Sept. 28, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:06
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is the founding editor of Quillette, Claire Lehman. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| I am thrilled to finally have you here. | ||
| This has been like, what, 87 years in the making? | ||
| Well, I live a very long way away, so it's difficult for me to get here. | ||
| Yeah, well, you made it. | ||
| You made it thousands of miles. | ||
| You are part of what I would say is IDW Australia, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, the diaspora. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Okay, so there's a ton I want to talk to you about. | ||
| Obviously, I want to focus on Quillette and the work that you're doing, and we obviously have a lot in common on the issues that we care about and things of that nature. | ||
| But first off, you are from Australia. | ||
| I've only had, I think, Two other guests that are Australian natives on the show. | ||
| What's going on in Australia these days? | ||
| What does the rest of the world need to know about Australia? | ||
| I would say that in Australia we're pretty chilled out at the moment, at least politically and culturally, compared to America and even Europe to a large extent. | ||
| We've had 25 years or more of economic growth. | ||
| So, people are pretty relaxed. | ||
| People are doing well. | ||
| The middle class is doing well. | ||
| There's not so much of a feeling that there's a zero-sum competition going on, like people are fighting over scarce resources. | ||
| And, you know, we obviously have political correctness and identity politics. | ||
| A lot of that's being imported from America. | ||
| How does that get imported? | ||
| Because I was mentioning to you right before we started that a disproportionate amount of our patrons, the people who support this show, are Australians. | ||
| So even if things are going pretty well, there's definitely a segment of people that are going, something's either not right or we're seeing the signs. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| I mean, it's difficult to identify exactly how these cultural trends get imported, but for example, through universities, through social media, through traditional media, so similar narratives get picked up by journalists, like the oppression narratives and And we're seeing with the younger generations how they pick up ideology through social media and through the echo chambers and the filter bubbles that are so easily accessible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that there's a geographic reason that some of this stuff hasn't fully hit Australia yet? | ||
| I mean, being surrounded by water in a pretty far off place from the rest of us, there's probably a little bit of safety in that, I would imagine. | ||
| Although borders are changing just because of technology. | ||
| Yeah, so we're more isolated, that's for sure. | ||
| We're smaller, so we don't have the same, we're not as diverse as other places like Europe and the United States. | ||
| We have less income inequality in Australia, which makes a difference. | ||
| And we're actually kind of parochial as well. | ||
| I mean, we do pick up cultural trends from America, but at the same time, we just focus on cooking shows and reality TV and football games. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when the article came out back in, was it May or so? | ||
| The Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, you were included in there, and many of us had not even met you at that point. | ||
| This is actually our first time meeting in person, even though we've been chatting online for a while. | ||
| Were you shocked about the reaction to that article? | ||
| Because it really did sort of level up all of the issues that we've been all talking about. | ||
| No, I wasn't shocked at all. | ||
| I think that the general movement, this ideas movement and this pushback of the sort of moral orthodoxy that the politically correct left have at the moment, it's been brewing for some time and someone just had to put a label on it, someone just had to name it. | ||
| I wasn't shocked by the groundswell of reaction to it because I've been seeing it through my work with Colette. | ||
| There are just so many people who write to me every day who say, I love what you're doing. | ||
| I can't write a blog myself. | ||
| I can't put my name on it because I would get in trouble at work or in my university. | ||
| But there are so many people who want to participate in these discussions but can't for whatever reason. | ||
| You know, they like to now be able to put a label on this general movement. | ||
| Yeah, so tell me a little bit about your personal background. | ||
| What led you to be one of the people that is okay putting your name on this stuff? | ||
| Because I do think that's one of the huge issues here. | ||
| We get all this support from academics and even people in politics and regular folks who are like, Yeah, I'm with ya, and I see the dangers, but I don't want to put my name on any of this. | ||
| So, how did Claire Lehman end up here, willing to put your name and face to all this stuff? | ||
| You know, I think I have a bit more of a risk-taking streak in my nature and I don't feel the same fear around social disapproval as a lot of other people. | ||
| So I was a psychology graduate student and I left my grad program and before I left I sort of took a few risks during my program and was sort of hung out | ||
| to dry by the university, so to speak. | ||
| Yeah, you want to give me an example of one of those? | ||
| As you sort of lit up when you said it. | ||
| Well, I complained about the amount of unpaid work that psychology students had to do in | ||
| a clinic that was associated with the university and they weren't happy with that and I sort | ||
| of received a bit of retaliation for sort of almost whistleblowing on the amount of | ||
| exploitation this clinic was involved in. | ||
| So I've always, it's not the first time I took a risk. | ||
| I've always taken risks when I have felt that my conscience demands that I do so. | ||
| And what led me to create Quillette was When I was a graduate student, I was involved in a lot of online discussions with academics in psychology. | ||
| And we had such fascinating, interesting discussions that were completely unlike anything that you would see in mainstream media. | ||
| And I thought, firstly, there's a business opportunity here if I can bring some of these conversations to a market. | ||
| And secondly, you know, people need to know that there is scientific evidence on some of these topics. | ||
| And mainstream journalists are neglecting to inform readers about some of these issues or some of this evidence. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to read the mission statement from Collette because it's pretty freaking perfect. | ||
| Quillette is a platform for free thought. | ||
| We respect ideas, even dangerous ones. | ||
| We also believe that free expression and the free exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress. | ||
| Quillette aims to provide a platform for this exchange. | ||
| Everybody seems to be afraid of dangerous ideas right now, right? | ||
| I mean, that's why this little crew of people are together for whatever our differences are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that there's been a conflation between Giving a platform or exploring ideas and endorsing ideas. | ||
| They're not the same thing. | ||
| I will publish stuff on Quillette that I don't necessarily agree with politically. | ||
| I don't see the fact of publishing necessarily as an endorsement. | ||
| I also am very clear that I'm going to make mistakes as an editor. | ||
| We don't want to make mistakes about accuracy, and if we're ever called out for publishing something that's not factually correct, we will own up to that mistake. | ||
| You know, we're living in a time of intense ideological flux and to work out where we're all going we need to be able to talk about things freely and we need to be able to make mistakes. | ||
| And I think being able to make mistakes is a sign of a healthy environment. | ||
| And it's a sign of, you know, it's part of the creative process. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the warriors who want to shut down debate, who want to shut down free speech And argue that giving a platform for exploring dangerous ideas is equivalent to endorsing them. | ||
| They're basically saying that you can't make a mistake and that's really scary because the only way we move forward is to experiment, test new ideas, see what works and pick the best ones out of the experimentation process and move forward that way. | ||
| Yeah, so I want to discuss some of the dangerous ideas, for sure, that you're platforming. | ||
| But it's interesting that you said this thing about you don't mind making mistakes, because I feel very much the same. | ||
| I will sit down with all sorts of people. | ||
| I've done it before, people I agree with and disagree with, some people who I really don't like what they're talking about, but I try to give everybody a fair shake. | ||
| And what I'm noticing is there's a tremendous amount of pushback just on that. | ||
| That's what you're getting to, like the idea that, A, you can sit down with someone and separate a human being from their ideas, but also that there's this sort of secondary thing that I'm noticing, and I think you get it too, just from the articles you guys put out, which is that if I don't ask the exact question that someone wants me to ask, or I miss this, or I word this this way, that just this army that doesn't feel that organic to me is ready to pounce. | ||
| And I'm really trying to work through that. | ||
| Like, I don't spend too much time thinking about it, but it is a conscious thing, like, There's going to be this group of people that no matter what I do, and really what they're trying to do is chill everybody out so that you'll only talk about what they're comfortable with. | ||
| Yeah, well there are... | ||
| There are people at the moment who feel that all of the important questions have been answered, all of the important moral and ethical dilemmas have an answer, and that at this point in history everything's been worked out and anyone who's exploring different ideas or is doubtful about these moral issues is evil. | ||
| You're part of the patriarchy, you're racist. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I come from a different approach where I don't know what's going on. | ||
| I'm trying to work it out with other people and I want the freedom to be able to explore. | ||
| In a weird way, does that get you the most hate? | ||
| Because I really believe that's where most people are. | ||
| I think that's why people appreciate what I do here. | ||
| I'm just being open about my journey and listening to people and learning and all of that. | ||
| But that opens you up from hate from both sides. | ||
| It's a lot easier to just stake out a position and then you'll only get hate one way. | ||
| But when you're like, I am gonna hear both sides. | ||
| It's why I love listening to Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson debate the biggest existential questions that there are. | ||
| It's like, if I've completely settled my mind on this, I don't know, I wouldn't be that impressed with my thought process or something. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, I don't get a lot of hate. | ||
| I certainly have Twitter trolls, but... Well, just wait till we post this. | ||
| I sort of don't really notice it or care. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, that's probably the most simple way to deal with this. | |
| All right, so let's talk about some of those dangerous ideas. | ||
| What are some dangerous ideas that have bubbled up from your writers that you've had to think about or that you're focused on these days? | ||
| Yeah, so because my background is in psychology, we tackle issues that come from the behavioral sciences. | ||
| So we've looked at sex differences, psychological sex differences between men and women, differences in interests and occupations. | ||
| So we've published some articles on why there are fewer women in computer science, for example. | ||
| And we published an analysis of James Damore's Google memo, written by four different scientists who have some | ||
| expertise in that area. | ||
| We've published on intelligence research. | ||
|
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What were some of the results of the James Damore idea? | |
| Well, they basically said something pretty similar, that he was in the ballpark in terms of getting the science right and his position is valid in terms of Regular scientific debate. | ||
| There are observable sex differences between men and women. | ||
| The differences in interest in occupations is very robust and reliable. | ||
| So women are overwhelmingly interested in occupations which have something to do with people. | ||
| So caring professions, medicine, even law. | ||
| Whereas men have more interest in occupations that are to do with systems and things, so anything mechanical, computer science, and there's no difference between the average intelligence scores between men and women, and the evidence around differences in verbal and mathematical ability is somewhat mixed. | ||
| You can have debates backwards and forwards over the strengths of those differences, but the difference in interest is very robust. | ||
| So why are people so afraid of that? | ||
| Why is it that there is a set of people out there right now that want us to be all equal in their minds, but it would actually force us to go against nature? | ||
| I mean, that's what this really is. | ||
| Well there is a fear that if you acknowledge that there are differences between individuals or groups, that you're saying that one group is inferior. | ||
| So there's been a The idea that we have to be the same to be equal has been a | ||
| very prevalent and strong idea. | ||
| I don't know where the idea comes from, but it's dangerous because if you argue that no true equality can be achieved | ||
| unless we're all the same, then we can't have equality. | ||
| However, if you argue that no, we are all morally equal and that we deserve equal opportunity and the equal... | ||
| We deserve equal opportunities to live a happy, flourishing life. | ||
| However, there are differences between us. | ||
| Then you can preserve that ethical principle. | ||
| So, it's very problematic for people who think that there can be no equality between men and women unless we're proven to be the same, identical, because the evidence doesn't support the idea that we're the same. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What are some of the other dangerous ideas? | ||
| Okay, so we've published... We're doing the dangerous role here. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| We've published work on intelligence research, which is controversial. | ||
| We've published articles about the heritage... Intelligence? | ||
| Are you talking about intelligence and race? | ||
| Because this seems to be one that people seem to be all... Yeah, that's a hugely controversial issue and we've published a defense of Charles Murray's The Bell Curve because after he had his conversation with Sam Harris, Vox came out and wrote a hit piece, or wrote some kind of article that misrepresented what they talked about and the bell curve. | ||
| And so we published a response from Professor Richard Heyer, who's the editor of the Intelligence Journal, so he's a preeminent expert in this area. | ||
| And he defended Charles Murray's book and defended the conversation that they had and said, this is an important issue, it's scientifically valid and has merit to talk about these issues and they got the science right. | ||
| So we don't aim to be provocative for the sake of just being inflammatory, right? | ||
| We have an objective where we want to protect the scientists who are doing this work or who are having these conversations. | ||
| We want to protect the individuals who are doing The knowledge production or the research, we want to protect them from the voxers and the journalists who just want to write hate pieces just to get the clicks. | ||
| So we have a sort of a commitment to those people who are doing risky work and need that kind of protection. | ||
| You're going to my soft spot today because as we're taping this only like an hour ago, Vox did a piece about me, about how I'm part of the reactionary right or something, and it's just like, you guys are just awful. | ||
| So in a weird way, your job in some respect has become sort of like a force field to just allow people to do the work that they're supposed to be doing. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, because universities, for all sorts of different reasons, are neglecting their duty to academic freedom, right? | ||
| And academic freedom is meant to exist to protect scientists in particular who are doing | ||
| work which contradicts the religious orthodoxy of the time or the moral orthodoxy. | ||
| And it's quite clear to me that there are scientists doing work which challenges politically | ||
| correct dogmas. | ||
| And I don't see universities doing a very good job at protecting those scientists. | ||
| And so we feel like we can fill the gap. | ||
| Where do you think the gender studies stuff fits into all this? | ||
| Because in a weird way, it seems like it's all being whittled down to that somehow, now especially related to trans issues. | ||
| I was just talking to a fairly well-known public professor yesterday, off the record, Yeah. | ||
| About how he's going into his old, even though he's factually correct and is confident about his research, he's going into old lesson plans to change wording just because he doesn't want to deal with the mob. | ||
| So things that were completely acceptable three, four years ago, he's now having to edit out. | ||
| I mean, that's truly dangerous. | ||
| So what is going on with the gender studies departments and the rest of this? | ||
| It's all moving so fast. | ||
| It's hard to really to analyze what's going on when it's shifting so fast, but certainly many of the humanities departments took a turn back in the 1970s, and they took on these fashionable theories such as poststructuralism, and they rejected empirical methods. | ||
| So what's the argument? | ||
| If we were trying to give them all the credit that they're due, at least in the argument, if you're rejecting empirical science or empirical facts, what is your argument that leads you there? | ||
| Because I know people are watching this going, that just sounds crazy. | ||
| But they obviously believe it, so let's try to give the devil his due, right? | ||
| So postmodernists have a good point, and that is that we are all biased. | ||
| And a scientist looking at an issue such as sexuality Has his or her own biases, right? | ||
| And so the questions that the scientist asks when he or she is designing a survey or designing a lab experiment are going to have some bias embedded within them. | ||
| So that's true, and the postmodernists had that insight. | ||
| However, the mistake they make is getting rid of empirical and objective methods altogether, and just saying, because we're biased, what's the point? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they're doing like a massive overcorrection, basically. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| When what should be done is acknowledging, yes, we all have our bias, and if I'm a scientist designing a study, I'm going to have my bias, and it might get embedded into the work that I'm doing. | ||
| However, there are ways to correct that. | ||
| And we want to improve our quantitative methodologies in order to correct for our own biases. | ||
| The problem that the postmodernists have is that they say, well, the bias is there so let's put it all in the bin and we're just going to double down on the bias and just talk about lived experience. | ||
| I mean, it's just taking completely the wrong direction. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| I mean, it's quite literally the reverse of the scientific method. | ||
| So basically, they're saying that bias is truth, right? | ||
| I mean, if you're saying bias, that the lived experience is what truth is, then bias is truth. | ||
| You know, I don't know if you saw it, but I did this talk at University of New Hampshire, and this woman was yelling at me, this trans woman, Yeah. | ||
| calling me alt-right and all of this other nonsense, shouting me down. | ||
| I didn't realize this till two months later or something, but it turned out she was a gender studies professor | ||
| at the school. | ||
| So you've got a gender studies professor trying to shout down an invited speaker | ||
| while live tweeting that I'm alt-right or whatever. | ||
| And it's like, I'm pretty sure, maybe I'm not right about everything. | ||
| I'll concede you on that, even though I said she should be treated with respect | ||
| and equality and all that. | ||
| But your bias that you're acting on right now definitely is not closer to truth than anything I was | ||
| saying. | ||
| Yeah, so the way I think of it is that there is an objective reality, and the way we get to objective reality is through the scientific method, whereas postmodernist academics believe, a lot of them believe that reality is created | ||
| through language and discourse. | ||
| I think that's one of the reasons why they believe that words can be violent, because | ||
| if reality is actually created through language and discourse, and there's some kind of, there's | ||
| some toxic discourse, then they truly believe that reality can be changed through words. | ||
| And so I think that's why they get so upset about freedom of speech and just having discussions, because they truly believe that words can change the way the world is constructed. | ||
| Right, so for now they say it's okay to punch a Nazi. | ||
| Well, they call everybody Nazis, then it's okay to punch a Nazi, and then we can go You know, however far down that road we want to go and then you're completely condoning violence. | ||
| How concerned are you that these ideas are going to trickle up higher into places of power and that once they, look, we know they're in the media, you've already mentioned Vox and a couple of those other things, but that once they're really in the places of power, in Australia or in the States or wherever else, The screws are really going to be turned against us because we're fighting for free speech. | ||
| Yeah, I would mostly be concerned about these ideas getting into the law. | ||
| Traditionally the law is a conservative field and they are pretty good at resisting political fads. | ||
| But you can see with the way that law is taught in law schools at the moment that there is critical legal studies and often critical legal studies is a mandatory component, so they teach like the feminist interpretation of law. | ||
| These approaches can undermine some of the basic fundamentals or foundations of how the law is meant to work. | ||
| I am worried that there are a lot of attacks on due process at the moment, freedom of speech, and the scientific method. | ||
| Those three things are foundations of a civilized society, and all of them are being attacked at the moment. | ||
| Yeah, how does Me Too fit into this? | ||
| Because you've been somewhat critical of that. | ||
|
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I think it hits all three of those criteria that you just laid out there. | |
| Look, you know, obviously Me Too started as a really legitimate and powerful movement in identifying the predation that Harvey Weinstein was engaged in, and surely there have been many powerful men in the last couple of decades working in industries where | ||
| there's a lot of young women around and they have positions of power and they're able to | ||
| exploit those positions. | ||
| But, you know, I'm a young woman myself, right? | ||
| And I don't see sexual harassment as being as pervasive as a lot of people claim. | ||
| And I also think it's very dangerous to make accusations against people publicly because our reputations are so valuable and so important that You know, we need to respect other people's ability to have their reputation. | ||
| And making accusations in public sort of goes against my feeling that it feels vindictive to me and it feels dangerous, a dangerous path to go down. | ||
| Because for every true accusation there is of sexual harassment, there's going to be someone who is You know, there are going to be people who have conflicts, and in the conflict, someone feels like they can resolve a conflict through making an accusation of sexual harassment, and that's really scary. | ||
| We don't want people to resolve their conflicts by making public accusations. | ||
| Right, but I definitely think there's a certain set of people that don't mind collateral damage, right? | ||
| I mean, that seems to be what's happening right now, and people, you see this, public people that are tweeting these kind of things. | ||
| Like, it doesn't matter if you take down a couple innocent people. | ||
| That's how dangerous this thing is. | ||
| That strikes me as far more dangerous, and I'm not belittling any of the actual things that some of these women have gone through. | ||
| Yeah, it's scary. | ||
| It's the desire for collective punishment, and that collective punishment is scary. | ||
| If you look at the Geneva Convention that was established after World War II, the UN declared collective punishment a war crime. | ||
| So the idea is that when there is a conflict between ethnic groups in certain places, if some people are killed in a conflict, you can't then go and wipe out a village as a collective retribution, because that's how these war crimes happen. | ||
| So now where this Like you said, this collateral damage, this desire for collateral damage is being normalized. | ||
| People don't seem to understand how dangerous this is and how unjust it is. | ||
| But is part of the issue that perhaps they do understand it, but they so want to destroy the system? | ||
| This is, you know, I've been on tour with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| One of the things he's been talking about a lot lately is, yes, you can acknowledge that we don't have perfect systems, and those perfect systems are probably impossible to ever get to. | ||
| But now we have this new thing in the system which is, let's just freaking destroy the whole thing to build our perfect system. | ||
| Yeah, I think people don't understand because we're not taught anymore. | ||
| We're not taught history properly. | ||
| We don't learn about human nature in school and how it's almost an instinct to want to desire retribution and vindictive justice. | ||
| I think it's part of our natures to want to punish people and punish groups. | ||
| And our institutions like due process and the presumption of innocence, they sort of They go against our instincts. | ||
| Thankfully! | ||
| And I think what we're seeing is just sort of like a regression back to our more tribal, instinctive nature. | ||
| And because our education system is so atrophied, young people aren't being taught the value and the fragility of these institutions, how they came about, why they're so important, why we must protect them. | ||
| So I think there's just a basic ignorance about why these institutions exist in the first place, | ||
| and then we're regressing back to our more primitive natures. | ||
| Yeah, how do you think social media fits into this? | ||
| Because I did a video, I think it's almost three years ago now, that online culture is becoming mainstream culture. | ||
| And I think that that's what we're seeing. | ||
| That what used to be just relegated to the meme makers and the Pepe people has now just leaked everywhere. | ||
| And just everyone in public is acting sort of as their worst selves all the time. | ||
| And then that feeds all of this, let's either destroy the system or let's ignore legitimate problems. | ||
| Well, when you don't have proper law and order, you do get mob justice and vigilante justice in real life. | ||
| And you can see that throughout history. | ||
| You get lynchings, you get pogroms, you get groups like mobs of people going and attacking an individual who they think is guilty of like a sex crime or some other crime and killing the person. | ||
| And then what happened was we developed legal and social norms Stopped that kind of vigilante justice from taking place and if you are a vigilante you can you can get in trouble with the law | ||
| And then we've developed social norms that prevent people from just forming mobs and going attacking people in the street. | ||
| But social media is this new technology and we haven't developed any of the legal or social norms yet. | ||
| And so it's brought back this mobbing behavior which is part of our nature. | ||
| It's brought it back but we haven't yet developed any of the norms to sort of suppress it or mitigate against it. | ||
| And I think we eventually will develop these norms, but it's going to take a while and there's going to be a few innocent people sort of metaphorically lynched in the process. | ||
| Yeah, so that's actually an interesting segue to something that's been on my mind lately. | ||
| So, you know, Alex Jones got booted from Twitter and YouTube and Facebook and whatever. | ||
| I don't even want to talk about any of the things that he talks about. | ||
| It does not matter. | ||
| But these tech companies basically decided that this one guy is too dangerous. | ||
| Farrakhan can be on here and Hamas, whoever else you want to pick that you don't like can be on here. | ||
| But this guy, even PayPal took him out last week. | ||
| Do you think that the free speech crew, forgetting his ideas, do you think we should have offered a better defense of why This person, a person, should be allowed to use these things? | ||
| I mean, should the guy be allowed to make a phone call? | ||
| Should he be allowed to have running water at his house? | ||
| Where do we draw the lines for this? | ||
| Yeah, well I think these tools that we use, such as payment processing and social media such as Twitter, the instant messaging, they're tools and they should be treated as such, like having electricity or water. | ||
|
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So you believe they're a public good, basically, the same way? | |
| Getting water to your house, getting the phone line connected to your house. | ||
| Yeah, and they shouldn't be politicized. | ||
| And as soon as you politicize these tools, then there's a slippery slope, and then there's going to be arguments about who do we ban next, what standards do we want to set, and that kind of thing. | ||
| In the context of Alex Jones, I think there's probably more to the story that the public is aware of, so I don't want to comment on him specifically. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't want to make it about him. | ||
| It's just the general idea that a digital assassination can occur because we're all agreeing to terms of services. | ||
| I'm not sitting around with a lawyer every time I click accept to the new terms of service. | ||
| Eventually, it could move on anybody, you know what I mean? | ||
| We know the way these ideas work. | ||
| You don't get one person and then suddenly be like, oh, well, we're good to go. | ||
| It's like, who do you get next? | ||
| Yeah, and the payment processing is scary. | ||
| I mean, the idea that that should be politicized is just crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what do you think the solution is? | ||
| I mean, I think you probably know my solution is that We need more competition, but I'm really understanding a big counter to that. | ||
| Because it's like, where is the counter? | ||
| Where is it? | ||
| Look, I don't have the answer and I tend towards being... | ||
| economically liberal. | ||
| However, some of these tools, as you said, are public goods and perhaps need to be thought of as public goods rather than private. | ||
| I'm open to ideas of regulation, government intervention, and I'm also open to ideas about breaking up some of the monopolies Because competition would be lovely but it's a bit difficult at the moment because some of these companies have got monopolies in lots of different verticals. | ||
| So Google for example has the search engine monopoly They've almost got the advertising monopoly, so they're leveraging their monopoly in one area into others, and that just shuts down competition. | ||
| Yeah, do you think it's even something a little more perverse than that, which is that, you know, look, there's obviously, I'm not blowing the lid on anything here, there's obviously tons of discussions with all sorts of people about how do we compete with YouTube or how do we compete with any of these things, but I think partly what's happening, it's not just people are going, they're this This big monolith. | ||
| I think people are actually genuinely afraid of what it means to go up against them. | ||
| It's not like it's going to just be a hard work situation. | ||
| It's like, what does it actually mean to go up against the world's information leader? | ||
| Well, you can't compete against a monopoly. | ||
| That's the definition of a monopoly. | ||
| There's no competition. | ||
| And some of these companies are monopolies, and they have captured the market so effectively that You cannot compete with them. | ||
| And so we either have to think about regulating them so that they're free and open to everybody, or breaking up their ability to control the market. | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| This is the tough part. | ||
| The libertarian part of me is like, no, don't do it. | ||
| And yet I do sense I'm being pinned into that kind of answer. | ||
| All right, so we've been talking a bit about the tech component of this grand cultural war that's going on. | ||
| You guys, Quillette, you're a small company. | ||
| You're funded on Patreon, which we're funded on Patreon. | ||
| It's pretty awesome. | ||
| You have people that voluntarily pay you to support your content and make you grow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| validating and rewarding it is and all that stuff. | ||
| But you find yourself often up against the big boys, right? | ||
| Like Vox, funded to hundreds of millions of dollars by different things, and you're being critical of them here. | ||
| So it does get me back to something that I started with before about, | ||
| where does it come from for you to just be brave? | ||
| I don't wanna belittle that part of it, that there's a new internet developing, | ||
| and I think it is people that are doing this sort of thing. | ||
| It's not these well-funded, well-oiled machines that we're watching them crumble, you know? | ||
| You sent me this morning this thing about Vox's ad rev is off by 15% or something, and it's like, we've got slim trim companies, and I really believe that's the future economically of this, as well as in terms of protecting the ideas. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We have a pretty amazing story. | ||
| I started by myself and I ran the website for maybe a year or even a year and a half before I got my assistant editor on board, who's now sort of the managing editor. | ||
| He's extraordinarily talented, extremely hardworking, so I'm very indebted to him for all of the work. | ||
| That's Jonathan? | ||
| Jonathan Kate and my other editor, Jamie. | ||
| Okay, Jamie Ballmer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Okay, let's give credit where credit's due. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, and my contributors are also amazing. | ||
| But we are hit now as of 2018, September, we're getting up to one million unique visitors a month | ||
| with a staff of, all part-time staff of six, there's six or seven people. | ||
| And we're getting almost a million uniques a month. | ||
| I'm aware of magazines that have a budget of millions of dollars that cannot compete with our traffic and who have staffing capacity of 30, 40, 50 people. | ||
| So we're extremely lean, but we're hardworking. | ||
| And we're nimble and innovative. | ||
| I'm always thinking about innovations to the business model. | ||
| What can we do that's different? | ||
| I think just following in the footsteps of the old model is probably a recipe for failure. | ||
| And I truly believe that advertising is on the way out. | ||
| I know people can still make some money through advertising but I think advertising gives you a vulnerability because now you see these activists trying to target brands if their brand is next to some content that activists don't like. | ||
| So I think advertising is just I think there's a vulnerability associated with it. | ||
| Is it almost a fake vulnerability though? | ||
| Because I always think when, you know, they always try to boycott Hannity, for example, and it's like all of the people trying to boycott him, putting aside whatever he said on that given instance, They don't watch him in the first place, and yet the advertisers still feel that they have to bow to the mob. | ||
| And I always find that to be a strange thing. | ||
| There's very few people who like Hannity who are so shocked by something he said that they want to boycott him. | ||
| It's always people who hate him in the first place that don't watch. | ||
| So there's an odd piece of this that's slightly disconnected from reality, I think. | ||
| Well, corporations and companies in general are skittish and conservative and they want to protect their reputations and they're afraid of any kind of controversy. | ||
| I agree with you that these activists on social media who are targeting companies, they're a tiny, tiny minority of the population. | ||
| Most people don't care or buy into this stuff, but corporations, it's probably some PR person who's like, whoa, we don't want any controversy, let's detach ourselves. | ||
| But, you know, that kind of timidity and lack of strength and lack of spine is not something that is part of Quillette. | ||
| So we very much are conscious of if we ever get mobbed, and we do get mobbed sometimes, we don't apologize, we don't give in to the heckler's veto, basically. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I really think it's important for corporations, company leaders, anyone in a leadership position to grow a spine in the era of social media and to not take any of this outrage seriously. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not take it seriously or not take it, I mean, I think we sort of, we have to take it seriously because it is sort of infecting a lot of society, but maybe not take it as if it's necessarily right just because it's outraged. | ||
| Is that fair? | ||
| Yeah, you can see the recent example, an editor of the New York Review of Books, Ian Burrima, was fired because he published an article by a Canadian radio journalist who was credibly accused of many cases of sexual assault. | ||
| And I think the radio journalist was like, he's a bad dude, but the editor was sacked | ||
| for publishing his article within like the space of two days or something. | ||
| So there was a social media outrage phenomenon and it's all wrapped up with Me Too. | ||
| And then he's just fired just like that. | ||
| And it's like, okay, take some time out to consider it. | ||
| Listen to the feedback from your readers or from people on social media, but when did we start making decisions so suddenly, these important decisions that affect people's livelihoods? | ||
| That's what I find astonishing, that people in leadership positions just sort of throw all caution to the wind and just say, okay, we're going to sap someone because some people on Twitter are unhappy. | ||
| Yeah, and also the guilt by association part of this, right? | ||
| I mean, it's possible for a slim trim operation that you have, you might find out in 10 years, you might find out that one of the guys you're working with now, three years ago, did something awful. | ||
| And then they'll use that to try to tar you. | ||
| And the danger in that, or that you sat down with somebody, and now we can put out a chart that links that person to this person to that person to this one, where in an age of the internet, within six steps, you can link anybody to Kevin Bacon or Barack Obama. | ||
| It's pretty ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, guilt by association is, I mean it's a fallacy but it is powerful and we do find ourselves tainted and it's tricky and I think we have to, every situation we have to judge on a case-by-case basis. | ||
| And you're probably right, it probably is going to happen, but I trust my readers, and I feel like they know who we are, they're aware of our values, and they can make the appropriate judgments at the time. | ||
| Yeah, so even though we've spent most of the time here, and most of the things that you guys are writing, talking about what's sort of going on with the modern left, and the frustrations that everyone knows | ||
| that I have with these guys. | ||
| Let's talk about the parts of the right that you actually find scary or untoward | ||
| or whatever you wanna call it. | ||
| What do you think the alt-right is at this point? | ||
| Like if someone says you, give me the definition of alt-right, | ||
| what does that even mean to you at this point? | ||
| Well, I consider them to be the white nationalists that want an ethno state. | ||
| And they're pretty morally repugnant and they're pretty scary | ||
| and they engage in quite vicious trolling. | ||
| They send death threats. | ||
| The journalist Cathy Young, for example, was one of the first people to write an article criticizing the bigotry of the alt-right, and she had Death Threat called into her home. | ||
| And they're pretty scary, but I think they're a small group. | ||
| Yeah, how are we able to quantify that? | ||
| Because that's one of the things that I think people are just very confused at. | ||
| The media makes it seem, because they call everyone alt-right or far-right, that there's this massive group I can only talk about this in an American lens, but maybe it's a little different in Australia. | ||
| But there's this massive group of white nationalists who are coming to turn America into some sort of ethno-state. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying there aren't racists. | ||
| Of course there are racists. | ||
| And of course there are bad people. | ||
| People using these tactics. | ||
| But I believe it's just a tiny sliver. | ||
| And then on top of that, you have all sort of the meme makers and the shit posters and the rest of it. | ||
| Those guys, you may not like what they do, but they're not, they're having fun in their eyes in a lot of ways. | ||
| They're not just the evil racist component. | ||
| I think a mistake was made back when Milo was around. | ||
| And I think he, You started using the term alt-right, and he might not have been aware of where that term originated, and it actually originated with the white nationalists. | ||
| So you think Milo was using it more in the way that I just laid it out, of just sort of these shit-posting meme-makers or something, without acknowledging the other people? | ||
| I don't know if he was aware of where the term originated or not, but it was a huge error for people who are just into shitposting. | ||
| It was a huge error for them to use that label for themselves, because unless In my view, unless you are a white nationalist, you're not an alt-righter. | ||
| The label, I think, came about in 2007. | ||
| I think it was Richard Spencer who created the Alt-Right Journal or something. | ||
| It was a big mistake for people who just want to have fun online and who want to push back against some of these PC orthodoxies. | ||
| It was a huge mistake for them to use the term for themselves and that's given license now for critics to Apply the term on everybody who pushes back against PC dogmas, and that's really unfortunate. | ||
| But we have to just say it over and over again. | ||
| These people are repugnant, and we don't want to have anything to do with their ideology. | ||
| Their ideology is authoritarian. | ||
| It's racist, and they engage in very scary, vicious behaviors. | ||
| Yeah, so absolutely, I will cosign all of that, just for the record. | ||
| Of course this is a repugnant ideology and these people are racist and all those things. | ||
| So I'm less concerned about that because I do believe it's a small sliver that doesn't have real institutional power. | ||
| Now maybe it's going to gain some, and I think there's evidence that, at least in Eastern Europe, that some of these ideas, partly as a pushback to the immigration problems, That maybe it is gaining some power. | ||
| But are you concerned that it has a bigger institutional power? | ||
| Because I think the stuff that we're often talking about is because we're worried about institutional power and structural power, not just that there are mean and bad people out there, which, yes, there are mean and bad people out there, and there will always be mean and bad people out there. | ||
| Because my background is so recently in academia, I focus a lot on universities and the ideologies that are popular within universities, so that makes me focus on left-wing ideologies such as critical theory, post-structuralism and Marxism. | ||
| If I was in a different context, I might focus more on right-wing ideologies and the effect that they have on institutions. | ||
| So you're giving a little nod to the postmodernists there, because you're showing that your own bias is a little part of how you look at things, right? | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| Closer to institutions that have more of a right-wing ideological influence, I would be criticizing those influences more. | ||
| Being Australian is... In Australia, our conservative or right-wing ideologies are quite different to America, so... | ||
| You probably already know this, but we have universal healthcare, we have gun control, we have a welfare state. | ||
| So if I lived in a country where we didn't have those things, I would probably be advocating for them. | ||
| But, you know, a lot of this is context-specific and you criticize what you know. | ||
| So a part of the reason why I criticize what Jordan Peterson calls post-modern neo-Marxism is because I've experienced it, I see it all of the time in academic settings, and I worry about the impact that that ideology is having on media, the law, And just the broader culture. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you hopeful that some of the good ideas that we've talked about here are going to win out? | ||
| That seems to be one of the biggest questions I get at public events now. | ||
| Like, I think there is a sense that we've woken up a certain amount of people. | ||
| You know, this Peterson tour is selling out every theater. | ||
| Thousands and thousands of people, literally all over the world, will be in Australia in February. | ||
| But I think there's still a concern of how much worse can it get before it gets better. | ||
| Yeah, and that's a question people ask me as well, and I don't have an oracle, I can't see the future, and all I can say is that I'm doing my very best to counter these bad ideas, and that it's actually Anybody who's concerned, I mean, they have some responsibility. | ||
| And I think everybody should think about sharing the risk. | ||
| We need these people, truly, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know, when Charlie Hebdo happened, and the mainstream media in Europe and the UK and America, I think, didn't want to publish that cartoon of Muhammad which got those men and women killed. | ||
| Douglas Murray came out and said, do it, share the risk. | ||
| That's when I came aware of Douglas. | ||
| It's one of his best moments. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| It's on YouTube. | ||
| Yeah, that was something that impacted me a lot as well. | ||
| And, you know, anyone who's concerned about the way our culture, broader Western culture, is headed needs to think deeply about how they can make a little bit of difference by sharing the risk. | ||
| Just speaking honestly in conversations with friends, speaking honestly and openly in the workplace, normalizing conversations, and yeah, just taking on a little bit of risk. | ||
| Yeah, what does that tell you about the slide that has occurred in the West? | ||
| Is this just a Is it an infection of success or something that we could be so successful that even taking a little risk seems awful to people? | ||
| Humans are very conformist, and most people are cowards, unfortunately. | ||
| And a lot of what we're talking about, these bad ideas that are being promoted, are only promoted by a tiny, tiny minority of people, but they're very noisy, loud, and aggressive. | ||
| And the problem is simply the silent majority not feeling too intimidated to sort of push back. | ||
| And if we can encourage those who are in the silent majority to push back against ideologues on both sides, both the hard right and the hard left, I think we will create a much healthier Civil society. | ||
| But it's about empowering the moderates to speak freely, speak openly, and not feel afraid, like, ashamed of their moderate views. | ||
| Right, they've also turned words like civility and moderation are thought of as bad now. | ||
| Like, oh, you're a fence-sitter, you don't want to murder half the people, you know, you're not Thanos from Avengers, you must be evil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, Those people who argue that civility is a bad thing and... We see a lot of this now, by the way, that civility is a bad thing. | |
| A lot of think pieces about this. | ||
| Well, I would argue that it's unrepresentative of the broader population. | ||
| I know that certain parts of media and universities have been captured by cultists in a way, and they have these crazy ideas, but I would be careful about generalizing those ideas to the broader population, because I think most normal people are pretty chill. | ||
| I mean, I haven't spent enough time in your country to know. | ||
| No, I think you are right. | ||
| I mean, I'm out there going across the country realizing that there are so many just decent, good people. | ||
| The hysterics and the way that I said earlier about how social media has leaked into reality or something, it's making everyone feel crazy, but I am meeting these incredible people all over the country They just want to live and let live, and yeah, maybe, I don't know your feelings on abortion, for example. | ||
| Maybe we agree, maybe we don't. | ||
| It just seems, that actually seems irrelevant at the moment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That sort of says something we touched on briefly right before we started, that politics, I was saying how I'm not that interested in politics per se at the moment, even though this is all framed within a political lens, that I'm much more interested in culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that how you feel about this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Definitely. | |
| And was that always how you felt about this or has something shifted? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I've never been particularly interested in partisan politics, but I think that politics is downstream of culture. | ||
| So the ideas that are popular within a culture then get reflected in your politics. | ||
| So if you want politics to be a certain way and to be a bit healthier and less dysfunctional, you want to impact the culture first. | ||
| Because culture is bigger than politics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is there a danger that we're just in this, like, locked culture war now so that our politics can never get better? | ||
| Like, we sort of have this authoritarian leftism, and now we've got Trump. | ||
| These are the cultural fights that we're having. | ||
| Now there's a couple of us in this spot, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But, like, that if all politics is gonna come from those two things at the moment, then politics sort of is almost irreparably damaged. | ||
| Yeah, look, I don't know what the future holds for the United States. | ||
| From an outsider looking in it, it does look quite scary. | ||
| The level of tribalism that seems apparent, and the amount of hate and distrust that each side has for the other, it's quite scary. | ||
| I just hope that If the worst happens to the United States, we will have outposts where Western civilization survives and thrives. | ||
|
unidentified
|
New Zealand, Australia. | |
| So basically going back to what I said at the beginning, it's good to be surrounded by water. | ||
| Yeah, we'll be an outpost. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You got extra room in your house? | |
| I don't need that much room. | ||
| A couple feet work. | ||
| A lot of people are going to New Zealand and buying houses there in case the worst happens. | ||
| Oh God, I don't want to end on this terrible note here. | ||
| We've got to bring this back. | ||
| But all right, so there's concern about that. | ||
| Of course, if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you could look at all of these ideas that I truly think are the ideas that could unravel Western society and free thought and all those things. | ||
| That's why I talk about them so much. | ||
| But there is a counter, and that's what we gotta keep doing. | ||
| So bring me home on a positive note, please, before people start buying real estate in New Zealand. | ||
| Or you were just trying to help the market in Australia there. | ||
| No, we don't need any help in the housing market. | ||
| I'm optimistic because I see the positive reception that I get through Quillette. | ||
| Our audience grows every month. | ||
| More and more people are contributing to our website, feeling brave enough to write their thoughts down and send it through. | ||
| And the thing is, every individual has the power to change the world of ideas. | ||
| If you've got an idea and you can articulate it and write it down and send it in, or articulate it in some other fashion, You do have the power to transform and impact this culture, and to make a huge difference. | ||
| So that's incredible, and that makes me feel happy and optimistic. | ||
| All right, that is how we can end it. | ||
| We can't end it on the seasteading, we're gonna be in the water world kind of thing. |
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