In this episode, I chat with Dr. Adam Satella, a PhD in English, about his time at Cornell University and his book, "Dangerous! How Moral Panic, Social Media and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing."
00:08:10.600And from my understanding, he got absolutely torched on the job market.
00:08:14.600Aside from the fact that his work is not trying to like accuse a text of racism or sexism,
00:08:20.600which is sort of like how you got a tenure track job.
00:08:23.600So he was saying, like, let's ground our analysis and science and evolution, which is not a social construct.
00:08:30.600So, I mean, when you are trying to make a career in English, that's the equivalent of holding a sign that says, you know, don't hire me.
00:08:37.600So do you see any improvements by improvement?
00:08:43.600I mean, lesser dogmatism in those fields or we haven't yet reached the apex of lunacy, which, of course, you cover in your book.
00:08:52.600No, I have. I mean, for the most part, I mean, I have a few colleagues who I can work with.
00:08:58.600My dissertation committee was very supportive, really great people.
00:09:03.600But for the most part, I mean, I think of all the corners of academia, even worse than I know the social sciences get a lot of heat.
00:09:10.600I actually think the humanities in English is where you find some of like the most outlandish, anti empirical nonsense.
00:09:18.600And from my understanding, no, there has not been any sign that that is going away.
00:09:24.600Like, I know, you know, if you watch South Park, South Park came back on the air a few weeks ago and they declared woke is dead.
00:09:31.600And like, I agree, woke is dead in certain corners, most notably the Oval Office.
00:09:36.600It seems very much dead. But, you know, if you go to Harvard English Department, Yale English Department, if you look at who they're hiring, who they're admitting for grad students,
00:09:44.600if you look at sort of the endless production of new victimology scholarship, it's I mean, it's just going on as business as usual.
00:09:52.600Wow, I'm gonna come back. I'm gonna do a deep dive shortly to this beautiful book. But before I do this, since I've got a, a literature expert, here is one thing that pisses me off about my reading discipline.
00:10:09.600I'm a voracious reader, have been my whole life, but I'm almost exclusively a nonfiction reader. Not, not, not 100%. But let's off the top of my head, let's go 95% of all books that I've ever read have been nonfiction.
00:10:28.700And that pisses me off, because I know that I'm losing out by not having explored more fiction. Because again, to our earlier point about Darwinian literary criticism,
00:10:39.700even if I were simply interested in reading literature because of my interest in evolutionary theory, I should be doing that.
00:10:46.700Because great literature is exactly speaking about these universal shared human experiences shaped by our biological heritage.
00:10:53.700So if I were to ask you, and forgive me if I'm putting you on the spot, off the top of your head, God said, we need to remedy your lacuna when it comes to reading fiction.
00:11:04.740Here are 10 books that you must read in the next five years. What would Dr. Satella tell me?
00:11:12.080Oh, man, that's a that's a tough question. Because like you, I would say I read 95% nonfiction.
00:11:16.640Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I, I'm looking at my library right now. I, I mean, I probably own 10 novels, to be honest.
00:11:26.180Wow. Yeah, I've just, I've been very fortunate. I've been kind of able to, like, my book is not a close reading of a lot of texts. It's more of like a sociological study of publishing. That's kind of what I'm interested in. But so off the top of my head, I mean, I am.
00:11:40.900I'm going to come off like a like a toxic male or whatever with these book recommendations. But I like a lot of the late 20th century transgressive fiction. So a lot of these novels actually got adapted into movies. So like Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, I think is like a really interesting sociological book that's also well written.
00:12:00.160I love Brett Easton Ellis' American Psycho. I love Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing of Las Vegas. I like A Clockwork Orange. And, you know, the fact that I haven't mentioned a single book published after like 1994, also speaks to, I think, something that, you know, comes, I didn't focus on it in my book, but it certainly tracks with my book, which is, in many ways, American publishing has become incredibly feminized in terms of what it accepts for publication,
00:12:29.000in terms of who it publishes. So like, if Chuck Palahniuk was taking Fight Club to Penguin Random House in 2025 as a new author, there's a 0% chance that book would be published.
00:12:40.360The fight scenes would be two men watch Bridget Jones' diary, and the one who cries more is the one that wins the fight. Would that be sort of the new adaptation of Fight Club?
00:12:52.940Yeah, it would be that, or maybe you keep the first 40% of Fight Club, but then the remaining 60% is like, the protagonist decides to like, go back to college, and then he learns that he's really toxic, and apologizes to everyone, and self-flagellates.
00:13:09.360There's, I'm sure you're familiar with my series of self-flagellation videos, yes?
00:13:14.960Oh, yeah, okay. The most recent one, I learned, you know, through important indoctrination and brainwashing, that Lizzo's more beautiful than Sidney Sweeney, that Dylan Mulvaney, and so on. So yes, so I'm a strong proponent of self-flagellation.
00:13:33.540You mentioned Clockwork Orange. It reminded me, actually, of something. That's Stanley Kubrick, yes?
00:13:38.580Yeah, he did the adaptation of Burgess's novel.
00:13:42.920Right. The reason I'm mentioning it is because Eyes Wide Shut, which is one of my favorite movies, turns out to be based on a novella written in the 1920s, if I'm not mistaken, by an Austrian psychiatrist named Arthur Schlesinger, or something like this.
00:14:04.760And the novella is called Dream Story. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I just returned from a speaking engagement in Seattle.
00:14:11.680I went to an antiquarian bookstore, and precisely because I want to cater to the lack of fiction that I read, I asked them if they had a first edition of Dream Story.
00:14:23.940They couldn't find it for me. Are you at all familiar with that, either the movie or that work?
00:14:29.020Yeah, I've seen the movie a few times. I like Kubrick's work a lot. I actually didn't know it was based off a novella.
00:14:33.980Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So, as promised, now we sink into this beauty. Take us through the journey.
00:14:40.860I was particularly interested, precisely to our earlier point about you doing empirical stuff.
00:14:46.060You interviewed the big five folks. You interviewed the literary agents. Talk us through the book, and then maybe we could talk about some of that empirical stuff.
00:14:54.080Yeah, sure. So, I completed my undergrad degree in English in 2012. I went on to get a master's, took some time off, taught, got my PhD in English.
00:15:04.680I've been heavily in the space of books and literary studies for the past 15 years.
00:15:10.100And I would say, like, early 2010s, sort of the period that people have described as the Great Awakening, when you start seeing these, like, weird cancellations and stuff on college campuses.
00:15:20.100You also start seeing book cancellations, making the news. And I'm not using cancellation in a metaphorical sense. I'm talking literally like a book is supposed to come out next month.
00:15:31.740An advanced reader copy circulates. People accuse it of racism or sexism. And the publisher cancels the book or they postpone the release date by six months.
00:15:41.300And they announced they're going to send it to sensitivity readers first. In some cases, books have been quite literally pulled from Amazon, pulled from eBay. Some have never seen the light of day.
00:15:51.960So, this is, when I'm talking about books, I'm talking about picture books. I'm talking about memoirs. I'm talking about novels. I'm talking about journalism. There's really no corner that has been untouched.
00:16:00.660So, basically, I was sort of just observing this stuff. And I would say around 2018, 2019, there were some particularly egregious examples of cancellations.
00:16:12.220And basically, I was like, if this is what I know about as someone who does not work in publishing, then surely this has to be affecting things behind closed doors.
00:16:23.360Surely, this has to be affecting acquisition practices, editing policies, sort of like the boardroom decisions that get made about which books to accept and et cetera.
00:16:32.420So, this was around the time I was starting my PhD. So, I basically set out for a few years just interviewing people in really every corner of publishing.
00:16:41.640So, from presidents and vice presidents of the five biggest publishers in the world, to editors, to agents, I even interviewed sensitivity readers, people hired to make books less offensive.
00:16:53.500I've interviewed public library directors. And basically, my book sort of summarizes what I uncovered about this sort of rampant self-censorship that is going on, ostensibly in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:17:07.680Wow. Was it difficult to get all of the survey respondents or, or if it was one-on-one, whatever method you used to engage with the interviewee?
00:17:23.480Did it take a lot of coaxing or were they more than happy to do so, but then gave you the proviso, please don't mention who I am or something like that?
00:17:33.620Yeah, yeah. So, I, again, I was trained as a qualitative sociologist. So, I basically used two approaches. One, just a large random sample. That means, you know, finding as many email addresses, phone numbers as I possibly can, and just cold pitching people.
00:17:49.520And, like, you know, relatively few people respond, not just because they might be scared, but they're also, like, super busy people when you start trying to interview presidents, vice presidents, et cetera.
00:17:59.340So, I used a random sample, and then I would use what's called a snowball sample. So, if I interviewed you, a president at an imprint at HarperCollins, and maybe you were like, hey, you need to talk to my colleague, Jane. Let me put you in touch with her.
00:18:11.080I would use that. But, for the most part, you know, I literally reached out to hundreds of different people, and it got to the point where I even got an email from an HR person at one of the big five publishers who told me to, like, cease and desist from trying to get interviews with people.
00:18:26.960And, you know, I was basically like, fuck off. You can't legally tell me to do that.
00:18:31.200Yeah. So, yeah. And then all my interviews, they're all one-on-one, long form. So, to your question, the people that I did get on the phone, that I did get on Zoom, or that I did talk to in person, I would say the two dominant emotions were, first and foremost, I think it was cathartic for a lot of these people.
00:18:51.620Because if you read the book, a lot of the people will say things like, I don't feel comfortable airing my skepticism about the censorship among my colleagues, because I don't want to be accused of whatever, being sympathetic to racism, to being a TERF, whatever.
00:19:07.660I would say that the second emotion, though, is just so, like, visceral fear. Like, I'm being slightly hyperbolic when I say if you walked by my office when I was on the phone with people, I mean, you would think I was Glenn Greenwald talking to Edward Snowden.
00:19:24.100And, like, these people are, you know, like, these huge whistleblowers, and I'm writing the story of the century about the NSA, when in reality, I'm just talking to an editor at Penguin Random House who was like, yeah, all my colleagues want to cancel Jordan Peterson's book.
00:19:38.360I think it should be published, but I'm scared to voice that. So, I mean, in my introduction, I say, and this is true, the question that I was asked the most by all the different people I interviewed was simply a checking question, which was,
00:19:51.140I just want to double check or triple check that you will not be including my full title in this book, that you will not be including my real name, because I do not want to be on the record criticizing this stuff.
00:20:02.200Wow. Well, I mean, this kind of plea to remain anonymous is something that I often talk about when I refer to probably the most common email that I have ever received in all my years of public engagement, which is usually,
00:20:16.920dear Professor Saad, a whole bunch of really nice, sweet words and compliments about my work, and they're a fan and so on. And then the last line is always, if you choose to read this letter on your show, please make sure to not include my name. So, I understand that reflex.
00:20:33.440Are there any, I understand that you didn't do sort of any statistical inferencing tests and so on, because it's more qualitative and so on. But in just sort of your experience, are you able to make statements?
00:20:47.400Well, you know, amongst these different classes of people that I interviewed in the publishing world, the agents are the most woke, the acquisition editors are the most woke, but the women, the female agents are more woke than the male agents. Are you able to make any such conclusions?
00:21:05.720Yeah, that's a good question. So, first and foremost, I want to dispel the myth that this is only like conservative people or only white men who are saying the, I call it the sensitivity error, who are saying the sensitivity error has gone too far. That's just objectively false. First, when you're talking about mainstream publishers, there are astronomically so few who identify as conservatives who actually work in this.
00:21:32.260Like, yes, there's a few imprints here and there that will publish like some big name conservative authors, but for the most part, mainstream publishing in the Northeast is overwhelmingly left of center in terms of who ends up in this industry.
00:21:45.100So, I have interviewed women of color. I have interviewed people who identify as feminists who are saying, no, we should publish Jordan Peterson's book. It's a good book. You know, I don't agree with all his beliefs, but I'm scared to say that because this person is going to accuse me of hating trans people or whatever. So, I just want to be clear about that.
00:22:02.260To your point, I would say, again, anecdotally, just based off sort of the qualitative approach I took, I would say agents are the ones who are more prone to defend literary freedom and to defend their authors.
00:22:16.320Because particularly when you're talking about the agents who represent sort of the authors that sell, the New York Times bestsellers, the Pulitzer Prize winners, many of these folks have been doing this for decades.
00:22:27.940And a lot of the changes that I explore really changes from about 2010 on.
00:22:33.600So, like the number of agents who I interviewed who have been doing this for a while and are now all of a sudden in these conversations that they've never had to be in before.
00:22:41.900And they're trying to defend their authors for first and foremost.
00:22:45.840But it's the people at the publishing houses who get their foot in the door when they're, you know, 23 years old and they just graduated from the English department at Yale and who are bringing sort of campus social justice ideology to the publishing process.
00:22:58.940So, like this one woman I interviewed, for example, she's older, she if you look at her client list, it really is like a who's who of contemporary literature.
00:23:06.820And she was like, you know, I was in a conversation recently where the publishing house was saying we need to change the dialogue of a character because it is misogynistic.
00:23:16.640And she's she's like, yeah, I do agree it's misogynistic.
00:23:20.000But the novel set in 1850, like that's how they talk.
00:23:25.760And she's also like people talk misogynistic ways in 2025.
00:23:30.460It's not like I don't I accept what you're saying about the dialogue, but that does not logically follow that it needs to be edited.
00:23:38.640But for her, it was particularly baffling because she's been doing this since like the 60s.
00:23:44.660And now all of a sudden she's she's she has to like defend her author's right to put sexist words in a fictional character's mouth.
00:23:53.500Did you earlier we were talking about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.
00:23:57.200Are you able to, you know, make any reasonable claims as to whether the likelihood of being canceled as an author is more likely if I'm a fiction writer or nonfiction writer or the cancellation is equal across the board?
00:24:13.860No, it's definitely it's definitely heavier in fiction.
00:24:16.420And I would say within fiction, there's certain genres that have been especially engulfed in social justice ideology.
00:24:25.020So there's a subgenre of fiction called young adult literature.
00:24:30.640Those controversies have been innumerable and really just explosive.
00:24:36.540So that's such a very it's an interesting genre because it's it's genre written for young people, young adults, people who aren't children, but aren't fully grown adults.
00:24:46.780But when you actually look at the buying data, this is overwhelmingly adults buying this material for themselves, not even for young people.
00:24:55.020But they use the excuse when they're trying to get books canceled, that this is going to like corrupt young minds, that young people are like especially vulnerable, that it's different if like a 15 year old kid reads this.
00:25:07.840So that that that area is sort of crazy.
00:25:12.340And for whatever reason, it also involves a lot of people who are like very online, who spend a lot of time on Twitter, especially when Tumblr was like a big site for sort of like liberal identity politics.
00:25:23.920So, yeah, if you were avoidant, if you're if you're an author who was like, I would not like to see my book censored, I'd say probably steer clear of young adult literature.
00:25:32.900Those people are absolute savages to two examples that speak to the central premise of your book.
00:25:41.240Number one, I actually cite this in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.
00:25:45.740It's the movie. I don't know if you saw it, but I suspect that you probably have the the 2023 movie, American Fiction.
00:25:52.340Have you seen that? I've read the novel that is on which that movie is based off of.
00:25:57.520It's one of those movies that it's been on the list. I just haven't got around.
00:26:00.520Yeah, yeah, yeah. So but I mean, just for our viewers and listeners who who who may not be familiar with the movie, I haven't read the book.
00:26:07.380So it exactly, in a sense, speaks to what you're talking about, which is here's this black.
00:26:13.300I think he's a professor. He's a black author. And he tries to write something that's, you know, pretty high brow as in his voice.
00:26:23.720But that's not really cool. You should be speaking in a particular black vernacular.
00:26:28.840And once he kind of scams it and starts speaking in that language, suddenly he becomes this big accepted, you know, author because he's speaking in the true, authentic black voice, so to speak.
00:26:40.580And the other one I want to discuss, I don't know if you know this one, this this came up probably after your book came out.
00:26:46.460This is straight white author's career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he's gender queer Nigerian.
00:26:56.360Are you familiar with this case? No, but it sounds on brown for I'll send you I'll send you the link because as I was, you know, just kind of quickly preparing for our chat, I saw this.
00:27:08.040I said, oh, I better put this in my book, but then I better raise it with Adam.
00:27:11.480OK, so I'll send you that clip. One what a few more questions on this thing that we're talking about.
00:27:17.660So I've noticed that maybe it's because I'm an author and therefore there's kind of a self perceptual bias or whatever.
00:27:27.120But is it is it wrong for me to think that almost every single movie that I watch, maybe again, that's a self selection bias.
00:27:34.280There's always a theme of an author of it's happening in the you know, there's a there's a book editor.
00:27:44.300There's is that right? I mean, would this would this be something that's worthwhile to to do a content analysis on?
00:27:51.420And if so, is it because there is a romantic notion of the author, the poet?
00:27:57.960Everybody wants to be an author, except I just haven't gotten around to to becoming an author.
00:28:02.920Everybody wants to be a poet. But have you noticed that also in movies that there's kind of an overrepresentation of authors and publishing industry folks in films?
00:28:13.980I haven't noticed that. No, I'd be curious what movies you're thinking of.
00:28:17.900I do. I do fully agree with the second half of your point, though, that when they are represented,
00:28:22.180it's often in this sort of like romantic kind of like artists, whatever, channeling their muse.
00:28:30.320And as opposed to just, you know, I assume you're probably similar because I've talked to an innumerable number of authors over the years who,
00:28:38.860especially the prolific ones, the ones who are churning out books, many of them just have a very blue collar relationship to their work where it's like I wake up.
00:28:46.760I set my timer from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and I force myself to write like that's how I do it.
00:28:51.860I don't you know, there's a quote by I think it was Somerset Mon, I think is how you pronounce his last name.
00:28:58.200He was like, I write only when inspiration strikes.
00:29:00.900Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine.
00:29:26.660What would be some advice, key, key pieces, key prescriptive advice that you would offer someone who's listening to this chat who is exactly to my earlier question wants to be the next author or poet?
00:29:41.840What would be three, four key lessons you'd give them?
00:29:46.140So there's a book that I've really only read maybe two, three books that have like genuinely changed my life in a consequential way.
00:29:54.260One of those books is a book called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, who is a novelist.
00:30:00.160Stephen's been on Joe Rogan's podcast a few times.
00:30:03.060Joe Rogan actually used to keep a stack of that book and he used to give it out to people.
00:30:07.140Wow. I've given copies to my friends who are stand up comedians, who are graphic designers.
00:30:13.700It's a short book you can read in a few hours, but it's it's one of the books that really helped me realize that I was self-sabotaging in terms of my own aspirations to be a writer by just procrastinating, by making excuses, by.
00:30:27.600And there's something about the way Stephen Pressfield sort of articulates the writer's life, the artist's life.
00:30:34.600And it applies just as easy to entrepreneurs, to podcasters, whatever.
00:30:54.040So I have some fair degree of productivity.
00:30:59.580I set an alarm every morning for four hours.
00:31:02.980I usually end up writing from about maybe like 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.
00:31:07.880I might write a bit longer after, but that's like I write whether I'm inspired, whether I want to write, whether I don't want to write.
00:31:15.840And even if you're only like I would consider myself a pretty slow writer, like I do maybe 250 words an hour.
00:31:24.140So but if you if you just stick to that and you just do it over time, eventually you have a book.
00:31:29.640If you stick to an exercise program, do it over time.
00:31:32.860Eventually you're going to lose weight.
00:31:33.980Like, again, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, I think writing, painting, making music, it gets like romanticized and stuff.
00:31:41.320But if you if you just take a sort of basic blue collar work ethic, have some discipline, like you will get better over time.
00:32:33.180It's very easy when you don't have an immediate boss to report to other than yourself to say,
00:32:41.280well, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.
00:32:43.160And then suddenly you're stuck in the procrastination loop.
00:32:46.420So I wholeheartedly agree with you that, you know, discipline is important.
00:32:50.260In my case, one of the things that I think I've found has made my voice successful amongst readers is that I and this may not apply to a novelist, what I'm about to say.
00:33:02.860But as a nonfiction writer, I think being able to interweave the science, the academia, the professorial hat with impactful personal stories that bring this stuff out has really helped me.
00:33:20.500And so I remember once speaking to someone who said, you know, I hope that the book that you write, actually, he was talking about the parasitic mind.
00:33:28.080He goes, you know, it'd be good if you wrote it in a style that's when you appear on Joe Rogan, how you seem so approachable.
00:33:34.720And you could say all the fancy stuff, but you're also funny and so on.
00:33:37.660And naturally, that's exactly how I like to communicate.
00:33:41.960That's why I think my voice has resonated with the trucker, with the corrections officer, with the policeman, and not just with professors at Stanford.
00:33:51.820And that's the game that I'm in, which is I'd like to convince as many minds as possible.
00:33:57.160I'm not restricting it to the Cornell ivory tower.
00:34:00.640And so I think that for me, that's really important.
00:34:04.200So this is maybe more advice for the nonfiction writer.
00:34:08.140I also say that having a clear roadmap.
00:34:13.980I could show you a whole section in any book that I've ever written where a priori I didn't know that there would be this section.
00:34:21.780It came up organically as I was going through the writing process.
00:34:24.700But prior to starting writing, I had a pretty clear idea of what are the eight main things I want to say, how.
00:34:35.520And so having that great outline, which then the book simply becomes filling in that outline, notwithstanding the organic elements that emerge, is also very important.
00:34:47.740Would you agree with much of what I just said there?
00:34:51.160I have outlines for everything I write.
00:34:54.060Even if it's like a thousand word essay, there's usually I at least have maybe one third of a Microsoft Word document with like a couple of the main points.
00:35:02.440I know my friends who are novelists and stuff, they often outline a novel in the same way, which is like act one, act two, act three.
00:35:09.300For me, it tends to just be kind of like a cyclical process.
00:35:13.300So like I might like the book I just finished, like I had most of those chapters outlined.
00:35:17.720I had research for them in my outline.
00:35:20.980But then once you start writing, right, maybe something comes up, you go back, you move things around, you adjust the outline.
00:35:26.720So like it's a combination for me of like going back and forth between what I'm writing, the outline.
00:35:30.940Maybe I might need a pause and do research or conduct interviews.
00:36:17.160I mean, that book is I'm writing that it reads like creative nonfiction.
00:36:22.900What I'm writing right now, like, yes, there's research and stuff.
00:36:25.200But for the most part, it's based off my experience in jujitsu gyms, doing powerlifting competitions and really like autobiographically coming out of like a I don't know, for lack of a better word, like stereotypically male space.
00:36:39.740And sort of knowing these guys very well, mixed in with like interviews I've conducted with Theo Vaughn, Scott Galloway, like all those sorts of folks.
00:37:19.340You might be the first author who was so keen with great alacrity to promote my work rather than their work on my show.
00:37:28.320So I appreciate that very kind gesture.
00:37:30.080In the parasitic mind, I talk about, in one section, about the links between physical formidability in men and their political and socioeconomic orientations.
00:37:45.200And perhaps not surprisingly, once I say it to you, men who are physically stronger, as measured by several different metrics,
00:37:53.320tend to be less accepting of, for example, economic egalitarianism because they understand that life is hierarchical, life is competitive.
00:38:05.220I'm going to go out there into the proverbial fight club, as you mentioned earlier.
00:38:59.140The guy that's spotting him had to help him.
00:39:01.520And so that became kind of a big scandal of what a wimpy is.
00:39:05.000Yeah, that's so like I mean, like one of the things I'm super interested in now is like the overlay of like fitness culture, male podcast culture and like people, young men casting their votes for Trump or whoever.
00:39:18.560And it's like I don't think you need a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard to like look at that and then look at like RFK is like 70 years old, jacked, hot wife doing pull ups, talking about like men should persevere, men should be strong.
00:39:34.240Same thing you see in like Jordan Peterson and Rogan.
00:39:37.180Like I don't I don't think you need to study at Harvard for six years to like understand which side might be more appealing to like an 18 year old dude.
00:39:47.020But forgive me for interrupting you, but as you probably know, the Democrats recently hired some consultants and I think paid 20 million dollars, 20 million, 20 million.
00:39:59.480Exactly. To help them understand how to speak to young men.
00:40:05.160I mean, just I would do it for 400 bucks.
00:40:07.720If they paid me 400, I would I would do it for a tomahawk steak.
00:40:11.920Wow. I mean, but I mean, just the fact that you commissioned that study, never mind paying 20 million dollars, that itself is proof why if I'm a male, I should never vote for your party.
00:40:28.800It's kind of like that movie, The Manchurian Candidate, where they like they're trying to create like the Manchurian Joe Rogan.
00:40:35.140But I think I think there's like I don't I don't think you can have sort of like say I'm just using Joe Rogan as an example.
00:40:43.480I don't think you can have that in the way that they want to have it, because I think at its core, there's a certain element of masculinity that revolves around strength and transgression.
00:40:53.880And so, like, I don't I don't know how you would like create that.
00:40:59.840So, I mean, it's probably going to be like a lot of liberal nonprofits, which is like certain liberals make a shitload of money and it in no way, shape or form helps them.
00:41:07.660Well, I'm going to I'm going to link what you just said about masculinity and some of the bro stuff with a the A word authenticity.
00:41:16.040Right. So for sure, Joe Rogan, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, they have ascended to the the apex of their respective pursuits, because as that book, I don't I don't remember who the author is, but, you know, the the subtle art of not giving an F.
00:41:37.180Oh, is that what it is? OK. Well, I mean, what is he saying there?
00:41:40.560I present myself to the world and I don't care. That doesn't mean I'm impolite.
00:41:45.980That doesn't mean I don't have social grace. But when I take my positions, they're never modulated.
00:41:52.780And I mean, I'm speaking now about me. I'm authentic to a fault.
00:41:56.560I simply can't modulate because if I modulate, I feel as though I'm being a fraud.
00:42:01.820I'm being fraudulent. Therefore, I present myself to the world.
00:42:05.700You like it. Great. You don't like it. F off. I don't give a shit. Right.
00:42:09.040And and if you look at each of these guys that I just mentioned, I think they all exude that.
00:42:15.800And that's I don't mean to be stereotypical, but to some extent, that's a very desired, sexy male attribute because it demonstrates self-assuredness and self-confidence.
00:42:27.820And certainly when we ask women, what is one of the things that you find most sexy about a man?
00:42:32.900They'll say self-confidence. So so if I have the self-confidence to be my authentic self and never worry about how to modulate, then I'm sexy.
00:42:43.340Yeah, for sure. And I mean, like thinking about authenticity, I know I know people were like busting Rogan's balls because he had Trump on before the election and he didn't have on Kamala Harris.
00:42:55.060But it's like, dude, he invited Kamala on. Kamala didn't go on.
00:42:58.860And like the way he tells it, and I have no reason to doubt him. He's like, Kamala's team was like, we want you to send us the questions ahead of time.
00:43:06.500We're going to have a stenographer in the room. We want you to come out to D.C.
00:43:10.060We want we want to do it for 50 minutes, not more than 50. And he's like, Trump, it was one email.
00:43:15.360Like, do you want to come on the podcast? Sure. And the guy comes on for three hours.
00:43:19.400And again, like independent of whether you agree with his politics, whether you like his personality or not, at least, you know who he is.
00:43:26.840Like, that's that's him. Whereas with the Democrats, they have not done a good job of sort of shucking the sort of like the constant, like liberal elite cosmetics that it seems like touches everything.
00:43:40.520I think the California guy, Gavin Newsom, is like, oh, my God, attempting to do that by like trying to be funny and like confrontational.
00:43:49.200But because he hasn't been doing that, it just seems like, I don't know, some of that 20 million, like a few hundred thousand went to someone who's like writing his tweets now.
00:43:58.620But speaking about Trump accepting, you know, after one email, whatever, I have a similar story.
00:44:05.900So, you know, I'm I know Elon Musk well and so on.
00:44:10.500And when he so we've only had one X Spaces chat together so far, although we had planned on doing more.
00:44:18.680And the day before we ended up having the X Spaces, we were communicating by email.
00:44:25.500And so I had written to him and I said, hey, so, Elon, you know, let me know, check your schedule, you know, expecting that, of course, he's infinitely busy.
00:44:33.680Right. And let me know, you know, when you'd like to hold it.
00:45:13.720What are some things that you as you were doing the research for this book surprised you to no ends that you wouldn't have expected that the results would come out this way or if any?
00:45:26.000Yeah. So one thing that was very surprising to me.
00:45:31.480So there's a part of the book where I talk about social experiments that I ran at Cornell with actual readers.
00:45:37.820So for these experiments, I worked with a couple other sociologists at Cornell, both of whom have a level of math genius that I do not possess.
00:45:45.300And they came on the project, helped me out.
00:45:47.740But basically the super spark notes version of what we did is we had two groups of readers and we we gave each group four poems and the groups would read the poems and then they would have 16 word choices and to describe the poem.
00:46:03.320So they could click, you know, this poem was well written, poorly written, progressive, racist, anti-racist.
00:47:09.220It reduces women to like animals or something.
00:47:12.460And then we also told these readers that after the experiment, they would be asked to log into their Facebook profile and they'd be part of a live discussion about the poem.
00:47:23.360So like people would know the veal of anonymity was removed.
00:47:27.060They would have to justify their responses.
00:47:28.520And the number of people accusing this literature of racist, of racism, of sexism, of homophobia, it just absolutely shot up.
00:47:38.620So from like about zero percent in the control group to about like 30 percent or more in the other group.
00:47:45.940And the craziest thing was I used a poem that had not been accused of anything bad.
00:47:50.980It's this poem called The Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg, who is like a far left poet active in the 60s.
00:47:59.860He's anthologized in the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, like liberals, progressives, Marxists, like they love Allen Ginsberg.
00:48:06.920His poem is just about grocery shopping.
00:48:08.620But we gave it to people and we said that a famous literary critic had accused it of harmful homophobia and like demeaning the gay community.
00:48:17.540And we got about like 30, 35 percent of people to click homophobic when they're evaluating his poem.
00:48:24.720And so I left that experiment and I was like this social pressure that we tried to create in our lab.
00:48:31.120It doesn't even remotely approximate like the real social pressure that people have, especially if you're one of those people who's like writing book reviews for the New York Review of Books or Vice or Salon.
00:48:41.200And you're like in that hyper liberal space where like everyone needs to toe the line.
00:48:47.720I was like, to what extent are these book controversies when you see like a book getting 5000 bad tweets on X or like 2000 heinous reviews on Goodreads?
00:48:57.540To what extent is this just people trying to fit in with their liberal peers?
00:49:01.860And my interviews would confirm that it's actually probably a big extent.
00:49:05.780Like I remember interviewing one agent who said that one of her authors got attacked, got called whatever, a misogynist, a racist.
00:49:13.920And one of her friends who also worked in publishing was like, what is happening to your author is so terrible.
00:49:19.440Like these are just groundless accusations.
00:49:21.200But then she's like, my friend actually liked one of the attacks on Twitter.
00:49:26.280And I asked them, I was like, what is that about?
00:49:30.880And she's like, my friend was like, if I don't if I don't click like if I don't support this, they're going to say I'm just being like a bystander.
00:49:41.920So that was, you know, there's a lot of things that interested me, sort of surprised me.
00:49:47.080But that was one where I was like, Jesus, like this actually does seem like lemmings just like falling, you know, following each other off a cliff.
00:49:57.200Two points to address what you just described.
00:50:02.360Number one, I so love the fact that you are using the experimental method to test some of these ideas.
00:50:09.640Again, to our earlier point, you could use a scientific approach to study something like literature.
00:50:16.160Along the same line, that's still part of my first point.
00:50:19.540But I recently returned from a conference at the University of Buckingham in England, where the conference was, as far as I know, the first academic anti-woke conference.
00:50:32.820It was organized by Professor Eric Kaufman, who recently returned on my show a couple of weeks ago.
00:50:38.960He's a political scientist by training, but a huge anti-woke professor.
00:50:42.520And he has called as part of something that he calls the Buckingham Declaration, which I'm a signatory of, that we have to study these woke issues empirically.
00:50:56.640And so the study that you just described using, you know, a control group and an experimental group and so on totally fits within this.
00:51:04.300So if it ends up being that you you're hoping to publish this empirical study, please reach out to me and I'll see if I can connect you with him, because what you've done there seems to be well in line with what, you know, he's hoping to to pioneer as a new field of study.
00:51:20.340Number two, you're finding that most people are mindless sheep that just, you know, conform to to group pressures is literally, in my view, arguably the key finding in maybe the three most famous experiments in psychology.
00:51:40.140Are you familiar with the Solomon Asch group conformity experiments?
00:51:43.500For sure. Yeah, it's been replicated like across countries and at a time when other social science research has not been replicated at all.
00:52:01.340Call it X, and then you put three lines ABC, one of which is the exact same length as X, and it's absolutely clear which one that is.
00:52:10.280In other words, you'd have to literally be congenitally blind to not be able to see that line B is the same length as line X.
00:52:19.780But the point of the experiment is to see what happens if you can get a bunch of Confederates, exactly as you had done in your experiment.
00:52:27.180So this is someone who is, who is, I mean, he's not really in the experiment, but he's pretending to be a participant.
00:52:36.560If I put eight people and I asked them, can you please tell me which of these three lines is the same length as the line X here?
00:52:44.080If they give what is clearly the wrong answer, can you get the final person who's the real subject, unbeknownst to him, not knowing that the other are Confederates, can you get him to conform?
00:52:58.420And now, of course, the reason why that experiment was so powerful, number one, it's a very simple design that you could explain to a 10-year-old.
00:53:05.020You don't have to have convoluted experimental designs to demonstrate something about human nature.
00:53:10.460But number two, if you can take something as black and white, right, this is not sort of gray stimulus.
00:53:19.100This is very clear which is the correct one.
00:53:21.600And if I can still get a number greater than zero, never mind that in his case, he got a lot more than zero, to kind of nod their head and go against their lying eyes, then it doesn't surprise me that in the more amorphous gray world of the group dynamics of political correctness, that there's such pressure on people to just conform and press that like button, as you said.
00:53:50.360In terms of your question, like another thing.
00:53:52.880So this wasn't necessarily surprising to me, but it was surprising to some other people who were kind of like early readers for the manuscript.
00:54:00.580So I think some people had a conception that, you know, it's one thing for like if you're an intern at HarperCollins or Penguin Random House or maybe you're fresh out of undergrad, this is your first job that you would kind of just tote the line, right?
00:54:14.300Like you're in an economically precarious situation, you want to make it.
00:54:17.580But like senior figures would be sort of more prone to like speak their minds, to have a spine, like people who've been there for decades, have high incomes, have status, power.
00:54:29.040But in my interviews, like I mean, I literally interviewed people at like sort of the top of the top, like not just the best publishers, but presidents, vice presidents.
00:54:39.280People have been there for a while, people make, my understanding, really, really good money and live in Manhattan.
00:54:45.240And even some of these people like just directly told me that they would not push back on accusations or editing policies that they thought were insane or wrong or no, this is not racist.
00:55:25.780Like just say that you think it's stupid that you're not publishing this book because, you know, some 25 year old who you hired six months ago said it was like sexist or something.
00:55:37.380In that situation, I'm like, you know, this is more your realm.
00:55:43.240Is this someone just like who needs to get blood work done?
00:55:45.800Like, does he have like super low testosterone levels?
00:55:49.220Like, what if that was just like a major explanation for kind of like wokeness and stuff?
00:55:53.320Because it's the same thing you see on campus, right?
00:55:55.000Like when you watch when you watch that fucking video of Evergreen State College, when there was that uproar over Brett Weinstein and those kids are holding the university president like essentially hostage in a classroom and they're in his face, they're screaming at him.
00:56:12.940And at one point, this guy says he has to go to the bathroom.
00:56:31.460Again, does this guy have like some sort of hormonal imbalance or something?
00:56:37.220And again, there's probably a big class element to this, like Evergreen State College, selective liberal arts college.
00:56:42.940Which if you went into like, you know, the neighborhood where my gym is about bodybuilding, powerlifting gym, a lot of like working class guys there.
00:56:50.380If you get in a grown man's face, especially as like an 18 year old kid and you tell him to like shut his mouth and that he's he's not going to go to the bathroom like that would.
00:57:00.980You get your teeth knocked out like immediately, like that's not.
00:57:05.620But I don't know, I guess if you're if you've spent your life going to an elite boarding school and you end up at Evergreen State College and you're used to talking to professionals in like a condescending, demanding way.
00:57:15.780And your president is an absolute, you know, spineless cretin who just wants to make the customer happy.
00:57:22.520Then I guess that's like how business works.
00:57:24.900Well, of course, you are exactly speaking my my language and my reality in my ecosystem.
00:57:32.040A couple of points. Number one, while, yes, it is.
00:57:35.660I fully understand your ire at having these super senior presidents be afraid to say, come on, what what kind of publishing edict is this?
00:57:47.240So institutionally, the reason why you have tenure is so that in case you are a sniveling coward, we can hopefully compel you to be courageous and speak your mind about anything without having the fear of being fired.
00:58:04.240That's why we have tenure. Yet I'm here to tell you, Adam, although I suspect you probably know it already, that there is no group of people that is more cowardly.
00:58:14.740You said you said you said spineless. So you may or may not have heard me mention the term that I have discovered a new biological species.
00:58:23.040They're called professors and they're known by the scientific term, the invertebrate castrati, because not only do they have spines, they don't have balls.
00:58:33.760And I don't care if you're male or female or any of the 873 other sexes and genders, you're you all share one thing.
00:58:41.680You have a progressive lisp. You're wimpy. You're cowardly.
00:58:46.560You're afraid of your shadow, which, by the way, that's one of the reasons why I mean, paradoxically, why I have such a large platform, because the corrections officer and the military sniper love me because they do have high testosterone.
00:59:02.700But why I don't get invited to many of the cool kids, progressive academic parties, because I'm a mean brute.
00:59:12.460I don't know how this guy went on to get all these fancy degrees at McGill and Cornell, because he should be speaking with a progressive lisp rather than his mean Middle Eastern way.
00:59:24.020He's so vulgar. Right. So and that has been, in a sense, for me, an existential, you know, fracture in my life, because I love academia like no one has ever loved academia.
00:59:36.640To be a professor is in my DNA. But I despise most academics because they're these little sniveling, wimpy cowards.
00:59:46.220Now, it could well be because just by by the luck of random combination of genes, I have high testosterone.
00:59:55.140It also is, by the way, and I'm being here literal, the fact that I was a competitive athlete.
01:00:01.400Right. You can't be a competitive soccer player and be a whiny girl. Right.
01:00:06.420You have to step into the ring. I remember something that Joe Rogan told me the first time that I went on his show.
01:00:11.580He said, you know, between the MMA fights that, you know, he's into that world and his stand up comic and my professorial stuff, there is something in common.
01:00:22.300I said, oh, what is that, Joe? He said, well, if you step into an arena to fight, you can't hide.
01:00:30.180If you get up in front of an audience as a stand up comic and you suck, you can't hide it.
01:00:35.320In your case, Gad, if you come on the show or you do all of your public engagement and you say something bullshit, you can't hide.
01:00:41.900So you have to be kind of a larger than life person to be able to do this.
01:00:45.520That's why most academics can't go on Joe Rogan because they know they're very, very, you know, narrow lane where they could talk about the specific tiny little thing that they know about.
01:00:55.900But they don't have the self-assuredness to pontificate about all kinds of other things.
01:01:00.260Have I kind of put it all together in a package?
01:01:04.000Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you down the line.
01:01:06.220And, you know, I think one of the reasons I'm probably drawn to your work, drawn to, you know, I think some of the kind of like younger guys around my age, like Rob Henderson, who went to Cambridge.
01:01:16.940You know what? This isn't like a requirement for for good scholarship, but I do find like a lot of the scholars I gravitate towards are people who have, you know, like absolute intellectual credibility, like a really acute research eye.
01:01:31.160But they often come from like non-traditional backgrounds.
01:01:34.420And by non-traditional, I don't just mean Rob Henderson, who went to foster care or even like me, like no one in my family went to college like my dad was in the military, but also people who come from like certain competitive sports backgrounds.
01:01:48.020Like I can say I've never met another Ph.D. student who is competing in powerlifting before starting Ph.D.
01:01:55.340If I started talking like some of my colleagues at a powerlifting meet, people would probably have no idea what the fuck I'm even talking about.
01:02:03.000Or two, if they actually got to what I'm talking about, they'd just be like, why are you such a weird pussy or something like that?
01:02:09.080Or like you need therapy, you know, so but, you know, when you have like these and frankly, there's not a lot of them, people who like slip through the cracks and end up getting a Ph.D.
01:02:20.180and even like slip further through where they get a tenure track job, get tenure.
01:02:24.500You know, you end up like, you know, there's a reason you have millions of people reading your work, because in many ways you are sort of an outlier.
01:02:31.140And I don't think your personal background, it doesn't sound like that's entirely like incidental to the kinds of questions you're interested in, how you go about those questions.
01:02:40.480The fact that you are willing to withstand social ostracization, you know, the various other things like, you know, as you put it, like there's a reason you're not going to be invited to speak at certain departments or what have you.
01:02:54.700And it's really unfortunate because there's probably people listening right now, especially if you're like an undergrad and you look at the intellectual life and there's so much that is gratifying about it.
01:03:05.640Like, I really enjoyed my time at Cornell, like I had two years of fellowship where I could just read and write and that was my life.
01:03:13.160And it's awesome for people who like to think and sit around reading hundreds of books every year.
01:03:17.900But on the other hand, like, quite frankly, sort of the last people on Earth that I would want to spend my free time with are intellectuals.
01:04:00.580Oh, Victor Davis Hanson, for anybody who's not...
01:04:03.060Yeah, anybody who's listening to us and doesn't know him, go down that rabbit hole.
01:04:08.160I mean, he's a guy who could, you know, pull up a link between some ancient Greek philosopher and some contemporary issue.
01:04:14.420And then the next minute, he'll explain to you how he uses the irrigation system on his farm.
01:04:19.920I'm like, that's the kind of cool guy I want to hang around with, right?
01:04:23.180That's the guy who can fix the broken, the flat tire if we had to have someone fix the flat tire.
01:04:31.160But let me, I want to kind of wrap that part of our conversation, linking it to you.
01:04:38.520All that we've said about some of our respective disdain for many of the academics, does that mean that if today...
01:04:46.220I know that you might be boxed out of academia because you did the unthinkable in writing such a book and you may not get a professorship.
01:04:52.960But if tomorrow you were to get Smith College or, you know, whatever, some university or college to offer you that assistant professorship, would you take it?
01:05:54.540Anyways, you know, I'm happy to come to campus, happy to come to campus, especially sort of like the heterodox academy people who have, you know, a place on certain campuses.
01:06:04.000But the idea of having to be around academics for the rest of my life, particularly in like an English department, is profoundly unappealing to me.
01:06:12.300And also, like, you know, even if someone was like, NYU calls me and they're like, hey, we're giving you that R1 position.
01:06:20.560You get to live in Greenwich Village, like a place I would love to live.
01:06:23.620You know, at the end of the day, I don't I don't really want to be reading, you know, 18 year old kids papers for the rest of my life, especially like the last time I taught was spring 2023.
01:06:35.740And I was already noticing because I teach writing and English and cultural studies, like heavy essay grounded disciplines.
01:06:44.020And I was already noticing, like the chat GPT and that sort of stuff.
01:06:48.740So, you know, I have enjoyed a lot of things about teaching.
01:06:51.740I don't have like a personal gripe against teaching.
01:06:55.340I have a lot of students I've connected with.
01:06:57.020But at the end of the day, like I just me personally, I don't I don't know if that's really like the best path for me in terms of how I want to use.
01:07:04.660Well, I'm now really eager to end this interview so that I could know off camera what your awesome job is.
01:07:11.960Anything that you want to discuss beyond the books two and three that you're currently working on?
01:07:17.980Any other projects that you'd like to promote before we wrap it up?
01:07:22.660Um, you know, no, I'll, you know, I'll promote your book up here.