https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OUs72-WqmwI
I’m talking today to Claire Layman who’s who’s originated a magazine online called Quillette which I think has become quite popular and quite successful in a relatively short period of time and it’s certainly a magazine that I’ve come to admire it looks like it’s staffed by real journalists and so we’re going to talk today a little bit about how she’s managed that and well and about Quillette in general and about what her her aims and and ambitions are so I guess we might as well start Claire you could introduce yourself to my audience and and tell tell them who who you are and how you manage this. Okay so I am a former graduate student in psychology but before I went back to graduate school I was working had a couple of different jobs my first degree was in English so I always wanted to be a teacher of literature so I always had that aesthetic interest I just had sort of a crisis in my graduate studies where I realized it wasn’t for me and I wanted to pursue writing but I knew there was nowhere that would publish the stuff that I wanted to write and I thought well why don’t I build my own platform and in the back of my mind I knew that there were people that I knew academics that I knew who would also grab the opportunity to be published. So what made you think that there was nobody there that would publish the sorts of things that you wanted to write? All right so it’s fairly simple I was working on an article about a psychologist called Lee Jusson who he’s a social psychologist who studies the accuracy of stereotypes and so it’s a it was a long form article about a scientific topic but completely contradicts left-wing kind of narratives and those two things don’t find an easy home so there’s a lot of conservative places that publish sort of conservative commentary but it’s often just about economics or some kind of partisan political battle and the interest in science is not very deep however the place the best places for scientific journalism such as the Guardian or Wired or Scientific American they won’t go near anything that contradicts very strong left-wing narratives such as stereotype accuracy or the biology of sex differences or intelligence research so there’s these areas of the behavioral sciences that don’t find a platform and I just wanted to create that platform and I also wanted to publish not just scientific stuff but sort of classical liberal any kind of commentary that doesn’t indulge in these regressive postmodernist kind of narratives I wanted to make it a free space for that and some of my early contributors were one of my earliest contributors was a guy called Jeffrey Taylor who was an editor at the Atlantic and he wrote for places like the New Republic but they stopped publishing his pieces because he became critical of Islam and he wanted to write pieces that were critical of Islam and he couldn’t get published even though he was this you know they’d publish his other work but anything that he wanted to publish that was critical of Islam just wouldn’t get past the editors so I’ll publish it so what you found was a implicit censorship in some sense well that’s not even the case it’s an explicit censorship in many cases so the stereotype literature is interesting because one of the things the so-called stereotype researchers have failed to do is to distinguish stereotype from heuristics people use low-resolution representations of the world all the time to simply and it’s absolutely vital that we do that we cannot function without without categorization and I know this was a problem with Banerjee’s work and she did some of the early work on stereotyping and remember she did a talk at Harvard when I was teaching in Boston and you know she was taken to task by the audience who weren’t all social psychologists for failing to distinguish between categorization and stereotyping and but that’s actually a really big problem it’s not a trivial issue with research and so I don’t remember the name of the psychologist you interview. Yeah so his name is Lee Jussam he’s a psychologist at Rutgers University and he was one of the founders of the heterodox academy okay yeah and he has a blog called rabble rouser at psychology today and I discovered that back in 2015 I think it was and he had these amazing essays about how he has battled group think and left-wing bias in his area of social social psychology and he’s got these amazing anecdotes and stories about how science in his particular area has not been self-correcting. Yes well psychology has been a corrupt discipline for about 25 years as far as I can tell and you know you see that reflected in things like the political work that’s been done so what’s it called system justification for example social psychology that’s being put forward by John Jost and I remember correctly he’s a student of Mazarin Banaji and there’s a there’s definitely an implicit left bias there because the notion fundamentally is that if you are justifying the current system in any way which means that you know you might have some element of patriotism in your thinking or believe that the system isn’t just an oppressive patriarchy that actually constitutes something approximating a political pathology so that’s right and it’s it’s really pernicious because it’s it’s it’s built into the terminology rather than being an explicit part of the theory and and you know the other thing that I noticed too that that was very interesting to me it took me decades to figure this out was that there was people have been studying the authoritarian personality basically since the end of World War II right and there’s the authoritarian personality scale that Adorno if I remember correctly the theater Adorno developed and you know for a long time I was trying to figure out why in the world there wasn’t the equivalent on the left and you know it’s really in I mean I hate to speak in conspiratorial terms but it’s essentially a conspiratorial movement that that’s deeply embedded within social psychology to deny the existence of authoritarian tendencies on the left wing no one’s managed yet use a good authoritarian left-wing scale and it’s partly because it’s partly because of the tremendous denial post World War II that anything like leftist authoritarianism could exist and really took me a long time to sort that out I couldn’t I couldn’t understand why that glaring absence existed and we’ve been trying to rectify that in my lab and trying to do that in a politically neutral way you know by doing a large-scale factor analysis of collections of political beliefs so that we can look at it from a relatively objective perspective without trying to drive home some a priority political belief so you so you said you had a crisis in some sense when you were in graduate school pursuing psychology and what what did that consist of there were lots of factors going on and I had some issues with the the course I was doing forensic psychology and I found the way it was run a little bit inflexible and authoritarian and I’m a mother so I had my son is now four but at the time he was just a baby and I needed a lot of flexibility and they couldn’t accommodate me and I just I just felt there was I could offer more through writing and and through communication of scientific ideas then being a practicing psychologist I mean I don’t want to get into the full backstory of what happened in my course but I have very cynical feelings towards universities in general I yeah I when I went back to graduate school I had I thought that I thought that you know considering all of the rhetoric around you know helping helping women and helping people you know pursue their careers I thought that there would be some flexibility for a young mother but there really wasn’t and but that that was not the only issue there were other issues but yeah it’s it’s I don’t know if I really wanted oh that’s fine I don’t want to yeah you into areas that you don’t want yeah I was I was just yes about what what exactly it was that that put you on this alternative path and so how long have you been running Quillette since November 2015 okay so it’s pretty new yeah yeah so why don’t you tell us how you did that and how you’ve got how you’ve attracted writers and how you’ve grown and and I’d like to know everything about it including sure it is that you’re doing for a monetization strategy because sure the fact that you’ve been able to launch a new what would you call it a new domain a new enterprise devoted to to journalism is really quite surprising because I mean it’s you bailed out of psychology into journalism and I gotta say that’s out of the fire into the because yeah that’s not exactly something that you’d consider if you had a business proposal and presented that to someone who said well I’m gonna start a new site devoted towards journalism you know I think you’d be laughed out of the venture capitalist office because it’s so it’s so difficult to monetize journalism now so so tell me a little bit about how you how you got this all going well I was just brainstorming with my husband one night domain names so I knew that to start a website I needed an original domain name and we were just brainstorming and I don’t know where Colette came from but it just came into my head and and we looked that up and that was available so I bought the domain name I was running my own blog so I transferred my own blog over to this new domain and put all of my old essays up and played around with what the website would look like for about two weeks so I was playing around with the aesthetics and I’m not a developer so I had to use sort of a website template out of the box so I the aesthetics were really important to me and I knew that if I was going to do something had to look really good and so I was playing around with that and then I put the word out through social media that I was going to launch a site and would anyone like to contribute and I happened to have some contacts in my social network who had essays up their sleeves my two first contributors were Brian Boutwell who is a criminologist at St. Louis University and Jamie Palmer who’s an excellent writer based in London and Brian he started his first essay was about being a criminologist who studies biology and about being shunned by his field and he I didn’t realize he was such a brilliant writer before I started writing for me it just it was just pure luck that he happened to be such a brilliant writer the second essay that he published got something like a hundred thousand views in just a few weeks so we immediately sort of exploded and that was just due to the quality of the contributors that I had straight away what did he write about for that first essay the first one was on biosocial criminology the second one was on behavioral genetics and the essay was about how parenting might not shape your personality as much as you think it does because he and he was explaining the data from twin studies and it was just such a well-written and counterintuitive kind of essay just exploded so I mean lots of people disagreed with it but it made a huge impact and right so we got to the heart of the conflict between the social constructionists and the biologists yeah I know there’s a new word that sort of emerged I don’t know if it’s specific to Canada or not but the word is biological essentialist and that seems to be like social justice warrior code for fascist as far as I can tell yeah you know biological essentialist seems to be anyone who believes that there’s any degree of biological influence on any element of human character whatsoever and you know last year I was concerned because of what was happening in Canada that being a biologist was eventually going to be illegal in some sense which I actually believe it is technically certain provisions of our law because this bill c16 that I opposed last year which was passed nationally has written social constructionism into the law so yeah our law now now is predicated on the idea that their relationship between biological sex gender expression gender identity and sexual proclivity which are all viewed as independent factors are in fact technically independent that there’s no causal relationship between them and which is a palpably absurd notion because the the correlation between them you know make biological males almost always have a male gender identity they almost always act and dress like males and they’re almost always homosexual it’s the correlations across the levels are almost are exceed 0.95 across all of the levels and yet now it’s technically the case that you have to treat those as independent and that and that and that suggesting that they’re not like I can’t I can’t say that it’s tantamount to hate speech but I would say that it’s close to that and the I don’t know if you’ve seen the sort of ridiculous animations that have been used animated drawings like the ginger the gender bread person or the gender unicorn yeah yeah yeah yeah so those are being pushed forward very hard in institutions all across Canada elementary schools junior high schools the military the police you name it where there’s this tremendous emphasis on the social construction of identity and it’s as if the social constructionists have taken to the law to enforce what they cannot prove scientifically what they failed to prove scientifically or what’s even being disproved scientifically which would be a more accurate way of thinking about it and the fact that there’s an all-out assault on on biology by the left is unbelievably ominous in my estimation yeah I agree just two things on that we’ve got an article coming out on Colette written by two evolutionary psychologists on the the false dichotomy between sex and gender and they give it some historical context so the fault that the false dichotomy I think started with Mooney yes exactly and I and then it was weaponized by feminists to deny biology and to deny sex differences basically yeah very strange thing for feminists to do yeah yeah you know one of the things that James DeMore has just pointed out lately he’s the guy that wrote that memo for Google is that the problem with denying the sex differences is that you automatically make the argument that if there are sex differences essentially they’re making the argument that the female differences are something like inferior because why would you object to their existence otherwise and you know DeMore’s memo was actually quite careful because he said well we should take a look at these differences and if we want to maximize the economic utility of women which seems to be a reasonable thing to do then we should actually have a serious discussion about what the differences are and see if we can set up our institutions so that we can take advantage of the of the difference in perspective and orientation that the two sexes might bring to bear on the on the workplace and on economic issues in general and you know you see that happening because people are starting to sort themselves out into occupations by sex essentially and you know the long term social consequences of that aren’t obvious and and we don’t know how to balance that but it’s it doesn’t it isn’t necessarily the case that it’s a bad thing no yeah and I my position has always been that women have probably more to lose when sex differences are denied I think because of women’s biological clock and the the fact that we bear much more of a burden when it comes to child bearing and child rearing if you deny that you know women pay a huge price if you deny the fact that what women go through to have bear children like firstly I think we need to separate mothers out from women there’s a there’s sort of a conflation when we talk about things like the gender gap where there’s a lot of the rhetoric implies that all women are discriminated against the women who pay a penalty are mothers right and which we need to talk about that more and we we shouldn’t minimize the the work and the sacrifice and and all of the the costs and the energy that women pour into that and I think when we deny sex differences we sort of we we do we minimize and we dismiss everything that women do that is female normative such as caring and and and working for others and and sacrificing pay for their children and you know all of these things right and it right well no I agree with you completely my daughter just had a baby a month ago you know we were talking to her last night she’s trying to finish up her degree she’s also had some health problems that have interfered with that you know she was talking to us last night about and she looked tired she had bags under her eyes and I mean she’s very happy to have the baby and it’s going very well and all of that but the first year after you have a baby you’re basically done you you know you don’t get you don’t get any sleep you’re absolutely overwhelmed especially for the first six months with the new infant especially if you’re a first-time mother because like what the hell do you know about taking care of this incredibly complicated thing and it produces all sorts of biochemical changes and it’s really hard on your body and there’s a long recovery period and you’re much more dependent on your familial structure than you were before and yeah the I like I like I mean it’s crazy that we even have to have this conversation but I like your distinction between women and mothers and you know there’s that one of the problems that I’ve had with with classic feminism if you could use that term is that there’s absolutely no respect built into it for maternal role and I really think that that’s that’s appalling on a variety of levels including appalling for men because like one of the things I’ve experienced is that I’ve had a pretty intense career I would say I’ve been very fortunate in that manner and I’ve had a lot of familial support and support from my wife for that and you know we kind of parsed our life up in a relatively traditional manner because she was quite interested in having children by the time we got together and I was perfectly willing to go along with that if if I could also continue what my my career pursues which were also necessary for our financial stability but for me like the domestic realm has been an incredibly meaningful part of my life like I I’m really happy in my marriage and blessed I would say in my marriage and I loved having kids and and for me my home has always been a refuge from from the insanity of the world in some sense and I think our society is it’s it’s so crazily skewed towards public performance let’s see it that we’ve denied the utility of the domestic sphere and that really is terrible for women because especially with regards to kids because that is their that is the role that they dominate let’s say or or dominate that they contribute most mightily to let’s put it that way and yeah it’s almost as if our society regards that as kind of an epiphenomena you know and I think it’s crazy I think it makes people miserable and I understand why the early feminists sort of downplayed the domestic sphere because they they were trapped in the domestic sphere and they wanted opportunities and I’m a I’m one of those women who would have been in early feminists probably because I crave intellectual stimulation and I would have been if I never had an opportunity to have a career I would have been bored and that kind of thing but now in in 2017 I can go and get a job as a psychologist I can run a website and you know I can do everything that a man can but I’m still biologically a female and so when it comes to having kids the cost is on me and the women in my life for example my own mother who’s super maternal and comes and helps with the children I see how we we don’t give that status and prestige anymore and it’s it’s just this male normative sphere where you can monetize something or something like you said public performance we afford that status and prestige but this invisible caring work that women are so good at and some women are exceptional at it’s it’s afforded no prestige whatsoever yes often and you know I noticed when my wife had little kids for example even though our little kids were very well behaved that she was treated she wasn’t treated well in in the public sphere she wasn’t treated well in restaurants I think people were afraid I think that was part of it in some sense you know they were afraid that if she showed up in a public place with children that there would be a disruption of one form or another so but it was certainly the case that I would say she received the opposite of respect and you know I’ve looked deeply into archetypal symbolism and the function that it plays and of course one of the divine images that sits at the bottom of Western culture and not only Western culture is the image of the Divine Mother you know the mother of the Savior of humanity which is an archetypal idea because every baby has the possibility of growing up to be a redemptive figure now that’s that’s the reason that that’s an archetypal figure is because any society that doesn’t worship it so to speak doesn’t give it a very high value will perish you know and the fact of the declining the catastrophically declining birth rate in the West is a real example of our willful blindness towards that sacred image and it’s a big problem and it is the case that I think if if so if the feminists were actually working on behalf of femininity which is essentially what they claim that they would be working a hell of a lot harder to elevate the status of mothers you know yeah other than women I think that’s a really good distinction that you’re drawing even though it seems rather self-evident it’s it’s not and you’re not the same once you become a mother you’re a different sort of person and I also think women who don’t have children are rather intimidated and afraid of that and that’s perfectly understandable because it is a radical transformation but I would also say and I’ve thought this for years that you don’t actually become mature you don’t actually become an adult until you have children and I know that that’s a statement that irritates the hell out of people but it’s it’s something that I stand by it you’re not an adult until someone else matters more than you do hmm and and you know what it is to sack to make real sacrifices yes exactly well and well especially as a mother you sacrifice yourself as the person of prime importance and and yeah and you know you you do it I suppose happily in some sense because generally you fall in love with your baby relatively rapidly and thank God for that because there are lots of trouble you know I was recounting the story of my daughter and she is trying to she was planning to take a course in biology online this this semester in order to move towards the completion of her degree and we told her last like she said she was overwhelmed when we went and talked to her last night and we told her just to leave it be because in first year is so intense that you’re you’re completely overwhelmed by it and it’s necessary because you want to get your baby off to a good start and get that relationship functioning properly yeah yeah exactly and that and that’s the one of the issues I had with my master’s degree I couldn’t bring myself to do a thesis because I wasn’t going to have the energy or the motivation to do it instead I created a website which is which also requires a lot of energy but it’s um it’s sort of self-generative because people write articles they send them in all I have to do is a little bit of editing and then post it online and it’s not it’s not quite as it’s absorbing as writing a thesis which I wouldn’t be able to do at this time so so one of the things that I’ve been studying and thinking about is high achievement in among among people in general and and this is also something that I don’t think is given any serious consideration in our discussion of the differences between the between the sexes so you know the the number of people who are extremely high achieving in any field is very low right and that depends on the Pareto principle essentially and that’s that that works itself out mathematically so that the square root of the number of people in a domain do half the work so you have a hundred scientists working in a particular subfield then ten of them will publish half the articles and if you look at that tiny percentage of people who are hyper productive they’re almost all men yeah so like in universities the median number of publications for men and women is very close but the high publishers are all men and the reason for that is because in order to be in that category not only do you have to be extraordinarily smart and extraordinarily conscientious but but associated with that conscientiousness you have to be able to devote something like 60 to 80 hours a week of solid attention to your job because otherwise people will out compete you right so it’s these extremely focused and narrow people who are obsessive that’s exactly right they’re absolutely obsessed with what they’re doing and they’re they’re quite rare and that they’re also the mystery that needs to be solved because you know the the fact that most people want to have a balanced life and that most people aren’t absolutely obsessed with a single issue to the exclusion of all else is actually normative behavior and quite understand that you get this extreme personality let’s say and it’s certainly not something I’m criticizing but it’s not the common lot and I do believe that it’s a far more difficult thing for women to manage because once you’re responsible for someone else like you are primarily responsible for small children then it’s extraordinarily difficult to concentrate like that to the exclusion of all else and you know I’ve seen a couple of women that I’ve had professional relationships with usually usually worked in the capacity of something like an executive coach in my clinical practice who’ve kind of managed that but they’re so they’re so stretched you know they they they’re concerned with the number of seconds that they have to microwave their food you know they’re hyper organized and it’s and even then it’s very difficult for them to manage because they’re juggling you know four or five impossible things at the same time and often also guilt-ridden because they’re not yes feel that they’re not paying enough attention to their children generally they are and they make very good role models but it’s a hell of a thing to expect of of someone who also has a maternal role it isn’t obvious that it’s even that it’s even possible and that’s another thing we can’t have a serious conversation about because there’s all sorts of lies I would say about how it’s the glass ceiling or or male models of success that are stopping women from succeeding at that high level and that isn’t right what what stops people from succeeding at that high level is it’s virtually impossible to begin with and all you need is one more impediment and then you can’t manage it yeah that’s right Camille Parlier has said that feminism has never acknowledged the the guilt that women feel when they are working when they have children and they are working and they pursue their careers and you know I’ve seen it at workplaces where I’ve worked where women are high achieving high achieving they’ve got their PhDs they’re there working full time and they are racked with guilt and I don’t think that happens to men nearly to the same degree I don’t think it happens to men really at all yeah yeah I mean it hasn’t been to my observation that it happens to men it happens to women all the time like all the time like I’ve I’ve done an awful lot of coaching with high achieving women I did that for about 10 years and you know these were women who were pretty much outstanding in in multiple dimensions you know and but but what would also this is mostly in the field of law and so most of them were in their early 30s and not only were they racked with guilt if they had children and weren’t spending as much time as they wanted with them they were also racked with guilt when they did spend time with their children because then they weren’t spending enough time on their career and so they basically stood both ways and yeah yeah and it wasn’t merely a matter of let’s say high negative emotional sensitivity you know because that is a biological difference between men and women although I would say some of the women that I coached were quite feminine and were more prone to anxiety than might have been good for them but it was merely a response to what’s essentially an impossible situation and like and it’s also not something that there’s an easy answer to I mean what I would recommend to them was that they outsource all of the domestic duties they could possibly manage and most of the successful women did that they had nannies they outsourced everything they could including their laundry and like they they tried to rid themselves of any domestic duties that could be partialed out to a third party and that’s a pretty that’s necessary it’s not optional if you want to pursue a career at a high level but it also requires a pretty high standard of living to be able to pull that off because it’s not like child care of any quality is extremely expensive and it’s very difficult to bring that cost down because with young children you need a very high ratio of caregiver to child like three to one or four to one and so if you have someone who’s even vaguely qualified and you pay them say forty thousand dollars a year which is pretty low double that for overhead so that’s eighty thousand so just the bare minimum cost of of the highest quality of quasi-institutional care for children is easily twenty thousand dollars per child per year and there’s no easy way of forcing that cost down you can the arithmetic is very straightforward so it’s a major societal problem and it isn’t clear that what’s unfortunate is that we’re not having serious conversations about this because we pretend that the barriers are well a consequence of something like patriarchal oppression or or straightforward you know prejudice against women and that’s just simply not the case the irony is that to make things easier for professional middle-class professional women you need more working-class women who can do cleaning and nannying work so if you get to to make life easier you need a cohort of lowly paid women which i don’t think would help the gender gap if that makes sense yes you have two tiers yes well that’s another highly paid women and then that’s exactly right that’s another under discussed under discussed topic which is that you you end up transferring the primary let’s say maternal burden domestic burden onto generally well they’re generally ethnic minority people that’s very very common and i mean it’s not necessarily a bad bargain for them given their comparative options let’s say but it’s very difficult to pay someone who’s doing domestic work enough so that they can have a reasonable standard of living because yeah but partly because it’s just so expensive to do so so it’s it’s an intransigent problem to say the least and it would be nice if we could actually have a serious and and compassionate discussion about it and i think the compassion part is to actually take a harsh look at the at at at such factors as the biological clock which certainly make women’s lives much more complicated up till their let’s say till their 40s you know it seems to me that men might have more complicated lives in the latter part of their life because of course we die about eight years earlier and our health problems are are more extreme and all of that but i think that men’s situation in life is somewhat simpler than women certainly up to the age of about 40 and it’s unfortunate that that we can’t address that squarely and start to figure out what to do about it not that it’s a simple thing because it’s certainly not well some places do better than others i think in i think it’s in holland or the yeah i think in in some of the scandinavian countries there many women work part time and that’s found to be quite productive for their economy and then women are happy working part time so you know i think some cult some societies are a little bit more progressive in answering some of these questions however there’s there’s still this i don’t know if any western culture is has has many honest conversations about biological sex differences i don’t we don’t have it in australia it doesn’t seem like you have it in canada or america i don’t know if it happens in the scandinavian countries i don’t see any evidence that it does i mean the scandinavians are always concerned that there’s over representation of men in in the stem fields for example especially in engineering even though i think the data is pretty clear that the idea that men are more interested in things and women are more interested in people is pretty robust finding and the differences aren’t small either i mean and the biological difference literature has been quite i think quite productive because basically what it’s indicated is that there doesn’t seem to be really much difference in men and women with regards to raw intellectual ability the mean iq is pretty much dead on exactly the same now there is a little debate about whether the standard deviation is the same with some evidence suggesting that men have a flatter standard deviation so there’s more hypergeniuses and there’s more men who are intellectually um impaired certainly there’s more men who are intellectually impaired on the learning disability end of this distribution for example but and you know even small differences in standard deviation can make huge differences out at the ends of the tables so but i would say the evidence for that is mixed you know it’s not conclusive but the evidence for difference in personality i think is absolutely conclusive and the evidence for difference in interest is even more conclusive the the effect sizes are extremely large and what is really interesting is how the sex differences in personality become larger in gender egalitarian countries yes that’s scandalous is what that is because it’s an absolute disproof of the social constructionist theory and and it’s very solid science despite the i mean that’s some of the material that james demore referred to in his memo and it’s very solid science from a social science perspective it’s i would say it’s it’s at the point where it’s if it’s it’s not incontrovertible precisely but it’s about as close as you get in the social sciences so yeah david schmidt was the lead author on that study i believe on the finding that personality differences increase in gender egalitarian countries and i think what’s what i find interesting is his finding that women become more neurotic and more anxious in more free you know um gender egalitarian or countries that have more freedom i think that’s really interesting and it and it speaks to uh some it it suggests that there must be some kind of biological underpinning for for anxiety in women uh the sex difference in anxiety well we should never assume that freedom is something that brings security i mean because freedom opens an expansive domain up in front of you and that’s full of opportunity but but if we think about that as novelty or or the unexpected or unexplored territory then you know your primary response to unexplored territory especially if this the territory is vast is initially um paralysis and fear yeah even in in the mythology of the hero which is the archetypal story of the confrontation with the unexplored it’s very very common for the hero to take flight at the first at the first appearance of the of the let’s say of the dragon of chaos that’s a good way of thinking about it archetypally because that that expanse is very it’s it’s it’s unsettled in the technical sense and you know that’s where the monsters are and so we should never make the assumption that more freedom includes it means more happiness yeah and you know the literature on happiness is quite interesting because it’s actually not a literature on happiness it’s a literature on the absence of anxiety because it isn’t that people want to be happy it’s that they don’t want to be miserable and anxious because those are technically separate systems one governs let’s say extroversion that’s the approach positive emotion system and the other uh governs um freezing in you know prey like freezing and then retreat it’s mostly what we want to do is keep the prey like response and the retreat systems under control because they’re unbearable when they’re activated yeah and so and there’s just no reason at all to assume either that freedom or even economic advantage is associated with well-being no there’s no evidence that people in industrialized countries are happier than people in non-industrialized countries even though their standard of living is much higher and they live much longer and they’re more disease free and i think a big part of that problem is that it takes a tremendous amount of sacrifice and work that’s future oriented in order to keep a society with a high standard of living functioning and so you’re constantly sacrificing the pleasures of the moment yeah to the security of the future and that’s a that’s a major moral and emotional load even though the reasons for it are obvious but that doesn’t simply boil down to something like freedom from anxiety or happiness you know if you have a high pressure job well you have a high pressure job you have responsibilities and if you screw up major things happen with major consequences and that’s that’s also a tremendous burden even though you can be well paid for it like yeah um you know we studied some some workers in in a factory in wisconsin and we were doing testing that would help identify promising workers who could be streamed into a management role and you know we found about a third of them didn’t want to take the tests and when we investigated that the reason was well they wanted to work nine to five in a bounded manner so that when they went home at night at five o’clock they were done their damn job and they could have their life and you know the thing about professional level jobs is that complex jobs managerial jobs complex administrative jobs or jobs in science or any of the professions is that you’re never not working yeah so if you add to that the complexity of a family then you know you’ve got things to worry about that are significant all the time yeah and so if you’re also higher in sensitivity to negative emotion that’s very stressful and and genuinely so so and and that’s well that’s the price you pay and it’s not a trivial price so back to quillette for a minute yes can you tell me a little bit about its reach and scope and about its monetization if if you sure don’t have to get into the details but people might be interested in trying to figure out how you manage that okay so for the first year that i was running it it was self-funded um i wasn’t collecting any revenue through advertising or patronage it was just i funded it myself but my costs were very low it doesn’t cost a whole lot to run a website i had minimal infrastructure at the time i now have um more robust infrastructure which costs more i paid professional freelance writers a fee but academics who wrote for me because they were already salaried i we you know they did sort of pro bono writing and that was fine so for the first year i i bootstrapped it and in and i funded it myself and then last year i set up a patreon page and for a while i was um getting enough just enough to cover costs and a little bit to pay writers and then i put advertising on the website and i was earning a little little bit through that but the earnings are quite modest and my patronage has recently um been bumped up because we published quite a popular article about the google memo before james was sacked i had reached out to four scientists one evolutionary psychologist jeffrey miller lee jessam the social psychologist deborah so the canadian sex writer and david schmidt who is the author of that um famous study and i got them to write a couple of paragraphs on what they thought about the google memo and i published that just as the news broke that he was fired and so that kind of went viral and the site crashed and um so we got a lot of attention for that and our patronage has since doubled um before that article was published we were getting around between 10 and 15 to 20 000 visitors a day uh and now it’s between 15 and 30 thousand a day so we get quite a lot of traffic and i could be making more money through advertising but the problem with advertising is that it slows down the webpage and there’s this trade-off between having a website that looks nice and is reasonably fast and one that is just loaded with ugly ads and is slow and clunky and so i’ve decided that i’m just going to focus on the patronage business model and get rid of the ads and and just focus on pleasing the patrons and and i think patronage is a better model to go with anyway because you don’t have to worry about how many clicks or views an article gets you just have to focus on the quality and and your patrons will reward you for quality not for you know how many people yeah exactly yeah yeah the other advantage to patronage is that you’re a lot more immune from political pressure and demonetization which is increasingly a big deal i mean obviously advertisers have the right to advertise wherever they want but certainly on youtube that’s become an emergent there’s many problems on youtube including censorship from within youtube itself and the construction of these like artificial intelligence social justice bots that they’re producing like mad but the the demonetization issue is a real problem for anybody that wants to maintain any sort of journalistic independence and i know lots of people like dave rubin for example has been hit really hard by demonetization so the the patronage model seems to be a really just seems to be a really good one how how much revenue are you generating with patreon at the moment if you don’t mind me asking uh 3 000 us a month okay so with any luck that’ll continue to grow and we’ll definitely put a link to the to your patreon account in the description of this uh of this interview and i would certainly encourage people who are watching to to support claire because quillette is really quite a remarkable accomplishment and it’s exactly the kind of journalism it’s reminds me kind of what the atlantic monthly used to be like before it took a nosedive into political correctness over the last i think about five years it’s something that seems to be afflicting so many journalistic sources i even see it as something that’s characterizing the economist which was a magazine that seemed pretty independent of that sort of thing for quite a while and the the new republic used to be a great bastion of classical liberalism and um just defense of western civilization and now it’s it’s the most regressive post-modernist i mean the new republic is unreadable i don’t know if you’re familiar with that magazine yeah i’m not as familiar with it as the other ones that i listed but i’ve noticed the same thing so well you know the the other thing that’s interesting this is part of the reason that that i’m so concerned with the pathology of the universities is because it seems to me this sounds conspiratorial but i’m i’m afraid i’m still going to discuss it the really serious post-modern new marxist disciplines like women’s studies for example they’re very very good at producing activists who are very very good at occupying mid-level bureaucratic positions and dominating relevant institutions so for example one of the things that’s happened in in the province i live in in ontario this month is that the ontario law society has now made it mandatory for lawyers to come out with a statement on diversity and equity so they have to do that as part of their practice and they basically have to admit to white privilege and and systemic racism within the profession despite the fact that their own damn data indicate for example that asians are overrepresented in the legal profession well you know the whole idea is if you have a theory and then you have a data point that invalidates the theory that’s a reliable data point then your theory is wrong and the fact that the white dominated legal profession actually promotes asians at a rate that exceeds what you’d expect by a population analysis absolutely invalidates the idea of systemic racism but it doesn’t matter because the law society has been taken over by a small coterie of extraordinarily dedicated post-modern activists and the the amount they care for facts is zero since they don’t even believe in the existence of factors so we’ve had we’ve had the same thing happen to the law society in australia my husband’s a lawyer and he brought home the law society magazine and on the front cover was an article about unconscious bias training and how it’s going to be mandatory for all lawyers in australia i i sent off a couple of emails to psychologists i know who do research in this area and one got back to me saying there is no data there are no meta-analyses and there are no randomized controlled trials that show that unconscious bias training has any effect after a couple of hours like it might have an initial effect on people when they’re doing a pencil and paper survey but after a couple of hours that that’s all gone and there’s no long-term effect on any measurable outcomes in the workplace so there’s no it’s right it’s it’s a complete scam yeah yeah and it’s a scam and it’s based on on that you know the implicit association test of course which has been pushed by people who have a very explicit radical left-wing agenda by the way because mazarin banaji is known quite well for that and yeah it’s been absolutely misused like the relationship between so-called implicit bias and and categorization isn’t well understood we don’t understand the relationship between implicit bias and the kind of in-group preference that makes you love your own family for example as opposed to you know equally distributing your care across the entire expanse of seven billion people the seven billion people that make up the human race which of course you just simply can’t do the behavioral effects of that implicit categorization let’s call it rather than bias aren’t well understood and there’s no evidence whatsoever that unconscious bias retraining programs do anything that’s positive whatsoever and yet it’s being pushed especially and being made mandatory at all sorts of levels of corporations and like i can’t understand why the lawyers for example put up with this it’s like they’re being accused they’re being they’re being accused of guilt before innocence which is that’s all a bunch of racists they’re being accused in the most appalling way because they’re saying that well it’s it’s even unconscious they’re they’re going after that you know the their targets unconscious perceptions which is so totalitarian that it it it isn’t even something that the bloody soviets could have thought up the legal profession as far as i’m aware relies on the reasonable person standard and the practitioners so lawyers and judges are supposed to be free of bias i mean that i i mean they’re not if you if you’re if you’re in trouble with the law and you go to a lawyer he’s biased toward or she’s biased towards you but if if you if the legal profession are now saying that their lawyers are inherently racist and sexist i mean that undermines the entire profession well and i would also say that that’s actually the reason that this is being done is to undermine the entire profession because the the meta story behind the post-modern and and neo-marxist activists is that everything about western civilization is corrupt and oppressive and should be taken down to its you know stripped down to its roots and rebuilt and so the fact that the implicit message is well you can’t trust the legal profession is no problem for the people who are doing that because that’s exactly what they think they think the entire edifice of western law is nothing but a oppressive patriarchal construction which is so appallingly backwards that it’s almost beyond comprehension i mean i suppose compared to their utopian view it’s an oppressive structure but compared to every other legal system in the world it operates like a charm i think that’s i think that’s the view of the the post-modernist and the activists but i think that i think there are sensible people who aren’t familiar with post-modernism that go along with this stuff and i see corporations and you know the legal societies implementing this unconscious bias training i think i think a lot of it has to do with mitigating the risk of lawsuits and then if they do get a lawsuit for example if someone wants to suit a female employee wants to sue them for gender discrimination in the workplace they can say oh well we’ve we’ve had this bias training we’re trying to do the right thing for example google have been google now have a class action lawsuit against them a handful of female employees are suing them for gender discriminate they’re saying that there is systematic gender discrimination because they were paid less than some male engineers that were hired at the same time that they were and were promoted more quickly and so i think i think a lot of this these policies are corporate companies and corporations just trying to cover their backside when it comes to the threat of legal action that you know i think i think that’s right and i think that’s driven in the united states by legislation like title nine because that’s held over especially in in educational institutions which is where it primarily applies that’s held over their heads like the sort of damocles and and it’s been tremendously damaging but the problem is for the corporations is that they’re they’re chasing away a small devil and letting a way bigger devil in at the same time and so as a short-term solution it’s it’s somewhat acceptable but by participating in these mandatory unconscious bias retraining processes they do two things this the first thing they do is admit their guilt right pragmatically speaking and that’s a big mistake it’s a massive mistake to let someone accuse you of unconscious systematic racism and bias and then to allow yourself to be retrained because you’re basically admitting guilt and i can’t see that that’s going to put them on a stronger legal ground moving forward you know because by saying well we need this training you’re admitting that the problem exists at precisely the level that is being diagnosed and you know my experience especially with say with large law firms is that they’re so goddamn desperate for talent that they do everything they possibly can say to retain their women they’re men over backwards and tie themselves into knots because if you have a female high performing female lawyer who’s also capable of generating revenue i mean those people are incredibly valuable and that that doesn’t mean that there isn’t conflict between the men and women in the law firms at an individual level because the other thing that you you see happening in high achieving professions among high achieving people is that they’re very very competitive and i’ve certainly seen like i’ve had many women in my uh in my coaching practice let’s say who were under constant stress from the men in their immediate environment who wouldn’t cooperate with them yeah you know and my point always was look it’s not surprising that these men aren’t cooperating with you you’re a threat you’re very good at what you do and they’re they’re not only trying to be good lawyers they’re trying to win and you are actually doing the winning and so they’re not going to help you and the objection of the women generally who were agreeable women say you know so more on the feminine end of the spectrum was well we’re all on the same team same team we should be pulling together it’s like well that isn’t exactly how competitive men work is that partly they’re conscientious which is the primary characteristic of a high achieving lawyers as well as high verbal intelligence but they also tend to be very disagreeable especially if they’re litigators and obviously they’re disagreeable because they wouldn’t be litigators otherwise yeah disagreeable men are competitive and they want to win and it’s another thing that we won’t talk about we can’t talk about is how in the world men are supposed to compete with women because men don’t know how to compete with women it’s like winning is is preferable to losing let’s say but it also tends to make you into something of a bully and that’s a big problem in competitive environments because the competition is actually part of what drives the productivity that’s right so it’s it’s also on and not a not a straightforward thing to sort out at all and and i don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about that but um so some of what’s regarded as say prejudice against women some of that can be merely attributed to the fact that men are competitive and they they treat each other harshly as well it’s not as if it’s limited to their in fact and i know perfectly well that it’s essentially mitigated in the case of women men are harsher with each other than they are with women even though they can be perfectly plenty harsh with women so but it’s part of the it’s part of what’s accepted as normative in in primarily male situations sure sure and that it’s a it’s a different that kind of um needling or you know the the casual insults i mean that it’s not taken as offensive often in male only groups it’s it’s almost a way of bonding yeah sure it’s also part of the mutual testing that goes on you know so because one of the things you want to find out from a new work crew member let’s say and i really saw this when i was working in in working class situations is you you really uh harass the hell out of them for a couple of weeks you know yeah put them down give them nicknames make fun of them and a huge part of the reason you’re doing that is to see if they have the kind of emotional and psychological integrity that would indicate that they could take a joke they can give and take they can stand some competition and that they’re not going to they’re not going to shirk and they’re not going to fail in a crisis and men are good at doing that with each other and it’s harder to do that with women it isn’t obvious exactly how you should do that and i mean it can be managed but it’s but it’s definitely not the same thing it’s a yeah thing yeah and men i mean i think part of the reason too that men are bailing out of so many university disciplines is because they also don’t know how to manage the the environment when it becomes female dominated they’re not exactly sure what the rules of engagement are like with the man i respect my my my attitude is something like um no holds barred and let the devil take the hindmost right it’s something like that and i can be as harsh and blunt and straightforward as i want to be in a situation like that and then but it the rules aren’t the same when dealing with women and it isn’t exactly that i know what the rules are i just know that they’re not the same and that’s quite confusing you know like my in my tv appearances my one of my producers has always cautioned me about um panels that are mixed sex and and and he said it’s very bad form on television to to be um on the attack in a mixed sex panel because you come across as a bully yeah and and and and and fair enough i understand that but i also don’t know what to do about it because it seems like like pulling my punches so to speak seems like seems necessary but also oddly inappropriate yeah yeah it puts me at a loss i’m not i’m not exactly sure how to manage it yeah well you know it’s one of those it’s one of the situations where there’s a lot of variation among women and um and if you don’t know anything more about a person other than the fact that they’re a woman you don’t know if they’re on the sort of male typical you know they’re more masculine or they’re on the highly agreeable you know feminine you don’t know anything about their personality so you don’t know if they’re they’re going to be able to handle that give and take one thing that i find really interesting is that we know we know quite a lot about male competition but we don’t we haven’t studied female competition a great deal i know that some evolutionary psychologists have been studying it like Ann Campbell but you know women compete with each other as well and women have their own forms of aggression but it’s all it’s it’s very it’s not spoken about much by in our culture no well we don’t and even in the workplace women compete with each other and um and i think that’s it you know we you know women might come up against hostile or hyper competitive men but women come up against other women as well and and it could be the case that uh younger women are not well one speculation or hypothesis that i’ve had is that younger women don’t always find it easier to work with older women because there is competition there and hostility there is evidence that women are happier with male bosses than with female bosses and you know yeah and that that your your observation about us not understanding the female competitive landscape is spot on we don’t understand female dominance hierarchies very well because female there’s females in the workplace are in a female dominance hierarchy and a male dominance hierarchy and the rules are not the same and there’s certainly there’s a there’s a kind of sexual attractiveness tension between older women and younger women that’s that that doesn’t play the same way with men and yeah and it it puts a strange dynamic into the workplace and it’s certainly by no means evidence evident self-evident that women are women’s best friends in the workplace either so that’s right these are all things that we don’t understand well and are afraid to address and i’m very curious about the female dominance hierarchy because it’s not predicated on the same presumptions as the male dominance hierarchy i had a friend of mine who’s a very uh very insightful person and he was talking about um the the mode of dress that’s characteristic of repressive islam you know and one of his hypotheses was that it was a way that the older women exercised control over the sexual attractiveness of the younger women and that it’s actually not primarily a phenomena that’s associated with male dominance of women at all i think that’s a really interesting hypothesis and highly credible because young women have a tremendous amount of sexual power and and that needs to be well that’s a let’s call it a complicating factor we could at least get along we could least get away with that it’s a massively complicating factor and we also don’t know the degree to which you women use sexual attractiveness in the workplace as a as a mode of achieving dominance and power and you know one of the things i’ve thought about for example is um and i’m not suggesting that this is something that should be done but you know a truly a society that was truly aiming at removing sex bias from the workplace might ban makeup because it’s not it’s not self-evident to me that yes that’s that’s appropriate from from a technical perspective in the workplace because it mixes sexual attractiveness with functionality in a way that’s well in a way that at least is complex now i wouldn’t ever say that we should go so far as to ban makeup in the workplace but there’s a point to be made there which is that we haven’t separated out the politics from the sexual politics and that’s a major major problem and and and partly because we can’t have real discussions about it generally speaking it’s something that stays unaddressed so so i’m going to stop i think yes um uh i’m very happy that you agreed to talk with me today i’m i’m a great admirer of your website i think quillette has done a remarkable job i hope we get a chance to talk again and i’m certainly going to encourage all the people who are watching and listening to contribute to your patreon account because i really believe that support for that is going to be in everyone’s best interest let’s put it that way and so um thanks very much for the conversation and i hope that we get a chance to talk again in the relatively near future and i’ll let you know when this is up and all of that okay all right great all right thanks jordan you bet you bet nice chatting talking to you okay thank you bye bye