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- [00:00]
A
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast, Inside Rail. I am sitting this afternoon, I am delighted to say, with my good friend Peter Boghossian. Peter and I have known each other for it's nine years now. Peter, long time. Before I say who you are, let me just say welcome to Dark Horse.
- [00:18]
B
Thank you. I appreciate it. And I appreciate the kindness that you and Heather have shown me over the years.
- [00:24]
A
And likewise to you as well, Peter. All right, Peter, for those of you who don't know him, is a PhD in education and he has specialized on critical thinking and moral reasoning. You may be familiar with him from his Street Epistemology series which you can find on YouTube and he's also written some best selling books. Anyway, Peter is a very interesting guy to talk to and it's exactly the right moment to be talking to him because of the Jason R. Day scandal.
- [00:59]
B
Aha.
- [01:01]
A
Yes, Peter, you ready to talk about Jason Our Day?
- [01:04]
B
I love talking about Jason Our Day. It's one of my most recent favorite subjects.
- [01:09]
A
Well, if you have been living under a rock for the last, what is it, 48, 72 hours? You may be unaware that Jason R. Day was a professor at Cambridge who was widely heralded in certain academic circles for his many achievements, which now seem largely to have been fictions that he made up.
- [01:39]
B
Extraordinary fictions, I must say, utterly remarkable fictions. Genuinely impressive creative abilities.
- [01:49]
A
Creative abilities and also pushing the outside of the envelope with respect to things like plagiarism. So you might imagine that Jason is a bit of a thrill seeker and that he was effectively daring anyone to notice that his credentials didn't make sense and his backstory was impossible. And quite literally, yes, quite literally in a number of ways. We should also say Jason is black. And so this raises many questions which are ones on which you, Peter, have specialized. Our first sponsor this week is one of our favorites and it's Maddie's all time favorite. It's Sundays for dogs. Sundays makes extraordinary dog food. You love your dogs so you want to make them happy and you want to keep them nourished and healthy. Sundays helps you do all those things. Sundays for dogs is different from any other dog food out there created by a dog loving veterinarian. Sundaes has 80% or more all natural meat in every one of their formulations, then adds superfoods like kale, ginger and blueberries. 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All of these companies have been bought by megacorporations and private equity firms which hijack beloved brands and replace it with the usual corporate slop. Van Mans will never sell out. Ready to ditch the corporate chemicals, Go to Vanman Shop Darkhorse 26 and use code DARKHORSE 26 for 15% off your first order. That's Vanman Shop Darkhorse 26, and use the code DARKHORSE for 15% off your first Order. Van Man Real ingredients, no exceptions. You and I met after the Evergreen meltdown and we were you were having a documentary made about you by Mike Nana, a someone who's been on the channel a couple of times, excellent filmmaker and very wise thinker in his own right. And we were exploring questions about what was happening to the academy in light of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and a leftist bent that seemed not to seek an end to oppression, but a turning of the tables of oppression. And so I think actually the place to start here is, you will remember, and we will show it here in a second, the very end of Mike Nana, when Mike Naina was doing a film about you and the so called Squared Hoax, the series of papers that you and James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose submitted to various journals to see whether they were going to notice the various problems with them. He was doing a documentary on that subject and he wanted to do a few minutes on Evergreen and he found, as I told him he might, that the Evergreen story, you can't just dip into it. You discover that there's a rabbit hole that's very deep there. So anyway, we're going to play a clip here of something I said at the end of the short documentary he did on the Evergreen Meltdown. I have to say I keep being invited to talk about free speech on college campuses. And every time I'm invited I make the same point, which is this isn't about free speech and this is only tangentially about college campuses. This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilization and it's spreading. And college campuses may be the first dramatic battle. But of course this is going to find its way into the courts. It's already found its way into the tech sector. It's Going to find its way to the highest levels of governance if we're not careful. And it actually does jeopardize the ability of civilization to continue to function. How has it gotten to this point? In part, it has gotten to this point because we let it fester. These ideas were wrong when they first took hold in the academy. And instead of shutting them down, we created phony fields that act as a kind of analytical affirmative action where ideas that do not deserve to survive are given sustenance. These ideas are so toxic and so ill conceived that to the extent that they are allowed to hold sway, as if one truth is equal to every other truth. Right. My truth is as good as your truth. To the extent that that idea is allowed to pervade other institutions on which civilization depends, civilization will come apart. So we have to fight this. And don't get the sense that it is just about college campuses or kids overreacting, because that ain't what this is. This is far more important than that. All right, so in that clip, I obviously say some things that at the time in 2017, seemed to a lot of people to be quite extre. But in retrospect. Yeah, Conspiratorial, perhaps. But then in light of the fact that. Well, obviously it wasn't just evergreen. Here we have.
- [10:02]
B
It was incredibly prescient. Incredibly prescient. Far more than anybody else could have. I don't know. It could have, but far more than people were willing to acknowledge, particularly if they participated in the ideology. And they had, as the vast majority of people do, cowardice inside them and a unwillingness to admit truth for fear of social consequences.
- [10:27]
A
Well, you're being too generous, unfortunately. I would love to claim credit for being some Nostradamus like character, but the fact is it was the revolution. And its natural consequences were not visible to the average person, certainly in 2017, but to you and me, yeah, it was pretty clear where this was headed.
- [10:48]
B
Well, the thing that. That was remarkable. Excuse me. About that clip. Was that you were honest about the nature of the problem. I mean, I'm. Look, I just turned 60. I am fairly confident at this point in my life. Most of the problems we have are that people are not willing to speak honestly about them. We all know the problems with immigration. We all know the problems with child households without a father. We all know wealth, and we all know that these problems. But very few people are willing to speak openly and honestly. And in that clip, in other places, you spoke very honestly. I spoke honestly about the problem. And they came for you. They Came. They speak for. This is just a recurring pattern throughout history. They, you know, if you violate the moral orthodoxy, they will come for you.
- [11:30]
A
Yes. And now, nine years later, we can finally say, well, I wasn't exaggerating, I was just simply extrapolating. That's. That's the basic thing that shows in that clip. As I was saying, you're talking. You're seeing it at Evergreen not even nine years later.
- [11:48]
B
I mean, even pre Claudine Gay, I mean, like it was. So I guess we should do a little chronology here. Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, comes out as a serial plagiarist who plagiarized her acknowledgments. Even if she didn't. I mean, it's pretty remarkable. She tries the acknowledgments of her dissertation. That's if you really let that percolate. That's an astonishing statement. But even so, even if she hadn't, she was totally unqualified for the position. But her being black was. You just couldn't say anything. You couldn't question it, you couldn't criticize it. But at the same time, more and more plagiarists, Rufo and others and myself had exposed more and more plagiarists at elite universities and institutions. But because they were black, nothing could be said about them. Or they said it was a rich hunt. It was, you're only hunting black people. Or it's a duplicative language. But I think there's so much to unpack here before we go on. I think one thing that's really important to note as it relates to the clip in particular is that Claudine Gay was found innocent of plagiarism before the investigation even began. What kind of investigation? Find someone that's not an investigation. I don't know. You need another word for that. Or. Or they retitled the duplicative language. But I only use her as a jumping off point because you said, you know, seven or nine years later, what have you. And even before then, the problems were so conspicuous and so egregious and they were. Everybody was a coward. They were just fearful of saying. Saying anything. And I want to come back to that point later of cowardice, because I think it's a really important point that people expect others to make criticisms specifically. I don't want to run this down this rabbit hole in the moment, but they expect moderate Muslims to criticize extreme Muslims when in our own culture we couldn't even criticize the whole lunatics who were saying that, you know, they don't know what a man or a woman is. So, like, I just think that that is an undue, an unfair burden to place on moderate Muslims. But, but I digress. I just think that you were honest. People were freaking out about it. And then I think our day is the apex of that problem.
- [14:06]
A
He is. And before we get back to our day, and there's a lot to say here, including one idea I want to run by you more than I want to run it by anybody else on earth. But the, in essence, if I look at this from an evolutionary perspective, what's happened is the DEI movement, whether you think it's well intentioned or not, created a niche. The idea was, with respect to people that we deem deserving based on these immutable demographic characteristics, we are going to suspend the standards that would normally have to be met. And what's more, we're not going to suspend them and acknowledge that that's what we've done. We're going to pretend that we are still applying those standards, but there's really nothing you can do that's going to cause us to say no, actually, you're not qualified. And as people who are in these categories discover that, especially unscrupulous people, they obviously take advantage of it, the niche is there. It would be surprising if nobody did take advantage. But what I wanted to say is the people to whom this is the most unfair are not even the people who are being unfairly competed with.
- [15:19]
B
I know where you're going.
- [15:20]
A
The regular applicants, but the, the true stars that we have who are in these demographic categories suffer a terrible fate when you have cheaters like Jason R. Day rising to the role of, you know, heralded professor at Cambridge. And, and that, that is tremendously disrespectful to the, you know, star black academics that we have. You know, people like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Lowry, John McWhirter, and a great number of black intellectuals who are outside of the academy. These people actually did the work and to, you know, remove the standards for other people, actually cast doubt on them, which they do not deserve. Correct. Okay, so can I run my idea by you?
- [16:09]
B
You can run literally anything by me. I am ready, willing and eager.
- [16:14]
A
Okay, so I will just recap for people. You and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay submitted a number of papers that were not fit for publication to various publications that use academic publications, journals that you suspected were basically faking being about something with the prediction that your papers would get through peer review in at least a number of cases, because peer Review wasn't a real process in. With respect to those journals. And you of course turned out to be right. Your papers got published, the experiment was terminated early because somebody outed you. And so the journals that you had submitted to got wise. But nonetheless, it's one of the great academic hoaxes that revealed the phony fields. That a fair summary?
- [17:11]
B
Yeah. I just add that it was not only papers that were broken, but papers that were morally reprehensible and vile.
- [17:21]
A
Your papers.
- [17:22]
B
Yeah. They were just despicable.
- [17:24]
A
Yes, they were.
- [17:25]
B
Thank you.
- [17:27]
A
All right, well, here's the idea. Okay. And I'm. I hesitate to even say it. I don't want to make it a suggestion because there's a way in which this could make things worse, but on some better timeline than the one that you and I live on, Jason, our day is the greatest hoaxer. And if this had been a witting exploitation of the insane standards that DEI has brought to the Academy, Imagine this is all being revealed on the eve of publication of his new fabulous book. Right. Which just continues with the elaborate impossible lies. Imagine he were to come out now and say, yes, the Academy has become fraudulent. I have demonstrated that. Because here are the lies I told and nobody even bothered to question them. Right. Wow. Would we be in a different world?
- [18:26]
B
Yeah, that. That's a genius idea. I'm hesitant to say I thought of it because it sounds very self aggrandizing. It's a genius idea. I would, I would revere that man. You know, they called what we did Sokal Squared. That would be Sokol Infinity. I mean that would literally be the highest. That would be it. That would, that would be the pinnacle that they would be. That would make me so happy. Because, you know, even people. 5 of academics with gravitas came out in support. I can't. The goodwill or good. Whatever read what a good something or you know. And then tens of thousands of academics have signed papers in support of him. Even now that it's been exposed that he's a serial plagiarist and pathological liar, running marathons, being in documentaries before he was born, they still support him. They still support him. That's their brain on race. So that might be something that actually is a cognitive disruption because if he
- [19:29]
A
came out and revealed that this had been a witting hoax with the purpose of revealing the bankruptcy of the modern academy, it would be. It would be a great service to western civilization, which is 100% trouble.
- [19:43]
B
Unfortunately. He already submitted his letter of resignation, which is almost certainly written by AI,
- [19:50]
A
but if even better, though.
- [19:53]
B
Oh, he better came out subsequently. Oh, my God, that's a genius move.
- [19:59]
A
If you just give me his cards at the moment.
- [20:01]
B
Oh, God, I know how to play. What we could do.
- [20:05]
A
Oh, it would be so beautiful. Because then we could finally have the conversation that we need to have. Especially we could focus on the people who have signed this petition supporting him in spite of the fact fact that the plagiarism is effectively proved at this point. Right. Those people, to my way of thinking, are exactly what people like you and me have been alleging. These are absolute cowards who are embracing what they see as power so that it will leave them alone. Right. So there's nothing he could do that would blow his credibility in their eyes. Because this isn't really about credibility, it's about power. And they're betting that the DEI folks aren't done. They're going to win. And so you might as well embrace this guy because that's the way power works.
- [20:53]
B
I think that's genius. And Western civilization would owe him a profound debt. It might be one of the few ways we could steer the academy back to meritocracy. I can't fathom that he would ever do such a thing because that would take a remarkable degree of cleverness. But if he did, it'd be really interesting to look at the cognitive dissonance of all the people who support. Supported them after he said that he scammed them. As you, as you know, from, from the literature on cults, etc, it Once the earth is going to end and the earth doesn't end, it's the faithfulness of the people that cause it not to end. I even think in those. Because I've read the tweets of people who came out in support of him and they're still supporting him. I mean, it's just. So that is the other reason that that. And I try to make it not about people, but it really is. I mean, these people are irredeemable. I mean, the whole system is so corrupt. I mean, so it's not just. And then, and then once he got caught by the way he said it was because he was black, that he didn't get enough treatment and he wasn't mentored well enough on these things. But so I don't know. I, you know, I'm a big fan of burning it all down. And I think the fact that this kind of corruption continues to happen in our universities and even when it's exposed that people support. I mean, think about how crazy it is that the institution Supports somebody who obtained their credentials fraudulently. Give me another institution that would do that. Would that be the case with brain surgeons? Would that be the case with firemen? Would anybody say, well, you know, the guy has black skin. Doesn't really matter that he fabricated his credentials, doesn't really matter that he stole someone else's work. Doesn't really matter that, that, you know, we ourselves are corrupt. The only thing that matters is that we have more black firemen.
- [22:52]
A
But I think you're, you're actually sort of rediscovering your own work here because to you and me, it seems absurd that anybody in any other institute. You know, the good thing about this happening in academia is that in general, lives don't depend on it in an immediate sense. Somebody can say really dumb stuff in a classroom or in a book and it doesn't, you know, cause people to keel over. But what you and I have been talking about since this revolution began is that eventually this does work its way. And in fact, what I said to you when you were, when Mike Nana was doing his documentary on your, on your, your hoax and you guys revealed it to Heather and me, I remember very clearly what I said to you guys was. The only flaw in what you did, as far as I can tell, is that you didn't run the same experiment on the sciences and that although the lies are more sophisticated there, they're harder to spot. For a layperson, they're no less egregious.
- [24:00]
B
Yeah.
- [24:00]
A
And so the point is, this is going on in the other institutions. This is going on. I mean, what did we see in Los Angeles with, you know, a fire chief that was just calming their pants down? With respect to fighting a major fire, our final sponsor this week is Branch Basics, which makes effective all natural, non toxic cleaning products. We've been using their products for a while now on counters, floors, in the laundry, kitchen and bath. They're all great products. You clean your home with have a huge impact on how your home feels and how you feel. The synthetic fragrance compounds, phthalates and harsh surfactants in many cleaning products all contribute to hormone disruption and can cause fertility issues, mood changes and thyroid dysfunction. And in the US products don't have to disclose everything on their labels. So you don't really know what's in your products. Branch Basics changes this with full transparency about their entire non toxic plant and mineral based ingredients. Their premium starter kit comes with one powerful concentrate that makes everything. Laundry detergent, bathroom cleaner, glass cleaner, even pet wash and vegetable rinse. It's safe for babies, pets and anyone wanting to reduce their daily exposure to harmful chemicals. They also offer dishwasher tablets with a microplastic free formula and laundry detergent that's safe for sensitive skin. Branch Basics is human, safe and fragrance free. And here's more good news. Branch Basics is now available everywhere you shop@target, target.com, amazon, and of course branchbasics.com tossing the toxins has never been more convenient. And for anyone grabbing the Premium Starter Kit, you can get 15% off@branchbasics.com with code DARKHORSE. The Premium Starter Kit comes with the concentrate and refillable bottles for your surface cleaners, including all purpose bathroom streak, free foaming hand wash and laundry. It also comes with oxygen boost for extra stubborn stains on pots and pans, laundry, bathroom tile and more. This kit is a great way to kickstart your human safe cleaning routine. Just use Code dark horse for 15% off the premium starter kit@branchbasics.com after you purchase when they ask where you heard about them, please make sure you mention our show.
- [26:11]
B
I want to go back to something you said before about rediscovering my own work. One of the things that I used to believe a long time ago that I no longer believe that I've reality has sobered me up. I used to believe that people would put in things that issue merit and they'd put in things like diversity quoters because they thought that the discipline in an academic context in which they institutionalized these new norms wasn't important. So, for example, you could have diversity in philosophy partners because nobody cares about philosophy. Philosophy is important. So we need more diversity. So I was wrong. I was wrong to think that because now there's diversity in every facet of life. It's not quite in hospice now, but it's nowhere near its heyday. There is diversity in medical school. There's diversity in if you look at the people who got accepted into Harvard, for example, African Americans, blacks would go from 13% to 0.9%. Whites would experience a marginal drop. Hispanics, if you just looked at the standardized test scores. I mean, again, this is a a much longer discussion. Asians would be grossly overrepresented, particularly in in the hard sciences. So I used to think it was you. You threw merit out the window because you thought the thing wasn't important. But then we started institutionalizing these deranged policies with things that mattered and that didn't seem to bother anybody. Pilots, you know, you have diversity quotas. Nobody see. And I thought, well, Jesus you would think that in medicine and flying a plane like those things, but no, no. That the ideology, the mimetic transmission of the ideology was so sticky that even otherwise sane people did not see this as civilizationally threatening, nevertheless threatening to make it more likely that the plane would crash or they wouldn't successfully survive surgery. So I was wrong about that.
- [28:14]
A
And I think I know why you were wrong, because it's strictly a game theory problem. The fact is, this idea traveled with a credible threat of ruin if you didn't sign on. Right. You and I are two people who have survived going up against this. But, you know, it has certainly taken a tremendous toll. Most people cannot survive standing up and saying, yeah, that diversity and equity and inclusion stuff is nonsense and it's dangerous. So it's not that any. I mean, I don't think most people are working at the level of rigorous thoughts. They've gotten out of the habit in part because their educations have failed them. But it's not that people are thinking, oh, we can do that to aviation and no planes will fall out of the sky. What they're thinking is, if I say what's true with respect to aviation, I will pay a spectacular toll. And the chances that I will die in a plane crash because I failed to say the right thing about aviation, I'm not going to move the needle at all. So I might as well say the thing that saves me from the mob and then let somebody else worry about the airplanes. And the problem is, eventually the bridges do fall down, the airplanes fall out of the sky. And I will say this one other thing. I'm curious about your reaction. In one way, the allegations of the post modernists are more correct than they have a right to be. The fact is, it is. Yeah, well, there are places where it is. If you're in finance and you crashed the world economy in 2008 by playing the bubble game, right, you did all of this harm. Well, if you were a big enough player, you got a bailout and you certainly didn't go to jail. So the point is you. The idea that there are realms in which. Oh, yeah, it's totally a fiction. The idea that we have markets that set prices and that, you know, the regulatory agencies are doing their job, that's all fiction. That's a bunch of power players playing a game in which regular people get hurt. So the fact is, Jason, our day at Cambridge is at least playing in the kiddie pool, right?
- [30:41]
B
Yeah. So here's my response to that. My response was never that the Postmodernist or the postmodern condition was entirely wrong. But it was never all about power. That's why science allows us to have corrective mechanisms. That's why, ideally, we put standards in that about plagiarism, about lying, about theft, and the fact that people violated those standards. There is some system of accountability, and that system should be transparent. And so there are norms that tether us to reality based on things we should value, like meritocracy. But it's still entirely possible that entire populations, wholesale, would just repudiate those pretty obvious facts about what makes society flourish. I mean, that's what we've seen the last 10 years. I mean, we've seen that in Western Europe. We're seeing that all over the world. Well, not all over the world, but we're seeing that in large swaths of the world.
- [31:35]
A
Yeah. Across the west, we are seeing that no discipline appears to have immunity. Right. You have biology departments that are accepting that men can become women. Even worse, you have medical schools, not one of which stood up and said, actually, that's not true, and they've actually participated in the physical maiming of otherwise healthy mutilation. Yeah, so? So no discipline is immune. It does result in harm in the physical world. It's not just word games. But I would also point out, I don't know what you'll make of this, but the recent appointment and the consent of the senate of the CDC. Yeah. For our new CDC chief, Dr. Erica Schwartz. I was struck. I was watching the confirmation hearing, and she's asked point blank by, frankly, a pharma shill in the Senate. She's asked point blank, does she think the MRNA platform is safe and effective. Now, there is no way that a person who is qualified for that position could think in 2026 that safe is a fair term. Maybe somebody could argue that it's safe enough in light of the benefits. I would argue that they are being misled with respect to the benefits. But so many people were injured by the COVID MRNA shots that the idea that you could just answer with a smile on your face and, you know, we'll show the clip.
- [33:27]
B
Dr. Schwartz, do you believe that MRNA vaccines, including the COVID 19 vaccine, are safe and effective?
- [33:37]
A
Senator, thank you for meeting with me earlier. I do appreciate that. I will say for the record, you do have the most beautiful office in the Senate. That being said, I do believe that mRNA, you're all welcome over afterwards. Yeah, I do believe that MRNA technology is safe and effective. She's jocular as she's Answering this question, she has no compunction about saying the MRNA platform is safe and effective. And as much as I hate to say it, I feel like Dr. Erica Schwartz, Dr. Jason Arday are variations on a theme. Right. One of these people is much more serious in a sense than the other, but they are taking advantage of the fact that there's a niche. You know, in the case of Erica Schwartz, there's a niche for an attractive black. Yes. Well spoken person who can lie to the camera about matters of life and death. And it doesn't faze her. And so there she is. I think it's, I think it's another instance of the same. Just as we saw in the, the Palisades fire and the fire chief who was ill prepared to handle a foreseeable disaster. Right.
- [34:53]
B
Okay. So. So here's the problem as I see it. So again, I'm lack the credentials. That's why I never talk about this stuff. I'm not credential. But here's the problem as I see it. Why should anybody trust her or anybody else? There is, you know, years ago, Tom Nichols wrote the book the Death of Expertise. But why is she trustworthy? And I remember Lawrence Krauss. Didn't we do an event with Lawrence Krauss, you and I?
- [35:18]
A
I didn't.
- [35:19]
B
Oh, I've done some events with Lawrence. But Lawrence Cross said something like the people will always have an asterisk by their name. And then later he apologized for that, but he was right. And so there is a mistrust of expertise. There's a mistrust of institutions. But here's the bad. And you alluded to this in the beginning. Here's the bad part. There's a mistrust of black people who hold positions of power because they don't think that they legitimately should have gotten into schools because they were affirmative actions in. They don't think that they, that they earned their positions through any kind of a meritocratic process. And consequently, you won't have the best people. And I'm not casting aspersions on her, but remember Joe Biden said he's going to put a black woman on the Supreme Court. There are only 2% of black women who graduate from, from law school. So it's statistically. You mean to tell me that the best person. And maybe, okay, maybe it's not a single best person, but you mean to tell me that that has to come from that 2% so that there's some exogenous variable that's at. At play to disrupt the meritocracy. And once the meritocracy becomes disrupted, it. This is Jurgen Habermas's 1973 paper about the legitimation crisis. Once you do that, among the other things that you dis. Trust in institutions is the functioning of civil society, because then you. You have resentment. Nobody trusts the institutions. Nobody trusts expertise. I don't trust expertise. I was hoodwinked by the Biden laptop. 51 of these, you know, guys came out and said, this Russian plan. I'm thinking, well, what the hell? I know about national security? I don't have a national. I've never been in the military. I don't know anybody in the CIA. Actually, one buddy, but. But there's just a wholesale mistrust of the institution. And in aggregate. In aggregate, that is the opposite of human flourishing. That will lead to the immiseration of society. It has to. There's no other possibility.
- [37:14]
A
All right, I want to deliver a confession that is relevant to your point before I get to the rejoinder to.
- [37:21]
B
And feel free to push back on anything I say.
- [37:25]
A
Well, here's, here's the confession. And it pains me to say this, but I feel a moral obligation. Please. I misjudged Thomas Sowell before knowing much about what he thought, because as he was introduced to me as a concept, but before I had seen his work, I felt like, okay, I know this story. A black conservative gets embraced by the right because it is so useful to have a black conservative saying something that is surprising to hear from such a person. Only when I encountered his actual work did I discover. No, no, no, no, no. This guy is an intellectual powerhouse. His blackness is completely irrelevant to what he is saying. It may call attention to it. But I think that's all well and good because from the point of view of the quality of the thinker, he's absolutely top notch. So anyway, I don't know the reason,
- [38:32]
B
but the reason you thought that is because we created systems that elevated people to positions that were not. Were unearned. And, and, and the difference with being black is you can just look at someone who's black and say, look, he's black. And so, yeah, I prejudged him. But, but you're prejudging him, I would argue, is less of a moral failing and more of the consequence of, you know, they love. These people, love to talk about systems, more of a consequence of the system that enabled people to rise to positions of authority, like Jason our day, who are simply undeserving of those systems, of those of that position. And the authority that carried with it. And making matters worse, the entire system supported this guy. Like the corruption is so endemic, it's so ubiquitous that even after it comes out that he's plagiarized hundreds of passages, people still support the guy because he's black. So you're, you're, you're, you know, there's no sin in the secular world, but if there were sin, that would be it. Like, that would be it like 20 years ago, it would be over. It doesn't matter if you midget Eskimo, it makes no difference what you are. If you obtain your credentials by fraud and intellectually stole, that's the worst thing you could do. So you're reaction to Thomas Sowell is a consequence of a position that frankly the far left put you in.
- [39:58]
A
Yeah, I mean, let's put it this way. It wasn't anti black prejudice, it was a prejudice about the way the system works and what it was likely to mean. But I judged him before I had information. And you know, we all use heuristics, you know, because you can't, you know, you can't think through, you know, what are the dangers of my picking up this pen off the table? In general, it's not dangerous. So you do it. So anyway, yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't a moral failing. It was like a due diligence failing. But I feel bad about it for, I mean, you see why I feel bad about it. And anyway, Thomas Sowell, if you are watching this, I apologize 100% my error. And you might be heartened to know that I am a great admirer of yours, having now encountered your excellent quality work.
- [40:47]
B
Okay, so, but that, that, that, I don't know if it belies another question or leads to another question. So if you, in the future, if you see black people who are public intellectuals that you're not familiar with their work, would not a rational response be to be skeptical of them precisely because they're black? And they may have not obtained their credentials through. They may have not been in that position for some.
- [41:16]
A
I don't know if you will remember this, but somewhere 20, 18, 19, I was concerned about this exact problem. And I was concerned that because you were getting a lot of these DEI hires that made, that basically introduced a lot of non serious people, you know, blacks in particular, into these upper echelons, that people were going to lose track of the fact that we actually had a very deep bench of black intellectuals. And I held on dark horse, what I called the black intellectual roundtable. I think it was. I think it was eight leading black intellectuals. And we had a very good conversation. And I will tell you, of all of the episodes I've done, it's one of the few that people, specifically when they introduce themselves to me, they will say that that episode had an important meaning to them. So anyway, I'm very proud to have done it. But, but the point was, yes, I was concerned, having been in this position myself, I was concerned that other people were going to start using a dumb heuristic and that basically just seeing a group of black intellectuals talking where I was like the token white guy would be useful. And apparently it was.
- [42:35]
B
Yeah, maybe that's. Maybe you've absorbed a lot of Christian culture and that's a kind of redemption.
- [42:40]
A
Yeah, maybe. I mean, I also, you know, redemption or not, I think it was the right thing to do. But I wanted to come back to another point of yours. Let's go back to the Biden example. So Biden says, I'm going to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court, thereby limiting his search to such a small population that the chances, yeah, the chances that the best person, even if capacity is completely evenly distributed across the population, the chances that the best person is going to be in any group that is only 2% is small.
- [43:15]
B
And we know, we know it's not evenly distributed across the population. So already there's a question, but let's just accept it by fiat.
- [43:22]
A
That's true. Even if it was, what you're effectively doing when you make a statement like that is saying, I am willing to take a lower quality person. Correct. In order to be in this demographic category. And so the point I want to make is this, as a complex systems theorist, which is what I trained for, if you pick any group, even if it's the group that has the highest concentration of capability, and you limit your search to that group over the course of many searches, you are condemning the system to hire people who are not the most qualified. The only search.
- [44:02]
B
By necessity. It's by necessity because you've self selected. You've selected from a group. Yeah, it has to be the case.
- [44:09]
A
It is a logical certainty.
- [44:11]
B
That's correct. But that's only a problem if you have a subordinate set of values. For example, if your highest value is not whether or not the Constitution should be interpreted in a certain way or strict constitutionalist or what have you, but if your highest priority is putting someone of a certain skin color on the bench, then that is totally irrelevant consideration. So it depends on what your first principle Is so you, you. You and I. You and I share for the first principle. You and I share first principles of somebody like Biden who does not share that first principle.
- [44:45]
A
Right. So from the. So this then goes to. One of the components of this woke madness that has overtaken western civilization is self obsession. And the idea that anybody would misunderstand when we put somebody on the Supreme Court it is an achievement for them. That is not the important factor. My feeling is who's smart enough to be on the Supreme Court? Nobody. But we need the Supreme Court to be composed entirely of people who are as close to smart enough to be there as possible. Because the things that they rule on have important impacts over the way civilization functions and how fair it is.
- [45:33]
B
Okay, so here's the problem. And this is not an availability heuristic. Here's the problem. So let's say that we took everything you said and we put it in a basket, right? Functioning of civil society, etc. Etc. And then you have another basket and the other basket is we need more black people. And that basket also has a set of a set of consequential consequences to it. Like so that in that basket is society will go here more. You know, blacks will have a role model like Word in Star Trek and his famous thing with MLK etc. You are privileging. This is what a kind of. I'm trying to do this in. In a neutral non standpoint way. It's almost impossible. But in your basket you're privileging something that the people who have the other basket are privileging something different. Those are going to lead to different outcomes in society based upon what one values. Like if you're start it so you have a series of starting assumptions about the society. The people who want more blacks on the Supreme Court they have a set of. They're looking at it through the lens of remediating past injustices and the way you remediate past injustices. What was the famous clip by and it's plan on talking about any of this today. Sandra Day o' Connor knows I think it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a woman. I can't remember who it was but one of those what's it. What's an. An equitable number of. Now I'm screwing up the joke of Supreme Court justices. And she said of female Supreme Court justices. And she said nine. But the idea is that that makes up for an historical injustice. So we put on. But that's the people who have this basket. This basket is they have certain starting assumptions about reality in which it is more important to have a black person on the Supreme Court than it is to have the functioning of civil society.
- [47:27]
A
Well, okay, you get to it in your last sentence there. The problem is that we didn't agree to all be able to decide what the top value is. The point is we are all dependent on a functioning civil society. Some of us don't understand what happens when that society breaks down. And so they don't have a proper fear of the world that they are inviting by sabotaging it. But any time you decide to impose some other value over meritocracy with respect to some important function, you are actually attacking civilization and all of the people who are depending on it. So my point is, whether you're confused about what the top value is or not, you don't have a right to. You can't, you know, yes, of course you can privately decide that physics is, you know, a fiction and that engineers are fakers and it's all about power and it doesn't really matter. So we can just put whoever in the chairs of the engineers that we feel is most deserving and don't worry about the consequences of their calculations because those are phony anyway. But when you do that, then you're risking my family as it crosses the bridge. You don't have the right to do that. Right.
- [48:44]
B
So it kind of reminds me of Hemingway's line about poverty. How did it happen? Slowly and all at once. As you're talking. Yeah, as you're talking, I was thinking about if you could make a linear map or a linear model of this and that the more systems are infected by something other than meritocracy, like you have another value. You know, I've been, I said for years, you know, if people really value diversity, put someone who knows nothing about math as the chair of a math department put midgets on basketball teams. I've been saying this stuff for years. It's. I try to move out of this space, but it's haunting me. It keeps coming back. But, but the point is that I wonder if you could. The more systems that stray from a meritocracy, the, the more predictable the outcomes are in terms of the collapse of the civilization because the civilization simply cannot be sustainable. You know, that's the other thing everybody is, everybody's talking about their lived experience, standpoint, epistemology, their truth, et cetera. But nobody talks about that when they go to a bank, right? Nobody talks about when, that. When they may want to make change for a five dollar bill and they get shorted for by a dollar. I think a lot of this stuff is just verbal behavior. It's just kind of speech patterns that people mimic through a set of, I don't know, just like a memetic value that transcribes to people. And they want to jockey for status in their community. And for them, it really is a sense of the tragedy of the commons. So for them, it's like, you know, Garrett Harding's 1953 piece. It's like, you know, you have a bunch of cows in the commons and every time you add a cow to the commons and you degrade the comments, but your benefits go up significantly. So everybody wants to just start grazing cows. I wonder if it's the same way. If you start shouting about there needs to be, you know, indigenation, more indigenous people, land acknowledgments, your cachet among a certain group of lunatics will increase, but in aggregate, you'll be throwing the entire society into the cesspool.
- [50:46]
A
Okay, this is perfect. So part of the reason that I think many of us are very exercised about Jason, our day, even more so than we were about Claudine Gay, for example, is that when the particular revelation is sufficiently over the top that everybody can see it, it's an opportunity to have a conversation that we are failing to have otherwise. And so what I would like people, you know, yeah, it's all hilarious to look at Jason our day and, you know, laugh at his whoppers.
- [51:26]
B
It is funny.
- [51:27]
A
It is funny. But what I want to say is, look, I don't even remember what ridiculous department at Cambridge he was hired into. But what I want to say is, okay, look at this example. We can all agree that this is ridiculous, that this guy. People are spending, I don't know how much it costs to go to Cambridge, but I'm pretty sure it's not cheap, right? People are spending their hard earned money to send their children into a classroom in which a fabulous can't seem to tell a lie big enough that anyone spots it and says anything. Right? Okay, Whatever's going on in that classroom is broken. If it was just that classroom, that would be interesting, but not that interesting. It turns out it's all of Cambridge.
- [52:11]
B
Correct.
- [52:11]
A
Is that the limit of it? No, it's the entire academy.
- [52:14]
B
Yeah, it's the entire we. But the part of the problem is we don't know how pervasive it is. That's part of the problem.
- [52:22]
A
We. I think we do know. I think you and I know.
- [52:25]
B
Yeah. We can make reasonable inferences about how bad it is.
- [52:29]
A
Well, you have said in a colorful way, you said you're a fan of burning it all down. Now. I think I know what you mean. What I have said is that the system is irredeemable. You can cover the campuses. But even if you, even if you started doing everything right tomorrow, you fired all of the phonies and you hired only people who were qualified. It's a minimum of three generations before you can even staff a new academy. Right. The level of fakery is so high even in the disciplines where you can't spot it because they're talking in jargon,
- [53:03]
B
but you can't even. I have to stop you there, because you can't even do that because they have tenure, they're contracted for life. So even if you wanted to do that, and now I'm going to throw something on top of that, a phrase popularized by Dan Dennett. If it's not worth doing, it's not worth doing. Well, you're better off looking at a wall than being taught by Jason our day.
- [53:22]
A
It's actually, it's actually counterproductive to get one of these educations. So, all right, you can't fix the academy. If you decided to fix it over time, it would take you at least three generations. And now you have a new problem, which is because you allowed this to go on for several generations. Who exactly is going to train these new people to think there's nobody in the university system who remembers how to do it. It's a handful of people who would need to train thousands, hundreds of thousands. So the point is, okay, can we agree that that's at least remarkable, that maybe the academy is the eyes of civilization and that we have blinded ourselves and been flying blind for 20 years?
- [54:07]
B
Yeah, that's a way to put it. I like, I like the ocular metaphor about the society having blind itself. I think that we have voluntarily crippled the engines of knowledge production.
- [54:20]
A
Right. And then you go from there and you say, I'm not saying it is true, but one obvious hypothesis is that the madness that is going on in the universities, which I apparently was able to phrase in a paragraph or two in 2017 or 18, whenever that was. Right. That sounded so prescient, but I'm telling you now, it wasn't. It was just extrapolation. The same person is telling you, okay, now extrapolate to the cdc, now extrapolate to the fire department in the county of Los Angeles and you'll start to get the picture that this is actually, for whatever reason, an attack on Western civilization's ability to function, correct? Right.
- [55:08]
B
So that's absolutely correct. And it's been. It's been funded through outside sources. It's been funded through Confucian institutes, it's been funded through. No, Faisal Al Mutar, who runs. Is very, very close friend of mine, runs Ideas Beyond Borders, talks about external funding from China and Russia flowing through Oman, Qatar. So this is not merely a homegrown problem. This is a problem that has foreign influence as well.
- [55:39]
A
I don't know who it is who wants the public feeble, but something does. And it's making our minds feeble and it's selling our children all kinds of nonsense that will cause them to harm themselves over the course of their lives. It's wrecking our fire departments and our engineering schools and our medical schools. It's putting us in ill health. The point is, it's all part of one thing. And the beauty of. Jason, our day. Let me back up. I've said that the purpose of a jester. I don't know how real our vision of what a jester was in a. In a king's court, but the king kind of needs somebody who can tell him what the mood of the public is, what the public thinks is funny without getting his head cut off, right? Like, if your advisor tells you, you know, the public thinks you're a raging asshole and pretty stupid. You tell that to the king, there's a chance that doesn't work out so well for you. So you have this role where somebody is so goofy that anything they say can be dismissed. Well, that person might be able to get a message through about what's really going on and whether intentional or not. I assume it's inadvertent. And Jason, our day, is just a liar, Mind you, even if that's what he is, he could still do us a big favor by tremendous revealing the lies.
- [57:07]
B
He could be the Christ of the university. Save the whole thing.
- [57:10]
A
He could save the whole thing. But at the moment, today, without a revelation that he's even. You know, that he even thinks of these as lies, what he is is the gesture. And he looks the part, you know, that crazy. Like him in his academic regalia with his long dreads down to his butt and all that. He's the Jester. And the point is, can you hear the Jester? Because the Jester is trying to tell you the most important thing that anybody has to say, which is your system is a joke. Your system, your system, the one that is actually supposed to make your children capable as they face the impossibly dangerous AI nuclear future. That system is making them dumber. It's telling them goofy shit. And nobody is bothering to say, hey, I don't actually quite accept that it can't quite be true because that's just not allowed.
- [58:09]
B
Yeah, I guess the question becomes what I've focused on for the last few years is what to do about it. I have a few ideas of what to do about it. I don't know if you want to segue the conversation there.
- [58:18]
A
Sure.
- [58:19]
B
I think we agree upon the analysis of the problem. I think the world is going to change very, very quickly within the next 18 months to two years from AI. Among other things, Musk has said that we're in the beginning of the singularity. I'll bracket that. What can be done about this problem? Maybe the problem will just rectify itself through these new technologies. But until it does, you know, I have a small nonprofit, tiny nonprofit National Progress Alliance. And one of the things you did, we had a campaign which should be the simplest ask in the world. It's literally the simplest. Most people ask for money, we ask for no money. We ask specifically that you'd stop donating to your alma mater. It should be literally the simple, simplest ask in the world. And the reason for that is these are not the same institutions that I graduated from. These are not the same institutions. So why would you fund them if they're going to crazy town? So that would be one example of an effortless indulgence. Just stop giving to you. And if you're not giving to universities, fantastic. You're already on board with the program. Keep it up. There are other program, there are other ways, I think correctives or corrective mechanisms. You know, Linda McMahon, the new Secretary of Education, she wants to clean house. And again, I don't know if you want to go down the. The question of solutions, but I think the problem has been over diagnosed to death. I think people are desperate to figure out what we can do about this. You know, I hate, I really do hate to say this, Brett, Like I truly hate to say this because there are a lot of really good kids who have gone to great institutions. And so I'm hesitant to say that you should not hire people from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, the Ivies, now Cambridge should absolutely be on that list. Anyone who doesn't fire plagiarists or is covered up plagiarist or is engaged in wide scale fraud and corruption, you just. There has to be some way of holding them accountable. And again, I understand that there are good students have gone there, but I think that might have to be a price to be paid. You just don't hire their students.
- [60:21]
A
First of all, let me say I love your idea of not donating to your alma mater and I like it even better. You know, I would like I can say this because it's not my organization. I would like it even better if the structure was don't give to your alma mater and give us 10% of us being you, 10% of what you would have given to them, which we will use to turn that into a weapon. That basically, if you haven't given to your alma mater and you have given to this organization, this organization will then take all of those people who are silently not donating and it will give them a voice. Here's why we stopped donating, because you're doing these things. Your medical school is participating in the maiming of healthy children. Okay? That is intolerable. And I'm not going to donate another cent to you until you end that practice and look into how it could possibly have happened so it doesn't happen again, that kind of thing. But the other thing, with respect to not hiring people from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, wherever it is, I would suggest an upgrade. Don't hire anybody from those institutions because of what it says on paper, because you don't know what it means. What I've told my kids is that for the world to come, what they should do is make sure that they create something of their own that is impressive. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't need to solve a real world problem. Great. If it does, it can be just an interesting machine that does something surprising and entertaining, but something that demonstrates that you yourself are capable. Because this machine wouldn't exist if you weren't. Right. And that, that kind of application, you know, if somebody approached me from Harvard, I wouldn't hold it against them if they had done something remarkable. But the fact that the paper says they're remarkable doesn't mean anything to me.
- [62:18]
B
Yeah, I gave my kids different advice. I told my daughter repeatedly to be an electrician. You know, my daughter, I told her to be an electrician. I, I think that the trades are going nowhere fast. The, the tr. No, that's not the expression. The trade. What is the expression?
- [62:34]
A
The trades aren't going anywhere.
- [62:35]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The trades aren't going anywhere. And they're not going anywhere for, for quite some time. Electrician, H Vac, carpenter, Plumber.
- [62:42]
A
I have bad news for you, you
- [62:44]
B
think they're going to be Optimus 3
- [62:46]
A
robotics out 100% for very. When that's the question. I don't think it's 20 years at all. I think it's much sooner than that. And for people who don't quite see, you know, on first pass, it seems like the trades are safe. But the problem is the reason that the robots that are being built, I mean, there are obviously lots of kinds of robots, but the reason that you're seeing the robots that you're seeing that have hominid form is not that that's a good form to build a robot, but it's a form that the world is built around. So if you can make a robot that looks like a person and has some extra advantages, like, you know, I've seen them, their heads can spin 180 degrees, their torsos can spin 180 degrees, their hands can invert. So the point is anything a person can do as soon as AI passes human intelligence, which I think is inevitable, right? Then a robot can do anything a person can do. And imagine, it's not like, oh, let's call the electrician robot because we need some extra circuits added into our house. The electrician robot is, the H Vac robot is. They can do it all. They connect seamlessly to the hardware store. The parts arrive.
- [64:12]
B
Yeah, I guess so. Then the question becomes, what's the time horizon? I don't know the answer. I don't think anybody knows. You know, Musk says we have three exponentials operating in tandem. And so, you know, many. Look, this is way outside my area of expertise, but many people are predicting that if you work on in a laptop, within 18 months, 85 to 90% of those jobs are toast. So I think if I were betting, I mean, I bet enough to tell my daughter to do it. I think that I'm quite confident that the electrician robot, the robots are not going to take over anything anytime soon, certainly with a. Not within five years. And I've actually talked to some people who are far more knowledgeable to the scenario. Again, I don't know. That's the problem with the, the future. It's inherently unpredictable. And in terms of the university setting, it could be that this is all a mood conversation, that universities and the architecture upon which they're predicated is the remnant, just. They're just legacy holdovers. It could be that we're looking at a very different future in which now, I mean, I ask Grok whatever I need to know, and I ask it to teach Me things or languages or teach me something like, I have a master's degree. I use Mark Andreessen's prompt. So maybe that's just going to be normative in a very short period of time. And I mean very short period of time.
- [65:30]
A
Yeah, I mean, I. I do think those of us who appreciate what the university system once was naturally are biased in the direction of wanting it back. And if it can't be fixed, then rebuilt. But that one of the beautiful things about not even the AI era, but the. The Internet era, was that it did democratize skill. Right. The number of. If you were interested in carpentry, the number of excellent, innovative carpenters who would show you how to do things you didn't know how to do so that you could go at your own speed. You know, they had different styles. I was a particular fan of the videos in which nothing was ever said. It was just done. And so you had to reverse engineer what was being done and why. Anyway, these are. These are educational opportunities that actually harken back to the age of apprenticeship more than the age of universities. So anyway, it. I think it's not inherently bad that we are going to default into some other way of learning if that's what happens.
- [66:47]
B
I totally agree.
- [66:48]
A
If. If we have, you know, let's say a digital bill of rights that allows us to pursue knowledge without being propagandized and surveilled in the process, good luck. Not. Not bloody likely, huh?
- [67:06]
B
Yeah. Social credit scores. I mean, there's just a range of problems besetting the west right now.
- [67:14]
A
You're telling me, man, we're in big trouble. All right. I know you have to go. Before you do, is there more that you think should be entered into this conversation?
- [67:29]
B
Boy, Yeah, I do. I think I'll give you my. Just turned 60. I'll give you my quick diagnosis of some of the problems we're facing in the west, if I may.
- [67:40]
A
Sure.
- [67:41]
B
I think that the primary problem we're facing is a lack of honesty. I think people are not being honest about their nature of the nature of the problems. I think, you know, I just wrote a sub stack about Sadiq Khan and Gay Pride and more platitudes without naming the ideology responsible for this. I think we're not being honest about the consequences of Islamic immigration in particular. I think we're not being honest about the consequences of not having an adult male in the home and the criminogenic factors and the risks of that. I think we're not being honest about the debt and the amount of money we're spending in relation to what sound fiscal policy should be. I think we're not being honest about Chinese hegemony, the one belt, one road system, Chinese designs over Taiwan. These things are, I mean, most Americans, what percentage of Americans can find Canada on a map or Europe on a map? So we have a problem with education, but even among the people who are ostensibly educated, I think that there's, and this is what we've seen in the conversation, there's a crisis of honesty. We're just not being honest about the nature of our problems. And I think if you do that long enough, then you're going to get what you deserve. Keep, sir, keep, keep lying about. And again, I think the paradigmatic example of that is Islamic immigration. And the necessary caveats every time you have to say this. Not all Muslims, majority, very minority of Muslims, but you're still looking at the, the tail end of a distribution in which not all Muslims are Islamists, but all Islamists are Muslims. And we're not being honest about the fact that Jews are fleeing everywhere, the Jews are fleeing out of Western Europe. We're not being honest about the fact that there is a vicious rise in anti Jew hatred and people are continuing to conflate that with, with Zionism. It's just not true. David Deutsch, the Oxford physicist, calls that the pattern. So I think we need to be honest about these problems. And if I could urge anything, it's the social consequences of being honest about the nature of your problems and being willing to revise your beliefs. The social consequences of that, if you're willing to take that risk, your life will be far better off your interaction. I think we had lunch one day and I was talking to you and you said that you've lost a lot of your friends, as have I, but the bonds between you and those friends were much tighter. And I think that that risk has greatly enabled me to flourish as a person. And I'm predicting, my guess is it's the same as you, but at core of it, I just think we're not being honest and we need to start being honest independent of the consequences.
- [70:33]
A
All right, well, I'm going to take that as an invitation because I want, I agree with most of what you said, but I believe it is incomplete in a particular way.
- [70:43]
B
Oh, how so?
- [70:44]
A
Well, I also think we need to be honest about the state of the consent of the governed. I think we are living in an era in which there is still some power left in voting, but it's very little that the degree to which the people and therefore the policies that we end up voting for are being, are functioning in the interests of the public is so low that it suggests that there, there's control in our system that isn't about the public well being.
- [71:23]
B
Oh, well, I have to go, but I want to talk about that just for a second. So what do you mean? Do you mean that the. Because the populace is under educated, they're making poor decisions or they're making decisions on the basis of something other than evidence? Or do you, do you mean that the way that the Republic has constructed itself, it's, it has a basic inability to discharge the will and the mandates of the people?
- [71:48]
A
Well, to be blunt, please, I think that by the time you get to the voting booth or the envelope, the people who would represent you aren't there. So we're constantly voting amongst people who have already sold us out in order to get onto the ballot. And so that is an intolerable problem. But I would also say I agree with you that, you know, it isn't Muslim immigration per se. It is immigration that is not done with the interests of the citizenry in mind. In other words, we're not bringing people in because we need more people. We're bringing people in for mysterious reasons. We are not asking them whether they even like the West. And to me it is. It couldn't be more foolish to invite in large numbers of people who don't like you. That just seems incredibly stupid. But the place where I would really suggest your model needs a potential upgrade.
- [72:59]
B
Please.
- [72:59]
A
Is that it has become very hard to talk about. Yes, the rise of anti Semitism. Anti Semitism is rising for various reasons. But one of them has to do with the fact that Israel is, it has a governance structure that isn't any more about the well being of Israelis than the American system is about Americans.
- [73:23]
B
And yeah, we should talk about, we should talk about that. I can't do that right now. We should talk about that. I do want to go back to something you said before about the governed. And I think that, I mean, maybe, I'm sure this point has been made ad nauseam by other people, but it does seem to me that the skills one would need to have a good campaign are not the skills one would need to be an effective leader. Those seems to occupy discrete categories of things. And so it seems obvious that there's a disconnect. But I don't see why you would think that that has expedited or that somehow it's worse now than it Was that's just a feature of the system in which we live. So that's the first thing and then the second thing, and then I'm sorry, I do have to go. But the second thing is, you know, I don't know, it's so obvious to me that trying to think of a way to frame this. If you just look at data, right, You're a big fan of facts and evidence. I'm a big fan of facts and evidence. And just parenthetically it's fascinating to me how facts and evidence have now been characterized as right wing phenomena. So if you're, if you know you're advocating facts and evidence, you're some kind of right wing maniac, as opposed to, to a person who's advocating for facts and evidence. My philosophy teacher once said to me as an undergraduate, eating ruins a good appetite. So, you know, you have a good ideology of everybody's going to get along. And if you start throwing facts and evidence in there, that's going to be disruptive. If you start naming communities or naming the ideology or naming the problem, that's going to cause problems. So let's, let's not do that. I think at core you can't even rise to the level of speaking about these things unless you have the acknowledgment that there are certain universal standards of facts and evidence. I mean, there are virtually no Jews in Malmo, Sweden. Look, and, and then this, this idea that is somehow the far right. I mean, how many? I mean, again, this is a huge conversation, but I just, I would love to have this conversation with you in depth. And I'd love to say one more thing. Can I say one more thing? It's a little bit extraneous. So I think the problem is that so many people are unwilling to have a conversation with somebody because they hold a certain view. And if you do that long enough, that's what our institutions have become. They've made a virtue of not holding or having a conversation. And over time, not only do people forget how to do so, but when they hear an idea that runs contrary to their worldview, they're just aghast. So I think the problem with people not having conversations with each other is that that increases the confidence way beyond the warrant of the evidence, so they become positive that what they believe is true. Because not only have they never heard something on the other side, but they don't have the dialectical tools, they don't have the skills to be able to do that. And I think over time, it's funny an emerging theme in this conversation is that if you don't consciously attend to things, then by necessity that they will crumble. And I think the same thing is true at a kind of atomistic level for people's individual epistemic structures. If over time you don't engage in conversations with people you disagree with in ways that are forthright, dare I say honest, you will have to lapse into error. You just want. Because you have no. You've. You're voluntarily absenting yourself from a corrective mechanism. And so that's the situation that I find now. It's like a big cake in which you have these epistemic structures in which we're all. People aren't being honest. We don't know how to have discussions. The common values of the civilization are being eroded anyway. I went on a long rampage. Sorry about that.
- [77:28]
A
No, that's all right. Let me just say in closing, I agree with you and I've noticed a particular tell that the reason that we don't have the conversations that you and I both believe would be so useful is that as you get towards a dangerous boundary, and I say dangerous with respect to some kind of power that does not want us to resolve our understanding of things, does not want us to see eye to eye. As you get near one of those boundaries, the accusation that comes back is that you are morally defective for asking the questions that you're asking, which then exempts the person from having to listen to you. Right. Why would I listen to a person who is motivated by grift or a
- [78:12]
B
private agenda or morally defective for not having the right answers to moral questions?
- [78:18]
A
Well, I would say we should be having an analytical discussion about what is taking place and what is its meaning and what are the causes and what are the effects. And that the fact that somebody disagrees with me, especially if it's somebody who I respect their capability of thinking, then it is interesting to me that we disagree because one, at least one of us, is wrong. And so I would like to have that conversation. If it's me, I certainly want to know.
- [78:44]
B
And if it's not me, absolutely.
- [78:48]
A
So anyway, I guess what I would say is a conversation like the one that you and I are having, the ground rules are good faith and that the standards which are likely to be flawed just need to be universally applied. You can't have one set of standards with respect to talking about Islam, let's say, and another set of standards for talking about Zionism. I just want to see a standard.
- [79:15]
B
I'll give you another One that I will not impose on you. That I will impose on myself. I am willing to revise my beliefs. I'm willing to change my mind if given sufficient reason or evidence. Of course, I won't. I won't impose that on you or my conversation partner, but that's the way to keep ourselves honest. That's.
- [79:36]
A
I think that's built into good faith. You're not. You're not arguing in good faith. If sufficient cause does not result in you changing your position.
- [79:44]
B
Yeah, then I. I guess it's a linguistic thing. I wouldn't say argue, but, you know. Yeah. So I don't know if it's built into good faith, but making that explicit, I think is very important to do because it sets the ground rules for the conversation. Anyway, I must run. My friend, thank you very much for having me on and talking about the Jason our day and other other things. Appreciate it.
- [80:06]
A
It's been a lot of fun. Peter Boghossian. Where can people find you?
- [80:10]
B
Substack Peter Boghossian B O G H O S s I n YouTube, Twitter. I'm all over the place. Peter Boghossian and Mike Nana's film is fantastic. It's called the Reformers. You referenced it here. Highly recommend Mike's work. So thank you, Brad. I appreciate.
- [80:26]
A
Me, too. And they can, of course, find you out on the street doing your epistemology.
- [80:31]
B
We're going to Canada in a few weeks.
- [80:33]
A
Hell, yeah. All right, well, thanks again. And to everybody else, thanks for joining us.