00:01:25.800And then you have this ideology that's gone in service to this goal and kind of just upended the thing.
00:01:31.360Like to give you an idea of how upended it is, you can take some of – there's a fellow on Twitter who has gone through some of the biggest books of kind of the social justice academic pantheon.
00:01:41.260And it's seen like Judith Butler, for example, and starts listing who does Judith Butler cite.
00:01:47.740And it's, you know, this postmodern philosopher, that postmodern philosopher, this lunatic, that lunatic.
00:01:53.540And then you have this guy, John Rawls, this philosopher who has this very famous book called The Theory of Justice and really lays out what a socially just society would look like from a liberal perspective.
00:02:05.860They almost never talk about the other side of what social justice means, which is what most people think social justice means, which is what most people actually agree with and support.
00:02:15.720Whether they're on the right, whether they're on the left, whether they're somewhere in the center, whatever their politics, most people agree that a more fair society is better and something worth trying to generate.
00:02:28.260And so you've got this kind of two things.
00:02:30.260Like in my talk yesterday, I pointed out that even in their own books, they admit we're doing something different than what most people think.
00:02:37.820We call ours critical social justice to distinguish it from mainstream standpoints.
00:02:42.740And, you know, some people call it social justice to try to tap into its true commitments, but we mean something else. So there are two things. There's this idea that society can be more fair. And then there's an ideology that claims to be working for that in a very specific way. That's basically postmodernism, the philosophy of postmodernism and grievance as we took.
00:03:04.500And the argument you made yesterday is that essentially they're trying to have a revolution.
00:03:09.920Yeah, they're revolutionaries, social revolutionaries.
00:03:12.400The goal is, don't take my word for it, go look.
00:04:53.820And I think that's a fundamental difference, but that leads into your question is if the problem with speech or the idea of speech is that you could take this in many different directions, but one is if your principles are not rationally derivable, then you need some way to enforce them.
00:05:14.780You need some mechanism there to pick up the slack between whatever the belief is
00:05:20.800and the reason that you have for believing that.
00:05:23.600And part of that is you just don't allow speech, you don't allow debates.
00:05:38.740It sounds like some kind of sexual assault.
00:05:41.760Yeah, so the idea is that one person's article was put up beside another person's article, and one was a pro and one was a con, which is normally...
00:05:54.160It's how we... I'm not saying it's the best way to do it, but that's the traditional way to do it.
00:06:00.000There's no violence there, and in my talk, I spoke about how they conceptualize speech as violence, which is part of the problem.
00:06:08.900And when my girlfriend does it, it's certainly...
00:06:11.080Yeah, so they have mechanisms to enforce, but she doesn't actually mean speech is violence.
00:06:17.580She just doesn't like him, that's all.
00:06:19.280Okay, well then maybe there's a different recipe for that.
00:06:23.880So they have all these mechanisms, they have bias response teams, and then these mechanisms act to limit not just freedom of speech, but what they're really limiting is cognitive liberty.
00:06:36.380Yeah. And so the way that I view it, it comes down to how you are free to pursue your truth.
00:06:43.680And in the social justice universe, there is a certain truth that is an ideologically driven truth.
00:06:50.440It is a dogma. And that's just what it is. And anything that prevents you from thinking in one way.
00:06:58.240So if we can limit speech so you won't think this way, that's a good thing.
00:07:02.400But it's even more than that. And this is something you guys talked about.
00:07:05.180I remember we had Douglas Meyer in the show about two or three weeks ago, and he was talking about, I asked him, do you feel like we live in a society where it is now dangerous to say the truth?
00:07:15.320But actually what you guys were talking about is that the whole point of social justice is to erode the concept of truth as an idea at all, to teach us all that there is no such thing as truth.
00:07:44.980It's that truth is relative to who's saying it and why they're saying it.
00:07:48.980And so truth is a contrivance of power.
00:07:51.360And truth is a political construct, is the way they see it.
00:07:54.100So there's no truth in the sense that, you know, the correspondence theory of truth, as it's called it, what we call true somehow corresponds to reality.
00:08:01.320There's no truth in that regard within this.
00:08:04.400Or as, you know, some of the more moderate, even the old postmodern thinkers like Richard already put it, the truth might be out there, but we can't get it.
00:08:12.880We're stuck in our biases and everybody has biases and everybody's biases are basically equally bad.
00:08:18.460So if there's truth out there, fine, but we can't get to it.
00:08:22.180So it's kind of to give them as much credit as they deserve is that the truth is inaccessible.
00:08:29.500So all we have left are politics, which.
00:08:33.400So if we run with our idea for a second, let me just finish this thing, Francis.
00:08:37.600And I put this question to Helen when we had her on the show.
00:08:40.840If we were living in Nazi Germany right now, there would be some scientific truths that would be the product of the power structures of the time, right?
00:08:52.360We would believe scientifically that black people are inferior.
00:08:57.160So is there not some truth to this idea that what we believe to be true, including scientifically, is a product of the power structures of the day?
00:09:07.540So it's possible to call things scientific truths that don't qualify.
00:09:13.380What you often find, and this is kind of a norm that's breaking down, and maybe it needs to break down, I don't know.
00:09:18.060But I always think back at times like this to Carl Sagan, who's very famous.
00:09:21.760He's a scientist and also a science popularizer.
00:09:25.120And unfortunately, he's mostly known for being the latter.
00:09:28.440Somebody who spoke about science very eloquently, wrote about science very beautifully.
00:09:32.520And Carl was not particularly well-received for doing this.
00:09:35.960So, within scientific communities, most scientists, I mean, you do have your arrogant git here and there, lots of them actually, but there's this overarching kind of norm or understanding that everything that it's doing is provisional.
00:09:51.620And, I mean, when I was doing physics, physics is sort of special because physics is really hard.
00:09:56.000Anything that's not, you know, 20 or 30 years old is kind of, you know, maybe unless it has something like five, six sigma confirmation levels, extremely high confirmation levels.
00:10:07.260So there's sort of this attitude that there's science, which is this very cautious, self-doubting process.
00:10:17.140And then you have kind of the image of science, or almost like some people call it scientism, is like science going too far.
00:10:25.160It's like what you would see out of a science journalist that barely understands the science.
00:10:28.380And, you know, it's like they figure out some chemical can inhibit the growth of a cancer cell or something like that in a Petri dish.
00:10:35.300And the cell happened to be for like a turtle or something like that.
00:10:39.100And then they write, you know, like bananas cure cancer.
00:10:43.340So the thing that gets called science may not actually be science.
00:10:48.520Once you acknowledge that, then you can say, yeah, they had a point.
00:10:51.920Things that were recognized as carrying scientific authority and promoted as such and still are promoted as such can be used as tools of power because, well, you'd be a fool to argue with science.
00:12:07.620And what we do about it is a different question.
00:12:09.440So, you know, the whole Nazi Germany thing, you take that as provisionally true, and then you ask what political inferences one can draw from that.
00:12:18.020And that is a function of the pre-existing ideology and the framework in which that fits.
00:12:22.540Right. So these postmodern thinkers, you know, they were looking accurately, well, not according to their critics at the time, their scholarship was a bit sloppy, apparently.
00:12:35.360We'll say they were looking fairly accurately at ways that the history of how science was being used and, of course, finding wrong answers.
00:12:43.900The idea with science, of course, is that you go from wrong answers to less wrong answers to less wrong answers.
00:12:49.200It's not that you go to right answers.
00:17:12.360Most people land in the overlapping zone in the middle.
00:17:15.780When you get out on the ends, which is where you have, in particular, your high performers in any given field, who's going to become an engineer?
00:17:24.480And so the highest performing people with engineering talent are likely to become engineers in many cases.
00:17:30.540And if it happens that the averages are even slightly different, the statistical bell curves, you're going to end up having more men, say, than women who are interested.
00:17:42.200Same reason why prisons are filled with men, right?
00:17:44.760The most violent people are men, therefore that's who fills the prisons, right?
00:17:48.360And so this approach to thinking about the world that's taken up by social justice is what's called social constructivist.
00:17:54.360constructivist and so what it believes is that that can't possibly be the result of anything
00:17:59.040innate to biology and men and women that has to be the result of how society treats men and women
00:18:06.460and so if we can just shatter society and rebuild it to where we don't treat men and women different
00:18:12.200in any way yeah we should probably linger on that because i'm sure you have a question because
00:18:16.820that's such a weird idea it's properly weird but i mean it is it's almost like the term for
00:18:23.040it's defamiliarization they often use that concept it's almost like helen describes it really well
00:18:29.060it was like an alien came down and has never seen a sexually reproducing species before a sexually
00:18:35.960dimorphic species before and is trying to without interacting and not reading you know the science
00:18:42.480or anything just watching from above trying to figure out why is this happening and all they can
00:18:47.360see are the social interactions and say oh well boys tend to play with trucks and legos or whatever
00:18:53.300and girls tend to play with these other you know dolls and whatever and so clearly the parents are
00:18:58.120giving them the dolls and their grandparents are buying them this kind of toy versus that kind of
00:19:02.260toy and they're being told this is what it's like these a boy you know there's a viral video in
00:19:06.780around if you guys watch it if you should haven't you should watch it like 30 times where the kids
00:19:10.340or two little boys are stepping on the trash can lid and it pops up hits them in the face and they
00:19:15.880laughing laughing it's like everybody's like boys yeah no so they would they would they would
00:19:21.300look at this and say well someone has clearly taught those boys that violence is fun and funny
00:19:28.060and so we have to figure out who's teaching them that and they think that it's not just that their
00:19:33.280parents or grandparents but it's a thing that's pervasive through all of us we're all complicit
00:19:38.940they say in this system of socialization and so basically imagine it that every possible behavior
00:19:45.200you can imagine is somehow learned by being taught that by society there's nothing innate we're the
00:19:53.100only animal without any kind of instinct right and if you can somehow change the institutions
00:19:57.500in society you can create an equality of outcome right and so this isn't let me let me be fair this
00:20:04.100isn't totally crazy because we are in and we are a species that's like a hyper social ultra social
00:20:11.520I think is the phrase for it. So there is a lot of actual, you know, social influence in these
00:20:15.680things. And if you look at history, it's very clear. You can mold and bend that. The thing is,
00:20:21.380if there's an underlying biology, which shouldn't be a controversial point,
00:20:25.840then there are also limits to how far that can be molded and bent. And that's where they
00:20:30.480cross off the rails. Almost everybody, people when we get into this conversation think, oh,
00:20:34.880there's the biology people and then there's the social construction people. That's an incorrect
00:20:39.440characterization there's a social construction people and then there are the biology plus social
00:20:44.020constructive people and then you have a handful of weirdos that are like no it's all biology
00:20:48.200a handful of weirdos that basically nobody respects almost everybody that's reasonable
00:20:52.720on the topic recognizes that biology plays some influence covariant yeah and and uh so
00:20:59.380socialization plays some role and those interact somehow and then you have these social
00:21:03.420constructionists who are like nope they're the weirdos on the other end yeah the weirdos on the
00:21:07.020them but there's a there's not a few of them and so we're talking about this and you know and
00:21:14.540there are some merits to what they're saying not a lot but there's some merits why is it so
00:21:18.940dangerous why can't we just say look you know if these people have these ideas that's fine and
00:21:23.660they're more than welcome to them and it's a broad church you should read some of the accounts they're
00:21:28.480charming um online where somebody's you know talking about the challenges and trials and
00:21:33.680tribulations of raising a gender neutral child they decide that they're going to raise their
00:21:37.860child without any reference to gender identity they're you know they're always gonna not going
00:21:42.320to put them in blue or pink or whatever the different thing trucks and toys and they're
00:21:45.640like why is my little girl always choosing dolls no matter how many times i buy her a truck or why
00:21:51.000is she putting a dress on the truck you know we try not to have gendered behavior and she just
00:21:57.460keeps choosing it what do i do she must be picking it up from society everywhere so when you start to
00:22:04.120how is it so dangerous um i don't i don't know how trying to force something on somebody that
00:22:14.740doesn't match whatever their proclivities are doesn't result in something that's at least
00:22:21.220suboptimal psychologically like i grew up in in the southeastern u.s which is a little bit behind
00:22:26.340the times. And so in the Bible, maybe you've, I don't know if you've read that book. It's an
00:22:30.720interesting book. Hey man, I'm from Russia. We're still living in the biblical times.
00:22:36.620Well, in the Bible, you may know that they mentioned it's like 27 times that being left
00:22:40.440handed is a sin. It's something that the devil, it's sinister or whatever. So I actually know
00:22:44.720one person who, because he was born left handed, had his left hand tied to his body until he was
00:22:50.660something like seven years old for most things, especially when he was at school or having to do
00:22:54.460writing tasks so you had to learn how to use his right hand even though he's left-handed and
00:22:58.580there's been some study there's enough people that have gone through this to where um there's
00:23:03.820been been some studies on these people and what you find is find out is that they're almost always
00:23:07.280as adults ambidextrous so you can use both hands very well the thing is is that all the evidence
00:23:14.340we have points to the the idea that they will never be as good with either of their hands as
00:23:19.800they would have been with their left hand if you just leaned into right what their natural
00:23:24.700proclivity was and so there's the threat there of um well you're limiting people limiting people
00:23:32.300yeah the other there are further threats of course which is if you think that the the mechanism for
00:23:36.820something is uh if you have the wrong diagnosis for for the the disease the prescription you get
00:23:43.940is probably going to be wrong so if the prescription if you believe that oh my child
00:23:48.420won't conform to the non-gender roles that i'm trying to force upon him or her uh what do i do
00:23:54.960it must be society now you have this mission well i have to break society because it's perverting my
00:24:00.180child and so at that point you're limiting your child potentially which you also get bent on this
00:24:07.740mission that tries to break apart the structures of society but if the structures of society have
00:24:12.720some correlation to the same underlying problems that you see problems that you're seeing in your
00:24:19.700child you can't break them without forcing it on people and when you start forcing it on people
00:24:24.380all kinds of weird stuff happens so let me ask you this peter because i i found it very interesting
00:24:29.320you talked about social justice as being a mind virus or in a cult i think you also is that was
00:24:35.220that you that said that? Oh, I was the virus guy. Oh, you were the virus guy. Yeah, we both said
00:24:39.120the ideas before. It's a pretty obvious idea. And they said
00:24:43.040that they were the virus. Oh, they said that. Okay, even more. So
00:24:47.080these ideas are dangerous, right? Let's take it as given.
00:24:55.540so quickly and so contagiously? Because
00:24:59.160That is a great question. Well, this is the thing. I'm afraid no one really talks
00:25:03.200about this but is it is it that they found a way to weaponize our empathy is it that in a word
00:25:08.640something that douglas murray would say that in a world without god we have found in your religion
00:25:14.520is it this mystical thing that we have a craving for is why is it so powerful yes in spreading
00:25:22.340there that's a great question i've thought about it quite a bit thank you
00:25:26.000one thing we should probably talk about is the substitution hypothesis why don't you take a step
00:25:44.920at that and then i'll oh yeah so that's the douglas murray idea so the substitution hypothesis
00:25:48.580is this idea that um you know people have left traditional religion so now they're looking for
00:25:55.440to get those psychological and social needs met uh by a not traditional religion in this case by
00:26:01.240politics for most people i think that there's something to that uh but not a lot to that uh
00:26:06.580because the way that that normally gets approached is well people need meaning in their lives yeah
00:26:10.860they're looking for meaning and they used to find meaning in god now they can't find meaning in god
00:26:14.620so they're going to find meaning in social activism or whatever it happens to be their
00:26:17.780political stuff and there's i don't want to say well that's not it because it's one of these
00:26:22.460things. There are multiple factors involved in why people turn to religions if you look at the
00:26:27.120psychology of religion, and one of them is that, and that's certainly going to be an issue. I think
00:26:31.520that you're going to find more of an issue there because as their economies go increasingly towards
00:26:36.760service, those are less fulfilling jobs, and people are looking to find meaning not so much
00:26:42.480because they lost God, but because they're losing meaning in their careers. But what I ultimately
00:26:47.020think is that the root of this is the problem of feeling out of control, which is a result of our
00:26:51.900polarization. And so we're so polarized, we're so afraid, Helen and I have called this existential
00:26:57.660polarization, that we're so afraid that the other side will get power and misuse it,
00:27:02.620that it'll cause existential threats. That's what we see as extinction rebellion going on right now
00:27:06.740is it's extinction, no kidding, that we can't possibly let the other side have any power.
00:27:12.900And that's a crisis of feeling out of control. And so when you feel a crisis of feeling out
00:27:17.780control, then you want to reassert control. Now, we can add in another element. Our fourth
00:27:23.800companion, Mike Naina, that's doing a film about us and our work. He has this really interesting
00:27:30.580hypothesis right now that video clips work kind of like miracles in today's social media economy.
00:27:38.960So, when did all of this blow up and spread so quickly? It was right after, really right after
00:27:43.460the Black Lives Matter thing blew up. So you have these videos, a minute and a half long,
00:27:48.680or a minute long, or 30 seconds long. You don't really know what happened. And then a narrative
00:27:52.800is attached to it. Turns out later, apparently, that the narrative that was spun widely was not
00:27:57.620correct. Not at all correct. But this spreads like wildfire. So now you have many people who
00:28:03.960feel like society is out of control. They feel like there's probably a lot of race issues,
00:28:08.760especially after coming out of the United States, Obama's presidency. The conservatives today in
00:28:12.740the u.s like to pretend that they weren't racist as hell during that and i'm like what i was
00:28:17.820what and some of them weren't not all of them of course but holy shit i mean they were burning
00:28:23.240black effigies and you know i saw people with bumper stickers driving around where i live that
00:28:28.800said stuff like it's called the white house for a reason and the confederate flag i mean there's
00:28:35.060confederate flags everywhere and they were really bad during during obama uh his presidency all
00:28:40.740through the south so there's a lot of people who are aware that there's still this racist resentment
00:28:45.140and that's that is that's racist resentment there's nothing else to call it and then all of a sudden
00:28:49.960you see racist cops and that's the narrative that spun off the miracle story video and boom that
00:28:56.980crisis of control just goes nuts to everybody and all of a sudden you have these people critical
00:29:03.640race theorists who since the 1980s have been writing down exactly the explanation for this
00:29:08.280society as hidden racism. Racism never got better from Jim Crow era. It never got better even from
00:29:14.940slavery. It just kept putting on a nicer and nicer white mask. They literally call it that.
00:29:21.640So it's all still there. All the same resentment, all the same inequality, all the same racism as
00:29:27.120during slavery. Jim Crow are still there. They just present themselves nicer. And then all of
00:29:32.200a sudden you have proof. You have this miracle video that's proof of that theory. And people
00:29:38.120very rapidly turned to the critical theory to start uh people on the left in particular who
00:29:44.240were most worried about these issues to start getting an explanation and so these critical
00:29:48.800race theorists and in gender you have you know the equivalence with queer theory post-colonial
00:29:54.760and just right across the board all of these different different approaches they all of a
00:29:58.740sudden had the answers that a panicking left was looking for and then you'd had the condition
00:30:05.700which was that the shooting in ferguson that was then cast as a racist event of course you also
00:30:11.600had the trayvon martin shooting which i don't know if that was racist or not that one's really
00:30:16.840morally ugly um so you have this kind of series of events and so you have lots of people all of
00:30:23.080a sudden saying we finally have an explanation and genuinely i think a lot of the people on on
00:30:27.940the left in general and certainly all of the social justice reactionary type people um firmly
00:30:33.820believe that things like critical race theory and the rest of this social justice scholarship
00:30:37.700is like having discovered the germ theory of disease, but
00:30:41.980for bigotry. And so they think we now have the diagnosis
00:30:45.800and this is the thing we have to fix. And in many ways, it's a simple
00:30:50.100solution to an incredibly complex problem in society. It's an over
00:30:53.760simple solution. Yeah. And that's why it won't work. I mean, it
00:30:57.920completely gets, again, it gets everything backwards.
00:31:01.480It starts by, well, we're going to reify differences in identity. We're going to make differences in identity matter more. We're going to get more difficult for people with different races to talk to one another and find common ground because we have to be constantly aware of the eggshells or landmines you might step on when you interact across any line.
00:31:20.060Because, as Robin DiAngelo tells us, racial dynamics are always present between people of different races.
00:31:28.000And the question is not, did racism manifest in the situation?
00:31:31.860It's how did racism manifest in the situation?
00:31:49.580Yeah. Now we have we have created a generation of people or almost a generation of people who for whom everything is a problem. Everything. There's racism in every interaction. There's racism in every film. There's racism. And and if you don't see it, it's because you're a racist.
00:32:06.500I'll give you an idea of how ridiculous this is.
00:32:08.920Last night during one of the panels, now I'm going to admit this and somebody's going to go looking for it and I'm just totally, I'm canceled.
00:32:14.100I was sitting there kind of like this with my hands between my legs and my index finger and thumb were close together while the other three fingers were resting on the chair.
00:32:23.780And it suddenly became, I was just kind of like out of it.
00:36:57.900And so the real threat there, Helen talks about this frequently, is that we're going to see as a pushback continues to mount, because it is already mounting, as it continues to mount, we run a real risk now of actually resurrecting, and this is their biggest fear, resurrecting genuine racism.
00:37:14.440I mean, I didn't get it. I wanted to talk about it, but the conversation went away on us last night on one of the panels, so I can mention it here.
00:37:21.480There's a great talk I watched a long time ago on YouTube by Dan O'Reilly, and he's talking about, frankly, it's a psychological mechanism, and he's talking about why does Catholic confession exist?
00:39:40.420And why can't I say the N-word to whoever I want?
00:39:43.560And it's just you really don't want to break whatever societal detente exists that keeps most people above those lines trying to do it right, even if they don't always measure up.
00:39:56.500You really don't want lots of people to start falling below that line or decide that that line doesn't matter anymore.
00:40:27.040If you can cancel somebody for that, you deny their ability to grow, their ability to change, their ability to try to get on the right track and stay above the bad line.
00:40:36.520And you offer them what forgiveness is in that.
00:40:40.060There's no, oh, well, you messed up because you were a teenager.
00:40:42.020We're all stupid when we're teenagers.
00:40:43.100We all did stupid stuff when we were teenagers, whatever it is.
00:40:45.240Even me saying we all did stupid stuff when we were teenagers,
00:40:47.600somebody will clip this out of context possibly and say,
00:40:50.460oh, this is a guy with something to hide.
00:40:52.400Well, if you're going to do that, please make it go viral for our show.
00:41:38.080And you weren't supposed to, you know, with a guy that was a different kind of.
00:41:43.280Now, today, that could possibly be interpreted as sexist.
00:41:46.900Right. Right. And so because you're treating people how, you know, even something is as little as a handshake.
00:41:52.400But that could be today. The zeitgeist is race and gender and things with identity level salience.
00:41:59.400But maybe tomorrow it's either something we can't imagine.
00:42:01.660My own prediction for this has been that we'll start, if a vestige of cancel culture exists, the next moral frontier will be factory farming.
00:42:13.100Oh, that guy ate factory farming, cancel him.
00:42:19.180So as I said before about the tying the left hand down, there's something that's incredibly psychologically alienating because you're not allowed to speak because your first question about censorship.
00:42:29.520and thus, as I said in my talk, you can't form those authentic relationships
00:42:32.980because you don't know what anybody means and everybody's walking on eggshells
00:42:36.280and you're not looking at people as people.
00:42:38.080Oh, there's a black woman across the street.
00:44:29.120Buy tickets now at greatoutdoorscomedyfestival.com.
00:44:33.020And then, you know, the way to do it is to lean into that victimhood, just lean into it and come with us and be activists.
00:44:39.460And we can fight this problem that makes you an anxious person, even though that's the thing that's causing them to be anxious.
00:44:44.940So you give somebody a, you induce vulnerability, you manipulate their vulnerability, make them feel usually bad or guilty or something, or afraid, fear of hell, for example, you might think about.
00:45:00.440And then you give them a path out of that.
00:45:09.880And so it's a way to create – anytime you have this kind of emotional manipulation that taps into some path of vulnerability, oh, you've been complicit in racism.
00:45:21.140Don't you feel guilty about that because you're white and that means you're comfortable and you don't have to think about what it's like to be a racial minority and what they have – all the crap they have to put up.
00:45:28.640Well, did you know that if you take up anti-racism, you can do something about that.
00:45:33.540It's not even – you're not allowed to do it to make yourself feel better.
00:45:36.560So it's like constantly self-flagellating.
00:45:38.640That'd be positioning yourself or myself, I guess, as a good white if I did it.
00:53:39.300My golden rule is if someone has harassed me and there's a considerable number of people or is currently harassing me, I will not have a conversation with them.
00:53:50.560But we talked about the road out of this just to kind of finish when we say, find your, I said, find your feet, you know, get with people and find your feet.
00:53:56.320There are three things really that have to be done.
00:54:00.080And each of us kind of spoke to it differently.
00:54:02.520But we've got to expose what's going on here.
00:54:05.460That's where I was talking about the picture on the social justice box, the diversity and treat everybody with respect doesn't match the contents, which is this kind of totalitarian ideology.
00:54:22.620People don't, like you said, most people won't agree with it once they see what it really is.
00:54:26.360You just have to get past that branding, which is really good.
00:54:29.300Second is if you have the time and energy, maybe not everybody does, try to explain it.
00:54:33.780If you guys have a show, have people on who can explain it.
00:54:35.740If you can read a few of their books or key papers or articles that people are writing on outlets like Aerial Magazine or Quillette or whatever it happens to be,
00:54:45.520learn to explain what's going on with some of this again people don't really agree with it and
00:54:50.320then if you can start looking for alternatives can you if you care about social justice i get
00:54:53.840asked this a lot i care about social justice but i don't like social justice warriors what do i do
00:54:57.820look look for and start articulating other ways how can you do the right thing like you're saying
00:55:04.080it's like maybe we shouldn't be thinking about race all the time maybe this whole thing like
00:55:08.460putting race first maybe we should ratchet that back down maybe we should ignore people who tell
00:55:12.960us that we have to pay attention to that all the time. And so you want to look for, but we still
00:55:17.520have to care and take people seriously. So maybe the lesson out of that is let's listen a little
00:55:21.200more than we did before. Let's take it a little more seriously and not be so quick to dismiss if
00:55:25.260that's still a problem. I'm not sure if that's even still a huge problem. Maybe it is, but fine.
00:55:30.540It's good advice in any case. And then let's investigate, but not this listen and believe
00:55:34.680crap, not shut up your story's been told. No, we'll listen. We'll check it out and you can help
00:55:40.120us check it out and it's all fine so look for alternatives that aren't just coming from this
00:55:46.700place of ideology that the the liberal approaches so that's what helen was talking about like
00:55:51.340let's just find ways to do the the thing let's take their complaints seriously figure out what's
00:55:56.620real inside their complaints and let's address those things and steal the whole thing from them
00:56:00.120and what advice would you give to somebody who's working in a particular industry or a company that
00:56:06.340is overtly work that's a great question so i don't ever tell anybody
00:56:11.060i don't ever advocate anybody stick out their neck if you have the the ability to do it what
00:56:20.440i often tell people when they ask me that i say oh i have to go to this diversity training what
00:56:23.480should i do blah blah blah i say take notes take very detailed notes and understand exactly what
00:56:29.940they're saying try to get a very clear picture if you try to challenge it on the spot they're
00:56:33.760just going to make life difficult for you it was no mistake that one of the papers we started to
00:56:37.120write but didn't have time to finish was things like if you go to diversity training we'll give
00:56:41.240you a survey did you like diversity training if you say no you have to take more diversity training
00:56:44.740or you get sent to diversity training and he gets called in as a character witness and you're like
00:56:50.000do you think he needed a diversity training he's a great guy it was misunderstood now you need
00:56:54.420diversity training you know so if you call it out on the spot once this stuff's been
00:56:58.240institutionalized you're just really causing yourself yeah there's nothing you can do at
00:57:01.580that way in a work environment start to understand it go out for drinks with your colleagues who
00:57:06.700also don't like it start talking because they won't talk either i have another idea for you
00:57:11.400guys as you know someone recently bought all our video equipment for us that is actually someone
00:57:15.600who works in the very work industry so if you want to change things check your number she's
00:57:20.100got a patreon page is all i'm saying yeah i'm saying that too yeah just give them money sounds
00:57:25.540good to us yeah that will solve the problem the magic wand p is to give them money but no um
00:57:31.280seriously start talking to each other and if you challenge it directly it's the wrong way start
00:57:35.940understanding it so you can explain it you can expose it and then you can start articulating
00:57:40.640alternatives yeah and we just wrote a piece about how important it is to listen and it really does
00:57:44.980start with listening because people will either say well they don't actually believe that well
00:57:49.120actually they do yeah and you should listen to them and in our piece argued that you should
00:57:54.520listen to them and believe them, not believe the content of their speech, but believe that they
00:57:58.340believe it. And then once you do that, you can say, okay, now I have a much more clear
00:58:02.400understanding of this. In a professional context, the idea is the same when you
00:58:06.540have to go to these trainings. Just take really good notes and listen and really understand
00:58:10.020what it is. What is this ideology? Once you really get it, then
00:58:14.480you can start speaking up because you're coming from a place where you can't
00:58:18.300easily be shut down or refuted. So start paying attention. Look into what they're saying.
00:58:46.080We set all that up in advance, just recommending each other's stuff.
00:58:49.100Listen, guys, the one question in the spirit of educating ourselves and having an opportunity for our audience to do the same is we always like to give our guests an opportunity to talk about something that's left field.
00:59:00.420So the last question we ask, and we'll ask it of each of you separately, is what is the one thing that we're not talking about that we should be talking about?
00:59:16.000I mean, some people are talking about the thing that I would say.
00:59:19.100And this isn't what anybody would expect.
00:59:22.080And nuclear power, there should be a lot more conversation on nuclear power.
00:59:26.140I hear all this stuff about renewables and green energy and, you know, great, you know.
00:59:31.480But there's so much resistance, especially from environmentalists, which is so strange, to nuclear power.
00:59:38.160I think we need lots more open-ended, clear discussion that defers to the science.
00:59:43.240You've got to, again, educate yourself a little bit.
00:59:45.640But people need to get more clear on actually in general how safe and clean nuclear power is and how it actually is something implementable on large scale rather quickly.
00:59:57.600And if we're looking at environmental problems and taking them seriously, as I think we should, it's something that just keeps falling in this crack because everybody doesn't like to talk about nuclear.
01:00:07.380So you probably didn't expect that. We are not talking enough about nuclear power, and we should be.
01:00:11.920Well, it's one of the safest forms of energy.
01:00:14.300And I say this as someone whose wife grew up right next to Chernobyl.