The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - Dr. Adam Szetela - Wokeism and Cancel Culture in the Publishing Industry (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_865)

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00:01:04.600 Hi everybody, this is Gad Saad.

00:01:07.600 After a bit of a break, we were away with the family in Bermuda, then I had a speaking engagement

00:01:13.600 in Seattle.

00:01:14.600 I'm back in my home base and my first guest post-family vacation is Adam Satella who is

00:01:21.600 a, he shares my alma mater, he is a PhD in English from Cornell University, and he was

00:01:28.600 kind enough to put immediately above his beautiful head a copy of a book.

00:01:33.600 I hear that the author of that book is an incredibly wise and good-looking man.

00:01:37.600 Thank you for putting him up.

00:01:39.600 Adam, how are you doing?

00:01:40.600 I'm doing great.

00:01:41.600 Thanks for having me.

00:01:42.600 It's a pleasure to have you.

00:01:43.600 I wanted to begin by letting people know about your book.

00:01:48.600 First book, correct?

00:01:50.600 First book, yeah.

00:01:51.600 Yes.

00:01:52.600 So here it is.

00:01:53.600 That book is dangerous!

00:01:56.600 How Moral Panic, Social Media and the Culture Wars are Remaking Publishing.

00:02:02.600 So we'll do a deep dive into that.

00:02:05.600 But perhaps first we can begin, Adam, with tell us about your time at Cornell.

00:02:10.600 Tell us about your PhD at Cornell.

00:02:12.600 What was your dissertation on?

00:02:14.600 And we can then delve into your book.

00:02:16.600 Yeah, for sure.

00:02:17.600 So I started at Cornell in fall of 2020 and I come from an English background, but one of

00:02:24.600 the reasons I went to Cornell over some of the other universities that had accepted me

00:02:29.600 is I've always been really into interdisciplinary work.

00:02:31.600 I know you yourself are as well.

00:02:34.600 And at least when I came into Cornell, I think it might have changed since then.

00:02:37.600 But I was promised the freedom to take graduate coursework in any field I wanted.

00:02:42.600 So I did my graduate coursework in English, but also sociology, social psychology, history,

00:02:47.600 American studies.

00:02:48.600 And yeah, for the five years I was at Cornell, I focused on book censorship, specifically in

00:02:55.600 the United States and specifically in the age of social media.

00:02:58.600 So my dissertation research was essentially the book that you're holding in your hands

00:03:03.600 right now.

00:03:04.600 OK, wonderful.

00:03:05.600 So your doctoral supervisor would have been, though, housed in, you know, literature or comparative

00:03:11.600 literature or something like that.

00:03:13.600 Yeah, she's a she's actually an ethnographer who doesn't really do literature stuff, but she

00:03:17.600 had a co-appointment in English.

00:03:19.600 And then I also had a sociologist on my dissertation committee, as well as someone who does interdisciplinary

00:03:24.600 work.

00:03:25.600 Yeah, well, of course, as you said, it's music to my ear to hear the word interdisciplinary,

00:03:31.600 because I also went to Cornell, I mean, for several reasons, but one of which is precisely

00:03:36.600 because you could sort of shape your program in any way that you wanted.

00:03:40.600 And of course, my academic career has been defined by the fact that I don't take disciplinary

00:03:46.600 boundaries seriously.

00:03:48.600 Is this something that is frequent?

00:03:51.600 I mean, a common amongst, you know, PhDs in literature or are they typically much less

00:03:57.600 likely to have training in sociology and in psychology and so on?

00:04:02.600 Yeah.

00:04:03.600 So on the one hand, everyone sort of in English, especially graduate students who have an eye

00:04:08.600 on the job market.

00:04:09.600 They all describe themselves as interdisciplinary.

00:04:12.600 But often what that looks like is, say, they read a Marxist geographer like David Harvey

00:04:18.600 and then they analyze place in a novel.

00:04:21.600 They call that interdisciplinary.

00:04:23.600 You know, I'll let your listeners decide whether that's in a display.

00:04:28.600 There's no geographers citing people in English.

00:04:31.600 And it's a very one way.

00:04:33.600 On the other hand, I would say the people that do kind of what I do, which is empirical

00:04:37.600 literary studies, like I will use social experiments.

00:04:40.600 I use surveys.

00:04:41.600 I use interviews.

00:04:42.600 I've used focus groups in my research.

00:04:44.600 At least when I was at Cornell, I didn't actually know anyone else who did that.

00:04:48.600 And I can I think I've really only come across maybe like one or two people over the past

00:04:54.600 five years who come out of an English background and do that.

00:04:57.600 I would say for the most part, as soon as you start using words like empirical or hypothesis

00:05:02.600 or testing people in English sort of like get uptight because that associates you with something

00:05:09.600 resembling science and, you know, whatever whiteness.

00:05:13.600 And you're you know, I mean, you know what I'm talking about.

00:05:15.600 So I wish and and and I guess they they're proud of the fact that they are in the humanities

00:05:22.600 and therefore distinctly different from applying the scientific method to whatever interests

00:05:29.600 they wish to pursue pursue, which, of course, I mean, pisses me off to no ends because you've

00:05:34.600 You've probably heard me mention this before, but in case you haven't let it be the first

00:05:39.600 time, but certainly some of my listeners and viewers have heard me say one of my favorite

00:05:42.600 books of all time is a book by one of my intellectual heroes, E.O.

00:05:46.600 Wilson from Harvard, who recently passed away.

00:05:49.600 He wrote a book in the late 1990s called Consilience, Unity of Knowledge, where consilience

00:05:54.600 basically refers to exactly that trying to build bridges between different endeavors of

00:05:59.600 human import.

00:06:00.600 And in his case, he was arguing that the way that we achieve consilience by bridging the

00:06:06.600 humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences is in his case, he was arguing through

00:06:10.600 evolutionary theory.

00:06:11.600 And so, again, I think irrespective of which field you're in, you could be a Shakespearean

00:06:17.600 scholar.

00:06:18.600 You could benefit from applying the scientific method to some of your work.

00:06:22.600 You could use content analysis to study the actual content of the text.

00:06:28.600 Right.

00:06:29.600 It doesn't all have to be interpretive stuff.

00:06:31.600 Earlier, you mentioned Marxist geographer, which kind of leads me to the next question.

00:06:36.600 Typically, when you do analyses in literature, it's through a Marxist lens or a Foucault lens

00:06:44.600 or a feminist lens or a post-Marxist lens. 0.66

00:06:47.600 Of course, we mentioned this before we came on air, Darwinian literary criticism tries

00:06:52.600 to apply the evolutionary lens to study great works of literature, precisely because the

00:06:58.600 idea is that what moves us about literature is that it appeals to certain fundamental universal

00:07:03.600 themes.

00:07:04.600 Is this a field that you're at all familiar with?

00:07:06.600 And if yes, what are your thoughts on it?

00:07:08.600 Yeah.

00:07:09.600 So it's a field that I assume you're probably way more familiar than I am.

00:07:14.600 So as you pointed out, you know, my I have four degrees in English and getting a degree

00:07:19.600 in English, at least in like two thousands on is really here are the conceptual frameworks

00:07:24.600 and try to make sense of literature within those frameworks.

00:07:27.600 So it could be Marxist.

00:07:28.600 It could be feminist. 1.00

00:07:29.600 Increasingly, it's like trans or queer or what have you. 0.84

00:07:33.600 And no point in in accumulating four degrees in English was I ever assigned a Darwinian literary

00:07:40.600 theorist.

00:07:41.600 The only one I know off the top of my head whose work I could actually speak to in some

00:07:45.600 detail is Jonathan Gottschall, who wrote The Professor in the Cage.

00:07:49.600 He's been on.

00:07:50.600 I don't know if he's been on your podcast.

00:07:51.600 He's been on Rogan's podcast.

00:07:52.600 He hasn't.

00:07:53.600 He's been on Rogan.

00:07:54.600 Yes.

00:07:55.600 He's you know, I think Jonathan's a super smart guy, phenomenal writer.

00:07:59.600 When he went on the job market, he had, you know, very impressive CV.

00:08:03.600 His work was being lauded by Steven Pinker and other, you know, like serious intellectuals,

00:08:08.600 both within English and outside.

00:08:10.600 And from my understanding, he got absolutely torched on the job market.

00:08:14.600 Aside from the fact that his work is not trying to like accuse a text of racism or sexism,

00:08:20.600 which is sort of like how you got a tenure track job.

00:08:23.600 So he was saying, like, let's ground our analysis and science and evolution, which is not a social construct.

00:08:30.600 So, 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.

00:08:37.600 So do you see any improvements by improvement?

00:08:43.600 I mean, lesser dogmatism in those fields or we haven't yet reached the apex of lunacy, which, of course, you cover in your book.

00:08:52.600 No, I have. I mean, for the most part, I mean, I have a few colleagues who I can work with.

00:08:58.600 My dissertation committee was very supportive, really great people.

00:09:03.600 But 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.

00:09:10.600 I actually think the humanities in English is where you find some of like the most outlandish, anti empirical nonsense.

00:09:18.600 And from my understanding, no, there has not been any sign that that is going away.

00:09:24.600 Like, 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.

00:09:31.600 And like, I agree, woke is dead in certain corners, most notably the Oval Office.

00:09:36.600 It 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,

00:09:44.600 if 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.

00:09:52.600 Wow, 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.

00:10:09.600 I'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.

00:10:28.700 And 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,

00:10:39.700 even if I were simply interested in reading literature because of my interest in evolutionary theory, I should be doing that.

00:10:46.700 Because great literature is exactly speaking about these universal shared human experiences shaped by our biological heritage.

00:10:53.700 So 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.

00:11:04.740 Here are 10 books that you must read in the next five years. What would Dr. Satella tell me?

00:11:12.080 Oh, man, that's a that's a tough question. Because like you, I would say I read 95% nonfiction.

00:11:16.640 Oh, 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.

00:11:26.180 Wow. 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.

00:11:40.900 I'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.

00:12:00.160 I 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,

00:12:29.000 in 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.

00:12:40.360 The 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?

00:12:52.940 Yeah, 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.

00:13:09.360 There's, I'm sure you're familiar with my series of self-flagellation videos, yes?

00:13:14.200 Oh, yeah.

00:13:14.960 Oh, 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.

00:13:33.540 You mentioned Clockwork Orange. It reminded me, actually, of something. That's Stanley Kubrick, yes?

00:13:38.580 Yeah, he did the adaptation of Burgess's novel.

00:13:42.920 Right. 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.

00:14:04.760 And the novella is called Dream Story. The reason I'm mentioning it is because I just returned from a speaking engagement in Seattle.

00:14:11.680 I 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.

00:14:23.940 They couldn't find it for me. Are you at all familiar with that, either the movie or that work?

00:14:29.020 Yeah, 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.

00:14:33.980 Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So, as promised, now we sink into this beauty. Take us through the journey.

00:14:40.860 I was particularly interested, precisely to our earlier point about you doing empirical stuff.

00:14:46.060 You 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.

00:14:54.080 Yeah, 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.

00:15:04.680 I've been heavily in the space of books and literary studies for the past 15 years.

00:15:10.100 And 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.

00:15:20.100 You 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.

00:15:31.740 An 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.

00:15:41.300 And 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.

00:15:51.960 So, 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.

00:16:00.660 So, basically, I was sort of just observing this stuff. And I would say around 2018, 2019, there were some particularly egregious examples of cancellations.

00:16:12.220 And 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.

00:16:23.360 Surely, 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.

00:16:32.420 So, 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.

00:16:41.640 So, 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.

00:16:53.500 I'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.

00:17:07.680 Wow. 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?

00:17:23.480 Did 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?

00:17:33.620 Yeah, 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.

00:17:49.520 And, 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.

00:17:59.340 So, 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.

00:18:11.080 I 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.

00:18:26.960 And, you know, I was basically like, fuck off. You can't legally tell me to do that. 0.99

00:18:30.840 Yeah, exactly.

00:18:31.200 Yeah. 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.

00:18:51.620 Because 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.

00:19:07.660 I 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.

00:19:24.100 And, 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.

00:19:38.360 I 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,

00:19:51.140 I 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.

00:20:02.200 Wow. 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,

00:20:16.920 dear 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.

00:20:33.440 Are 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?

00:20:47.400 Well, 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?

00:21:05.720 Yeah, 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.

00:21:32.260 Like, 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.

00:21:45.100 So, 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.

00:22:02.260 To 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.

00:22:16.320 Because 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.

00:22:27.940 And a lot of the changes that I explore really changes from about 2010 on.

00:22:33.600 So, 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.

00:22:41.900 And they're trying to defend their authors for first and foremost.

00:22:45.840 But 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.

00:22:58.940 So, 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.

00:23:06.820 And 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.

00:23:16.640 And she's she's like, yeah, I do agree it's misogynistic.

00:23:20.000 But the novel set in 1850, like that's how they talk.

00:23:25.760 And she's also like people talk misogynistic ways in 2025. 1.00

00:23:30.460 It'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.

00:23:38.640 But for her, it was particularly baffling because she's been doing this since like the 60s.

00:23:44.660 And 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.

00:23:52.760 Amazing.

00:23:53.500 Did you earlier we were talking about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.

00:23:57.200 Are 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?

00:24:13.860 No, it's definitely it's definitely heavier in fiction.

00:24:16.420 And I would say within fiction, there's certain genres that have been especially engulfed in social justice ideology.

00:24:25.020 So there's a subgenre of fiction called young adult literature.

00:24:30.640 Those controversies have been innumerable and really just explosive.

00:24:36.540 So 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.

00:24:46.780 But when you actually look at the buying data, this is overwhelmingly adults buying this material for themselves, not even for young people.

00:24:55.020 But 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.

00:25:07.840 So that that that area is sort of crazy.

00:25:12.340 And 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.

00:25:23.920 So, 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.

00:25:32.900 Those people are absolute savages to two examples that speak to the central premise of your book.

00:25:41.240 Number one, I actually cite this in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.

00:25:45.740 It's the movie. I don't know if you saw it, but I suspect that you probably have the the 2023 movie, American Fiction.

00:25:52.340 Have you seen that? I've read the novel that is on which that movie is based off of.

00:25:57.520 It's one of those movies that it's been on the list. I just haven't got around.

00:26:00.520 Yeah, 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.

00:26:07.380 So it exactly, in a sense, speaks to what you're talking about, which is here's this black. 0.99

00:26:13.300 I 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.

00:26:23.720 But that's not really cool. You should be speaking in a particular black vernacular. 1.00

00:26:28.840 And 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.

00:26:40.580 And 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.

00:26:46.460 This is straight white author's career finally takes off after he tells woke publishers he's gender queer Nigerian.

00:26:56.360 Are 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.

00:27:08.040 I said, oh, I better put this in my book, but then I better raise it with Adam.

00:27:11.480 OK, so I'll send you that clip. One what a few more questions on this thing that we're talking about.

00:27:17.660 So I've noticed that maybe it's because I'm an author and therefore there's kind of a self perceptual bias or whatever.

00:27:27.120 But 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.

00:27:34.280 There's always a theme of an author of it's happening in the you know, there's a there's a book editor.

00:27:44.300 There's is that right? I mean, would this would this be something that's worthwhile to to do a content analysis on?

00:27:51.420 And if so, is it because there is a romantic notion of the author, the poet?

00:27:57.960 Everybody wants to be an author, except I just haven't gotten around to to becoming an author.

00:28:02.920 Everybody 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?

00:28:13.980 I haven't noticed that. No, I'd be curious what movies you're thinking of.

00:28:17.900 I do. I do fully agree with the second half of your point, though, that when they are represented,

00:28:22.180 it's often in this sort of like romantic kind of like artists, whatever, channeling their muse.

00:28:30.320 And 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,

00:28:38.860 especially 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.

00:28:46.760 I set my timer from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and I force myself to write like that's how I do it.

00:28:51.860 I don't you know, there's a quote by I think it was Somerset Mon, I think is how you pronounce his last name.

00:28:58.200 He was like, I write only when inspiration strikes.

00:29:00.900 Fortunately, it strikes every morning at nine.

00:29:03.560 So that's sort of like my reality.

00:29:05.500 Like I sit down, set a timer.

00:29:08.200 But when I watch movies and stuff, it's like, you know, it's it gets a little romanticized and a little kind of like wishy washy.

00:29:15.860 Right. So I'm glad that you sort of spoke about your your routine as a as an author, as a young author.

00:29:25.140 This is your first book.

00:29:26.660 What 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?

00:29:41.840 What would be three, four key lessons you'd give them?

00:29:44.760 Yeah, it's a great question.

00:29:46.140 So 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.

00:29:54.260 One of those books is a book called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield, who is a novelist.

00:30:00.160 Stephen's been on Joe Rogan's podcast a few times.

00:30:03.060 Joe Rogan actually used to keep a stack of that book and he used to give it out to people.

00:30:07.140 Wow. I've given copies to my friends who are stand up comedians, who are graphic designers.

00:30:13.700 It'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.

00:30:27.600 And there's something about the way Stephen Pressfield sort of articulates the writer's life, the artist's life.

00:30:34.600 And it applies just as easy to entrepreneurs, to podcasters, whatever.

00:30:38.320 It really hit home for me.

00:30:40.020 And I've read that book probably every other year for the past 15 years.

00:30:43.880 Now, more pragmatically, my own writing process.

00:30:48.240 So this is my first book.

00:30:50.320 I finished my second book.

00:30:51.820 It's in the hands of my agent.

00:30:52.880 I have a third book I'm working on.

00:30:54.040 So I have some fair degree of productivity.

00:30:59.580 I set an alarm every morning for four hours.

00:31:02.980 I usually end up writing from about maybe like 7 a.m. to 11 a.m.

00:31:07.880 I 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.

00:31:15.840 And even if you're only like I would consider myself a pretty slow writer, like I do maybe 250 words an hour.

00:31:24.140 So but if you if you just stick to that and you just do it over time, eventually you have a book.

00:31:29.640 If you stick to an exercise program, do it over time.

00:31:32.860 Eventually you're going to lose weight.

00:31:33.980 Like, again, kind of like what we were talking about earlier, I think writing, painting, making music, it gets like romanticized and stuff.

00:31:41.320 But if you if you just take a sort of basic blue collar work ethic, have some discipline, like you will get better over time.

00:31:49.620 You will produce work.

00:31:51.460 So that's that's I would be like my main advice to people.

00:31:55.240 I'd be curious what your your approach is.

00:31:57.760 You're yeah.

00:31:58.480 No, thank you for asking.

00:31:59.820 I mean, there are several elements.

00:32:01.340 I wholeheartedly agree with the sort of stick to it in this the discipline.

00:32:06.880 I don't care if I'm coughing.

00:32:08.680 I don't care if I'm tired.

00:32:09.940 I don't care if I have bronchitis.

00:32:11.520 I don't care if it seems like today my creative juices are not flowing.

00:32:15.500 I need to to clock in right to punt.

00:32:18.880 What is it called?

00:32:19.320 The puncher?

00:32:19.720 What's the what's the clock?

00:32:20.820 Yeah, like the time, like the old school time clock.

00:32:22.860 Old time clock.

00:32:23.580 You just got it.

00:32:24.300 And you got to put it.

00:32:25.140 And then, hey, close your eyes.

00:32:26.980 Open your eyes.

00:32:27.680 You've lost, as you said, 80 pounds.

00:32:29.620 Close your eyes.

00:32:30.120 Open your eyes.

00:32:30.800 You've got a 70,000 page manuscript.

00:32:33.180 It's very easy when you don't have an immediate boss to report to other than yourself to say,

00:32:41.280 well, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

00:32:43.160 And then suddenly you're stuck in the procrastination loop.

00:32:46.420 So I wholeheartedly agree with you that, you know, discipline is important.

00:32:50.260 In 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.

00:33:02.860 But 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.

00:33:20.500 And 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.

00:33:28.080 He 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.

00:33:34.720 And you could say all the fancy stuff, but you're also funny and so on.

00:33:37.660 And naturally, that's exactly how I like to communicate.

00:33:41.960 That'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.

00:33:51.820 And that's the game that I'm in, which is I'd like to convince as many minds as possible.

00:33:57.160 I'm not restricting it to the Cornell ivory tower.

00:34:00.640 And so I think that for me, that's really important.

00:34:04.200 So this is maybe more advice for the nonfiction writer.

00:34:08.140 I also say that having a clear roadmap.

00:34:12.500 Look, writing is organic.

00:34:13.980 I 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.

00:34:21.780 It came up organically as I was going through the writing process.

00:34:24.700 But prior to starting writing, I had a pretty clear idea of what are the eight main things I want to say, how.

00:34:35.520 And 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.

00:34:47.740 Would you agree with much of what I just said there?

00:34:50.360 Yeah, 100%.

00:34:51.160 I have outlines for everything I write.

00:34:54.060 Even 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.

00:35:02.440 I 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.

00:35:09.300 For me, it tends to just be kind of like a cyclical process.

00:35:13.300 So like I might like the book I just finished, like I had most of those chapters outlined.

00:35:17.720 I had research for them in my outline.

00:35:20.980 But then once you start writing, right, maybe something comes up, you go back, you move things around, you adjust the outline.

00:35:26.720 So like it's a combination for me of like going back and forth between what I'm writing, the outline.

00:35:30.940 Maybe I might need a pause and do research or conduct interviews.

00:35:35.400 So, yeah, I mean, that's it.

00:35:36.780 But there's always at least like some roadmap I'm starting.

00:35:39.980 I don't just kind of sit down and whatever, like make words appear out of nowhere.

00:35:45.360 Are you willing, and if not, it's totally understandable.

00:35:49.500 Are you willing to give us any hints about books two and three that you're working on?

00:35:55.480 I can't talk about book two as per the directions of my agent.

00:36:00.740 So I'll brag about you will love book two.

00:36:03.500 I will say that.

00:36:04.440 Oh, OK.

00:36:06.960 Book three, I'm basically writing a book trying to answer the question of why so many young men in America have moved right politically.

00:36:15.640 So, yeah, that's a book.

00:36:17.160 I mean, that book is I'm writing that it reads like creative nonfiction.

00:36:22.900 What I'm writing right now, like, yes, there's research and stuff.

00:36:25.200 But 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.

00:36:39.740 And 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.

00:36:50.160 Oh, right.

00:36:50.560 Speaking of powerlifting, what did you think of our good friend Mamdani having difficulty with the 135 pounds?

00:36:58.920 This is all new to me, but I'm.

00:37:00.740 Oh, you didn't know that?

00:37:01.540 Oh, I'm immediately.

00:37:02.720 I'm immediately interested in what you're talking about.

00:37:05.240 No, I haven't heard of this.

00:37:06.780 Well, I did see the RFK video of him like doing pull ups and stuff like that.

00:37:10.800 So you may remember, and again, many thanks for the lovely gesture of putting my parasitic mind in evidence.

00:37:18.420 I appreciate that.

00:37:19.340 You might be the first author who was so keen with great alacrity to promote my work rather than their work on my show.

00:37:28.320 So I appreciate that very kind gesture.

00:37:30.080 In the parasitic mind, I talk about, in one section, about the links between physical formidability in men and their political and socioeconomic orientations.

00:37:45.200 And perhaps not surprisingly, once I say it to you, men who are physically stronger, as measured by several different metrics,

00:37:53.320 tend to be less accepting of, for example, economic egalitarianism because they understand that life is hierarchical, life is competitive.

00:38:05.220 I'm going to go out there into the proverbial fight club, as you mentioned earlier.

00:38:09.400 There'll be a winner.

00:38:10.180 There'll be a loser. 0.79

00:38:10.860 And that's called life. 0.93

00:38:11.720 Whereas when I'm a wimpy guy with pear-shaped and I cry at Bridget Jones, it's not fair.

00:38:17.600 I want everything to be equal.

00:38:18.960 So Mamdani, who looks like a gigantic wimp, is also a huge socialist.

00:38:25.940 So I think we've just proven the theory yet again.

00:38:29.320 So explain the first part.

00:38:31.360 There was a video of him struggling to lift a nominal amount of weight.

00:38:35.000 Yeah.

00:38:35.020 So apparently he was, you know, because he wants to show that he's a man of the people.

00:38:40.120 He's approachable.

00:38:41.100 He's just a regular guy and so on.

00:38:43.060 So he's at some sort of gym or whatever it is, and he's trying to bench press 135 pounds.

00:38:52.180 Now, I'm not much of a lifter, so I don't know, but it doesn't seem like it's a lot of weight.

00:38:57.460 And yet he couldn't sort of do it.

00:38:59.140 The guy that's spotting him had to help him.

00:39:01.520 And so that became kind of a big scandal of what a wimpy is.

00:39:05.000 Yeah, 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.

00:39:18.560 And 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.

00:39:34.240 Same thing you see in like Jordan Peterson and Rogan.

00:39:37.180 Like 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.

00:39:47.020 But 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.

00:39:59.480 Exactly. To help them understand how to speak to young men.

00:40:05.160 I mean, just I would do it for 400 bucks.

00:40:07.720 If they paid me 400, I would I would do it for a tomahawk steak.

00:40:11.920 Wow. 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.

00:40:26.800 No. Yeah, it's insane.

00:40:28.800 It's kind of like that movie, The Manchurian Candidate, where they like they're trying to create like the Manchurian Joe Rogan. 0.90

00:40:35.140 But 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.

00:40:43.480 I 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.

00:40:53.880 And so, like, I don't I don't know how you would like create that.

00:40:59.840 So, 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.

00:41:07.660 Well, 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.

00:41:16.040 Right. 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.

00:41:35.420 Remember that Mark Manson?

00:41:37.180 Oh, is that what it is? OK. Well, I mean, what is he saying there?

00:41:40.560 I present myself to the world and I don't care. That doesn't mean I'm impolite.

00:41:45.980 That doesn't mean I don't have social grace. But when I take my positions, they're never modulated.

00:41:52.780 And I mean, I'm speaking now about me. I'm authentic to a fault.

00:41:56.560 I simply can't modulate because if I modulate, I feel as though I'm being a fraud.

00:42:01.820 I'm being fraudulent. Therefore, I present myself to the world.

00:42:05.700 You like it. Great. You don't like it. F off. I don't give a shit. Right.

00:42:09.040 And and if you look at each of these guys that I just mentioned, I think they all exude that.

00:42:15.800 And 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.

00:42:27.820 And certainly when we ask women, what is one of the things that you find most sexy about a man?

00:42:32.900 They'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.

00:42:43.340 Yeah, 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. 0.78

00:42:55.060 But it's like, dude, he invited Kamala on. Kamala didn't go on.

00:42:58.860 And 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.

00:43:06.500 We're going to have a stenographer in the room. We want you to come out to D.C.

00:43:10.060 We want we want to do it for 50 minutes, not more than 50. And he's like, Trump, it was one email.

00:43:15.360 Like, do you want to come on the podcast? Sure. And the guy comes on for three hours.

00:43:19.400 And again, like independent of whether you agree with his politics, whether you like his personality or not, at least, you know who he is.

00:43:26.840 Like, 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.

00:43:40.520 I think the California guy, Gavin Newsom, is like, oh, my God, attempting to do that by like trying to be funny and like confrontational.

00:43:49.200 But 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.

00:43:58.620 But speaking about Trump accepting, you know, after one email, whatever, I have a similar story.

00:44:05.900 So, you know, I'm I know Elon Musk well and so on.

00:44:10.500 And when he so we've only had one X Spaces chat together so far, although we had planned on doing more.

00:44:18.680 And the day before we ended up having the X Spaces, we were communicating by email.

00:44:25.500 And 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.

00:44:33.680 Right. And let me know, you know, when you'd like to hold it.

00:44:37.220 And so the next morning, it's Sunday.

00:44:39.160 I think I sent that I sent it on a Saturday night or something.

00:44:42.400 The next morning I wake up, I'm at the coffee shop just planning on taking an easy, you know, easy day.

00:44:48.280 And I have a reply from Elon, which I only read on Sunday morning saying, oh, let's do it today.

00:44:53.720 Meaning. Right.

00:44:55.160 So so there was no checking his schedule.

00:44:57.420 And I thought, how refreshing is that? 0.92

00:45:00.140 No pretense, no bullshit, no drama, no pass it through my 17 layers of checkers first. 0.90

00:45:07.840 It's like two guys. 0.95

00:45:09.400 Let's have fun.

00:45:10.180 Let's chat.

00:45:10.960 And so so I wholeheartedly agree.

00:45:13.300 All right.

00:45:13.720 What 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?

00:45:26.000 Yeah. So one thing that was very surprising to me.

00:45:31.480 So there's a part of the book where I talk about social experiments that I ran at Cornell with actual readers.

00:45:37.820 So 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.

00:45:45.300 And they came on the project, helped me out.

00:45:47.740 But 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.

00:46:03.320 So they could click, you know, this poem was well written, poorly written, progressive, racist, anti-racist.

00:46:10.820 They had to pick three. Right. 0.87

00:46:12.120 So we used three poems that had been accused of transgressions in the real world of racism, sexism, whatever.

00:46:19.280 And then we use one poem that was just a random poem that had not.

00:46:22.220 And in the first group, what we found in these were not college students we used, I think we used MTurk, if I remember.

00:46:28.100 So just a random sample of U.S. adults approximating a nationally representative sample.

00:46:34.100 And what we found was like normal people reading this stuff.

00:46:36.800 It was like 95 percent of them are not accusing these poems of racism and sexism and stuff.

00:46:42.680 They were just like, this is a good poem, this is a bad poem, whatever.

00:46:45.180 The second group, same thing.

00:46:47.700 We gave them these poems, but I wrote criticism as a Confederate.

00:46:53.380 So like pretending to be a literary critic.

00:46:56.300 And I just wrote two sentences for each poem, but the sentences were very critical.

00:47:00.660 So it would be like, this poem is so racist.

00:47:03.800 It does like real damage to the African-American community. 1.00

00:47:07.180 This poem is so sexist. 0.96

00:47:09.220 It reduces women to like animals or something. 1.00

00:47:12.460 And 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.

00:47:23.360 So like people would know the veal of anonymity was removed.

00:47:27.060 They would have to justify their responses.

00:47:28.520 And the number of people accusing this literature of racist, of racism, of sexism, of homophobia, it just absolutely shot up.

00:47:38.620 So from like about zero percent in the control group to about like 30 percent or more in the other group.

00:47:45.940 And the craziest thing was I used a poem that had not been accused of anything bad.

00:47:50.980 It's this poem called The Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg, who is like a far left poet active in the 60s.

00:47:58.460 He's a gay guy.

00:47:59.860 He's anthologized in the Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature, like liberals, progressives, Marxists, like they love Allen Ginsberg.

00:48:06.920 His poem is just about grocery shopping.

00:48:08.620 But 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.

00:48:17.540 And we got about like 30, 35 percent of people to click homophobic when they're evaluating his poem.

00:48:24.720 And so I left that experiment and I was like this social pressure that we tried to create in our lab.

00:48:31.120 It 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.

00:48:41.200 And you're like in that hyper liberal space where like everyone needs to toe the line.

00:48:46.100 So I came out of that experiment.

00:48:47.720 I 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?

00:48:57.540 To what extent is this just people trying to fit in with their liberal peers?

00:49:01.860 And my interviews would confirm that it's actually probably a big extent.

00:49:05.780 Like I remember interviewing one agent who said that one of her authors got attacked, got called whatever, a misogynist, a racist.

00:49:13.920 And one of her friends who also worked in publishing was like, what is happening to your author is so terrible.

00:49:19.440 Like these are just groundless accusations.

00:49:21.200 But then she's like, my friend actually liked one of the attacks on Twitter.

00:49:26.280 And I asked them, I was like, what is that about? 1.00

00:49:28.560 Like you said this was bullshit. 0.98

00:49:30.880 And 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. 1.00

00:49:40.680 Silence is violence.

00:49:41.920 So that was, you know, there's a lot of things that interested me, sort of surprised me.

00:49:47.080 But 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. 0.99

00:49:57.200 Two points to address what you just described.

00:50:02.360 Number one, I so love the fact that you are using the experimental method to test some of these ideas.

00:50:09.640 Again, to our earlier point, you could use a scientific approach to study something like literature.

00:50:16.160 Along the same line, that's still part of my first point.

00:50:19.540 But 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.

00:50:32.820 It was organized by Professor Eric Kaufman, who recently returned on my show a couple of weeks ago.

00:50:38.960 He's a political scientist by training, but a huge anti-woke professor.

00:50:42.520 And 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.

00:50:56.640 And so the study that you just described using, you know, a control group and an experimental group and so on totally fits within this.

00:51:04.300 So 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.

00:51:19.700 So that's number one.

00:51:20.340 Number 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.

00:51:38.340 I'll only mention one here.

00:51:40.140 Are you familiar with the Solomon Asch group conformity experiments?

00:51:43.500 For sure. Yeah, it's been replicated like across countries and at a time when other social science research has not been replicated at all.

00:51:51.580 So, yeah.

00:51:52.120 And so so in that case, I know you know it, but maybe some of our listeners and viewers don't.

00:51:58.320 You basically take a single line.

00:52:01.340 Call 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.

00:52:10.280 In 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.

00:52:19.780 But 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.

00:52:27.180 So this is someone who is, who is, I mean, he's not really in the experiment, but he's pretending to be a participant.

00:52:36.560 If 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?

00:52:44.080 If 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?

00:52:58.420 And 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.

00:53:05.020 You don't have to have convoluted experimental designs to demonstrate something about human nature.

00:53:10.460 But number two, if you can take something as black and white, right, this is not sort of gray stimulus.

00:53:19.100 This is very clear which is the correct one.

00:53:21.600 And 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.

00:53:47.680 Yeah, for sure.

00:53:48.480 And yeah, you're absolutely right.

00:53:50.360 In terms of your question, like another thing.

00:53:52.880 So 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.

00:54:00.580 So 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?

00:54:14.300 Like you're in an economically precarious situation, you want to make it.

00:54:17.580 But 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.

00:54:29.040 But 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.

00:54:39.280 People have been there for a while, people make, my understanding, really, really good money and live in Manhattan.

00:54:45.240 And 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.

00:54:59.480 No, this is not sexist.

00:55:00.620 And I, you know, it was difficult for me to hear because on the one hand, yeah, I understand where you're coming from.

00:55:08.620 Like you don't want the pitchforks to be turned towards you.

00:55:11.960 You don't want to be called someone who's like a racist sympathizer or turf or whatever.

00:55:16.320 Like you don't want to be hosted about by your colleagues on X.

00:55:20.460 Like, I get that.

00:55:21.440 I understand it.

00:55:22.520 But at the same time, it's like, come on, man. 1.00

00:55:24.360 Like you're a grown ass fucking man. 1.00

00:55:25.780 Like 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. 1.00

00:55:37.380 In that situation, I'm like, you know, this is more your realm. 0.96

00:55:41.640 But I'm like.

00:55:43.240 Is this someone just like who needs to get blood work done?

00:55:45.800 Like, does he have like super low testosterone levels?

00:55:49.220 Like, what if that was just like a major explanation for kind of like wokeness and stuff?

00:55:53.320 Because it's the same thing you see on campus, right? 0.85

00:55:55.000 Like 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. 0.98

00:56:12.940 And at one point, this guy says he has to go to the bathroom. 1.00

00:56:16.500 There's a grown ass man. 0.98

00:56:17.440 And one of the students says, you're not going anywhere like you're going to hold it. 0.99

00:56:21.780 And if you go to the bathroom, we're sending someone to escort you. 0.98

00:56:24.800 And the president at this point had already told the police, the campus police to like stand down.

00:56:28.940 And he's like, I need to go to the bathroom.

00:56:30.800 I'm just like.

00:56:31.460 Again, does this guy have like some sort of hormonal imbalance or something?

00:56:37.220 And again, there's probably a big class element to this, like Evergreen State College, selective liberal arts college.

00:56:42.940 Which 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.

00:56:50.380 If 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.

00:57:00.980 You get your teeth knocked out like immediately, like that's not.

00:57:05.620 But 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. 0.93

00:57:15.780 And your president is an absolute, you know, spineless cretin who just wants to make the customer happy. 0.77

00:57:22.520 Then I guess that's like how business works. 0.96

00:57:24.900 Well, of course, you are exactly speaking my my language and my reality in my ecosystem.

00:57:32.040 A couple of points. Number one, while, yes, it is.

00:57:35.660 I fully understand your ire at having these super senior presidents be afraid to say, come on, what what kind of publishing edict is this?

00:57:44.000 How about professors who have tenure?

00:57:47.240 So 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.

00:58:04.240 That'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. 0.95

00:58:14.740 You 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.

00:58:23.040 They'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.

00:58:33.760 And 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. 0.96

00:58:41.680 You have a progressive lisp. You're wimpy. You're cowardly. 0.98

00:58:46.560 You'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. 0.98

00:59:02.700 But why I don't get invited to many of the cool kids, progressive academic parties, because I'm a mean brute.

00:59:12.460 I 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.

00:59:24.020 He'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.

00:59:36.640 To be a professor is in my DNA. But I despise most academics because they're these little sniveling, wimpy cowards. 0.99

00:59:46.220 Now, it could well be because just by by the luck of random combination of genes, I have high testosterone. 0.97

00:59:55.140 It also is, by the way, and I'm being here literal, the fact that I was a competitive athlete.

01:00:01.400 Right. You can't be a competitive soccer player and be a whiny girl. Right. 1.00

01:00:06.420 You have to step into the ring. I remember something that Joe Rogan told me the first time that I went on his show.

01:00:11.580 He 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.

01:00:22.300 I said, oh, what is that, Joe? He said, well, if you step into an arena to fight, you can't hide.

01:00:30.180 If you get up in front of an audience as a stand up comic and you suck, you can't hide it. 0.99

01:00:35.320 In 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. 0.99

01:00:41.900 So you have to be kind of a larger than life person to be able to do this. 0.61

01:00:45.520 That'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.

01:00:55.900 But they don't have the self-assuredness to pontificate about all kinds of other things.

01:01:00.260 Have I kind of put it all together in a package?

01:01:04.000 Yeah, yeah. No, I agree with you down the line.

01:01:06.220 And, 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.

01:01:16.940 You 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.

01:01:31.160 But they often come from like non-traditional backgrounds.

01:01:34.420 And 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.

01:01:48.020 Like I can say I've never met another Ph.D. student who is competing in powerlifting before starting Ph.D. 0.96

01:01:55.340 If 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. 0.99

01:02:03.000 Or 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? 1.00

01:02:09.080 Or 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. 0.98

01:02:20.180 and even like slip further through where they get a tenure track job, get tenure.

01:02:24.500 You 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.

01:02:31.140 And 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.

01:02:40.480 The 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.

01:02:54.700 And 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.

01:03:05.640 Like, 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.

01:03:13.160 And it's awesome for people who like to think and sit around reading hundreds of books every year.

01:03:17.900 But 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.

01:03:28.100 So, yeah, no, I hear you.

01:03:30.060 Just to intergenerationally link Rob Henderson with someone much older, but that fits that mold.

01:03:37.880 Victor Davis Hanson would be one such character, right?

01:03:40.940 Because he does have impeccable academic credentials.

01:03:44.680 I mean, he was a professor for many years.

01:03:46.300 He's a Hoover Institution fellow.

01:03:48.560 He's a PhD in classics from Stanford, but he's also a farmer, Adam, right?

01:03:54.480 So this is a guy who's...

01:03:55.940 No, but did you know that about him?

01:03:57.800 No, I didn't.

01:03:58.840 I'm not familiar with him, but yeah.

01:04:00.580 Oh, Victor Davis Hanson, for anybody who's not...

01:04:03.060 Yeah, anybody who's listening to us and doesn't know him, go down that rabbit hole.

01:04:08.160 I mean, he's a guy who could, you know, pull up a link between some ancient Greek philosopher and some contemporary issue.

01:04:14.420 And then the next minute, he'll explain to you how he uses the irrigation system on his farm.

01:04:19.920 I'm like, that's the kind of cool guy I want to hang around with, right?

01:04:23.180 That's the guy who can fix the broken, the flat tire if we had to have someone fix the flat tire.

01:04:31.160 But let me, I want to kind of wrap that part of our conversation, linking it to you.

01:04:38.520 All that we've said about some of our respective disdain for many of the academics, does that mean that if today...

01:04:46.220 I 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.

01:04:52.960 But 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?

01:05:03.020 Would you be interested?

01:05:03.880 Or have you already made the decision, I want to be with the power lifters.

01:05:07.740 I don't want to be with the intellectual wimps.

01:05:11.340 Yeah, no, I've already made my decision.

01:05:12.740 I have.

01:05:13.640 So I obviously write and, you know, I'm fortunate enough where I have an agent and can make money off my books and whatnot.

01:05:19.560 I have a job in addition to this.

01:05:22.040 I can tell you about it off camera. 0.99

01:05:23.360 It's fucking amazing. 0.97

01:05:25.320 But yeah, I don't see myself ever going back to academia. 0.96

01:05:29.960 I will give university, you know, I'm giving a few campus talks.

01:05:33.860 I'm actually giving one at, I think, Ole Miss or someone who's also hosting you because they told me to say hi.

01:05:40.480 I'm not doing a good job.

01:05:41.720 I'm forgetting the university and the institute.

01:05:44.520 Well, I can't.

01:05:45.720 I'm not at liberty to say anything.

01:05:47.540 There are links between me and Ole Miss that people will find out about shortly.

01:05:52.880 Yeah, I think it's Ole Miss.

01:05:54.540 Anyways, 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.

01:06:04.000 But 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.

01:06:12.300 And also, like, you know, even if someone was like, NYU calls me and they're like, hey, we're giving you that R1 position.

01:06:20.560 You get to live in Greenwich Village, like a place I would love to live.

01:06:23.620 You 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.

01:06:35.740 And I was already noticing because I teach writing and English and cultural studies, like heavy essay grounded disciplines.

01:06:44.020 And I was already noticing, like the chat GPT and that sort of stuff.

01:06:48.740 So, you know, I have enjoyed a lot of things about teaching.

01:06:51.740 I don't have like a personal gripe against teaching.

01:06:53.900 I want to teach in Ward-Equanel.

01:06:55.340 I have a lot of students I've connected with.

01:06:57.020 But 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.

01:07:04.660 Well, I'm now really eager to end this interview so that I could know off camera what your awesome job is.

01:07:11.960 Anything that you want to discuss beyond the books two and three that you're currently working on?

01:07:17.980 Any other projects that you'd like to promote before we wrap it up?

01:07:22.660 Um, you know, no, I'll, you know, I'll promote your book up here.

01:07:28.520 I like that a lot.

01:07:29.460 I'll do the same with yours.

01:07:30.700 Guys, go out there.

01:07:31.660 It came out August 12th.

01:07:33.380 Fantastic book.

01:07:34.640 Go out and order it now.

01:07:37.240 All right.

01:07:38.140 Adam, it's such a pleasure to to meet you and chat with you.

01:07:41.600 I can't wait to check out books two and three and to find out off camera what you're you're you're not an adult film star, are you?

01:07:49.660 No, I'm not.

01:07:50.560 I'm not.

01:07:51.060 No, no, I'm not.

01:07:52.600 All right.

01:07:53.160 A real pleasure having you on the show.

01:07:54.760 Stay on the line so we could chat.

01:07:56.360 Sounds good.

01:07:57.020 Talk to you soon.

01:07:57.780 Take care.

01:07:58.160 Thank you.

The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - August 28, 2025

Dr. Adam Szetela - Wokeism and Cancel Culture in the Publishing Industry (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_865)

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