Special Episode: Interview with Jesse Singal on Quick Fix Psychology
Another week and another extra special interview with journalist, podcaster, and Twitter outrage lightning rod, Jesse Singal.We discuss his new book on Quick Fix psychology, the fallout of the replication crisis, and why we should be skeptical of anyone peddling simple 'one size fits all' solutions to complex social & psychological problems.We have a fun wide ranging discussion covering social media dynamics, the dangers of audience capture, and the goddamn lab leak hypothesis! We also discover the dictionary definition pedantism and abuse Jesse with unending uncomfortable questions about culture war controversies.Jesse provides keen insight and is a good sport when it comes to critical topics, we really enjoyed having him on and hope you guys enjoy the result!LinksJesse's new Book: The Quick FixBlocked and Reported PodcastJesse's Singal-Minded Substack
It's the podcast where an anthropologist and a psychologist listen to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try our very best to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Professor Matt Brown, and with me is Associate Professor Chris Kavanagh.
Who are we?
What's our deal?
Well, we're like the odd couple if one of the characters was a grumpy, combative Irishman.
Welcome, Chris.
I'm impressed with your impromptu intro.
I thought you didn't have one ready, so just impressively off the cuff.
Yeah, good morning, Matt.
How's it going?
It's going pretty well.
Now, as you know, sometimes, just sometimes, we have special guests on who are going to help us figure out what is true, beautiful, and real in this crazy, mixed-up world.
And today is one of those days.
Who have we got with us today, Chris?
We have Jesse Singel, author, podcaster, journalist.
Internet hero legend.
I thought you guys were going to say, sometimes we have special guests, sometimes we have average guests, like today.
No, no, no.
All of our guests are very special to us, and also...
I think it's fair to say that you're probably our least controversial guest, Jesse.
You managed to just avoid any of the road bumps on the internet.
So that's refreshing.
That's what I'm known for.
So the other thing is that you have a book which is not new, right?
Well, I guess it's close to new.
It's a couple of months out, The Quick Things, which you...
Kindly shared with us.
And I'm sure Matt dreadfully read everything and has his notes for each chapter ready.
Right, Matt?
I have quite a few notes, actually.
You'll be surprised, Chris.
Well, I think we originally...
I can't even remember if we invited you before you had your book or not.
But with the book, it seems there's a lot of overlap with our interests because we're focusing on...
Online gurus and the online dynamics as well.
And a lot of what you covered in the book, which was really good, by the way, just there.
Thank you.
I'll say, I think your book, Together with Stuart Ritchie's recent book.
Yeah, Science Fictions is great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a really neat encapsulation of, maybe I'd even put it as a capstone.
Is that the phrase?
The replication crisis.
It's a nice accounting of what went on there and where we are now in social sciences and in psychology in particular.
So, yeah, there's a lot that naturally overlaps with the kind of things we talk about.
Matt, I know that you like the book as well, right?
Yeah, I did like the book.
Congrats, Jesse.
I guess one good place to start is just to ask you to, can you sum up the thesis in your own words?
I could do it for you, but I think you could probably do it better.
How would you describe it to someone who hasn't read it?
Yeah, I think it's an examination of why psychologists proffer easy-seeming solutions to complicated problems, and maybe just as importantly, why The media and TED Talks and other scientists disseminate these ideas despite the lack of evidence to support the grand claims underpinning them.
Yeah, and you talk about perhaps some of our natural tendencies towards simple and monocausal explanations for things.
Yeah, I'd say over and over in the book, there'll be some observation about how the world works or how inequality works that...
It usually stems from a grain of truth.
It's just sort of focusing in on this one aspect of the problem at the expense of almost everything else.
I think that's a big part of the problem, and that's why people fall for TED Talkers.
They're good storytellers, and they're simple storytellers.
There's a question I had about that, Jesse, because the conclusion that it's more complicated than that, and there's multiple factors.
That's almost always true, and it's an evergreen I'm completely on board with that as well.
But don't you agree that this might just be my corner of the internet or the academic world, but TED Talks, for example, it feels like there has been a backlash to their kind of glib,
monocausal accounts or overselling solutions that now...
TED Talks are almost equally a source of parody as they are something which CEOs turn to for the next nudge.
Yeah, I think there's something to that, especially among the sorts of people who follow the replication crisis closely.
But I think a lot of people still believe in that stuff.
And in my book, a lot of the chapters are sort of case studies, and I think they range from...
Stuff that is pretty widely accepted as debunked to, in some cases, ideas that are still percolating along strongly but shouldn't be.
So I think there's a range there in terms of how far along these ideas are in their life cycle.
So one of the things I noticed is that, like in broad brushstrokes, a lot of those ideas or schools of work sometimes have some reasonably serious academic foundations.
But then you have like a range of poorer quality, but I guess more accessible and appealing papers in the literature.
And then that in turn can get picked up by popularizers of various kinds.
And these people could range from someone like Jordan Peterson to Robin DiAngelo, I suppose, who then have a big influence on popular culture.
And so one thing that struck me is that the...
The sort of thing you were diagnosing, like it doesn't really have a political valence.
But if you do want to look at it like that, it's happening across the spectrum.
Yeah, what's interesting is like, so I think there's an interesting conversation to be had about psychology is overwhelmingly liberal.
And I think that can have some consequences for the quality of research.
Because like I used to view...
Ideological diversity is sort of a punchline.
In looking into these stories of how these bad ideas percolate, I've come to appreciate it a little bit more.
But I think if there's any bias that props up these ideas, it's almost...
I don't love the term neoliberalism, but these are pretty neoliberal ideas.
They're not about restructuring society.
They're about optimizing individuals in cost-effective ways that don't require redistribution.
So I agree that my book has...
Most of the ideas don't have much of a political valence, but I think if there is one, it's a little bit more nuanced than just left or right-wing ideas.
Yeah, for sure.
Actually, I'm glad you said that because I noticed the same thing you pointed out in the book, which is that a lot of these social psychology concepts like giving people little nudges or building up their sense of self-efficacy or positive thinking and so on are kind of a very individualistic,
atomic.
And yeah, I don't love the term either, but it fits very nicely with the neoliberal consensus, doesn't it?
Yeah, and I think that it's a useful example of the limitations of these political labels because I bet almost everyone, I think the best example of this is grit.
You know, this idea of a scale that can measure people's, particularly students, level of stick-to-itiveness and basically conscientiousness.
It might actually be measuring conscientiousness.
Read the book for more details on that.
But the point is, I bet 90% of the people who developed Grit, including Angela Duckworth, are reliable Democratic voters.
They're liberals in the simple liberal conservative binary.
But Grit is a very classic American, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps idea.
So it's just more complicated than the idea of a liberal bias in science.
Something more nuanced is going on.
Similarly, Jesse, when you talked about the power-posing literature and Amy Cuddy's framing, Of that research.
I mean, the issue, if she's claiming that striking a pose can subjectively make you feel a bit more confident going into an interview, there's probably less of a concern, right?
Because that's a relatively limited claim.
But the claim that doing that can be demonstrated to have a massive impact on...
Who will be selected for a job and alter your hormone levels?
And that these kind of interventions are much more tractable than, say, attempts to change the fundamental structures of institutions or systems.
So you kind of frame it as those two approaches being in conflict.
And do you see that as being a necessity or just like a feature of the people that you
I'm not sure they're inherently in conflict.
I think it's a matter of what you pay attention to and what you focus on.
So I situate power posing within this recent tradition in America of lean-in feminism.
So Sheryl Sandberg wrote Lean In, and her book and Cuddy's book both say that women should just be...
Basically be more assertive and in certain senses more masculine.
So my argument is instead of focusing on telling women to fake it till they make it in terms of their confidence and sense of power, which is literally one of the things they say, there's probably room for organizational level tweaks that will make things a little bit fair.
So when Sandberg talks about being in business school at...
I think it was Sandberg.
It was in business school at Harvard, I believe.
Professors there would not take notes.
Class participation was very important.
Professors wouldn't take notes.
So this would clearly benefit the sorts of blowhards, like the three of us, who could just stand up and say something authoritative-seeming in class.
To me, that's a good example.
That probably benefits people with male socialization.
Why would you not change that system so professors can take notes and you don't have to rely on people who are...
That's the kind of thing where it's like, why are we telling women to stand up and speak more confidently when they don't feel confident rather than making it so that the systems don't reward undue confidence, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
So that's sort of a related...
Topic you get into is the literature and ideas around self-esteem and positive thinking.
So a few rungs down the intellectual ladder is the book called The Secret by Rona Byrne that you talk about.
So in that book, it promotes the power of positive thinking and encourages people to visualize the things they want and then they will come true.
So, I mean, for me, this is really interesting because it's similar to what some people are looking at with the conspirituality movement, which is like this weird horseshoe in terms of kind of right-wing and libertarian-type thinking with the alternative health and wellness.
So, likewise, it seems that that kind of material that gets promoted by Oprah and stuff like that is like a weird dovetailing of this very capitalist kind of individualist.
Get the things you want.
But also with this sort of warm and fluffy stuff around, believe in yourself and it will come true.
So what are your thoughts about that, Jesse?
I just think in general, a lot of social psychology has ventured, and definitely positive psychology, they've ventured much too closely to self-help.
And it's often hard to discern the two.
So you have the consumers of this stuff are maybe...
I have no data to support this, but I would imagine a little bit higher educated and they like the idea that they're listening to the latest social psychological insights from Harvard or UPenn.
But when you actually dig down into these messages, they're just self-help.
And there's the trappings of science, but very little genuine, robust science underpinning them.
I think I like the way in that chapter you traced the development of the Self-esteem literature linking it to the, like, some of the names were amazing,
like Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, right?
Yeah.
Clockmaker and mesmerist.
The new thought movement, which is an amazing movement.
I wanted to learn more about it.
I learned a little from the book, but new thought is incredible stuff.
Yeah, and then next, the power of positive thinking, right?
Norman Vincent Peale.
There seems to be a, I don't know, a triple-barreled name effect that somebody should study.
But I like that because it's often overlooked how much some of the contemporary trends in psychology are linked into fads.
That you can find echoes in the Victorian era or even earlier than that.
And it does feel, including with the culture war stuff, that there's something of a recency bias.
I'm not saying that things never change, but more that there's definitely elements that repeat cyclically.
And I wonder if you found it helpful to...
To take that kind of perspective, looking back and seeing that we've always had people peddling miracle psychological interventions.
Yeah, I mean, so I guess there's a couple different questions there.
One about sort of the culture wars, one about social psychology.
I think you can make...
I think some of the stuff going on with social psychology is maybe less cyclical.
I think like...
Certain specific elements of how it developed as a profession, some of which were in an earlier draft of my book, but I just had to cut it for flow reasons.
But social psychology got more and more individualistic over the years and there was this post-war golden age when it was very interdisciplinary.
So you'd have anthropologists and sociologists working with social psychologists.
Social psychologists sort of fell in love with lab studies and with the endless amount of statistically significant findings you can generate in labs.
I think it could be argued and some have argued that that's when the ship started to veer off course a little bit because it's hard to measure, you know, learn about social aspects of human life with lab studies.
And I do think that that culminated in...
Certain dead ends that really peaked maybe in the first decade or so of the 21st century.
And that coincided with TED Talks, with social media, with like a million new news outlets that like to cover science, but not in a rigorous way.
So I think it was just like a worst case scenario in terms of sort of the deer of all this stuff.
The culture war stuff more broadly, I agree, is very cyclical.
Yeah, look, just got to say, so Jesse, you've got a pretty strong background in statistics as well.
And fortunately, most of my work is in the survey domain where we have very large samples and we don't try to do experimental manipulations.
But I am involved with a lot of laboratory research as well.
And to be honest, my gut feeling is that if you design and analyze an experimental manipulation well, Then you have a very, very low chance of finding the thing that you expect.
However, if you do it badly and cut corners, then you can find a supposed effect there.
So, I mean, just on a very personal gut feeling level, I've seen what you're describing there with the weakness of laboratory studies.
Yeah.
Well, you can also run 20 statistical tests and two or three of them are going to hit.
And then you can just say that's what you were looking for the whole time.
It's like very, there's a lot of ways it can go wrong.
And I just want to like,
I don't have a very strong background in statistics.
I just know the basics.
But just knowing the basics, unfortunately, makes me more qualified than most journalists who write about this stuff.
Yeah, and some psychologists, Jesse.
You know, like selling the benefits of interdisciplinary collaborations is music to my ears because like Matt and me are in some sense interdisciplinary collaboration.
Collaboration with anthropologists is overrated.
No, no, it isn't.
It's the future.
And the institute I work at at Oxford is very much focused on that kind of collaborating with historians and psychologists and so on.
But I will say that something I've noticed within social psychology and cross-cultural psychology disciplines is that anthropology went through these debates in the 70s up till like the 90s, the kind of first wave of...
The culture wars or the modern culture wars.
And a lot of it was focused on academic minutiae.
But there were also things about objectivity and taking academic perspectives and representing indigenous perspectives and so on.
And the interesting thing for me is that I came into anthropology at the tail end of that and leaned more towards the you can still do that stuff, but you can combine it with empirical.
So I became involved with psychology, and that's where I'm situated now in the hinterlands.
But I've noticed that psychology is now very much recapitulating the concerns of 90s anthropology.
Like, I went to a psychology conference, and there was a guy standing up saying, I don't think he was raising the issues that the psychology discipline is overwhelmed by liberals.
And then he was making the point that they don't understand honor cultures.
And that what they need to do, instead of running experimental studies, is go and live with people in the Deep South or wherever for a number of years and then write qualitative accounts based on interviews.
And I was just going, that's anthropology.
It already exists.
So, yeah, it just struck me that there's calls for that kind of thing.
There's also something to be said for disciplinary specialization.
Yeah, I guess it depends what kind of specialization.
One of the best sort of younger-ish social psychologists working is a woman named Betsy Pollack at Princeton.
She has more of a field research background than a lot of social psychologists.
Pretty amazing real-world studies that I think are expensive and hard to pull off, but probably tell us much more about the world than the average lab finding.
Yeah, there's a good researcher who's now at LSE who did a multi-year study about ritual dynamics.
I think it was in an Indian community.
In any case, it was like a five-year study where they networked out all the relationships between the people in this village and were tracing their ritual performances.
And it was great.
It came out as an empirical...
But the reality of it is that that person had to spend five years working in a rural Indian village to collect that kind of rich data.
Whereas in the meantime, and sure, they actually got a position out of LSE and stuff related to that.
So that's a good outcome.
But in reality, most people don't have the time or resources to do that.
They are going to run MTurk studies or a lab.
Yeah, no, I was going to say that in that time, you could probably publish five to ten studies on implicit bias using university samples.
Yeah.
So, Jesse, again, I'm going to talk a little bit because I just want to...
Let our listeners know that the sort of stuff that you talk about in your book, I think is really important.
And I feel like I've seen it in my own career.
Back when I was a research student, a couple of things were very popular.
One of them was neuro-linguistic programming, NLP.
And another one that I actually did my honours thesis in was...
Transformational leadership as opposed to transactional leadership.
Now, this is from organizational psychology and transformational leadership is this wonderful thing where the managers inspire and have these genuine, authentic relationships.
You name it, it's great.
Now, even at that young age, you could tell that this stuff was telling executives and managers what they wanted to hear and that there were people who were making a lot of money by heading up to corporations
and running these transformational leadership courses and so on and really capitalizing on it.
And it was hugely popular.
A lot of people made a lot of money out of it.
But from studying it, I realized that the foundations were extremely weak.
Now, I don't think you talk about that in the book, but that's the kind of example I could see where there's this interface between people's incentives.
Yeah, I mean, I do think the implicit association test is a really good example of that because it creates these incredibly useful, lucrative tools for individual companies and schools to...
They seem to be doing something science-y about racism and discrimination.
Now, does it help at all?
There's no real evidence to suggest it does, but it certainly helps make it seem like they're doing something.
Yeah, I just think, especially because the average...
What, they're going to do a longitudinal study, like measuring whether the training module they hired had any effect in the long run?
Of course they're not.
They're just trying to check an item off a list.
So I think there's always going to be a market for half-baked, psychology-informed, corporate and educational modules, basically.
Yeah, so one thing that struck deep for me is that...
Many of the things that we see in our gurus, which is like taking these shortcuts for attention and impact through speculative claims and bad reasoning, yeah, it's a harsh lesson because your book essentially illustrates that those same motivations are operating on every academic and journalist too,
for that matter.
So what are your thoughts on that and is there anything we can do about it?
Yeah, I mean, it's tricky.
I think a lot of the incentives point toward half-baked ideas getting disseminated.
I do think some of the reform efforts underway in psychology are likely to improve things.
It seems like there's a pretty good diagnosis of what went wrong and how to fix it.
That doesn't mean...
Psychology is going to be perfect 10 years from now, but I do think it's getting better.
Journalism, I have less faith in just because we are continuing to collapse entirely in a structural sense.
And I think, if anything, there's going to be fewer journalists really qualified to write about this kind of research.
But yeah, so I'm torn on the future.
It might always be the case that we're a sucker for novel ideas that sound right, but aren't all that true or don't mean all that much.
But it's just something that, as humans, we need to be on guard for.
Yeah, I like the point.
One, it was very refreshing that you had a chapter on the efforts to improve things, the open science movement.
The importance of many labs and all that kind of thing.
Because I think there's always a danger with this stuff that you end up just bemoaning the situation such as it exists.
And it's not really your requirement that you have solutions, but I still think it's good when people can point to that there is at least signs of hope in reform movements and that kind of thing.
Yeah, I don't want people to slide into some sort of nihilism or relativism where science is just sort of another broken human institution.
I do think the benefit of it is it contains the tools for self-correction in a way other belief systems don't.
So that's why I still have faith in science, for lack of a better, more intelligent way to put it.
Research psychologists have closed ranks and denied that there's a problem and so on, but have really embraced that and doing some serious self-reflection and hopefully reform.
I will say, Matt, that I've noticed as well, and I'm sure, Jesse, you've seen this, that any reform movement and the open science movement is not immune from this.
As it goes on, it tends to fracture.
And form into camps, like in the same way the atheist movement, the new atheist movement did, and pretty much all online groups or movements that I've seen, maybe even not just online.
But the open science movement feels to me like it...
It's won some concessions with now pre-registrations are recognized as important and there's registered reports and whatnot.
But they have also broke into these fighting camps that predictably have ended up arguing about how important it is to include a social justice component in the open science movement.
And I know...
People within the movement, for example, Jesse, have quite different reactions to you, right?
But they don't disagree with you on any of the points about methodological reforms, but they do on social justice issues.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I've had trouble historically, and this maybe is just Twitter, understanding...
I mean, there's one sort of open science adjacent figure in particular who's very critical of me, although he's also skeptical of open science in general because I think he thinks it's sort of like a white dude bro endeavor.
I guess I would need more specifics about what their critiques are.
I found, again, this could just be the result of Twitter.
Too much of these conversations take place, but a lot of the time when someone is mad at me and my work, and I'll ask them what it is I've said they're mad about, they don't always display intimate familiarity with.
I'm trying to be diplomatic here.
I've had so many interactions with people where I've just asked, like, point me to what it is I've written that you really disagree with.
Yeah.
So some of the open science fracturing stuff, I've been following it a little bit.
I'm just not – I don't know.
I feel like with so many of these like internecine culture where fights there's like a kernel of truth and that of course psychology is like – like so many other areas of academia benefits privileged people and that probably leads to disproportionately white people.
But that's just like a pretty deep structural thing to have to face and to me – I'm not sure you can sort of straightforwardly insert concern about that into every aspect of, like, pre-registration or replication.
I mean, pre-registration is, I think, good.
I think we should promote it.
I'm not sure, like, every step of the way when you're promoting pre-registration, you can tie directly into, like, you know, Black Lives Matter or whatever.
Sometimes, I don't know, I don't always understand the critiques, I guess, is what I'm saying.
Either of me or of, like, what it is the open science movement should do differently.
Yeah, I think it comes down to whether you regard social justice as a fundamental, that should be a fundamental focus on par with methodological reform, or whether you regard those as orthogonal issues,
right?
That it could be that you're completely on board with social justice positions or whatever form that you...
People regard them as taking, but that you don't think that that directly ties into, like you say, why you would need to pre-register studies or that kind of thing.
And I think I probably fall into close to that high decoupling space within academic stuff.
I think Matt and me have the now non-fashionable view that activism and objectivity Yeah,
I mean, I guess I'm with you.
I think the reason to care about pre-registration is that half of published studies don't replicate.
And I think you can have that conversation.
It's not always going to tie directly into other ongoing social justice conversations, as important as those are.
Someone who is very concerned with social justice should like one of the central theses of your book, which relates to that neoliberal stuff we were talking about before.
A lot of the poor quality research that assumes that everything can be boiled down to the individual and that can be manipulated in an experiment, little nudges and so on.
Whereas, as you point out with your emphasis on multi-causal...
Explanations for things.
It's not just at the individual level.
It's got to do with social structures and power and so on.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a pretty standard pinko big government type of argument.
I mean, obviously, it's more complicated.
You can't always just throw money at a problem and solve it, but it certainly helps.
And obviously, the U.S. has, in many ways, a uniquely dysfunctional welfare state.
So yeah, that's sort of underpinning the whole book.
Jesse, we'd be remiss if we didn't at least spend some time on the culture wars that, for better or worse, that you swim in and the various online controversies that you attract.
But before any of the ones that probably people would expect us to get through.
I have a controversy that I want to pick up with you personally.
Yeah, this was all like a force just to get to my issues.
So you know this thing, the lab leak hypothesis, right?
Have you heard of that?
Yes, I've heard of it.
So it's this little topic that keeps popping up recently.
But I listened to an episode with you recently.
It might have been...
Ben Burgess, or I think you discussed it with Katie as well on Blocked and Reported.
And the point that you and many people online are making this currently, like, you know, Tybee and Green World and so on, is that there was this groupthink within the liberal media sources, right, which presented any discussion of the possibility of a lab leak as a racist conspiracy theory.
And that this was tied into a, at this point, Like for Trump and the fact that his agenda immediately went to that.
And in so doing, that they papered over an area of legitimate scientific debate and controversy.
Is that a fair framing or would you add anything?
Yeah, I think that's a fair framing.
Until I do hundreds of hours more research, I will remain agnostic on how...
There's a realistic possibility we should view the lab leak theory as.
I just sort of defer to the experts, to some experts who seem to think like we should at least not discount it.
So that was my only claim, though.
It shouldn't have been so aggressively discounted and treated as quote-unquote debunked like more than a year ago.
Okay, yeah.
By the way, I'm not trying to trap you.
Katie and I were actually the ones who released the virus.
I hope you'll delete this, but we're just...
This is where I'm getting to, Jesse.
The percentage.
I want to know the percentage that it's you that's the source.
I don't want to argue that there's no coverage on Vox or Salon or whatever, which essentially presents any...
Raising of questions about the lab leak as being tied to Trump talking points.
But a bit I'd like to push back on, and I think it relates to some of the other culture war stuff, is that when I look back at that coverage and people were sharing all these headlines, basically saying, look, this was verboten to discuss this.
And you go in and do what you often say, like read the articles and what they say, not the headlines.
You get these accounts and then you'll get like a paragraph where they talk about how the majority of virologists think that it's from a natural cause.
And then there's usually a source who said it and something like, but no virologists were willing to completely discount the possibility of a lab leak.
And that's what I see also in most of the academic published They talked about that for various reasons that we don't need to get into.
Their analysis suggests that a natural origin is more likely, but they don't rule out the possibility.
But it strikes me that the narrative on this, especially amongst alternative media or sub-stacky people, is that you were not allowed to say that, and that it was completely forbidden for people to acknowledge any possibility.
I see it more that people were just...
I'm not saying all journalists said this right, like I've had enough caveats in, but that Roller, it was them saying, this is the consensus, but people don't rule it out.
And I just don't get the impression that it was forbidden to say, to add the caveat.
Like, I just see the caveat in lots of the writing and stuff.
So, I don't know.
Like, it's not much of a question.
Yeah, no.
I get what you're saying.
So I did think there were a few articles.
I'm thinking of one in NPR and one in Slate that either straightforwardly referred to the theory as debunked.
Usually what would happen is it would either be in the headline or in the journalist's own words.
But then you would see that none of the sources they were quoting were saying exactly that.
I think this is a point John Chate made.
It seemed like this almost like reflective knee-jerk thing.
Like, no, no, no.
We view it as debunked.
It's bad.
And then...
Slate did a long article basically saying that it tied into this history of anti-Chinese racism, which is sort of bizarre when you realize that the orthodox theory has it coming out of a wet market, which to me ties way more into anti-Chinese racist tropes.
So I get what you're saying.
I also think in 2021, the question of what's forbidden to say is complicated because you can say whatever you want.
There's just a lot of things that maybe mainstream outlets won't say or you could get in trouble for saying.
So that's some of the complication of talking about this quote-unquote censorship or cancellation.
So my critique was really just of the mainstream outlets that, to me, should be shooting most down the middle, trying to, to the extent possible, While we acknowledge that objectivity isn't a real thing, trying to get to the bottom of this in a somewhat objective way.
And I think some of them failed in doing that.
I actually think that specific issue relates in an interesting way to the takeaway from your book, because it's obviously to essentially encourage a kind of skepticism towards some widely accepted...
claims that are coming out of academia or institutions.
So I guess a good question is, how do we separate the healthy skepticism from a kind of conspiratorial
I mean, it's tricky, right?
There's just like, there's so much to be skeptical of when it comes to authority.
And I've gotten...
I think significantly more skeptical of a lot of mainstream institutions.
I think there's a real crisis of institutional authority right now.
And I don't think it's 100% trumped up, no pun intended, by right-wing demagogues and populists.
I think a lot of institutions aren't performing their functions well.
And part of the backlash is a response to that.
And it worries the hell out of me.
I'm not offering a constructive response because I don't know what to do about it.
I'm a little bit worried about this, to be honest.
Jesse, that is related to a question I wanted to ask you, because something that we see in the guru types that we look at is this really, really strong anti-institutional, anti-establishment terrorism, right?
It's almost definitional of what it means to be an online guru, right?
So that's one of the issue things on your guru.
Gurometer, right?
How you raise it?
Correct.
You've studied the science.
Exactly.
I see.
And the Gurometer is a well-validated scale, as we know.
Indeed.
It's science, Jesse.
It's science.
It's science and art combined.
But so my issue, and I listened to your interview with Very Bad Wizards that Like small other podcasts by, you know, lesser known academics.
Never heard of it.
They made the point that we've blocked and reported, which is really enjoyable.
And I, as much as anyone, I think, enjoy more in the inside of the culture war.
But there is this dynamic that you're well aware of where that...
From one side of the pool, like the Quillette and critical-obsessed side, not universally, but generally, you get a positive reception, right?
And from the progressive wing of the liberal side, it's fair to say that you get a fair share of criticism.
Light criticism, you know.
And just normal social dynamics will mean that...
You must get pulled right towards the side to treat you nicer in an interpersonal way.
You know, I think this is something that Sam Harris has an issue with as well.
And I wonder, do you think that could partly relate to why your skepticism with institutionalism is growing?
And does it concern you if so?
Yeah, well, I think it's a fair question.
I guess I would say, first of all, like, James Lindsay and his fans seem to really dislike me at this point because I thought his analysis of the election was ridiculous.
Dave Rubin and his fans very much don't like me.
So when it comes to some of the biggest so-called heterodox, anti-CRT types, they don't like me.
And I still think most of my fans are progressives.
There's a huge market for just sort of quote-unquote reasonable Obama liberals.
And I do think that's my average listener.
That's the average person I hear from.
I think with people like Lindsay, I think they've gone down really dark rabbit holes where they think they're at war with cultural Marxists or whatever, and I just think it's a very myopic worldview.
I have critiques of what I do view as a crisis of authority in some liberal institutions, but I try to make them in a way that, I don't know, puts them in the proper context.
I'm not going to blow up some random college kid who does a dumb college kid thing.
There's a definite risk of sort of audience capture or feeling like, you know, these people are being nicer to me.
I do think that's human nature.
For whatever reason, in my case, it hasn't really raised any problems.
I think just because I've never...
My real-life social network is very not offline and is...
I think 100% Democrat voting.
The biggest social impact of this is I hang out with more libertarians because they're good drinking buddies.
God bless you.
I have some points of agreement with them on some of the culture war stuff.
I think it's a fair question.
When I look at people like James Lindsay and Dave Rubin, they've completely, to me, gone over to a...
Pretty reactionary place.
But yeah, I try to be cognizant of that.
And I try to be cognizant of the fact that, frankly, you do make more money writing about culture war stuff and beating that drum over and over and over again.
If I wanted to maximize my revenue and audience, that would be all I ever wrote about.
And I'm not going to do that.
And my book is not about culture war stuff.
Yeah, and I gotta say, Jesse, I really appreciated your...
Your presence in that debate, moderated in inverted commas by Brett Weinstein and with James Lindsay.
And I take the point entirely that James Lindsay is not your biggest fan.
That's quite evident.
But I'm more thinking that, like, say your recent appearance was Sam Harris.
And I don't want to litigate all the things, you know, individual things that have been said or whatnot.
But it's more like...
Okay, so Sam has famously stated that white supremacy is the fringe of the fringe.
And in some sense, he's making a completely valid claim.
And one I think you have covered, that there is a tendency to catastrophize about the extent to which extreme views are common.
But on the other hand, the President of the United States prior to this one came to political prominence on the back of the Burfer movement.
And then you had figures like Stephen Miller in the White House dictating immigration policy for four years.
So it feels to me that there's a danger of the, you know, yes, snarling Nazis with swastikas on their head are a fringe, but the far-right political movement,
such as it exists, and I would say that Trump falls pretty...
Close to what I'd consider far right.
And that's definitely not fringe now.
I just don't...
I loathe Trump, but I've got...
And people disagree with me.
I think George W. Bush did way more damage as president.
And he would have done more damage if he had just been a one-term president too.
I think in terms of Trump's actual agenda, there was something uniquely horrible about his immigration policy.
The fact that Steve Bannon was anywhere close to power was horrifying.
Same with Stephen Miller.
George W. Bush had John Ashcroft.
And Ashcroft is a guy, he gave a glowing interview to basically a segregationist magazine.
There is a lot of white grievance in the Republican Party.
There is a very reactionary element.
On most policy issues, Donald Trump is just a Republican president.
He really is.
And that extends even to like...
Not really fighting the gay marriage fight anymore.
Not being that anti-LGBT.
The one exception is the horrible attempt to ban trans people from the military, which I think he's just trying to throw red meat to the evangelical base.
I just...
I think so many of the problems in the U.S. do come down to like Republican economic policy.
And when we pretend our fight is against like the Charlottesville crowd, obviously those people worry me.
I'm Jewish and like a liberal.
You will not replace us.
Exactly.
I mean, I will replace them.
So I just, I don't know.
I hate to say it.
I know this is unpopular view.
I just think it's been a little bit of a distraction.
And I also think...
It benefits certain people to pretend Trump was like a few notches to the left of Hitler or even like...
I don't know.
You guys can tell me if I'm wrong.
I just think on most policy issues, he's a Republican president.
His rhetoric was what was different.
And there are uniquely threatening aspects of having a president who slings rhetoric like that and who, frankly, comes across as emotionally unstable and labile.
But most of that stuff was held in check.
He was a one-term president.
And I'm just hopeful that some of the damage is reversible.
His approach to immigration and Stephen Miller's just absolutely grotesque.
I don't think it's that far off from, unfortunately, what a lot of conservatives believe in the U.S. and definitely what a lot of people believe in Europe.
This is just like...
I don't know.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is just something that bubbles up everywhere.
We need to be on the lookout for it.
So I don't like the idea of pretending it's sort of some wave of white nationalism responsible for it.
I think it'll always be with us, unfortunately.
Yeah, I think some of these questions go to the relative weight of concern one should have in various directions.
So, you know, in a way, the way you describe Trump, which I don't necessarily disagree with, as not being exceptional.
It's actually more disturbing, isn't it?
Well, there is this whole interesting thing where the Republican Party thought that it could be this sort of more respectable, like Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, nice guys wearing suits.
There's always been a divide between what the base wants, and the base is, frankly, a lot more racist.
That's not the only thing animating them, and some of them have legitimate economic concerns, but Trump was...
That is who the base wants, people like Trump, and that's how Trump has totally captured the party.
And I think that's a big problem, but I don't think the idea of a Republican base that is very far to the right on these issues is new, or we should pretend it's new.
Yeah, I guess, I think part of the objection that I could see people raise is like, okay, so people could legitimately say, you know, academia is strongly, like, the vast majority is liberal leaning.
And people make this argument about media as well, right?
And entertainment and so on.
But the people who make those arguments tend not to acknowledge at the same time the really, really severe issues with the gerrymandering of votes, right?
how disproportionate it is for a liberal or democratic president to be elected with the way that the system is set up or the composition of the supreme court and what that means
I often find myself annoyed when people talk about the media as if the right-wing media is not a really significant force and doesn't really have that much influence.
And that strikes me as a...
Almost as big a problem as the people on the left in media who oversell the problem.
Because there is an issue there, right?
Well, I mean, right-wing media is accessible and has been for a long time.
And I think probably took a real turn for the worse in like 2015 or so.
And I wrote about some of that fake news stuff.
My worry, and this could send us down a whole other road, is that I do think in certain ways...
Liberal media is sort of headed down the same path in like a very aggressive, hyper-partisan bent to everything.
And that worries me because I just think we need to be able to trust mainstream journalistic institutions to tell the truth and to be as dispassionate as possible.
And I do think there's been a turning away from that that worries me.
This is based on, there's like, you know, two or three issues where I consider myself pretty informed.
When I see how these issues are covered in mainstream outlets, it worries me a great deal.
But I think overall, the right has a much bigger problem with fake news and just like gonzo outlets spreading bile.
Part of the reason I focus on what I focus on is because I just think I'm in a better position to critique the left of center.
Yeah, like I have to say, I agree with you there, JC.
Yeah, the fact that Fox News is accessible doesn't mean that one shouldn't want the New York Times to be better.
And talking about the importance of objectivity, I even experienced this in my own.
Very specialised field, which is looking at the public health of addiction and addictive products.
And you'll see people at conferences who point the finger at people like me who say we should remain scientists, right?
Yes, the implications of our research does have social impacts, but we're not activists.
We should be all about presenting an accurate...
We have our own personal feelings about what should be done and so on, but we try to keep those separate.
And you will find people at academic conferences saying, no, we should be activists.
All of our research should be geared towards pushing.
A good line to change society for the better, and I just don't agree.
Well, this is the exact same thing going on in journalism, where especially among younger journalists, I don't think most of them could really answer the question of what differentiates them from activists, other than they interview people, which maybe activists don't usually do.
But that worries the hell out of me, because I just think the only value we as journalists can add is to be that trustworthy, dispassionate voice.
Again, people will try to derail the conversation by saying, oh, so you think it's possible to be truly objective?
Which, of course, it's not.
We all have biases, but you can acknowledge them and you can try to take every incident on its own terms and try to explain them to people in an honest way.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just agreeing with you after you agreed with me.
I'm just worried about the trajectory of things.
Well, this is what happens when you speak to reasonable people, Jesse.
It's agreement after agreement.
Great.
Now I'm going to be cancelled too with you, Jesse.
What's it like?
It's not that bad, I hope.
No, my experiences with cancellation have been very positive, to be honest.
I do think that, you know, it's possibly harmful for the podcast, as you mentioned, but I was really impressed with you, Jesse, as I'm sure you care about my judgment of it, but whenever Chase Stragno,
or I don't know how to pronounce his surname, but when he came out recently...
I think for you and a bunch of other people on the bus, although he later claimed, right, the sentence meant something slightly different.
Missing period, yeah.
That was quite a good inventive defense, at least.
But yeah, so in that case, you know, you said there's no point in responding because if I tweet something, like, the people who like me are going to share it and then...
The people that don't like me are going to attack it, and he'll respond.
I don't know if it came off the back of the personal tragedies that you've endured recently, but it seemed like that dynamic where you said, look, if you want to talk about it, you can come on the podcast, we'll have a real dialogue, but I'm not going to engage with this.
And you laid out why he was wrong in what he said, but that struck me as infinitely more productive, right?
Less of a contribution to the culture wars.
And maybe, Jesse, I'm interested in your thoughts if that's something you're hoping to keep up.
Oh, no.
I mean, look, I did respond on Twitter, which maybe isn't productive, but I just sort of did a statement being like, the context was Chase in an interview, Chase Strangio, sort of the ACLU's main voice on trans issues, in an interview with GQ, claimed that me and other people had said,
That we find trans people disgusting and that that was motivating the stuff that I guess Chase disagrees with.
I don't know exactly what Chase disagrees with that I've written because he hasn't said, but so I just said, I've never in public or private said anything remotely like that.
And Chase responded by claiming that this was a punctuation error.
And due to a missing period, he meant to accuse unnamed people of calling trans people disgusting.
Chase can come on the podcast anytime.
I'm just sort of tired of the endless lobbing of bullshit back and forth on Twitter, and it doesn't get us anywhere.
And there is an element of just like, it's like a circus for everyone to watch, and everyone to...
People got super excited that I was going to sue Chase.
Like, I'm going to sue the ACLU.
Like, that's what I'm going to spend my summer on.
I don't think that would go well, I guess, as well.
No, it's not going to happen.
I just do think I have a right to defend myself.
And I also think there are plenty of good faith criticisms people can level of my work if they want to.
But in my experience on Twitter or just in the media landscape now, it has mostly not been that.
It has mostly been things like, oh, you think trans people are disgusting.
You think trans people want to die.
And that's a really fucking crazy thing to accuse someone of without evidence.
Yeah.
I do have a follow-up related to that on the trans issue specifically.
Sure.
This isn't an area that I think me or Matt are in any way have any expertise in.
And it's definitely not an area that's fun to weed into.
But having said that, like, so from what I see, Jesse, there's two million, I mean, there's lots of things, right?
There's lots of things that people accuse you of.
And a lot of it seems unwarranted that you're sliding into their DMs and that kind of thing.
But the two criticisms that you could argue have more legitimacy to them are, one, that by focusing on the transitioners, that you're potentially presenting it as,
you know, if people wrote an article like back when gay people were fighting for equal rights, if they focused on the fact that some people have a gay fears and they go out of it.
And they wrote a big profile on it.
It would be true, but it would also potentially be giving fuel to the thing that homosexuality is just a fear and most people go out of it.
And the second one is that Kenneth Zucker, this is something that seems to be a perennial point that a lot of people who take different positions from you regarded that he is doing a version of conversion.
And that you're laundering his reputation by saying that's not fair.
And so those two points, do you think there's any legitimacy to them?
And if you could do everything over again, is there anything that you would change or like you stand by everything as it has shaken out?
Yeah.
So the Zucker story, Kenneth Zucker was fired by his gender clinic was shut down.
As a result of allegations against him of misconduct and of basically doing conversion therapy.
Jesus, when was this now?
2015?
2016?
1940?
I don't know.
At some point in the last seven years, I wrote an investigative piece and I proved that the allegations against him were...
Highly flawed.
And when I say proved, I can use that word because there was subsequently a settlement where his hospital acknowledged, we published false information about you.
I got in touch with the one specific accuser who claimed that Ken Zucker had called him a, this is a trans man, he claimed that Kenneth Zucker had called him a hairy little vermin after he had taken his shirt off, which is like a very, you know, it's just a horrible thing for a clinician to say to a patient.
I talked to that person and put together their story and showed that they had not been a patient of Kenneth Zucker's.
They had confused Kenneth Zucker with an entirely different clinician.
So I reported that.
I reported on other weaknesses of the investigative procedure.
I got in touch with a woman who was quoted at NPR as believing her child had basically been through conversion therapy.
I showed why that was, I think, an oversimplification.
So I stand by the reporting.
I stand by the claim that He was fired unfairly.
And I actually don't see how anyone could argue with that unless you'd have to come up with a reason that the hospital paid him a settlement and admitted to having launched false accusations against him.
You'd have to say they were lying about how I don't know how you would even construct that.
What I probably could have done if I was under less time pressure and had like a more zoomed out perspective.
I could have had another 2,000 words on maybe like the history of conversion therapy and why this stokes such potent fears within the trans community because obviously for both gay and trans people there's a long history of conversion therapy and it's horrible and it's a real advance in human decency that is going extinct.
I think it could be the case that in the long run we view Zucker's approach as too conservative, as too gatekeepy.
But because when kids showed up at his clinic and they'd already been socially transitioned, he did not try to push them back.
That's what he said.
And I didn't find any evidence to suggest otherwise.
I just thought that these particular accusations against him were unwarranted.
And I did find some vindication in the legal settlement.
I mean, the hospital paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of these false accusations.
So I just think my reporting was right.
The question of how much to focus on detransition, I think the comparison with sort of ex-gay stuff doesn't work because it's very low stakes.
Like, who cares?
If someone's gay for a while, who cares?
It doesn't matter.
What we're talking about here is like a pretty intense fight over what the diagnostic procedure should be before Young people go on puberty blockers and hormones.
And this is an area where you have at the same time a near exponential increase in the number of kids showing up at these clinics with gender dysphoria, mostly natal female, assigned female at birth, whatever you want to call it.
That's at the same time that every national government or healthcare system that looks into the evidence behind puberty blockers and hormones is finding that there basically is none.
That the strength of the evidence is like...
There's basically almost no evidence for the efficacy of these treatments, which is horrible.
Now, how do you thread the needle?
How do you make that argument while also arguing, as I have, that these conservative laws seeking to ban these treatments outright are a terrible idea?
It's difficult, but my justification for writing about it in the way I do is the U.S. is very early on in figuring out what our own protocols are going to be.
Far behind the UK.
We're far behind the Netherlands, which is one of the pioneers in this stuff.
And we have a crappy patchwork healthcare system.
So I think the question of when kids should go on puberty blockers and hormones is interesting and important.
And I've quoted a lot of highly respected clinicians, including the head of the U.S. Professional Association for Transgender Health, who is herself a trans woman, who thinks that there's just a lot of shitty clinicians out there doing...
Doing bad work.
So I think that is like one of the stronger arguments against what I've done.
Like, why do you care about detransitioners?
I just think in context, it's a reasonable thing to worry about.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that the point that you make, which I find a lot of validity to, is that whatever your position that you end up taking on these topics, there is...
Genuine room for discussion and the need for evidence or discussion of evidence and so on.
That doesn't immediately fall into the most hyper online culture war partisanship.
It's inevitable, but it's also a shame that that's where it's ended up.
The issue of what you said, Jesse, is when you said, you know, if somebody goes through a gay phase, who cares?
I think quite a few people historically have cared.
I'm sorry.
Yes, no, I did not mean that in such a glib way.
What I mean is it's a silly thing to focus on because it's...
I don't think you should care.
People have cared, but they've cared wrongly.
I think if a kid goes on hormones because they were misdiagnosed, I care about that much more than I care about whether someone is like a lesbian until graduation or whatever.
Yeah, I imagined that.
I was just, you know, Irish Catholic upbringing was flashing on the sides of my head.
So, like, as I said, I...
This isn't an area I know well.
I've just followed the culture war discourse on it, and it just seems extremely toxic, and everything is dialed up to 11. So part of it, Jesse, this is just my perspective,
is that you have a personality, and even with your book and the various other topics, completely unrelated to trans stuff that you talk about.
You have a pedantic personality, right?
Like, fair to say.
I think it's important to be a...
I'd like to think I'm not pedantic because the dictionary definition is you focus on stuff that doesn't matter.
But I definitely have that, like, well, actually, define your terms, fallacy, blah, blah, blah, annoying Jew personality.
And I think that's...
Yeah, I think it works for me.
To mention the dictionary definition of pedantism.
It's pedantry.
In my defense, I almost wrote a recent substack in defense of pedantry and then I looked up the definition and I realized I didn't know exactly what it was and I don't want to self-identify to come out of it.
That's okay.
I just appreciated that irony.
Your personality type, whether it's pedantry or detail-focused or however to frame it, I think it's fair to say that you care about specific details and that this inevitably means that you kind of rub up wrong.
You have complained to various editors, right, about articles that activists have written.
And if I did that, I know that the activists, and okay, I know that they're often related to you, so there's a relevance there.
But I mean, you must know that that's going to be like a red flag to a bull, right?
And I just wonder if, like, for you, the personal cost That comes about this.
The fact that you are fairly frequently, not in the past week or so, but trending on Twitter.
And I know the issues with the trending bar and how little it takes to get there.
But is it worth it to stay on this topic?
Or do you ever consider just dropping it completely?
No, I think, if anything, the more unhinged stuff makes me want to stick with it more because I have that kind of personality.
And I also think the feedback I get off of Twitter is overwhelmingly positive.
And there are high-ranking journalists and editors who will not say a word about this publicly, but who have told me they value my work.
It's also worked out career-wise.
So there's obviously a subset of people who, in my view, wrongly view me as some kind of reactionary.
I just think if you actually read my stuff, that's sort of a ridiculous claim.
Yeah, I'd be lying.
I'd be lying if I said that I didn't sometimes wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit hole, but I don't think in the long, hopefully long arc of my career...
If I don't choke on a slice of pizza tonight, I don't think it's going to be a huge part of what I've written.
Again, I wrote a whole book about other stuff, and I've got some other stuff in the works, although also an article about this.
I think I'm okay with how things are doing, and I view the most unhinged people trying to make my life miserable on Twitter as irrelevant.
I try not to worry about them.
I do get sucked back in.
I'm always open for a conversation with most of them if they want to get into the pedantic details of why they disagree with me.
I'm sorry, Jesse, if it feels like a cross-examination.
I would happily go on record to say that the fact that you are presented as a nefarious villain on par with someone like Stephen Miller or that kind of thing online always just strikes me as bizarre because in many respects,
as you've highlighted, you have For maybe 90 or 95% of liberal stances, you're in line with progressives.
I'm in line with progressives on this too.
They just won't say so on Twitter.
I'm sure.
I mean, in an anonymous survey, what percentage of progressives do you think would respond negatively to before a 12-year-old goes on puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones, they should be thoroughly assessed for mental health comorbidities?
It's just insane to imagine that that's a controversial stance.
And that is to the extent I've expressed my own opinion in my work rather than just debunk and highlight experts I agree with.
That's the most controversial thing I've written.
So that's why I find the whole thing a little bit cartoonish, especially years after my biggest piece of this came out.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time that Twitter and the online infosphere has been cartoonish, that's for sure.
We're getting close to time, so are you guys okay to move towards wrapping it up?
Any other of Jesse's personality issues?
No, the only other thing, Jesse, I would say, you know, Katie, your co-host, I came across her originally, she did an interview with Brett Weinstein, I think for his podcast, and that wasn't the best.
Introduction to Katie.
Partly because of, I think, the two of them were in a, you know, heterodox feedback cycle.
But I want to say that on the podcast, I really like blocked and reported.
And in some sense, I think the dynamic that you two have and the fact that, you know, to her, you're, I think you're, like, semi-moderating force for her, like, more heterodox takes.
And maybe she pushes you a bit when you're leaning towards being more sympathetic to liberals.
Yeah, it's a really nice dynamic.
So just to say that your podcast made me revise my harsh assessment of Katie.
I'm sure she cares.
So, good job.
I do have to edit out a lot of phrenology and Holocaust denial, but that's just...
Well, that's the same on our podcast.
Matt's level of anti-gypsy bias is astonishing.
It's, frankly, hours and hours of anecdotes.
So that was all, Matt.
That's the only other thing I want to say, and it's more of a comment than a question.
Yeah, so Jesse, at the end of your book, you mentioned a paper that was written by a group of psychologists, and it was titled, Is Social and Behavioral Science Evidence Ready for Application and Dissemination?
So in that, they argued that our field shouldn't be arguing for...
Policy people and the public to be paying more attention to us at the moment, but rather just focus on the hard work of evidence-based science and earning that credibility and legitimacy.
And I liked that paper and I liked your take on it as well because I think a lot of that advice could be well taken by many of our gurus as well.
Just before we wrap up, is there any final thoughts or comments you'd like to get off your chest?
No.
I'm just going to burn every remaining bridge.
No, I appreciate what you guys do and I appreciate you having me on.
I have not listened to every episode.
I think an interesting thing for you guys to look into, and correct me if you have, is capital W whiteness as sort of an explanatory...
Or like mystical force in the world.
I just think the evolution of that concept in liberal discourse has been really interesting.
And if you want to talk about like gurus and self-help, just this idea of whiteness as a force that transcends boundaries and you have to search yourself to undo your whiteness.
I find that stuff fascinating.
I would definitely listen to a podcast of you guys talking about it.
Yeah.
No, look, that's a comparison I've made before, which is that if we're focusing on conspiracies being very abstract and nebulous and difficult to observe directly forces, working surreptitiously behind the scenes and having this ubiquitous effect,
then...
I agree.
Some versions, especially in the popular interpretations of whiteness, could be said to fit some of those properties.
Look, our podcast does focus on...
We do ad hominem, so we focus on people and individuals.
But I think Robert D 'Angelo and some other people can fit with that.
I think the closest we've covered is Kendi, right?
And he...
Yeah.
He's an interesting guy, but I just think D 'Angelo is much more a guru.
Yeah.
I hope you guys cover her at some point.
I'm very skeptical of her, but I remain fascinated by her.
I think part of the issue for us is, we actually discussed about covering D 'Angelo, but the way that You and Kitty and various other people have covered her content.
It feels like an easy punching bag.
Yeah, that might be true.
There's a very small contingent now, even on the far left, who are willing to say that D 'Angelo is good.
Yeah, that's true.
Maybe it's already been done.
Yeah, but we're not above looking at Scott Adams.
We're not above taking an easy putt, that's for sure.
You know who you guys should talk about is that Hitler guy.
Yeah, he's terrible.
These ideas were awful.
I mean, are you kidding me?
It was mainly Web 2.0 that enabled him to rise to power, though.
That's the real dynamic.
Yeah, there's definitely...
We've talked about taking a little jaunt into the left again.
And I also want to go into the heterodox sub-stack world of like, you know, Tybee and Greenwald or even the Tankies and Jimmy Dore and stuff.
But that's a little bit easy because it is the case that, you know, Matt and me are in the...
That area that you discussed, Jesse, you know, the Obama liberals, the silent, moderate majority that does exist.
And the problem with that group is that there aren't that many, you know, guru types, because they tend to be offering very milquetoast, moderate policies,
like maybe Nate Silver.
The closest you get.
I'm sure people will correct me about this, but yeah, it feels like it's easy for us to punch people that we don't agree with fundamentally.
So we probably should make an effort to target people that are on our side, so to speak.
Yeah, it can be good to do once in a while.
But either way, like I said, I appreciate what you guys do and thank you for having me on.
Yeah, thanks so much.
It's been great to hear about the book, and great to talk to you, Jesse.
Oh, and Matt, shouldn't we normally say, Jesse, don't people usually say in interviews, like, what are you doing next?
I knew you were going to write an article on pedantism, but besides that...
Oh, do you want to ask me that?
That was my incredible...
Journalistic question of what's next for you, Jesse?
Yeah, I have some stuff in the works.
I haven't quite figured it out.
I mean, the podcast and the newsletter keep me busy.
jessiesingle.substack.com if you want to check out the podcast.
Sorry, that's the newsletter.
Blocked Reporters podcast.
Yeah, I'm hoping to do more long-form stuff.
Hopefully not culture war stuff, but we will see.
All right.
Well, congratulations on the book and, yeah, congratulations on an extremely popular podcast, Locked and Reported.
Yeah, good luck.
Thank you guys.
Thank you guys very much.
Yeah, I think it was the first one as well, right?
It was the very first podcast.
Yeah, definitely.
All right.
Well, cheers, Jesse, and thanks for being a good sport.
