30:30.560 And so it's just another example of how these ideas, these let's call them anti-racist ideas

00:30:36.860 for the time being, or anti-group prejudice ideas are there.

00:30:42.160 There's an insistence that they manifest themselves everywhere.

00:30:45.020 And you might say, well, you know, who isn't anti-racist?

00:30:48.020 And so why object to that?

00:30:49.500 And my sense is that, well, they don't come, they're not part, they're not, they don't

00:30:55.960 stand on their own.

00:30:57.000 They're part of an entire system of ideas.

00:30:58.980 That's the thing that, that, that it's always bothered me is that there's a whole system of

00:31:03.340 ideas here and the, and I mean, maybe it's best exemplified in critical race theory.

00:31:09.440 That's sort of its most extreme, extreme.

00:31:11.760 I also really don't believe in ceding the language, like in saying, let's just call it

00:31:17.380 anti-racism because I'm not ceding that language to an ideology that is insisting on resegregating

00:31:26.020 the culture.

00:31:27.280 Why, why not cede the language?

00:31:29.900 Because, because, because it's a war of language.

00:31:33.320 It's a war of language.

00:31:34.900 I mean, to, if you're going to call what's essentially neo-racism and neo-segregation

00:31:43.940 anti-racism, like I'm not going to go along with the lie of that.

00:31:49.460 I'm just not.

00:31:50.740 I am going to insist on a version of anti-racism that is rooted in our common humanity and is

00:31:58.100 actually about eradicating racism, not on obsessing on the social construct of race and reifying

00:32:07.680 it and making us pitted in a kind of like zero sum war against each other based on our

00:32:15.460 immutable characteristics.

00:32:16.920 I'm sorry.

00:32:17.480 I'm not doing that.

00:32:18.660 I'm not giving into their language.

00:32:19.960 Yeah.

00:32:20.140 Well, then the question is right where you draw the line.

00:32:22.560 I mean, I didn't want to use identity politics language in reference to personal pronouns

00:32:28.020 in Canada, and that's pretty much done in my career as a, as a researcher and probably

00:32:33.560 as a clinical psychologist as well.

00:32:35.660 So it's, it's not a trivial battle to undertake.

00:32:39.400 And people of course asked, well, why did you pick that particular hill to die on?

00:32:43.800 Because what weren't protections that were already built into the law for other groups merely

00:32:49.240 extended to another deserving group.

00:32:51.480 But what I saw was a terrible misuse of language at a very fundamental level.

00:32:56.980 So part of it was an issue of compelled speech.

00:32:59.740 I have to use the terminology that you demand and you claim that it's only about your emotional

00:33:06.040 well-being and your identity.

00:33:07.780 But for me, it's part and parcel of a complete ideology.

00:33:10.900 And then there's also the, the smuggling in of a particular view of identity that I don't

00:33:19.200 believe has any credence whatsoever, because your identity is by no means only who you feel

00:33:24.280 that you are.

00:33:25.460 Your identity is a complex game that you negotiate with others.

00:33:29.500 And it's it, what it is exactly is very difficult to elucidate because it's central to the nature

00:33:35.880 of human existence, what your identity is.

00:33:38.120 But it's certainly not the simplistic group signifier that can be that, that you conveniently

00:33:46.400 hang your hat on, especially when you want to exercise arbitrary power over other people

00:33:50.880 without them noticing that that's what you're doing.

00:33:53.880 So I don't want to cede the language either.

00:33:56.600 And part of the discussion we can have today is, is just about exactly what the language

00:34:01.180 implies.

00:34:01.660 We could talk about systemic racism for a minute or two, if you don't mind, then we'll get

00:34:06.180 back to the Wall Street Journal story and sort of move biographically.

00:34:09.640 Yeah.

00:34:09.900 Yeah.

00:34:10.340 Yeah.

00:34:10.860 Well, so I've been thinking about the phrase systemic racism, and it's a very interesting

00:34:17.180 phrase because it's sort of systemic racism, systemic racism.

00:34:23.520 And you can't hear racism.

00:34:25.440 Well, it's important.

00:34:26.720 It's important.

00:34:27.460 You can't hear racism.

00:34:29.040 Like as soon as you hear racism, there's a, there's a moral issue, a major moral issue

00:34:33.500 at stake.

00:34:34.300 And the proposition essentially is if I come up to you and say, this is racist, I instantly

00:34:40.040 put you in a position where if you disagree with anything that I'm saying, you have to

00:34:44.940 defend yourself morally right to the basis of your soul, because it's such a terrible thing.

00:34:50.860 Arbitrary prejudice is such a terrible, devastating thing.

00:34:53.760 And virtually everyone recognizes that.

00:34:56.740 And so, and so there's a club that comes along with the use of the phrase right away.

00:35:01.480 And the club is, well, I'm on the right side of history here with my claim about opposing

00:35:08.420 this terrible, satanic, um, uh, uh, um, uh, an ethnocentric viewpoint.

00:35:17.240 And then I can say systemic.

00:35:19.440 And so I've been thinking about systemic.

00:35:21.320 Now, systemic means pervasive.

00:35:24.280 It means everywhere.

00:35:25.700 That's what systemic means.

00:35:26.940 It has its connotations and its, and its explicit meaning.

00:35:30.800 But it means that it's the central tendency of the system, let's say.

00:35:36.100 And that's just wrong.

00:35:38.180 The central tendency of functional Western social institutions is not racism.

00:35:44.300 The central tendency is something like cooperative endeavor towards productive ends.

00:35:50.080 And the aberration is deception and power and racism.

00:35:55.280 But the central tendency isn't that now.

00:35:58.160 And this is, this is the crucial issue here because systemic means central tendency.

00:36:03.900 And, and, and if you accept systemic, not only do you accept that the central tendency is

00:36:10.000 racist, let's say an exclusionary, and that also means in support of the privilege of certain

00:36:16.200 groups, because that's part and parcel of the entire argument, but you also accept the proposition

00:36:21.180 that the motivations that drive people to success in the systemically racist system also have

00:36:29.140 to be power and systemic racism, hence the use of tests like the implicit association test.

00:36:35.320 So not only are the institutions systemically racist, but the psychological motivations of

00:36:41.340 those who are striving to move forward within the systems are all of a sudden now, uh, tyrannical

00:36:46.820 power and systemic racism.

00:36:48.800 And all that's packed into that word systemic.

00:36:51.720 And it's just snuck in there because racism is so loud and so vicious and so horrible that

00:36:58.300 you're not allowed to object to anything that manifests itself within its vicinity.

00:37:03.040 It's unbelievably, what would you call it?

00:37:07.520 Well, it's propagandistic is probably the right word, but it just, it blows people out of the

00:37:13.200 water because they're hit with this racist issue.

00:37:15.480 And that just, you know, it rattles them up so badly ethically that they can't stand forward

00:37:20.520 and make a reasonable argument.

00:37:22.840 Well, I, there's, there's a ton there, Jordan.

00:37:25.340 I guess I would say that I think there is a way to acknowledge that, for example, this

00:37:33.280 country had, you know, in, in the way that let's say black Americans were deprived of,

00:37:41.140 of building generational wealth because they were deprived of loans.

00:37:44.680 They weren't allowed to buy homes or, you know, redlining or Jim Crow, or we could go all

00:37:49.940 the way back to 1619 or slavery.

00:37:53.120 I mean, Oh, we could go back a lot farther than that, but it, meaning it is true that

00:37:58.060 there were systems in America that were, I don't know what other word to say it systemically

00:38:05.760 racist.

00:38:06.940 Well, you wouldn't, you could say there were systems in America that were racist without

00:38:11.480 saying there were systems in America that were systemically racist.

00:38:14.700 There's no doubt whatsoever that arbitrary prejudice is a blight upon mankind and that

00:38:21.700 it manifests itself everywhere.

00:38:23.420 But it's not just arbitrary, right?

00:38:24.780 If you look just at one discreet example, like the drug war, the disparity between the punishment

00:38:30.300 in the 1980s, between being caught with crack and being caught with cocaine.

00:38:34.360 I don't know what else to call that.

00:38:36.600 You know that, but call it racist.

00:38:38.500 Sure, but that's not just whatever the word adjective you used before was, just before.

00:38:44.600 Well, it, this, we should argue about this a lot because it's the core point.

00:38:49.320 So it's a good idea to do this.

00:38:50.920 So there are definitely systematic manifestations of racism.

00:38:55.840 They inculcate themselves, let's say, into the legal system.

00:38:59.740 And some of them are more explicit and some of them are more implicit, but that's not the

00:39:03.740 issue.

00:39:04.060 The issue, or that, that's, yes, that's not the issue when you're talking about systemic

00:39:09.360 racism, because there's a tangle of claims in that term.

00:39:14.280 And so please do argue with me, okay?

00:39:16.660 Okay, so I think that we need to be able to acknowledge, I think, as you just did, what

00:39:22.360 I just said, and also see that the way that that phrase is being weaponized right now is

00:39:30.000 basically as an argument to tear down liberalism, America and the West.

00:39:35.260 Okay, okay.

00:39:35.940 So now, okay, so now we're starting to unpack that.

00:39:39.460 So we're, so we'll look at the issue of racism first.

00:39:43.560 Okay, so people are radically ethnocentric and that's a human universal.

00:39:48.980 Now we're, we have a tendency to trade with groups of people who aren't us and we will

00:39:53.760 investigate them and explore them.

00:39:55.320 But we're also not so much terrified of them because it's not exactly fear, but leery of

00:40:01.020 them.

00:40:01.640 And we're leery of them for all sorts of reasons.

00:40:03.660 One reason we're leery of them, I just talked to a great biologist whose name is going to

00:40:08.800 escape me momentarily.

00:40:10.520 He formulated the parasite stress theory of, of political belief.

00:40:15.260 And so one of the things he points out is that as isolated groups of human beings came

00:40:20.540 into contact with one another throughout our entire evolutionary history, we were able to

00:40:24.980 trade ideas and goods and that was greatly to our benefit, but we also traded infectious

00:40:30.080 agents and that killed us a lot.

00:40:32.620 And so we have this terrible tension at the base of our being between being open to what's

00:40:37.560 new and being killed by what's new.

00:40:40.280 And so that's part of what makes us ethnocentric.

00:40:43.120 It's not by any means the entire thing.

00:40:45.020 So, but we have this ethnocentrism built in as well as the desire to trade.

00:40:50.000 Slavery is a human universal.

00:40:52.060 It goes back as far back in time as you can, as you can possibly manage.

00:40:55.600 And so we can admit that all those things exist and we can admit that they're powerful

00:41:00.360 tendencies without having to take this next step, which is the one that you pointed to

00:41:04.960 by saying, well, that's the foundation of our institutions themselves.

00:41:10.140 Right.

00:41:10.480 And because of that, the institutions have to be torn down.

00:41:13.040 Rather than saying slavery has been with humanity for eons and the exceptional thing about America

00:41:19.140 is not that we had slavery, but that slavery was abolished.

00:41:23.020 Okay.

00:41:23.420 And I would say that's the exceptional thing about Britain, not America, because the Brits

00:41:28.480 did it first and they were, that's my understanding of the situation.

00:41:33.380 Now that doesn't take away from the American accomplishment or the Canadian accomplishment for that matter.

00:41:37.720 The systemic tendency is the eradication of slavery.

00:41:43.820 I'm simply saying that the thing that is being emphasized that I want to push back against

00:41:50.120 that often comes along with the use of the phrase systemic racism is the idea that because

00:41:57.700 the dead white men that created, that wrote the constitution or that came up with these enlightenment values or any number of other things that have allowed us to live in this exceptional, let's say, civilization, it's beyond just America,

00:42:15.880 that because of their moral hypocrisy, that somehow the things that they built are ill gotten and need to be sort of rooted out, torn down at the core.

00:42:31.820 And I fundamentally reject that view.

00:42:36.080 Okay, now why should I presume that your fear of, okay, you've just characterized the relationship between the idea of systemic racism with a bunch of other ideas.

00:42:47.780 Okay, so, right, the idea that there's a lot more to the story than the mere emphasis on systemic racism.

00:42:54.520 There's a belief that the institutions themselves, the fundamental institutions of the West, are corrupt right to their core.

00:43:02.220 That is the implication often of the people using the phrase, but I think one should be able to use the phrase without implying all of that.

00:43:12.100 Unfortunately, right now when you hear it, it tends to be that the things I just described come along with the use of that phrase.

00:43:19.300 A little bit like anti-racism.

00:43:21.420 Why are you convinced that your belief that the idea of systemic racism is associated with these other ideas is true?

00:43:29.680 Because I see it.

00:43:30.600 Tell me about that.

00:43:33.060 I mean, I don't know where to start.

00:43:35.560 I mean, that is...

00:43:36.580 I understand that.

00:43:38.140 So help push me toward what area you're most interested in.

00:43:41.420 Well, I agree with you.

00:43:43.260 I mean, the reason that I took the stance I took five years ago, which I've had plenty of time to think about, by the way, is because I saw the linkage between ideas.

00:43:52.640 I didn't believe that this was just what it appeared to be.

00:43:56.280 It was associated with an entire ideology, and the ideology seems to me to be, I'll lay out some of its features, and you can tell me if you think it is in accord with what you see.

00:44:06.700 That inequality of outcome is evidence of systemic discrimination, for example.

00:44:12.620 Yes, that would be, that inequality of outcome conveniently described for the purposes of justifying the ideology.

00:44:20.840 Yeah, let me describe how I, like some of the features of this ideology, and you tell me if you agree.

00:44:25.920 That inequality of outcome is necessarily a result of systemic discrimination or systemic bigotry.

00:44:32.900 Okay, and that's part of the equity issue.

00:44:36.400 Sure.

00:44:37.180 But again, that's another one of these words that's been hijacked.

00:44:40.520 I know.

00:44:41.200 Well, that's exactly why I brought it up, is because I've been talking to a group of people in L.A. who are liberals, on the left of me, I would say.

00:44:50.380 But, and we've been stuck on this issue of equity, because I've been insisting, for example, that it does mean it's a drive towards equality of outcome defined in exactly the manner that you describe.

00:45:01.160 And their insistence is, no, that's a view that only a minority of the people who are pushing the idea of equity hold.

00:45:08.300 Well, the majority of people that go along with, you know, equity, just think, I believe in fairness.

00:45:16.480 They're not thinking deeply about this.

00:45:18.580 It's like the person that says Black Lives Matter.

00:45:20.820 Well, of course, Black Lives Matter.

00:45:22.600 But if you look under the hood of what the organizations that are at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement believe, well, they believe in, you know, abolishing the nuclear family.

00:45:33.640 They believe in abolishing or defunding the police.

00:45:36.040 They believe that capitalism is evil.

00:45:38.860 I mean, they believe in all kinds of things.

00:45:40.500 But the majority of people that are saying or putting up a sign, Black Lives Matter, are saying racism is bad.

00:45:46.300 The majority of people that are saying, I believe in equity and diversity are saying, I believe in the dignity of difference.

00:45:51.520 And I believe in fairness.

00:45:52.540 And I believe in equality of opportunity.

00:45:55.440 So when the people in, these theoretical people in L.A., when they're saying that, is that what they mean?

00:46:00.340 Or do they mean something else?

00:46:02.180 No, they mean, they, I think what they mean is that the people who are pushing equity believe in equality of opportunity.

00:46:09.240 And they don't see the Trojan horse-ness.

00:46:13.060 Exactly right.

00:46:14.240 And these are reasonable people.

00:46:15.860 And they're not that happy with political correctness, I should also say.

00:46:20.360 So they're as reasonable a group as I can communicate with.

00:46:22.740 But I have to be honest, at this point, if you can't, if one can't see the way that this language has been hijacked and has been used as a kind of Trojan horse, brilliant, I should say, Trojan horse strategy to smuggle in a sort of hardened identity, you know, zero-sum identity politics view of the world.

00:46:46.980 To smuggle in a view of the world in which we either have collective guilt or collective innocence, literally based on the circumstances of our birth, that smuggle in a, you know, deeply anti-capitalist position, that smuggle in essentially, you know, a leftist liberalism, then I'm sorry, you have blinders on.

00:47:09.660 I, I, the evidence for this is so overwhelming at this point.

00:47:13.920 I'm really not sure how, like, if you, if you don't want, if you don't want to believe it, I think it's because the discomfort of believing it outweighs the, let me, let me say that again.

00:47:26.440 I think it's because that admitting that that's true and that that's what's happening is extremely psychologically scary.

00:47:34.020 And it's extremely socially scary if you were a liberal, because all of a sudden it means that these institutions and the, and let's just even say like the social world and the culture that you took for granted as being a certain thing and having certain qualities is no longer what it appears to be.

00:47:53.660 And that is the perfect segue to connect it back to the New York Times.

00:47:56.460 Yes. Okay. So let's do that. That, that I agree with you that let's do that now. So now you're at the wall street journal and, and you're, you're starting to write there.

00:48:05.360 Yeah. And let's just fast forward that I get to the New York times and suffice it to say that, you know, I, I was never popular.

00:48:12.460 Um, I had already published lots of things. I was known as, um, being a Zionist. I, I was known for, for, you know, views that put me outside of the, let's say the, the cool woke kids table.

00:48:26.880 What do you mean by you were never popular? You just, you glossed over that very rapidly.

00:48:31.520 Sure. There's an experience there.

00:48:33.420 There was a skepticism of me from the beginning, but I mean, it was the New York times. It's the most important journalistic platform in the world. And so I was more than willing to, um, put up with, you know, getting the cold shoulder from some of my colleagues because the, you, you, you can just can't overstate how powerful that distribution system is.

00:49:01.920 Much more so than the wall street journal. And it holds a certain position. I would say just not beyond America, you know, in, in, in, in the West. Um, and, and so I, I was loath to give that up and I would be willing and was willing to put up with a lot in order to cling to that position.

00:49:24.000 Well, how do you think people saw you? The, like, because they, they, they, they, they assumed they made a variety of assumptions about you and that was what was alienating. What is it that you represented or were in their eyes?

00:49:37.180 Heresy. Heresy. Someone who lived like them, went to the same restaurants as them, dated like them, um, you know, by all metrics should have agreed with them on every tenant of this new orthodoxy.

00:49:53.000 Right. So you're worse because of that. See, I just talked to, uh, Rima Azar, um, professor at Mount Ellison, who's, who's an Arab, um, immigrant to Canada, Lebanese.

00:50:06.860 And she just got hung out to dry by the pathetic cowards at her university.

00:50:12.060 For what was her sin?

00:50:13.940 She doesn't exactly know, but apparently it was something like incitement to sexual violence and also insistence that Canada isn't a systemically racist country.

00:50:22.440 And, and, and she wrote some of this in her blog, which she thought was mostly for distribution to her friends.

00:50:28.260 And anyways, uh, she, but she's a heretic like you are because she's female and she's an immigrant to Canada.

00:50:35.060 And so it's incumbent upon her to adopt the victimized identity that people like her should know is good for them.

00:50:43.820 And because she didn't, although in quite a minor way, she really literally doesn't know what her crime was.

00:50:49.920 She doesn't really know who her accusers were.

00:50:52.740 They suspended her without pay.

00:50:54.600 She's a tenured professor.

00:50:56.200 It's a worse case than the case in New York with Paul Rossi.

00:51:01.240 It's much worse.

00:51:02.360 It's quite stunning.

00:51:03.700 I mean, if you met her, you'd think really, this is the, she's the person that all these institutions was, were hypothetically designed to protect.

00:51:12.280 But if you think about it in a way, it makes sense that it's sort of the, the, the, the people at the edges that are more dangerous than the people across the street.

00:51:23.380 Because if what your goal is, is to reshape, let's say what it means to be liberal and progressive, which is what this is about.

00:51:30.740 And if your goal is to sort of remoralize people into that view of the world, then you need to make examples of people and sharpen the boundary of who is in the community of the righteous and the good.

00:51:46.580 And by making examples of people who don't go along with every part of it, because right, the point of the ostracisms and the point of what sounds like happened to this professor is to say, you know, it's not really about the person.

00:52:03.860 It's about sending a message to everyone watching it, that if you don't fall in line, if you don't conform, if you don't obey, this is what's going to happen to you.

00:52:13.120 And you, you better believe that that is an extraordinarily effective strategy.

00:52:18.320 Unbelievably so.

00:52:19.240 So, so I think what I, you know, what I saw at the New York times was, I guess, the only way to describe it is, is this kind of ideological, excuse me, ideological succession.

00:52:32.140 And it's not just a story about the New York times, it's a story about nature magazine, it's a story about Bloomberg, it's a story about Harvard, it's a story about the name, the institution, it's probably about that institution.

00:52:46.860 And so what's maddening, for someone who's seeing it, is that for most people on the outside, they're just saying, wait, it's the New York times, it has this like vested authority, it has the same font, it has the same

00:53:01.540 masthead. And you're telling me that really, the New York times is no longer the New York times. And that's exactly what I'm telling you. And it's

00:53:09.460 Yeah, and so then the question is, what is it?

00:53:12.380 Well, it's

00:53:13.540 Well, what it used to be, it basically is

00:53:18.660 if the old version of the New York times was supposed to be, you know, telling the truth without fear or favor, now it's something more like MSNBC in print, right?

00:53:30.220 If you look at Fox, you look at MSNBC, it's very easy to see what those things are. They're political heroine for their side.

00:53:39.260 That's increasingly what the New York times is. And you can really point I mean, you don't have to believe in, you know, an ideological conspiracy, to understand the push for that to be the new product, right?

00:53:56.860 Go back to the age before the internet, when the group that the New York times had to appease were the advertisers, that was who you had to fear pissing off. Well, now that advertising is basically a dead letter, who do you have to appeal to? You have to appeal to your subscribers. Those are the people that are paying the bills in the end of the day. And lo and behold, 95% might be 92%. But it's something along those lines of New York times subscribers identify as liberals progress.

00:54:26.840 or Democrats. So you better believe that in order to keep your subscribers, your readers, the people paying the bills happy, you have to give them what they want.

00:54:36.840 And so we just shouldn't be surprised anymore, that Fox is doing what it's doing. And that the New York Times is doing what it's doing. It's very good for business, it may not be good for democracy, but it's extremely good for business. And I think that the only reason that it's been harder work before, like if this is necessary to appease your consumer base, for example, I mean, you made a bit of a case there that it was the advertisers.

00:54:59.480 And you said that the advertisers in some sense now have been replaced by the direct consumer, and they're more arbitrary. But but it still begs the question, if the New York Times was a reasonable paper of record 20 years ago, or Time magazine, for that matter, it's quite shocking to look at a Time magazine from the 1970s, it's about a quarter of an inch thick, and it's all text, you know, it's a real magazine. And that's, of course, gone by the wayside.

00:55:25.480 But why did it work before? Why was there a market for, let's call it objective journalism, five years ago, or 10 years ago, and there isn't now?

00:55:34.240 Well, social media has a tremendous amount to do with it. I mean, because there's no longer what Martin Goury has called like secret knowledge. And for those who haven't read his book, The Revolt of the Public, it is the best description of everything that we are talking about.

00:55:50.680 You no longer need Walter Cronkite, or, you know, or the New York Times, for that matter, to tell you about the anti-Semitic attack that happened in West Hollywood the other night, because by the way, they're probably not going to cover it. All you need to do is follow the right accounts on Twitter.

00:56:04.480 And so when information becomes democratized, and you don't rely, let's put to the side, for example, the Times is excellent China coverage, or it's foreign policy coverage, where you really do need an enormous budget and people flying to the other side of the world, oftentimes infiltrating closed societies to tell you what is genuinely closed information.

00:56:26.880 But for by and large, let's say on domestic issues, and a number of and certainly style and opinion, you can just get that on the internet. And so what am I subscribing? What am I what is the reason to pay for the New York Times? So the reason for that has changed. It's no longer so that you can find out what happened in West LA the other night. Increasingly, increasingly, first of all, it's products like crosswords and cooking and documentaries and all these other things that are more like entertainment.

00:56:56.860 entertainment. But it's also to rah rah for your team. That's that's another enormous reason for it. And I'll just add one more thing about Twitter. I just, you cannot overstate the effect that social media has on editors and reporters. You know, they are people like anyone else. And you know, very well, Jordan, as I do, how bad it feels to get dragged and slandered on on social media, by often, you know, thousands of people,

00:57:26.860 people and you and if you know that in advance, and you know, that writing about a certain topic, or writing about a topic that's ugly or writing about a topic that has a perspective that the majority of your followers or the subscribers to your paper don't agree with.

00:57:41.860 It's like, it's like, you don't need to be told don't write about it. You talk yourself out of it. Because you don't want to experience that punishment. Why is it worth it? Why should I die on that hill? It's easier to commission the 5000th op ed about why Donald Trump is is horrendous. And so every incentive just pushes you in that direction. The social incentive, both social online, but social in your real life. And the economic incentive. And the economic incentive.

00:58:10.860 And frankly, frankly, the incentive of the people that you're literally surrounded by. And so resisting all of those forces is extremely difficult. The only way that it becomes, it's like the only way it becomes possible is if you know, that the people who are running the paper, and the people that are in charge, and the people who are in the end of the day, writing your paycheck, believe in that mission, that goes against those incentives and supports you.

00:58:37.860 And once that falls away, and once you see, as I did, that you could no longer rely on those people to support, and sort of defend you in court, including against other colleagues at the paper, then you just knew that you weren't going to be protected anymore.

00:58:52.860 Okay, so I want to split this now into two, I want to continue with the biographical, you are you were Yes, absolutely. I want to continue with the biographical, but I want to go back to the to the propagandistic issue too. Because there's still something that we haven't explored. So you and and I, in this discussion have fleshed out this structure of ideas that's lurking behind the claim of sustainability.

00:59:20.860 Working behind the claim of systemic racism, we haven't done that thoroughly, but we've done it to some degree, we've linked it with such things as propagandistic education and tried to contrast that with the genuine exploration of ideas. But what we haven't touched on, and something that's quite mysterious to me is, well, what's driving this? Like what's in it for the people who are pushing the critical race theories?

00:59:44.640 Well, it's, it's strange, though, because they're the proposition that is being put forth by people who hold these theories is that it's power that's fundamentally driving all social institutions. And then that's the fundamental manifestation of human ambition.

01:00:01.200 And so but then to turn around and say, well, it's power that's driving the ideology seems to be adopting their theoretical stance to criticize their theoretical stance. It's like, I still don't get it.

01:00:12.640 Like, well, let's let's let's give them let's try and steel man their argument, right? The idea that, you know, for all of human history, up until five minutes ago, that people like you were at the top of the, let's call it the caste system. And, you know, a black transgender disabled person is at the very bottom.

01:00:34.640 There is an understandable impulse to say, let's remedy that. Like, you've had your day in the sun, Jordan. So is Brad Pitt and, you know, Jon Hamm, and all of the other cisgendered white males.

01:00:47.780 And let's give a chance and elevate voices who historically, let's be honest, have been kept out of the pages of The New York Times. You think that 70 years ago, I would have been able to walk into The New York Times wearing a Jewish star?

01:01:00.980 Oh, I would have taken it off before I walked in. So there there is there is.

01:01:05.780 Right. But but you could now, except perversely and perversely, you couldn't for any length of time because of the of the of the influence of the ideas that we're describing.

01:01:17.340 Well, OK, so you made a steel man argument there. So I would I would first say, well, let's take it apart carefully.

01:01:23.640 All throughout history, those who have shared some of my immutable characteristics have had a higher probability of attaining positions of status.

01:01:34.240 But those positions can't be confused only with positions of power, because status is about much more than power.

01:01:41.840 And when systems are working properly, status is conferred upon people because they're productive and generous and cooperative and useful, not because they're arbitrary holders of tyrannical power.

01:01:53.160 And that's so true that it's not just true for human beings. It's also true for our nearest non-human relatives like chimpanzees who are often parodied as power mad.

01:02:03.280 But if you do the analysis there, you see that it's reciprocity that keeps even chimpanzee social organizations going.

01:02:10.040 So there's the first thing is that it was not merely the arbitrary bestowal of power.

01:02:16.140 And the second thing is, is that merely possessing those immutable characteristics was in in no way a certain avenue to the top because of course, throw his right.

01:02:26.180 But these these of course, it wasn't certain.

01:02:28.800 But the point is, is that if you didn't have those qualities, you weren't even allowed to enter the race.

01:02:32.740 That's the point. No, I'm just trying to understand, like, what is drawing people to these ideas?

01:02:41.440 OK, good hearted, well-intentioned people.

01:02:44.740 And I believe that the thing that is drawing them to these ideas is a sense of historical repair, is a sense of justice, is a sense.

01:02:58.300 Well, oh, fair. OK, fair. Look, fair enough. And I mean, it's not like the reason I think the reason I think it's important to understand what's drawing people to these ideas is because I want to defeat these ideas.

01:03:10.420 Why?

01:03:11.600 Because I believe they are fundamentally illiberal and because I do not believe in a world of caste.

01:03:17.720 I believe that we should be fighting for a world in which there isn't a caste system, not where we reverse a caste system.

01:03:24.460 OK, well, then I would say that the systems that have privileged people like me in the past are also the same systems for whatever reasons that have, in fact, led to the freeing of the people who weren't allowed to play the game increasingly across time.

01:03:42.560 And that that's a universal truth, not a particular truth.

01:03:45.620 And that and that's the point, right?

01:03:47.860 Well, and you accept that argument. You accept that argument. And so then then we have another problem here, Barry, still, which is you you're making the case that well-meaning people want this.

01:03:58.140 And I understand your point. And it's not like I don't feel for the dispossessed, you know, and grasp the argument.

01:04:06.140 But my sense is, is that the very institutions that are under assault by people who purport to be standing up for the dispossessed are, in fact, the best antidote to that dispossession that the world has ever produced.

01:04:19.960 And it seems to me that if you don't see that, then you have blinders on.

01:04:24.020 And if you have those blinders on, then the question is, why are you more interested in tearing down than in building up?

01:04:30.360 Let me tell you a brief story.

01:04:31.820 OK, and you tell me what you think of this. I had this debate with Slavoj Zizek and in the beginning of the debate, which it was a strange debate because he basically declared himself not a Marxist, even though that was what the debate was about.

01:04:44.740 And I say that with all due regard for Zizek, who was very kind to me when I was ill and who seems like a fine person.

01:04:51.260 And so this is not an ad hominem attack at all. People are complicated.

01:04:54.960 And it was a delight, actually, to have the debate with him.

01:04:58.400 But in any case, I started the debate with a 15 minute critique of of the Communist Manifesto.

01:05:04.620 And at one point I said it was a call to bloody violent revolution.

01:05:09.060 And the crowd cheered and laughed for about three seconds and a substantial maybe 10 percent of the crowd.

01:05:18.360 And so there were a lot of people there who were on the radical end of the Marxist distribution and they had come to hear their purported champion, you know, give me a good stomping.

01:05:26.800 But it was so interesting, especially for someone who's psychoanalytically minded, because it was a great Freudian slip.

01:05:33.960 I thought it put me back for about 10 seconds because I thought, really, you sons of bitches, you cheered violent, bloody revolution, knowing full well what happened over the course of the 20th century with all the absolutely catastrophic horrors that laid out as a consequence of Marxist ideas.

01:05:52.400 Because you're hidden by the crowd. You can let your laughter, you can let your resentment, your desire for nothing but upheaval manifest itself because it's invisible.

01:06:02.400 But it wasn't invisible because there were thousands of people there. And so they laughed away about bloody violent revolution.

01:06:08.740 And so on the one hand, and then I've been talking to people.

01:06:11.500 I talked to Stephen Blackwood this week, who's who's starting a college designed to teach people liberal arts again.

01:06:18.240 Yes, I heard about that. Yeah.

01:06:18.820 Well, and you know, he insisted that people are always pursuing the good. And I've a number of people on my show have insisted that well, that that even if it's warped and twisted in some it's it's analogous to the argument that you were making.

01:06:31.840 And this isn't a criticism of you. You know, you said, look, you can see why these ideas are so attractive.

01:06:37.880 I know you are. I know you are. And I'm not going after your argument. I'm just trying to elaborate it.

01:06:43.440 You know, there is this concern for the dispossessed. And that's what gives the radicals the moral high ground.

01:06:51.200 So often we're concerned for the dispossessed. Aren't you? It's like, well, yes, as a matter of fact, we are.

01:06:57.060 And so they start out these the wielders of these ideas start out with a moral advantage.

01:07:03.780 Yeah. But the evidence seems to suggest that the very systems they're attempting to tear down are, in fact, the best antidote to the problems that they're laying out.

01:07:14.960 So then the question pops up again. So if that's the case, why the hell is there so much force behind the ideas?

01:07:22.380 What's driving it? And it's it's associated with that laughter at the thought of violent, bloody revolution.

01:07:28.020 Because we're so removed from violent, bloody revolution.

01:07:32.540 That's why there's it like the it's a luxury to flirt with these ideas.

01:07:40.060 It's that's a good that's a really good that's a really good idea.

01:07:42.940 If you think if you are so if you take the fact, let's just take an example that I can, you know, I'm not wearing long sleeves.

01:07:53.780 You could see my collarbone and that I can walk down the street here with my wife and go get a falafel at the end of the street and not be stoned to death.

01:08:03.580 OK, like that's a reality. That's a miracle.

01:08:07.620 That's right. And that's what divides people is whether or not they know that's a miracle.

01:08:11.860 Yes. And if you are so removed from the truth of that miracle and from gratitude for everyone and every idea, every piece of scaffolding that allows for that to be that my reality, then you will have the foolishness.

01:08:30.380 But it's really the luxury and the decadence to flirt with ideas about doing away with it.

01:08:37.760 And I just I don't know why some people feel like I'm going to steal.

01:08:43.100 I don't know why I feel man. I'm just going to say I was going to say one thing.

01:08:47.780 OK, I am so curious about why certain people feel in their bones how thin the veneer of civilization is and why other people are so nonchalant about it.

01:09:01.800 And I feel that's a psychological question, but I don't know it.

01:09:05.820 I don't know either. I don't know either.

01:09:07.560 You know, when I was in graduate school, I was obsessed with the finitude of life and with mortality and death.

01:09:13.020 I mean, I wake up every morning and think there's no time. Get to it now.

01:09:17.460 And I had friends who I would say were more well adjusted than me.

01:09:21.220 That's certainly part of it. Like they were more emotionally stable, technically speaking, less prone to depression and anxiety.

01:09:27.220 So that's part of it. And they it was that those ideas never entered the theater of their imagination.

01:09:33.720 Right. They just weren't a set of existential problems for them.

01:09:37.860 For me, it's always been paramount. And I very I read.

01:09:43.080 Oh, I can't. He worked for The New York Times, too, a great journalist.

01:09:47.080 He wrote of. But I can't remember the book.

01:09:49.300 Anyways, he had spent a lot of time in Beirut during the catastrophes in Beirut.

01:09:55.080 And then he talked about going to a baseball game in the United States.

01:10:00.580 Right. And he was at these baseball game with all these people who were sitting there doing what people do at baseball games, chat nonchalantly, drink a bit of beer, have a hot dog.

01:10:09.540 It's like I went to a I've hardly gone to any baseball games.

01:10:12.480 And I went to one in Boston and I was thinking, Jesus, this is boring.

01:10:16.720 Nothing's happening. Why are people here? Don't they have something better to do?

01:10:20.500 And then I started to look around and I thought, oh, I see. I'm so wrong.

01:10:26.280 They're here because this is nothing to do. It's just leisure.

01:10:30.980 It's like you don't really have to pay it.

01:10:33.680 But it's deeper. It's channeling those human forces that want us to go into tribal warfare and putting it into supporting the Red Sox or the Yankees.

01:10:45.520 Right, right.

01:10:46.060 Which is a miracle.

01:10:46.960 It's a miracle. Yes, that's exactly. But the whole thing is a miracle is that we can go out there and play out these tribal antagonisms at a completely peaceful level and sit there and and and and and have it be benevolent and calm.

01:11:01.820 And then I realized, well, people do this for leisure. That's why they're doing this.

01:11:05.600 Listen, you're the idiot, not them. But but the commentator, the author, he had a hard time going to baseball games after he had been in Beirut because the thinness of the veneer was always apparent to him after that, because he couldn't drive across the city without being stopped by armed gangs constantly.

01:11:23.680 And I guess it's also maybe to some degree, whether your view of humanity tilts more towards Hobbes or more towards Rousseau, you know, and I like to think of myself as balanced between the two, because I think people do do do have the capacity for good.

01:11:39.440 And that, you know, it's not a war against all in the state of nature. But I certainly am sensitive to the state of nature argument.

01:11:47.560 It is always a miracle to me when I go outside and there isn't a riot in the streets. And I do think it's a thin veneer and we have to be very careful with it.

01:11:54.940 So Dostoevsky said in Notes from the Underground, one of the most insightful passages there, sections, talks about the flaws in utopian thinking.

01:12:07.020 He said, well, people are constituted such that if you provided them with utopia, the first thing they would do is break it to pieces just so that something interesting would happen, so that they could have their own capricious way.

01:12:20.180 And that's very much akin to the argument that you're making, the luxury argument. And so then there's a there's another problem there that we could delve into that I I've talked about with the sort of rational optimist types like Matt Ridley and Bjorn Lomberg and so on, is that we offer young people this luxury that produces the kind of decadence that you're describing.

01:12:43.160 But what they're deprived of is the opportunity for romantic adventure. And so part of the positive thing that's driving them to shatter the veneer is the desire for something more than, you know, the calm.

01:12:56.020 Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's a yes. I, I, I completely agree with you. Yeah. It's a desire for it's a desire for meaning. Yeah. Meaning. And, you know, this is something we could talk about this for a long time, but I think that there is a reckoning that that needs to be had with, you know, the new atheists or what was called the new atheists in a group.

01:13:20.800 Yes. I've been having that reckoning. So why do you say that?

01:13:24.580 Well, only because one, let me back up into it this way. When I look at the qualities of the people who have the strength and the fortitude to not go along with the crowd and to be willing to be slandered and to sacrifice for the stake of resisting this illiberalism, almost all of them are religious in some way or another.

01:13:48.760 Almost all of them were deeply, deeply anchored. I would say to, I don't want to say spirituality, but like local, something deeper is rooting them.

01:14:00.580 That's what Solzhenitsyn said against the, about the people he met in the gulag who could, who could stand up to the, to the, to the Soviets.

01:14:07.880 And I think that's the thing I'm finding again and again now, as I'm sort of making my way through all of these different sectors of life, reporting on the spread of this ideology, who's willing to talk to me, who's willing to speak up.

01:14:19.380 And one of the things that I don't necessarily think that, that the atheist group, you know, who I admire on a lot of levels that they maybe couldn't have foreseen is that robbing people of that religious impulse, both sort of soften the ground for the rise of this deeply illiberal ideology that functions in many ways,

01:14:43.380 like a new religion. And also ham, like it just deprived it in a way it's deeply connected, I think, to the rise of this new orthodoxy.

01:14:53.380 So I've been thinking about the idea of, of rendering unto Caesar, what is Caesar's and rendering unto God, what is God's.

01:15:02.200 And it seems to me that if we blur the distinction between God and Caesar, then Caesar becomes God.

01:15:11.140 It's not that we dispense with God. That's the thing. And that's, that's what's at the core.

01:15:16.760 That's what's wrong with the new atheist hypothesis is that.

01:15:19.380 So imagine just psychologically that we have a drive towards ethical unity and that would be the same force that drives us towards a monotheism, right?

01:15:28.200 The idea that all is one is that there has to be a unifying spirit that animates and unites all of our ethical strivings.

01:15:36.120 And, and we picture that in all sorts of different ways, but it tilts in this monotheistic direction.

01:15:41.080 And so that becomes a transcendent value and it's the value, the transcendent value from which we derive our notions of sovereignty and individual worth and natural law and all of that.

01:15:50.460 But it's a psych, it's a psychological necessity.

01:15:52.820 I would say that rises from the requirement that we build our ethical systems in a manner that's internally non-contradictory because that drives them towards a unity.

01:16:03.700 Well, and then we have to worship that unity or we worship something else that approximates it.

01:16:09.800 And that would be one of these totalizing systems that, you know, that you discussed where instead of there being God who's mysterious and who we can't understand and who we have some relationship with that we can't specify and whom we have to struggle with,

01:16:22.460 because that's the meaning of the term Israel, right? To struggle with God.

01:16:26.220 We replace it with an idol. We replace it with an idol that has exactly the same totalizing impulse, but lacks all the advantages of that, of that transcendent that can't be identified with us.

01:16:39.500 That's the thing is that, you know, if Stalin doesn't have God, then Stalin is God.

01:16:44.960 And that's not, that's, and that seems to me to be somewhat independent of whether or not there is a God, which is, that's a different issue, right?

01:16:53.660 The metaphysical reality of that unity is a different issue than the psychological necessity of that unity.

01:17:00.300 And I do think the new atheists, I mean, they're getting hoist on their own petard to some degree.

01:17:04.600 You see what's happened to Dawkins in the last couple of months, stripped, stripped of his award by the humanists because he dared to challenge this rising religious orthodoxy.

01:17:14.260 And I do think it is that. And so now I want to switch a little bit here.

01:17:18.960 So, and talk about your column you talked about, you just showed it to me, but I had to come across it before.

01:17:25.760 It's a call to what people need to do in order to resist this totalizing propaganda, let's call it.

01:17:35.320 And we've started to explore the reasons for its existence.

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01:20:23.720 Now, the reason I want to bring it up is because we've also been making the case that people do need something like a romantic adventure.

01:20:36.900 And toying with catastrophe at the fringes provides that romantic adventure, right?

01:20:43.940 Because you're jousting with the dragon at that edge.

01:20:47.880 You can understand, if you have any sense, if you can remember what it was like to be a teenager at all, you can understand how exciting it would be.

01:20:55.820 Yes, well, that's for sure and confusing.

01:20:57.740 But you could also understand how it's exciting to go to a riot and then to sit and drink a few beer afterwards and to talk about the incredible excitement that that generated.

01:21:08.040 And especially if that's bolstered by your sense that you're on the moral frontier.

01:21:12.380 Now, you have had an adventure.

01:21:16.480 And your adventure, at least in principle, was a consequence of telling the truth.

01:21:22.320 And that, to me, is the replacement for that romantic adventure, is that if you embody the truth in your own life, you have that romantic adventure.

01:21:30.180 And the thing you straighten out is you, not other people.

01:21:33.880 So you don't get to have an enemy under those conditions.

01:21:37.220 And so you have a call in your column to, and I explored this as well with Paul Rossi, who stood up against, you know, the incursion of the politically correct agenda into his classrooms.

01:21:49.680 So let's go back to the New York Times.

01:21:52.300 Now, you're trying to, I presume, you're trying to explore the truth, to tell the truth.

01:21:56.940 What are you doing as a journalist?

01:21:59.200 I mean, all kinds of things.

01:22:00.580 I would say the thing that got me the most national attention in the beginning were some columns that I wrote that I think subsequently have definitely become the commonsensical position, the most on me too.

01:22:14.000 So the biggest one was this piece that I wrote about Aziz Ansari, and I wrote a piece about called The Limits of Believe All Women.

01:22:21.040 And it was basically saying, you know, we should just never, it's trust but verify, and that someone's gender shouldn't determine whether or not what they're saying is true.

01:22:33.100 It seemed to me a very basic point, but it caused a lot of controversy.

01:22:37.520 And, you know, but I did lots of different pieces.

01:22:39.880 I did pieces, I wrote that piece about the intellectual dark web, of course.

01:22:42.600 I did deep features, you know, like one on the City of David, which is the most important archaeological dig in Jerusalem that tells us a lot about what Jerusalem used to be and says a lot about its future, all kinds of stories.

01:22:55.700 But the thing that I love doing more than writing was commissioning pieces that other people didn't agree with and working with writers.

01:23:05.680 I mean, there's nothing that I love more than commissioning and editing, and that's still the case, and I'm doing a lot of that on my sub stack.

01:23:11.140 Why do you love that?

01:23:12.720 What is it about it when it's working right?

01:23:16.160 Helping someone, first of all, like if you've never published before, and then you get to be read by people in the world, like go back in your mind if you can to the first time that that happens.

01:23:27.820 That happened for you maybe in your own life.

01:23:29.800 It's extremely exciting, the experience of that, and getting to engage with the reader.

01:23:36.160 Why do you think that's so exciting?

01:23:38.580 And you're making the case that you were opening up that avenue of opportunity to other people.

01:23:42.880 Well, I was.

01:23:43.800 Okay, so I want to comment on that a little bit, briefly, and then go back to, let me just say this one thing here.

01:23:52.900 Yeah, I was going to give you an example of, I remember, I interviewed someone, I was, there were kind of panels of people that would interview new hires, and I was brought in, as I always was, as the kind of intellectual diversity person.

01:24:09.160 And it really struck me, because the first thing that this candidate, to be an op-ed editor, the first thing she said to me was, I don't know how you can edit op-eds from people you disagree with.

01:24:18.780 And I said, that's kind of the point of the job here.

01:24:23.640 And it's fun, because it, not only for the pleasures, the personal pleasures of helping someone find their voice and articulate what they want to say in the most clear and powerful way possible.

01:24:35.760 But why is that a pleasure?

01:24:37.180 Why is that a pleasure?

01:24:38.680 I don't know, why is like going for a swim in the sunshine a pleasure?

01:24:41.500 No, no, no, this is more, this is a more crucial point.

01:24:44.220 I'll tell you why.

01:24:45.320 Because one of, I've been thinking very hard about this proposition that our social institutions are predicated on power.

01:24:52.240 And power implies aggressive exploitation.

01:24:55.020 That implies forcing people to do things that are against their will.

01:24:58.220 And the proposition that our social institutions are predicated on power implies that there is pleasure, substantial pleasure, in forcing people to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do against their will.

01:25:11.820 Now, what I've seen instead in the functional institutions that I've been associated with is that the best people are fundamentally motivated by exactly what you just said.

01:25:21.580 And that's why I'm honing in on it, which is that there's something unbelievably intrinsically pleasurable.

01:25:27.900 And now what you said about helping people find their voice and expressing themselves in the clearest possible terms.

01:25:33.820 And that doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not.

01:25:36.660 And you love that.

01:25:38.420 And that's, you see, yes, yes.

01:25:40.840 Well, that is the opposite of power.

01:25:43.520 It's not just that it isn't that power manifests itself in these institutions.

01:25:48.220 It's that when they're running properly, it's the very opposite of power.

01:25:52.540 It's the opening up of the possibility of creative expression for others.

01:25:56.080 And we take tremendous pleasure in that.

01:25:58.780 I don't think there's a more fundamental human pleasure than that.

01:26:02.140 A deeper, more fundamental pleasure.

01:26:08.500 Yeah.

01:26:09.120 And then you think, you think so odd, it's so odd because you focused on this anecdote.

01:26:13.580 How can you do that even for people that you disagree with?

01:26:16.720 Well, it turns out that the pleasure of opening up the possibility of expressing the ideas, the thoughts, the pleasure in that is so intense that you'll even take the hit to your own beliefs in order to engage in it.

01:26:30.040 And it also, there's a selfish aspect of it, too, which is that it sharpens your own beliefs.

01:26:34.820 It sharpens them to encounter and actually to help someone with the opposite beliefs, articulate them in the most powerful way possible, forces you to confront your own.

01:26:47.520 And I think that I take a lot of pleasure in that.

01:26:51.200 I mean, it's the kind of pleasure of like going for a run.

01:26:54.500 You know, it's maybe not like an immediate it's it's it's different than than licking an ice cream cone, but it's a deeper kind of pleasure in a way.

01:27:03.820 And I thought, well, I think that would be the same that would be allied with the same motivation, because imagine that if part of what's giving you pleasure is the ability to foster the capacity of other people to communicate, to formulate their ideas and communicate while you're doing that.

01:27:21.380 You're also fostering that within yourself by, you know, putting yourself to the test constantly.

01:27:26.800 Well, it's a it's a repetition of the same fundamental motivation.

01:27:30.720 And so it seems to me that when when our social institutions are functioning properly, then the basis of the relationship between individuals within it at different levels of the hierarchy is actually one of broadened.

01:27:44.580 It's more like parenthood than it is like the expression of power.

01:27:47.740 Well, what I'm expressing, though, is like so old fashioned, like, you know, it's not necessarily a general it's largely a generational divide.

01:27:57.000 It doesn't always break down along those lines.

01:27:58.660 But I would say for the younger generation of people who don't believe, let's say, in journalism is.

01:28:05.660 Like, embodying the values I just described, exploratory and hearing the other perspective and trying, in fact, to make it as strong as it possibly can be, hearing the other person in good faith, all of those things that are like fundamental to the liberal worldview.

01:28:24.300 They don't believe that they believe in journalism as a tool.

01:28:28.800 And why?

01:28:29.520 Why do they believe that?

01:28:30.800 Now, is that a consequence of their education?

01:28:32.760 Yeah, it's completely connected to the ideas that I was describing, encountering when I was a student at Columbia or that Yonmi Park described to you.

01:28:40.900 You know, it turns out that the there was an idea until extremely recently that was shared by conservatives and liberals in your generation.

01:28:49.420 I would say that what happened on largely what happens on campus stays on campus.

01:28:55.360 The Oberlin gender studies major will make her way into the universe and she'll get her job at McKinsey and she's going to leave those silly ideas behind.

01:29:02.440 No, no, that is not what's happened.

01:29:04.500 It turns out ideas really, really matter.

01:29:07.300 Ideas are extremely serious.

01:29:08.700 And if you're marinating the most important formative years of your life in basically an echo chamber of this ideology and that all of a sudden you're going into these institutions, incredibly important institutions that are our newspapers, our publishing houses, our Hollywood, like go go down the line.

01:29:30.660 It's not like you're leaving, checking those ideas at the door, you're bringing them with you.

01:29:34.940 And what we've seen is that you don't actually need a majority of people inside an institution to agree with these ideas for these ideas to gain moral for these ideas to gain force.

01:29:45.020 No, you need a tiny minority, a tiny minority.

01:29:47.440 And you need cowardice at the top, cowardice at the top.

01:29:50.380 That is the key ingredient.

01:29:51.960 You need people at the top who are willing to sell out the authority of the institution and the values of the institution that have taken decades, sometimes centuries to accrue, basically for the short-term benefit of not being called a bad name.

01:30:15.180 Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit.

01:30:17.000 Okay, because that's actually pretty bloody awful, as it turns out.

01:30:21.420 You know, I mean, we don't want to, look, here's what I've learned in the last five years.

01:30:26.560 One thing I've learned is that most people will shut up very rapidly and apologize when attacked.

01:30:31.100 And a very small minority won't.

01:30:33.280 Why is that?

01:30:34.360 Well, because it's so horrible to be attacked.

01:30:37.480 And not only that, because it's so horrible to be attacked, but also because if you're a sensible person and you get attacked, the right thing to think to begin with is maybe you're stupid and wrong.

01:30:48.580 Yes, exactly.

01:30:49.920 Of course.

01:30:50.500 Exactly.

01:30:50.900 Well, it's not only natural, it's even beneficial, right?

01:30:56.380 I mean, because you want to be reactive to your social surround.

01:31:00.660 And so then the question becomes, well, the first question is, why stick your neck out at all when the cost of sticking your neck out is like extraordinarily high?

01:31:09.540 Yeah.

01:31:09.740 Both psychologically and practically, which it's certain, even if you stick your neck out accidentally, which you, so.

01:31:16.440 Because it's never, I guess, because it's, because there are things that are, and I don't know how to say this without sounding cheesy, but like there are virtues that are so much more important than getting ratioed on Twitter.

01:31:33.260 There just are, there are, again, without sounding too high-minded, if you can get in touch with things that are, that you're willing to risk your life for, or let's say risk your reputation for, it's only then will you be able to withstand the pain of the lies and the slander.

01:31:56.200 Okay, so what are you going to, what, what, you gave up your job at the New York Times.

01:32:02.620 I'm going to return to this point you just made.

01:32:04.900 I want to run through the biography again.

01:32:06.600 Now, you're working at the New York Times.

01:32:07.980 You're not the world's most popular person there.

01:32:10.440 No.

01:32:10.500 So you're, you're, you're paying a price.

01:32:12.040 Now, you can obviously tolerate that.

01:32:13.980 You're constitutionally built so that you can tolerate that.

01:32:17.000 I think that, I'm not an expert in this subject, but I think that I would qualify as highly disagreeable.

01:32:23.900 Yes.

01:32:24.280 According to your definition.

01:32:25.420 Although, it's hard for me to say that because I really care what other people think about me.

01:32:30.060 Yeah, well, you might be low, high, and you should take my personality test and find out.

01:32:34.360 Okay, I'll take it.

01:32:34.980 I suspect, I suspect you're low in politeness and high in compassion.

01:32:39.920 That splits, that splits agreeableness, eh?

01:32:42.400 Because then you would care for other people, but you'd still be willing to say what you have to say.

01:32:48.660 I suspect that's, and I also suspect you're probably pretty high in conscientiousness and openness.

01:32:53.380 And that makes you a weird political animal because openness tilts you in a liberal direction,

01:32:57.980 but conscientiousness tilts you in a conservative direction.

01:33:02.240 But it'd be worth taking the test to find out.

01:33:04.140 I'll take it.

01:33:04.740 In general, I'd never take personality test.

01:33:08.420 I don't know what my Myers-Briggs is either, but I will take it.

01:33:11.420 I guess it's a longer conversation, but the question of how to incentivize,

01:33:19.320 like, I'm obsessed with the idea of courage and what makes people courageous

01:33:24.800 or what makes people willing to be Natan Sharansky or be Andrei Sakharov.

01:33:31.260 Like, what is it?

01:33:32.580 I think it's fear of God.

01:33:35.360 Yeah.

01:33:35.780 You know, they say that's the beginning of wisdom.

01:33:37.680 Well, I kind of, I mean that, I mean that genuinely, but also metaphorically.

01:33:43.840 A lot of courage, I think, is being afraid of the right thing.

01:33:47.940 Like, I don't think it was courage that drove me to do what I did five years ago in Canada.

01:33:52.800 I think it was fear of what was coming as an alternative.

01:33:56.460 I could see it.

01:33:57.520 It was like, well, there's a little beast here that I could tackle, or there's a great huge beast that's lumbering forward in the distance.

01:34:04.080 But why are so many people diluting themselves into thinking that if they just, like, keep quiet about any number of the issues we're talking about,

01:34:14.280 that it will somehow get easier to speak out later?

01:34:18.440 Like, this is going to be the easiest time right now.

01:34:21.980 Yeah, well, that's the thing.

01:34:22.980 I don't know how, I don't know what the conditions are for learning that.

01:34:26.680 You see, that's one thing.

01:34:27.980 I kind of, I think I've sort of known that for a long, long time, that the time to have the fight is now.

01:34:36.260 For me, I think being deeply connected to Jewish history and feeling like it's not just history, but it's like a compass in my life.

01:34:52.840 And that I am deeply obligated to its lessons and deeply obligated to all of the people who suffered and sacrificed so that I can live in the freedom and the privilege that I have.

01:35:09.740 Like, that's my anchoring thing.

01:35:12.380 And it just, I'm interested in how do we incentivize more people to see what this is and to sort of come out of the closet?

01:35:25.960 Because the thing that is, like, so fascinating to me about this strange phenomenon is, like, by any measure, we're living in the freest societies that human beings have ever known.

01:35:39.420 And they're rapidly improving.

01:35:40.880 Yes, and that people are acting as if, and for very understandable reasons, like we're living in a totalitarian society to some degree, meaning they are double thinking.

01:35:52.160 They are living lives in which they have a private persona, and they will tell me in private at dinner, totally agree with you, but I could never say it out loud.

01:36:03.340 Like, that phenomenon to me is so unbelievably widespread.

01:36:08.500 Yeah, well, that's the state, well, that is the indication of the dawning of the totalitarian state, because the totalitarian state depends entirely on the dissociation between the public persona and the private viewpoint.

01:36:24.240 And to the degree that each person is willing to swallow that lie, that's their contribution to the totalitarian state.

01:36:32.560 And so it is a requirement.

01:36:33.720 It's interesting that you, you know, you pose your moral obligation in terms of your responsibility to, at least in part, to Jewish history.

01:36:41.280 Well, and the fact that so many times people didn't say what they needed to say and the consequences were absolutely catastrophic, I mean, that's certainly the case in Nazi Germany, to say the least.

01:36:53.360 But it also characterized the Stalinists and the Maoists and all of those totalitarian states.

01:37:00.040 I mean, if people, people need to realize that if they're in a position where they can't say what they think, that that's the evidence that we're sliding in a direction that's not good.

01:37:09.640 It's there's the evidence.

01:37:10.820 It's right there.

01:37:11.360 And what do you do about that?

01:37:12.340 Well, you say what you think carefully.

01:37:14.960 And the reason for that is the, the alternative is worse.

01:37:19.180 That's, that's the, I also think that it was really hard for me to give up the prestige of work.

01:37:29.260 God, I bet.

01:37:30.220 I want to, I want to hear about that.

01:37:31.880 It was really hard for me.

01:37:32.880 And, but I think that like putting myself, like have the fact that I had already put myself on the hook so publicly for standing up for certain values made it impossible for me not to follow through with doing the right thing.

01:37:49.780 It's a little bit like when I wanted to run the marathon, like I insanely, cause I can't run a half a mile right now, but years ago I ran the New York city marathon, having never been a runner in my life.

01:37:59.360 And the way that I did that was I told everyone in my life, I'm running a marathon before I'd even run a step and the pressure to sort of follow through with what I had publicly stated was very good because it forced me to do it.

01:38:11.700 And I guess what I would say to Nietzsche said, every great man is the actor of his own ideal.

01:38:18.100 Well, yeah, I guess what I would say to people listening to this is like, put yourself on the hook now in front of people that you respect and admire and maybe even do it in a public way.

01:38:28.040 Because then when the testing time comes, it's very embarrassing not to follow through with, with living by your ideals.

01:38:35.920 Well, and let's say, well, the testing time isn't going to come and we're just overstating the danger because that's the, that's the rationale, right?

01:38:43.500 That's the rationale.

01:38:45.380 Well, do you think we're overstating it?

01:38:49.800 We could talk about France.

01:38:51.440 Well, I, I don't know.

01:38:54.780 I don't know.

01:38:55.440 Right.

01:38:55.640 Cause who knows, right?

01:38:56.580 I don't know which way history is going to turn.

01:38:58.640 It, it doesn't look very, I'm, I'm certainly not happy with what's happening in the universities.

01:39:03.180 I'm not happy with what's happening in the scientific journals.

01:39:06.060 It doesn't seem to me a great thing that diversity, inclusivity and equity is popping up absolutely everywhere that human resources departments have a stranglehold on corporations.

01:39:15.420 All I'm saying is that if we're living in a world in which people cannot say their commonsensical views out loud.

01:39:25.320 Okay.

01:39:25.800 I'm not talking about political views.

01:39:27.940 I'm talking about, are there differences between men and women?

01:39:31.200 Are, you know, is, is America fundamentally a good place?

01:39:36.920 Is Lincoln a hero?

01:39:38.920 Like these are basic things that have become taboo.

01:39:43.480 If we cannot say those basic things out loud.

01:39:46.280 And if those ideas about the fundamental goodness, let's say of the American project, but really of the Western project have become really of, of, of, I would say more than that.

01:39:57.760 I would say of humanity itself, because this is a fundamental critique.

01:40:01.600 The idea that our social institutions are predicated on exploitative power, that's not, that's a critique of the human spirit.

01:40:08.800 Sure.

01:40:09.240 It goes past even the West.

01:40:11.120 Yeah.

01:40:11.260 If you can't say that looting is bad.

01:40:14.640 Okay.

01:40:15.280 To, to think about this summer.

01:40:16.960 If you can't say that segregation is evil and wrong.

01:40:22.460 If you can't say that, I mean, we all know what the things are, the things that have become unsayable.

01:40:28.640 And I'm suggesting that that is enough for me to sound the alarm.

01:40:34.860 And if it turns out that I was a little paranoid or hysterical, but I made these things more sayable in, in sounding the alarm, I'm okay with that.

01:40:45.860 I'd rather be wrong now.

01:40:49.480 So tell me, tell me, you, why did, what happened when you decided to leave the times?

01:40:56.500 Well.

01:40:56.720 Well, I mean, how did you come to, I'd like the story.

01:40:59.740 What, how did you come to that decision?

01:41:02.120 Well, there was a kind of forced ideological conformity that was happening.

01:41:11.780 And it became like a battle to get any piece through that didn't conform to the narrative and anything that didn't, how would that battle manifest itself?

01:41:25.080 So you would commission in all kinds of ways, in all kinds of ways.

01:41:28.300 Yeah.

01:41:28.640 I mean, it would be, I'd like to do a column on this and me being tremendously, like having to jump through hoops and get 10 more sources.

01:41:41.920 Whereas other pieces from other writers would just sail through with like obvious, embarrassing errors.

01:41:47.840 Not that I haven't had my own share of errors.

01:41:50.560 I have, and they're horrifically embarrassing and anyone can find them online.

01:41:53.760 But I'm saying, if you didn't comport with the orthodoxy, then you, your character and your work were just unbelievably scrutinized in a way that another person's weren't.

01:42:07.100 When it came to commission.

01:42:07.720 So the load increased, the effort load increased.

01:42:09.920 Yeah. I mean, when it came to commissioning things, like I, you know, I remember Ayaan Hirsi Ali called me the smuggler because early on when I was there, again, in this very brief, good period of self-reflection, I was able to get an op-ed that she wrote into the New York Times.

01:42:26.740 And she was like, I can't believe you were able to do that.

01:42:29.000 So there was this brief period in the beginning where the humiliation of getting Trump wrong, I think, led to an opening of the Overton window.

01:42:38.860 But then for reasons I can't really figure out, it really, really, really just closed again.

01:42:43.580 And it narrowed much more so, like to a sliver in a way.

01:42:48.180 It was much narrower than I would say pre the election.

01:42:51.980 And of course, Trump had a tremendous amount to do with it.

01:42:55.620 If you believed that, you know, and I think a lot of my colleagues genuinely believed this, that Trump was a fundamental threat to America, to the Republic, to minorities, we can go on and on and on.

01:43:06.760 We know the argument.

01:43:07.620 We could read it anywhere else.

01:43:09.740 Then you were morally obligated to defeat that threat.

01:43:15.040 And that meant that anything that flirted with any number of topics where he was on a particular side of it, then the right was like the correct position was always to be on the opposite side of it.

01:43:29.380 And so you saw this really, really clearly, let's say, in the lab leak theory, right, which was completely of the Wuhan, of coronavirus, which increasingly it seems like the coronavirus was, you know, unintentionally, let's say, leaked from this lab in Wuhan.

01:43:45.700 Well, that became unsayable.

01:43:47.020 And it became unsayable because people in the Trump administration were saying that that was the case.

01:43:51.660 And so everything was seen through the prism of this incredibly singular figure of Trump.

01:43:58.040 So that sped it all up.

01:44:01.300 And then you had the summer and you had the killing of George Floyd.

01:44:06.080 And that just brought everything that was sort of at a low boil just absolutely bubbling over.

01:44:12.480 And the way that it bubbled over most acutely was in the choice in June to run an op-ed by Republican Senator Tom Cotton that said not that the National Guard should be brought in to quell peaceful protests, but that the National Guard should be brought in to quell violent rioting.

01:44:31.440 It was a controversial piece by any stretch in that really sensitive moment.

01:44:37.180 But it was a view, frankly, that was shared by the majority of Americans, if you go back and look at polls at that time.

01:44:43.980 But inside the context, the rarefied context of the New York Times, not only was this op-ed seen as controversial, it was seen as literal violence, literal violence.

01:44:57.740 More than 800 of my colleagues signed a letter saying that this op-ed literally put the lives of Black New York Times staffers in danger.

01:45:07.180 And anyone that didn't...

01:45:08.700 What was the argument?

01:45:09.900 What kind of argument was made in favor of that position?

01:45:13.480 That the argument was, first of all, it was a misreading of his op-ed.

01:45:17.360 It was based on a fundamental misreading that insisted that his op-ed was about bringing in the military to put down justified, understandable riots in reaction to George Floyd.

01:45:29.260 So they never made the distinction.

01:45:31.080 They collapsed the distinction between bringing in the National Guard to put down violent rioting and bringing in the National Guard to put down peaceful protests.

01:45:38.600 And then they said, you know, that because police and the military are systemically racist, I'm being crude and just sort of giving you the overview, that this move would necessarily result in inordinate amount of Black death, death of Black Americans.

01:45:54.380 So that was the, so just, that was the argument.

01:45:58.640 And what happened was not, from the top, a defense of the op-ed and a defense of all of the various players.

01:46:05.920 Was this an op-ed you had commissioned?

01:46:07.900 No, I had nothing to do with the op-ed.

01:46:09.260 Oh, okay, okay.

01:46:09.900 So you're just watching this.

01:46:11.460 Yeah, I ended up being sort of brought in as a kind of punching bag because I ended up tweeting out some tweets that I think hold up extremely well about that this was a very, very useful litmus test to understand the generational divide inside the New York Times.

01:46:32.020 But I had nothing to do with the op-ed, but the people that did have something to do with the op-ed, my 25-year-old, uh-huh.

01:46:39.120 I want to ask you something about that generational divide, sorry.

01:46:42.500 It's okay.

01:46:42.780 Well, I'm still trying to think through this, the education of young people to adopt the viewpoint that our social institutions are fundamentally corrupt and driven by power.

01:46:56.700 And so then I think, well, how much of that, this calls for speculation, how much of that is a consequence of the breakdown of family structure?

01:47:07.300 I mean, so I see the positive element of our social institutions as something like the positive aspect of the paternal spirit.

01:47:17.180 So it's a father, it's the positive father who encourages in exactly the way that you encourage the writers that were under your care to express themselves and develop.

01:47:25.960 Am I the father in that situation?

01:47:27.680 Well, you would be, well, you knew you were female, but you're working in the patriarchy.

01:47:31.540 So yes, that's, I would say, symbolically speaking, that that's a manifestation of, well, the spirit of your Jewish ancestors, let's put it that way.

01:47:40.540 Well, I mean that, I mean that, you know, and you're the one who said that that tradition has shaped you to such a degree.

01:47:47.780 It's like, well, you're embody, you feel you have an obligation to embody that.

01:47:51.440 Well, is it not a paternal spirit?

01:47:53.280 That's the tradition and it's, but what if you've never experienced that?

01:47:57.880 I don't know if I would call it paternal or not.

01:47:59.980 That's not the way I think about things, but I, I do think, I, I don't know.

01:48:08.560 If your family's broken, if you've never had a positive relationship with someone who's.

01:48:12.920 I think it's different than that.

01:48:14.040 I think it's about, should corporations, which is what the New York times is in the end of the day, should they be moral actors?

01:48:24.140 That's the big difference.

01:48:25.260 Like there's a sense among the younger generation that a newspaper or a tech company or a, whatever, the, the, the place that you work should somehow also not just be about pursuing the bottom line, but should also be a manifestation of what you consider to be good politics and good morals.

01:48:46.260 And that's why you see, you know, I don't know if you followed this entire story at Coinbase that I think is really, really interesting.

01:48:53.780 Where basically the heads of Coinbase said, because they felt like rather than pursuing excellence for the company, so much of employees energy and, and attention and time was being devoted to, you know, using Slack to discuss the politics of the day.

01:49:10.360 And they basically said, look, no more politics at work.

01:49:13.560 That's not, work is not a place for politics.

01:49:16.720 Work is a place for making Coinbase excellent.

01:49:18.800 And if you're uncomfortable with that, we're going to give you a really, really nice severance package.

01:49:23.660 You've seen Basecamp follow suit.

01:49:25.740 You've seen, and I suspect that we're going to see.

01:49:27.840 When did this happen?

01:49:28.640 This happened, I would say Coinbase in the past two months and then Basecamp, another, another company much more recently.

01:49:37.420 And this, I, I, I'm really watching that trend because if you're running a company and rather than let's take the case of the New York times, you're spending, you're spending, you're spending, you're

01:49:48.780 not spending your time reporting and editing and commissioning, but you're spending your time

01:49:52.560 basically being like an offense archaeologist looking through things that other people have

01:49:57.740 published to decide whether or not an adjective was Orientalist or not. That's a bad use of your

01:50:05.760 time if you're supposed to be producing the best newspaper in the world. And so that's one thing

01:50:11.760 I'm watching for. I'm curious if what Coinbase did is going to take off because I think it's

01:50:17.260 extremely, I thought that was just really, really, really smart strategy to say, no, that's not going

01:50:22.620 to be, that's not going to be what we do at this company. But suffice it to say, the New York Times

01:50:27.100 has not followed Coinbase's suit. And what happened after, so the fallout from the Tom Cotton episode

01:50:34.980 was that within 48 hours, my immediate boss was reassigned. My, the boss who had hired me, James

01:50:43.600 Bennett was pushed out of the paper after he was struggle sessioned in front of thousands of

01:50:48.860 employees at the company. Tell us about that. I will. Well, in Slack channels with thousands of

01:50:54.560 people, guillotines and ax emojis were put next to his name and my name. And no one said a word about

01:51:03.040 that. Remember, this is an ideology that tells us silence is violence, you know, and, and, you know,

01:51:08.660 But guillotine, guillotine emojis aren't. Exactly. But basically what happened was that,

01:51:14.040 you know, they, it's the same script that's happened everywhere else. Like a normal human

01:51:20.120 being who looked out and saw that 800 of his colleagues felt that he decided to run an op-ed

01:51:26.160 that literally put their lives in danger. Well, the normal human response to that, as you explained

01:51:31.040 before is I'm so sorry, but unfortunately in the rubric of this ideology, I'm so sorry is evidence

01:51:39.100 of your guilt. It's blood in the water. And that's exactly what happened. I mean, it was,

01:51:44.040 I'm so sorry is a confession. Yes. Confession. And so, which means don't apologize if you haven't

01:51:50.300 done anything wrong. Yes. Because that's exactly right. And so he was pushed out of the paper and,

01:51:55.180 and perhaps most disgustingly, um, my colleague is a very dear friend of mine, Adam Rubenstein,

01:52:01.600 who was one of the editors, one of seven editors who worked on the piece. His name was leaked by

01:52:06.920 others of our colleagues to the new side of the paper. And a 25 year old editor at the very beginning

01:52:12.520 of his career was sort of the, the guy that was thrown under the bus. And he ultimately ended up

01:52:17.840 leaving the paper too. And I found that to be the most disgusting part of the entire episode,

01:52:22.220 because as everyone who works in any organization knows, um, and he didn't make them, there was no

01:52:27.820 mistake that was in that op-ed, but generally what happens in a collegial environment is if,

01:52:32.480 if someone makes a mistake. So for example, months prior to the Tom Cotton episode, the New York

01:52:37.580 Times ran a flagrantly anti-Semitic cartoon in which, um, Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of

01:52:44.560 Israel is shown, um, wearing a, it's shown as a, as a dachshund, a long wiener dog wearing a, um,

01:52:53.940 a collar with a Jewish star. And he's shown leading a blind Trump who's wearing a yarmulke on his head.

01:52:59.240 People can look it up. Now, everyone in the editorial staff knew who chose that op-ed, sorry,

01:53:04.320 that, that cartoon. And no one in the public knows his name. And that's exactly as it should be.

01:53:09.820 It's exactly as it should be. And yet in this case, a 25 year old editor was hung out to dry.

01:53:16.280 And so essentially what I gathered from this entire episode was risk-taking can get you fired.

01:53:24.500 Running an op-ed that other people inside the paper considered controversial could get you

01:53:29.940 struggle session in front of the entire company. And knowing that that was literally what my job was,

01:53:35.820 well, that job became impossible. And the thing that happened that I, it's really unbelievable.

01:53:41.940 If you're thinking about like running a large organization, this will sound as insane as it is.

01:53:46.380 The, the new rule became kind of editing by consensus. So every single op-ed editor had to

01:53:53.900 say that they were comfortable with every single op-ed. Well, you can imagine that if 9.9 out of people,

01:54:00.000 9.9 out of 10 people agree with this view of the world, that my job became impossible.

01:54:05.160 By the time that I, you know, sort of the last few weeks of the paper, I was told explicitly don't

01:54:09.360 commission op-eds anymore because there, none of them are, I mean, none of them were able to get

01:54:13.800 through this new gauntlet. And I said to myself, you know, why did I go into journalism? I did not go

01:54:21.100 into journalism to be rich. You know, I went into journalism because it's, it's a, it's a job that lets you

01:54:28.000 that allows you to pursue your curiosity, which is unbelievable, which is incredible. And if I can't

01:54:34.460 do that anymore, and if I need to sort of like become a half version of myself and sit on my hands

01:54:43.340 about an increasing number of topics that I think are incredibly urgent, what's the point of doing

01:54:49.560 this? And so I felt like, you know, I could kind of like become a husk or I could leave of my own

01:54:56.480 volition before something similar happened to me. And so I decided to leave and left in a very public

01:55:02.960 way and having no idea sort of what I would do next. And I will be honest, it took me a long time

01:55:09.000 to sort of like get my bearing after I did that. Have you got your bearing? Yeah. And in retrospect,

01:55:14.200 I would say to anyone considering leaving an institution, have a good plan in place for what

01:55:20.020 you plan to do next. Cause I wish that's no easy thing to manage. I mean, it's, you know, you, you

01:55:25.420 had, well, a dream job fundamentally, right? I mean, that's the pinnacle to, to be an op-ed editor at

01:55:31.700 the New York times. That's, that's, that's a star position. Yeah. Have I gotten my bearing,

01:55:38.960 my bearings? I would say very much so. And I feel good for you. I feel so much more optimistic

01:55:47.300 now than I did, you know, if I left in July, it was in August and September. I mean, it was very

01:55:54.780 disorienting at first to feel like, wow, I've been in institutions for my entire life. I've never been

01:56:02.880 an entrepreneur. I've never, I've never had to figure out all these things for myself. You know,

01:56:09.060 I've always sort of been in these fancy institutions and what would it look like to try and build one

01:56:14.340 myself? And how would I, and this is something I'm struggling with a lot right now or not struggling,

01:56:19.620 struggling in a good way. How do I resist the same forces that I so criticize the New York times for?

01:56:28.040 And let me give you a specific example. So I'm writing on Substack now and it's incredible.

01:56:32.280 And tell us about Substack too. So Substack for people that don't know is this new platform for,

01:56:38.080 well, it's for any writers, but that allows people to subscribe directly to you. And so I publish

01:56:45.400 about two things a week, often a column that I've written in a column I've commissioned,

01:56:49.540 but ultimately I want to build this into a much bigger media company, but this is the start of it.

01:56:54.580 And it's going extremely, extremely well. And I'm in the top 10 of, you know, politics. So

01:56:59.620 I just have to go a little bit further to beat, you know, Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald.

01:57:04.860 So it's going really well, but the thing that is corrupting about it, it's the same force that's

01:57:11.060 corrupting at the New York times or, or any media right now, which is to say, I know that if I run

01:57:17.220 certain kinds of stories, that that's going to be like a heroin hit for my readers. And I see,

01:57:23.020 you see right away. Yes. And we all know about the temptation of providing heroin hits for our

01:57:28.680 readers. Yes. And it's very, I mean, and at least at the New York times, you have some insulation.

01:57:35.860 Okay. You write one column that is a viral hit. Great. You write one the next month. That's only a

01:57:41.120 couple hundred thousand, but there is some level of insulation with Substack. There's not,

01:57:45.480 I see every single night, how many people are converting to paid subscriptions. And I see

01:57:51.880 extremely clearly what's kinds of stories make, make that happen. And I don't want to give in to

01:57:57.960 the same. I don't want to radicalize my readers in a certain direction. And so you have to be as an

01:58:03.980 editor and as a writer disciplined, you know, I'm going to commission this story.

01:58:07.680 You have to be pursuing something else. That's the thing is, I mean, I've struggled with the same

01:58:12.540 thing with, with this podcast. I mean, and what I'm trying to do, maybe this is insulation. I don't

01:58:18.920 know as I'm trying to learn things I don't know. And so I'm talking to people that I think are

01:58:24.600 interesting and I'm hoping they'll teach me things so that I'm not quite so stupid. And if people are

01:58:30.040 happy with that, I mean, I, I read the comments, I'm responsive to my audience. I respect my audience,

01:58:35.860 but the respect is that I'm going to take them along for the journey that, and so I'm not

01:58:41.460 tailoring it to an audience at all. And that seems, but what's so nice about that is it really

01:58:46.100 seems to work. Like when I'm not tailoring to my audience, when I'm engaging in a genuine

01:58:51.700 conversation, that's when the responses are the best. And so that's so heartening that that's the

01:58:57.220 case. I mean, what are you seeing with regards to responses? What, what's the temptation exactly?

01:59:03.260 Yeah. So I think that, you know, when I resigned from the New York times, that letter I think was

01:59:10.480 probably the most widely read thing that I've ever written. And I'm really, really proud of it.

01:59:15.340 But I think in a way I became like symbolic of, let's just say like the anti-woke position.

01:59:21.640 And on the one hand, I think it's extremely important for me to report on that. And I'm

01:59:27.000 really proud of the reporting that I've done exposing the way that this ideology, for example,

01:59:31.760 is taking over K through 12 education. And one of the reasons I think it's so important that I do it

01:59:36.600 is that the mainstream media is not going to touch it, because it's the same ideological

01:59:40.140 succession that they're implicated in. So on the one hand, I think I have a particular burden

01:59:45.780 to write about this topic that's being untouched. And on the other hand, I don't want every single

01:59:51.180 piece to be pounding the drumbeat of anti-wokeers.

01:59:54.460 Yeah. Yeah. One of the problems, because then it's a feeling of like, oh my God, the world's

02:00:00.060 melting down. It's like, no, you also want to give people a sense of perspective. So that's,

02:00:05.460 that's my challenge. But I imagine for other writers on the site, it's a different challenge.

02:00:11.040 And yeah, the challenge is that you don't want to become a parody of yourself and serve your previous

02:00:16.480 image. I mean, that's a very, that's a very troublesome thing, especially as your image develops. So as you

02:00:22.480 said, you've become symbolic of something. And so then the question is, is the power of that symbol

02:00:27.780 so overwhelming that it shapes your entire character and everything that you do? And there's, there's,

02:00:33.300 there's definite incentives in that direction, but, and it's hard to resist and it's being demanded

02:00:39.960 in some sense by your audience. Right. So, right. And it's, it's really hard also because

02:00:45.240 I, I picture my reader as someone who still reads the New York times and the Washington post, and

02:00:52.780 they're coming to me for the thing they're not getting there, but for the readers who are only

02:00:57.300 reading me, let's say, and only reading a handful of writers that are sort of playing in my same

02:01:02.060 playground that can have a radicalizing effect. And so I just want to, that's the thing.

02:01:08.660 Right. And it's because you're also not embedded with a bunch of other opinions as you would be in the

02:01:13.120 newspaper, right? Exactly. So that's right. And so my dream situation and what I'm trying to build

02:01:18.680 toward is creating that ecosystem. I am not interested in like the creator economy, whatever

02:01:29.680 that meaning. I think I've watched you and I've watched other public figures who have become such

02:01:36.640 potent symbols. And on the one hand, I'm like, look at the effect that they've had. It's so

02:01:42.640 powerful. And I know just from what, when I was, you know, writing about the intellectual dark rabbit

02:01:48.280 web and reading 12 rules for life, I remember sitting at a hotel and a young waiter, a man coming

02:01:53.240 up to me saying like, that book saved my life. And that's unbelievably powerful. And on the other hand,

02:01:58.960 it's the burdens of it seem very scary and dangerous to me. And so I want to place myself

02:02:07.220 ideally in a, in a kind of round table, like a kind of group where, where it's like a sensibility

02:02:15.400 and I'm not the only one because I don't know. I'm, am I wrong about? No, no, I don't think you're

02:02:23.140 wrong at all. I mean, in this, in the new book I wrote beyond order. I talk about this necessity for,

02:02:28.940 social interaction as a, as a sanity, as the prime sanity maintaining process is that sane people

02:02:37.440 aren't sane because they're so organized internally that their psyches are organized properly. That's

02:02:42.940 what you might expect to conclude if you were psychoanalytically minded or maybe psychologically

02:02:48.560 minded. But what really is the case that what maintains our sanity is constant receptivity to

02:02:54.600 the reactions of other people. At least that's part of what maintains it. We have a dialogue

02:02:58.780 with our own conscience, which is something like that internal spirit that you described earlier,

02:03:03.480 the spirit that animates history speaking within us. We have a responsibility to that,

02:03:08.520 but we have to be open to other people, especially people who don't share our opinions because we're

02:03:13.980 stupid and lost. And it's, it's absolutely crucial. So I think that from a psychological perspective,

02:03:19.340 I think that's a great idea. And I mean, it also keeps you alive because then other people are

02:03:24.920 feeding you new ideas all the time. Right. And, and, and, and yeah. And I think, you know,

02:03:30.820 for all of the downsides of the New York times, I think being around people, you know, good faith

02:03:37.520 people, and there were many good faith people who just disagreed with me. And like, I, you know,

02:03:42.060 I had a wonderful editor there who, you know, was definitely to my left, but was such a fair reader

02:03:48.120 and made everything I wrote stronger. Like I need that. Everybody needs that. And one of the things

02:03:53.880 that I think is one of the beauties of this sort of like Cambrian explosion of the podcast world and

02:04:00.680 newsletter world and the Patreon world and the locals world and the whatever's going to come before

02:04:04.760 we publish this world. It's amazing because we can connect directly to an audience, but also like

02:04:11.680 everyone, everyone needs an editor, everyone, and everyone needs a community. And, you know,

02:04:20.680 if your community is only like parroting back to you, the things you believe, that's not a recipe

02:04:27.220 for growth. And it's also a recipe, I think, for being captive to who you are in a particular moment.

02:04:33.100 And I really want to make sure that I'm giving myself the ability to change and grow as hard as

02:04:38.760 that might be able to do in public. Well, that's the, but that's the right thing to model. I think

02:04:43.640 is that I believe that when these podcasts work properly, the reason they're compelling to the

02:04:49.520 degree they managed to be compelling is because what people are observing and participating in is

02:04:54.800 the process by which two people mutually transform one another towards a higher good. And they're like,

02:05:01.280 and so we're both struggling to make things clear and to, to approach something that we don't have yet,

02:05:06.520 but it's in that struggle. That's that the motivation arises.

02:05:10.540 But you know how you and I, before this podcast started, both said, like, I said to you, I'm

02:05:15.200 nervous. And you said, I've been nervous for five years or anxious for five years. And I said, I know

02:05:19.980 exactly what you mean. Like that's true to some extent, but we both know that we're having this

02:05:25.060 conversation, just the two of us right now, but that it's going to be in public and that millions of

02:05:29.240 people potentially could see it. And that ultimately changes the way that we talk to each other. It makes us

02:05:35.580 more careful. And I think that's, that, that's a good thing, but the conversation.

02:05:39.660 Yeah. And more nervous, but the conversation you and I might have in private, like that's a

02:05:46.500 different conversation. And that, that to me is the most precious kind because that's like the high

02:05:52.560 trust. I mean, obviously I have a, I have a high level of trust enough to be able to come on this

02:05:57.160 and trust that the conversation is going to be fair and good faith. And of course I have that,

02:06:01.060 but like it's still in public. Right. And yeah, my dream is that, you know, that, that these

02:06:09.040 conversations are as close to a private conversation as public can, as it can possibly be

02:06:13.920 managed. Of course, of course. But, but you see, but it is, it is, well, yeah, it's interesting

02:06:19.640 because we've struggled with this a fair bit because often at the end of the interview or the

02:06:24.840 discussion, you know, we'll close it and then we'll keep talking that me and whoever I'm talking

02:06:30.100 to. And then we'll talk about some things that are interesting. And then, you know, we have the

02:06:33.940 decision because we're still recording often is like, well, do we include that? And generally the

02:06:38.300 answer has been yes. Although not always, I mean, it's hard to, it's interesting though, too, because

02:06:44.320 if you make a private conversation public, see, that is the truth to do that. And then that really

02:06:50.580 shows that you have trust in your audience is that, look, I'm going to tell you what I actually

02:06:54.540 think I'm going to take, but then they see Barry too. That's that adventure that we were talking

02:06:59.120 about earlier that, that is being offered by these radical movements is like, there's something

02:07:04.800 unbelievably adventurous about telling the truth in public because you don't know, you see, you have

02:07:11.520 to stake the, you have to stake your faith on the truth in that situation because you make the

02:07:16.140 presumption that that's the best possible approach for it, even though you don't know what's going

02:07:21.280 to happen. You hedge your bets otherwise, right? And you're more conservative and you're more

02:07:25.500 cautious because, well, because you want to direct what's going to happen, even though you really

02:07:30.760 can't, but to the degree that you can throw that off and say, well, to hell with it, so to speak,

02:07:35.600 I'm going to say what I think. And, um, but that's also when the, when these things really take

02:07:41.340 off when the discussions really take off. I agree. And I just, for, for me, you know,

02:07:47.580 now that I'm doing well on Substack and I'm building my, my company, it's like, I can tell,

02:07:54.680 like, I can tell the truth, telling the truth has sort of, it's good for business for me,

02:07:59.340 but what about like the young, the young person, right? Who like hasn't even started their career.

02:08:06.280 It seems to me that the, I guess what I'm trying to say is the price of telling the

02:08:11.260 truth is so high. Well, I I've thought about that a lot, you know, and in my first book,

02:08:17.500 I learned a fair bit of this from reading Nietzsche, I would say, but there is an emphasis

02:08:24.100 in Nietzsche's thinking on the necessity for an apprenticeship. Like, let's say you're a young

02:08:28.260 person. Well, and you don't really know how to express yourself and you don't really know

02:08:31.800 anything yet. And so what you have to do to some degree is subjugate yourself to a disciplinary

02:08:37.600 process. And that means that your particular voice is temporarily, it's not suppressed exactly.

02:08:43.340 It's subordinated. Yeah. Right. But it's subordinated to authority, not to power. And then

02:08:48.800 you go through that, that, that apprenticeship process, which for you would have happened to

02:08:53.700 some degree in college. And then to some degree at the wall street journal, you go through that

02:08:57.440 subordination process and discipline yourself. And then you can start integrating who you are with

02:09:03.800 the discipline and then speaking. Well, this, this is the thing that I think

02:09:08.460 some people in our, in like, let's say the independent, like the wild West universe do not

02:09:16.980 appreciate about what the institutions at their best can do, which is exactly what you're describing.

02:09:22.700 It's the training and the raising up and the elevation of the younger generation and of other

02:09:28.440 voices. And that's not their exploitation. No. And I want to figure out how can I do that?

02:09:36.960 How can I build a version of an institution that somehow is immunized or inoculated from the,

02:09:46.840 the ideological takeover that adheres to the kind of old school liberal values that we've talked about

02:09:54.240 on this podcast and that allow me to do the thing that I told you I love doing, which yes,

02:10:00.760 I love writing. And I, I, something about my personality allows me to be in the arena much

02:10:06.060 more so than a lot of other people. Extraversion and openness. Maybe. Sure.

02:10:10.860 You'll find out when you take the test. Yes. But, but also like, I will not be satisfied

02:10:16.960 if that's the only thing that I do. Like, I, I just know that the reasons that I'm able to do what

02:10:23.660 I do or be able to put together a column or know how to report or speak in public is because

02:10:30.920 so much effort on the part of other people went into training me to be able to do that.

02:10:38.100 Yes. Yes. Well, this is, this is something else we can talk about. You talk about editing.

02:10:42.880 But for people that are like coming up, let's say like as Instagram influencers or like clubhouse

02:10:48.160 personalities or whatever, like that's not, that's, that's not a substitute for the kind

02:10:54.520 of process that I'm describing. It's just really not.

02:10:58.540 So you talked about, you can get the substitute to some degree, I suppose, by being carefully

02:11:04.600 responsive to your audience because they will train you to some degree, but that then you run

02:11:09.720 into the problem of the echo chamber, the potential echo chamber, developing the positive feedback loop.

02:11:14.620 Now, there's something here about judgment, like in our society, the idea that you should become,

02:11:22.220 that you should be nonjudgmental has become a truism. And it's one of those truisms that you have,

02:11:27.220 that you violate at your own peril. But I don't like that at all, because if you're going to be

02:11:32.700 a good apprentice master, let's say what you use is your judgment.

02:11:37.820 Judgment's my entire business. Judgment's discernment, saying that some things are worthy

02:11:43.720 and some things aren't, some ideas are worthy of being heard by the world and some writers and

02:11:49.420 some voices and some style and certain, like, you want to tell me that like, you know, everyone's

02:11:56.100 as good as Joan Didion and we should have no judgment. Like, give me a, give me a break.

02:12:00.320 Well, that's it. Well, right. Well, it's certainly the pathway to insanity because everything becomes,

02:12:05.600 but when people say that it's like, no judgment, it's like good vibes.

02:12:10.020 It's like, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't mean it. I don't think people understand the depth of

02:12:15.480 what it means. Judgment is essential. Judgment is absolutely essential. It's certainly essential

02:12:21.800 if you want to be a good writer. And well, if you want the good judgment is inevitable because you

02:12:28.360 have to differentiate between what is good and what isn't now. Now, so how do you construe the

02:12:34.560 relationship between fostering the development of someone and the imposition of that judgment?

02:12:40.300 Because you're going to impose high standards, right? And so that means judgment and judgment

02:12:46.680 means criticism. Criticism means this and not this, right? It doesn't mean not this. It doesn't mean

02:12:52.380 it's all bad. It means, well, we'll keep this and we'll dispense with the rest, right? It's the

02:12:57.020 winnowing of the wheat from the chaff. And so how do you construe that in relationship to mentoring?

02:13:02.220 And how do you do that without becoming an, like a, a too imposing force?

02:13:07.640 It's very interesting. It's such a delicate, good question that really comes down to the trust you

02:13:16.100 develop with someone and whether or not they believe that you're trying to shape them into the

02:13:22.840 best potential, not version of themselves that's saying too much, but like their talent becoming.

02:13:29.780 I don't know if it is saying too much. I think, I don't think so. I think that is,

02:13:34.240 and I do think that's an extension of the parental

02:13:37.420 place and that that's the proper way to construe the social institution.

02:13:43.340 I would say to, to, to steal a term, you know, I do think a safe space is extremely important.

02:13:50.380 I have been able to hear incredibly harsh criticism from people in my life, mentors in my life.

02:13:58.500 I'm thinking now, especially back to my early days at the wall street journal and,

02:14:02.680 you know, people like Brett Stevens and Paul Gagot or Melanie Kirkpatrick, when I knew it was coming

02:14:07.740 from a place of genuinely wanting the best for me. That's really what I mean. And right. So you,

02:14:14.620 you trusted the sort, the judgment was, and, and because I think you were on the right path.

02:14:18.900 Because it was connected to like, I admired what they were doing. I saw that it was impressive and

02:14:24.520 good. I saw, even if I disagreed with the view, right. The, the crap. Right. And I knew that I

02:14:30.940 couldn't do that yet. And I knew that judgment in the service of what's admirable and good is

02:14:35.760 to be devoutly hoped for. Yeah. Yeah. And just, it was so, but it was just so obvious to me that I

02:14:45.900 couldn't do what they could do. And that if I wanted to learn to do what they could do and what

02:14:50.340 I so desperately wanted to be good at for whatever reasons about my history or the way I was raised or

02:14:57.260 whatever, then I needed to like, put my ego aside and listen to them. And sometimes that meant that

02:15:07.260 the things I wrote, they said were, were, were like pretty much garbage. Yeah. Well, that's the

02:15:11.960 case though. When you start to write or think is 95% of what you write or think is garbage. And even

02:15:16.760 when you're good at it, you have to, the more you throw away the better in some sense, because you

02:15:21.020 only keep what's great if you can manage it. And I also think that like, there's a mimicry in the

02:15:27.040 beginning that I think is extremely important. Yes. Studying what works and literally mapping it

02:15:33.800 out. You know, I was just, yeah, that's the humanities by the way. Yeah. Like that's very

02:15:41.180 important. And that doesn't mean that you're a parrot and that doesn't mean that you're, you don't

02:15:46.420 have your own style, but like, like, you know, and why would you make that comment about style?

02:15:53.060 Well, because I think that a lot of people in my generation are, and especially younger,

02:15:58.060 obsessed with like being singular and being different from everyone that came before.

02:16:02.680 And they confuse the discipline with the eradication of their style.

02:16:06.780 I think, yeah, yeah.

02:16:08.580 Well, it is a fine discernment.

02:16:10.540 It is. And I think that, you know, you can, I also think that style has to do with inborn talent

02:16:18.200 a lot of the time and that you can learn to be an excellent, like, I'm not a great writer.

02:16:24.440 I'm a very good writer, but there are people who are like, just like Cirque du Soleil writers.

02:16:33.020 Yeah. Okay. And, but being a very good writer and being able to communicate plainly and compellingly

02:16:39.360 convincingly, that's more than most people can hope for. And I guess I'm saying that, like,

02:16:46.560 I think a lot of young writers imagine that, like, they can do something that no one's ever done

02:16:52.280 before. And it's like, why don't we strive for being able to communicate really clearly and plainly

02:16:58.180 without jargon to someone with only a high school degree so that they can understand a complicated

02:17:03.640 topic?

02:17:03.860 Right. So that's the imposition of constraints to begin with, just to develop the discipline of the

02:17:08.260 craft. And then hopefully you can deviate from that in a stylistically appropriate manner as you become

02:17:13.440 an expert.

02:17:14.120 Exactly. It's just like, you're not Hunter S. Thompson. Maybe you could be that, but like,

02:17:19.420 let's try and just get the basics down.

02:17:22.260 Start with Hemingway.

02:17:23.140 The basics are hard enough. The basics are hard enough. And like, yeah, I just think that it sounds

02:17:32.100 so basic, but, but being able to communicate plainly without the crutch of jargon is something

02:17:39.560 that many people that are coming out of the most celebrated, elite, prestigious universities in the

02:17:47.040 North, in North America cannot do. And I will tell you that when I can find a young person that can do

02:17:52.260 that, I will, I cling to that person. That's how rare it is.

02:17:55.800 And why cling? Why do you say that?

02:17:59.260 Because it's special and rare. It's special and rare to be able to find someone that who's,

02:18:05.520 who's frankly worldview, but then that's reflected in the writing has not been captured by,

02:18:14.220 look, it seems so, it seems so obvious to me that it's obvious in a way that is only obvious when you

02:18:23.440 realize it, but that when, when institutions are functioning properly, they consist of people who

02:18:29.540 are looking to young people to find talent in the direction of their interests and to nurture that.

02:18:35.940 I mean, isn't that you're, you, you've experienced your apprenticeship in this various institutions.

02:18:41.180 Is there any relationships that you've had that you regard as intensely positive that weren't of

02:18:48.560 that nature? That weren't, that weren't mentored? Yeah, that, that weren't. So I like to think

02:18:55.300 about it as the best in that person serving the best in you. And when you look back at the people

02:19:01.920 who've shaped your development, I mean, isn't that the nature of the relationship that you had with

02:19:08.240 them rather than the relationship of arbitrary power, where they're skimming off, say the excess

02:19:13.580 profits of your labor, it's not fundamentally exploitative. And that's a sec.

02:19:19.920 Overwhelmingly, it's been, overwhelmingly, it's been the former overwhelmingly. It's been

02:19:25.940 positive. Now that's not to say, listen, as, as you've sort of assessed me without me taking the

02:19:33.600 personality test yet. I'm also someone that can piss off a boss, because I'm someone who can, you know,

02:19:43.780 swim upstream by my nature. Now, oftentimes, though, that's been a quality that's appreciated,

02:19:51.060 because it's meant sometimes in homogenous environments that I've been looked to as like

02:19:57.900 a check on it. So I think that they're, they're, you know, a good advantage of disagreeable people

02:20:03.060 is exactly that they will actually tell you what they think. Yeah. But sometimes they're right.

02:20:09.380 Often we are right, I will say, but it can piss people off that are just trying to kind of like,

02:20:15.660 you know, let's get through the day, let's put out the paper, it can be annoying, frankly,

02:20:20.540 and I know, I know that about myself. But also, I think that it can be a superpower. I really do.

02:20:27.900 So what's in the immediate future with regard to Substack? And how many subscribers do you have?

02:20:35.220 Tell me about, tell me the end of the story. So now you're on Substack.

02:20:38.920 Oh, God, there's so much that's happened. We've drawn out like a resignation over two hours,

02:20:46.840 but I hope we fit other things that are of interest into it. So now I'm on Substack, like,

02:20:51.900 you know, like, I think a lot of the, a lot of heterodox journalists who don't fit in with a

02:21:00.400 tribe are also on Substack. And I think it's extremely interesting. The thing that I think is

02:21:07.540 a challenge. It's like an IDW of journalists. Yeah. I mean, the thing that I think is,

02:21:11.960 is challenging, right, is if you're like a dentist or an accountant or a lawyer, and I meet a lot of

02:21:18.120 these people, they say, I don't trust the New York Times anymore. What do I read? Well, it's a really

02:21:22.780 dissatisfying answer, because I'm like, well, you need to subscribe to these 10 Substacks and listen

02:21:27.720 to these five podcasts and follow these 30 people on Twitter. No, like, that's not going to work.

02:21:32.880 So I am extremely interested in, in what I've been referring to, like, how do I make a common address

02:21:39.880 for that sensibility, that independent minded spirit, that, you know, is not like centrist in

02:21:48.440 the sense of like, just finding the middle path, but is able to see truth on, on, but is able to

02:21:55.260 separate, let's say, identity from ideas, and is able to say, yeah, that person maybe sucks on this

02:22:01.060 thing, but they're really right about that. Like, that's what I'm interested in building. And so

02:22:05.360 the way that started off for me, and I'm proud of it is, you know, commissioning op eds and columns

02:22:10.900 and reported pieces from voices that, you know, don't have the platform that I think that they

02:22:16.720 should, and trying to elevate them to my readers, but it's going to be, you know, my podcast, podcast

02:22:22.860 network, and ultimately, I hope, like a whole ecosystem of journalism and storytelling. That's

02:22:30.320 what I'm interested in building. And so I have 10s of 1000s of subscribers. And that's,

02:22:35.360 been fantastic. And I'm incredibly grateful to it. But for me, this is just the beginning. And I

02:22:40.760 really, really, like, in the end of the day, the reason that I left the New York Times, Jordan, is

02:22:46.460 that, you know, yes, because I was being bullied. Yes, because I couldn't do my job, both true things.

02:22:53.960 But ultimately, it's because I really believe that the fight for

02:22:59.500 liberalism, and I don't mean that in the partisan sense, but I mean, the kind of values we've been

02:23:06.320 describing during this conversation, that like, that is more important than any amount of popularity,

02:23:13.480 than any amount of accolades on Twitter, than, than anything else, than anything else. And so I had to

02:23:21.360 leave the, the institution, in order to fight for, for liberalism. And that I see as like the,

02:23:30.120 like the mission of my life, I guess you can say.

02:23:32.500 And the catastrophe of our times.

02:23:34.760 Yeah, but...

02:23:35.700 I mean, for, especially for someone who's older, like me, you know, I mean, I had a dream a while

02:23:40.180 back, I, I wandered into the backyard of a cabin that I was staying at. And there was a dying lion by

02:23:46.400 a fire pit at the boundary of this, of this cabin's property. And my aunt, who, who, who's...

02:23:53.480 Wait, an actual dying lion?

02:23:55.840 This is in a dream.

02:23:57.180 Oh, in a dream, in a dream.

02:23:58.100 Yeah, sorry.

02:23:58.620 Yes. And so, so my aunt called to me to warn me about the presence of this lion. And I looked

02:24:05.520 at it, and it was in rough shape. It was mangy and, and ill-kempt and not good, but still, you

02:24:11.680 know, a lion and powerful. And then I wandered around to the left side of the house. And

02:24:18.060 interestingly enough, and there was a whole number of them, tigers, lions, all these predatory

02:24:27.220 beasts, all in terrible shape and all hungry and willing to attack. And I had to speak in

02:24:33.800 order to keep them at bay. And I woke up and I thought, well, Jesus, that's pretty bloody

02:24:38.520 obvious. I know what that dream means. I mean, there's all these dying lions, the New York

02:24:43.280 Times, the legacy medias, the institutions. I'm not happy to see their demise.

02:24:49.240 No.

02:24:49.800 It's really awful. I mean, they were stellar. And to hear someone like Yon-mi Park talk about

02:24:54.720 Columbia in that way, it's so awful. And to see what happened with you at the New York

02:24:59.220 Times, it's like, you know, on the one hand, the story is, well, you know, you pursued your

02:25:03.780 creative spirit and you established yourself independently. And isn't that wonderful? But

02:25:07.860 that loss that you described of the institution that has the capacity to apprentice and train,

02:25:13.420 that's cataclysmic.

02:25:14.940 I will say that I spent months, I could kind of cry thinking about it, mourning that. Like,

02:25:22.660 it is catastrophic. But there are things in history that have been more catastrophic.

02:25:32.320 And that's the kind of perspective that I'm trying to keep. Because if I spent all day looking at the

02:25:39.040 wreckage, and more than just looking at the wreckage, trying desperately to try and, like,

02:25:45.540 shore up something that is so clearly rotten, I would spend my life in grief. And I just believe

02:25:54.040 so strongly that, not believe, I see that people have had to build things in way, way, way more trying

02:26:04.200 and difficult circumstances than this. And so if they could build things from true wreckage,

02:26:13.440 believe me, we can rebuild new institutions, we can. And that's what I'm going to do. And I think

02:26:19.760 that's what everyone that comes to me, you know, complaining about what's going on in their kids

02:26:25.120 school, or what's going on in their company. Sometimes people that are running the companies

02:26:29.780 coming to me complaining about what's happening in their own company that they have control over,

02:26:33.000 like enough, enough, like no more complaining, quietly, no more anonymous emails, like the time

02:26:41.120 is now to out yourself as someone that is opposed to this, that is alarmed about it, and then spend

02:26:49.500 all of your energy and money and time banding together with people to build new things. I wish there

02:26:55.940 was another option, because that sounds exhausting, I realized, but I just don't think there's another

02:27:00.980 option. And three years ago, if you had asked me, I would have suggested something different. I really

02:27:07.120 believe that a lot of these institutions can be saved. And by the way, some of them, and the extent

02:27:11.660 to which there are ones that can be saved and shored up, they should be, because it's really, really,

02:27:16.940 really, really, really hard to build new things. Really hard. It's so easy to tear things down. But

02:27:22.640 that's the conclusion that I've come to. And I think the more people that can, yes, like, let's grieve

02:27:30.480 the 20th century institutions that are crumbling. Let's understand that they are something that they

02:27:39.520 might have the same name, but they're no longer what they used to be. And then let's get to work

02:27:44.900 building the things that we know we need to build that are necessary for upholding

02:27:49.680 the civilization that we talked about earlier. That's what I think the task is.

02:27:59.240 Thank you very much for talking with me today.

02:28:02.340 Thank you, Jordan.

02:28:05.780 It was really good to see you, Barry.

02:28:07.480 It was great to see you too.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - June 10, 2021

175. Journalist or Heretic？｜ Bari Weiss

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