In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Joe and Douglas discuss the current events happening around the world, including the fires in California, the anti-fascism movement in Seattle, and the recent events in Portland, Oregon, and Washington, D.C. They also talk about the Black Lives Matter movement, and whether or not they are actually anti-fascist, and why they need to stop calling themselves that. And, of course, there's a quiz from Curtdizzle too. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends about this podcast! -Joe Rogan is an American comedian, podcaster, writer, and podcaster. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, and is one of the funniest people I know. He's also a good friend of mine, and I'm sure you'll agree that he's a great conversationalist and a very funny human being. I hope you enjoy this episode, and that you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed making it. -The Joe Rogans Experience, by day, and by night, all day, by night. Thank you for listening and supporting the show, Joe! -Your support is greatly appreciated, and we'll be looking out for you in the future for more episodes like this one! xoxo, Tom and Douglas. Cheers, Tom & Douglas - The Joe Show, by Night, All Day, By Night, By Day - By Night - All Day All Day by Night - by Night All Day - by Nightside, by Grace, by Nightmare, by Eve, by Grumpy, by Day, by Squeals, by Gorms, by Mr. & Lady, by Mrs. & Mrs. Squeen, by Bill, by Joe, by Alyssa, by Lady, By Mr. , by Ms. & Mr. , by Mr & Mrs., by Mrs., By Mrs. , By Mr & Mr, by Ms., by Mr, By Mrs., etc., By Lady, etc., etc, etc. by Mr and Mrs. by Mr J & Mrs, By Ms. , etc., by Mrs & Mrs , by Mrs, Mrs, & Mrs , By Mrs, by Sr. , and Mrs, etc, & so on, by P. , , etc. . , and by Mrs , & Mrs . , etc.. , by Ms, & by Mrs .
00:02:40.000It's just amazing that that name is still being used by people.
00:02:45.000There's some people particularly like hardcore left-wing sites that still call them anti-fascists.
00:02:52.000Instead of Antifa, they're calling them anti-fascists, which is like an obvious move to distort what they've done and what they stand for and what happened in Seattle and what's happened for over a hundred days in Portland.
00:03:07.000The language matters, and everyone's been caught on the back foot by it because a huge number of people have clearly been persuaded that they are what they pretended they were.
00:03:16.000You know, I suppose people are falling away bit by bit from believing that the anti-fascists are actually anti-fascists, but they've clearly fooled a lot of people.
00:03:25.000It's been a clever move on their part, calling themselves this.
00:03:28.000If they had just called themselves fascists, they might have, you know, everyone else might have got there a bit faster, but they were quite clever on the naming.
00:03:35.000Yes, because if you look at what they're doing, there's nothing anti-fascist about what they're doing at all.
00:03:40.000In fact, what they're trying to do is get people to comply.
00:03:44.000They're actually using fascist tactics, getting people to use their language and comply, and they're trying to literally get rid of the current police and the current authority, and they're trying to do it by force.
00:03:58.000The best example of the fact they're not even trying to disguise it is that they're trying to make everyone raise their arm.
00:04:08.000Yeah, the thing that they did in Washington, D.C. I'm continually astounded.
00:04:14.000Every day I look at the news for a hope, like a glimmer of light, like some reason has popped through, and it's not coming.
00:04:22.000Every day it gets more and more bonkers.
00:04:24.000Those people outside, a bunch of white people, by the way, screaming at this lady who has marched for Black Lives Matter multiple times, telling her she must raise her fist in compliance.
00:04:41.000You know, quite often in sort of good times or comparatively good times, people say things like, you know, where are the heroic people?
00:04:48.000And they sort of forget that heroic people come up because bad things occur and heroism, which they didn't know was there, comes out.
00:04:56.000I think that woman is a very good example of that.
00:04:58.000She probably didn't know she had the heroic instinct to make her not go along with the mob.
00:05:04.000And she just one evening in her own spare time out for dinner proves this incredibly heroic trait, which is, no, I won't go along with you.
00:05:32.000But she's like, that's not what this is.
00:05:35.000This is a bunch of thugs bullying me into compliance and it's a bizarre, disgusting, natural human instinct to try to get people to bend to your will.
00:05:44.000And that's what all those idiots were doing when they were surrounding her with this arbitrary gesture of raise your fist as if that helps anything.
00:05:53.000Also, didn't you feel, I mean, people are too generous to the people who go along with this, but when I saw the footage of the people in DC restaurants who did go along with that, you know, sitting having a quiet dinner with their girlfriend and then these people come in and they sort of do agree to raise their fist and You can see some of them looking a little nervous when the chanting started to become fuck the police.
00:06:12.000You know, it's like, oh, I'm not sure I'm born with that one.
00:06:15.000But no, and I feel a sort of contempt for those people because that is also the problem.
00:06:21.000The problem is these people who are willing to go along with the crowds and be told by the crowd what to do.
00:06:26.000Instead of standing up, which they should do, and saying, excuse me, I'm trying to have a dinner with my girlfriend here.
00:06:34.000I agree with you, but I think those people are just in fear, literally, of their safety and possibly their life.
00:06:40.000We've seen so many instances of people getting beaten up and stomped and kicked.
00:06:44.000I'm sure you saw the one guy who got pulled out of his car and a guy ran up behind him and kicked him in the head and knocked him unconscious.
00:06:57.000But you know as well as I do, if you're in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and a beggar comes along and disturbs the clientele, the restaurant staff will move the beggar along.
00:07:26.000Well, that's what's scary about these things happening in places that have open carry for firearms.
00:07:33.000And, you know, you're seeing that, obviously, in Kenosha when that 17-year-old kid showed up with a gun and They attacked him and he shot and killed two people.
00:07:42.000This is a really scary moment where it could tip one way or the other.
00:07:47.000My fear is that after the election, it tips in the worst way possible.
00:07:52.000I don't see a positive resolution left or right.
00:07:56.000I think if Biden wins, people will be furious.
00:07:59.000If Trump wins, people will be furious.
00:08:02.000I've always loved your country and I've spent quite a lot of time in it.
00:08:08.000But I do have to say, watching it at the moment, this is all the basis for a civil war.
00:08:15.000And I'm sure you know that, but I think a lot of people haven't quite realized this yet.
00:08:21.000My country went through this 400 years ago.
00:08:25.000A fundamental debate over the nature of our state and our government.
00:08:29.000And it seems to me you have a fundamental disagreement like that going on there now.
00:08:35.000You know, a portion of the country doesn't believe in the founding principles and another one holds them to be absolutely holy.
00:09:04.000I think COVID has ramped up everything considerably because everyone's so nervous and there's so many people out of work and there's so many people that have the time to...
00:09:20.000And as they see these traditional structures, the traditional economic structure, the traditional political structure, as they see these things deteriorating, they're making their moves.
00:09:31.000And this is where it gets really spooky.
00:09:34.000Because if they continue to do things like CHAZ, the six-block We're good to go.
00:10:53.000Well, basically, because now it's out this month, is that basically I thought something very interesting happened through the COVID era, which was that at the beginning of it, I thought, we all thought, okay, this is a plague like the Justinian plague.
00:11:10.000We're all going to lose massive numbers of our loved ones.
00:11:14.000And if that's the case, at least at these end times, the social justice warriors will pipe down.
00:11:21.000You know, my one consolation was I thought, at least we won't have to deal with them so much, because if everyone's got real problems, if everyone's got real complaints, kind of microaggressions start to seem less important than they have done in recent years.
00:11:36.000So that was my assumption at the beginning, was if the plague was what it seemed at first, then we'd hear less from these people.
00:11:42.000And then my impression was that as COVID went on, something very interesting happened, which was that Our tolerance for the social justice activists diminished.
00:11:52.000I mean, there were little bits of light, like Sam Smith, you know, from his mansion, posts a photo of him Sort of crying a bit and sort of sad because he's lonely.
00:12:05.000And normally that would be, oh, Sam Smith, they is feeling bad and so on.
00:13:10.000And I sort of thought things like that were a good sign, you know, because that's it.
00:13:15.000You know, if at best we're all going to see a massive decline in our living standards and our whole societies have got mass unemployment and so on, then I thought, well, at least we'll hear a bit less from those guys.
00:13:27.000The first was that some people started doing things along the following lines.
00:13:32.000As you know, in Madness of Crowds, I do each of these in turn.
00:13:35.000I do gay, women, that is, relations between the sexes, race and trans.
00:13:39.000And I noticed that the women thing came in first, that people started saying things like, Women are suffering most from COVID. And I thought, well, okay, we've got to look at the stats on this.
00:13:50.000And then the stats came in and it showed that men were disproportionately likely to die.
00:13:54.000And then the same people said, well, the men might be doing the dying, but the women are doing the suffering or something.
00:14:00.000And that didn't make very much sense, but it showed that there were some people who needed to look at this through the prism they've looked through everything, which is women, men, Disproportionate relations between the sexes.
00:14:15.000And then you've got some people doing that with gay.
00:14:19.000The BBC in my own country, in Britain, started running pieces about, you know, it's difficult for a lot of LGBT people because they're living with their families who might be homophobic.
00:14:29.000And again, you know, you sort of read these stories.
00:14:32.000You thought, well, yeah, a lot of people are living with their families who are, well, their families.
00:14:36.000I mean, they're having to live with their mum and dad, and they might be heterosexual, and they'd just be forced into chastity by government regulations.
00:15:41.000And the race one came back with a vengeance.
00:15:45.000And that had been happening through COVID, obviously, because in all of our countries, we had this thing of ethnic minorities, particularly black people, suffering disproportionately from the virus.
00:15:57.000And what I was worried about was that in the American media and the British media and elsewhere, this was being portrayed as if this was the case, and it does seem to be, Then it was because America couldn't even import a virus from China without giving it its own special racist spin.
00:16:17.000You know, all of the things that you could look at to explain why there might be a higher mortality rate, including higher numbers of perhaps nurses in the health service, underlying health issues, and much more.
00:16:35.000It kept on being portrayed as if this could only be because of racism.
00:16:40.000And that just worried me because I thought even a virus A pandemic can't bring us together.
00:16:48.000And we still have these people doing this.
00:16:50.000But as I say, it wasn't until after Minnesota that then that really took off.
00:16:53.000And we discovered something very important, which is that racism and the whole issue of race is even more important than trying to avoid the pandemic.
00:17:04.000And that and everything that's flowed from it is just rolling on and on.
00:17:11.000It's everything I feared would happen, which was everybody doubling down on these identity traits in the era when we all hoped we could move beyond them.
00:17:23.000We also got to this weird point where we're supposed to collectively ignore the fact that having 50,000 people marching through the streets arm-in-arm could easily be spreading the disease.
00:17:35.000And there was this giant uptick of the disease in America, and everyone stuffed their head in the sand and pretended they were not connected.
00:17:52.000It was actually saying that we don't mind.
00:17:55.000I mean, the medical professionals in America who signed a joint letter defending people going out on the protests were saying that racism kills, and so does COVID, but racism is clearly a bigger underlying risk than COVID. And if you've taken that view,
00:18:18.000I mean, apart from the fact that it's clearly not true, because however you would work out the numbers of people killed by racism, which does exist, but to claim that the mortality rates from racism are Are higher than those from COVID when,
00:18:43.000Surely the people who claim that racism kills more people than COVID should have to answer and say, where are the 190,000 racist murders in America this year?
00:20:30.000I happened to be with someone who worked for YouTube, and I was talking to them about...
00:20:36.000Some of the problems with YouTube and suppression, particularly at the time, there was a person who had taken a conversation with you and Sam Harris and they had put it on their playlist.
00:20:46.000I believe I talked to you about this, did I not?
00:20:49.000They put it on their playlist and they got a flag for violating the community guidelines just from putting that conversation with you and Sam Harris.
00:20:57.000I brought this up to her and she immediately dismissively said, well that was because it's hate speech.
00:21:10.000Tell me what was the concept of the conversation.
00:21:12.000And my wife is squeezing my leg under the table because she thinks I'm about to go ballistic.
00:21:17.000I'm like, how can you just flippantly say this is hate speech?
00:21:20.000You're talking about two public intellectuals.
00:21:22.000Who are discussing all sorts of intricate and nuanced issues, and you're just saying it's hate speech, and that you're justifying a community guideline strike on this person's channel, who just had it on their playlist.
00:21:34.000Like, this is an interesting conversation that I enjoyed.
00:21:38.000Whether I agree or disagree, it inspired thought.
00:21:43.000Yeah, but this is one of the most sinister things of the time.
00:21:48.000As you know, I do a chapter on tech in the book and spend some time in Silicon Valley trying to work out what the hell's going on.
00:21:55.000If there's a big underlying thing that's gone on here, Joe, I think it's that in all of our countries, the people in charge of, as it were, what correct opinion is, have managed to draw their lines in a way that excludes majority opinions.
00:22:13.000And that is, I mean, it's sustainable, I suppose.
00:22:17.000It obviously is for some people as a business model, but it's a disaster for our societies.
00:22:22.000I mean, you know, if you decide that talking about certain issues is beyond the pale on each of these subjects, and, you know, you could do that if it was a wildly minority-held opinion.
00:22:36.000But actually, I mean, most people, for instance, don't think men have to just never talk about women.
00:22:41.000Most people think the sexes need to get on.
00:22:45.000It's not my personal area of study, but I reckon that men and women have to be able to thrive and have relationships without this being this unbelievable landmine territory.
00:22:59.000And yet, the social media companies decide, no, even to talk around any of the necessary but difficult stuff must comprise hate speech.
00:23:12.000And what they don't seem to realize is that you're keeping majority's concerns and thoughts and conversations out.
00:23:22.000Long-term, it's an unsustainable thing to do.
00:23:26.000It's also a minority perspective that's deciding to censor the discussion between two enormous groups of people.
00:23:36.000The people that are on the left and the people that are on the right.
00:24:03.000Well, you've fucked this whole thing up because the whole way this works is people have to state their argument, debate, discuss it, and then the people that are objective or on the outside or on the fence, they get to look at it and go, oh, this guy's making a lot of sense.
00:24:18.000I used to be this, but now I might be leaning more towards being a centrist or more towards being libertarian or more towards being a liberal or whatever.
00:24:27.000Whatever the fuck it is that's convincing to you.
00:24:29.000And whoever makes the most convincing argument, whether it's Noam Chomsky or whether it's Ben Shapiro, whoever makes the most convincing argument, for you, you're allowed to take that side.
00:24:39.000You're allowed to incorporate those opinions.
00:24:42.000And you can't do that if everybody's censored.
00:24:44.000And you're also, by the way, I mean, one that really troubles me is you should be magnanimous in victory.
00:24:51.000I mean, that is so striking to me in the one I do first, the issue of gay, which is that we are currently, and the tech companies are doing this, are pretending, first of all, that our current views on, for instance,
00:25:06.000gay marriage, which I was an early supporter of, but if you weren't for gay marriage before almost anyone else was, you're now a homophobe.
00:25:29.000I give some examples of this, of really prominent figures from television and elsewhere in the States who, you know, in the 2000s weren't in favor of gay marriage.
00:25:38.000Barack Obama wasn't in favor of gay marriage at that stage.
00:25:41.000But they're already going back like this and saying, you didn't hold in the past views that people hold now.
00:25:48.000And this goes against one of the absolute central tenets, which is, you know, boot on the other footism.
00:25:54.000You know, gay rights, like all other rights movements, managed to advance because it said, you know, you may not want to do this, but we're not asking you to do this.
00:26:04.000We're looking for the right to live our own lives this way too.
00:26:07.000And then there's this terrible moment, and I say it happens in every rights claim, the terrible moment when equal doesn't seem to do it for some people.
00:26:16.000And they say, no, now we've got the upper hand.
00:26:25.000And we're going to make you a non-person and we're going to say you can't even gather in private places and you can't even talk to each other online or on the internet.
00:26:34.000This is the profoundly illiberal viewpoint and it's being done by people in the name of liberalism.
00:26:41.000And it's people on the fringes that are the loudest.
00:26:44.000And these are the ones that are causing people to be most upset and ironically making people lean towards the right.
00:26:51.000They're saying these people on the left are out of control because the people that are on the left that they're hearing from are the ones that are outrageous.
00:26:57.000They're not the ones that are reasonable, left of center, and that you just have opinions that most of us believe about...
00:27:05.000Civil unions, about gay rights, civil rights, about women's rights, all the different areas that people think of when they think of people on the left.
00:27:16.000Until you get to these far, far left people that are so loud and outrageous and they want to get rid of the police and get rid of the laws and everyone should be a communist.
00:27:41.000The number of friends of mine in America who are saying exactly this privately at the moment.
00:27:48.000I don't know anyone who says, well, maybe I know a couple, but I don't know very many people who say, I just love Donald Trump and everything about him, and his character is just so good.
00:28:01.000He's just obviously the sort of person I'd like my children to grow up to want to be.
00:28:21.000They are pushing it so far that it'll make room for my ideology because they'll clear the path and they'll silence and eliminate all these horrible right wing people that I don't agree with.
00:28:34.000They're like, he's not my guy, I don't think the way he thinks, but that guy's not gonna let that shit fly.
00:28:39.000And he's gonna step in, and yeah, he might be a liar, and he might be full of shit, and he might have done terrible things in business, and he might have lied about the destructive consequences of COVID and all these other issues that people have problems with him.
00:28:56.000Yeah, I mean, on almost any issue, this is the case.
00:29:00.000There was this, in the John Bolton memoir, there's this rather hair-raising story of President Trump talking with our then Prime Minister, and it becomes clear that Donald Trump doesn't know that the UK is a nuclear power.
00:29:47.000Anyhow, and that had just happened in a little, little, the cathedral city of Salisbury.
00:29:52.000Theresa May, the then Prime Minister, says to Donald Trump in Chequers, you know, Mr. President, I'd like to remind you that we in Britain regard this as a WMD attack.
00:30:03.000And what's more, she says, looking at him meaningfully, a WMD attack on a nuclear power.
00:30:09.000And Donald Trump turns to one of the other people with Theresa May and says, have you got nukes?
00:30:23.000Anyhow, the point about this is that you hear this sort of story and you think, well, that's shocking, but not that surprising.
00:30:31.000And then you think, But anyway, look what else is being offered.
00:30:36.000And this thought is just obviously going through everyone's minds because the left in America has screwed up so badly.
00:30:43.000It's so striking to me as an outsider.
00:30:46.000They could have spent the last four years saying, How did this person with all of these character traits that we sort of agreed on that we don't like and with lots of downsides, how did he win anyway?
00:30:58.000And they could have looked at that and worked so much out.
00:31:02.000And instead, you've had four wasted years of, frankly, bullshit claims that have wasted everyone's time.
00:31:12.000We, by the way, have had something very similar in Britain, but it's horrifying for an outsider to see this.
00:31:17.000I think they thought those claims were going to work.
00:31:19.000I think they thought the Russia scandal was going to work.
00:31:22.000I think they thought his affairs were going to ruin him.
00:31:26.000I think they thought all these various chess pieces that they moved into position, they thought they were at checkmate multiple times.
00:31:38.000And I just don't think they correctly estimated his resilience.
00:31:45.000Nor did they estimate the way people who support him would view him.
00:31:50.000And again, I think there's a lot of people that don't agree with him, don't like his tactics, don't like his personality, but they see him as the preferable alternative to what's going on in Portland, what's going on in Seattle, and what happens when you get lawlessness.
00:32:07.000I mean, it's not even like he's very good...
00:32:12.000And effective at what he claims to want to do.
00:32:15.000The most obvious critique of him is he'll tweet something, but he won't act on it.
00:32:20.000He knows one big lever to pull, but he's got no idea of how to work out the intricacies of all the little levers you need to know about to run An effective administration.
00:32:30.000And that's a reasonable critique, and everyone can see it.
00:32:51.000But the point is, even despite that, Because of what the left has done and what it's allowed to happen, what it's allowed to rush through, We now see people who know every single critique you can make of Donald J. Trump and will still vote for him.
00:34:05.000But when you're the goddamn president of the greatest superpower the world has ever known, you're the commander-in-chief of the biggest army the planet has ever seen.
00:34:14.000And you just tweet a thing about one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time talking about getting orgasmic when he beats the fuck out of people.
00:34:23.000It's just like, what world are we living in?
00:34:32.000We should talk about something orgasmic and see if we can get him to retweet it again.
00:34:36.000Well, he's been retweeting a lot of my stuff lately for some strange reason.
00:34:41.000He tweeted a video the other day where I said that, to me, Joe Biden is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going on a long walk in the woods.
00:34:59.000And I feel bad for the left that they've got to pretend that this is a good choice.
00:35:04.000But, you know, there's just one obvious thing, though, Joe.
00:35:07.000I mean, again, an outsider, but you can't have a future if you hate your past.
00:35:17.000You can't have a future if you disagree on the foundational principles of the state.
00:35:24.000And watching senior members of the Democratic Party being asked, for instance, if they'll condemn the bringing down the statues of George Washington, and watching them trying to dodge the question, it's just heartbreaking because that is the terrain which America used to be able to agree on.
00:35:43.000You know, to watch a CNN presenter standing on MSNBC standing in front of Mount Rushmore and saying, as one of them did, that the president is going to give a speech tonight in front of statues of slave owners on stolen ground.
00:35:58.000Mount Rushmore used to be able to agree on that.
00:36:02.000He used to be able to agree on On Roosevelt and Lincoln.
00:36:09.000And you used to be proud of these people.
00:36:12.000And you had good reason to be proud of them.
00:36:14.000Oh, sure, there were critiques as well, because there always are.
00:36:17.000Because amazingly, people in history aren't as perfect as all of us living today and thinking we're right.
00:36:22.000But you used to be able to agree that these people were honorable men and distinguished men and people who had done an extraordinary thing in creating The United States of America.
00:36:35.000And if you don't think that's extraordinary, if you don't think that, okay, there are people who can think that America isn't exceptional, but to think that America is only exceptional in being exceptionally evil, well,
00:36:51.000then you don't have a future if that idea catches on.
00:36:56.000And it seems to have caught on, on a significant swathe of the American left.
00:37:01.000It's also, talking about Mount Rushmore, describing it as statues of former slave owners on stolen land, that's such a simplistic perspective on who those people were.
00:37:15.000And yeah, this land did used to belong to indigenous people.
00:37:19.000But that story, it's very disingenuous to tell that story in one sentence.
00:37:24.000It's a very complex tale of a different era.
00:37:28.000It's of a different time and of people seeking to try to figure out and carve out a new form of democracy, an experiment in self-government that never existed before.
00:37:43.000I'm just stunned by this because it's happening everywhere, but it's happening in America furthest and fastest.
00:37:50.000And it's this thing of looking at the past as a savannah of grievances we want to, you know, hack through and find and then use, you know, as if the past is just there for this purpose.
00:38:07.000And as you know, I write a bit about this in Man's of Crowd.
00:38:10.000It's about how we can get to a more reasonable Attitude towards the past, because if we got a more reasonable attitude towards the past, we'd also have a more reasonable attitude towards our present.
00:38:22.000We'd know better how we ought to be behaving now, because we might, among other things, have a certain amount of damn humility, be a bit less assertive and dogmatic.
00:38:35.000Wouldn't it be good if we realized that people in the past Even the best people acted given the knowledge they had in the circumstances they found themselves in.
00:38:48.000They weren't sort of involving themselves in some abstract experiment to see if they could pass muster in 2020. Right.
00:38:56.000And it's almost as if our societies have taught a form of history which isn't interested in doing that.
00:39:03.000And as a result, we're not interested in doing it in our own lives and realizing that all of us are going to make mistakes.
00:39:10.000Well, you hope that people can be forgiving.
00:39:12.000And you hope you can be to some degree forgiving of people in the past when they acted in ways you don't approve of now, because you also hope that people who come after us look at us with a certain amount of forgiveness, because there will be things we're doing now that are insane.
00:39:29.000And people after us, we would hope would look at us and think, well, maybe they did them not because they were evil people, but because they were acting on the knowledge they had And certain presumptions they have, which we now know to be wrong.
00:39:43.000Yeah, I mean, that's a very accurate way of assessing it.
00:39:46.000And I think that it's difficult to be reasonable and balanced and forgiving today, because it's an uphill battle, whereas someone who virtue signals Who uses social media,
00:40:25.000The American Psychological Association ought to refer itself, I think...
00:40:31.000It's one of the strange things, because this is the second time in a year, isn't it?
00:40:35.000Because it was the American Psychological Association that last year described masculinity as toxic.
00:40:42.000And I pity all the young men who are being referred to people approved of by the American Psychological Association who are telling them that being a man is bad.
00:40:55.000You know, and that masculinity is bad.
00:40:58.000I really pity the people who are going to have to grow up with that kind of rubbish, evil rubbish being told to them.
00:41:07.000The American Psychological Association saying that everything in America is built on white supremacy.
00:41:15.000Like, what do you do with a claim like that?
00:41:21.000And why should a body that had some respect, I mean, it had some standing, it still, as I understand it, is the body that has to approve anyone in the US who's going to practice in psychology.
00:41:35.000What do you do when that body says there's something fundamentally wrong with being a man and there's something fundamentally evil about being white?
00:41:44.000What do you do in a society where Formerly serious organizations are saying that.
00:41:51.000Well, I think what's happening now is the thing that everyone was criticizing years ago about what was happening in academia, what's happening in the schools, the silencing of conservative speakers and blowing air horns and pulling fire alarms.
00:42:07.000People were making that out to be no big deal.
00:42:10.000Like, oh, it's much ado about nothing.
00:42:12.000There's a small amount of occurrences in universities.
00:42:15.000And then the Brett Weinstein thing happened at Evergreen.
00:42:17.000And everybody went, wow, that is extreme.
00:42:19.000But again, it's a small, strange college in the Pacific Northwest.
00:42:23.000But what we're seeing is the chickens coming home to roost.
00:42:26.000All these warnings that all these people in academia, like Brett Weinstein and like others...
00:42:32.000You know, Peter Boghossian and many others, James Lindsay, who had seen this coming.
00:42:36.000They're like, this is going to be a real problem because these people are going to enter the workforce.
00:42:41.000They're going to be 23, 24, 25 years old, and they're going to be telling people what to do, and they're going to be dictating policy, and they're going to be forcing people to shape society in this idea.
00:43:01.000I mean, you know, because conservatives, when they talked about the campus stuff, there was a kind of easy, easy joke on it, which was, and I've made it myself, you know, which was basically that, you know, your daughter goes away to college, you remortgage the house, she goes to study lesbian dance,
00:43:18.000and then she graduates and discovers there aren't very many jobs in lesbian dance.
00:43:25.000And so, you know, she then realizes the error of her ways and becomes a conservative.
00:43:31.000That was sort of the background idea that conservatives had about this, that the market would assert itself.
00:43:39.000And of course, that turned out to be totally wrong.
00:43:42.000There were jobs for these people to go to.
00:43:46.000They've filled job after job and role after role.
00:43:50.000They have washed through major former newspapers in the US like the New York Times.
00:43:57.000They have washed across the cultural institutions in all of our countries.
00:44:03.000If we'd been speaking even five years ago, you would have thought, well, Corporate America's not going to fall for that.
00:44:08.000They're not going to be held hostage by the people with, you know, like croc degrees in non-disciplines.
00:44:16.000But, you know, there the corporates all are, and they all encourage the growth of their HR departments, and they're packed with people who now can hold an entire company hostage.
00:44:26.000I see this in the publishing industry.
00:44:28.000I mean, JK Rowling, you know, Harry Potter fame, She's got this book coming out for kids called The Ichabog and 150 or so staff at her publishers at Hachette threatened to walk out because they said they couldn't justify working for a publisher that brought out a book by JK Rowling because JK Rowling has expressed perfectly mainstream and decent and reasonable
00:44:58.000views About where trans rights appears to cross over and tread on women's rights.
00:45:03.000And, you know, unsurprisingly, most of the people who signed that letter were young.
00:45:07.000But the problem with it was that on that occasion, the CEO actually stood by JK Rowling because she's very, very successful, probably the world's most successful author.
00:45:16.000And at the moment, at that very, very top level, sometimes, not all the time, the money speaks.
00:45:22.000But nobody turned around and said the only thing that needed to be said, which was, you know, You're not even at a publishing house that's publishing J.K. Rowling's Big Book of Trams.
00:45:32.000You know, it's not Chicks with Dicks by J.K. Rowling.
00:45:47.000And if you cannot work in an office that's publishing the Ichabog, you're probably not just not cut out for this profession, but probably not cut out for this life.
00:45:59.000You're going to find life really tricky if the Ichabog terrifies you.
00:46:04.000And what's more, the CEO of a company in that position should by now have said, thank you so much for your letter.
00:46:14.000And in the next day's newspapers, there should have been 150 openings at that publisher for people who wanted to work in the business of ideas and thought.
00:46:24.000And what is so striking is that even on the ones where people hold the line, they are not saying what needs to be said.
00:46:34.000Which is we cannot be, as societies or as companies or as cultural entities, we cannot be held hostage by fundamentally dishonest, hostile actors.
00:46:46.000And we certainly can't be held hostage at the risk of just one person, because that's all it requires, just one person saying, the ichabog's too mean for me.
00:47:01.000And what she's saying should be debated.
00:47:05.000If you disagree with what she's saying about trans rights entering into the realm or suppressing women's rights, this should be a conversation that people have.
00:47:13.000The idea that you're going to silence literally the most popular author alive today because she has a very reasonable position.
00:47:24.000And this is the same attitude that's led to deplatforming people with reasonable views.
00:47:29.000It's the same attitude that is infuriating people to the point where they're going to vote the opposite way and vote for people like Donald Trump.
00:48:35.000Don't waste your life looking to solve the world through these means, because all you will do is make yourself and everyone around you much, much more unhappy.
00:48:43.000But also, you know, we all in our lives definitely have something more important to do than talk endlessly about gender.
00:48:53.000You know, we almost certainly all have in our lives something more important to do than to talk endlessly about hereditary characteristics over which we have no say.
00:49:04.000And one of the best takes on this, in my opinion, has been Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay when they did these grievance studies, and some of their more preposterous ideas and papers didn't just get reviewed, but got awarded.
00:50:28.000And all they did was turn on the people who did it.
00:50:30.000But by the way, that's the absolutely typical thing of the time.
00:50:34.000I mean, that's why I think that those of us who do have the ability to talk about this stuff, and it's weird why we do, but those of us who survive and are able to sort of not be stopped by the mob, We have to talk about these things because it can't be made this impossible.
00:50:56.000Men cannot be stopped from talking about women.
00:50:59.000White people cannot fear any discussion about race because of the fear of being called a racist by dishonest people.
00:51:06.000You know, straight people can't live in fear of being called homophobes or transphobes.
00:51:13.000We've just made the cost of entry into the discussion too high.
00:51:17.000In fact, we've made it so high that nobody really wants to go into it.
00:51:20.000Well, I think it's because they don't really want a discussion.
00:51:22.000They want compliance, and that seems to be a big part of what this is all about.
00:51:49.000That's taken quite a long time for some people to work out that what we're dealing with very often is dishonest people who want to win.
00:51:57.000And are willing to just use any maneuver in the meantime.
00:52:00.000I mean, I've talked about this, but it might have been actually on the thing which your contact at YouTube talked about with Sam Harris before, which was, you know, I said to him once, just as a moral proposal, like, why don't you and I say that all the people who criticize us are pedophiles?
00:52:18.000Why don't we just say, whenever they say, like, Sam Harris is the worst person in the world, and Douglas Murray is a terrible bigot, Why don't we just say, well, it's a shame you can't stop shagging kids.
00:52:30.000And when they then say, what, how dare you?
00:52:35.000Then we can say, oh, I'm sorry, I thought we were doing that.
00:52:38.000I thought we were just throwing around crazy attempts to end each other's careers.
00:52:44.000I thought that was the game we played.
00:52:47.000Maybe we'd both like to step back a moment.
00:52:49.000The point is, there's a fundamental reason why we don't, which is that For a lot of us, we are holding on, and tenuously in some cases, holding on to the idea that we can continue to have reasonable discussion and reasonable debates with honest actors,
00:53:06.000and that therefore to lie knowingly about other people would be a bad thing to do and a wrong thing to do.
00:53:11.000I mean, I actually, you know, I do think that's the case because I think you wouldn't know when to stop.
00:53:17.000And that's what we're seeing on the parts of the far left.
00:53:21.000They don't know when to stop because they've been given the most powerful tools of the time.
00:53:27.000Which is to accuse people of all the things that our society abhors.
00:53:30.000Our society abhors racism, it abhors homophobia, it abhors misogyny.
00:53:36.000And so if you're given the tools to wield and you wield them dishonestly, you don't know when to stop.
00:53:41.000And that's why they've done it all these years against all these people.
00:53:45.000But the obvious thing to break through here is How can people not be vulnerable to the dishonest claims?
00:53:58.000And, you know, I'm afraid that we cannot put any faith in the idea which some people have faith in, which is that, you know, people will kind of learn.
00:56:33.000And the visceral rage she demonstrated at what was being attempted against her in the studio is the visceral rage that everybody should use when that move is played against them.
00:56:44.000We shouldn't just brush it off and say, oh, well, it happens.
00:57:50.000He's clearly a lost person who probably led a life that was filled with mistakes and fuck-ups, and then he finds himself in this situation where he has a gun in the middle of chaos, and he's literally got his hand on his gun running around stalking Trump supporters,
00:58:09.000and finds one that's willing to engage him, and he shoots the guy and kills him.
00:58:14.000But you know, we had a couple of weeks of this in the UK where it looked like it might run away with us.
00:58:21.000You know, the police were literally chased down the street in Westminster by crowds shouting, run, piggy, run.
00:58:32.000But we managed to step back from the brink.
00:58:35.000And it seems interesting to me that America couldn't around the same time.
00:58:40.000And there might be lots of reasons for that, but one which mystifies me, I've not got the answer to it, is why America has so many people in exactly that position you just described, like very, very lost people.
00:58:56.000Yeah, I don't have the answer to that.
00:59:11.000You gather them together in large cities and you give them bullhorns and bats and have them screaming against the fascists, whatever the fuck that means.
00:59:19.000And they all of a sudden have a family.
00:59:31.000And I think that's what you're seeing now in Portland.
00:59:33.000When these people are walking on the street marching and cheering together, for a lot of these people, this is the most exciting moment of their lives.
00:59:53.000I give this analogy, I lift it from a late Australian philosopher, Ken Minogue, but this is why I talk about St. George in retirement syndrome.
01:00:04.000And the St. George in retirement syndrome is, I think, what a lot of campaigners are stuck in at the moment, which is that basically the situation St. George would be in After he'd got the acclaim of slaying the dragon, he might be tempted to go around the land looking for other dragons to slay.
01:00:24.000And if there aren't dragons, he might be found attacking smaller and smaller animals until eventually one day St. George can be found swinging his sword at thin air.
01:00:34.000Now, I don't say that there's absolutely thin air.
01:00:39.000But the St. George in retirement syndrome clearly exists for a portion of young people, in America in particular, because they've been told that, you know, and the problem is this is sort of right in lots of ways.
01:00:53.000Like, who wouldn't have wanted to have been with Martin Luther King and the March on Washington, you know?
01:00:58.000Who wouldn't have wanted to have had the pleasure and the satisfaction of being at the head of a movement like that?
01:01:09.000I have to say, I wouldn't particularly myself, but lots of people have been told, you know, you should have been at the Stonewall Inn in 1968, or you should have burnt your bra with the second wave feminists, you know, and they missed this stuff because all of these movements have been vindicated massively.
01:01:29.000And the people who did partake in them have got a very serious But it means that in 2020 we have people who think that they are still slaying dragons,
01:01:50.000which at the very least by now are just not that powerful dragons.
01:03:29.000Well, lots of books on the Russian Revolution, 1917, and of course everything on the French Revolution always remains pertinent, mainly because...
01:03:38.000Of just the unchanging nature of our species, you know, it always happens in similar ways.
01:03:46.000I mean, you know, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution in 1917, people who weren't on the side of the revolutionaries but didn't want to get hurt would affix to their sleeves, you know, signs of the revolution so that the mob would leave them alone.
01:04:48.000They've done their stuff of saying, well, you know, America's a racist society, and of course we live in a white supremacist society.
01:04:55.000And they did all of that, and now they've got to this other stage when the rubber hits the road and when people start to act on it because they believe it.
01:05:21.000And by the way, it's also always for the same reason.
01:05:26.000When the assembly meets after the revolution, they immediately start to talk about the rights of man and the rights that they're all going to acquire.
01:06:33.000Yeah, it's very confusing to me because I don't know how we get out of it.
01:06:37.000I don't see any map of the territory that seems like all we have to do is band together on these critical issues and just agree that we could speak civilly and discuss things and debate things.
01:06:56.000I think there are answers to get out of it.
01:06:59.000I think there's a very obvious one, by the way, which is staring everyone in the face, which is, in all of our countries, we have this term, the silent majority, you know?
01:07:09.000Everyone's always talking about the silent majority.
01:07:11.000There are a number of people in recent weeks who've said to me, look, I know this person who owns a business, they make, you know, and it's literally things like, you know, they make frilly flowers or something, or they make doilies, or, you know, it's always sort of something completely harmless.
01:07:26.000And somebody finds out that they didn't make a statement on Black Lives Matter and bang!
01:07:35.000So eventually they did and eventually they posted the right thing and they said the right thing and they bowed and they took the knee and they raised the fist and they danced and so on.
01:07:43.000But my suggestion is why is the majority silent?
01:07:49.000Why does it only speak if it speaks at elections?
01:07:54.000Why Once you work out what the force, I mean, you know this from MMA, but we haven't worked out fast enough, we should have done by now, that our entire society is being knocked off kilter by a very small number of people hitting very,
01:08:15.000And that is answerable, but it is only answerable if that majority stops being silent.
01:08:22.000It's not answerable if a few people Scattered around the globe are allowed to talk about the difficult issues of the day.
01:08:30.000It's only answerable if the silent majority stops being silent and that means nothing less than a mass act of resistance of people against the dishonest actors.
01:08:42.000It is to speak up and say I will not for instance go through indoctrination training at my workplace.
01:08:51.000I will not I will not be made to sit in a workshop with somebody who knows less than me telling me to educate myself.
01:09:00.000I will not continue to be humiliated in this fashion.
01:09:04.000And there are various ways you can do that.
01:09:06.000The most threatening, by the way, and it's not a nice one, but the most threatening is to say, I will not partake in the re-racialization of my society and the Attacks on people by racial group,
01:09:32.000And if that happened at every corporation in America, this could stop.
01:09:38.000And the only reason it doesn't stop is because the majority has been cowed.
01:09:43.000That's why I go back to that woman in the restaurant in Washington.
01:09:47.000Everybody could say, I understand legitimate grievances, but I will not be cowed by people who are at this stage trying to bully an entire society to go along silently.
01:10:05.000I completely agree with you, but when I think about human nature and I think about the way people have reacted so far to this kind of outrage, I just don't see it happening.
01:10:18.000People are terrified of repercussions, and there's real repercussions for saying reasonable things.
01:10:24.000There was a broadcaster that was asked about Black Lives Matter, and he said all lives matter, all of them, and he was fired.
01:11:09.000Right, but the problem is if this guy gets fired, no one wants to hire him back because he was fired for not going along with Black Lives Matter.
01:11:17.000So he might go through a period of years without being employed again.
01:12:40.000This is why all of us, certainly me, has this horrible feeling that what is happening at the moment is an end of empire moment.
01:12:50.000It's because of the combination of things that is washing across us.
01:12:56.000Look through Roman history and the fall of the Republic, which takes 400 years from Nero to the fall.
01:13:04.000But there's plague after plague that comes through the land and ends out just taking out people, making people fearful, destroying the Republic in another way.
01:13:17.000But if you use this analogy on now, what is so fascinating about and terrible about the combination of COVID and the BLM thing is I would bet that, for instance, teams all taking the knee would not happen if the stadiums had people in them.
01:13:37.000I don't want to speak about American football because I really would be on the least knowledgeable terrain I could possibly find myself in.
01:13:44.000If the terraces in the UK, the soccer terraces, the football terraces, were filled with fans, the fans would not still be staying silent as the teams all took the knee.
01:13:56.000There was a cricket match the other day between England and Ireland, and the BBC, because there's no one in the stadium, of course, says, and now, of course, both teams are going to take the knee, as if it's like an ancient tradition we've always done.
01:14:10.000And, I mean, everyone watching, you just sort of think, I know every friend, it's just so strange.
01:14:15.000It's all sort of, everyone, now we take the knee and the ritual.
01:14:21.000Cricket audiences are a bit politer, maybe, than football ones.
01:14:25.000But I don't think that the cricket stadium in August, months on from George Floyd, would be Just saying, yeah, no, sure, we all approve of that.
01:14:36.000The terraces in the football would definitely not be by now.
01:14:41.000And so this is this thing of the combination of events.
01:14:46.000The team captains and others don't seem to be able to judge the public mood.
01:14:50.000And the public mood, can I just suggest it on that one, for instance, is this.
01:14:54.000Everyone's sorry about the death of George Floyd.
01:14:57.000Nobody defends a Minnesotan policeman and we feel no responsibility for the killing.
01:15:04.000Nobody in the football stadium had anything to do with the killing of George Floyd.
01:15:10.000And the cricket audience didn't kill George Floyd.
01:15:17.000And they're willing for a bit to say, Well, you know, there seems to be a particular problem that does sometimes come up in American policing, and I wish that was able to be sorted out because that's just ugly as hell.
01:15:30.000I'm not changing all the norms of my society.
01:15:33.000I'm not introducing new weird rituals and dance routines we're meant to go through, jumping through hoop after hoop after hoop because of something which I have no connection to and no responsibility to.
01:15:44.000Because this is a form of a claim of collective guilt and responsibility, which is ugly every way you tried to do it.
01:15:56.000I agree with everything you just said.
01:15:58.000I think it would be interesting to see how people would react in a large crowd and whether or not the crowd in America in a football stadium would go with it or whether or not they would boo.
01:16:09.000I would assume most people would go with it given today's climate because they would be scared to boo.
01:16:17.000This is how I feel the climate is today in America.
01:16:21.000Most people don't really want their politics mixed in with sports, but when they are, and it's kind of being forced down everyone's throat, they just go along with it.
01:16:32.000Because the consequences of going against it, saying, look, I support Black Lives Matter, but do we have to have it here?
01:16:39.000Can't this just be football, only football?
01:17:47.000So the problem is institution after institution is falling for it because they are not doing the thing they could do, which as I just said, is we're very sorry about this thing that happened, but it had nothing to do with us.
01:18:02.000And if you come along and pretend that it did, then we're going to say, sorry, you're a dishonest actor.
01:18:08.000And the problem about all of this is that the most liberal and tolerant societies in human history are now unified in being portrayed as the most oppressive and bigoted societies ever.
01:18:23.000And that's, by the way, a particular problem you have in America, particularly with American graduates.
01:18:27.000They know so little about the rest of the world.
01:18:32.000They honestly think the United States is the most reprehensible country on Earth.
01:18:37.000And anybody who knew anything about the rest of the world, who had traveled anywhere, would know what rubbish that is.
01:18:44.000And yet not enough people say it because they're being held hostage by dishonest hostage takers.
01:18:50.000Well, you've managed to express yourself honestly, but not without consequence.
01:18:56.000And it's one of the things that I want to talk to you about because I think you're a very reasonable person with some well-educated beliefs.
01:21:10.000But I can't tell you, and particularly your listeners who are wondering about this, it is so much better in your life to tell the truth, however you see it.
01:21:20.000It is so much better to just say what you see Than to shut up.
01:21:26.000You know, of all the regrets we could all have on our deathbeds, I reckon one of the biggest is the regret that you just sidled through life, kind of hoping people didn't notice you and you just got by and you did everything you were told to do and you just were a good boy,
01:22:26.000I mean, you know, if your wife says to you, you know, you're really onto the wrong thing here, then, you know, then you listen because you know she wants you to do well.
01:22:34.000If some guy in the street with an I hate Joe Rogan t-shirt on tells you what you should do, obviously you're not going to listen to them.
01:22:46.000It's one of the tools we all have to hone in our lives, I suppose, to work out who wants us to do well, who wishes us well, and to listen to them, even if they're critical of us, and they will be at times, and to separate out those people from people who just, of course they don't want you to do well.
01:23:04.000You know, hate you, hate everything about you and whatever.
01:23:07.000But I'm just, you know, I don't have much sympathy for the people who bang on about being, you know, cancelled.
01:23:14.000I mean, I do when it's people who have You know, ordinary jobs and they've just been horribly treated by the madness of this era.
01:23:23.000I have every sympathy for them and a lot of the cases I write about in Madness of Crowds tries to highlight that.
01:23:29.000But I don't have much sympathy with public figures who say, I can't say what I think and I can't speak up and all this sort of thing.
01:23:37.000Because I just think if you're not going to now, when are you going to?
01:23:41.000If you're not going to in this life, what life are you expecting to come where you'll do it?
01:23:46.000And so, no, I'm comfortable, as comfortable as you can be in the end times, obviously, as everything's burning down and there's plagues of locusts coming our way.
01:24:00.000I honestly urge other people to do the same.
01:24:11.000I mean, you know, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I'm not lying.
01:24:17.000And for young people watching in particular, this is just one of the most important things, because as I say somewhere in Manners of Crowds, the problem with being told, the problem with going along with being told to bend the knee,
01:24:33.000raise the fist, jump through the hoop, is that it demoralizes you.
01:24:38.000And it makes you a smaller person inside.
01:24:43.000You will be demoralized because you'll know that you shouldn't have done that.
01:24:48.000And at some level, you will think badly of yourself for having done it.
01:24:51.000You'll feel regretful, you'll feel cowardly, and it will affect your life in other ways.
01:25:00.000The person who doesn't stand The person who doesn't go along with the mob, the person who refuses to walk with the crowd, will feel quietly but significantly better about themselves, and I think will be a better person.
01:25:15.000And they will achieve more in their lives, whatever that is, because they will have self-respect.
01:25:21.000And that's what totalitarian movements across history always knew, was that you grind people down and make them agree to lies because you will then be able to make them do anything.
01:25:33.000If I can say so, there's this very, very telling thing that happened in the communist era in Eastern Europe.
01:25:38.000Václav Havel, a great late Czech leader, says this when he was one of the great Czech dissidents and playwrights of the period in the 60s and 70s.
01:25:45.000He wrote a piece once, which is really worth reading again today, where he cites the example of a greengrocer in Prague.
01:25:54.000Who has to put up in his window, like everyone else, the notice that says workers of the world unite.
01:26:00.000And it's sent by party headquarters to all greengrocers and you all have to hang it.
01:26:06.000And Václav Havel says a number of things happened from this.
01:26:09.000The first thing is that, of course, that the greengrocer is showing to everyone that he is a party lawyers and he wouldn't be able to operate as a business if he didn't do this thing.
01:26:18.000But it also hangs there every day as a sign of his subjugation.
01:26:24.000It's a little thing, but it hangs there as a sign of his subjugation.
01:26:29.000And it reminds him that he's not the man he could be.
01:26:34.000Now, one of the results of that is that such a person ends up hating the people who make him hang the sign.
01:26:43.000Hates him because they have demoralized him.
01:26:46.000But Havel's point, among others, is you think you're doing a little thing, but you're not.
01:26:53.000You are diminishing your soul by doing this because you know that you could be something more than the person who just has to hang whatever party headquarters tells you to hang this week.
01:27:11.000What you just said is an excellent guideline of how to live a meaningful life and express yourself honestly.
01:27:19.000And I think one of the things that we're dealing with, with these collective groups of people subjugating themselves to the masses, is a failure of our education system.
01:27:29.000Because although we teach people mathematics and history and all these different things, we don't teach them enough of the psychology of, first of all, the consequences of giving into these things, also the temptation of giving into these things,
01:27:45.000why they occur, what is happening with human beings when they're trying to force people to comply, and how this is a natural occurrence.
01:28:23.000More people could realize, you know, what I've written and what James Lindsay and Boghossian and Plark Rose and others, Deborah Sow and others have been writing, is an attempt, I think, I can't speak for us collectively, but certainly for myself, is an attempt to help people fast forward through this era of thought.
01:28:43.000So you've been immersed in bad thinking all of these years.
01:28:51.000And you're being encouraged to wade through more of it.
01:28:54.000Your boss is sending you lists of unreadable books that tell lies and telling you to read them.
01:28:59.000And one of the things I'm trying to do is to say, I'm going to try to short circuit that, like get you through that now for the following reason.
01:29:08.000None of this is what any of us should be spending our lives doing.
01:30:13.000That if this works, what a few of us are trying to do is short-circuiting that, get through this fast, fast forward through that, and helping people to realize what this is, on the other side of it, everyone will be able to have more the life they should have been having.
01:30:33.000They will be dedicating themselves to the things they're good at.
01:30:36.000They will be thinking about the things they wanted to think about.
01:30:39.000They won't be thinking about what is exactly the composition racially of the group I am listening to, but who's the best group out there?
01:30:48.000And that's what we could all be doing.
01:30:52.000You know, a friend of mine spoke at a university in America when you could still speak in public.
01:31:00.000And said to me afterwards, he's a businessman, said every single one of the questions was about, you know, identity stuff.
01:31:08.000And he said, he just turned to them and he said, Why are you doing this?
01:31:12.000He said, your generation should be working out how we live in underwater cities and get to Mars.
01:31:18.000Now, a particular student might not feel they have much to give in the way of helping us live in underwater cities.
01:31:25.000I myself would be a terrible guide to that.
01:31:27.000But I know that everybody has something better they could be doing.
01:31:33.000Than just performing these crowd performances that we're all being told to do.
01:31:39.000We could have much better music, we could have much better art, much better sports, much better everything, much better science.
01:31:48.000If we stopped doing what we're doing at the moment, fast-forwarded it through it, and just used the amazing potential we have and the interconnected potential we all famously have now on the planet and used it to do what's worth doing.
01:32:02.000It seems like with a lot of these subjects, we have these people who have clung to these subjects because they give them power.
01:32:13.000They're grifters, essentially, but they're sanctioned grifters because they're going after these very particular hot subjects that no one wants to disagree with.
01:32:24.000So you're allowed to be a grifter and you're allowed to pretend that everything is racist or everything is sexist or there's a million genders.
01:32:30.000And if you disagree with that, you are disagreeing with the current orthodoxy.
01:32:35.000You're stepping out of line and you'll be punished for that.
01:32:38.000And it's very much like cult thinking.
01:32:40.000It's very much like fundamentalist religious thinking.
01:32:45.000There's a lot of parallels that we're seeing.
01:32:51.000I mean, we are, this should be said and we're off and we're dealing with a cult.
01:32:54.000The so-called woke thing, which always sounds too jokey to me, the so-called woke thing is a cult.
01:32:59.000You have people telling Telling young people not to speak to their grandparents if their grandparents don't have the right views.
01:33:07.000That's a cult right there, right there.
01:33:09.000And by the way, I was watching the other night this documentary on the Jonestown massacre and I was amazed to see, I mean the cult parallels all over the place.
01:33:17.000I was amazed to see that one of Jim Jones's things to his followers was you can't go back to the United States because it's so racist.
01:33:28.000Like, hucksters and fraudsters have been onto this longer than I knew they had.
01:33:34.000Yeah, because it's such a hot-button subject, and if you say it to people, they get terrified that they actually are racist, or that they're going to be accused of being racist, and so they'll comply just to avoid the sting, the sting of the accusation, and they'll subjugate themselves.
01:33:49.000Unless, as I say, unless we all take the Joan Rivers approach, and we say, there will be a cost to you For dishonestly saying something about me like that.
01:34:01.000If we took the inspiration of Joan Rivers, we'd get somewhere.
01:34:04.000Well, maybe with more people being at least...
01:34:07.000Definitely more people are taken out of their current occupation because of COVID. More people have lost their jobs.
01:34:14.000And there's a lot of people that are forced into being independent.
01:34:19.000If they can become truly independent and not be concerned about losing a job, they can at least express themselves more freely and then only be concerned with the people around them who are forced into compliance and have to attack them.
01:34:35.000People who do have jobs and can lose those jobs.
01:34:37.000I mean, there's a lot of people that you're not just forced into behaving a certain way.
01:34:42.000You're forced into condemning other people who don't go along with it.
01:34:45.000They're asking you to jump on board, pile on to the mob.
01:34:49.000Yeah, well, I just read Deborah So's book.
01:35:18.000Deborah is a very good example of that.
01:35:20.000She could have spent her life lying and hanging around and doing peer-reviewed papers making the same bullshit claims that all of her contemporaries were making whilst whispering in the canteen that it was all bullshit.
01:35:33.000And instead she's written a really good book and doubtless she'll do many more great things.
01:35:39.000Because she happens to be able to live in the truth.
01:35:41.000Yes, and fortunately for her, there are these avenues.
01:35:45.000There's these places that she can go where she can go on podcasts, she can use social media, but she gets attacked left and right because of it.
01:35:54.000And I got attacked because of having her on.
01:35:57.000But what she's saying, there's clearly something going on when you have this gigantic uptick of young girls who have sudden onset gender dysphoria and are turning trans.
01:36:10.000And then the same with Abigail Shearer, her book as well.
01:36:43.000There's a reason why cults exist in the first place.
01:36:46.000Human beings are very subject to manipulation, to influence, to suggestion, and also the praise that these young girls are getting for stepping out and saying that they're trans.
01:38:51.000Most parents know something's going on in this.
01:38:54.000It's also, by the way, to have the real discussion about it is much more interesting than the fake one, because the real discussion, as I say, about things like autogynephilia, about sexual eroticism and transdressing and all this stuff, is really interesting.
01:39:08.000And there's not much written about it, as you know, but I mean, it's really, really interesting.
01:39:50.000Paglia says at the end of every empire they get interested in sexual fluidity, hermaphroditism and so on.
01:39:59.000And I do think that if this is the end of American dominance in the world, and it could be, if America falls into civil war then this is the end of American dominance.
01:40:08.000It's the end of The West, as we saw it, and the rise, obviously, and the overtaking by China, first of all.
01:40:17.000And if that happens, and historians look back on this, one of the things that they will say is, wasn't it strange that in the last decades, this American society got completely hung up on the issue of trans?
01:40:32.000It will be seen to be a late empire, a bad sign.
01:40:39.000A bad sign of things falling apart, on top of the multitude of other bad signs that you, particularly in America, have all around you at the moment.
01:40:48.000That is fascinating that at the end of empires, they get really concerned with gender and hermaphrodites and those things.
01:41:04.000I think it must be something to do with those boundaries and all other boundaries starting to erode.
01:41:10.000I mean, the nature of society is that we have certain fixed ideas that we agree on.
01:41:16.000I mean, by the way, trans is a brilliant one, but the whole non-binary thing is a brilliant one if you wanted to pull apart society because, again, get people to pretend that men and women don't exist.
01:41:28.000Get people to pretend that one of the things that we've all known from the beginning is It doesn't exist, and you can do all of the other stuff too.
01:41:38.000It's a brilliant one to demoralize people on.
01:41:41.000Say there's no difference between men and women, the penis is a social construct.
01:41:47.000A Labour MP said recently on television, she actually had the gall to say on television, she said children are born without sex.
01:41:55.000Penises and vaginas are so 20th century.
01:41:59.000And, you know, if you do that stuff, then of course people end up, they just doubt everything.
01:42:33.000Oh, you can predict with 100% certainty the people who will use the latest, craziest trans claim and run with it.
01:42:43.000There are definitely politicians in all of our countries Who, pardon the image, but use trans people as a battering ram for something else.
01:42:52.000They use trans as a battering ram against capitalism.
01:42:55.000Horrible image, but I mean, they're just running at the door of capitalism using the latest thing that they think will be useful because they think that it demonstrates our horribleness as a society.
01:43:05.000And obviously communist regimes were much better with trans.
01:44:03.000Until I found out that there was a woman who was a man for 30 years and then started entering into mixed martial arts competitions as a woman without telling the women that she was a man for 30 years.
01:45:11.000And then you can also say that she is not just a woman, but she's equal to women in terms of physical strength, all the different physical attributes that we know.
01:45:24.000Reaction time, one tenth of a second faster.
01:45:26.000There's all these different things that make the shape of the hips, the shape of the shoulders, the size of the hands, the mind that has grown with testosterone for 30 years.
01:45:36.000If you had a woman that was competing in any sport, forget about combat sports, but any sport, and it was found out that her parents were injecting her with testosterone from the time she was a baby.
01:45:47.000And just making her the perfect killing machine so that when she entered into the octagon, she would have this spectacular advantage over women, and all they were going to do is just cut off her testosterone about two years before she entered into competition.
01:46:50.000I mean, I'm surprised that there isn't more objection when, you know, because, again, all of this is so much more interesting to have out honestly.
01:46:58.000The trans sporting thing is so much more interesting if you have it out honestly than if you pretend As so many people want to.
01:47:15.000I don't believe they're pretending to want to be women.
01:47:19.000I don't believe they're pretending to be, even the ones who don't want to be women, but the men who are sexually aroused by putting on women's clothes and women's shoes.
01:47:41.000But when you wrap this up with identity politics and you wrap this up with this forced compliance, now all of a sudden we can never get to the answer.
01:47:48.000And then you can say things like, there is no such thing as biological sex.
01:47:52.000And you go, what the fuck are you talking about?
01:47:55.000It's exactly the same with the relations between the sexes questions.
01:48:01.000It's so much more interesting to have the discussion we're not having than it is to have the nonsense one.
01:48:07.000As you know, I have this obsession with Christine Lagarde, the former head of the IMF, because she always says, she did it again recently, she says that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, then we might not have had the financial crisis.
01:48:52.000That's the only reason why they're not so successful.
01:48:55.000And by the way, Laguna did it recently as well when she said that female world leaders have been more successful than male world leaders in tackling COVID and then just left it there dangling.
01:49:05.000But it's much more interesting to have the discussion that nobody then has, which is to say, if that was the case, and I don't think it is particularly, but if that was the case, why might that be?
01:49:16.000Is it the case that something in the female mind makes them better at dealing with pandemics?
01:49:22.000Instead of putting it on a chart and putting a one on the female side and a zero on the male side, let's find out what they did and apply it to everybody.
01:49:31.000If it is true, then we better get women to the top for the...
01:49:52.000If that is the case, and by the way, there's a small handful of women that are running countries, so you're not dealing with a lot of people.
01:49:59.000So what is about those women, and why are we pretending, why would anybody pretend that those women are equal and exactly the same as every woman who's ever existed?
01:50:11.000And this idea that you can identify with a particular gender and that would make you automatically better at handling COVID is so fucking stupid.
01:50:20.000It's just amazing that someone can just say that.
01:50:23.000Someone whose opinion is supposed to be respected can just...
01:51:22.000And, you know, you do just, you at some point have to be able to have the discussion.
01:51:26.000You have to have the discussion anyway, whether you're allowed to or not, about whether, for instance, the underrepresented groups that are going to have to go on board, including women, people who are trans, I think Pacific Islanders was one, LGBT,
01:51:45.000You've got to at some point tell everyone if you're going to make everyone go through this incredibly painful and potentially financially It's an unhelpful process.
01:51:54.000You've got to, at some point, tell them exactly what the benefit is.
01:51:57.000And again, like Christine Lagarde, California is stuck in this situation where they have to simultaneously pretend, as I say in the women chapter, that every group is simultaneously exactly equal in their competencies and also underrepresented people bring something that's better.
01:52:22.000I think you can hold one of those, but you can't hold both.
01:52:27.000Or at least you can't hold both without serious cognitive dissonance.
01:52:32.000Because at some point, I mean, by the way, I had a friend who's a mathematician to run the figures of this in the state of California, of the number of companies.
01:52:42.000And I think I'm right in saying that if you're trans or a Pacific Islander in California, you better clear your diary For the next few years, because you are going to have to dash from board meeting to board meeting.
01:52:56.000It's going to be, it's going to be, your diary for 2022 is blocked.
01:54:41.000But I'm also sure that there's a lot of women that aren't interested in these male-dominated fields because they don't appeal to them.
01:54:47.000Because they can make their own decisions of what they want to do with their life.
01:54:50.000And if all of a sudden those things that they are not interested in become open, they just go to it because, well, I can get an easy job as a CEO. Fuck it.
01:55:04.000Because there will be lots of girls who will be growing up and they'll be smart and they'll be looking to do things in their lives.
01:55:11.000And they'll hear Obama or anyone else in charge saying this.
01:55:17.000And they will honestly think that if they go into a job, and I've had this conversation with lots of people since Manners of Crowds came out, they will honestly think that if they go into a job in their 20s, they will be paid less than their male colleagues.
01:55:29.000And that's just a horrible way to start your life.
01:55:32.000It's the same way, you know, if you tell people lies about their society, and sometimes they seem at the time quite small things like gender pay gap, why go on about the gender pay gap?
01:55:44.000But because down the line, you get a generation of very disgruntled people who have a false understanding of pay in their society.
01:55:54.000And then further down the line, and I mean, like the transparency issue, I've had a lot of contact from women since the book came out about the chapter on women saying, you say something there which is very painful but is correct, which is where I highlight the issue of motherhood.
01:56:17.000It didn't really know what to deal with it, and so it went on to things it saw as being easier questions.
01:56:24.000Could you elaborate on that, for people that are just listening to this, that haven't read your book?
01:56:30.000The second way feminists knew that motherhood was a big question, and that Of all of the things that made women different, this was possibly the most important.
01:56:44.000But they didn't know what to do with it because it is undoubtedly, if you're talking about career and motherhood, the desire to have children and the desire to have the career that you can have, these are obviously things that at some point are going to come into contest.
01:56:59.000Now, you can set up your society better in order to help women who have that, but it's It's never optimal because, as we know, small companies, how do you support a woman when you've got a staff of three if one of the woman goes away on pregnancy leave and you've got to still support and so on.
01:57:19.000These aren't impossible to solve, but they're very tricky in lots of ways.
01:57:24.000And on a personal level, the thing that's tricky is How you deal, unless you're very, very rich, with the conundrum of working every hour of the day in order to get to the top in a particular line of work and also being able to look after children and being able to mother children and indeed I mean,
01:57:45.000the point is, it was always there as a very, very tricky issue, which it continues to be.
01:58:39.000Some words mean things they don't, and others don't mean what they say, and it depends on my personal choice, is what Ezra Klein was saying.
01:58:56.000And it's painful for women as it is for men.
01:59:00.000And it's much more useful for our society to have that discussion and be better at sorting that out than it is to pretend that it's a problem which is either not there or solved.
01:59:12.000And, you know, again, there is an opportunity cost To having these things out wrongly.
01:59:18.000And the one, as I say, at the end of it is that you end up with people who have a misunderstanding of the society they're in.
01:59:25.000They think it's uniquely unhappy, uniquely unpleasant, uniquely bigoted against them, uniquely biased against them.
01:59:31.000And it'll mean that they will have less chance in their lives of fulfilling their potential because they have been told that they've been born in society where they're second class from the outset.
02:00:14.000Actually giving birth and raising human beings that came out of their body.
02:00:18.000I had this bit that was one of the times when I was being canceled was taken out of context and put in print because it's an easy one to do.
02:00:28.000I was talking about how my own mother was saying, I want a woman to be president because I think it would be great if a woman did the most important job in the world.
02:00:39.000And I said, you make all the people That's not the most important job.
02:00:46.000Every person that's ever lived came out of a woman's body.
02:02:40.000I quote the American writer Wendell Berry on this.
02:02:47.000He said somewhere a couple of decades ago that he was going to resent the portrayal of motherhood as mere drudgery and as something that women spend their lives on where they could be doing something better.
02:03:04.000You know, I identify in matters of crowds that these cases like The Economist magazine a couple of years ago ran a piece describing like the child debt.
02:03:13.000What it costs you to have a child and how it's sort of therefore not worth your while because you won't get to this level in promotion.
02:03:23.000It was being talked about as if the point of life is to get to the grave with the largest possible bank balance.
02:03:31.000And, you know, Wendell Berry says, and I love this, he says, we all have to spend our lives on something.
02:03:39.000We have to spend ourselves on something.
02:03:43.000And of all of the things you could spend yourself on in your life, the raising of a child would seem to be absolutely at the top, much higher than if you pretended the thing at the top was dying with the largest bank balance.
02:03:59.000And so it's not that it has to be either or, but it is incredibly sad when a society, yes, presents it as if one of the greatest things you can ever do Is mere drudgery.
02:04:13.000And by comparison, you know, getting to the top of some bloody investment firm where you're going to find they're all woke idiots anyway once you're there and you're wasted your time and then you've got a retirement party and you're out.
02:04:26.000And that wasn't all it was cracked up to be after all.
02:04:31.000You know, everybody has to, as my late friend Christopher Hitchens once said, everybody has to choose their regrets, you know?
02:04:39.000There's a regret worth choosing or not.
02:04:42.000And if whatever you choose, knowing honestly what you're going into would be a good thing.
02:04:47.000And I would say I completely agree with that, and I'd also say there are women that don't ever want children, and that's fine too.
02:04:56.000There's women that want to travel the world, and they want to do art, or they want to be CEOs of companies, or they want to be fighter jet pilots.
02:05:05.000Whatever the fuck they want to do, that's fine.
02:05:06.000That's wonderful, but to diminish the idea of womanhood To the point where you're diminishing this incredible thing that human beings are capable of doing, and only females making human beings.
02:05:24.000It's one of the most spectacular things that we know of.
02:05:27.000If there was an invention that could do that, it would be phenomenal.
02:05:33.000If someone had a box and babies came out of it, and then those babies went on to be presidents and football players and mathematicians, you'd be like, this is the most incredible thing ever.
02:05:46.000Through this box, inventors have been born.
02:06:06.000Here's a suggestion, by the way, because I'm always after answers to these things.
02:06:11.000I think that a suggestion that we could try to get agreement on across all political boundaries, such as they now exist, is that I think you get an absolute majority in all the developed countries for the following proposition,
02:06:28.000which is that nobody should be held back from achieving whatever they can achieve in their life by dint of a characteristic over which they have no say.
02:06:37.000And I think, I mean, maybe people aren't honest to politicians.
02:06:41.000I think it's a very small number of people now in America or Britain who think that a woman who's able to do the job shouldn't get the job.
02:06:52.000I think a very small number of people think that, you know, those of us who are gay shouldn't achieve things because we're gay if we can do them.
02:07:01.000And I think a very small number of people, they exist, but I think there's definitely a vast minority.
02:07:07.000I think most people think that you shouldn't be held back from whatever you can achieve because of the color of your skin.
02:07:14.000I think we have almost total agreement on this in our societies.
02:07:17.000And I resent, by the way, those people on the far left who pretend That actually everybody on the right doesn't agree to that because it's absolute agreement on that.
02:07:25.000What there is a disagreement about is a perfectly serious issue to disagree on, which is how you go about making sure that those optimal conditions not only are attained but remain in place.
02:08:58.000But this is also an issue when you force people into these positions or when you make it so difficult for people to have a workplace environment that is friendly and loose and easy Yes.
02:09:54.000You could also, I mean, there are already stats on that of CEOs who just won't fly in the same cabin of a plane as female colleagues and will not even be on the same hotel floor as female colleagues on a business trip.
02:10:08.000The stats are staggering, the fear that is being injected.
02:10:14.000And the problem is, and this is the problem on all of these identity traits thing and the way we've decided to weaponise them, the problem is that it relies on everybody on Earth being honest all the time.
02:10:25.000It relies on everybody being an honest actor.
02:10:28.000For instance, if you get the right character trait person in place, they will always use their position accurately, and they will always level accusations truthfully.
02:10:42.000And it's possible, and I just put it out there, human nature being what it is, that some people, when they're found to have a cudgel that they can use, might use it Yes.
02:11:12.000It's that thing I'm trying to help defuse.
02:11:14.000Everything's bubbling away underneath and nothing is allowed to happen above the surface.
02:11:19.000Everybody knows what we, you know, I say about the sexes, everyone knew a load of things till yesterday and we've had to pretend not to know them today.
02:11:28.000And that's the case in each of these situations.
02:11:31.000I'm a big fan of Steven Pinker's, and one of the things that I enjoy about Steven Pinker's work is watching people get angry at him saying how things are better today than they've ever been before.
02:11:42.000And I think that's really inarguably true.
02:11:46.000It's pretty clear when you look at the statistics of violence, of rape, of murder, of theft, of all the variables that we would consider to be important in a polite society, there's less of all those things today than there have been in the past.
02:12:05.000My fear is that we're going through this really fucked up time, and it will get better, but it'll take so much time that I'll be an old man before I see it, and that all these years will be spent just knee-deep in nonsense and dealing with all this horseshit until the generations eventually work it out.
02:12:30.000Look, I mean, there have been lots of people who have predicted this, but that the problem that you get when you get a society of the kind of freedom that we have, particularly in America, is that at the end of this process, people are bored and they want something to do and they react against freedom out of something like habit.
02:12:49.000They're so used to reacting to things, against things, that they react against the best thing going and they don't realize it.
02:12:56.000There is something like that that's going on in America.
02:12:59.000There is a way back, and it has to involve, as I said before, some historical context.
02:13:05.000It has to involve people knowing about things that happened before yesterday, has to involve people knowing about things that have happened and are happening now around the world.
02:13:15.000Because if you have it in context, you cannot possibly think that the system you've got going in America is so unfair that it deserves to have a 1789 or 1917 moment.
02:13:29.000And maybe what will happen is that people will start to see the stakes, will realize that they were interested in the performative bit of revolution, but they don't actually want to burn down the whole damn building.
02:13:42.000And you just have to hope those people are going to be in large enough numbers to see off the people who see a great big bloody pyrotechnic disaster and just want to rush towards it.
02:13:55.000Well, I'm very thankful that there's people like you that are out there that are writing books that highlight all these issues that we're dealing with and that you are brave enough to go forward with your thoughts uncensored despite the criticism and the way you present them.
02:14:09.000You're so articulate and you're so dead on the money with so many of these issues.
02:14:14.000I think you're one of the bright lights.
02:14:17.000That could lead us out of this darkness.
02:14:19.000And I think your work is very brave in that regard because I know the kind of blowback.
02:14:23.000I've read the kind of blowback that you've received.
02:14:26.000I think it's very important what you're doing.