Listen to this episode on our podcast page or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform here. In the fifteenth episode of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle are joined by Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay, of the famed "Grievance Studies Affair" who submitted hoax studies to academic journals and got three of them accepted. Peter and James are self-proclaimed atheists who are politically liberal, but their work exposing how certain areas of academia prioritize narrative above truth is not only important but hilarious. They also care a lot about having meaningful disagreements and are actively fighting "cancel culture." We talk to them about the Grievance Studies Affair as well as their new book, How To Have Impossible Conversations. They also have a new project for facilitating impossible conversations called New Discourses. As usual, Kyle and Ethan also get into a few news stories including John Bolton the walrus, vaping AR-15's, and Monopoly for Christian women. They extend the conversation with Peter and James in the subscriber-exclusive portion of the episode. Follow Peter Boghossian on Twitter Follow James Linday on Twitter (7:12) John Bolton Waves Goodbye, Returns To Sea To Be Walrus Again (11:02) New Version Of Monopoly For Christian Women Has You Recruit All The Other Players Into A Pyramid Scheme (15:56) More E-Cigs Being Disguised As AR-15s To Avoid Ban (19:43) Interview: The Grievance Studies Affair and How To Have Impossible Conversations with Peter Boghossian & James Lindsay (56:57) Hate Mail (1:00:51) Paid Subscriber-Exclusive: Continuing the conversation with Peter and James about the insanity of academia, the ridiculous things their papers endorsed, and how social justice is like a cult (and also Gremlins) Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
Bringing you only the truest of news since the creation of the world 6,000 years ago.
You're listening to the Babylon Beague with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
Yes.
Thank you, Dave, for that wonderful intro.
This is Kyle from the Babylon Bee Podcast, and sitting across from me is...
Ethan Nicole.
I thought you were going to say my name.
I think it gets more and more awkward every time.
We're getting worse at this.
Some people can really get into announcing and talking on stuff.
I feel totally weird doing it.
Yeah.
Still.
You know, those TV shows that were really good in the first three seasons and they just drop off.
This is like our season seven of The Office or season eight of The Office.
We're already there.
I've kind of talked about possibly having Dave on.
We were just talking about Dave, our voice guy.
I would like to talk about that because you hear like the Christian radio station and you'll hear guys read like scripture in like a really cheesy voice.
Yeah.
That's how you do it.
Encouraging voice of the day.
Verse of the day.
Yeah.
God gave his only begotten son.
It's just weird.
They've got that encouraging edge to their voice.
Or almost like halfway to the movie trailer voice.
Yeah.
God loved the world.
It's just weird.
There's like inspiring music and angelic chorus behind it.
Yeah, they have whole audio Bibles like that, right?
You know what he's bugging me about Christian radio is how like upbeat the DJs are all the time.
They're just super positive.
Hey, man, this is going, everybody.
You want some depressed negative, discouraging.
Welcome to KJ Fly.
I don't know what the name of him.
KJ Fly.
KJ Jesus is fly.
Well, there's KJ52.
He's the rapper.
K-Light is the radio station where I grew up.
K-Light?
L-I-T-E?
Like light soda.
No, I can't remember what the actual address of it was, but they called it K-Light.
Like, you know, light, shiny stuff.
Do radio stations have addresses?
You know, like it's K-Y-O-P-P-R.
Oh, the call sign or is that what it's called?
The call sign?
Call, yeah, whatever you call it.
Something like that.
So what have you been up to this week?
Kyle?
Thanks for asking, Ethan.
Well, I had the wonderful experience.
My brother's having a baby, actually adopting a baby.
And so we did a wonderful experience of experiencing your brother have a baby.
Well, no, no.
Can you track with me?
Sorry.
You take a lot of weird pauses.
So, well, the pauses are because you keep interrupting me.
So my brother is adopting a baby, so we did like a...
Adopting.
We did like a lot.
Well, I said having, and then I changed it to a.
Okay.
So we did like a last hurrah for him and we took him out and we went to axe throwing, which is pretty much what it sounds like.
Hey, you throw axes.
And so I just love that in this economy, like all these businesses are opening and people just have these ideas like axe throwing.
They just take two terms and slap them together and they make a business out of it.
And it's like, it's crazy to me.
I know all these places are going to go out of business when the economy goes down.
Like there's a recession.
It's like there's no way axe throwing is going to stick around.
I'm waiting for that to hit the entertainment industry because, yeah, you're right.
Like there's weird stuff like that.
The entertainment industry, like movies and stuff, it's still all remakes and stuff like that.
And you feel like they feel like there's just so much bloat that's going to get hacked away.
Yeah.
But yeah, so it's kind of amazing.
It's like you walk in this place.
I was wearing sandals, which isn't very smart for throwing sharp objects.
It does seem dangerous.
But I walk in and they're just like, you guys want to throw axes?
You know, it's like this warehouse.
It's like just imagine they're all like lumber sexual kind of guys.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Is that an okay tour?
I'm going to say lumber sensual.
Sensual.
And yeah, and they just say, oh, you want to throw axes?
You're like, sure.
And they're like, here's some axes.
It's like, I walked into the axe throwing place.
And they, you know, you sign away your toes and your, you know, your life.
And they hand you axes and then they just walk you over and they're like, here's your target.
And then he like throws it once.
This is how you throw it.
All right, guys, have fun.
You know, and it's like, I was amazed at how quickly they trusted me with an axe.
But how did you keep score or anything?
Yeah, they have a bunch of games.
It's kind of like throwing darts.
You know, they have different around the world and all the different little games.
So, but you know, it's definitely something where you kind of feel like you're manly and you're getting in touch with your masculine side.
But really, you're just throwing an axe.
I chopped wood in my childhood, so I got all my manliness out chopping actual wood for our house that was heated by a wood stove.
So you never want to see another axe as long as you live.
I do kind of miss it sometimes.
It felt really good, like chopping it.
I remember my dad would let us chop wood when we went camping or whatever.
You know, he gave us all the axe safety rules, and then we'd set the log on there and give it a good yeah.
Like literally every Saturday I had these three big shelves I'd like fill with chopped wood.
So I don't appear as manly as I perhaps actually am.
You do I'm a lumberjack.
Appear as manly.
I earned this beard.
Anyway, I don't have an exciting story except for this one.
I woke up this morning to my wife saying, Did you check to make sure that the back door was locked last night?
And I went, I don't always do that because it's like kind of this weird, it's not really a back porch, but the next door is locked, so they could steal our kids' toys if they wanted to, whatever.
But any people listening, you want to steal our kids' toys.
We buy garbage for our children.
Hopefully, your neighbors aren't listening.
Yeah.
But so if I had gone out there last night to lock that door, I would have noticed that our two-year-old had gone back there.
He's obsessed with turning our hose on because it runs to the alligator pool that we have back there.
It's an inflatable pool.
He had turned it on sometime probably in the afternoon yesterday.
And that thing had been on full blast all night.
And the backyard was a swamp.
Oh, my.
And the water's going into our playroom.
Like, the carpet is wet.
So, yeah, that was cool.
Wow.
Well, could have been worse, but yeah, it was pretty bad.
Bros before hose.
Wait, what?
You can't say that.
Like, no, a hose.
At least you can say this.
Where's your mind?
H-O-S-E.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, on that note, that's a perfect segue into stories of the week.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
John Bolton waves goodbye, returns to the sea to be Walrus again.
Ethan, give us your walrus sound.
I don't know.
It's like a pig.
I never heard him.
It was like sea pigs.
The pigs of this sea.
I imagine it's like a seal with a lot of bass.
I don't know.
Well, so Ethan, so John Bolton retired or got kicked out or resigned or something.
And we ran a piece saying that he was moving from the U.S. to the Galactic Empire to oversee like the Death Star and all.
Yeah, so I have to make a point, right?
I'm like, oh, yeah, this warmonger guy.
Ah, you know, and that's.
I know nothing about him, so my headline's coming from.
So Ethan's like, oh, he looks like a walrus.
That's all I know.
He looks like a walrus.
So he writes this, and I go, you know what, Ethan?
Fine.
You can write this article.
Yeah, it was not.
Like, usually, if you're an enthusiast with an article, it's yes.
I'm a millennial, so I say, yeah, slay queen.
And you, yeah, and so I'm like, fine, go ahead.
So he writes this whole article, does this whole Photoshop of these walruses and Boltons swimming around?
And I'm like, and I throw it up like the last article of the day or something, and I go, I doubted it too.
I was like, oh, this is so stupid.
I was like, you know, Ethan's a funny guy.
This is a funny article.
But it's just going to be a little, oh, haha.
Yeah, I thought a couple hundred shares.
I thought he was like the top shared article of the day.
I couldn't even believe it.
So walrus humor's in.
Bye, bye, bye.
It's classic.
Just the Wilfrid Brimley Walrus mustache.
I think there's something to be said.
You know, a piece that just makes everybody chill out a bit.
Yeah, that doesn't take Frank.
Frank says this: that, and he'll listen to this now that he's going to be mentioned.
But that he, you know, that's his favorite kind of political humor.
He doesn't take a side.
It's just stupid.
I know that's the exact words he uses, but yeah, yeah.
It's just dumb.
It's not like, oh, hey, I have all these opinions about this guy.
Yeah, I think if you have too many opinions, you care too much, then it's just dumb.
It gets harder to be funny.
Yeah, it gets harder to be funny.
I mean, sometimes you can't.
Yeah, humor comes from passion too.
It depends.
But like, I don't care.
Hey, this guy looks like a walrus everybody.
I like how obnoxious we are.
All these people are really concerned about the national security of the nation.
What does this mean for our national security?
Hey, guys, this guy looks like a walrus.
I think it was the visual of him kind of strolling gently towards the sea as he has a tear in his eye and waves goodbye to everybody.
Like, well, my work here in America is done.
Back I go when he like kind of sails off.
You just see his head.
He has the and then the walruses pop up.
Yeah.
He's responding to the call of the sea on his life.
Yeah.
You know, one thing I liked about when Bolton got fired is all of a sudden he was like the hero of the liberals.
Like all these liberals were doing like, it's a dangerous sign that for our national security, but they all hated him when he got when he came on the Trump administration.
They're like, oh, this guy's a warmonger.
I don't know about anything about that.
I just know that he looks like a walrus.
So I'm going to continue making smart, well-informed points.
You'd be the nuanced one.
It's like our writer's room were all sitting around.
Well, here's all the interesting points about Bolton.
And then Ethan's, hey, you know, it looks like a walrus.
All right.
Well, we've milked that topic to death just like just like you milk a walrus.
Yes.
New version of Monopoly for Christian women as you recruit all the other players into a pyramid scheme.
Are you making fun of essential oils, Kyle?
Again.
Gosh.
Sad.
It's really mean.
Not good.
These are legitimate jobs that women in the church have.
My original idea for this was to have the because there's actually a Ms. Monopoly.
Based on a real Ms. Monopoly is like not Mrs. It's Ms. Monopoly.
And the whole deal is that women get paid more than men in this version.
So they get $240 when they pass Go instead of $200.
It's like now women can enjoy all the privileges that men have.
Is that what we get?
We get an extra $40.
Well, that's the funny thing.
Wasn't the original Monopoly just $200 for everybody when you pass Go?
I've never played Monopoly.
What?
Yeah.
Is that crazy?
Are you serious?
Yeah.
Somehow I've somehow avoided it my entire life.
It's not a very good game, but it's not as bad as people make out.
Bad people say it are bad.
Well, okay, so.
That was a bad sentence.
People say it are bad.
It looks like a walrus.
Yeah.
Okay, so in nerdy board game culture, Monopoly is considered to be a bad game because it takes a long time and you roll dice and it's all luck based.
But family, you know, that's like, it's like, it's like one of the top selling games ever because families love it.
Gotcha.
But I don't know if anybody actually likes it.
It's just like, well, we've got Monopoly, you know, and it's the game everybody has.
So anyway, my original idea for this joke was to say, did I say jerk?
Yark.
This is a quality podcast.
I think this episode is going very well.
Very well.
My original idea for this joke was to say that the female version of Monopoly is that they get lost.
You know, well, they go around the board.
They can't find their way.
I don't know.
Women are bad drivers or something.
Is that the stereotype?
I guess they can't follow.
The total opposite in my relationship.
My wife.
I have a horrible sense of direction.
My wife has no sense of direction.
She's okay at following the navigation app, though.
She's good at that.
That's a compliment.
Well, some people can't even do that.
I hate having it on, like the voice going.
Do you do the voice?
Or like every time?
I turn off the voice.
Yeah, she hates the voice.
It drives her crazy because I turn off the voice and I just, if I'm sitting next to her, like, I'll just read her, you're going to get off in this exit.
And she doesn't like that.
She's like, just leave the voice on.
I'll follow the voice.
I hate the voices.
I'm trying to listen to a podcast or a TV show or not a TV show, but like a TV show on the road.
Trying to listen to music and constantly like, up here, you will turn right on Johnson Boulevard.
Turn right.
Anyway.
Yeah.
But yeah, my sense of direction, like I have to sit, I'm not going to know my way around an area unless I don't, like, I have to sit at home and look at a map of the area and get like an imprint of it in my head and get ideas about like where like, yeah, I have to create an image in my head of that place that sticks with me.
And that's not common for me to do.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So.
Yeah, I like looking at a map and seeing like I know all the general cross streets in an area where this thing is.
I have to be like, that looks kind of like an armadillo, that area.
It looks like a walrus.
And then I can tell myself later, I'll be like, oh, I'm up near the armadillo's ear right now.
And I know if I go south, I'm towards its feet.
Like, that helps me.
I have to be visual.
You should release a navigation app that does this.
Turn left at the armadillo's tail.
Yeah.
All right, moving on.
Have you insulted women enough, Kyle?
I don't know.
We didn't really insult their pyramid schemes very much here.
Yeah, the actual pyramid schemes.
I don't know.
I like the idea of everybody trying to recruit everybody else until all the women in a church are everybody's under somebody else's pyramid scheme.
So everyone's at the top of a pyramid and everyone's also at the bottom of a pyramid.
Yeah, I don't know much about board games, so I don't know how it would work.
Well, no, I mean, not necessarily board games, but just in real life, like this happens.
Yeah.
No, there's a lot of people in my family that do these like essential oils, handbags, like all these.
So I assume if anyone listens, then they'll be heartbroken if they hear this portion.
So I'm trying to get through it.
Well, multi-level marketing reps, send us your best pitches and see if we want to join your MLM.
Please don't, but you can.
Yes.
More e-cigs being disguised as AR-15s to avoid ban.
That's crazy.
I get it.
Because AR-15s, nobody wants to ban those for some reason.
Because they're just like other rifles, but people are scared of them because they're scary looking.
Yeah.
This is one of those jokes I can't look too closely at.
If you don't look, it's like the sun.
You don't look directly into it.
It was just funny to me, the image of an ATF guy coming up and being like, hey, is that an e-cig?
And you go, oh, no.
It's an AR-15.
They are 15.
And you fire it off at the range.
He's like, oh, okay.
You're good.
And then you take a puff.
But it's also just the randomness of what the government decides is worthy of a ban.
Like three or four people might have died maybe because of e-cigs, possibly.
Yeah, I was reading one of those stories.
I was just curious to get into the details of it.
What determined that it killed him?
And the one that I read, it was like a much older, like he's really old, an older guy, and like he had heart issues and stuff.
So I'm not getting, I'm like a journalist here, but I was just like, well, this doesn't sound as cut and dry as a 13-year-old that took a puff and then passed, like just died right that one spot.
And then the other weird thing is that they're all talking about flavors.
Right.
None of the stories I've read have anything to do with flavors.
It has to do with this THC.
They're doing like weed vaping.
So it's bizarre that they're.
It's like a you get some bad news.
So like it's like, oh, I could use this to like get on board with this.
There's like this huge movement to get rid of flavored vaping because they think it's like appealing to children.
So it seems like they've kind of like latched onto that.
Yeah.
It's kind of unicorn Cheerio vape.
All these like really childish names.
Birthday cake swirl.
Yeah.
Periwinkle peach.
I don't know.
I uh yeah.
Hold on.
Hold on.
I was trying to think of more funny vape.
Oh, flavor dance.
My uh no, no, I was marshmallow graham cracker.
I was gonna say every time there's like a shooting, that's what it always is with the gun parts.
It's like, well, let's roll the dice and see what gun part we're gonna ban, you know, that we're gonna pin this on.
No, it really does work is like, because both, both of the issues, like the like the obsession with the flavors has nothing to do with the issue.
And the obsession with the AR-15 has basically nothing to do with the issue.
It's this distraction.
How many people die from tobacco every year?
I don't know.
I'm always dubious of the numbers on that because how do they determine that?
I'm not sure.
I'm going to Google it.
Okay.
Hey, producer.
Hey, producer guy over there.
Can you Google this?
One of those guys that are a little assistant guy, they always look stuff up while we're talking.
So the CDC says 480,000 cigarette deaths per year.
Seems like a lot.
That seems like that many people die every year.
You'd know a couple.
That's true.
So you're saying this is a false flag?
I don't know.
It was just weird to me.
Next week, Ethan will be interviewing Alex Jones, his good buddy.
Not that I don't believe that cigarettes are bad for him.
Let's say that.
Where did he get that number?
I get that.
But let's say they're off by half and it's only 200,000 or something.
Yeah, compared to what, six?
Compared to like three or four from e-cigs.
Just the random ban, man.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know.
What about cigars?
How many deaths are cigars responsible for, Ethan?
No idea.
I choose not to look.
Ignorance is bliss.
And sometimes death.
All right.
So this week we are doing an interview with very distinguished guests.
Peter Bogosian, professor, straight out of academia, and James Lindsay, his friend.
You guys may have heard of these guys.
They were in the news a while back.
They did these bogus academic papers that went to these journals and they actually made it through, but they were completely a hoax and kind of exposed the way that some of these journals work when it comes to like social justice and all that kind of stuff.
So, anyway, they have a book coming out about having conversations, having impossible conversations.
So, we want to have them on to talk about that.
These guys are straight up academic, brainy, liberal, atheist guys, but they hated what was happening in academia.
And so that's why they got into what they're doing.
Let's do it.
You ready, Kyle?
I'm ready.
Buckle your safety belts.
Presenting an exclusive Babylon B interview.
All right.
And here we are with Peter Bogozian and James Lindsay.
These guys are liberal atheists who own the libs.
That's like the right way to put it.
They did these grievance study papers.
And I feel like you guys would be better at explaining it than I am.
But welcome to the Babylon B podcast.
Well, thanks a lot.
Appreciate you guys having us very much so.
Yeah, absolutely glad to be here.
Yeah, so why don't you tell us a little bit about these papers that you guys submitted and they got accepted in like peer-reviewed journals and they were like totally made up.
So we'd love to hear a little bit about that.
Yeah, just kind of the nutshell version.
I know you guys have talked about this a ton, but just as an introduction to our audience that haven't heard this story, it's so fascinating.
Sure, Jim, go for it.
All right.
So starting in the summer of 2017, Peter and I set off on a mission to write as many bogus academic papers as we could, mostly in gender studies, but in other fields that are related, ethnic studies, race studies, queer theory, post-colonial stuff.
It just goes on and on.
Feminist geography, as a matter of fact, feminist theory, and you can just keep going.
And so we started trying to write these papers.
We recruited a third member pretty quickly, Helen Pluckrose, who is the commissioning editor at Ariel Magazine.
And we started cranking these things out.
We sought to write as many of them as we could, initially planning to write for a year and then ended up having to cut it off after 10 months of writing because we were running out of time.
We ended up writing 20 papers that covered just, I mean, what we did was we started with the conclusion and then worked backwards and just wrote the most crazy stuff into every paper that we could.
Either something really funny, like examining dog genitals to understand rape culture better, or stuff that was just like horrifying, like putting white kids in chains as an educational opportunity so they could experience oppression in the back of the classroom.
Yeah, I read that you guys examined like tens of thousands of dog genitals.
Well, we said we did anyway.
I personally examined no dog genitals.
I can't speak for Peter.
As I like to say, I am not my Peter's keeper.
So, yeah, well, we wrote these and we submitted them to mostly highly ranked, but not all highly ranked, academic journals that involved the peer review process, including the leading feminist philosophy journal, including a big interdisciplinary journal called Sex Roles that studies sex roles.
And so sounds like a very strange Danish job.
Hypatia is the name of that journal.
Yeah, the biggest feminist journal.
And that was also the journal, if many of your listeners may be familiar.
There was another scandal at Hypatia.
And basically, it boiled down to one's moral mind overriding one's rational mind.
But that's another conversation about Rebecca Tuval.
If someone could identify as a different race, why couldn't they identify as a different gender?
All right, Jim, go for it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we submitted 20 of these papers over the course of a little over a year.
We wrote them for about 10 months, like I said, and across a slew of journals, including sociology of sport journals and I mean, all kinds of stuff.
And in the end, by the time we ended up being dragged into the public by the Wall Street Journal, figuring out what we were doing, we had had seven of those papers accepted and four of those got published.
The one about dog genitals was given an honor for excellence in scholarship by his journal.
And then we had seven more that were still under consideration, and five of those had received positive feedback to the point where it was very likely we would have been able to get them in with a few more months of work.
So did you guys from the journals?
Did you guys out yourselves, or you said the Wall Street Journal?
Well, it's kind of a mixed story.
It was a, we'll say it was a collaboration.
No, it wasn't.
The Wall Street Journal started sniffing around enough to where we realized that if we wanted to be able to tell the story on our terms without, say, the journals, the academic journals piecing together what was going on, that we had to go public sooner rather than later.
So when the Wall Street Journal started asking us questions, we decided to offer them the true story and let them break it.
In essence, what had happened was the Wall Street Journal doing its journalistic due diligence started contacting the academic journals that they were suspicious about and they started their own internal investigations into what was going on.
And so it was at that point a race against the clock to see whether the academic journals or us would be able to tell the story on our terms first.
So we decided to give the story to the Wall Street Journal and get that thing out there.
Did you guys have like a big reveal planned that got ruined?
Like Peter was going to have like a big hologram of his head appear above like some big university, like hello, owned, smoke.
It wasn't rising.
It wasn't quite that cool.
No, we did actually have a massive plan.
We're working, we have a documentary filmmaker who got interested in tracking the project with us and make he's Mike Nena is his name, and he's finishing a feature-length documentary about what we did with the Grievance Studies Affair now.
He lives in Melbourne, so he's in Australia right now, sleeping probably, but doing that when he's not asleep.
And so he was trying to help us solve the communications issue around this.
So we had planned a number of written exposés, and he was putting together a number of videos that would articulate what we did and what the papers were and why they were significant and kind of the culture male around us that makes them relevant rather than it just looking like some weird academic joke, which is kind of what ended up people picking up off of it.
We think it's indicative of a bigger problem that's a lot more, if you will, systemic.
We were not as successful because we had in communicating that because we had a seven-month plan to devise our communications that got condensed into three weeks.
Yeah, so it was a tremendous amount of work.
I cannot even stress life devastating when we got prematurely exposed.
And I really want to stress to you how utterly bat crazy these papers were.
And you can bleep all that out.
It'll be beeped.
And I so, but I don't want anybody to take my word for it.
I don't want anybody to take Jim's word for it or your word for it.
They can read these papers themselves.
They're all published on a Google Drive.
We'll give you.
And the fact that the reviewers gushed praise about utterly inane ideas.
And not only were they inane, they were morally reprehensible.
And the papers themselves were intentionally broken.
And they thought this was a great idea.
And so Jim's correct.
The larger point here is that there is a sickness within academia.
There is a kind of corruption.
And unless it corrects itself when we were trying to nudge it at the very least, maybe even shove it into self-correction, then confidence in our universities will continue to be eroded.
And I'm deeply concerned about the consequences of that.
I mean, already, if you look at the statistics, the polls.
The vast majority of conservatives don't trust what happens inside the university system.
And much of that, I would argue, is due to the fact that conservative and moderate and now liberal voices are being culled from the system.
Right.
And then you keep seeing things like what's happening.
Thankfully, I'm in the midst of black despair right now.
You've caught me on a great day.
Because occasionally some of this stuff that's coming through the social justice and scholarship and its level of infection within academia and beyond really gets to me.
And today, yesterday, actually, I should say, I found out that the Journal of the American Medical Association is making a commitment to social justice and in fact was talking on Twitter about creating social justice activist physicians as opposed to scientist physicians.
And that's a little concerning.
But then I see that yesterday and I'm a little upset.
The New England Journal of Medicine did that not that long ago.
And then today I run into the Lancet and Cell are both signing on to this and Nature's giving a slap on the back.
So you're talking the four biggest medical journals in the world, plus the biggest science journal in the world, are all kind of rallying around the stuff we exposed by showing that they'll publish stuff like dog genitals as an indicator of rape culture.
So it's really a very concerning issue.
You know, Peter's talking about trying to expose that there's this problem that's rife throughout the academy and it undercuts confidence, but it's really leaking into kind of everything.
If it's going to be the, you know, lingua franca of the four top medical journals, how long is it until it's the main thing at medical schools?
And how long after that until it's medical practice?
I mean, is that weird for journals to have like a stated agenda?
Like, is that normal?
So they usually have what are called aims and scope, and they would have an agenda.
So in a sense, so for example, the, you know, Journal of Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, for example, should probably have something along the lines of the agenda of publishing the most accurate and useful medical research that's available today.
Possibly, you know, combining that with the agenda of, if they get into teaching theory or whatever at all, covering how to create the best doctors for the 21st century or to work around current technology or whatever.
And then, you know, there's even a, there's an argument to be made that says, okay, well, some issues of social justice are relevant to public health.
So there should be some of that.
But the question becomes how much?
And it's really concerning because everywhere we've seen this introduced, it comes in with this smiling face like that and says, you know, well, public health has different variables that are related to social justice concerns and racism and blah, blah, blah.
And so we need to bring this in and make it a thing and climate change and so on.
And there are the different points they're raising.
And you say, okay.
And then the thing inside the box that they're actually unleashing into your system is not that picture that's on the outside of the box.
It is, it's kind of, it's kind of like that old movie Gremlins, where, you know, you buy the cute little fuzzy magawai guy and somehow it decides to have a piece of pizza at 12.05 a.m.
And the next thing you know, it's just like, you know, mayhem.
And then, you know, they're spraying each other with the hose and there's 5,000 of them everywhere.
And they're working into every, I mean, it's really very, it's a good analogy.
It's like gremlins.
You buy the nice little cute thing and it's, you know, don't feed it after midnight and don't get it wet.
And then, you know, it's both of those things are happening once it gets in.
Did you come up with that on the spot?
Or is that something like you woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down, gremlins, that's it?
I think about it sometimes, but I did come up with it, I think, kind of on my own, but not today.
Oh, bummer.
Yeah, and we also want to stress that this is in knitting clubs.
It's in, I don't know if you guys play Dungeons and Dragons.
I do it too.
Dungeons and Dragons.
It's in virtually every realm of life.
It's infected and prosthetized virtually.
If it can get into that, it can get into anything.
The fifth edition, Dungeons and Dragons, has specific rules on your gender identity.
But if you're a male character, you have to have low charisma.
No, I'm just saying.
It tells you to think about how your gender is perceived by other characters in your game world and all this stuff, which is wild because it's a game where you can just imagine anything.
So it's like you could already do that.
You didn't need a specific paragraph for it.
I'm up to getting 30 or 40, sometimes 50 messages a day between my email and my Twitter DMs primarily of people telling me about how this is in their walk of life.
So I've been in the last couple of days, there's been a lot of physicians and nurses contacting me talking about how it's working into medical schools and how it's working into the hospital environment.
I had a guy that does fantasy novels and Dungeons and Dragons stuff contacted me today.
I had rock climbing yesterday.
Knitting was exposed on Quillette, and I've talked to that woman several times that brought that to public light.
Hiking clubs, Buddhism, the American Zen Buddhist Association or something like that.
I mean, it's just, it's pretty much everything.
Personal finance.
So you start looking into the corporate world, law, you start looking into the legal world, education, education.
I can't tell you how many people, desperate parents and concerned others, that send me messages about what's going on in the school systems and how this is taking over their kids' education K through 12.
They're sending kids off to kindergarten and they're coming back and like calling their parents racists and stuff.
So I was wondering, just as a perspective on this, because I think that there's a lot of people who think they hear this and they go, and I also want to get, because we're having a Zonka have a book coming out.
So I do want to kind of morph towards that topic.
But why is it bad?
Like when you hear the idea that social justice is being inserted into all this stuff, well, isn't that good?
It's social justice.
It's even better than normal justice.
It has justice right in the word.
Yeah.
So like, why is everybody upset about this?
Like, it should be in everything.
It should be in Jell-O commercials and it should be in your toothpaste and it should be in everything you do.
Yes, it should, right?
So this is really the thing.
The ideology driving social justice as the activism goes right now and the scholarship is, first of all, as we try to endeavor with the papers that we wrote, not rooted in science.
A lot of people think, oh, well, this is basically race research or gender research and it's kind of science, but it's not.
We made up crap about dog genitals.
It's actually not.
It is theory that is based actually in literary theory.
And they used postmodern mindset to expand the definition of literature text to be pretty much anything.
And then they analyze it using literary theory techniques by looking for problems and exaggerating the scope of problems and trying to.
This is going to sound absolutely crazy, but this is the thing.
The goal of social justice is not actually to increase justice in society.
It is to create a societal revolution that throws off the old paradigm with that science, be that evidence-based reasoning, whether it be using reason and logic, whether it be the capitalist system of economics, whether it be the liberal democratic order and our legal system and our political system.
It is actually an agenda to stick social justice activism as it's carried out, not to stick the idea of social justice of making society more fair.
That's the picture on the box.
That's a little Magwai.
And then the gremlin, the thing inside the box, is actually to take exactly all of this divisive, angry activism that makes everything about race, everything about gender, everything a gigantic fight, everybody problematic, everybody a racist, and to insert that ideology into every institution it can get into.
And it sounds tinfoil hat.
And people say, well, why would you think that?
And it's because I read their literature and they write it in almost every paper they write, that that's their goal is to create, is to dismantle the existing social system and replace it with one that's adhering to social justice ideology.
It's not a secret.
They're very open about what they want to do.
It's on almost every page of half of the books that they write.
It's insane how openly this is discussed.
The goal, I mean, think about some of the words that you're likely to have heard associated with social justice activism.
Dismantle, subvert, remake, re-educate.
They're using these terms because that's actually, you know, I keep saying this on Twitter.
It's very frustrating.
When somebody tells you what they're about over and over and over and over and over again in plain language, you might actually want to listen to them.
All I ever hear from people with this is, yeah, they can't really mean that, though.
Like where this education book I have, is everyone really equal is the title of the book written by Senzoy and Robin D'Angelo.
So I have this book and I'm looking through it and it actually has this little box inside, you know, set aside on one of the pages, you know, those special extra information boxes.
And it talks about how individual people are not individuals.
They're actually just made up of the various group identities that they're made out of.
So group identity becomes the only thing.
So if you're concerned about, you know, the whole debate between individuality and collective identity, they're openly all about collective identity.
So you say, why?
And then you go read Mapping the Margins, which was written by Kimberly Crenshaw, which is sort of the most decisive academic paper.
It's where intersectionality got its legs.
It's not where it was defined.
That was also Kimberly Crenshaw two years earlier, but it's really where it got its legs.
And in that paper, she explicitly says we're going to do this for the purpose of pushing identity politics.
So if you think that identity politics are actually helping things, you might think that this is a good idea.
But if you can see how just viciously divisive it is and how it makes people unable to relate to one another and how it seems to be tearing everything apart and fighting over, you know, identity-based status and identity-based privilege, then you may be kind of cottoning on to why this isn't necessarily the good thing that it looks like it is when it says, oh, we're just concerned about fairness and making a more just society.
I think that's a good segue into talking about the book that you guys have coming out because I think that one thing it makes it very hard to do is to have any kind of conversation about anything outside of a very specific set of preconceived ideas that you have to agree with.
The moment you give off that you don't agree with these ideas, you're immediately bad.
Exactly.
So I'd love to talk about that.
Like what inspired the book?
I mean, it seems like you guys have done a lot.
And just we were talking about it before we came on.
Like it's fascinating.
Here we are.
You guys are two atheists.
You're politically liberal.
And, you know, we're talking and you've been all over conservative media.
I mean, I was looking you guys up on everything.
I was just fascinated when this story came out.
You were on, you know, on Joe Rogan and on Bridget's podcast and all over the place.
So yeah, let's talk about the genesis of that book.
It'll be out when this podcast airs.
I do think that there's a realignment going on now.
And that realignment, there's a fault line and there are schisms within traditional groups and organizations and even thought communities.
And I think the fault line in that is in social justice with a capital uppercase S and uppercase J.
So you see a realignment between traditional or traditionally religious folks, particularly those folks who have more strict or fundamentalist interpretations of scripture in which they don't think an additional hermeneutic or a lens to interpret biblical texts is necessary.
For example, they don't think you need intersectionality to interpret the gospel.
And so you see a realignment between those folks and correspondent theory of truth atheists like Jim and I, or I'll just speak for myself, like myself.
And on the other side of that divide, you see social justice Christians and social justice atheists who have aligned under the banner of social justice.
So this is a very complex social and cultural phenomenon that's bleeding into and even fueling a large part of the culture war.
So one of the reasons we wrote this book was because in the ashes of social justice, we need to build something up.
And that thing that we need to build up is we need to teach ourselves how to recommunicate with each other because those traditional methods of or even modalities of someone giving a talk, someone giving a rebuttal, very traditional that we've adhered to for I don't even know how long, those have broken down under this new social order.
And now you see disinvitations, yelling, bullhorns, with students increasingly fragile, not having heard the other side of the issue.
And one of the impetus and impetus for this book was that we need to start speaking to each other across divides.
People don't, not only do they not know how to do it, but they've actually seen the exact opposite modeling behaviors.
Yeah, it's really kind of interesting.
I feel like, you know, we talk about the culture war, but Pete's often phrased this as this is culture war 2.0.
And we've come out of Culture War 1.0.
As everybody, you know, who's older than maybe 30 that's listening will certainly realize and many younger than that as well.
This isn't the first vestige of the culture war.
It was clearly raging pretty hot, you know, even in 2007, 2008, 2009, before social justice or even political correctness were that high on the radar.
Of course, political correctness had its heyday in the 90s also, and then kind of got, you know, it kind of went out of fashion and then it seems to have made a massive comeback.
But there was this other culture war, I think, and we certainly would be guilty of having participated in that, the so-called, you know, atheist versus faith culture war is one way you could characterize it, or you could see it as the growing animosity between Democrats and Republicans, a conservative and I don't know, I don't want to say liberal because liberal means something slightly bigger than this divide.
And so we coming out of Culture War 1.0, you know, as Pete might phrase it, we saw a difficulty.
So as, you know, like the elephant in the room, if you would, for our conversation is, oh, you guys are liberal atheists and we're conservative Christians.
And so obviously that's some kind of a problem.
But that's an assumption of Culture War 1.0.
And part of the hangover of Culture War 1.0 is that we forgot how to talk to each other and make friends across difference.
We started drawing lines in the sand and backing away.
So, you know, the right would draw a line somewhere, you know, in right wing land and then back 10 steps away from it.
And anything to the left of that line is no good.
And the left did the same thing.
Anything to the right of that line would be no good.
And they stopped talking to each other.
You can see it in the polarization of Congress, for example, where people, all the political capital in crossing the aisle and speaking to people on the so-called other side as if there's not a bigger side called America that we're all together in on.
There's no political capital in crossing the aisle.
And we lost social capital in crossing the aisle in our day-to-day lives.
And so, you know, I used to go to, you know, parties or hanging out with my friends or whatever.
And it'd be this kind of weird mix of, you know, Republican type people and conservatives and liberals and Democrats and progressives.
And, you know, we just kind of didn't talk a lot about politics.
And there's always that like awkward conversation that would come up here and there.
And everybody would kind of, why did that happen?
And now it's, I go to parties and it's like, I either go to a conservative party or I go to a liberal party and everybody has the same views.
And everybody talks about how somehow this is better because you can talk freely, but you actually can't relate with people who you don't already agree with.
And so Peter and I saw this coming out of Culture War 1.0 as Culture War 2.0 is really starting to flare up.
And we thought, man, part of the reason is we can't talk across divides because for the last 10 years, we've been making it harder and harder to do that.
We've got to start talking across divides, making friends with people who don't have the same views as us, trying to find common ground with people.
And then if we can help change each other's minds or find more truth or whatever other goals we have in discussing across a difference, fine.
But first, let's start being friends.
Let's start hearing each other.
Let's start listening to each other again.
Which parties are more fun?
The Republican parties or the Democrat parties?
Which one's more messed up?
Which ones are more fun?
No, which one has more fun?
Like you said, you go to a Republican party, you're shooting beer cans.
Honestly, it depends on your definition of fun, not to be weird.
But the liberal parties I go to, people tend to drink a lot more and really let loose and carry on.
But everybody's kind of got this weird like hipster Seinfeld pretentiousness where they're kind of slightly better than everybody else.
And then the conservative parties, you have none of that.
So everybody's relating to each other really well.
But the overall vibe is just kind of like, it's a little stuck in the mud, I gotta say.
So I'm not gonna say one size better.
I mean, libertarian parties tend to just blow out everything.
Everybody's naked, doing pot, doing marijuana.
Exactly.
You know, shooting guns into the air like wild animals.
I mean, screaming at the moon.
I mean, it's just insane.
No, I don't know in terms of libertarian parties.
Most of my friends are libertarians, but they mostly go to dive bars as far as I know.
Well, we're going to, we are going to be bringing you guys on for the subscriber portion.
We're going to get a little more into those papers and some of the funny stories behind that and the kind of the bizarre stuff you got into.
But I would like to, did you have something you want to say?
I was going to ask.
Maybe you're saying it now, but did we say the name of their book?
Yeah, the name of the book is How to Have Impossible Conversations.
Is that correct?
Yes.
How to have Impossible Conversations.
And it's out.
You can get it on Amazon or Bondra Noble.
It's out September 17th.
And we would appreciate not only buying the book, but most importantly, using the book in your daily interactions.
Yes, I asked, before we close out of this portion of the show, do you guys have any hot tips you want to preview on conversations?
I think one thing that I found interesting when I started talking to atheists, just a quick little note on my own little journey, when I, you know, as a Christian, I hit this point where I started doubting everything.
And I realized there was all these questions I had never asked myself.
So I wrote out every question I could think of that really challenged my faith in this book.
I just wrote out every single one.
And I decided the best way to confront all these questions was not just to read what Christians say, but I went onto an atheist website.
This was like way back in like early 2000s when forums were really popular.
And I just started debating atheists on this stuff in a friendly way.
And I found that there are so many things I have in common with atheists because there's so many questions that only we think about.
Neither of us convinced each other.
There was a joy in exploring ideas that other people seem to like just kind of look at you like, are you crazy that you even thought of that?
So I was wondering if there's those kinds of things in when you're trying to talk to somebody in social justice land, are there common ideas that we can start from that we both care about?
That kind of thing.
A few things.
I want to put a bookmark on that and just say, just think about how lovely that is.
I mean, just really think about the opportunity to wonder aloud with someone who has different views.
Yeah.
What do you think would happen if you tried that today on social media?
Yeah, dogpile.
That's that's what that's what's sad thing about forums dying out.
It's Twitter is like a forum, but it's everybody and it's this giant room of screaming.
Like I always imagine all internet spaces as like physical rooms and Twitter is like a riot.
Yeah, I think we've we've lost something.
And one of the things that I think is really worth taking note of is: so you have an attitudinal disposition to wonder, to ask, to think, and the people with whom you were speaking also have that attitudinal disposition, and they act upon that, right?
They actually talk to you.
There's something fundamentally good about that.
There's something civilized about that.
Even if one of those parties starts with what they think is absolute knowledge and they just have the pretense to wonder, there's still an open communication, a talking to each other, a discourse, a dialogue to a certain extent, maybe more or less listening.
But there's something good that needs to be preserved about that.
That's a kind of cohesive glue that keeps us together.
And so you can see people across divides as people and not just as existential enemies or threats or bad people or what have you.
And so Jim and I would really like to try to reclaim some of that, even if those, you know, it's really, I mean, how important is it really that those conversations end in agreement, but that they end in mutual understanding?
Yeah.
So if we, that's a philosopher Jürgen Habermas's idea.
And there are techniques, specific things you can do to get there.
One thing is, and again, every there are 36 techniques in the book.
Every single one of these, they work okay when they're on their own at best, but when they're, there's an incredible synthesis when you bring in two techniques, three techniques, four techniques, you know, listen, Loy Rap Reports rules.
There are things from Haas's negotiations and cult exiting and the Socratic method and applied epistemology and all of this stuff when it works in concert with the one technique piggybacking off of another another technique, those conversations are profoundly fulfilling and enriching for the people that the people who choose to have them.
So, you know, listening, if you want to be listened to, you need to listen to first using little things like conversation extenders or acknowledging you're listening to someone, not criticizing until you've repeated back the idea to someone to make sure you have it right.
That's called Rap Reports Rules, and you're looking for the idea where they say that's right.
That's from Haash's negotiations.
So there are all of these techniques that help people understand that you genuinely do want to understand the process by which they come to knowledge.
And so it's a hearkening back, not to a conservative value, but to an ancient value.
And that ancient value is that which was promulgated by Socrates.
And he talks about finding truth, figuring out what's true, what's the best type of life to lead.
And hopefully the book, when folks start reading and applying it, will help people just do just that, which is to live better lives and have more fulfilling relationships.
And I actually truly believe that.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I wasn't listening to anything you just said.
That's good.
Kyle's quicker.
That's why we put a section in the book about calling somebody names when they deserve it.
No, I'm just kidding.
For me, if you want to know, by the way, my favorite, I think the most important things for me in the book were at the very beginning, the first thing we talked about is establishing conversational goals, understanding why you're actually speaking with that person.
So, if you're like I am and you get invited to these parties in both sides of the political spectrum all the time, the goal probably shouldn't be to go assert your politics everywhere you go because it's probably not going to go real well for your life and you're not going to have a lot of friends.
So, sometimes there's other goals like nourishing a relationship, building rapport, becoming friends.
And we have sections dedicated to those ideas.
Listening and learning is probably something that's really important to bear in mind, no matter what.
So, say you're talking one of these social justice people who refuses to have a conversation with you and you run into that.
What do you do?
Well, you can always default, always default to listening and learning.
Just become curious about what they think.
Don't even worry about whether or not you convince them.
Just do everything in your power to understand their perspective and then you can go think about it or whatever.
And a lot of times you'll end up letting them talk themselves into moderating their views or even changing their minds if they run into their own ignorance, which happens a lot.
But to navigate those conversations, I personally think that the most important technique in the book is has the title let friends, and it really should be let people in general, to be honest, be wrong.
If you're focusing on your goals, it is okay.
Like, let's say that you and I decided we're going to have some, you know, epic Christian atheist rap battle right now.
It is okay for us to acknowledge that we don't agree on that.
And from your perspective, you can let me be wrong about being an atheist and I can let you be wrong about being a Christian.
And we can pursue other aspects of conversation or even explore one another's beliefs, whether that's about metaphysics, whether that's about how to be a good person, whether that's about revealed wisdom, whether that's about the value in the wisdom, whether it was revealed or not.
We have lots of different things that we can communicate on.
While setting aside, say, if it's a substantive metaphysical disagreement, we can set that aside and still, for example, discuss the Bible and have no problem having a productive and valuable conversation about what's in there.
And I feel like, you know, that extends to everything, whether it's politics, whether it's religion.
It is actually not only possible, but usually very helpful to just let other people be wrong.
And when you're on social media, you know, you don't actually have to go yell at that guy with the wrong opinion.
You can just see it and then either scroll past or mute that account or unfollow it or whatever it happens to be.
It's absolute madness.
It's madness.
You don't actually have to reply in all caps.
What's that old XKCD comic?
Someone is wrong on the internet.
You guys ever see it?
That's right.
You can't go to bed.
Somebody's wrong on the internet.
So this has been great.
I feel like we could talk for way longer because we're just getting into some really interesting stuff here.
So thank you guys for coming on.
Where can our listeners find you?
And we know the book's on Amazon.
If they want to open their minds and follow some atheist guys on Twitter, let us know where our listeners can find you guys.
They can find me on Twitter.
It's at Peter Bogosian.
That's at P-E-T-E-R-B-O-G-H-O-S-S-I-A-N.
And I'm at conceptual James.
I'm not going to spell that.
And that, my friends, was a conversation that occurred.
That was something that happened.
It did.
On Skype, no less.
Yeah, that was super interesting.
I wonder if in Christian land, if there was like, what's the Christian equivalent of academic journals?
It makes you like wonder if like, yeah, back when they were canonizing scripture, if somebody like submitted some fake books and we're like, just to see if they could tell which ones are real.
And this would be like if they got some like fake book in called like Has It, Has A Good, Has A, Has A Keyo or something.
I'm trying to think of a fake.
The Book Of James is, oh, that's what it is.
Yeah, that's what Luther thought.
Okay yeah, Luther thought James was uh, no good, bogus.
So um yeah, but I yeah, I was wondering if there's some Christian like journal or something we could get.
We could write some Christian satirical hoax piece and get it in there.
There was a great piece someone did once that was relevant.
There was a great piece someone did once um, that was making fun of liberal, um scholarship on the Bible like uh, historical critical theory on the Bible which basically says like um, you know, Paul didn't write any of the Pauline epistles and you know, the Gospels are all fake and all this and the way that they do those things is basically like these two letters sound too different so they can't be Paul, you know.
But then if they're too similar, it's like these two letters are too similar, so someone was copying this other letter.
So it's always, they're always trying to cast doubt on the different letters.
So someone did a satire piece once i'll have to look it up and we can link it.
But it's like on the authorship of Poo, p-o-o-h.
Okay, and it argues.
It argues that um, it sounds some like some deep in the weed theology.
I'm getting humor.
Yeah oh okay, it's called new directions in poo studies.
I just think Poo is funny and he has all this argument that that A Milne didn't really write Winnie The Poo, basically using the same argument, and I bet you could get something like that published.
That was a.
That was.
That pat punchline was really worthwhile.
I'm glad we pursued that.
Uh, i'm glad we pursued that line of thought.
So I like Walrus jokes and Poo jokes.
Let's do our hate mail.
I really miss Adam Forg.
All right, this is actually a twitter reply.
Okay, I really hate reply.
I really appreciated the um cleverness here.
Okay, you know, because people always reply and they go.
You know they say things like to be comedy, you have to be funny, and it's just like, come on like that doesn't, or you guys are garbage and it's just like, okay, good job.
So I really appreciate it.
When there's like some thought that goes into the insult that they sling back at you, I think we can all relate.
So anyway, here's here's.
Here's the reply.
This guy says, oh god, sorry for that, but that's what he said.
But it's lowercase.
Oh god, you guys are bad at this.
The only thing you have in common with the onion is that you make my eyes water in pain.
So I like, tagged the onion.
So he's saying that the actual satirical newspaper makes his eyes water in pain.
Well, I suppose he was talking about the uh, you know what is an onion said legume?
No, it's a.
Uh, it's like a bold.
No, it has.
It has a funny.
Um, you're googling again.
Hold on hold on, hold on hold.
On what vegetable it?
If you search onion, all that comes up root.
If you search onion no no, hold on, if you search, if you search onion, the only thing that comes up is the onion.
What happened to good old fashioned how?
Asked that question like if I was asking.
Well, so it's a vegetable, kind of a thing.
Is an onion, it's a shallot, oh wait, but what are shallots then?
Um, it's a type of onion.
I thought a shallot was a.
Okay, never mind that, that's a type of onion.
Yeah, a shallot is a mixture of an onion and garlic it's, it's one of God's graph, I guess.
An onion is just a?
Uh, it's just a yeah.
What's the category?
It's a bold onion.
We will have our more nerdy uh listeners producer tweeting at us, google onion.
What is an onion?
What is a walrus?
All right well anyway, thanks a lot for that insight.
We we, so we do appreciate you trolls when you're, when you're clever.
Yeah, if you're gonna insult us, do it cleverly, and that's the show.
Kyle yeah, what you?
What do we tell people?
Because we do have more stuff.
We're gonna continue our conversation with Peter and James.
Yeah, not from the Bible, but from atheism.
That is interesting.
They are Peter and James.
Yeah, they're more Biblically named than we are.
Yeah, though my name is in the bible Kyle, it's probably not the book Of Kyle.
I wish I was in the bible Kyle.
So our conversation with them will be picked up.
We, we did get into some of the details of their papers, but we just kind of the conversation really just kind of kept it going.
We got into more.
Actually I, I did feel like some of the stuff we talked about in the subscriber portion was more interesting than we talked about previously, but you'll have to be the judge.
Subscribers, yeah.
So anyway subscribers, thanks for subscribing.
If you haven't subscribed, go to Babylonb.com, slash plans and give us some money and then you can also access the secret exclusive subscriber lounge yeah, and get all the ads taken off the website and all this awesome stuff.
It's so nice.
Just to clarify, there's no actual lounge.
That's just referring to the subscriber segment.
Yeah, it's an audio lounge.
We're gonna get nasty letters saying, where's my lounge?
Why don't I have a lounge?
All right well Kyle yeah, happy week to you.
Happy week to you, sir.
Let's go throw some axes, Let us do it.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dylan for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.