All Episodes
Previous Next
March 10, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:08:18
Quillette: Discussion with Founder/Editor Claire Lehmann
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Music I'm talking today to Claire Lehman, who's originated a magazine online called Quillette, which I think has become quite popular and quite successful in a relatively short period of time.
and it's certainly a magazine that I've come to admire it.
It looks like it's staffed by real journalists, and so we're going to talk today a little bit about how she's managed that and Well, and about Quillette in general and about what her aims and ambitions are.
So I guess we might as well start, Clare, you could introduce yourself to my audience and tell them who you are and how you manage this.
Okay, so I am a former graduate student in psychology.
But before I went back to graduate school, I was working, had a couple of different jobs.
My first degree was in English, so I always wanted to be a teacher of literature, so I always had that aesthetic interest.
I just had sort of a crisis in my graduate studies where I realised it wasn't for me and I wanted to pursue writing, but I knew there was nowhere that would publish the stuff that I wanted to write And I thought, well, why don't I build my own platform?
And in the back of my mind, I knew that there were people that I knew, academics that I knew, who would also grab the opportunity to be published.
So what made you think that there was nobody there that would publish the sorts of things that you wanted to write?
Alright, so it's fairly simple.
I was working on an article about a psychologist called Lee Jossum.
He's a social psychologist who studies the accuracy of stereotypes.
And so it was a long-form article about a scientific topic but completely contradicts left-wing kind of narratives.
And those two things don't find an easy home.
So there's a lot of conservative places that are Published sort of conservative commentary, but it's often just about economics or some kind of partisan political battle.
And the interest in science is not very deep.
However, the best places for scientific journalism, such as The Guardian or Wired or Scientific American, they won't go near anything that contradicts very strong left-wing narratives, such as Stereotype accuracy or the biology of sex differences or intelligence research.
So there's these areas of the behavioural sciences that don't find a platform and I just wanted to create that platform.
And I also wanted to publish not just scientific stuff but sort of classical, liberal...
Any kind of commentary that doesn't indulge in these regressive postmodernist kind of narratives, I wanted to make it a free space for that.
And some of my early contributors were, one of my earliest contributors was a guy called Jeffrey Taylor who was an editor at The Atlantic and he wrote for places like The New Republic, but they stopped publishing His pieces because he became critical of Islam and he wanted to write pieces that were critical of Islam and he couldn't get published,
even though he was this, you know, they'd publish his other work, but anything that he wanted to publish that was critical of Islam just wouldn't get past the editors.
I'll publish it.
So what you found was an implicit censorship in some sense.
Well, that's not even the case.
It's an explicit censorship in many cases.
So the stereotype literature is interesting because one of the things the so-called stereotype researchers have failed to do is to distinguish stereotype from heuristics.
People use low resolution representations of the world all the time.
To simplify it.
It's absolutely vital that we do that.
We cannot function without categorization.
I know this was a problem with Banaji's work.
She did some of the early work on stereotyping.
I remember she did a talk at Harvard when I was teaching in Boston.
She was taken to task by the audience who weren't all social psychologists for failing to distinguish between categorization and stereotyping.
That's actually a really big problem.
It's not a trivial issue with regards to that research.
And so, I don't remember the name of the psychologist that you interviewed.
Yeah, so his name is Lee Jossum.
He's a psychologist at Rutgers University.
And he was one of the founders of the Heterodox Academy.
Okay.
Yeah, and he has a blog called Rabble Rouser at Psychology Today.
And I discovered that back in 2015, I think it was.
And he had these amazing essays about how he has battled groupthink and left-wing bias in his area of social psychology.
And he's got these amazing anecdotes and stories about how science in his particular area has not been self-correcting.
Yes, well, social psychology has been a corrupt discipline for about 25 years, as far as I can tell.
And, you know, you see that reflected in things like the political work that's been done.
So, what's it called?
System justification, for example.
That's a theory in social psychology that's being put forward by John Jost.
If I remember correctly, he's a student of Mazarin Banaji.
There's definitely an implicit left bias there, because the notion fundamentally is that if you're justifying the current system in any way, which means that you might have some element of patriotism in your thinking, or believe that the system isn't just an oppressive patriarchy, That that actually constitutes something approximating a political pathology.
That's right.
And it's really pernicious because It's built into the terminology rather than being an explicit part of the theory.
The other thing that I noticed too that was very interesting to me, it took me decades to figure this out, was that people have been studying the authoritarian personality basically since the end of World War II. There's the authoritarian personality scale that Adorno, if I remember correctly, Theodore Adorno developed.
For a long time, I was trying to figure out why in the world there wasn't the equivalent on the left.
I hate to speak in conspiratorial terms, but it's essentially a conspiratorial movement that's deeply embedded within social psychology to deny the existence of authoritarian tendencies on the left wing.
No one's managed to produce a good authoritarian left wing scale, and it's partly because Of the tremendous denial post-World War II that anything like leftist authoritarianism could exist.
It really took me a long time to sort that out.
I couldn't understand why that glaring absence existed.
We've been trying to rectify that in my lab and trying to do that in a politically neutral way, you know, by doing a large-scale factor analysis of collections of political beliefs so that we can look at it from a relatively objective perspective without trying to drive home some a priori political belief.
So you said you had a crisis in some sense when you were in graduate school pursuing psychology.
What did that consist of?
There were lots of factors going on and I had some issues with the course.
I was doing forensic psychology and I found the way it was run a little bit inflexible and authoritarian and I'm a mother so I had my son, he's now four, but at the time he was just a baby and I needed a lot of flexibility and they couldn't accommodate me and I just felt there was...
I could offer more through writing and through communication of scientific ideas than being a practicing psychologist.
I mean, I don't want to get into the full backstory of what happened in my course, but I have very cynical feelings towards universities in general.
Yeah, when I went back to graduate school, I thought that considering all of the rhetoric around helping women and helping people pursue their careers, I thought that there would be some flexibility for a young mother, but there really wasn't.
But that was not the only issue.
There were other issues, but yeah, it's...
I don't know if I really want to...
Well, that's fine.
I don't want to put you into areas that you don't want to go.
I was just curious about what exactly it was that put you on this alternative path.
And so, how long have you been running Quillette?
Since November 2015.
Okay, so it's pretty new.
Yeah, yeah.
Why don't you tell us how you did that and how you've attracted writers and how you've grown.
I'd like to know everything about it, including whatever it is that you're doing for a monetization strategy.
Because the fact that you've been able to launch a new, what would you call it, a new domain, a new enterprise devoted to...
To journalism is really quite surprising because, I mean, you bailed out of psychology into journalism and I've got to say that's out of the fire into the frying pan because that's not exactly something that you'd consider if you had a business proposal and presented that to someone and said, well, I'm going to start a new site devoted towards journalism.
You know, I think you'd be laughed out of the venture capitalist office because it's so difficult to monetize journalism now.
So tell me a little bit about how you got this all going.
Well, I was just brainstorming with my husband one night domain names.
So I knew that to start a website I needed an original domain name and we were just brainstorming and I I don't know where Quillette came from but it just came into my head and we looked that up and that was available.
So I bought the domain name.
I was running my own blog so I transferred my own blog over to this new domain and put all of my old essays up and played around with what the website would look like for about two weeks.
Playing around with the aesthetics and I'm not a developer so I had to use sort of a website template out of the box.
So the aesthetics were really important to me and I knew that if I was going to do something it had to look really good and so I was playing around with that and then I put the word out through social media that I was going to launch a site And would anyone like to contribute?
And I happen to have some contacts in my social network who had essays up their sleeves.
My two first contributors were Brian Boutwell, who is a criminologist at St Louis University, and Jamie Palmer, who's an excellent writer based in London.
And Brian, his first The essay was about being a criminologist who studies biology and about being shunned by his field.
And I didn't realise he was such a brilliant writer before he started writing for me.
It was just pure luck that he happened to be such a brilliant writer.
The second essay that he published got something like 100,000 views in just a few weeks.
So we immediately sort of exploded and that was Just due to the quality of the contributors that I had straight away.
What did he write about for that first essay?
The first one was on bio-social criminology.
The second one was on behavioral genetics and the essay was about how parenting might not shape your personality as much as you think it does.
And he was explaining the data from twin studies.
And it was just such a well-written and counter-intuitive kind of essay.
It just exploded.
So, I mean, lots of people disagreed with it, but it made a huge impact.
Right, so she got to the heart of the conflict between the social constructionists and the biologists.
I know there's a new word that sort of emerged.
I don't know if it's specific to Canada or not, but the word is biological essentialist.
And that seems to be like social justice warrior code for fascist, as far as I can tell.
And, you know, biological essentialist seems to be anyone who believes that there's any degree of biological influence on any element of human character whatsoever.
And, you know, last year I was concerned, because of what was happening in Canada, that Being a biologist was eventually going to be illegal in some sense, which I actually believe it is, technically, under certain provisions of our law, because this Bill C-16 that I opposed last year,
which was passed nationally, has written social constructionism into the law, so our law now is predicated on the idea that their relationship between biological sex, gender expression, Gender identity and sexual proclivity,
which are all viewed as independent factors, are in fact technically independent, that there's no causal relationship between them, which is a palpably absurd notion because the correlation between them, you know, Biological males almost always have a male gender identity.
They almost always act and dress like males, and they're almost always heterosexual.
The correlations across the levels exceed 0.95 across all of the levels, and yet in the law now it's technically the case that you have to treat those as independent, and that suggesting that they're not I can't say that it's tantamount to hate speech, but I would say that it's close to that.
I don't know if you've seen the sort of ridiculous animations that have been used, animated drawings, like the gender-bred person or the gender unicorn.
So those are being pushed It's going forward very hard in institutions all across Canada, elementary schools, junior high schools, the military, the police, you name it, where there's this tremendous emphasis on the social construction of identity, and it's as if the social constructionists have taken to the law Enforce what they cannot prove scientifically, what they failed to prove scientifically, or what's even been disproved scientifically, which would be a more accurate way of thinking about it.
And the fact that there's an all-out assault on biology by the left is unbelievably ominous in my estimation.
Yeah, I agree.
Just two things on that.
We've got an article coming out on Quillette written by two evolutionary psychologists on the The false dichotomy between sex and gender and they give it some historical context.
So the false dichotomy I think started with Mooney?
Yes, exactly.
And then it was weaponized by feminists to deny biology and to deny sex differences basically.
It's a very strange thing for feminists to do.
One of the things that James Damore has just pointed out lately, he's the guy that wrote that memo for Google, is that the problem with denying the sex differences is that you automatically make the argument that if there are sex differences, essentially they're making the argument that the female differences are something like inferior, because why in the world would you object to their existence otherwise?
Damore's memo was actually quite careful because he said, well, we should take a look at these differences and if we want to maximize the economic utility of women, which seems to be a reasonable thing to do, then we should actually have a serious discussion about what the differences are and see if we can set up our institutions so that we can take advantage of the difference in perspective and orientation that the two sexes might bring to bear on the workplace and on economic issues in general.
And you see some of that happening because people are starting to sort themselves out into occupations by sex, essentially, and the long-term social consequences of that aren't obvious and we don't know how to balance that, but it isn't necessarily the case that it's a bad thing.
No, yeah.
And my position has always been that women have probably more to lose when sex differences are denied.
I think because of women's biological clock and the fact that we bear much more of a burden when it comes to childbearing and child-wearing, if you deny that, you know, women pay a huge price.
If you deny the fact that what women go through to bear children...
Firstly, I think we need to separate mothers out...
There's sort of a conflation when we talk about things like the gender gap where a lot of the rhetoric implies that all women are discriminated against.
The women who pay a penalty are mothers and we need to talk about that more and we shouldn't minimise the work and the sacrifice and all of the costs and the Energy that women pour into that and I think when we deny sex differences We sort of We we do we minimize and we sort of
dismiss Everything that women do that is female normative such as caring and and and working for others and and Sacrificing pay for their children and you know all of these things and it Right.
Well, no, I agree with you completely.
My daughter just had a baby a month ago, you know, and we were talking to her last night.
She's trying to finish up her degree.
She's also had some health problems that have interfered with that.
And, you know, she was talking to us last night about, and she looked tired.
She had bags under her eyes.
And I mean, she's very happy to have the baby and it's going very well and all of that.
But the first year after you have a baby, you're basically done.
You know, you don't get any sleep.
You're You're absolutely overwhelmed, especially for the first six months with a new infant, especially if you're a first-time mother, because what the hell do you know about taking care of this incredibly complicated thing?
It produces all sorts of biochemical changes, and it's really hard on your body, and there's a long recovery period, and you're much more dependent on your familial structure than you were before.
It's crazy that we even have to have this conversation, but I like your distinction between women and mothers.
One of the problems that I've had with classic feminism, if you could use that term, is that there's absolutely no respect built into it for the maternal role.
I really think that that's that's appalling on a variety of levels including appalling for men because like one of the things I've experienced is that I've had a pretty intense career I would say I've been very fortunate in that manner and I've had a lot of familial support and support from my wife for that and you know we kind of parsed our life up in a relatively traditional manner because she was quite interested in having children by the time we got together and I was I'm perfectly willing to go along
with that if I could also continue my career pursuits, which were also necessary for our financial stability.
But for me, the domestic realm has been an incredibly meaningful part of my life.
I'm really happy in my marriage and blessed, I would say, in my marriage.
I loved having kids and and for me my home has always been a refuge from from the Insanity of the world in some sense and I think our society is it's it's so crazily skewed towards public performance let's say that we've denied the utility of the domestic sphere and that really is terrible for women because especially with regards to kids because that is their That is the role that they dominate,
let's say, or dominate, that they contribute most mightily to, let's put it that way.
And it's almost as if our society regards that as kind of an epiphenomena, you know, and I think it's crazy.
I think it makes people miserable.
I do too.
And I understand why the early feminists sort of downplayed the domestic...
Because they were trapped in the domestic sphere and they wanted opportunities.
And I'm one of those women who would have been an early feminist probably because I crave intellectual stimulation and I would have been...
If I'd never had an opportunity to have a career, I would have been bored and that kind of thing.
But now, in 2017, I can go and get a job as a psychologist.
I can run a website and, you know, I can...
Do everything that a man can, but I'm still biologically a female, and so when it comes to having kids, the cost is on me.
And the women in my life, for example, my own mother who's super maternal and comes and helps with the children, I see how we don't give that status and prestige anymore, and it's just this male normative sphere where You can monetize something or something, like you said, public performance.
We afford that status and prestige, but this invisible, caring work that women are so good at and some women are exceptional at, it's afforded no prestige whatsoever.
It's often the opposite.
You know, I noticed when my wife had little kids, for example, even though our little kids were very well behaved, that she wasn't treated well in the public sphere.
She wasn't treated well in restaurants.
I think people were afraid.
I think that was part of it in some sense.
They were afraid that if she showed up in a public place with children that there would be a disruption of one form or another.
But it was certainly the case that I would say she received the opposite of respect.
I've looked deeply into archetypal symbolism and the function that it plays.
And of course, one of the divine images that sits at the bottom of Western culture, and not only Western culture, is the image of the Divine Mother.
The mother of the savior of humanity, which is an archetypal idea, because every baby has the possibility of growing up to be a redemptive figure.
The reason that that's an archetypal figure is because any society that doesn't worship it, so to speak, doesn't give it a very high value.
The fact that the catastrophically declining birth rate in the West is a real example of our willful blindness towards that sacred image.
It's a big problem.
It is the case that, I think, if the feminists were actually working on behalf of femininity, which is essentially what they claim, That they would be working a hell of a lot harder to elevate the status of mothers, you know, rather than women.
I think that's a really good distinction that you're drawing, even though it seems rather self-evident.
It's not, and you're not the same once you become a mother.
You're a different sort of person.
And I also think women who don't have children are rather intimidated and afraid of that, and that's perfectly understandable, because it is a radical transformation.
But I would also say, and I've thought this for years, that you don't actually become mature.
You don't actually become an adult until you have children.
And I know that that's a statement that irritates the hell out of people, but it's something that I stand by.
You're not an adult until someone else matters more than you do.
And you know what it is to make real sacrifices.
Yes, exactly.
Well, especially as a mother, you sacrifice yourself as the person of prime importance.
And, you know, you do it, I suppose, happily in some sense because generally you fall in love with your baby relatively rapidly.
And thank God for that because there are lots of trouble.
You know, I was recounting the story of my daughter and she is...
She was planning to take a course in biology online this semester in order to move towards the completion of her degree.
She said she was overwhelmed when we went and talked to her last night and we told her just to leave it be.
Because that first year is so intense that you're completely overwhelmed by it.
And it's necessary because you want to get your baby off to a good start and get that relationship functioning properly.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's one of the issues I had with my master's degree.
I couldn't bring myself to do a thesis because I wasn't going to have the energy or the motivation to do it.
Instead, I created a website which also requires a lot of energy but it's sort of self-generative because people write articles, they send them in, all I have to do is...
A little bit of editing and then post it online and it's not quite as absorbing as writing a thesis, which I wouldn't be able to do at this time.
So one of the things that I've been studying and thinking about is high achievement among people in general.
And this is also something that I don't think is given any serious consideration in our discussion of the differences between the between the sexes.
So, you know, the number of people who are extremely high achieving in any field is very low, right?
And that depends on the Pareto principle, essentially.
And that works itself out mathematically so that the square root of the number of people in a domain do half the work.
So if you have a hundred scientists working in a particular subfield, then ten of them will publish half the articles.
And if you look at that tiny percentage of people who are hyper productive, they're almost all men.
And so like in universities, the median number of publications for men and women is very close.
But the high publishers are all men.
And the reason for that is because in order to be in that category, not only do you have to be extraordinarily smart and extraordinarily conscientious, But associated with that conscientiousness, you have to be able to devote something like 60 to 80 hours a week of solid attention to your job because otherwise people will out-compete you, right?
So it's these extremely focused and narrow people who are...
Obsessive!
That's exactly right.
They're absolutely obsessed with what they're doing and they're quite rare and that they're also the mystery that needs to be solved because, you know, the The fact that most people want to have a balanced life and that most people aren't absolutely obsessed with a single issue to the exclusion of all else is actually normative behavior and quite understandable.
You get this extreme personality, let's say, and it's certainly not something I'm criticizing, but it's not the common lot.
And I do believe that it's a far more difficult thing for women to manage because once you're responsible for someone else, like you are primarily responsible for small children, Then it's extraordinarily difficult to concentrate like that to the expansion of all else.
You know, I've seen a couple of women that I've had professional relationships with, usually worked in the capacity of something like an executive coach in my clinical practice, who've kind of managed that, but they're so They're stretched.
They're concerned with the number of seconds that they have to microwave their food.
They're hyper-organized.
And even then, it's very difficult for them to manage because they're juggling four or five impossible things at the same time.
Often also guilt-ridden because they feel that they're not paying enough attention to their children.
Generally they are, and they make very good role models.
But it's a hell of a thing to expect of someone who also has a maternal role.
It isn't obvious.
That it's even possible.
And that's another thing we can't have a serious conversation about because there's all sorts of lies, I would say, about how it's the glass ceiling or male models of success that are stopping women from succeeding at that high level.
And that isn't right.
What stops people from succeeding at that high level is it's virtually impossible to begin with and all you need is one more impediment and then you can't manage it.
Yeah, that's right.
Camille Paglia has said that feminism has never acknowledged the guilt that women feel when they have children and they are working and they pursue their careers.
And, you know, I've seen it at workplaces where I've worked where women are high-achieving, they've got their PhDs, they're there working full-time and they are wracked with guilt.
And I don't think that happens to men nearly to the same degree.
I don't think it happens to men, really, at all.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it hasn't been to my observation that it happens to men.
It happens to women all the time.
All the time.
Like, I've done an awful lot of coaching with high-achieving women.
I did that for about 10 years.
And, you know, these were women who were pretty much outstanding in multiple dimensions, you know.
But what would also, this is mostly in the field of law, and so most of them were in their early 30s.
Not only were they racked with guilt if they had children and weren't spending as much time as they wanted with them, but they were also racked with guilt when they did spend time with their children because then they weren't spending enough time on their career.
And so they were basically screwed both ways.
And it wasn't merely a matter of Let's say high negative emotional sensitivity, you know, because that is a biological difference between men and women.
Although I would say some of the women that I coached were quite feminine and were more prone to anxiety than might have been good for them.
But it was merely a response to what's essentially an impossible situation.
And it's also not something that there's an easy answer to.
I mean, what I would recommend to them was that they outsource all of the domestic duties they could possibly manage.
And most of the successful women did that.
They had nannies.
They outsourced everything they could, including their laundry.
They tried to rid themselves of any domestic duties that could be partialed out to a third party.
And that's necessary.
It's not optional if you want to pursue a career at a high level.
But it also requires a pretty high standard of living to be able to pull that off because it's not like child care of any quality is extremely expensive and it's very difficult to bring that cost down because with young children you need a very high ratio of caregiver to child like three to one or four to one and so if you have someone who's even vaguely qualified and you pay them say forty thousand dollars a year which is pretty low double that for overhead so that's eighty thousand So just the bare minimum cost
of the highest quality of quasi-institutional care for children is easily $20,000 per child per year.
And there's no easy way of forcing that cost down.
The arithmetic is very straightforward.
So it's a major societal problem, and it isn't clear that...
And what's unfortunate is that we're not having serious conversations about this because we pretend that the barriers are, well, a consequence of something like patriarchal oppression or straightforward, you know, prejudice against women, and that's just simply not the case.
The irony is that to make things easier for middle-class professional women, you need more working-class women who can do cleaning and nannying work.
If you get to make life easier, you need a cohort of lowly paid women, which I don't think would help the gender gap, if that makes sense.
You have two tiers of highly paid women.
That's exactly right.
That's another under-discussed topic, which is that you...
You end up transferring the primary, let's say, maternal burden, domestic burden, on to, generally, well, they're generally ethnic minority people.
That's very, very common.
I mean, it's not necessarily a bad bargain for them.
Given their comparative options, let's say.
But it's very difficult to pay someone who's doing domestic work enough so that they can have a reasonable standard of living, partly because it's just so expensive to do so.
So it's an intransigent problem, to say the least.
And it would be nice if we could actually have a serious and compassionate discussion about it.
And I think the compassion part...
Is to actually take a harsh look at such factors as the biological clock, which certainly make women's lives much more complicated up till their, let's say, till their 40s.
It seems to me that men might have more complicated lives in the latter part of their life because, of course, we die about eight years earlier and our health problems are more extreme and all of that.
But I think that men's situation in life is somewhat simpler than women, certainly up to the age of about 40.
And it's unfortunate that we can't address that squarely and start to figure out what to do about it.
Not that it's a simple thing, because it's certainly not.
Well, some places do better than others.
I think it's in Holland.
I think in some of the Scandinavian countries, many women work part-time and it's found to be quite productive for their economy and women are happy working part-time.
So, you know, I think some societies are a little bit more Progressive in answering some of these questions.
However, there's still this, I don't know if any Western culture has many honest conversations about biological sex differences.
We don't have it in Australia.
It doesn't seem like you have it in Canada or America.
I don't know if it happens in the Scandinavian countries.
I don't see any evidence that it does.
I mean, the Scandinavians are always concerned that there's over-representation of men in the STEM fields, for example, especially in engineering, even though I think the data is pretty clear that The idea that men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people is pretty damn robust finding and the differences aren't small either.
I mean, and the biological difference literature has been quite, I think, quite productive because basically what it's indicated is that there doesn't seem to be really much difference in men and women with regards to raw intellectual ability.
The mean IQ is pretty much dead on exactly the same.
Now there is a little debate about whether the standard deviation is the same, with some evidence suggesting that men have a flatter standard deviation, so there's more hyper geniuses and there's more men who are intellectually impaired.
Certainly there's more men who are intellectually impaired on the learning disability end of this distribution, for example.
Even small differences in standard deviation can make huge differences out at the ends of the table.
But I would say the evidence for that is mixed.
It's not conclusive.
But the evidence for difference in personality I think is absolutely conclusive and the evidence for difference in interest is even more conclusive.
The effect sizes are extremely large.
And what is really interesting is how the sex differences in personality become larger In gender egalitarian countries.
Yes, that's scandalous is what that is.
Yeah.
Because it's an absolute disproof of the social constructionist theory.
And it's very solid science, despite the fact, I mean, that's some of the material that James Damore referred to in his memo.
And it's very solid science from a social science perspective.
I would say it's at the point where it's not incontrovertible precisely, but it's about as close as you get in the social sciences.
Yeah.
Yeah, David Schmidt was the lead author on that study, I believe, on the finding that personality differences increase in gender egalitarian countries.
And I think what I find interesting is his finding that women become more neurotic and more anxious in more free, you know, gender egalitarian or countries that have more freedom.
I think that's really interesting.
And it speaks to It suggests that there must be some kind of biological underpinning for anxiety in women, the sex difference in anxiety.
Well, we should never assume that freedom is something that brings security.
I mean, because freedom opens an expansive domain up in front of you.
That's full of opportunity, but if we think about that as novelty or the unexpected or unexplored territory, then your primary response to unexplored territory, especially if the territory is vast, is initially paralysis and fear.
Even in the mythology of the hero, which is the archetypal story of the confrontation with the unexplored, it's very, very common for the hero to take flight at the first appearance of the Of the, let's say, of the Dragon of Chaos.
That's a good way of thinking about it archetypally.
Because that expanse is very...
It's unsettled in the technical sense.
And, you know, that's where the monsters are.
And so we should never make the assumption that more freedom means more happiness.
And, you know, the literature on happiness is quite interesting because it's actually not a literature on happiness.
It's a literature on the absence of anxiety.
Because it isn't that people want to be happy.
It's that they don't want to be miserable and anxious.
And because those are technically separate systems, one Governs, let's say, extroversion.
That's the approach positive emotion system, and the other governs freezing, you know, prey-like freezing and then retreat.
It's mostly what we want to do is keep the prey-like response and the retreat systems under control because they're unbearable when they're activated.
And so, there's just no reason at all to assume either that freedom or even economic advantage It's associated with well-being.
There's no evidence that people in industrialized countries are happier than people in non-industrialized countries, even though their standard of living is much higher and they live much longer and they're more disease-free.
And I think a big part of that problem is that It takes a tremendous amount of sacrifice and work that's future oriented in order to keep a society with a high standard of living functioning and so you're constantly sacrificing the pleasures of the moment to the security of the future and that's a major moral and emotional load even though the reasons for it are obvious but that doesn't simply boil down to something like freedom from anxiety
or happiness If you have a high-pressure job, well, you have a high-pressure job, you have responsibilities, and if you screw up, major things happen with major consequences, and that's also a tremendous burden, even though you can be well paid for it.
We studied some workers in a factory in Wisconsin, and we were doing testing that Would help identify promising workers who could be streamed into a management role.
And you know, we found about a third of them didn't want to take the tests.
And when we investigated that, the reason was, well, they wanted to work 9 to 5 in a bounded manner.
So that when they went home at night at 5 o'clock, they were done their damn job, and they could have their life.
And the thing about professional level jobs is that complex jobs, managerial jobs, complex administrative jobs, or jobs in science, or any of the professions, is that you're never not working.
Yeah.
So if you add to that the complexity of a family, then you've got things to worry about that are significant all the time.
And so if you're also higher in sensitivity to negative emotion, that's very stressful, and genuinely so.
And that's the price you pay, and it's not a trivial price.
So back to Quillette for a minute.
Can you tell me a little bit about its reach and scope and about its monetization?
Sure.
You don't have to get into the details, but people might be interested in trying to figure out how you manage that.
Okay, so for the first year that I was running it, it was self-funded.
I wasn't collecting any revenue through advertising or patronage.
I funded it myself.
But my costs were very low.
It doesn't cost a whole lot to run a website.
I had minimal infrastructure at the time.
I now have more robust infrastructure, which costs more.
I pay professional freelance writers a fee, but academics who wrote for me, because they were already salaried, they did pro bono writing, and that was fine.
So for the first year, I... I bootstrapped it and I funded it myself and then last year I set up a Patreon page and for a while I was getting just enough to cover costs and a little bit to pay writers and then I put advertising on the website and I was earning a little A little bit through that,
but the earnings are quite modest and my patronage has recently been bumped up because we published quite a popular article about the Google memo.
Before James was sacked, I had reached out to four scientists, one evolutionary psychologist, Jeffrey Miller, Lee Jussum, the social psychologist, Deborah Sow, the Canadian sex writer, and David Schmidt, who is the author of that famous study.
And I got them to write a couple of paragraphs on what they thought about the Google memo.
And I published that just as the news broke that he was fired.
And so that kind of went viral and the site crashed.
And so we got a lot of attention for that and our patronage has since doubled.
Before that article was published we were getting around between 10 and 15 to 20,000 visitors a day and now it's between 15 and 30,000 a day.
So we get quite a lot of traffic and I could be making more money through advertising but the problem with advertising is that it slows down the webpage and there's this trade-off between having a website that Looks nice and is reasonably fast and one that is just loaded with ugly ads and is slow and clunky.
And so I've decided that I'm just going to focus on the patronage business model and get rid of the ads and just focus on pleasing the patrons.
And I think patronage is a better model to go with anyway because you don't have to worry about How many clicks or views an article gets, you just have to focus on the quality and your patrons will reward you for quality, not for, you know, how many...
Yeah, exactly.
The other advantage to patronage is that you're a lot more immune from political pressure and demonetization, which is increasingly a big deal.
I mean, obviously advertisers have the right to advertise wherever they want, but certainly on YouTube that's become an emergent There's many problems on YouTube, including censorship from within YouTube itself and the construction of these artificial intelligence social justice bots that they're producing like mad.
But the demonetization issue is a real problem for anybody that wants to maintain any sort of journalistic independence.
And I know lots of people like Dave Rubin, for example, has been hit really hard by demonetization.
So the patronage model seems to be a really good one.
How much revenue are you generating with Patreon at the moment, if you don't mind me asking?
3,000 US a month.
Okay, so with any luck, that'll continue to grow.
We'll definitely put a link to your Patreon account in the description of this interview, and I would certainly encourage people who are watching to To support Clare because Quillette is really quite a remarkable accomplishment and it's exactly the kind of journalism.
It reminds me kind of what the Atlantic Monthly used to be like before it took a nosedive into political correctness over the last, I think, about five years.
It's something that seems to be afflicting so many journalistic sources.
I even see it as something that's characterizing The Economist, which was a magazine that seemed pretty independent of that sort of thing for quite a while.
And the New Republic used to be a A great bastion of classical liberalism and just defence of Western civilisation and now it's the most regressive post-modernist, I mean the New Republic is unreadable.
I don't know if you're familiar with that magazine.
Yeah, I'm not as familiar with it as the other ones that I listed, but I've noticed the same thing.
The other thing that's interesting, and this is part of the reason that I'm so concerned with the pathology of the universities, is because it seems to me, and this sounds conspiratorial, but I'm afraid I'm still going to discuss it, The really serious post-modern neo-Marxist disciplines like women's studies, for example.
They're very, very good at producing activists who are very, very good at occupying mid-level bureaucratic positions and dominating relevant institutions.
So, for example, one of the things that's happened in the province I live in in Ontario this month is that the Ontario Law Society has now made it mandatory for lawyers to come out with a statement on diversity and equity.
So they have to do that as part of their practice.
And they basically have to admit to white privilege and systemic racism within the profession, despite the fact that their own damn data indicate, for example, that Asians are over-represented in the legal profession.
The whole idea is if you have a theory and then you have a data point that invalidates the theory that's a reliable data point, then your theory is wrong.
And the fact that the white dominated legal profession actually promotes Asians at a rate that exceeds what you'd expect by a population analysis absolutely invalidates the idea of systemic racism.
But it doesn't matter because the Law Society has been taken over by a small coterie of extraordinarily dedicated postmodern activists and the amount they care for facts is zero since they don't even believe in the existence of facts.
We've had the same thing happen to the Law Society in Australia.
My husband's a lawyer and he brought home The Law Society magazine and on the front cover was an article about unconscious bias training and how it's going to be mandatory for all lawyers in Australia.
I sent off a couple of emails to psychologists I know who do research in this area and one got back to me saying there is no data, there are no meta-analyses and there are no randomized controlled trials that show that unconscious bias training has any effect after a couple of hours like it might have an initial effect on people when they're doing a pencil and paper survey but after a couple of hours that
that's all gone and there's no long-term effect on any measurable outcomes in the workplace so there's no That's right.
It's a complete scam.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a scam.
And it's based on that, you know, the implicit association test, of course, which has been pushed by people who have a very explicit radical left-wing agenda, by the way, because Mazarin Banaji is known quite well for that.
And it's been absolutely misused, like the relationship between so-called implicit bias and categorization isn't well understood.
We don't understand the relationship between implicit bias and the kind of in-group preference that makes you love your own family, for example, as opposed to, you know, equally distributing your care across the entire expanse of seven billion people, the seven billion people that make up the human race, which of course you just simply can't do.
The behavioral effects of that implicit categorization, let's call it, rather than bias, aren't well understood.
And there's no evidence whatsoever that unconscious bias retraining programs do anything that's positive whatsoever.
And yet it's being pushed, especially, and being made mandatory at all sorts of levels of corporations.
I can't understand why the lawyers, for example, put up with this.
It's like they're being accused.
They're being accused of guilt before innocence, which is that they're all a bunch of racists.
They're being accused in the most appalling way because they're saying that, well, it's even unconscious.
They're going after their target's unconscious perceptions, which is so totalitarian that it isn't even something that the bloody Soviets could have thought up.
The legal profession As far as I'm aware, it relies on the reasonable person standard and the practitioners, the lawyers and judges, are supposed to be free of bias.
I mean, they're not...
If you're in trouble with the law and you go to a lawyer, he's biased or she's biased towards you, but if you...
If the legal profession are now saying that their lawyers are inherently racist and sexist, I mean, that undermines the entire profession.
Well, I would also say that that's actually the reason that this is being done, is to undermine the entire profession, because the meta story behind the postmodern and neo-Marxist activists is that everything about Western civilization is corrupt and oppressive and should be taken down to its, you know, stripped down to its roots and rebuilt.
The fact that the implicit message is, well, you can't trust the legal profession, is no problem for the people who are doing that, because that's exactly what they think.
They think the entire edifice of Western law is nothing but an oppressive patriarchal construction, which is so appallingly backwards that it's almost beyond comprehension.
I mean, I suppose compared to their utopian view, it's an oppressive structure, but compared to every other legal system in the world, it operates like a charm.
I think that's the view of the postmodernists and the activists but I think there are sensible people who aren't familiar with postmodernism that go along with this stuff and I see corporations and the legal societies implementing this unconscious bias training.
I think a lot of it has to do with mitigating the risk of lawsuits and then if they do get a lawsuit, for example, if A female employee wants to sue them for gender discrimination in the workplace.
They can say, oh, well, we've had this bias training.
We're trying to do the right thing.
For example, Google now have a class action lawsuit against them.
A handful of female employees are suing them for gender discrimination.
They're saying that there is systematic gender discrimination because they were paid less than some male engineers that were hired at the same time that they were and were promoted more quickly.
And so I think a lot of these policies are companies and corporations just trying to cover their backside when it comes to the threat of legal action.
No, I think that's right, and I think that's driven in the United States by legislation like Title IX because that's held over, especially in educational institutions, which is where it primarily applies, that's held over their heads like the Sword of Damocles, and it's been tremendously damaging, but the problem is, for the corporations, is that they're They're chasing away a small devil and letting a way bigger devil in at the same time.
And so, as a short-term solution, it's somewhat acceptable.
But by participating in these mandatory unconscious bias retraining processes, they do two things.
The first thing they do is admit their guilt, right?
Pragmatically speaking.
And that's a big mistake.
It's a massive mistake to let someone accuse you of Unconscious systematic racism and bias and then to allow yourself to be retrained because you're basically admitting guilt and I can't see that that's going to put them on a stronger legal ground moving forward You know because by saying well we need this training you're admitting that the problem Exists at precisely the level that it's being diagnosed and you know my experience especially with with say with large law firms is that they're so goddamn desperate
for talent and That they do everything they possibly can, say, to retain their women.
Men over backwards and tie themselves into knots, because if you have a female, high-performing female lawyer, who's also capable of generating revenue, I mean, those people are incredibly valuable.
And that doesn't mean that there isn't conflict between the men and women in the law firms at an individual level.
Because the other thing that you see happening in high-achieving professions, among high-achieving people, is that They're very, very competitive.
And I've certainly seen, like I've had many women in my coaching practice, let's say, who were under constant stress from the men in their immediate environment who wouldn't cooperate with them.
And my point always was, look, it's not surprising that these men aren't cooperating with you.
You're a threat.
You're very good at what you do.
And they're not only trying to be good lawyers, they're trying to win.
And you are actually doing the winning, and so they're not going to help you.
And the objection of the women, generally who were agreeable women, say, you know, so more on the feminine end of the spectrum, was, well, we're all on the same team, we should be pulling together.
It's like, well, that isn't exactly how competitive men work, is that partly they're conscientious, which is the primary characteristic of a high-achieving lawyer, as well as high verbal intelligence, but they also tend to be very disagreeable.
Especially if they're litigators and obviously they're disagreeable because they wouldn't be litigators otherwise.
Disagreeable men are competitive and they want to win.
It's another thing that we won't talk about, we can't talk about, is how in the world men are supposed to compete with women.
Because men don't know how to compete with women.
Winning is preferable to losing, let's say, but it also tends to make you into something of a bully.
And that's a big problem in competitive environments because the competition is actually part of what drives the productivity.
That's right.
So it's also not a straightforward thing to sort out at all, and I don't know exactly what we're going to do about that.
So some of what's regarded as, say, prejudice against women Some of that can be merely attributed to the fact that men are competitive and they treat each other harshly as well.
It's not as if it's limited to their...
In fact, I know perfectly well that it's essentially mitigated in the case of women.
Men are harsher with each other than they are with women, even though they can be perfectly, plenty harsh with women.
But it's part of what's accepted as normative in primarily male situations.
Sure, sure.
And it's a different, that kind of needling or, you know, the casual insults.
I mean, it's not taken as offensive often in male-only groups.
It's almost a way of bonding.
Yeah, sure.
It's also part of the mutual testing that goes on.
Because one of the things you want to find out from a new work crew member, let's say, And I really saw this when I was working in working class situations, is you really harass the hell out of them for a couple of weeks, you know?
Put them down, give them nicknames, make fun of them, and a huge part of the reason you're doing that is to see if they have the kind of emotional and psychological integrity that would indicate that they could take a joke, they can give and take, they can stand some competition, and that they're not going to shirk and they're not going to fail in a crisis.
And men are good at doing that with each other, and it's harder to do that with women.
It isn't obvious exactly how you should do that.
I mean, it can be managed, but it's definitely not the same thing.
It's a different thing.
I mean, I think part of the reason too that men are bailing out of so many university disciplines is because they also don't know how to manage the environment when it becomes female dominated.
They're not exactly sure what the rules of engagement are.
With the man I respect, my attitude is something like, No holds barred and let the devil take the hindmost, right?
It's something like that.
And I can be as harsh and blunt and straightforward as I want to be in a situation like that.
But the rules aren't the same when dealing with women.
And it isn't exactly that I know what the rules are.
I just know that they're not the same.
And that's quite confusing.
You know, like in my TV appearances, one of my producers has always cautioned me about Panels that are mixed sex and and and he said it's very bad form on television to to be on the attack in a mixed sex panel because you come across as a bully yeah and and and and fair enough I understand that but I also don't know what to do about it because it seems like like pulling
my punches so to speak seems like seems necessary but also oddly Yeah, yeah.
It puts me at a loss.
I'm not exactly sure how to manage it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's one of the situations where there's a lot of variation among women and if you don't know anything more about a person other than the fact that they're a woman, you don't know if they're on the sort of male typical, you know, they're more masculine or they're on the highly agreeable, you know, feminine side.
You don't know anything about their personality, so you don't know if they're going to be able to handle that give and take.
One thing that I find really interesting is that we know quite a lot about male competition, but we haven't studied female competition a great deal.
I know that some evolutionary psychologists have been studying it, like Ann Campbell, but Women compete with each other as well, and women have their own forms of aggression, but it's not spoken about much in our culture.
And even in the workplace, women compete with each other, and I think that's it.
Women might come up against hostile or hyper-competitive men, but women come up against other women as well.
And it could be the case that Younger women are not, well, one speculation or hypothesis that I've had is that younger women don't always find it easier to work with older women because there is competition there and hostility.
Yes, well, there is evidence that women are happier with male bosses than with female bosses.
And, you know, your observation about us not understanding the female competitive landscape is spot on.
We don't understand female dominance hierarchies very well because females in the workplace are in a female dominance hierarchy and a male dominance hierarchy and the rules are not the same.
And there's certainly a kind of sexual attractiveness tension between older women and younger women that doesn't play the same way with men.
And it puts a strange dynamic into the workplace.
And it's certainly by no means self-evident that women are women's best friends in the workplace either.
That's right.
These are all things that we don't understand well and are afraid to address.
I'm very curious about the female dominance hierarchy because it's not predicated on the same presumptions as the male dominance hierarchy.
I had a friend of mine who's a very insightful person.
He was talking about the mode of dress that's characteristic of repressive Islam.
One of his hypotheses was that it was a way that the older women exercise control over the sexual attractiveness of the younger women.
It's actually not primarily a phenomenon that's associated with male dominance of women at all.
I think that's a really interesting hypothesis and highly credible because young women have a tremendous amount of sexual power.
Let's call it a complicating factor.
We could at least get away with that.
It's a massively complicating factor.
And we also don't know the degree to which women use sexual attractiveness in the workplace as a mode of achieving dominance and power.
One of the things I've thought about for example is, and I'm not suggesting that this is something that should be done, but a society that was truly aiming at removing sex bias from the workplace might ban makeup.
Because it's not self-evident to me that that's appropriate from a technical perspective in the workplace because it mixes Sexual attractiveness with functionality in a way that's well in a way that at least is complex now I wouldn't ever say that we should go so far as to ban makeup in the workplace But there's a point to be made there which is that we haven't separated out the politics from the sexual politics and that's a major major problem and and and Partly
because we can't have real discussions about it generally speaking.
It's something that stays unaddressed and so So, I'm going to stop, I think.
I'm very happy that you agreed to talk with me today.
I'm a great admirer of your website.
I think Quillette has done a remarkable job.
I hope we get a chance to talk again.
And I'm certainly going to encourage all the people who are watching and listening to contribute to your Patreon account because I really believe that support for that is going to be in everyone's best interest.
Let's put it that way.
And so, thanks very much for the conversation and I hope that we get a chance to talk again in a relatively near future.
And I'll let you know when this is up and all of that, okay?
All right.
Great.
All right.
Thanks, Jordan.
You bet.
Nice chatting.
Nice talking to you.
Okay.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
▲
Export Selection