 All right. Hello, John. Thanks so much for joining me. How you doing today? I'm good, Chris. How are you? I am fantastic. And we're going to be talking about your brand new book, Woke Racism. For those who don't know, what is this book about? You've been writing some sub-stack pieces and I'm sure people are curious. What's different about it? Mm-hmm. Well, this is a book that's designed to show that the excesses of wokeism today, not just being a woke person, but the excesses are a problem, not just because they're too much, not just because an awful lot of fundamentally nice people are being taught that it's okay to be really obnoxious for certain reasons. All of that is just texture. The problem is that this new form of being woke hurts black people. There's this religious approach to being a hard left person where what's important is more that you show that you're not a racist and just leave it there than that you actually help the people you're supposedly so concerned with. And so people should realize I have a reputation for being a contrarian where I make black people angry. I accept that. This book is mostly about white people. This time I'm going to make a whole lot of white enemies, even more than I have before, because a lot of people think they're speaking in the name of people of my color when they're just hurting them. That's what woke racism is about. So I think some people think it's going to be just an extension of my saying that wokeness is a religion. That's only one chapter. This is about the harm that it does. Yeah, absolutely. So if I'm being honest with you, John, we're just meeting, but beforehand, I had opinions about you. I'm half black, but obviously I look white. And I was like, is he just a contrarian? Is he just doing this for people to talk about him and stuff? So I read the book and I'm like, oh, like you have very sound opinions and you seem very rational and you're looking at, you know, kind of what's going on. And, you know, something I've been dying to ask you is, what do you think is, you know, a misconception about your views or opinions, you know, from the public? Well, there's some people out there who actually think, and it took me years to fully understand that they think this and to understand why they think this, but the idea is that I say these things because right wing whites like to hear it. And I think the idea is that I'm looking for speaking fees because, you know, if you are somebody who has an established presence on the speaking fee circuit, you know, even if you're not a huge star, you can make about 20 a pop. And I get the feeling some people think that what I'm trying to do is get out on the road a couple of times a month talking to white people and telling them that racism is not a thing. And the simple truth is that's not anything like what I've ever been doing. My issue is not saying that racism doesn't exist. It's saying that I think we exaggerate the extent to which it's an obstacle and that includes systemic racism. I definitely believe that, but I've never thought that racism didn't exist. And I've always written about my own experiences with personal racism. I understand that society isn't perfect. But the notion people have that I'm this bow tied right wing conservative who is out there saying things that white people like and isn't concerned with the black community. I get it. I know there's something about my voice and my demeanor that that bogeyman character gets out there. I get why people think that I'm that person, but it's the characterization is way, way off. And I don't know if I can completely dispel it, but woke racism is not written by somebody who's trying to make white people comfortable by any means. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the reasons I love the book. And I'm glad that you said that because that's something I'm thinking I'm always thinking about is are people arguing that racism doesn't exist? Or, you know, are we not paying attention to like the extent, right? So you actually did the forward for a pre, I guess it was just on recently Bonnie karigan Snyder, right? So her book on doctrine is more about K through 12, you kind of talk about more college campuses and something I asked her. And, you know, I try to ask everybody is with the extent of, you know, wokeness and this problem and silencing people. How bad do you think it is, right? Like, is this something that's just kind of bubbling up and we're trying to address it before it gets out of control? Or do you think it is a gigantic issue? Because I'm always curious. I'm like, are we kind of turning this into like a moral panic? You know what I mean? Sure, sure. And it's easy to do that. And even if you are not, for example, some cynical person trying to make money on speaking fees, you have to watch out for yourself as a writer, because you develop a hobby horse and people ask you about things and it starts to become the groove that you think in. And then you look back five years later and you think, what was the big deal about that? I'm trying to check myself about that sort of thing. But on this, it's, it's at the beginning. I'm trying to nip something in the bud because I am worried that this self gratifying way of looking at being an anti racist that doesn't involve a whole lot of serious thinking really might exert enough control over the way young people are taught things really might completely take over the humanities and the social sciences. And now even the hard sciences on campuses and might really affect how art is created, how justice is discussed in a way that will one hurt black people and two frankly just dumb down society. It worries me to see things like just in the past year and a half the world of musicology and music theory pretending to take seriously the idea that music theory is a racist construct. The whole idea makes no blessed sense at all. And yet I'm watching various people in that world. That isn't my world, but I have a toe in it. And so I work pretending that this makes sense. And that's just one place. And there's some people, it's interesting how bias works. And I certainly have my biases. But for example, Michelle Goldberg, and I'm not picking a fight with her, but you know, she works at the times as I do now, but she the other day wrote a piece where she was saying that, you know, there are only 400 or so documented examples of people being fired because of, you know, leftist mobs jumping them, professors, you know, losing their jobs, only 400 or so. But you know, the truth is, if there were 400 or so stories of black teenagers being killed by white cops that anybody would say for every one of those stories we hear there are two or three that didn't make the books. And this is a national crisis in the way we treat race. That would be considered a crisis. I'm not saying that Michelle is cynical or anything like that. But the idea that only 415 cases means that the problem has essentially been solved. That's a particular lens. So yeah, I see something really dangerous. I wouldn't have written this book three years ago, but something happened after George Floyd where I thought this is becoming really scary to me because if it goes beyond where it is, we're not in, and I'm not going to say America. That's not how I think we're not in a mature society. If this is the way it's going to go. It's going to be in a mature society. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, speaking of a mature society, one thing that I'm always looking at is how it's difficult for people to even have conversations, right? And that's something you discussed quite a bit in the book where conversations are just shut down. Like they don't even want to have this kind of debate, but you know, to that, like when we're talking about, you know, how many documented cases of people getting fired or whatever, like for me, from what I've noticed, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, you know, how many people have an issue with self-censorship, right? It's a lot of people who are trying to avoid getting fired or having the mob come after them. So do you think that that is a more silent issue? Because you know, I'm always looking at stats and data, and we would never know because those people are silent. And that's kind of what Bonnie talked about in her book about kids K through 12, is that they're self-censoring. So with, you know, even with people that you talk to outside of, you know, public conversation, do you see that as an issue with this kind of self-censorship? It is utterly rife in modern American life. I started hearing it from my bolder students back in the mid-teens when this became a problem just within the little world of college campuses. Now you hear it over the glass of Chardonnay at the play date, you know, from the New York Times reading middle-class parent. That is real. Now, how do you document it? It's one of those things where if you don't want to see it, if you don't want to admit it's a problem, you can say, well, no studies indicated, but that's because we're dealing with negative evidence. But yes, people are censoring themselves all over the place. Anybody who is halfway awake can see that a lot of our problem is that you're supposed to just fold and say nothing. There's not only the self-censorship, but there are people who are signing manifestos and letters who could not possibly agree with what's in them. But the problem is that it's gotten to the point that if you don't sign the letter of anti-racism, claiming that, say, Princeton needs to turn completely upside down and become an anti-racist star chamber, not having signed it gets you in trouble. And so you figure you'll pay to play because you have groceries to buy and you want to catch up with the second season of Ted Lasso. You want to be a normal person. And so, yeah, the self-censorship is alarming. I've already seen it. In the subfield that I work in in linguistics, this hyper-wokism actually hit back in the late 90s. I was already prepared for how this sort of thing is going to go. There are all sorts of things that people do not study in my subfield about Creole languages because they can see certain truths, but they don't want to get mauled by a certain few people and they worry about whether it would affect their chances of getting a good job. And so I've seen that happen in my little corner of the world. I'm now watching that becoming all of academia and I just say no. And if it's a little easier for me to say these things without being jumped because I'm black, although it's not going to make me completely immune, then I'm going to do it. You know, a white me couldn't do this. If I'm black, you can call me certain names, but maybe people will listen a little harder. And that's what I'm trying to do. Yeah. So now, now you got me curious. So my family background is actually Creole. So on my half black side, my last name is Boutet. So what, what were you, what was going on with kind of Creole language? You mean, are we talking about Louisiana by any chance? Yeah. Yeah. I guess it's a town in Louisiana called Boutet. I've never actually been to Louisiana. I want to go. My mom's been to New Orleans multiple times, but, but yeah. It's really, it's really pretty easy. If you study Louisiana Creole French, and you've also studied French of France, you can't help noticing that Louisiana Creole French is basically everything that's annoyingly hard or arbitrary about French stripped away. It's French the way it should be older languages get gunked up with meaningless complexity because they can and the human mind is compatible with it and kids can pick it up before they realize how silly it is. So that's what all languages are like, unless a language starts again. And so if you have adult slaves who are thrown the language, you know, long after their ability to learn a language fully has passed, then what you get as a pigeon and a pigeon is not a language at all. You learn several hundred words and not much grammar. Then you build it out into a real language, but it's a real language. It's a language with subtlety. It's a language with a big vocabulary, but if it's only two or 300 years old, it doesn't have all that gunk yet. It doesn't have it there. You can't say that in Creole studies and Creole studies. You're not allowed to say that Creoles are less complicated than French and Russian, et cetera, because then you're saying something about Creole speakers brains. And you know, to be honest, I'm not exaggerating the controversy. And I've talked about the ways that Creole languages do have complexity because they do have them. Talk about how all languages are complex. It's just that some are more complex than others. I have a whole book about how people's thoughts cannot be correlated with how complex or what their grammars are like, all of it. But still, I am considered a terrible person among many people who study Creole languages for frankly, just speaking the truth and giving a reason why Creole languages are different and interesting. Their language, as it starts again, you're not allowed to say that. I learned that for me to say that back in 1999, means that I'm having some trouble with Michelle Foucault. And so I've learned how unreasoning this sort of thing can be. That kind of ideology is now taking over all of academia and even making its way into the hard sciences. One has to stand a fort. That kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah. So we're not here to promote this. But I actually did just finish the language hoax. I was actually introduced to your work by Amanda Montell. She was on the podcast. I was like, Hey, what's the sociolinguistics thing? Who writes about this? And that's how I double across the work. And then dove into this aspect of it. But since I have you here with the, with the woke conversation, I'm really curious about the language, right? And something that I think you'd be interested in is I think a lot about, you know, this, this word that's been floating around that they talk about in the coddling of the American mind, microaggressions, right? So here's kind of my opinion. I love your thoughts on this. So I'm always thinking like on, on a spectrum, right? Like what we're talking about racism, does it exist or not exist? Or what's the extent of it? So with microaggressions, I almost think of it, you know, people using this word as it being a positive. Because you're saying like, this is a minor thing, right? It's not full out, you know, physical assault. It's not full aggression. It's not saying racial slurs. So if I had two people and one just dropped, you know, called my dad, the N word with a hard R. That's at the extreme, but then there's a microaggression. So that's how I separate the two. So personally, I don't see the major issue with it, but you've probably thought about this and have a lot of views. So I'm curious what you think about that word being used. I am. I have an article that nobody read called Starbucks and the swimming pool where I write about these sorts of incidents. But yeah, microaggressions are real and I undergo them, but our issue is the degree that it's implied that those things affect us. I don't think it's an accident that because the macroaggressions now are rare. And yes, George Floyd was killed, but that sort of thing doesn't happen every day. Rare in terms of the experience of a black person walking around the hard R, for example, highly unlikely these days. And so we talk about microaggressions and it's the little stuff. And my position on that is simply that don't exaggerate the extent to which things like that hurt you because that's not what normal human beings do. And so I think often we're told that to be a black person today is to walk around and during constant microaggressions of that kind. There's a whole book about it. It's now getting old, but I think many people wouldn't see it as dated at all. Ellis Coase's book, the rage of the, the rage of the black middle, rage of a privileged class. And it's from the 90s. And it's about microaggressions. That middle-class black people go through and it's designed to answer the question many whites have, which is, you know, why are they all still so angry? And the depiction of that book is that someone like me goes out into the world every day. And it's just, you know, denigrated in some subtle way by one person after another. That's not what black life is like. It's an exaggeration. And to exaggerate the degree of your victimhood, one of my biggest problems with it is that it's not an exaggeration. And to exaggerate the degree of your victimhood, one of my biggest problems with it is that it is a desecration of our ancestors and not just slaves, but our recent ancestors. You cannot watch a documentary about early 20th century black life. And lynching is just the beginning of it. The jobs that you couldn't have, where you have to sit on the bus, the way you were spoken to by ordinary white people, even in the North, you cannot look at that and then feel good about saying somebody microaggressed me by asking me where I was from the other day. I had to go to the diversity coordinator and now I'm in therapy. No, you dishonor your grandmother. So I just think that we need to turn the volume down on how much a microaggression matters because if, if you pretend that you're more hurt than you are, and I really do think that's what we're taught, pretend you're more hurt than you are, you're letting white people win because white people are never going to stop microaggressing to a certain extent. And if you let them win one day you die and they want some people seem to think they're immortal. We're not in a movie. One day you're just going to die. Do you want to let them win? Because we only have about 80 years here. So that's my feeling about that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And we're both fathers too. And it's kind of like a child where it's like, hey, that didn't hurt as much as you're kind of exaggerating a bit. But scrape off your knee. Yeah. Yeah. When you're talking about that too in the history of like slavery or something, I think I really got interested in this conversation around, you know, woke-ism because, you know, my mom's the white one, my dad's the black one. And, you know, she grew up in like the 60s and she has two fake front teeth. She grew up in central California. She used to get beat up for dating black men, right? Like it just wasn't cool, right? And she's been through so much in her life and everything like that just to, you know, date and marry who she wants. And I remember when this stuff kind of bubbled up, last year, people who have never experienced anything like she has or my dad has, we're trying to silence her. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, time out. You know, and that's, that's when I really saw like, oh, this, this is kind of becoming an issue. So I've been, you know, keeping an eye on it. But, you know, when it, when it comes to this stuff too, with the microaggressions and things not being as bad, even though there's still room for progress. And you, you talk about in the book, like this is directed towards white people and how it could harm black people. Like I'm always wondering like, is this kind of like infantilizing black people? Like they are too sensitive to deal with these things. They can't, you know, work hard and things like that. Because like I'm sure that not all black people see it this way too. So do you see it as kind of like infantilizing that group? I do. I think that the whole country is being taught that black people are these hot house flowers that really just can't handle it. The idea is that, you know, slavery, Jim Crow, and then I guess redlining left us just such messes that we can't cope. Society is imperfect. The playing field isn't quite level. People aren't perfect. And that leaves us just these shattered messes that white people have to step around carefully. And that is frankly an insult. There is no compatibility between that vision and saying that this is such thing as black strength or just thinking of black people as human beings with normal resilience. And so what it means it's, it's funny as time goes by and more and more I see Robin D'Angelo as a really confounding figure. She wrote white fragility. This is the Bible of that perspective. And she clearly, you know, I've seen the occasional interview with her. She clearly thinks of herself as in the right. She thinks of herself as doing God's work, so to speak. And she's quite smug about it. And so if she hears that a black person doesn't agree with her, she thinks that black person is just an uncle Tom and doesn't know as much about racism as she does. She said that straight out. And I don't think people realize what a deeply insulting vision that is coming. I have to, I have to pull something I don't usually, it's this white lady who's got this idea about what it is to be black and will not budge even when a black person says what you're saying doesn't represent me. How dare she. And frankly, she represents a view of black people these days that is shared by increasing numbers of people of her color. And so it's not about Robin D'Angelo. It's that she represents a certain take on these matters that doesn't correspond to the way healthy people deal with an imperfect, however, much progressed beyond 1965 society. So yeah, there's the idea is that you're a baby. And especially that black kids are babies and that you're supposed to treat them to be babies and to pretend things hurt more than they do. It won't go. It just, it won't do more people need to start standing up to what is clearly nonsense. But people are afraid because nobody wants to get jumped on Twitter. I understand that, but it's time for people to grow some balls. Yeah. No, no, absolutely. In 2019, I had that internet mob come after me and seeing people like you and many others like Peter Burgosian and you know, Greg would be on off and everybody. I'm like, okay, I, you know, so I'm starting to open up a bit more. And it's not as scary, but you know, with, with, with all of this too, something I found really interesting about the book, like when it comes to infantilizing black people and something that you and Glenn talk about quite a bit too is the culture as well. Right. And in the book, you talk about something that I've only read in books about like group psychology and things like that. One of the things that we don't talk about our dress is that you, you're seen as acting white if you do well in school. And that is a massive, massive issue, right? Because that's, that's a group holding themselves back. You know, so I'm curious your thoughts like what, what is even a solution to start, you know, working on that within black communities where it's okay to perform well and you're not looked at somebody who's like forgetting about your neighborhood or, you know, whatever, because yeah, there are, I do see some systemic issues, but we also have to acknowledge that there's some people who are holding themselves back because they don't want to be outcast because, you know, my whole thing is psychology and nobody wants to be cast out of the group. You know what I mean? So how, what, what is even a place to start with that? Well, you know, that's been discussed for 30 years and a true educator of small and teenage kids would be better placed than me to say what to do about it. But we have to get a meme out there and I get the feeling the meme is already out there to an extent and I believe that the presidency of Barack Obama helped it somewhat, but you've got to get a meme out there that no, it is not white to do well in school. It's not, I don't think it's that hard to get that across to kids. Just say somebody's going to say that to you. It's not true. And here are some black people who've done very well in school and they certainly seem, you know, really black to all of us, don't they? But yeah, that's there and it's, it's one of those things where encouraged to think of black issues as simple. Everything is complicated except for black people and racism, which is simple. The whole acting white thing comes from a response to racist teachers and students back in the 60s. That's when that starts. Nobody was being called white for liking school in 1937. You might have been called a walking encyclopedia, but the idea wasn't that it was white. It's a new thing. It's a post black power thing. And it's because of the way black kids were taught when schools were desegregated. So this stuff is complicated because the desegregation was anti-racist, but then the kids in the school are racist. And then it gets passed down as a kind of group tribalism because that's what teams of any color do. But here we are in the present tense. And so what do you do about kids saying that school is white? And many people think, well, because we have to deal with racism, we have to say that white people have to stop being racist to the kids. No, no. The reason the kids are saying that now is not because of any racism that they're experiencing. If they are experiencing any, it's not the kind that would make them turn against school because black people are normal human beings. And so it's not that it's a historical legacy that can only be fixed in the present by the black community getting the word out. It's not going to be about something white people do. But for many people that is that can't be heard because it's supposed to be about sticking your finger in white people's face all the time. And that's a problem because it means that you have to say that any cultural problem black people has is a response to racism right now. When really, I think we all know that a lot of the problems are due to racism, but then racism can create some cultural traits, which unfortunately only the black community can fix. And so the beautiful analogy here, and this comes from Amy Wax, the white law school professor at U Penn, who gets in trouble for saying certain things, but she has a wonderful analogy, which is that if somebody runs you over, if you get run over by a truck and your leg is broken, only you can learn how to walk again. The person who drove the truck might be able to give you some money for physical therapy, but you were the one who has to get up and learn to use your body again. And that may not be fair, but that's simply the way it is. Same thing with these cultural traits that are legacies of things in the past. Unfortunately, there are things white people can't fix. And certainly the fix is not white people learning that black people are full human beings. Some white people will never think so. Certainly the solution is not creating a utopian society where the playing field is perfectly level. There's never been such a society. It's not that. Sometimes you have to do some cultural work, but we're taught that black Americans are exempt from that requirement because of slavery and Jim Crow, but unfortunately you can't exempt any group of human beings from that requirement. There's no other way to change some things. Yeah, and that's something else I want to chat with you about. I'm actually not super familiar with the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates, but you mentioned in there he had a piece about the case for reparations. So whenever I'm looking at solutions and things like that, I'm like, okay, where does it go from here? I also think a lot about hedonic adaptation. Eventually we get used to what it was. So like with reparations, for example, we give black people like, here's a boatload of money, but how long does that last? Even when people get a new job and they're all excited, how long until they define with it and they want more? So anyways, that's kind of what I think. But anyway, something you brought up in the book is that that never really or even he argues that it still wouldn't fix everything. So do you think that's a lot of like some of the or a lot of the conversations going on about things that aren't full-on solutions, like to your point about the broken leg and you got to teach people how to walk? So do you think we should stop having those conversations and look more like repairing black communities or what is a better solution than something like reparations? Well, I think with reparations I've always said, this is the sort of thing that's a difference between this bowtide right-wing figure that many people seem to think I am and what I really am. It's not that I'm against reparations. I get it. It's just that my position is that we already had that and it did some good things, but I'm not sure what more would do. Just one thing, affirmative action. I think many people think there was affirmative action in 1890. That's something that happened in the 1960s. It was unprecedented and it's had a really big impact on the world. That was reparations and there were various other things that were. I think of it as do we need more reparations? Dan, if I can think of what you would do that hasn't already been done that would make a major difference. However, because you don't want to just get stuck in the same old groove, there are a lot of people who keep thinking about reparations. My job is not to dig in my heels and keep on saying the same thing over and over again. I'm not going to say, God off the ground and we're going to happen. I wouldn't say don't do it. I'm not that mean, but then again, what I do know is this if it happened, no matter how it happened, because of the nature of this religion, because of the nature of this way of approaching race, the relevant people would never be satisfied because they can't be. The only thing that people would do is saying that racism exists and being mal content about that. And that means that no matter what happened, it could be that every black person in the country was given $600,000. It could be that everybody who could trace their heritage to a redlined neighborhood was given a split level home. No matter what it was, there would be no satisfaction. As soon as the pen was on the paper, it's not over. They can't treat us like animals for 300 years and expect to just pay us off. And to me, I just can't help thinking and this is one of my weaker positions because it's just in my belly. I know that that's what would be true but my feeling is given that that is the way it would be and it would be that way. Why bother if it's not going to help, why bother? If there are going to be new reparations, if there are black conservatives, i.e. real ones who will say that and they will have articulate arguments, that will not be my position, but I will be very sad that once the reparations squad got their way, everybody would still be just as discontent. I think that's sad, but I know that's the way it would be. Yeah. And you related to religion and in the book you talk about this kind of original sin. I read her newer book too, but last year when I read her book, I'm like, why do people have an issue with this lady? I started looking around and I read her new book, but anyways, what I see is this kind of lose-lose scenario where they're saying, especially Robin D'Enzo, if you're white, you're racist, that will never change no matter what you do. And the analogy I always use, I'm a recovering drug addict. I got sober in 2012, and I say, you're never going to be anything more than a drug addict. You're always going to be this person. Why are they going to want to change? And I'm curious, is that kind of this idea of the original sin aspect of if nothing you can do can make it better? What's the incentive? Is that kind of what you're talking about? Yes. And why in the world would anybody be interested in that kind of perspective except I'm going to accept I will always be a racist. I'm going to work at it and work at it, but I will still always be a sinner. To embrace that, you don't embrace that out of a basic interest in changing a society because you're not changing anything. You do that because it's become your moral creed. It's the way that you feel good about yourself to constantly admit that you are a racist. That's a weird thing. And the problem is it has nothing to do with helping an underserved young black man in Detroit get a good manual labor or white collar job and support a family. It has nothing to do with getting rid of the war on drugs. It has nothing to do with how you teach a kid how to read in a mostly black school where most of the teachers are under-trained by ideologically slanted education schools that don't teach them to do what they need how to do. None of it has anything to do with that. It's just a bunch of people basically going that's not real. And yet we're being taught that that's the work as we call it. Supposedly as a prelude to something else but the people who are into Robin D'Angelo's approach aren't much into grassroots politics and I think it's frankly because grassroots politics is too hard and kind of boring. But unfortunately changing society means getting your hands dirty. Yeah. And on top of that, that's what I noticed too. I was actually doing the work and at the time of recording this yesterday I had the vet Ramaswamy on here who wrote a book called Woke Inc. I talked with Baya Unger Sargon about her new book, Bad News is about woke media. And that's mainly what some of these arguments are against woke is I'm like I'm looking at these communities. I'm like what do we do? How do we fix it? And do you see it as kind of this like just distraction even with people like maybe Ibra Max Kindie or Robin D'Angelo from doing the real work? Do you think a lot of people are getting the average people, the people who are being affected? Do you think they're being distracted from how we actually resolve some of the issues that are going on? I do. And all you have to do is think about recent history. You think about what Martin Luther King was doing before the premature end of his life. He was working. He had ideas. He was thinking about poverty over race. And even when he wasn't, he was thinking about what do we do? What are we going to go out there and do to change things? Now fast forward from that to a bunch of people sitting in a circle admitting that they're racists and calling that doing the work or think of the white girl who asked Malcolm X, what can I do to help? And Malcolm X says nothing. He got past that. But do you think that if you had given the girl a real answer, what you would have told the girl is go sit in a circle with other white people and learn to admit your subtle racist feelings and allow that you're never going to get rid of them? Is that what anybody would have told that girl to do in 1964? And we know that the answer is no. All of that would have sounded like science fiction. It's a distraction. And frankly, it's a masturbatory distraction. The idea, and I have to use that word because anybody would know what I was thinking about is that it's encouraging people to self-gratify themselves and pretend that that is acting in the vein of what used to be called civil rights activism. It's complete shit. And yet if you say that in many circles, you're told that you're a terrible person and most people would rather not be told that. And so you have this whole situation of people acting. There is so much kabuki going on in this society right now. But it's time that this stopped. And I think that it's happening. I think there's a pushback, Batya's book, Vivek's book, mine. There are enough people out there who have been watching this since last summer. And it takes a little while to write a book and publish it. But it's coming. And it's not just books, it's podcasts, it's media, it's articles. These things aren't that hard to see through. The issue is not that these things are so complicated. It's that our society is living in fear of being called white supremacist on Twitter. It's as simple as that. And the truth is, if you let people call you a white supremacist on Twitter, then in many cases they'll just keep doing it and then they'll stop and you can go on about your business. I think many people need to consider that the way that you show your strength about race in today's America is not to sit in a chair and do the work of admitting that you'll always be a dirty racist. Frankly, that's not that hard anyway. The real work is learning that a certain kind of person is going to call you a white supremacist because often it's not today, they're white. I'm not thinking about a black person, frankly. I'm talking about white people calling each other white supremacist. Yeah. And just let them, let them and you go on about your work and, you know, your friend can, you know, make himself feel good by calling you a white supremacist, but you could go out and do real work where you help more black people than your friend ever will sitting around talking about intersectionality. I think we need to understand that sometimes being called a white supremacist is not the right thing in the world. There are many ways that we can hurt each other. That could be considered to be just kind of a sandbox, potty mouth sort of thing. That's the way I view it at this point. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think a great way to hit you with this final question while we're talking about doing the work, right? And we talk about, you know, back, you know, when Martin Luther King was like organizing and everything like that there's, I'm trying to understand so I'm hoping you can help me understand it. So last year, last summer, right, we had massive protests and everything like that. Some of them turned like violent and rioting and that's not cool. I'm not done with that, but I'm curious what the criticisms are because that was people taking to the streets and they weren't sitting behind their keyboard anymore, right? So I'm just trying to understand the criticisms like I guess, you know, to wrap this up. What's the ideal way to take action and talk about these subjects, not just behind your screen, if last year rioting and burning of stuff down, like that aside, what is the correct way or what's the ideal way? Yeah, I'm not as, I mean, I'm not in favor of rioting either. I'm not as upset about that as say, for example, my good friend Glenn Lowry is there are always excesses to be honest. It was a time in the spring and summer of 2020. We have to remember it's not it seems like an almost trivial thing to talk about in the context, but there was a pandemic and a lot of people were stuck at home. A lot of that was people wanting an excuse to get out into the street and deal with people and I can completely understand it. Was there a truly obnoxious kind of person who took advantage and started stealing TV sets, etc. Yeah, that figure is an old, old character. Glenn and I called him the Omar in one of our talks. Yeah, Omar, Omar sucks, but Omar is almost inevitable. And really it was people out on the street protesting police brutality. I think that the whole issue of police brutality and raises vastly oversimplified. I also understand that I cannot command that a whole bunch of people read me and agree with me before they decide to go out into the streets. And so that that happened. You have to want change for real people. You should have a compact number of strategies, not 36 planks where you're signaling that you're aware of certain things, but it has nothing to do with what Congress could ever do, just a few. And I do not have great hope that we can make a serious difference in the behavior of cops in 18,000 separate police districts in this country. That's going to be a real tall order. So I don't say much about that in the book. I don't I don't see how that could work. I think we have to do an end run around the cops and people will differ as to what they consider most important, but go out there and fight for new legislation and maybe for you it's about defunding the police, but go go fight for that and just let go of all the virtue signaling and the doing the work and, you know, pretending that there needs to be a dichotomy between racist and anti racist acts with nothing in between all of that is just play acting. And that's what Dr. King and his comrades were doing. And I think that we'll figure out what works, but go out and do real things and so notice once again the sell out who wants to make $20,000 going and talking to Republican think tanks. No, it's not about not doing the work. It's not that there doesn't need to be change. It's just stop exaggerating stop making it about yourself go out and make it about black people, especially poor ones. And this is my advice for white black people and everybody in between. It's not it's not about the microaggressions. It's about people who genuinely need help and an answer to the question as to why can't we deal with both things. One answer is that dealing with microaggressions is to give in to whites with a pretend performance and one day you're going to be dead and the white people won't be any different. I would say why waste energy with all of that get out to the street and you know a person's going to break a window get out to the street go lobby and try to change the world the way people did before us and I you know I try to be part of these things I try to write about these things. That's what needs to happen. I have no interest in the idea that black people need to just shape up if I would pity the person who was assigned to find me saying that all my writings and you know they'd be waiting and thinking that's what I said and they wouldn't find it. It's just not there. It's just what do you do and what you do is not sit around exaggerating. You go out and work for real people. That is my counsel on this sort of thing. Yeah, beautifully said and I love the book and I really hope here's my hope for the launch of this book is that people give it a chance and think they know something because I try to read books by people that I might disagree with and I was blown away and I was really surprised by some of your thoughts and opinions and the solutions and everything. So, John, when when's the official release date and will it be out internationally or are there two separate launches? How do people find this book and where can they find you? Well, the book is Woke Racism. It drops on October 26th. There is an audio version which I think is dropping the same day. It is read by me. There will soon thereafter be a version in German, but to be honest I don't think many people watching this would be interested in that. If you're interested, there will be a German version and I will not be reading the audio version of that one. And yeah, and I'll be doing the usual publicity and my opinions about things that are happening in the moment are at the Times. I'm writing a newsletter twice a week at the Times these days and then if you want to know about me and Jolly Language issues, I do a bi-weekly podcast called Lexicon Valley. You can find that on Substack and then Glenn and I are always talking. So that's where I am, but the book is October 26th. Beautiful. Awesome. John, I know you're a busy man, so thank you so much for your time and yeah, best of luck with the launch. Thank you, Chris. This was fun.