The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 243. Quillette's Founder On Starting The Most Controversial Magazine In The World ｜ Claire Lehmann

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00:00:30.000 Hey, everyone. Real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important. Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

00:00:42.600 We know how isolating and overwhelming these conditions can be, and we wanted to take a moment to reach out to those listening who may be struggling.

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00:01:21.220 Welcome to episode 243 of the JBP podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson.

00:01:29.980 This episode featured Claire Lehman from Quillette.

00:01:33.500 Her and dad discussed the success of Quillette magazine, left-wing authoritarianism, gender dysphoria, mentorship, stereotypes, social media and in-group preference, moral reasoning, aggressive empathy, and more.

00:01:47.180 Claire is the founding editor of Quillette magazine.

00:01:49.340 She works with journalists whose type of content reviews make finding a platform difficult.

00:01:54.880 Quillette has published articles from Coleman Hughes, Rav Arora, Rob Henderson, and Kevin Mims, among others.

00:02:00.880 I wanted to remind you guys that dad is on Parler.

00:02:03.360 If you're trying to avoid Twitter, check it out, Parler.

00:02:06.500 Also, please visit jordanbpeterson.supercast.com to sign up for the ad-free version of this podcast, plus other premium perks.

00:02:15.280 It works on all major platforms, and it's just $10 a month.

00:02:18.140 Again, that's only at jordanbpeterson.supercast.com.

00:02:22.240 I hope you enjoy this conversation.

00:02:23.680 Hello, everyone.

00:02:43.480 I'm pleased to have with me as a guest today Claire Lehman, the founding editor of Quillette, and someone I've known for a while now, as much as you could know someone when you're in Canada and they're in Australia.

00:02:57.560 Quillette is a nonpartisan online publication that publishes long-form commentary and analysis, and which specializes in ideas other outlets often appear too timid to touch.

00:03:07.140 Quillette's first anthology was Panics and Persecutions, 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age, which featured essays from those who have been targeted by mobs in academic and artistic communities.

00:03:21.820 Claire is also a regular contributor to The Australian, the most widely read newspaper in Australia.

00:03:27.980 Hello, good to see you.

00:03:30.280 It's been a long time since we've talked.

00:03:32.720 Hi, Jordan.

00:03:33.720 Thanks so much for having me.

00:03:35.300 It's good to see you.

00:03:36.800 So let's start by talking about Quillette.

00:03:39.580 Let's go back to the beginning.

00:03:41.020 You were a graduate student in psychology, if I remember correctly, pursuing a master's degree at that point, and then you took a sideways move.

00:03:48.460 And then why?

00:03:51.080 Well, often people assume that I left university or left academia because for a political reason, but it wasn't the case.

00:04:01.960 The situation was simply that I had a baby at the time, and I couldn't juggle my requirement to do hundreds of hours of unpaid clinical work to complete my master's with also having a baby at home.

00:04:21.380 So you did something easy, like start the most controversial new magazine in the world, perhaps, or in the English-speaking world.

00:04:30.020 Well, it was meant to be a project to keep me occupied in between quitting my master's and finding a professional job.

00:04:39.420 It wasn't ever meant to be my career, but it took off almost immediately after I launched the website and attracted quite an engaged readership.

00:04:51.920 So over time, I naturally started to focus more on Quillette and less on other things, and now it's my full-time job, and it occupies my full-time mental capacity.

00:05:07.580 And it's a very rewarding and fulfilling occupation, that's for sure.

00:05:13.460 Well, you picked a great name, so that's a good start.

00:05:17.100 Yeah.

00:05:17.420 And you've had great writers.

00:05:19.200 I mean, who have you particularly enjoyed publishing, and what do you think's been most worthwhile as far as you're concerned?

00:05:26.080 Well, the best part of the job is finding young writers, and by young I mean very young, in their early 20s or even late teens in some cases,

00:05:36.280 who are brilliant and who wouldn't be picked up by other publications because, you know, they don't know the right people in media, they're too young, they don't have the connections.

00:05:48.660 I think one thing I've been really proud of with Quillette is our promotion of young talent, promotion of talent that, you know, we have writers that come from rural areas who aren't in the big cities.

00:06:05.200 We have a really diverse, we publish older people, younger people, we have a real true diversity in our writers, and that's not by design.

00:06:18.700 We're not plucking people out because they fit our diversity metrics.

00:06:22.540 It's just that when you select people on talent and merit, you naturally get a diverse range of voices.

00:06:30.000 Yeah, there's a truly egalitarian statement, right?

00:06:33.100 Yeah, yeah.

00:06:33.860 I mean, if you actually believe that merit is distributed throughout all human populations, let's say ethnicities, races, gender, sex, all of that, then why not just choose on merit?

00:06:46.500 And what I find is that if you select on merit, you will find the diamond in the rough, you will find the writers who might not be the best self-promoters, the best at attending the right parties and sucking up to the right editors.

00:07:06.420 But if you assess people's writing purely on the quality and originality of their ideas, you naturally get a broad range of voices, and that's something I'm really proud of.

00:07:23.760 And some of our younger writers include people like Common Hughes, and, well, he's not with us anymore, but we were the first to publish him.

00:07:33.340 Rav Evora, Rob Henderson, he's not as young as Common, but he's an amazingly original thinker, and comes from a unique, has a unique background.

00:07:49.640 Another writer who I'm proud of publishing is an older writer, who is an Amazon warehouse worker.

00:08:00.380 And he writes from a sort of a blue-collar, working-class perspective.

00:08:06.700 He's very well-read and has a very unique but important voice.

00:08:14.580 You know, he can contextualise issues around class from a real lived experience, which is kind of rare in journalism, because journalism has become such an elite occupation, particularly in the United States.

00:08:28.380 What's his name?

00:08:29.380 What's his name?

00:08:30.700 Kevin Mims.

00:08:32.380 Kevin Mims.

00:08:33.680 Yeah, well, I've often found that the most interesting people to speak with are very smart people who haven't been educated, haven't pursued a complete course of higher education, and they do the reading on their own, and they think in some ways on their own.

00:08:51.160 And so when you encounter them, they have ideas that you don't hear from anyone else.

00:08:55.320 Yeah, yeah.

00:08:56.800 Yeah, and they're not affected by the manners.

00:08:59.520 So much of education is just about internalising the manners of the upper-middle class.

00:09:05.200 And when you don't, when you have the ideas and the insights, but they're not, they don't come with the baggage of all of that upper-class etiquette, it can be quite interesting.

00:09:18.040 And there can be some...

00:09:19.340 It's often quite humorous, often, as well.

00:09:21.900 Yeah, yeah, of course.

00:09:22.880 So do you regard Quillette as a conservative or a right-wing publication?

00:09:27.660 And was that your goal to begin with?

00:09:29.440 No, we're not conservative, and we're not right-wing.

00:09:35.240 I'm not particularly...

00:09:37.680 Well, I would consider myself a centrist.

00:09:40.560 I'm conservative on some issues, for sure, but I don't come in a conservative package,

00:09:47.020 and I'm quite high in openness to experience, so my temperament is quite liberal.

00:09:53.140 How about conscientiousness?

00:09:55.560 It could be higher.

00:09:56.680 Yeah, well, your room is clean, so that's part of that, so...

00:10:00.680 Yeah, that was a last-minute effort to just push things out of...

00:10:04.540 I see, I see.

00:10:06.380 Yeah, no, I'm not orderly at all.

00:10:08.460 I'm industrious, but my orderliness is actually quite low.

00:10:12.500 And I never considered myself a conservative until I think the left became sort of hijacked

00:10:26.120 by these social justice ideas.

00:10:28.760 Yeah, that's exactly what happened to me as well, fundamentally.

00:10:32.240 I never thought I was a conservative.

00:10:33.880 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:34.880 You know, who knows, right?

00:10:36.280 Yeah, but I do think there are tremendous insights in conservative philosophy, and, you

00:10:42.260 know, as I've grown older and become a parent and that kind of thing, I appreciate the conservative

00:10:47.380 perspective a lot more than I used to when I was younger.

00:10:50.340 Yeah, well, the conservative emphasis on being very careful of unintended consequences is definitely

00:10:57.140 something that is wise and a necessary counterpart to, well, too much incautious originality, let's

00:11:07.000 say.

00:11:07.760 Yeah, and I think that the conservatives have it right when it comes to family and relationships.

00:11:15.540 You know, there's not a whole lot of experimentation that one can do with family structure without

00:11:23.560 it going haywire.

00:11:25.700 Yeah, well, it's a difficult thing to manage.

00:11:28.360 So, no, I just can't see how it's possible to operate as a single parent, particularly.

00:11:38.960 It's very, very difficult to do that, to work and to raise children.

00:11:42.320 I mean, I know people do it, and some people do it extremely well, but, man, it's quite 0.97

00:11:47.060 the damn job to manage it well. 0.93

00:11:49.800 And then you don't have someone around constantly to talk to about your kids, which is also a 1.00

00:11:54.020 problem.

00:11:54.500 I mean, maybe you have friends, but that's not quite the same thing.

00:11:57.800 So, that doesn't necessarily say that the nuclear family is the only option, but we are

00:12:03.720 pretty tightly pair-bonded as a species, so.

00:12:06.280 Yeah, no, I think it's hard work, but there's a big trade-off.

00:12:15.980 And, you know, something our culture is not very good at talking about is the risk to children

00:12:24.340 that is presented by having unrelated adults in their household, which is something I'm

00:12:31.640 very aware of being a mother, you know, it's, you can't, when you've got little children

00:12:38.120 running around and they're creating messes and dramas and they're acting up, you kind

00:12:43.440 of need the male in the house to be biologically related to them, to protect them from, you know, 0.79

00:12:50.380 potential aggravation.

00:12:52.840 It's just, you know, it seems to me a uniquely dangerous thing to do to your children to bring

00:13:01.500 in men who don't have the instincts to care for them, but that's a separate issue.

00:13:09.180 Well, yes and no.

00:13:11.360 I mean, one fact that has been pretty persistent in psychological investigation is the fact

00:13:17.620 that a child is at a much higher risk for physical abuse from a step-parent.

00:13:22.380 I think it's, I hate to say this, but I think it's a hundredfold, it's something like that.

00:13:28.600 But that part might be wrong, it's been a while since I looked at it, but the fact that it's

00:13:33.100 a greatly increased risk is not wrong.

00:13:35.800 And that is definitely worth thinking about.

00:13:37.680 I mean, children push your buttons.

00:13:39.580 That's right.

00:13:40.620 Yes, and smart, tough children particularly do that.

00:13:45.400 And so, well, there has to be some inhibition of that and that, well, we don't necessarily

00:13:51.860 understand exactly the relationship between the love that inhibits that sort of thing

00:13:55.960 and direct genetic relationship, biological relationship.

00:13:59.920 But it's not zero, that's for sure.

00:14:02.180 Yeah.

00:14:02.340 So those people you listed as writers for Quillette, they've gone on to have quite the careers.

00:14:07.940 Rav Avora, Rob Henderson, Coleman Hughes.

00:14:12.000 Yeah, so that's, it's nice to, yeah, it's exciting to be able to find young people and

00:14:16.300 to put them in positions where they can succeed or to help them along that path.

00:14:21.120 That's one thing I really liked about being a professor with undergrads and graduate students

00:14:25.220 when that worked.

00:14:26.380 Yeah, that's, that's definitely the most rewarding aspect of the job and just giving people a

00:14:34.080 platform, particularly when people are going through a difficult time, you know, we've

00:14:37.700 published lots of articles written by people who have been, you know, for want of a better

00:14:44.420 term, cancelled at their university or their workplace.

00:14:49.920 And tortured is a better word, really.

00:14:52.080 Yeah, yeah, and we had an article about the, the similarities between cancel culture and

00:14:58.340 torture a few weeks ago on Quillette.

00:15:01.580 So that, that, that's also been very rewarding, just being able to provide a bit of cover for

00:15:06.500 people and a bit of moral support and giving, giving people a voice, but potentially when

00:15:11.180 they're going through a rough time in their lives.

00:15:14.840 So that's, so you know, that, that comment you made about the most rewarding part of it

00:15:20.540 being the ability to find promising young people and to open doors for them.

00:15:26.360 That's really worth thinking about too, you know, because people have, it's easy for people

00:15:30.820 to have a stereotypical view of, let's say, the boss in an organization. 0.99

00:15:36.360 And there are unreasonable bosses and foolish ones and stupid ones, obviously, because for 0.99

00:15:42.040 obvious reasons, but I think that benevolent element is extremely overlooked when people 0.99

00:15:52.120 are thinking about how organizations are structured, because the good people I know in organizations

00:15:57.420 think the way you do about what they're doing, that there's almost nothing more fun than finding

00:16:03.800 some young person who's promising and, and helping them succeed in a variety of ways as people.

00:16:11.900 And as there's a new sitcom, I don't know if you've seen it, it's quite interesting, called

00:16:17.280 Ted Lasso.

00:16:18.660 It's about an American football coach who goes to the, to the UK to coach a soccer team.

00:16:24.620 And it's a very, very positive sitcom and has very positive male and female characters,

00:16:29.820 which is quite rare, but it focuses on that to a tremendous degree.

00:16:34.300 And very effectively, I think that it's sort of in loco parentis.

00:16:37.940 And it makes sense that that would be a motivation because of course, we love our children and

00:16:42.160 most of the time, and we would like to facilitate their development.

00:16:46.180 And so why wouldn't that be a natural source of, of reward?

00:16:50.740 It's an analog to that when you're running an organization.

00:16:54.440 Oh, it's definitely.

00:16:55.420 And, you know, you would know this as a clinical psychologist that we often feel anxious and

00:17:01.320 depressed when we're focusing on ourselves too much and we're ruminating and we're thinking

00:17:06.660 about, you know, when we get trapped in our own mind, in our own world.

00:17:11.460 And so focusing on what we can do for others is a really easy way to get out of that trap.

00:17:19.280 Yeah, well, depressed people use I a lot.

00:17:23.680 Yeah.

00:17:24.700 Yes, pronoun use, you know how important that is.

00:17:27.300 So, but yes, that, that constant use of self-referential pronouns is a sign of depression.

00:17:32.700 And that's an interesting observation.

00:17:34.740 We, we really don't know how much you have to concentrate on other people to be optimally

00:17:40.200 situated in terms of your emotional regulation, but too much self-focus that is clearly associated

00:17:46.280 with depression because the causal connection is hard to exactly establish, but certainly

00:17:51.700 people who get depressed do tend to sever or lose a lot of their social connections and

00:17:58.020 that tends to make their depression spiral.

00:18:01.520 So I also, when I was treating people with social anxiety, we know one of the things that

00:18:07.720 I had them practice doing was paying more attention to other people.

00:18:14.920 And I meant that like physically and psychologically.

00:18:17.580 It's like, if you start getting anxious instead of avoiding and falling into your self-devouring

00:18:23.780 thoughts, pay attention to the faces in particular of the people you're interacting with, because

00:18:29.440 you'll see with depressed and anxious people, they'll often avoid eye contact.

00:18:33.120 They're trying to shield themselves from what they see as excessive evaluation, right?

00:18:38.880 And they think that evaluation is going to be critical, but if they would just look, then

00:18:43.580 that's generally not true.

00:18:45.100 And depressed and anxious people radically overestimate the degree to which that's true.

00:18:49.320 And then the other thing that happens is that like, if I'm not looking at you, then I'm

00:18:54.660 going to be awkward in my conversation with you and that's going to make me anxious.

00:18:58.480 But if I look at your face, well, then I can see what you're doing and how you're operating.

00:19:03.500 And then all the automatic mechanisms I have that if I'm reasonably socially skilled, they

00:19:09.000 just kick in.

00:19:10.420 Some people lack that, but most people don't.

00:19:13.060 And so as long as they initiate it through attention, then away they go.

00:19:18.620 Yeah, that's a really good point.

00:19:20.880 And it reminds me of the experience I had growing up.

00:19:26.020 So I worked before I was doing a psychology master's and before I'd been doing Quillette,

00:19:33.140 I worked for 10 years from the age of 15 to 25 as a waitress.

00:19:39.120 And I think that was actually probably one of the best things that I've done in my life

00:19:43.780 because, I mean, for a range of reasons.

00:19:46.180 But I remember being in my late teens and early 20s and just having all of these interactions

00:19:52.640 with people every night.

00:19:55.420 Well, I wouldn't work every night, but every week having hundreds of interactions, small

00:20:00.180 interactions where you have to greet people, seat them, take their order, attend to them

00:20:06.480 during their dinner, that kind of thing, and make sure everything's okay.

00:20:09.500 I mean, they're just tiny, small interactions, but any social anxiety immediately becomes

00:20:19.280 immediately extinct.

00:20:21.100 And you learn confidence in just talking to people and any kind of fear that you might

00:20:26.780 have as a young person who sort of, you know, doesn't have high status or hasn't had much

00:20:32.980 experience in the world.

00:20:34.180 That all melts away just from having a service job.

00:20:36.940 And I think that having a service job is one of the best things a young person can do,

00:20:41.460 particularly if they suffer.

00:20:42.860 Did you enjoy it?

00:20:44.140 Oh, yeah.

00:20:44.840 I loved it.

00:20:45.560 Yeah.

00:20:45.940 I worked in restaurants for years.

00:20:47.840 I started when I was 14.

00:20:49.600 I worked in restaurants on and off until I was probably 19 or so for about five years.

00:20:57.160 That was mostly as a short order cook and so forth.

00:21:00.980 I started as a dishwasher, but it's tremendously social occupation.

00:21:05.800 Yeah.

00:21:06.080 And so, yeah, yeah, I loved it.

00:21:08.220 And, and in one restaurant in particular, I worked there with friends and it was a rude

00:21:13.200 shock to me to graduate university and then get an office job after working in a restaurant

00:21:20.080 because it was so boring by comparison.

00:21:23.180 And so, um, to me, it just seemed like it wasn't real work working in an office.

00:21:30.760 I worked with this guy named Scotty Kyle and he was about 34 years old and he had been an

00:21:36.760 alcoholic and he had most of his teeth punched out in fights.

00:21:40.000 He was a rough guy, but he'd stopped drinking by the time I was working with him.

00:21:43.100 And he was a great practical joker.

00:21:44.300 And so the best, and he was always playing jokes on the waitresses and they liked him.

00:21:49.100 He wasn't mean.

00:21:50.000 He was very, very funny.

00:21:51.160 And so they got along with him really well.

00:21:52.700 And, uh, the best joke he ever pulled, I thought was we had a cooler that you could walk into

00:21:58.980 and in the cooler, there was a white, uh, bucket that we kept salad in, in ice water so that

00:22:06.360 we could just scoop it out and serve a fresh salad.

00:22:10.060 Pretty straightforwardly, the waitresses would go back and do that. 0.99

00:22:13.140 It was their job to, to, uh, serve the salads and to get them out of the cooler.

00:22:16.980 So Scotty stuffed himself into the cooler, which was only about this wide.

00:22:21.920 And he put his hands in the ice water and then the, the lights were off back there too.

00:22:28.460 And so when the waitress came back into the, into the room where the cooler wasn't open, 0.56

00:22:33.040 she put, put her, put the scoop in to get the salad and he grabbed her hands with both his hands,

00:22:38.040 which were ice cold.

00:22:39.080 Well, she's, I was about three rooms away, but you could definitely hear her scream. 1.00

00:22:44.440 And I think you could hear it through the whole restaurant.

00:22:46.740 It was extraordinarily funny.

00:22:48.540 And so that's one of the things I really liked about working class jobs actually, 0.85

00:22:52.120 is that they, they had a constant and the constant humor that, that was happening.

00:22:57.300 That was absolutely.

00:22:59.360 Yeah.

00:23:00.480 So, so back to Quillette.

00:23:02.700 So why did Quillette succeed so well?

00:23:05.900 Do you think, what did you do right?

00:23:07.460 And I mean, timing is something, right?

00:23:09.960 But still you have to be in the right place.

00:23:13.400 You were in the right place at the right time.

00:23:15.460 And so what happened, do you think?

00:23:19.500 Well, I, I'm pretty good at spotting talent.

00:23:23.400 And so I, I spotted a couple of writers.

00:23:29.180 I was on Twitter and I saw people writing for their own blogs.

00:23:35.200 One of them was Jamie Palmer, who's now sort of second in charge.

00:23:39.440 He's senior editor in London.

00:23:40.880 And he was writing for his own blog.

00:23:42.940 And I remember reading his prose and just thinking, why isn't this guy working for the Sunday Times?

00:23:49.480 Like his, his prose was so beautiful.

00:23:51.240 And so, um, had such a complexity that was so interesting.

00:23:56.440 So as I could see unexploited talent and I mean, when I, when I created Quillette, it was in late 2015.

00:24:07.000 It was just before or happened simultaneously with the creation of the Heterodox Academy.

00:24:12.560 And I was actually, you know, I was a huge fan of Jonathan Haidt prior to beginning Quillette.

00:24:19.800 And I had met, um, a psychologist called Lee Jusson, who had come out to Australia to give a talk at a psychology symposium.

00:24:28.680 And I went to get, I went to meet him and, and talk to him.

00:24:32.380 And we talked a lot about the left-wing bias in psychology, in particular social psychology.

00:24:38.000 And that was, we should talk more about that.

00:24:40.120 So, yeah, so that was fascinating to me because, you know, I'd been studying psychology for a long time.

00:24:46.280 I loved psychology.

00:24:48.420 I like my favorite aspects of psychology are the sort of things that you look at, such as personality and individual differences.

00:24:55.660 But it was really, uh, amazing to me to discover that social psychology might have a huge replication problem because they had this political bias sort of baked into their studies.

00:25:09.100 And so I went to talk to Lee Jusson about this.

00:25:12.900 And this, this, I mean, this was six years ago, but it was before the problems in academia had become very widely known and talked about.

00:25:24.300 And so I was fascinated, I was fascinated by this idea that a particular area of, uh, science could be corrupted by political bias.

00:25:36.100 And then I wanted to write an article about this particular topic.

00:25:40.120 And I thought, there's no publication that will have me because the publications that focus on science, such as Scientific American, or even The Guardian, they, they do, they publish on scientific topics.

00:25:54.860 And then publications that, uh, might be interested in publishing articles that, um, contest some left-wing narratives, they're not going to be particularly interested in science.

00:26:11.880 So I needed a publication that could have, that was interested in analysis and scientific rigor, but was also going to challenge left-wing narratives.

00:26:24.480 And I thought that such a public, such a publication didn't actually exist.

00:26:28.260 So I had to create my own.

00:26:29.820 Um, and some of the first articles that I published were by academics who, uh, in either in their research or in their career, come up against left-wing ideology in academia or either in there.

00:26:47.380 So, so I had a particular interest in, um, sex differences.

00:26:54.040 So sex differences in psychology, you know, there, there's a lot, as you know, there's a lot of empirical evidence.

00:26:59.300 That, uh, men and women aren't the same psychologically.

00:27:03.600 We have different career preferences.

00:27:05.540 We have different sexual psychology, but it's difficult to talk about these issues in mainstream journalism.

00:27:12.320 Um, so.

00:27:13.800 Yeah, I've noticed.

00:27:15.340 Yeah, of course.

00:27:17.060 And, uh, so I wanted a publication that would explore these issues.

00:27:20.840 And I invited academics who I knew who had interests in either evolutionary psychology or behavioral genetics.

00:27:28.960 To come and write for me.

00:27:31.200 And a couple of my early, a couple of the early essays that I published were just very good.

00:27:37.460 And they kind of went viral as much as, you know, viral for, for a high intellectual publication.

00:27:44.000 And it just took off from there.

00:27:46.400 And we, we just built up a social media following.

00:27:49.900 Okay.

00:27:50.340 So you, you point to two factors, say.

00:27:52.720 So one is that you like to spot talent and you actually could do it.

00:27:59.680 And you also believe that talent exists.

00:28:02.060 So that's kind of helpful for that.

00:28:03.560 If it does happen to be the case that talent does exist.

00:28:06.340 And then when talented people are having difficulty, let's say being published somewhere because of their, the tenor of their viewpoint, whatever that happens to be.

00:28:15.500 That does create exactly the kind of opportunity that you just described, right?

00:28:19.400 Because then you have this pool of talent that isn't being utilized that you can capitalize on, so to speak, while also aiding in the development of those people.

00:28:27.180 Then that issue that you brought up there, that, that, that, that's part of your ability to spot what's not right.

00:28:33.560 You know, the fact that you cottoned on to that bias in psychology so early in your psychological progression.

00:28:40.540 I mean, you, you, you happen to talk to people who knew this, but still, that's quite the realization.

00:28:46.340 You know, I really didn't understand that until I had been a psychologist, probably for at least 15 years, a professor.

00:28:55.760 Now, I was, I did my PhD in a more biological area.

00:28:59.960 And then I was a personality psychologist, and it doesn't have the same kind of bias.

00:29:04.820 But then I started looking into the literature on authoritarian personality and authoritarianism.

00:29:10.120 And all I found was this insistence that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism.

00:29:17.380 And I thought, what the hell is this?

00:29:20.000 How can we possibly assume as a science, social psychology, which is not much of a science as far as I'm concerned, by the way.

00:29:27.520 But how can we state so bluntly that there's no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism?

00:29:34.320 And the authoritarian scale that had been used by social psychologists was only right-wing authoritarianism.

00:29:40.660 And I thought, well, what about the communists?

00:29:43.520 I mean, did nobody notice in social psychology that there were communist dictators?

00:29:48.260 What were those people?

00:29:50.160 Well, and that now, and then it's worse than that.

00:29:52.860 That's bad enough.

00:29:53.900 Now, I had a graduate student who, we started to do research on left-wing authoritarianism.

00:30:00.280 But that, by the time that got off the ground, fundamentally, things exploded around me, and I stopped working as a professor.

00:30:08.060 I couldn't do that anymore.

00:30:09.420 But the other thing that's really horrible, horrible, horrible, is the implicit association test.

00:30:16.460 Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:30:17.640 Now, and that left-wing issue is dead relevant here.

00:30:21.300 So, you know, I'll tell you a story.

00:30:23.740 This is a good story, I think.

00:30:25.240 Okay.

00:30:26.040 So Mazarin Banaji, who is one of the inventors of the IAT, and who hasn't protested against its misuse to the degree that the other creators of the IAT have,

00:30:39.220 and also nowhere nearly as much, is quite left in her viewpoint.

00:30:44.220 Yeah.

00:30:44.300 So that's point number one.

00:30:46.460 Point number two, I saw her when I was at Harvard.

00:30:49.580 She came to deliver a talk.

00:30:51.060 She's there now, but she wasn't when I was there.

00:30:53.460 She came to deliver a talk about the IAT.

00:30:56.020 She talked about bias, implicit bias.

00:30:58.840 And so I think I asked her this question.

00:31:01.560 She was delivering a talk to the faculty and the graduate students.

00:31:05.040 I said, what's the difference between implicit bias and categorization?

00:31:08.760 And she didn't really have an answer to that.

00:31:12.020 And I thought, wait a second.

00:31:14.560 This is an important issue.

00:31:17.160 You're equating categorization with implicit bias.

00:31:22.800 Yeah.

00:31:23.300 Well, let's call that a pronounced sin on the left.

00:31:28.140 And here's the fundamental idea, as far as I can tell, is that, well, it isn't obvious how we categorize.

00:31:34.220 That's partly Foucault's criticism of category structures.

00:31:37.820 And there's something to that, because categorization is extremely difficult.

00:31:41.940 But to leap from that to say that categorization as such is, say, nothing but bias, it's insane.

00:31:52.620 It's so shallow and so wrong and so dangerously wrong.

00:31:58.580 Well, it's not surprising that the IAT has gone out into the world from social psychology and just wreaked devastating havoc.

00:32:06.940 And I should also say, as a research and clinical psychologist, that if a clinical psychologist used that test in a clinical setting,

00:32:16.520 they would be in deep trouble because it's nowhere near valid enough or reliable enough to be used for diagnostic purposes.

00:32:23.620 Period.

00:32:24.380 The end.

00:32:25.240 Well, they, I mean, I mean, you would think there'd be some sanctions on Harvard or the academics putting, making the test available to the public on their web.

00:32:36.860 So the IAT is available on a Harvard website.

00:32:40.700 It's not diagnosis.

00:32:43.600 Yeah.

00:32:43.920 So there's some disclaimer that, you know, it can be used, can't be used for research, can't be used as a diagnostic tool because it doesn't have validity and reliability.

00:32:53.440 But it's available on a Harvard website so that all of these consultants who are paid God knows how much per hour can have their workers take it.

00:33:04.260 And, you know, it comes with the prestige of Harvard.

00:33:07.820 Yeah.

00:33:08.100 And so de facto, de facto, that's right.

00:33:10.600 De facto, it's a clinical diagnostic test, but it's not marked.

00:33:14.420 It's not, it's not promoted directly as such.

00:33:17.720 Right.

00:33:18.040 And it isn't licensed clinicians that are using it.

00:33:21.440 Yeah.

00:33:21.620 It's extraordinarily horrible, shameful.

00:33:25.360 Now, I think it should be used for research purposes because the question of to what degree implicit bias, power differential even might affect categorization is a perfectly reasonable question.

00:33:39.480 But, but to equate them thoughtlessly is, it's, it's absolutely inexcusable intellectually.

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00:36:34.340 What I find interesting is the research on stereotype accuracy.

00:36:41.260 And from the reading that I've done, so this is Ali Jussam's work, he has found that stereotypes do tend to be reasonably accurate.

00:36:52.640 They're not, it's just a heuristic we have.

00:36:54.900 Yeah, well, that's the issue.

00:36:56.480 The heuristic issue is exactly the issue.

00:36:58.240 Almost all our perceptions and categories are heuristics.

00:37:01.640 They're shortcuts because we can't see everything.

00:37:05.020 So everything we perceive is a heuristic.

00:37:08.040 I mean, the very objects we see are perceptual heuristics.

00:37:11.880 Exactly.

00:37:12.240 But what's really interesting about Jussam's work is that he finds that we, because of our mental shortcuts and heuristics, we can make snap judgments about an individual or about a person according to the group that they belong to.

00:37:28.300 But as soon as we get more data about that individual, the stereotype drops away.

00:37:33.740 So we're very good at updating our perceptions of individuals according to the data that comes in.

00:37:42.420 And that makes sense.

00:37:43.520 Okay.

00:37:43.880 So partly what we do, like we have, all of us have complete maps of the world.

00:37:49.560 And you might say, well, how can we?

00:37:51.140 Because we don't know everything.

00:37:52.360 Well, the answer is we just use low resolution representations.

00:37:55.740 And so, like, there's, you know that Mongolia exists.

00:38:01.280 But if I asked you everything you knew about Mongolia, it would, unless you're a specialist, it would take you long to exhaust your knowledge.

00:38:10.060 Yeah.

00:38:10.620 So you have a representation, just like the representation you have of a helicopter, you know.

00:38:16.680 Yeah.

00:38:16.860 And you could draw your representation of a helicopter.

00:38:19.480 It would be like a circle with a couple of lines on it and a rotor, you know, that's a helicopter.

00:38:23.440 It's like, no, it's not, not at all, you know.

00:38:25.740 But, okay, so, and what happens is that when we use a low resolution representation, when a high res representation is necessary, we hit errors.

00:38:37.220 Yeah.

00:38:37.840 And then we update and we, and we differentiate the map.

00:38:41.200 Yeah.

00:38:41.620 And, and, and that's, there isn't any difference between that and thinking.

00:38:45.980 That, that's essentially, that's what you do when you're thinking. 0.89

00:38:48.160 But, but because you have to have shorthand, when you're ignorant, you have to rely on something. 0.74

00:38:54.660 Yeah. 0.93

00:38:54.760 And so, yeah, of course.

00:38:56.320 And, you know, I think there are times when people refuse to update their stereotypes, you know, because it takes effort.

00:39:02.640 And so, but that, that's a separate issue.

00:39:06.060 Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

00:39:09.060 Yeah.

00:39:09.520 So the, the, the, the lack of left-wing authoritarianism is, is interesting.

00:39:15.640 I wonder if that body of research has been updated in the last couple of years.

00:39:20.380 I haven't looked at it for a while, but when I did look at it, I remember a, an academic at, I think maybe NYU called John Jost.

00:39:29.260 Oh, yes.

00:39:29.760 He was very resistant to the idea that there was left, such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism.

00:39:34.100 And I think he argued that conservatism was almost a form of false consciousness.

00:39:43.080 Oh, yes.

00:39:43.700 They, they have, yes, yes.

00:39:44.900 That's the scale.

00:39:45.940 It's something like system justification theory.

00:39:48.180 Yeah, that's the one, yes.

00:39:49.040 That's it.

00:39:49.560 Yeah, yeah.

00:39:50.020 So if you, that's exactly it.

00:39:51.600 And it's, it's again, social psychologists playing at clinical pathologization.

00:39:56.500 Yeah.

00:39:56.860 That's deeply embedded in that, in that social, in that system justification theory literature.

00:40:02.580 It's like, well, if you, if you're patriotic, well, there's something wrong with you.

00:40:07.400 Yeah.

00:40:07.920 Now.

00:40:08.460 Yeah.

00:40:10.300 Yes.

00:40:11.740 Yeah.

00:40:12.180 Yeah.

00:40:12.300 So I don't think that anything has been updated on this, on, on the end of investigation into

00:40:19.380 left-wing authoritarianism.

00:40:20.520 And it's too bad, you know, because it isn't exactly obvious to me that when the left goes

00:40:25.800 wrong, it goes wrong exactly the same way the right goes wrong when it goes wrong.

00:40:31.540 Yeah.

00:40:32.040 So I, I think the right might have more of a proclivity to clump together in a unitary fashion,

00:40:38.760 partly because I think it's easier to do that on the right.

00:40:41.820 You know, if it's true that those on the right are more conscientious and dutiful and

00:40:47.060 lower in openness, that means they're not as diverse in their opinions and, and, and

00:40:52.640 range of, of interests, let's say.

00:40:55.060 And so in principle, it would be easier to unite them.

00:40:58.000 And that might be an advantage.

00:40:59.580 You know, there's an advantage to rapid unification, just like there's an advantage to diversity of

00:41:05.500 ideation, which covers more territory, but it's slower and harder to organize.

00:41:10.500 So, and the fact that the research isn't balanced to investigate both ends means, well, that we're

00:41:17.920 ignorant about these things when we shouldn't be.

00:41:21.460 Yes. 0.97

00:41:21.980 And we should be studying it and we should be studying the impact or the, the relationship

00:41:29.940 of social media, particularly to both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism.

00:41:34.560 I have a, there's an article that Rob Henderson wrote with another grad student called Vincent

00:41:43.640 Haranam.

00:41:45.880 He, he, we published it a couple of years ago and it's called Political Moderates Are Lying.

00:41:51.840 And the, the thesis was that in our online groups and online tribes, over time, those who are more

00:42:03.440 fanatical or those who are more dogmatic in their views come to dominate the discussion and they

00:42:10.700 intimidate the moderates in the group.

00:42:14.060 And the effect that that has is over time, it pulls the moderates over to the, the more extreme

00:42:20.580 pole of the group or the more extreme pole of the ideology that is held.

00:42:26.260 And this similar to what Jonathan Haidt was writing.

00:42:29.700 You suppose it's because, is it because the more extreme types are more willing to use punishment

00:42:35.980 in service of their certainty?

00:42:39.040 I think that would be part of it.

00:42:40.240 So that would be hard on the moderates, right?

00:42:41.820 Yeah, yeah.

00:42:42.820 I think that would be part of it.

00:42:44.760 And certainly there's, and, and the more extreme voices do more.

00:42:53.560 So, so you get into this moral grandstanding and this performative sort of behavior and they

00:43:01.460 impose more costly signals on themselves and others.

00:43:05.920 So, and this is, this happens on, in groups that are both left-wing and right-wing.

00:43:11.040 And, and I'm more familiar with the dynamics on the left because we've covered it a lot

00:43:15.800 at Colette, but if you've got like an artistic community and, uh, so, so we published an article

00:43:24.920 about the implosion of the Boston Pride parade.

00:43:28.440 So this, there's an organization that is pro-LGBT, et cetera, and a, a group of young activists come

00:43:40.060 in and say, we're going to take over your organization.

00:43:43.060 Now you're, the Boston Pride parade has to be about black trans lives mattering.

00:43:48.320 It's got to be about black trans lives, not just about LGBT.

00:43:51.880 So they want to narrow the issue down to something very tiny and specific.

00:43:58.520 And then they want to impose that belief system on the rest of the group.

00:44:03.980 And now the moderates in the group are thinking, well, I want to support, I want to be part of

00:44:10.000 the Boston Pride group.

00:44:11.360 I want to go and march for LGBT people and, and lesbian and gay rights and transgender rights.

00:44:17.440 I want to be involved in that, but I can't sign on to these quite extreme demands.

00:44:24.060 And, and this, this group of activists wanted to sort of pivot the, the pride march away from

00:44:31.120 just LGBT and towards black trans lives had a suite of demands where they had to, you know,

00:44:38.860 the, the, uh, the white people of the group had to acknowledge that they were colonialists

00:44:43.600 and they had stolen from the native peoples and they had to, um, rally against gentrification.

00:44:49.780 So all this whole suite of sort of pseudo Marxist demands were, came along in this package and

00:44:56.860 the moderates just give up.

00:44:58.540 They're either intimidated or cowed into silence, leave the group or just cave in.

00:45:04.380 And, um, I can kind of, you might also wonder if the moderates have better things to do on

00:45:10.580 average.

00:45:11.260 Yeah.

00:45:11.360 You know, you know what I mean?

00:45:12.620 If you're, so imagine you're moderate in your life and you're kind of distributed, your interests

00:45:18.060 are kind of distributed along around a number of things, your family, you have a job, et

00:45:22.800 cetera, et cetera.

00:45:23.900 And so you're, you're tangentially or involved with the group, but when push comes to shove,

00:45:29.120 well, if someone's getting hostile and it's starting to cause you a lot of grief and misery,

00:45:33.540 then it's easy enough to bow out.

00:45:35.900 And absolutely.

00:45:36.960 That's, that's exactly right.

00:45:38.340 And, and, and the concern I have is that I'm seeing, so this is sort of like a deranging

00:45:44.580 dynamic that is now happening where tiny minorities of fanatics are pulling their respective

00:45:52.860 communities and their ideological tribes away from the center.

00:45:56.980 And it's not just happening on the left.

00:45:59.980 I'm seeing it more and more happening on the right.

00:46:02.620 And I,

00:46:03.460 Do you think social media is, do you think what social media is doing is speeding that

00:46:08.220 up and making it easier?

00:46:10.000 Right.

00:46:10.140 Yeah, I do.

00:46:10.900 Because it's, it's not that easy if you're a bully, let's say, ideologically committed

00:46:15.560 to bully to actually find people and bully them.

00:46:19.120 Yeah.

00:46:19.280 But online, you can do that because it's so efficient.

00:46:21.780 You can do that extremely quickly and with very many people and you can unite.

00:46:27.580 That's the other thing is you can unite fanatics, even if they're rare statistically.

00:46:32.600 So, you know, in a small town, maybe you could find two fanatics and what the hell are they

00:46:36.380 going to do?

00:46:36.880 But online, well, then there's a group.

00:46:40.780 And then that would also mean that the fanatics are more likely to overestimate how popular

00:46:45.460 their ideas actually are because there's a biased sampling issue, for example, we'll say.

00:46:51.420 Yeah.

00:46:51.760 But also fanatics can attract quite large followings on social media, particularly if they focus

00:46:59.940 on one issue.

00:47:00.960 So if you're so a very, very effective strategy for being an activist on social media, using

00:47:09.580 social media as one of your main or your main tool of engagement is to just pick one

00:47:15.540 issue and focus on it and just repeat it over and over and over again.

00:47:20.300 And that is, I mean, I'm not saying all activism is bad by any means, but it's, it can, it can

00:47:30.660 create a community that can become fanatical, basically, which is a danger.

00:47:36.860 I'm not so sure that, that activism isn't just bad.

00:47:40.780 Altogether.

00:47:41.300 You know, well, it's obviously the idea that you need to pay attention to your institutions

00:47:47.460 and that sometimes they need criticism and reform.

00:47:50.920 It's like, obviously institutions ossify and they become corrupt and everyone has to be

00:47:59.940 alert to that.

00:48:00.920 And there are steps you can and should take and are morally obligated, I think, to take.

00:48:06.220 But the thing about activism is that it's almost always predicated on the idea that you're right,

00:48:12.020 you're morally superior and you've identified the people who are wrong.

00:48:16.700 And to me, that's one step away from mob and it's one step away from punishment.

00:48:21.320 And one of the things that appalls me and makes me ashamed in relationship to the universities

00:48:27.500 is that universities are pretty good at teaching young people that being an activist is a good

00:48:35.140 thing.

00:48:35.860 And I'm not so sure at all that it's a good thing.

00:48:38.500 I think it's pseudo responsibility, especially because it always comes with an easy identification

00:48:45.840 of just who the enemy is.

00:48:48.520 That's exactly right.

00:48:50.160 No, I think you're right.

00:48:51.440 And I think that if you're going to attack, if you're going to be on the attack, you have

00:48:55.560 to also build.

00:48:56.800 It's your responsibility and it's your duty to build.

00:49:00.360 So I, you know, I disagree.

00:49:03.160 Well, you built an alternative.

00:49:04.520 That's what you did.

00:49:05.920 Yeah.

00:49:06.100 Yeah.

00:49:06.580 And I think, you know, if you're going to attack our institutions, you know, I have

00:49:12.320 a lot of problems with establishment institutions, but you can't just attack them.

00:49:18.020 What are we going to have left when we've got no institutions?

00:49:20.920 We've got to have new institutions.

00:49:25.660 We've got to start building them now.

00:49:27.300 Well, we can have rubble and everyone could be equal in the rubble.

00:49:30.620 That's happened many, many, many times.

00:49:33.400 And that's the risk.

00:49:34.600 Like, that's the reason that's, you know, that's why I think, you know, attacking institutions

00:49:40.120 has to go hand in hand with building new ones.

00:49:43.240 And lots of people, you know, I know quite a few people who are trying to build new institutions.

00:49:49.260 But, yeah, I agree that there's something about social media and social media enabled activism

00:49:57.000 that makes finding an out group, dehumanizing the out group and attacking them very easy.

00:50:04.940 Well, OK, let's dive into that for a minute.

00:50:07.400 OK, so.

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00:51:26.780 Oh, Maya.

00:51:29.640 Maya.

00:51:30.780 She loves being cool.

00:51:32.800 21 degrees is her favorite number.

00:51:35.620 God, she's the coolest, especially at night.

00:51:38.500 So, I raise the temp at 10 p.m. because she gets chilly when she sleeps.

00:51:42.740 Maya loves using less energy. 1.00

00:51:44.560 And I love Maya.

00:51:45.820 We're basically besties.

00:51:47.380 With SmartFlow from Enbridge Sustain, you won't have to think about your HVAC, but it will

00:51:51.840 always be thinking of you.

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00:51:57.720 more.

00:51:58.540 How many times have you sworn at somebody when you're walking down the street versus how

00:52:03.780 many times have you sworn at someone when you're in your car and they're in their car?

00:52:07.920 I don't think I've sworn at anyone ever in that manner.

00:52:13.900 Okay.

00:52:14.260 Well, then you're very, you're much more polite than me, let's say.

00:52:17.660 But it's much more probable when there's a barrier like that, that people will manifest

00:52:24.160 aggressive behavior.

00:52:25.240 You know, we don't know exactly what inhibits aggressive behavior, but one thing that does

00:52:29.780 is rather, rather close personal proximity, real proximity.

00:52:34.280 Now, when you take the person and you, you place them in a shell, let's say that's a car,

00:52:40.260 you place yourself in a shell.

00:52:41.500 Well, all of those cues, those subtle and complex cues aren't there.

00:52:46.780 And so online, well, every, you don't even have an avatar.

00:52:51.580 You only have your hypothetical fantasy about the person that you're attacking.

00:52:55.700 You don't even know them.

00:52:57.060 Yeah.

00:52:57.560 And so, and we don't know what that does to people at all.

00:53:01.280 I mean, we see some of that on Twitter and we have no idea if this hypothesis that you

00:53:06.040 laid out is true, you know, is if there's a tendency for those who are more committed

00:53:12.140 to dominate certain types of institutions because the moderates bail out.

00:53:17.260 And then if it's also true that that's sped along by social media, which is a possibility,

00:53:22.820 not a certainty, but it could be.

00:53:24.740 And then it's also easier to dehumanize people in social media circles, if particularly if

00:53:31.480 you're so inclined and maybe even if you're not, then, well, that can be a perfect storm.

00:53:37.000 I mean, I just read an article by Jonathan Haidt today where he, I've been noticing what

00:53:44.240 seems to be developing into something like a runaway positive feedback loop in the political

00:53:50.100 landscape, particularly in the U.S.

00:53:52.080 And, you know, I spent a fair bit of time thinking about what a mental disorder actually

00:53:58.280 was.

00:53:59.200 And the most common description now, I think it's from Wakefield, I think, is that it's

00:54:04.780 the deviation of a complex mental function from its evolutionarily signified path.

00:54:11.260 And I don't like that at all because it's very difficult to specify the evolutionarily

00:54:15.280 signified path.

00:54:16.520 And it violates the is-ought distinction, right?

00:54:20.700 Just because that's how it evolved.

00:54:22.800 Assuming, why did the hand evolve?

00:54:26.140 You know, it does a lot of things.

00:54:27.840 Yeah.

00:54:28.280 Okay.

00:54:28.540 But one of the things I did notice that a lot of mental disorders are positive feedback

00:54:34.060 loops.

00:54:35.060 Depression's a good example.

00:54:36.440 So you start feeling bad.

00:54:39.000 Well, and then you reduce your social contacts and you're less effective at work.

00:54:43.260 Well, that makes you feel worse.

00:54:44.680 Well, then you're more irritable.

00:54:46.340 So you start fighting with your wife or your husband.

00:54:48.400 That makes you feel worse.

00:54:49.680 And then away it goes, spiraling downhill.

00:54:54.320 Anxiety, you start to avoid.

00:54:56.100 That's how agoraphobia develops.

00:54:58.560 Alcoholism, you drink to get rid of your hangover.

00:55:01.180 Well, positive feedback loop.

00:55:03.580 Now, not every mental disorder is a positive feedback loop, but plenty of them seem to

00:55:08.340 be.

00:55:08.540 They have that element.

00:55:09.660 And you have to figure out how to stop that spiral from continuing.

00:55:13.720 Well, we're getting into a situation.

00:55:16.980 Imagine this domination of the radical groups on both sides.

00:55:20.740 And they have an outsized voice, an outsized ability to utilize punishment effectively.

00:55:27.600 And now they're upsetting the hell out of each other.

00:55:30.500 Yeah.

00:55:30.920 And so they're more and more set in their ways.

00:55:33.700 And now the moderates are pulling over to that side.

00:55:36.620 This is the process Haidt outlines in part in this article that he, I believe he released

00:55:43.380 it today.

00:55:43.880 Um, it's October 30th, by the way, this will be put up later.

00:55:48.040 Um, and he thinks that at least in part, this was driven by Facebook like and Twitter

00:55:55.520 adoption of like, and you know, this is, we were talking about conservativism and liberalism.

00:56:01.140 And, you know, one of the things conservatives always say to liberals is don't be thinking 0.99

00:56:05.400 that your stupid invention is only doing what you think it is. 1.00

00:56:08.400 Oh, yeah. 1.00

00:56:09.420 Yeah.

00:56:09.640 Right.

00:56:10.220 That's the Chesterton's fence concept.

00:56:13.980 Yes.

00:56:14.380 And if you've done any sort of laboratory experiments, you get very, very sensitive to that because

00:56:19.520 things don't go the way you predict they will.

00:56:23.200 Right. 1.00

00:56:23.480 You're with your stupid hypothesis. 1.00

00:56:25.560 And so who knows what the like button did? 1.00

00:56:28.300 Facebook is a, it's not nothing, right?

00:56:30.720 Oh, it's just a like button.

00:56:31.740 No, no.

00:56:32.240 It's, it's like 300 million like buttons.

00:56:35.520 Yeah.

00:56:35.840 Oh, I think we vastly underestimate the impact that social media is having on our societies

00:56:42.940 and political culture.

00:56:44.600 And, you know, people will say, oh, it's, it's simply magnifying what's already there.

00:56:49.440 And that might be true.

00:56:51.280 But what if, what if what's already there is quite fragile?

00:56:54.780 What if the United States was on the pathway to extreme political polarization?

00:57:01.220 I mean, it's not a small thing to speed that up.

00:57:03.880 Like it's a, it's a very dangerous thing to speed that process up.

00:57:07.320 Yeah.

00:57:07.420 Well, it's harder to think, it's harder to think things through and put on the brakes

00:57:11.480 when it's happening really, really fast.

00:57:13.640 And you're not sure why, you know, like I, I put a fair bit of the responsibility for

00:57:21.320 this mess that we're in on faculty members at universities who let the administrators take

00:57:29.200 over by kowtowing 300 times over a 30 year period.

00:57:35.580 So, and then what happened?

00:57:36.960 So the administrators took over the universities and then the DIEI people took over the administrators.

00:57:42.080 And yeah, well, I know that's an oversimplification, but, but, but, and then these ideas, these poisonous

00:57:49.180 ideas, just away they go out into the culture.

00:57:52.880 And yeah.

00:57:53.460 And I think Hyatt is probably correct when he says that these bad ideas.

00:58:00.320 So we're talking about the postmodernism, the, you know, intersectionality, all of that,

00:58:07.420 those rubbish ideas, they would have stayed enclosed within the walls of these quite

00:58:13.500 marginalized university departments. 0.96

00:58:17.340 They would have stayed enclosed if it weren't for social media.

00:58:22.140 Yeah.

00:58:22.540 You know, the IAT, the IAT had a fair bit to do with that too.

00:58:25.920 Yeah.

00:58:26.560 Yeah.

00:58:26.780 The release of that.

00:58:27.900 So, because it did what you said with regards to consultants, right?

00:58:31.300 It gave them this scientifically valid quasi clinical tool where they could go into institutions

00:58:37.160 and claim, Hey, we can, we can ferret out your prejudice.

00:58:41.440 It's like, yeah, yeah.

00:58:43.220 Yeah.

00:58:43.700 I mean, so it's not, it's not wholly because of social media, but it's certainly allowed bad

00:58:49.920 ideas to spread very quickly.

00:58:53.620 And, and we could see that with, I mean, there's, there's so many.

00:58:58.160 Yeah.

00:58:58.180 There's the pandemic we should really be worried about.

00:59:01.300 Yeah.

00:59:01.920 I mean, so one example of, of bad, so there's, there's two things that I'll talk about.

00:59:08.660 I'll mention bad ideas spreading, but also social contagion of mental disorders.

00:59:13.600 So, I mean, and, and I guess they're, they're fairly similar.

00:59:17.880 So, you know, when George Floyd died in the United States, there were riots that spread

00:59:25.040 across the United States.

00:59:28.020 You know, I think that more damage was done in the riots that occurred in 2020 that had

00:59:33.800 been, that had, that were the worst riots in 50 years or something like that in the United

00:59:39.840 States.

00:59:40.160 So it barely had any mainstream media coverage, if any coverage at all.

00:59:45.220 And I think there hasn't even been, been a thorough investigation of how these riots

00:59:52.460 occurred, how, how much damage was done, how many people died as a result, because the

00:59:59.460 murder rate has spiked in the US since the police have pulled back from their policing.

01:00:04.500 Um, so, you know, this, this outrage that occurred from a single video clip of someone, you know,

01:00:12.820 obviously the murder was horrific and, you know, it was a horrifying thing to view.

01:00:17.440 I remember feeling absolutely disgusted, like just horrified watching the footage, but it's

01:00:22.920 gone viral and it sparked these riots around the whole nation.

01:00:26.140 Well, we also, you know, you think about what's happening with regard to our heuristics as a

01:00:31.980 consequence of that, you know, because we're kind of wired to assume that if we see something

01:00:36.740 violent, that means that the probability of violence in our local environment is quite

01:00:42.220 high because otherwise we wouldn't see it.

01:00:44.840 And so it isn't obvious that our emotional systems can look at something like that and

01:00:50.420 simultaneously say, well, remember, this is a pool of 300 million.

01:00:55.200 It's like 300 million.

01:00:56.780 How many is that?

01:00:57.700 Like, you don't know, you're, you're kind of wired for 200, not 300 million.

01:01:03.260 Exactly.

01:01:04.020 Yeah.

01:01:04.440 But the, the remarkable thing was how, uh, huge demonstrations in support of Black Lives

01:01:12.440 Matter happened all over Europe.

01:01:14.700 And they even, there was so much as even in Australia in the middle of a pandemic.

01:01:19.000 And you had tens of thousands of people marching in the middle of a pandemic in support of Black

01:01:25.840 Lives Matter in the UK.

01:01:28.400 They had Black Lives Matter marches where people were, were chanting hands up, don't shoot.

01:01:36.200 Now the police in the UK don't have guns.

01:01:39.920 Oh, Maya, Maya.

01:01:42.180 She loves being cool.

01:01:44.220 21 degrees is her favorite number.

01:01:46.620 God, she's the coolest, especially at night.

01:01:50.040 So I raised the temp at 10 PM because she gets chilly when she sleeps. 0.51

01:01:54.180 Maya loves using less energy. 1.00

01:01:55.960 And I love Maya.

01:01:57.220 We're basically besties.

01:01:59.200 With SmartFlow from Enbridge Sustain, you won't have to think about your HVAC, but it

01:02:03.080 will always be thinking of you.

01:02:04.720 With smart controls and zero upfront costs, visit EnbridgeSustainSmartFlow.com to learn more.

01:02:09.420 So we could look at that psychologically, you know, and we could say, well, you know, on

01:02:16.040 the positive side, you watched the George Floyd video and you had an empathic reaction

01:02:21.740 and a reaction of disgust.

01:02:23.720 And, you know, we could say kudos for that because it's an indication of the operation

01:02:27.480 of a moral instinct.

01:02:28.480 And we could also say the same thing about, you know, beyond cynicism about the, these

01:02:34.000 demonstrations everywhere.

01:02:35.600 I mean, one thing you can say about that is, well, people are concerned enough about inequality,

01:02:41.100 like genuinely oppressive inequality, so that even something like that will trigger it.

01:02:47.220 And so, but, but then we have to detail out the other side of the argument, which is,

01:02:52.240 well, how do you separate that from the kind of overreaction that will tear down structures

01:02:59.900 that are actually helpful to people?

01:03:01.960 And so, well, now it's defund the police.

01:03:04.700 Well, you know, maybe not, maybe that's not the right response to that video.

01:03:12.000 And it's certainly not obviously the right response.

01:03:15.280 And were more people killed by defund the police?

01:03:18.720 Like how many people are killed by defund the police?

01:03:21.160 We don't know.

01:03:22.240 We don't know.

01:03:22.840 But it's certainly not zero.

01:03:24.660 That's right.

01:03:25.740 Yeah.

01:03:26.180 I mean, I shouldn't, I shouldn't suggest that marching in support of, you know.

01:03:32.880 I don't think you were.

01:03:34.080 I don't, I don't think you were.

01:03:35.460 I think the point I was trying to make was simply that the political movements can go viral.

01:03:42.140 And they can spread outside, you know, it's obviously an American issue, police brutality,

01:03:46.860 and the race issues that are inherent in American culture.

01:03:52.040 You know, that's obviously very specific to America.

01:03:55.080 And, you know, you can't, you just simply cannot graft American race relations onto a country like Australia or the UK or Europe.

01:04:04.780 You know, we don't have the same history.

01:04:06.440 We haven't had slavery, completely different cultures.

01:04:08.880 So it was quite eye-opening and surprising to me to see how easily this political movement spread and how this Americanisation occurred all over the world without much, you know, people just got swept up in it with this sort of mood affiliation.

01:04:28.620 You even had epidemiologists joining, didn't happen in Australia, but I know in the United States, even epidemiologists came out and joined the movement to support Black Lives Matter and said, you know, these marches are, you know, racism is a public health crisis.

01:04:46.760 It's worse than the, worse than COVID, which is just, that's like temporary insanity for an epidemiologist to say that.

01:04:55.620 So, I mean, it's also, it's also frightening because it means that certain political viewpoints are acceptable during a pandemic and others aren't.

01:05:04.980 And because they're of such critical importance, you see that happening in the UK right now with the Climate Change Summit.

01:05:10.920 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:05:12.780 They've, they've, they've, they've liberalized travel restrictions on so-called red countries, as long as you're an attendee of the Climate Change Summit.

01:05:23.380 And that's absolutely horrifying to me.

01:05:25.080 It's like, oh, I see.

01:05:26.480 So because you share, you all share a particular political take on a particular issue, that's so important all of a sudden that you're in a different legal category.

01:05:37.040 And you don't think that's a, that's a dangerous precedent or you don't care. 1.00

01:05:41.160 So you're either stupid or malevolent, one of the two. 1.00

01:05:44.960 And, and, you know, I don't like to use such harsh words, but that's not acceptable, period. 1.00

01:05:50.520 That's right.

01:05:51.280 Yeah, absolutely. 0.88

01:05:52.940 And, you know, and when we've got such low trust in institutions as it is to be coming out with double standards, according to political affiliation is just ridiculous. 0.70

01:06:05.180 But then the other thing that is scary about social media is the, is social contagion of mental disorders.

01:06:16.020 So we know that we're aware now that certain proportion of young girls who are identifying as gender dysphoric and trying, attempting to become transgender, we're aware now that there is such a thing as rapid onset gender dysphoria.

01:06:39.580 Okay, so there's a book called Discovery of the Unconscious, which is a great book, Henry Ellen Berger.

01:06:46.440 It's, it's, I was given that book by a psychiatrist at the Douglas Hospital, who was my supervisor, a French guy, Maurice Dangier, a very distinguished psychiatrist.

01:07:00.120 And he said, this is the psychoanalytic Bible, Discovery of the Unconscious.

01:07:06.100 And the first, it's about that thick, and it covers Jung, Freud, Adler, it's a great book.

01:07:11.720 And, but the first 300 pages is a history of pre-psychoanalytic thought.

01:07:16.200 And part of that is a historical survey of contagion.

01:07:21.020 Yeah.

01:07:21.880 Right.

01:07:22.260 And so there, so the multiple personality disorder, for example, has cycled through about 300 years.

01:07:27.900 And there, there, there, there, there are, there are people who are temperamentally susceptible to such contagion.

01:07:34.880 They're likely the same people who are relatively easily hypnotizable.

01:07:39.000 Yeah.

01:07:39.580 It's likely associated with high openness, by the way.

01:07:42.780 Right.

01:07:43.140 Okay.

01:07:43.500 And you are, and you could also imagine that if you're high in openness, it's harder for you to catalyze and specify an identity.

01:07:49.200 And you're more diverse in your inner life, maybe even your emotional life.

01:07:54.820 And so, right.

01:07:56.400 And then there's confusion here too, that we should talk about as psychologists.

01:08:00.720 So sex and gender, you know, and I've been accused of just saying this, that those are identical, but I know they're not.

01:08:09.380 But because there is a lot of personality variability on top of biological sex, and it isn't like, it isn't a particularly rare woman who has essentially the same temperament as the average man.

01:08:27.100 Sure.

01:08:27.300 My suspicions are, it's probably about one woman in 10.

01:08:30.300 Now, it would depend on exactly how you made the cutoffs, you know, but I don't, if it's not 10%, maybe it's 5%, I don't care.

01:08:38.120 Somewhere in that range.

01:08:39.440 And the same can be said for men.

01:08:41.320 And so, it's perfectly possible for a boy to have a temperament that's more like a girl.

01:08:46.220 But that does not mean that he's in the wrong body.

01:08:50.740 That's the wrong, like, that's a pretty radical solution for a problem that's essentially a consequence of normal temperamental variability.

01:08:57.840 Yeah.

01:08:57.960 And so, there is some utility in separating out gender from sex, if you think of gender as personality, which I think is the appropriate way to think about it scientifically.

01:09:08.120 But I knew back when the, when I got entangled in my first political conflict, I thought, all this mucking about with gender categories is going to confuse and hurt way more people than it's going to help.

01:09:22.760 And part of this is this problem of contagion of confusion.

01:09:28.020 Yes.

01:09:28.340 So, all adolescents really need, that's really what they need, is more confusion about sex and gender when they're 13.

01:09:37.200 That's just perfect.

01:09:39.380 Yeah.

01:09:39.700 It's freedom.

01:09:40.480 It's like, yeah, freedom.

01:09:42.140 Yeah, right.

01:09:43.020 Yeah.

01:09:43.200 And it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be an issue.

01:09:46.260 I mean, there's nothing, androgyny has been around for hundreds, thousands of years.

01:09:53.820 I mean, there's, there's ancient sculptures of androgynous figures.

01:09:59.200 I mean, ancient cultures understood androgyny.

01:10:02.700 And there's plenty of historical precedent for the idea that androgynous personality is actually more of an ideal.

01:10:09.900 There's lots of speculation in Christian mysticism about the androgyny of Christ.

01:10:14.720 Yeah, that's right.

01:10:15.980 And, you know, I, I'm not, I, when I was a teenager, I used to look up to androgynous celebrities, like, well, David Bowie was a little bit before my time, but he was androgynous.

01:10:28.900 I used to, androgyny was like, yeah, I mean, it wasn't, it was an ideal to emulate and to be a tomboy was considered cool.

01:10:37.840 But you would never consider medical intervention.

01:10:42.120 You would never consider hormone treatment or modifying your body to.

01:10:47.040 How about mastectomy? 0.99

01:10:48.680 How about, how about, how about attempting to make a penis out of the musculature in your arm? 1.00

01:10:55.180 You know, penises are actually quite complex. 1.00

01:10:57.060 It's not that easy to take your arm and turn it into one. 0.98

01:11:00.640 And certainly not without a tremendous amount of cost and trouble.

01:11:03.760 And then, well, and then, and then let's just imagine that you were wrong and confused just for a moment.

01:11:12.440 You know, and the, and the contrary argument is, well, you better deal with this early.

01:11:17.020 It's like, yeah, you really know that, do you?

01:11:19.120 You're so bloody sure about that, are you?

01:11:21.140 Well, they can, the, the emotional blackmail that activists have used has been, you know, this argument that if kids don't get this early intervention, then they're at higher risk of suicide.

01:11:34.960 Well, we have absolutely no idea whether, you know, we don't, you know, suicidal, suicidal ideation or distress is not easily disentangled from confusion around your identity.

01:11:54.000 It's not clear that it's simply transphobia or being trapped.

01:11:58.880 No, no, it's clear that it's, no, it's clear that it's simply not, it's not simple, first of all, as you just pointed out, it's actually unbelievably complicated.

01:12:09.640 So, like most difficult things.

01:12:12.460 Yep.

01:12:13.080 Yeah.

01:12:13.620 Well, there's a, there's a paper that's been recently published by Lisa Lipman, who did the original exploratory research on rapid onset gender dysphoria.

01:12:23.520 And she's gone and interviewed a hundred D transitioners, which is a lot of people. 0.98

01:12:28.800 I think she just talked to Barry Weiss about that.

01:12:31.300 Okay.

01:12:31.840 Yeah.

01:12:32.160 Well, her paper, well, she interviewed D transitioners. 0.96

01:12:36.240 So people who have transitioned gender and who now regret it.

01:12:41.380 And there, there's a couple of patterns that stand out.

01:12:44.920 One, one, uh, pattern that stands out is that often people felt the need to transition after some trauma had happened to them.

01:12:53.980 So they experienced the trauma.

01:12:56.040 And then another pattern that stands out is that these individuals were sort of sold trend gender transition as a solution to all of their problems.

01:13:06.380 Yeah, yeah.

01:13:06.740 I, I, I think I read the paper.

01:13:08.420 I think that one of the most common claims of the D transitioners was that they were tremendously ill-informed about the full consequences of their actions by the relevant medical professionals.

01:13:19.680 Yeah.

01:13:19.900 And then we could also say, it's certainly possible that the relevant medical professionals are too terrified to fully inform them.

01:13:27.680 Hmm.

01:13:28.460 Well, it's their job.

01:13:29.660 I mean.

01:13:29.840 Yeah, I know I'm not, it's not an excuse, but, but it is, but it, but, but it's, it's still worth noting because you can understand, look, I know what happened in Toronto to the world's lead researcher on transsexual transition in children.

01:13:44.620 I mean, his life was torn into shreds and he's an apolitical guy.

01:13:49.260 He's just a researcher and he's a good one as well.

01:13:52.080 Yeah.

01:13:52.420 And so the, the, this fear, you know, you, you can say, well, you're a professional, it's your duty to stand up regardless of the fear.

01:14:02.100 But, but when there's that much pressure, even people who stand up are going to be inclined to speak a lot less than they might otherwise.

01:14:11.600 Yeah.

01:14:12.460 Oh, I had, I've had a press council complaint made against me for a, an article I wrote for the Australian on transgender issues.

01:14:21.640 And it wasn't upheld, but anytime a journalist in Australia wants to write about issues, particularly to do with medical intervention and gender dysphoric kids, they are subject to complaints, press council complaints. 0.95

01:14:38.960 Well, and if you're a, if you're an MD or a psychologist, if someone takes a complaint against you to your college, especially if that college has been increasingly dominated by activists, you are so screwed. 0.95

01:14:52.640 Yeah. 0.64

01:14:53.180 Like I, I had one client just caused me just an unbelievable amount of misery.

01:14:59.080 Really?

01:14:59.600 And well, because you can hijack the whole bureaucracy as a weapon.

01:15:03.700 And yeah, and so, yeah, yeah.

01:15:06.080 And that's what these activists do and they're very good at it.

01:15:08.780 And they, you know, they only need to have a couple of successes under their belt and they have a whole system for attacking people.

01:15:15.220 Well, we have the human rights commissions in Canada, which are quasi judicial entity with, with increasing power.

01:15:23.120 And that's a perfect weapon for any activist who's motivated to use it and that whoever the target of the human rights commission is, you can kiss five years of their life goodbye.

01:15:34.920 And there's a high probability that they're going to be found guilty regardless of what they did.

01:15:39.080 It's really, it's, it's truly appalling, especially given that it's happening under the aegis, hypothetically, of human rights.

01:15:46.800 And, and, and the ability to give informed consent.

01:15:51.340 Hmm.

01:15:52.480 And this, this is just one, this is an example of how fanatics hijack institutions, which you would have previously thought were fairly centrist and moderate.

01:16:04.540 So it's, you know, this, the transgender activism issue is, is a perfect example because it's a tiny, like transgender activists are a minority of transgender people who are a tiny minority anyway.

01:16:21.020 So it's, it's, it's, it's just like the, the smallest number of people creating an extreme amount of havoc.

01:16:29.500 Uh, and it's, it's, it's a perfect example of how this, how a tiny intolerant minority can, uh, basically dominate others using all of the, all of the new tools that we have today.

01:16:47.040 Social media, uh, you know, bureaucratic complaints, uh, mobbing, that type of thing.

01:16:56.260 So let's go back to Quillette directly for, for, for, for, for a bit.

01:17:01.580 Um, what's the growth pattern like?

01:17:05.040 Are you still, are you still on an ascending, an ascending trajectory?

01:17:09.880 How, how's Quillette doing and what are your plans for the future?

01:17:12.600 Uh, we, our revenue is growing, but I, our traffic has been steady for the last couple of years, year or so.

01:17:23.820 So our revenue is increasing and our subscriptions are increasing, but our traffic isn't, um, our plan for next year is to broaden into publishing physical books.

01:17:38.440 And I want to, uh, focus more on the academic audience.

01:17:42.980 I want to recruit more heterodox because what I've noticed in the past five years since doing Quillette is that media has diversified a bit.

01:17:52.500 So when I started, uh, main, you know, the main, the mainstream media was quite, uh, stale.

01:17:59.940 There were just, you know, these big corporate, um, entities that were too timid to touch controversial issues.

01:18:07.800 I feel like the media landscape is much more diverse and varied now, and that's got a lot to do with Substack, the innovations of that newsletter technology.

01:18:17.600 So I, I, I think there's more heterodoxy, more variety, more diversity in media.

01:18:26.120 However, I don't think one can say the same thing about academia.

01:18:30.580 Academia is still stuck in this stagnant, uh, sort of decaying kind of, it needs rejuvenation.

01:18:41.060 It needs sort of.

01:18:41.740 Well, if you're right, there should be an opportunity there, just like there was with Quillette.

01:18:45.420 So, yeah, and I feel like academic publishing is ripe for disruption and it's, I don't want to become an academic publisher per se, but I would like to publish books written by interesting scholars who may find it difficult to get published by traditional academic publishers because their ideas are too challenging or potentially too controversial.

01:19:13.120 Great. Maybe you'll find a psychologist who can publish a good book with some research in it about left-wing authoritarianism.

01:19:20.200 Yeah, that would be, that, that would be ideal.

01:19:23.820 Yeah. So that's what I'd like to do.

01:19:25.340 I feel like, you know, media, media is on the right path.

01:19:28.600 There's a lot of, uh, brave journalists like Barry Weiss is one.

01:19:33.500 There's others who are really pushing back against the group think that has existed in journalism.

01:19:40.880 But I think there's more work to be done in academia is, and I can't, I'm not an academic, I'm not going to go into the universities, but I can at least give a platform to renegade or dissident academics who find it difficult to get their ideas out to a broader public and get published and that kind of thing.

01:20:00.720 So that's where I'm moving.

01:20:03.880 So sort of, I never really wanted to, I never wanted Collect to become like a mass market product.

01:20:12.820 We, our interest isn't necessarily to capture the largest audience possible, but we do want to provide high quality content for a niche audience.

01:20:24.140 And I feel like our niche is very engaged.

01:20:28.480 How would you define that niche?

01:20:29.980 Do you think?

01:20:31.720 Well, um, certainly our readers are, you know, it's interesting.

01:20:37.960 Um, uh, if you can, if you look at the demographic sort of, I don't do a lot of digital analytics, but you can see some demographic variables and for some, somehow Google can pick up where people trend politically.

01:20:55.760 And at the majority of our readers describe themselves as independent, so they're in the center.

01:21:03.000 And then I would also describe our readers as being more analytical than the average.

01:21:10.240 Is there a sex difference?

01:21:11.240 Is there a sex difference?

01:21:12.660 Yeah.

01:21:13.160 So our audience is 70, 70, 30 male to female.

01:21:17.080 Yeah, well, I wonder, I wonder if that's, uh, actually reflective of Quillette or reflective of the gender difference in preference for fiction versus nonfiction because females prefer fiction and males prefer nonfiction on average.

01:21:31.980 And I don't know if maybe that would account for a, you know, a pretty decent chunk of that 70, 30.

01:21:38.140 Probably.

01:21:38.620 And we don't publish, um, lifestyle content.

01:21:42.900 And I think women must be overwhelmingly the main consumers of lifestyle content. 0.96

01:21:49.220 So, I mean, it's interesting what you were saying about variations in personality.

01:21:54.780 So, you know, I'm overwhelmingly interested in, uh, politics and sort of big, um, philosophical ideas, which, and that, you know, I, I tend to find writers and readers who are interested in those things tend to be more male than female.

01:22:12.140 Um, so, you know.

01:22:14.000 Well, you see an openness.

01:22:15.280 There's a gender difference too, is that men are more, are higher in intellect, which is interest in ideas and women are higher in prop openness proper, which is a subset of openness to experience.

01:22:26.580 And that has more to do with the, I would say the, the more, yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:22:31.240 The more artistic end, let's say of, of that intellectual predilection.

01:22:35.240 Now, the gender difference there isn't huge and women and men don't differ that much in openness total, but if you break it down into its two major aspects, you do get that difference.

01:22:45.860 So, that's interesting.

01:22:46.900 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:48.080 Yeah.

01:22:48.240 That probably goes along a little bit with that male proclivity to be more interested in things than people compared to women.

01:22:55.000 And so that's, might it be a manifestation of that in the openness domain?

01:22:58.800 Hmm.

01:22:59.820 I think that one of the things that has gone wrong with journalism up until very recently is a, a lack of analysis and a lack of rigor.

01:23:10.840 So, if you look at, if you look at a paper like the New York Times, I mean, I'm not a scholar of, I'm not a historian of the New York Times.

01:23:20.480 I don't really know what their, what their articles were like 30 years ago.

01:23:24.920 But at least in the last 10 years, since I've been reading them, the last 15 years, you see more arguments made from, you see more emotional reasoning and more sort of narrative storytelling.

01:23:40.080 And, I mean, this might be great for fiction, but it's not great for objective, you know, for journalism, which is meant to be an objective empirical profession.

01:23:53.100 And, and, and I think, you know, I mean, I don't know what the gender ratio is of journalists, but probably there are more women now in journalism than there ever has been.

01:24:05.580 You are not afraid of causing trouble, are you?

01:24:07.700 I just, I, I, I, um, but I, I think about this, I think about how, you know, in certain occupations, you might have had a gender imbalance before, where there has been more men than women.

01:24:22.740 But what happens when there's more women than men? 1.00

01:24:25.060 Like what, what happens, what happens to the oppression?

01:24:27.780 Yeah, we have, we have, we also don't know what happens to the political structure when women are hyper involved. 1.00

01:24:33.400 We have absolutely no idea, because that's a, that, that's only been happening for, well, 100 years at the, at the, at the maximum, but let's say 50, really, since the Second World War.

01:24:45.460 I think that's when it really took off, and we have no idea.

01:24:48.880 And so, you know, we don't know what particular forms of political pathology are unique to women. 1.00

01:24:55.600 We have some sense of, well, I don't, yeah, I, I don't think it's pathology, but what, what I, one thing I've been thinking about is moral reasoning.

01:25:05.000 So you would be familiar with, um, Kohlberg's work, right, in the stages of moral development.

01:25:12.860 And then remember, uh, Carol Gilligan came out with the critique. 0.89

01:25:18.780 I remember Carol Gilligan, yeah.

01:25:20.300 So she, so, so what happened was Kohlberg measured stages of moral development in children, and the highest stage of moral development was this, uh, universalism, where we have principles that can be, um, principles of fairness that can be, you know, uh, applied to everybody, you know, basically.

01:25:45.980 I'm, I'm probably mangling the concept, but there was a, a bit of controversy because girls were not scoring as high or not as many girls were scoring, uh, reaching that level of moral development as boys.

01:26:01.840 And so Carol Gilligan's theory was that girls and women have a different way of reasoning about moral problems than boys and men.

01:26:12.940 And she wrote a book called In a Different Voice, and she came up with this concept of care ethics.

01:26:18.900 Well, you know, it, it, it, it, it makes a certain degree of sense because women are higher in agreeableness, which is the empathy and politeness dimension. 1.00

01:26:28.020 And it's particularly, if you break it down into the aspects, which are compassion and politeness, the, the biggest gender difference is in compassion per se. 1.00

01:26:37.340 And that makes a certain amount of sense, I would say from a biological perspective, given that women are the primary caretakers for extreme, for infants, and they need nothing but empathy fund for the first nine months, pretty much empathy is, is the whole, is the whole deal.

01:26:53.920 Absolutely, yeah.

01:26:54.800 So I think, I think it makes a lot of sense.

01:26:57.160 And I, I mean, I remember being at university and we, you know, you have to do these trolley problems where, where you're trying to work out, you know, what is the most moral thing to do.

01:27:09.560 And I think it's a measure of utilitarianism or something like that.

01:27:12.780 And there's one version of the trolley problem where you're in an attic and you've got to bake, you've got to make a choice between suffer, smothering a baby, your, your, presumably your own baby, who's going to cry.

01:27:29.540 So you're, you're hiding out from the Nazis in an attic, you're up there with a bunch of people who will be killed if they're discovered by the Nazis, and you have a baby.

01:27:41.180 And you, and the baby's going to start crying or is crying, and you have to smother the baby to death.

01:27:46.800 That's how the famous sitcom MASH ended.

01:27:50.160 That was the last, that dilemma was exactly the last episode of MASH.

01:27:55.060 Yeah, okay.

01:27:55.780 Yeah, yeah.

01:27:56.440 I didn't know that.

01:27:57.060 I remember reading this moral dilemma at university, and I was sort of offended that anyone would even ask me, like, of course, I would never smother my own baby.

01:28:09.860 I couldn't, you know, I've got my own children now.

01:28:13.120 I couldn't never.

01:28:13.300 Right, abstractions be damned.

01:28:15.800 It's like, how dare you even ask me?

01:28:18.160 I would never do that to my own child.

01:28:20.760 And, and, and you could, I mean, I'm sure this is, fathers feel the same way as well.

01:28:25.720 But as a, as a mother, you would let other people be harmed to protect your own, you just would.

01:28:33.940 I mean, I would, I would protect my child before any other consideration.

01:28:39.020 And so I understand Carol Gilligan's theory, and I think it makes a lot of sense, and it intuitively corresponds with the way, with how I feel and think.

01:28:52.380 But I can also see that that kind of moral reasoning works for a family environment, and works for a mother and her children.

01:29:02.380 It's not, probably not going to work at a governmental level.

01:29:07.300 Well, that, that is, that is a question, isn't it?

01:29:09.620 And that's, that's the question of the limp, the limits of empathy, per se.

01:29:14.300 Yeah, yeah.

01:29:14.840 You know, and we're trying to elevate empathy to the prime virtue.

01:29:18.880 Yeah.

01:29:19.000 And, you know, one of the things I really appreciated about Freud, and the psychoanalysts in particular, was their insistence that the good mother fails.

01:29:30.980 Okay.

01:29:31.740 Right?

01:29:32.240 Because you, you protect your infant at all costs, but by two, you don't have an infant.

01:29:38.620 You have someone who needs to go out into the world, and so you have to control, like my, my, my, my daughter-in-law, and to her great credit, her, her son is now, he's 18 months old, and he's going to daycare.

01:29:51.180 And she handled that beautifully.

01:29:53.600 She, she took him to daycare for an hour a day, and it's just with three, three kids.

01:29:58.720 And for the first week, and then two hours a day for a week, and then the whole eight hours.

01:30:05.040 And she, the first day that he stayed there, she just dropped him off and left.

01:30:09.100 No drama.

01:30:10.140 Gone.

01:30:10.840 And then she went home and cried.

01:30:13.000 It's like it was hard for her, because she'd been with this child for 18 months, for 24 hours a day, and now this was the first real separation.

01:30:20.860 And she had to be tough about it, despite the emotion, you know.

01:30:24.940 And because she did it properly, he had virtually no trouble whatsoever making the transition.

01:30:31.400 But that, that's not, that's not exactly that kind of empathy, that reflexive empathy that you just described, right?

01:30:37.940 That's something different.

01:30:39.040 That's the ability to abstract yourself away from protecting this creature that's with you at all cost right now,

01:30:46.520 and to think into the future about what's more important, the facilitation, let's say, of this, of this drive to explore and to separate from that maternal environment.

01:30:56.460 And that's a, that's an ethic as well.

01:30:58.760 And it's not identical with reflexive empathy.

01:31:02.080 Yeah, yeah, well, I think, I think the, I think the, the difference in moral reasoning, and I, of course, you know, I'm simply referring to averages,

01:31:15.080 and I honestly don't even know if there are great sex differences in moral reasoning between men and women.

01:31:22.220 But if we're thinking about government bureaucracies and thinking about imposing moral frameworks on a very large number of people, an entire population,

01:31:33.780 you want something that's going to be, not going to be engaging in kind of favoritism, not going to,

01:31:45.720 you're, you're going to want something that's very cold and analytical, where you get the sort of utilitarian moral framework, which is,

01:31:55.920 Yeah, well, it's a good question. It's a good question, isn't it? You know, at what level of social organization does, does empathy, and, you know, that would facilitate nepotism? How would it not?

01:32:07.200 Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, and I think it potentially facilitates aggressive aggression, because,

01:32:14.980 Yeah, well, that's the dark side, that's the dark side of it. Well, of course, one of the things empathy does, obviously, is tighten in-group relationships for the empathetic circle.

01:32:24.720 And so, who's outside the empathetic circle? Well, snakes and vipers, obviously. And that is a danger, that, that's the dark side of empathy.

01:32:32.580 That's part of the devouring mother, what would you call it, pathology, that the psychoanalysts were so good at delineating.

01:32:40.820 Yeah.

01:32:41.020 And so, that dark, the dark side of that. So, well, Claire, I'm coming to Australia, I think, in next fall.

01:32:48.980 Oh, wonderful.

01:32:49.980 I think that's the plan. So, I'm doing a tour next year, by the looks of things, if I can manage to stay on my feet.

01:32:56.660 Oh, that's wonderful.

01:32:56.680 So, I would really like to see you again, when we.

01:32:59.640 Yeah, that would be, that would be brilliant.

01:33:02.020 And, and congratulations on Quillette, and, and your success at finding that niche, and, and also on your encouragement of these young writers.

01:33:11.200 And, and that's such a great accomplishment, to manage that. And, and good luck with your academic publishing plans. That's, that's a killer idea, I think.

01:33:20.360 Oh, yeah.

01:33:20.860 I'd be interesting to see if you can manage that, and manage to monetize it successfully, because that's a total order, you know?

01:33:25.760 Yeah, that's the challenge.

01:33:27.040 You bet, man. That's a real challenge.

01:33:29.180 Yeah.

01:33:29.420 So, yeah. And thanks very much for talking to me today.

01:33:32.700 Yeah, no, thank you, Jordan. It's a pleasure.

01:33:34.740 Yeah, it's really good to see you.

01:33:36.540 Yeah, you too.

01:33:37.160 Thank you.

01:33:37.660 Thank you.

01:33:38.160 Thank you.

01:33:39.160 Thank you.

01:33:40.160 Thank you.

01:33:41.160 Oh, Maya. Maya. She loves being cool. 0.99

01:34:08.600 21 degrees is her favorite number. God, she's the coolest, especially at night. So, I raise the temp at 10 p.m. because she gets chilly when she sleeps.

01:34:18.540 Maya loves using less energy, and I love Maya. We're basically besties.

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The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - April 11, 2022

243. Quillette's Founder On Starting The Most Controversial Magazine In The World ｜ Claire Lehmann

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