Hey guys, welcome to relatable. Hope everyone is having a great day. Today I am talking to James Lindsay.

He is an author, scholar, an amazing thinker. And you can already tell as you've started this podcast, this is a long episode.

I already I told my team after I finished this conversation that I actually need to book four hours when I talk to James Lindsay because you'll be able to tell like I can't I just can't stop talking to him. My brain just keeps going because he says so much that there

that needs to be dissected and analyzed and questioned and you are going to love this conversation. You're going to feel so smart after it because he is so smart and gives such great insight. And I'm really excited for you to listen to it.

If you haven't listened to our first conversation from a few months ago from January, I'll link it in the description so you can go back and listen to that. It gives a little bit more context about what we're talking about today.

But nevertheless, you will love the dialogue that we have. So without further ado, here is James Lindsay.

James, thank you so much for joining me again. Last time we talked all about your books and the whole theories. We talked about critical race theory.

We're going to continue that conversation today. I want to first talk to you. We're recording this in January. This will come out sometime in May. And so who knows who the heck knows what's going to happen over the next few months. But as we're talking, we've seen a flurry of executive orders from the Biden administration in regards to sex discrimination, racial discrimination that may be all sound good in the name of equity.

But it seems to me that those people who voted for him thinking that it was going to end wokeness and a lot of the stuff that you've talked about are wrong. Can you break that down for us?

Yeah, I did think and still think that those people are wrong. We'll see where that is when this comes out. I suppose. But the I want to be as generous to their arguments possible.

So their argument is that Trump was radicalizing and galvanizing the left so that it was impossible to make the argument against wokeness to normal people because to try to argue against wokeness to normal people would result in them saying something like, but Trump.

You know, so Trump is a bigger problem or Trump is the problem and we wouldn't have to do this if Trump wasn't in office. So their belief was that if we remove that.

That irritant from the White House, then we can start to make headway on the cultural argument against wokeness. We can start to show normal people just how bad wokeness is.

My counter to that I do sympathize and I do think they are actually right that certainly much of the left was galvanizing around anti-Trumpism to the point where they were unable to I mean it became very tribal and partisan.

They were unable to give an inch on almost anything because Trump. So I understand their argument and I sympathize with their argument and I think it's actually largely correct.

The thing that I disagree with them on is that I believe that they are operating under the assumption that politics is usual and culture is usual are still in operation.

And I think that that assumption has failed. I do not think we're operating in politics as usual. I think we are now operating in a very different circumstance and that there is now no check on a movement that Biden has either is either controlled by or is bought into or both to some degree.

Yeah, that wants nothing but more power and is going to put the pedal to the metal to get as much not just power but unassailable power as it can take while it has the opportunity and we see literally his first hour in the the White House Biden signed something like 17 executive orders at least a handful of which are.

Brutally woke or sending the critical race theory ban that Trump had put in in October or September.

Doing whatever it is with gender identity and so basically women sports and probably lots of women's safety is now compromised at the level of executive order and this was I mean we're talking first hour in office.

So these were extremely high priorities and are just a tip of a very large iceberg right.

I'm very worried about so I think those people have a compelling argument and I've always maintained since I've started making it that they have an argument that is the correct argument if things are normal and I disagree with the assumption that things remain normal.

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