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An epistemic avalanche of madness, with Peter Boghossian
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One of the most important academic papers of modern times was published in 2017. It was titled, ‘The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct’. Thankfully, it wasn’t the content of the paper that started a global discussion, but rather the circumstances that surrounded it and the light that it shone on the current state of academia, woke ideology and notions of truth and freedom of expression.
This week, host Will Kingston is joined by one of the pseudonymous authors of the paper, philosopher, writer, and one of the most interesting thinkers of our age, Dr Peter Boghossian.
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Visit Peter's website here.
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Gratitude
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, it's Will here. Before we get stuck into this week's show, I just wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who has been leaving us their ratings and reviews. It's a wonderful way to help us grow Australiana and it's super quick and easy. If you are yet to do so, please leave us one now so we can remain in the good graces of the mystical algorithmic podcast gods that control our destiny. Now, cue the jingle.
The Conceptual Penis Paper
00:00:40
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Australiana from the Spectator Australia. I'm Will Kingston.
00:00:45
Speaker
One of the most important academic papers of modern times was published in 2017. It wasn't concerned with splitting the atom or curing cancer or world history. No, instead it argued that the penis should be understood less as an anatomic organ and more as a social construct, isomorphic to performative toxic masculinity. Thankfully, it wasn't exactly the content of the paper that started a global discussion, but rather the circumstances that surrounded it and the light that had shone on the current state of academia
00:01:15
Speaker
work ideology, and notions of truth and freedom of expression.
Interview with Dr. Peter Begosian
00:01:20
Speaker
I'm thrilled to be joined by one of the pseudonymous authors of the amusingly titled The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct philosopher, writer, and indeed one of the most interesting thinkers of our age, Dr. Peter Begosian. Peter, welcome to Australia.
00:01:37
Speaker
G'day. Come on, OK? Yeah, we'll give you an eye for effort. I'll take the A for effort. Oh, how that comports perfectly with the age of self-esteem in which we're living. Yeah, so we wrote in 2017, we wrote the conceptual penis James Lindsay and I, my writing partner, wrote the conceptual penis as a social construct and we did it. And then we wrote the explanation for why we did it in the spec and
00:02:06
Speaker
in Skeptic magazine because there's a deep rot, there's a corruption in scholarship and peer-reviewed scholarship has to be something upon which we can rely, especially now. That was in 2017.
Distrust in Academia and Ideological Shifts
00:02:19
Speaker
People trust our institutions less and less and less and so the idea was to expose a rot in corruption
00:02:26
Speaker
And particularly in certain fields, anything with studies in it, but gender studies is really the heart of it. Draw the camera back. When did you first start noticing this? Because you've been a philosopher for what, 25, 30, 30 years. When did you start noticing this change? I've often said it was like a blitzkrieg without a war.
00:02:44
Speaker
I started noticing it in 2017. No, I'm sorry. I started noticing it in 2012, and I was the right person in the right time and the right location. At the time, I just moved out of Portland, but I was living in Portland, Oregon, which was fully caught in social justice ideology, critical social justice, depending on how I wonder. It goes by many names. Wokeism.
00:03:09
Speaker
I want to go on a quick tangent there because I was listening to a Spectator podcast literally just before we started this interview and Lionel Shriver was saying that the term work now is too cute, it's too nice, what we're dealing with is something more evil. Winston Marshall you spoke to recently as well, fellow Spectator podcaster said that he thinks it's a
00:03:30
Speaker
It's a nasty term. It's something which can be kind of derogatory. Why do you use that term?
Wokeism and Language Manipulation
00:03:36
Speaker
And does the language really matter when we're talking about this? Language is everything. This is how critical social justice or wokeism, and we can unpack that, metastasize its way into the society. So Helen Pluckrose, the author of Cynical Theories' bestselling book, which by the way, was kept off in The New York Times' bestseller list,
00:03:54
Speaker
intentionally by the New York Times. She calls it critical social justice. Wesley Lang Yang calls it, I just spoke to him yesterday, calls it the successor ideology, what succeeded liberalism. Majit Nawaz calls it regressive leftism. Woke people used to call it wokeism. But one of the ways, this isn't, it's really important to understand, this is not an academic thing. This is not me being pedantic or
00:04:18
Speaker
overly academic, the way this, we're in this freaking catastrophe right now, this an epistemic avalanche of madness, because
00:04:30
Speaker
People have used ordinary words and changed the meanings of those words. You mentioned right beforehand you saw my interview with Lawrence Fox when I explained that, the motte and the bailey. The motte is the defensible area of the castle. The bailey is the area in which the peasants go. That's not defensible. They can be picked off by arrows. Every single woke word, everyone
00:04:49
Speaker
And I think I wrote a piece for The Spectator about this. It has a motte and a bailey. It has a defensible meaning of a word and an indefensible meaning of the word. And James Lindsay's also written about this, and he's the other author of the esteemed paper that you cited in the beginning. It should be read by everyone, the conceptualist, the pianist. And so what happens is in public policy, the bailey goes in, the
00:05:18
Speaker
words with double meanings go in like inclusion. But the retreat, what they really mean before it goes into public policy is so it is is the bail is what they really mean. And the retreat is the mot when someone questions them about this all inclusion. You don't want everyone to be included. But what inclusion really means is is restricted speech. So, yeah. So the reason I use wokeism, it's a very specific word.
00:05:46
Speaker
the guy on Hard Talk, that was his first question to me, and VBZ Hard Talk. We don't have to use wokeism. We can use any word we want. Some people could think the word woke is cute, but the most important thing right now is that the people who traffic in the ideology don't get to dictate the meanings of words.
Public Misunderstanding of Woke Terms
00:06:05
Speaker
They just don't, and we cannot see that ground.
00:06:08
Speaker
Yeah, interesting. And Peter, I've been a fan for some time, but I think possibly my favorite thing that you've done is your series on Woke in Plain English, where you try to really simply articulate that modern Bailey, what we or what people who may not have kind of an everyday engagement with these cultural battles.
00:06:29
Speaker
what they may assume that the word means and then what the word actually mean. Correct. Is a lot of this the fact that you have a lot of well-meaning people who when they hear a word like diversity or they hear a word like inclusion, they go, that is something that obviously we want to endorse.
00:06:47
Speaker
But there is something behind it, there is another gender behind it, and that's almost how this gets momentum. Yeah, because if you ask someone who doesn't participate, forget, okay, I was just going to say, I'm going to correct myself. I was just going to say, if you ask someone who doesn't participate in the culture wars and political, but forget about that. If you ask someone who is political and does participate in the culture war, even they don't know what it means.
00:07:09
Speaker
Joe Biden, in his second debate with Donald Trump, didn't know the difference between equity and equality, which are antonyms, they're not synonyms, in the presidential debate, and yet it's plastered all over the Democratic Party platform.
00:07:23
Speaker
Bernie Sanders on Real Time with Bill Maher didn't know the difference. And I went to his webpage, and on his webpage, equity is one of his primary pledges. And he didn't even know the difference. So forget about normies, quote unquote, who don't participate in the culture war. People don't know the meanings of basic, how woke people use woke words and then
00:07:45
Speaker
how those words end up into public policy. So that's why we did the Woken Plain English where I break woke words down in 60 seconds. That's why this is a heavy thing to say in a quick period of time, but that's why how wokeism goes into other cultures out of the Anglosphere. Wokeism goes because only the primary meaning of the word translates. The secondary meaning, the Bailey doesn't translate, only the Mott. So with inclusion, we include people. It's not restricted speech. So
00:08:13
Speaker
For woke isn't to work you'll hear people go bla bla bla bla bla bla and then diversity of bla bla bla bla equity so they'll. The english word will there won't be that there won't be a translation of the german or the french or what have you.
00:08:29
Speaker
And that's an extremely important point. And I just wrote the forward to the book, Rajiv Mahultra is of Indian public intellectual stakes in the Ganga. And he talks about how Wokism is a neocolonial export and the idea of changing the meanings of words. It's a wonderful, it's a massive tome. It's like 800 pages. It took me forever to read, but it's
Handling Workplace Diversity Conversations
00:08:48
Speaker
great. There are people who will be listening to this podcast who will
00:08:54
Speaker
be in an office every day and they will be told by their HR department to support diversity initiatives, to support inclusion initiatives. How do you go about having that conversation in an environment where you are afraid that you may very well be fired for putting forward a contrary opinion to people in middle management who are pushing the, whether it's the motto of the Bailey, but the meaning that is the underhand meaning of say diversity or inclusion,
00:09:23
Speaker
That's a great question. I was just in Australia. I was there for a month. I was in Melbourne for a few weeks in Sydney for a few weeks. I had a faculty appointment. I did some talks, did some spectrum street epistemology. And when I was in the meeting, I was in meetings with deans and think tank leaders and reporters. And my buddy, Reed Niswander, goes around the world with me. And I had one sole thought that was dominating my mind in these meetings. Wow, Australia is about a year behind.
00:09:53
Speaker
They're about a year behind. I got up from the table at the end of one of these meetings and as I was walking to the door, my buddy turned to me and he said, they're about a year behind. It's exactly what I was thinking.
Ideological Capture in Academia
00:10:05
Speaker
Whatever you see now in the US, you'll see it in about a year. I say that to situate your question.
00:10:12
Speaker
What's going to happen in a few months may be different because we can see the waning of the ideology here. We can see, and I can explain why if you want. So what do we do? What do we do? Okay, so the first thing you need to do is you have to remember that this is a non-falsifiable belief set. These are not scientific propositions. These cannot be falsified. These are not scientific. They're not rigorous.
00:10:39
Speaker
These are ideological conclusions pushed by ideologues. Now, at the same time, people can point to a bunch of different dodgy studies from the types of journals that you've taken the piss out of to say that this has academic credibility. Well, yeah, that's how it weaves its way in that. So, you know, employers are paranoid of lawsuits.
00:11:00
Speaker
So they have to have this. There are legitimate instances of discrimination that we have to protect people against on the basis of their sexual orientation or their trans status or their race. And those are legitimate. And we need some safeguards and protections against those, some legal mechanisms in place. And then we have ideologues who have, I could explain, idea laundering if you want. Probably it speaks to what
00:11:29
Speaker
you're talking about. So money laundering is if I'm selling heroin and I have all this money and I don't know what to do with it. So I started a laundromat and then I take a loss on the laundromat and then
00:11:45
Speaker
I quote unquote launder the money. That's where it comes from, from laundromats. And then outside I have taxable income that I can sell, buy properties, do whatever I want, start legitimate businesses, et cetera. Idea laundering is what the ideologues in the institution have done. People who are academicians with 10 year jobs for life, a bunch of like-minded people have gotten together. They've published in journals, like-minded, when I say like-minded, I mean morally like-minded. They've published in journals.
00:12:15
Speaker
they've laundered their ideas. They go in as moral impulses and they come out as knowledge. And not even moral knowledge, just knowledge. And then those studies are cited when people want to change or form public policies. They cite journal articles that have been ideal laundered. So those are not legitimate. They're not rigorous.
00:12:40
Speaker
They have the imprimatur of legitimacy. For example, they're from a university or an institution, but they're just the musings of ideologues. That's all they are. Yeah. I was going to say, I imagine the legitimacy comes from a couple of things. A, probably from peer review and B, from the fact that the idea of a academic journal by its nature still has this veneer of credibility around it.
00:13:02
Speaker
Correct. And the purpose of those journals is to forward the narrative. It's not to seek truth. They think they've already found the truth, like fat studies, for example. It's not to talk about A1Cs or carbs.
00:13:15
Speaker
how many percentage of carbs and micro nutrients or how much vitamin C or what have you, do you need? It's to push fat acceptance and anything that does that will be published if it does it in the right way. And so these journals are themselves narrative forwarding machines and that those narratives are then used to inform public policy. That's the other reason we got into this mess that we're in because we have a group of ideologues who have published
00:13:41
Speaker
papers, they point to those papers. Educational administrators, for example, universities cite those. They take over specifically people who have EDDs as opposed to PhDs in philosophy, but certainly PhDs in philosophy or English literature or what have you, not immune to this. Then they take over colleges of education in which people
00:14:02
Speaker
will be want to be teachers who want to go into K through 12 teach and then they become indoctrinated with peer reviewed literature. So then they teach people things, trigger warning, safe spaces, micro regressions, belonging, diversity, inclusion, equity, and they never learn the other side. They only learn to teach, they don't learn to teach the truth. They learn to teach
00:14:26
Speaker
The purpose of, and this is amazing, this is ubiquitous, at least in the United States, I can't speak to it in Australia, but they use Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and they learned that the purpose of education is to alleviate people from oppression. So all of this is predicated on journal articles that have been idea laundered, things that academics can point to to justify their own conclusions that are forwarded by people who already believe that, and they're not seeking the truth, they're not seeking to disconfirm what they believe, they're seeking to forward a narrative.
00:14:56
Speaker
We'll get to how you combat that group think, and group think seems to be the thread that makes this possible. But before that, I'm keen to understand how this group think took place. If I think of the stereotype of the English common room in Oxford colleges in the 1940s and 1950s,
00:15:16
Speaker
this is not the types of discussions they're having. That probably would have been quite a conservative environment. I would have thought, how ideologically have we got to a point in academic institutions where there is overwhelmingly one type of thinking and it's overwhelmingly this regressive leftism or wokeism or however you want to frame it. There's some great literature on that. There's some great empirical literature by Cass Sunstein and there's some great, I just read a few months ago. Is that the behavioral economics guy?
00:15:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's the guy, the word cast is a little, some people think it's a female, but his work is fantastic. He does work. Some of his work is really interesting. It's like what happens when you put people who have a similar ideology together, a similar belief system,
00:16:03
Speaker
He found an empirical testing that they become more extreme in their beliefs. Tim Urban has a wonderful book, What's Our Problem? It's one of the best books I've ever read. He has the blog, Wait But Why, and he explains this in detail as well.
00:16:18
Speaker
It's complicated but the genesis of this so it's complicated okay so let's build upon what we've already discussed so ideal under so in order to get tenure you have to publish seven papers in seven years you have to do other stuff too but that's that's like a key a key piece of that seven papers in seven years okay so if you're attempting to publish in journals that have been ideal under.
00:16:41
Speaker
your publishing pieces. Remember, the point of the journals, the entire purpose of the journal is to forward a narrative in which you adhere to the orthodoxy, the moral orthodoxy, critical social justice, and the suite of propositions that go here that are found within that orthodoxy.
00:17:00
Speaker
So if you try to publish against the orthodoxy, because the journals are ideologically captured, those articles won't get published. And if those articles don't get published, you're not going to reach your seven articles in seven years. By the way, seven articles in seven years is a freaking joke. I could do that. No, I mean, it's true. We wrote 20 spoof papers, seven of which were published. We probably would have gotten four or five more in.
00:17:29
Speaker
because we got better at writing toward the end. This was post the conceptual penis in 10 months. So seven is nothing. Okay, so let's talk about that. Just quickly, I imagine the same principle applies up and down the academic chain, as in an undergrad student probably has to tow the same orthodoxy in order to get a distinction these days. Does that same principle apply the lower or higher up the academic food chain?
00:17:54
Speaker
much less so lower. But yeah, I mean, you cannot write, for example, I don't even want to say this because people will meme it out. But there are certain things that you can't write about or you can't give data for, particularly racial things, right? So you can't even have that. But as you go up, up the academic chain or the food chain, I can't remember what you said, you're more held, you're held hostage to the to the orthodoxy. So one way is this happened is that
00:18:22
Speaker
people will hire people who are ideologically similar to themselves. And they, for all this talk about diversity, I love Thomas Sewell's quotation.
00:18:32
Speaker
I'll believe there's diverse, something I'm paraphrasing, but I'll believe there's diversity when they put a Republican in the sociology department. So diversity just means people who think the same. Diversity means intellectual homogeneity, ideally from people with dark skin or trans status or some historical oppression variable. From your work in plain English, people who look different but think alike. Yes. Yes. Wow. You really did read, go through my stuff. Good. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. So how did it happen? One, it happened because
00:19:02
Speaker
people were more likely to get published in journals that forward narratives if they themselves forwarded the narratives and they believed it. They taught those articles in class to their students and they taught them as they didn't teach the other side. So for example, nobody ever
00:19:19
Speaker
in gender studies, I've probably asked, I don't even know, tens of thousands of people this question. Have you ever studied Martha Nussbaum's critique of Judas Butler? Not a single person has studied it. The reason is because they forward narratives and they want people to believe certain things that they think are true, and there's no dialectic. There's no other side of it. There's just this one
00:19:42
Speaker
funnel like it's like a fang you just take a fang and the neck and just suck the blood and then that's what there is so okay so that that's one way that happened throwing people out or
00:19:54
Speaker
It expedited very, very rapidly once diversity, equity, and inclusion came into the picture, because then these offices went around hunting people. They hunted me. They hunted Bruce Gilly, who wrote the case for colonialism also at Portland State. They've hunted Charles Nege from Central Florida. They've hunted countless people who hold
00:20:14
Speaker
Positions that they don't think you should hold so you then have a an enforcement mechanism for the ideology and even the threat of being under investigation is huge even the threat of it so anyway it and then when people who are like ideologically similar get together and they don't.
00:20:33
Speaker
Here, other points of view, you move from epistemology, which is how you know what you know, to morality. So you move from what Socrates famously talked about, about what is knowledge? Knowledge is true justified belief, or justified true belief. Justified, you need a reason for believing it. True, it aligns with reality. And belief, you believe it. It moved from they don't have justification to this, to they're a bad person for believing this.
00:20:59
Speaker
teach the other side of the issue, there is no other side, and then they'll talk about Nazism. Oh, there's no other side of throwing Jews in ovens or what have you. Okay, well, so these are all variables and factors for how this happened. Does that make sense? Is that clear? Yeah, it does. And we'll get to straight epistemology in a second, but I want to go a bit deeper on the cultural rot within academia first. There seems to be, from what I've read,
00:21:25
Speaker
two schools of thought on how you go about repairing these academic institutions.
Repairing or Replacing Academic Institutions
00:21:31
Speaker
Well, how you go about solving this problem. And one is the repair school of thought, which is basically saying, strip out this DEI dogma and the apparatchiks that promote it and replace them with people who are predisposed to free thought. And I've heard you talk about this. Lauren, you've said something like that.
00:21:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And you've said something like Chris Rufo is going through this at the moment and this is his approach. Correct. And then the second is you go, right, these institutions are too far gone. We need to build things fresh. Correct. An example of this would be University of Austin, which you are now deeply involved in. Correct. How do you think about those respective parts? That's a terrific question. And anybody who really wants to understand what comes
00:22:11
Speaker
Not what comes next, but what comes right now in the culture war. That's the question to be asking. There's another set of questions for what comes next. But so as I said before, I like Chris Rufo. Chris Rufo is a buddy of mine. We have.
00:22:25
Speaker
substantive disagreements about metaphysics. He's Catholic, I'm an atheist, but we're aligned when it comes to what the problem in the institution is. We have people, and it gets back to Karl Popper's 1945 Paradox of Tolerance. Popper was an English Austrian who, a very, very, very influential thinker.
00:22:47
Speaker
who talked about how much should we tolerate the intolerant. The very purpose of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, the raison d'etre of the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is to limit people's speech and protect, quote unquote, minoritized, that's another word that I give, or to protect people from certain types of speech. It's to restrict speech. That's the whole purpose of the office. That's literally what it does. So if Chris Rufo is successful,
00:23:15
Speaker
And Vivek Ramaswamy is another one. Ron DeSantis, Vivek is a presidential candidate. Ron DeSantis is another one. Vivek is actually in second place now, right after Trump. Really interesting guy, by the way. Yeah, fascinating, super smart, super smart guy. So I run a nonprofit and I cannot, I'm not allowed to endorse any candidates. So I'm not endorsing Biden, I'm not endorsing Vivek, but I will say, no but there. And I will say,
00:23:43
Speaker
Vivek's last book, I just finished it a while ago. It's great. He's super smart. He's like, he has great insights into so much of this stuff, but okay, so bracket that. And the Christian nationalists are going after him like crazy because he's a Hindu, even though he believes in God and he's a vegetarian and somehow these maniacs have found a reason to be upset with people who are vegetarians. Anyway. We'll get into religion, don't worry. You'll be able to vent soon enough.
00:24:11
Speaker
Okay, I can't. What were we talking about? I got distracted there. Two parts of how we go about repairing academic institutions. So I can't and I won't wait around for people to attempt to extirpate the DEI bureaucracy from the ground of derangement. So you either build or you destroy.
00:24:33
Speaker
So whatever, I just don't think, I don't, anyway, if someone wants to do that, I have all the power to them, but I'm going to build new institutions. I'm going to give students a choice between, as the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, I'm going to give them a choice between truth-seeking institutions, or a time when they attempt to do my part, truth-thinking institutions and social justice institutions or woke institutions. And Haidt has some great lectures on this. So we'll get to the University of Austin specifically in a second, but before that,
00:25:02
Speaker
You get a bit deeper on the repair side. Do you think it is possible? Why are you just saying more power to you? Why are you not actively pursuing that avenue? Oh, that's an easy question. Because they have jobs for life. They have tenure. What are you going to do? You can't get them out. That's the snakes and the gunga, the snakes, the vipers. You just cannot get them out.
00:25:24
Speaker
They view the institution as a mechanism for discharging their ideology. They view the classroom as an indoctrination mill. They're absolute zealots who are completely convinced that they're in possession of moral truths. What on earth are you going to do with these people? OK, well, you go on the board of trustees, you end DEI bureaucracies. There's no appetite for that, because at this moment in America, certainly American cultural history and
00:25:53
Speaker
I'm pretty sure I can speak for your island. At this moment, one of the worst things you can be called is a racist, a bigot, a homophobe, even still a Nazi, even though it's ridiculous. They have that one tool in the toolkit, which is to call you names, like the person who didn't want to do the training. Oh, we didn't answer that question fully. I should answer that. Let me just answer that question fully. So let me go back to that real quick. So if you're in a training and you don't
00:26:18
Speaker
You're like, oh my God, these people are complete maniacs. You need to document everything. Look, check the local laws, see if you can record it. Ideally, you'd upload those things. If you want to ask a question, remember, even the very idea of asking a question, they'll view you as a bad person because dialogue and discourse are not valued, but you can frame it like this. Microaggression. Yeah. I was told at Portland State University when I asked for evidence of a policy that that itself, my asking for evidence was itself a microaggression.
00:26:46
Speaker
which is really think about that level of derangement. That's the way that the ideology buttresses itself from criticism. So back to the person who's in the DEI training, this is what I'd recommend you say. Oh, this is very, very interesting.
00:27:02
Speaker
What do I do if someone says this to me and then you put in your, what you really want to say? So that way it doesn't look like it's coming from you. It looks like you have, so it's much more difficult if they bring you up on charges for questioning the orthodoxy because you, you could claim, and I'm not claiming anybody lie, but you could, it, it looks more like you're trying to defend the orthodoxy from some heretic. Uh, so document frame questions like that.
00:27:30
Speaker
and think about what questions to ask. That's in my book, How to Have Impossible Conversations. There's ways to ask targeted questions. And remember, the purpose of these is to get you to think this way, and it has a legal protective mechanism in it as well for the employer who offers it. So there are things that you can do, and you can always sue, like Jody Shaw is suing Smith College, and there are ways to sue as well.
00:27:57
Speaker
I want to, before we go off the conversation around academic institutions, I want to get a better sense of where exactly this is coming from. I don't know. Are you aware of the work of Peter Klein, fellow American academic? I know of Peter Klein. I'm not familiar with his work.
00:28:13
Speaker
We had a chat with Peter three or four months ago. He had a wonderful paper called, Why Do Companies Go Work? He used academic institutions as one case study because it's the one that he knows the best. He split up very simply academic institutions into students, into the administrative body, and then into the vice-chancellors and the very senior levels, as well as the lecturers.
00:28:40
Speaker
What you just said, it sounds like there's a big drive coming from tenured academics. His view was slightly different in that he said he didn't actually see, maybe it's because he's in a business school, but he didn't see as much of this ideological drive coming from tenured or from academics, or even from students, as much as this glut of middle management. Oh, 100%. Yeah, I want to make it more articulate. He's going to make their job more meaningful. Yeah, he's right. I should have.
00:29:07
Speaker
Should've made been more articulate. Yeah. It's also buttressed by the fact that they have large salaries and they don't want to upset the boat. They don't want to rock the boat. And I think when you're in those environments long enough, you start drinking your own Kool-Aid. Do you have that expression down there? Drink the Kool-Aid? Yeah, we do. Okay. Yeah. You start drinking because sometimes I'm, I say something people agree, but yeah. Australia is downstream of American culture. Chances are we will have heard it through a movie or a TV show. Don't worry.
00:29:34
Speaker
Okay. Okay. Yeah. So they've basically drank their own Kool-Aid, but there's no question about it that mid-level administrators and even presidents of universities, they don't want to rock the boat either, especially they're getting, you know, many deans make upwards of here in Portland, I'm thinking make upwards of 300,000
00:29:54
Speaker
with parking spaces, who wants to give that up, right? So you just promote the orthodoxy. You're probably thinking in the back. You don't have to think too much about it. It's probably a good thing. Or at least that's a story you tell yourself. And then from there, you get involved in some pretty dastardly deeds.
00:30:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting. Censoring people, firing people, people committing suicide. Because remember, the key thing that people need to remember is it's not if racism took place, it's how it manifested.
Cultural War and Disruption
00:30:24
Speaker
So the default assumption that's from Robin DiAngelo, the mega, mega bestselling author who's hoodwinked, I don't even know how many hundreds of millions of people around the world. The default assumption is that racism is
00:30:34
Speaker
is there and you need these tools of critical consciousness to uncover the racism and that's one of the reasons that the administrators etc push this madness that sexism is there that heteronormativity is so that's the default assumption that these malignant phenomenon exists and you need to train people to identify it and weed it out.
00:30:56
Speaker
Take the mention of racism as a segue into street epistemology, which I think is brilliant. Before we get into what exactly it is, start with the context. To put it in an Australian context, we have a vote later this year. The vote is to enshrine an Indigenous representative body in our constitution. We'll do it through a referendum where everyone has to vote on it.
00:31:20
Speaker
And what it's done, it's revealed a really troubling instinct and troubling instinct, which I think is common amongst Western countries. And that's a general unwillingness to persuade. So proponents of the voice, which is what it's called, are very happy to call the other side racist, as opposed to doing the harder job of saying, why this is a good thing, of selling it to the people. And I can speak for Australian politics to say that there are less and less politicians who are very happy to
00:31:47
Speaker
try and win hearts and minds, and more and more who will look at just labeling people as particular names, which I think you mentioned just before. Yeah, because you're down, like you said, they're downstream of us, and then you're taking what we do, and you're adopting those tactics. So why is persuasion less valued than potentially it was at some point in the 20th century? Boy, that is a, I can't, it's very difficult to answer that question. So, okay, I'm gonna try to do this without
00:32:17
Speaker
Let's get that big brain to work. Unearthing a large infrastructure. Okay, so I published a piece about this. It's called the Great Realignment Cultural War 1.0 or 2.0. And so we're in a new culture war right now. This will answer your question. I'll try to do this as expeditiously as possible. So the old culture war, primarily but not exclusively, for example, revolved around atheism and metaphysics.
00:32:44
Speaker
And was there enough evidence to warrant belief in God, things like that? Did someone walk on water?
00:32:50
Speaker
secularism and separation of church and state, et cetera. The people in that culture were there are some commonalities among the participants. One is that they both believe there's a correspondence theory of truth. Basically that there is a truth out there and you can figure out what it is through reason. And for example, many Christians believe that you can figure out the existence of God or you can infer it, et cetera. Atheists didn't believe that.
00:33:18
Speaker
Another one. Just quickly, just to ground where we are historically, are we talking the new atheism movement of Dawkins and Hitchens of the early 2000s? Well, we're talking the new culture war didn't come in. So yes, we are talking about that. But we're it precedes that for a long time, really almost since the scopes monkey trial. So we're, we're talking about the new culture awards coming in, which basically came in 2011, 2012. One of the
00:33:46
Speaker
vital, one indispensable way to understand Wokism and the new culture war.
00:33:52
Speaker
is that the people who participate in this culture war do not buy into the same rules of engagement. In culture war 1.0, someone would go up and they'd make a speech and someone else would rebut them or their debate or they would, nothing wrong with protests. In fact, I'm a big fan of peaceful protests, actually peaceful protests. But in culture war 2.0, what you see is the people
00:34:19
Speaker
woke people don't buy into the rules of engagement. So they don't believe that, as I've said repeatedly in this podcast, discourse, debate, etc.
00:34:30
Speaker
are the ways to solve problems. The black lesbian Aubrey Lord has a wonderful piece, the master's tools cannot disable the master's house. The master's tools are epistemic adequacy, science, discussion, conversation, debate, dialectic discourse. Those cannot disable racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, cis ableism, et cetera. And so what you need is
00:34:57
Speaker
You need to disrupt and dismantle, that's the quotation, to disrupt and dismantle. So the people who participate in the ideology, when you don't participate in the same rules of engagement, so someone gives a speech, you don't like it, you disrupt the speech, you blow bullhorns, you report them to the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for rape, rape, like actual rape.
00:35:20
Speaker
Don't worry, you don't need any evidence because you have these things called bias response teams that are at over 200 institutions that anybody can file an anonymous report that goes to the police department. I don't believe me. Julian Melcher has written about this and others subsequently have written about this.
00:35:36
Speaker
So when people do not buy into the rules of engagement, very, very nasty things happen very, very quickly. Antifa would be a great example of a whole group, the militant wing of wokeism. And ah, that's another thing. Don't let those words fool you. Antifascist, right? That's how people get hoodwinked. That's how their moral mind overrides their rational mind. Oh, antifascist, I'm an antifa. Well, who's not an antifascist?
00:36:02
Speaker
But the thugs of today come, I'm trying to think of that Huey Long quote, I can't think of it, but the anti-fascists of today are, I can't remember the quote, but these, they're identical, they're thugs. They're using identical tools for what they consider to be a course of justice. Andy knows, just had a trial here, his book Antifa is excellent on that.
00:36:26
Speaker
Yeah.
Street Epistemology Explained
00:36:27
Speaker
Yeah. Well, we were saying we both spoken to Winston Marshall who paid a heavy price for supporting that book. And I think he's been well and truly validated in what we've seen subsequently. Yeah. Winston's a great guy. I lived in his basement for a month. He became a good friend of mine and nothing but respect. And so that's another example. So here's an example of Winston. So Winston's a Christian and I'm an atheist.
00:36:51
Speaker
And not only did neither one of us hide it, but we discuss it and we talk about it. And that's not a reason, not only is that not damaged our friendship, that's enhanced our friendship, right? Because I love Winston. I really do love Winston. And I have a genuine fondness for him and I like him. And
00:37:08
Speaker
My respect for him and my caring about him as a person has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he thinks someone walked on water. And my disagreement with him that I don't think anybody ever walked on water is absolutely unequivocally not a reason to be upset with someone or end a friendship with someone. Winston's an incredibly kind, decent human being. His metaphysical beliefs are largely irrelevant.
00:37:34
Speaker
I'm keen to get into that discussion around how we have religious debates effectively, but just before we do, talk to me about street epistemology, what it is, how do the mechanics of it work, and what are you trying to achieve by doing it? Street epistemology is my life's work. It is a way to help people, a non-confrontational, non-evocarial way
00:37:58
Speaker
to help people align their beliefs with reality, to calibrate the evidence and the reason that they have for their beliefs, to the confidence in those beliefs. And again, the key there is it's non-confrontational, non-adversarial. So my friend, nice wonder, who's the president of street epistemology.
00:38:16
Speaker
we go around the world and we do street epistemology. I wrote about it in the coin, the term, and wrote about it in 2013, although I just read that someone said I didn't coin the term, but I haven't looked into that. Whenever I published that in my book, so it probably preceded that a couple of years, but we do something called spectrum street epistemology, and the idea is you take
00:38:40
Speaker
epistemology out of a university context, and you bring it to the streets. And so we put lines of tape on a sidewalk, and you can see these videos that we did in Australia. God, what's that one of the names? Flanders Station we did in Melbourne. In Melbourne, yep. Is it Flinders or Flanders? And then, well, we did a bunch of them, and some parks and such. And we basically asked people to have conversations with us, and we give them a statement, trans women should
00:39:11
Speaker
be allowed to participate in women's sports or whatever the statement is. And these are all posted free on my YouTube channel. We do this as part of my nonprofit National Progress Alliance. And then people will go to a line, strongly disagree, disagree, slightly disagree in neutral, and then the other side. And then I'll ask them targeted Socratic questions.
00:39:32
Speaker
And then I'll facilitate conversations between people on different lines. And those are fascinating to watch. It's also fascinating to watch because you can see people change their belief in real time. Physically, you can see them move to a line, a different line.
00:39:49
Speaker
We live in an age where people are so ingrained in their way of thinking and conversations are so adversarial. Twitter, we've seen it's just toxic and even in the real world, it's similar. What is it about this method that breaks that particular part of the brain that is saying, I need to stay with my tribe? So when I designed street epistemology, I pulled from, I did this, I did this in the prisons. The prototype was
00:40:19
Speaker
precursor to actual street epistemology was when I taught in the prisons. I found questions throughout the history of Western intellectual thought. I can't remember off the top of my head, it was so long ago, but what does it mean to be a man? Questions about justice.
00:40:35
Speaker
And I took the lessons from that experience and then I delved, took a deep, deep dive into hostage negotiations, cult exiting, applied epistemology. But basically it's at the core of it is Socratic tools. And when you, and I wrote about this in my last book, I'd have impossible conversations. Many people have well-rehearsed defenses for conclusions, but not for epistemologies.
00:41:03
Speaker
What's the difference for people who wouldn't understand that? Yeah. So if you challenge a conclusion, like a conclusion is the United States should have a border wall. That's a hot topic. At least it was. I'll probably be a hot topic in the next debate, in the next election, but who knows? But should the United States have a border wall as a conclusion? How do you know that the United States should have a border wall? That's an epistemology. Like I know this because I know that X number of Mexicans come in or Canadians are
00:41:31
Speaker
or I know this because every country has a right to defend its borders. So that would be like, these are my reasons for believing this. And so then you'd say to someone, so like you'd put someone, you put them on a neutral line and you'd say the rules of the game, very simple. You can move anytime you want or not move at all. But the only thing is you have to commit to a line. So you can't go in between the lines. You have to make a full change of mind. And then you say, okay,
00:41:58
Speaker
the united states should have a border wall two border walls one between canada one between mexico a border wall to make the claim simpler between united states and mexico five four three two one move people move to a line and then you begin immediately asking them targeted questions you could do cool stuff too like you can get them to
00:42:15
Speaker
switch lines, like if someone's on strongly agree, you could get them to argue for strongly disagree. And this is something that's, it's not difficult to learn. I've put out videos on how to do this. And my hope is that teachers, educators, and people will bring these tools to the classroom to start asking people questions about what it is, how confident are they in certain beliefs? And does their confidence align with the evidence?
00:42:42
Speaker
The problem is that within woke ideology, they don't want to do that because they think that you should be completely confident in their conclusions. This was going to be my question. I can see how it can work for tax policy or for a border wall, but for when people have a quasi-religious belief in something, can it still be effective?
00:43:03
Speaker
Oh, it works 100%. My first book was a manual for creating atheists. It was specifically designed at that time, again, coming off the heels of my prison experiences, teaching in prisons for religious faith. It was specifically designed as faith is not a reliable epistemology. The problem is that if somebody thinks that they have the truth,
00:43:24
Speaker
they don't look for it or they don't search for it. So woke educators simply will not use this unless this tool, this pedagogical tool, unless they're going to use it to attempt to reinforce the orthodoxy because they believe they found the truth, for example, about pronouns, about quote unquote, gender affirming care, about transitioning minors. They believe that they know the truth
00:43:45
Speaker
And so they don't want anybody to question that. So this pedagogy helps people question their beliefs and make their ideas clear. But you would only use it if you valued helping people change their beliefs, or not even change, but align their beliefs with reality and proportionate to the evidence. So in one sense, it's doomed.
00:44:05
Speaker
But in another sense, it's the single best mechanism for helping people calibrate their beliefs that exist. In my opinion, I do this, I think about this stuff constantly. I've never seen anything else that even comes close to it.
00:44:19
Speaker
Yeah, I've watched the other videos you're talking about. They are wonderful. And for everyone listening, they are included in the show notes to the episode. I'll let the dog off the leash. We'll move to religion. I spoke to Brendan O'Neill recently, who I know you've spoken to recently as well. Yeah. I had drinks with him and Andrew Doyle. We had an awesome night out. He's a great guy. I love him.
00:44:39
Speaker
Funny, Andrew Doyle is coming up on the podcast as well for our listeners in the next month
Belief Systems and Human Nature
00:44:43
Speaker
or so. So it seems like we've got a similar rotating roster. Yeah. Andrew Doyle, by the way, is a very close friend of mine. I love the guy. The guy is absolutely, I'm not going to swear on your show, effing genius. He's a great example, the paradigmatic example of somebody who has unimpeachable liberal principles.
00:45:06
Speaker
people are constantly going at him because he's gay, because he's, you know, they think he's a Nazi, of course, what else are they going to get? But he's, I can't say enough, enough. That's the other thing about being in this space. You just meet so many amazing people like Brendan Winston, Andrew, that's just not even touching the surface, but you just meet so many amazing people who have such deep intellectual integrity.
00:45:31
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. Well, let me- Brendan's book is great, by the way. I'm almost finished with it now. The second chapter is Her Penis. Yeah, we discussed his book on the podcast and it is wonderful. But let me not drive a wedge between the friendship, but offer up something which he would disagree with you about. Great. He has a problem with the new atheist movement of which many people have said you are a part.
00:45:57
Speaker
He basically said that on the podcast, I've got two problems with it, despite being an atheist himself. He said, A, I disagree with defining my public identity through a negative. I would rather define myself through the positive. I'm a humanist as opposed to I don't believe in something. I don't believe in religion. He also took issue with Dawkins and Hitchens, whether
00:46:20
Speaker
probably counterintuitive things. So the gods of the new atheism movement, the assumption from them that the humankind is not some special category of creature. Dawkins would say we're just stardust or Hitchens would say we're just clever monkeys. He found it all just quite depressing. How do you respond or how do you think about how the new atheism movement worked and how would you respond to the way that Brendan thinks about it?
00:46:45
Speaker
So that was a compound question. So the first part of the question was, I was trying to track it while I answered it in my head. The first part of the question is, oh, defining oneself in terms of a negative. Yeah, that's true. Look, you can just substitute non-stamp collector for atheist. The number of people who don't collect stamps are
00:47:07
Speaker
vast. In fact, almost nobody collects stamps. Those people have different beliefs, different views, different metaphors, different everything. So the fact that you don't collect stamps doesn't tell you anything about yourself. So we should start with definition. I personally define atheism as I do not think that there is sufficient evidence to warrant belief in God, but if I were given that evidence, I would believe. So I
00:47:32
Speaker
I agree with him, defining yourself and I never even think about being an atheist. I just, it literally never occurs to me unless somebody, even when someone asks me, it just, it's not in my.
00:47:43
Speaker
It doesn't mean anything. In the same way that I don't think about the fact that I don't collect stamps. It just literally never occurs to me. And then the second part was Stardust, Monkeys, etc. There's something exceptional. I don't necessarily think that's incongruent with atheism or that it coheres with atheism. You can be an atheist and
00:48:06
Speaker
think about your special position in life or evolution or what have you. I think the, if I may offer something else, a criticism of new atheism that I've been thinking about a lot is what I've termed the substitution hypothesis. And I just talked to Dawkins about this and did an interview with him about it. I've talked to a lot of people about this because Michael Scharmer, who's a very good friend of mine,
00:48:34
Speaker
This may line up very nicely with my next question, which is, should the new atheist shoulder some responsibility for the rise of quasi-religious attitudes in work ideology? Yeah, that's the question, isn't it? That's the question. So the question is, let's talk about the substitution hypothesis. As belief in traditional religions fall, another religion will supplant it.
00:48:58
Speaker
And you said before about the new gods. The irony of a religious movement rising within an atheist movement should not be lost on anyone. It's fascinating. The Old Guard, Atheists, Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, they did not become woke.
00:49:19
Speaker
They did not succumb to the ideology, Shermer, myself, et cetera. But almost everybody else did, like the rank and file completely bought into the ideology. Men can be pregnant and transitions. I just watched this just truly deranged thing the other day about you can sleep. I don't even, even saying it's breaking my brain, but like having sex with a person with a penis who thinks they're a woman
00:49:48
Speaker
does not make you a homosexual. Back to the substitution hypothesis. That belief I just said would be a manifestation of what happens in the substitution hypothesis. What would substitute
00:50:06
Speaker
If belief is the default state and we have to believe something, we have to believe something supernatural, we have to believe in conspiracies or demons or aliens or whatever it is that we have to believe in, aliens would necessarily be supernatural. But just before we get to that, because that is a premise, do we need to believe in something? Is that an instinct that we need to have?
00:50:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's the substitution hypothesis. Dawkins said he doesn't think so. I don't know the answer to the question. My tendency is to think that's not the case, but I could be wrong. But the new atheist, myself included, was somewhat Pollyanna about the whole thing. We believe that if we could just get rid of these irrational beliefs, we'd kind of
00:50:49
Speaker
flourish or we would take the chains off of us to allow a new age of enlightenment or a new age of reason and rationality for human flourishing. Turned out that that's false, something far more dangerous took its place. I tweeted out and people gave me a lot of crap for it, but it's true. There are degrees of crazy, right? And there are degrees of dangerous and not all ideologies and not all beliefs are equally crazy or equally dangerous. And so the belief that someone walked on water
00:51:19
Speaker
is far less crazy than many of the beliefs that woke people have. Everything is systemic, like Ibram X. Kendi, that every disparity in outcome is due to systems. That's just demonstrably false. You can demonstrate that that's false, but bracket that for a second.
00:51:42
Speaker
The substitution hypothesis is true, and wokeism took over as the new religion. It was because the new atheist did a number on Christianity in particular, but religion in general. And so in that sense, that articulates with your question, because to what extent were the new atheists responsible for that? Does that make sense? Is that framing making sense?
00:52:10
Speaker
Yeah, it is. I've heard you speak about this a lot. That doesn't necessarily make the new atheism movement invalid because the search for truth should take primacy and that was a search for and a continuing search for truth. But it is nonetheless something that we need to be mindful of that if you create a vacuum, something is going to fall within that vacuum. Yeah, the search for truth and within the search for truth, that should always be the primary objective, everybody's primary objective.
00:52:39
Speaker
And within the search for truth, hold on, sorry, so much shit in my head right now. Within the search for truth, you have rigorous epistemology. Like how do you know what you think you know? That's the street epistemology component. That's in addition to having a search for truth, you have to have the right tools that enable you to get there.
00:53:00
Speaker
Wokeism has a backward roadmap. It has the opposite tools. One of the tools is you have to value engaging people with whom you have substantive disagreements and listening and understanding. But that's anathema to wokeism.
00:53:13
Speaker
I just want to test this because this is something which has been on my mind for the last few weeks and it's from listening to a podcast. It was either with Lawrence Fox or Winston. I can't remember which one. I'm a free speech absolutist or maybe with the traditional caveats of incitement of violence and defamation, but more or less free speech absolutist.
00:53:32
Speaker
There was a thought experiment that came up in one of your conversations, and it's a dangerous one in the current context, but I think it's worth talking about. And it was along the lines of imagine a future scientific breakthrough comes along that allows us to conclusively establish that the full bears of particular ethnic groups had different cognitive capabilities. Would it still be in the best interests of society for that knowledge to be communicated? Right. Are you asking me that question?
00:54:01
Speaker
Why not? Let's go into that very murky water. The real question there would be, how would you figure out the answer to that question? That's what I think is the real question.
Free Speech and its Decline
00:54:16
Speaker
You'd have to have an ethical infrastructure in which people were allowed, particularly in democratic societies through democratic institutions,
00:54:26
Speaker
to debate and converse and questions like, should there be forbidden knowledge? What would the consequences of this be? Should we formulate immigration policies, for example, around whether or not this is true? And then you said the normal caveat, but the normal caveat also applies here just because it's true for a particular racial group accepting by fiat that it is true. It doesn't mean that
00:54:54
Speaker
Not only does it mean it's never ethically justifiable to treat an individual from a particular group on the basis of the stereotype, even if the stereotype is accurate of that group. So even then, that's not a reason to discriminate against an individual based on the group stereotype. But the answer to your question is,
00:55:19
Speaker
you would have to have a mechanism in place so that people could debate and talk about it. And if you just have people coming in and making this forbidden knowledge, that's when your problems are going to begin.
00:55:31
Speaker
It feels like one of the reasons why we do have these types of people saying something should be said and some shouldn't. I'm thinking, say, big tech is one example. It seems like as a society, we're not nearly as good as we once were back in the days of, say, John Stuart Mill, of talking about free speech or advocating for free speech on first principles and as a consequence.
00:55:53
Speaker
Totally. Many young people particularly default to if something is nasty, if something is bad, if something is quote unquote hateful. Hurts my feelings. Yeah, that's becoming increasingly becoming the default. And for Australia, it's a little different from the United States because that's enshrined in our constitution, right? That's why we have a constitution. That's the whole point of having a constitution. States can't vote in things that are against inalienable rights.
00:56:22
Speaker
Yes. Well, we have a constitution. It's just, unfortunately, free speech isn't protected within it. Correct. How can we make the case for free speech better than we currently are? That's a huge question. Andrew Doyle, who you're going to have on the book, you should ask him that question. I'll punt to him. He has a wonderful little book, easy to read, et cetera, free speech.
00:56:41
Speaker
But bottom line, and he and I have had debates where we take opposite sides of the coin. We both argue for and against free speech, which unfortunately we had to do because the people who are against free speech don't believe in free speech, so they don't know how to make arguments.
Critical Thinking and Ideological Resistance
00:56:56
Speaker
That's the other thing. What it does over time, if you're not exposed to other ideas, is it dulls you cognitively and you become a hostage to your own
00:57:06
Speaker
whims to whatever the cultural capriciousness has to be. So you have to have some way, some corrective, some way to get in there and challenge and think about and think through and engage ideas. And free speech is one of the best ways to do that. The other reason for free speech is many of the people who are against free speech think it's harmful to minorities. But exactly the opposite is true.
00:57:27
Speaker
Every single civil rights achievement we've ever had is precisely because of free speech. But in order to know that, you would have to understand history, you'd need to talk to people, or at least look at people with whom you have substantive disagreements. But the problem is that this ideology has built in mechanisms to prevent it from dislodging from its hosts. One of those is discourse is bad, dialogue is bad, free speech is bad, et cetera.
00:57:53
Speaker
When you have those beliefs, you never have any corrective to figure out if the things you believe are true because they're never challenged.
00:58:01
Speaker
And one more thing you didn't ask me and I want to get back to real quick about our other thing is very briefly about the substitution of hypothesis. So why is it that, and this is a question that's fascinating, fascinated me, why is it that some people have fallen for this insanity, hook, line and sinker? And other people have just said that's completely insane. Like this whole idea of a man who wants to
00:58:29
Speaker
breastfeed and they get chemicals into them and then they want to womb so they can get an abortion. And again, this is an extreme example, but why is it that people, is there some personality or attitudinal disposition or characteristic that some people have that make them not immune, but more resistant or less likely to become
00:58:55
Speaker
ideologically captured themselves or have their cognitions hijacked by some mind virus like wokeism. Like what is it that, are there some personality dispositions? Is there an educational, I was just reading this great piece in the epistemology of democracy by Kenneth or Keith Standlich. And it was called, it's about my side bias. The only thing that my side bias is one of the most difficult things to get out of. You know, my side is true. Kind of people call it tribalism, et cetera.
00:59:26
Speaker
Those hooks and those anchors are very, very powerful for people's beliefs.
00:59:31
Speaker
And we could talk about that, but I just wanted to throw that out there to people who are listening. Really think about it. Why is it that some people can resist trends and cultures of the age and other people cannot? Because wokeism will fall, specifically this whole trans thing and detransition under 18, et cetera. Why is it that some people fell for this insanity, hook, line and sinker, like having Leah Thomas, an intact male in the women's room,
01:00:00
Speaker
at swimming events with his penis hanging out in a woman's room. And when the women complain, they're told to seek psychological counseling. Like, how is it that some people fell for that and other people said, that's the most insane shit I've ever heard? Like, what is it that those people have? And the question for your listeners is, how do I cultivate that? How do I cultivate that so I do not become an epistemic victim? How do I cultivate that so I do not fall for nonsense?
01:00:30
Speaker
You should be asking yourself that question and our institutions should be teaching people how to do that and they're not. They have failed us. They've failed a generation of people who think that they're smarter and wiser and more educated, but they're less of all of those things.
01:00:46
Speaker
everyone that is currently walking the dog or on their way to work, I will let you ponder that. I'm about a third of the way through the questions that I could ask, but we're at time. I fully expected that to be the case.
Conclusion and Call to Action
01:00:57
Speaker
Peter, we'll have to get you on again. It's normally very easy for me to write the plug for the guest at the end of the interview. Peter, it's harder for you because there's just so much stuff that I would recommend everyone listens to and reads to. We've got
01:01:09
Speaker
the link to your website and your link tree in the show notes, so everyone can go on there and see everything from how to have impossible conversations to the street epistemology stuff, your podcast, which is wonderful. I recommend to everyone listening, feast on all of that content, because as I said at the start of the podcast, Peter is, as I'm sure everyone now can see, one of the great thinkers of our time. Oh, you're so kind to me. That's very nice of you to say. That's just very kind of you to say, thanks. I don't know how true that is, but I just,
01:01:38
Speaker
I think that the key to all of this stuff is that when you think about things, you just reason openly and honestly with yourself and you surround yourself with people who will love you and just be your friend regardless of what conclusions you come to. A sincere person should not be discriminated against.
01:01:58
Speaker
I mean, obviously there are deal breakers, but if you're sincere and you're asking good questions and you're really trying to figure out what's true, that should be the glue that binds you together in a friendship, not a particular conclusion one has. And so I think that's really important and that we've lost sight of that. And the other thing I think we've lost sight of is that it's okay for friends, you can let friends be wrong. Like you don't have to be in complete congruity with everything someone believes is your friend. In fact, the relationship will be far more interesting if you don't believe
01:02:28
Speaker
everything that somebody believes. And so I urge people to just be a little more mindful about that. And one more thing, you didn't, this is unsolicited, you didn't ask me, but I think it's really important to be willing to revise your beliefs and to be open. As I'm 57, I just turned 57, and one of the things that I've come to learn is that
01:02:55
Speaker
We need to start listening, like genuinely listening to people more. And I know the entire books have been written about that, but here's a technique that people can use that's very easy to do. It's called Rappaport's first rule.
01:03:10
Speaker
And you should do this when you're trying to speak across a gulf, particularly a moral gulf, a political gulf. Listen to somebody, and when you think you've understood what they mean, ask them, okay, put the burden of responsibility on yourself. This is what I heard. Is this correct? And repeat it back to them.
01:03:29
Speaker
And if they say no, or if there's no, then you haven't understood because look, there's no possible way that everything you believe is 100% true. Like if you think that that's a delusion, like it's just de facto a delusion. So given that you
01:03:46
Speaker
must be wrong about many of your beliefs, it's an opportunity for you to figure out either better, you can increase your confidence that your belief is true by listening to other arguments or you can
01:04:01
Speaker
Nobody wants to be wrong longer than they have to be. So you can talk to somebody and figure out which of your beliefs are incorrect and just use that as a mechanism to live a better life. So I think it's really important that we start talking to each other again.
01:04:17
Speaker
You know, the street epistemology videos are free. There are tutorials. It's part of my nonprofit. Anybody can do it. If you're a teacher and you value having your students align their beliefs to the evidence, you can do it for free. They can read curriculum modules or whatever it is, and you can put them online. It doesn't cost anything. You don't even need tape. Maybe it cost a dollar. You know, you can use chalk.
01:04:39
Speaker
and just write the lines there. So the tools are available to people. And through the tools, you can help them cultivate a disposition of trusting reason and evidence and being willing to revise their belief. You just need to want to do it. That's it. The links to all of that good stuff is in the show notes. And I've got no doubt a lot of people will take you up on that. Peter, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for coming on Australiana. Cool. Thanks. Well, I appreciate it. I'm coming back to the island next year. Looking forward to it. We'll be sure to catch up then. Awesome.
01:05:08
Speaker
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