In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster talks about the 2008 Global Pandemic and how he managed to survive it. He talks about what it's like to walk the world wearing a mask, and what it was like to be locked in your house during one of the worst lockdown periods of the pandemic. He also talks about how he dealt with the aftermath of the lockdown in his home country of the UK, and why he decided not to wear a mask again after the first one. And finally, he talks about why he doesn't wear his mask anymore, and how it's not as bad as it used to be. It's a good one, and it's a funny one too, which is what makes it even better. Enjoy, and spread the word to your friends and family about this one! If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and we'll read it out on the next episode of the pod! Thank you so much for all your support, it means a lot to us and we really appreciate it. XOXO, Joe and Rory. Cheers, Caitie and Rory - The O.J. xoxo - Caitie & Rory - Rory & Rory - Joe Rogans The OJ Experience - This is not a podcast, it's an homage to the movie 'PANDemic' by the movie PANDemic, directed by Tom HAPPY BONUS EPISODES! - Caitie is out there's a new episode with a new song out now, so you should listen to it! and Rory will be listening to it on the pod, so don't forget to check it out! Joe's new album is out soon! (and it's out in the next week, too! ) - it's going to be out soon, so be sure to check out the music is out by the end of the OJ Podcast. - Rory and Rory's new music is coming soon, too. . - Tom and Rory are looking out for the music, so keep up with us in the PodCastle, we'll be listening out for it, so we'll have an update on that in the podcast, so that you can be sure you'll know that it's all the best of what's going on in the pod. Timestamps: 2:30 - What do you think of it? 3:00 - What's better than that? 4:15 - How does it feel like?
00:00:47.000Well, I don't like to say exactly what I did, but I did decide that after lockdown one in my native country, the UK, I wasn't going through that again.
00:00:58.000I mean, lockdowns are bad everywhere, but in the UK, they just kept doing them.
00:01:39.000She said, in my village, we have people who inform.
00:01:43.000And I said, well, what does that look like?
00:01:44.000She said, for instance, somebody leant over the garden wall the other day and said to me, you are aware this is your second walk of the day.
00:02:44.000And those people, I don't know what we can do with them after this because they're going to lose their meaning because they've just had a whale of a time.
00:05:18.000And because it didn't work, it felt like everyone could sigh a bit of a breath.
00:05:25.000It's also fortunate that the people that went for it were CNN, and they're just so untrustworthy.
00:05:31.000And people know how biased they are, and they know how...
00:05:36.000Socially weird their fucking anchors are just these awkward Non-relatable people that no one feel like if there's someone on TV And that I mean pick a person like Jon Stewart is a great relatable person who I find to be a brilliant guy Who's a kind person if Jon Stewart thinks you're a piece of shit.
00:05:57.000I'm gonna listen right, you know But if Brian Stelter doesn't like you That doesn't mean anything to me.
00:06:05.000One of my rules, try and never be mean about people because of their appearances.
00:08:01.000Early last year I just spent a bit of time watching it and everything in the coverage was horrible and inflammatory and everything in the advert breaks were for like adverts about the KKK's history in America.
00:08:16.000So like all you saw all the time was like burning crosses and that was the relief from the interview stuff.
00:08:27.000Because if you're dealing with a show that's only an hour long and it's supposedly a new show, you kind of have to pay attention to only the bad things because you have to be aware of those bad things.
00:08:37.000Maybe those bad things are something like Russia invading Ukraine, something you actually have to pay attention to.
00:08:43.000But it's not an accurate assessment of the world at large.
00:08:48.000Like, there's so much great stuff going on.
00:08:49.000It's like most of the world is wonderful.
00:08:52.000Most of the world is people getting along.
00:08:54.000Most interactions between people are fine.
00:08:57.000Now, I mean, there was a British philosopher some years ago who tried to start a website which only did good news.
00:09:03.000I felt really sorry for him because it was obviously going to fail.
00:09:07.000It was a nice idea, but it was obviously going to fail because people don't really just want to hear that things are okay.
00:09:14.000Is there a problem with just the idea of having news, just news in that way, like where you're just going to something to see what's happening in the world?
00:09:23.000So it's almost always going to be negative.
00:09:25.000Like there's no news channel of record that we're aware of ever that is focused on like really positive stories.
00:09:32.000No, I mean, some local news used to do a bit of that, didn't they?
00:10:25.000And things like Sky in the UK, the BBC. Because they think their job is to move the story along.
00:10:34.000Because otherwise it's just them all day saying the same thing, which it kind of is.
00:10:38.000But the other thing is it's just a very bad way to absorb news.
00:10:42.000I mean, I flick down a few news websites in the morning and I can get most of them and most of the news in like a minute maybe, an overview.
00:10:51.000And if I was watching nightly news, that would take half an hour.
00:10:56.000That's just not a good use of my time.
00:10:58.000Well, even the way they handle debates or discussions They have too many people.
00:11:04.000They'll have a panel with four or five people and they're all talking over each other and they're all trying to get a sound bite.
00:11:08.000I always joke about that one that they do where they say, now here's an incredibly important issue and it's a world important issue and that's why we're going to discuss it for three minutes.
00:11:18.000With five guests, all of whom get 15 seconds.
00:11:50.000Well, that was a lot of people's reputation.
00:11:53.000Like, that interviewer would ask the tough questions and would prod you about your personal life and then get deep and make you uncomfortable, you know?
00:12:01.000They'd throw you off center and all that sort of thing.
00:12:38.000And then Madness of Crowds, I was told actually by somebody who knew somebody on the inside that they, when I suggested that they should interview me about the Madness of Crowds, the person who suggested it almost lost her job.
00:12:53.000And it's happened that fast in my own life, in my own career.
00:12:56.000But no, when you did used to sort of do NPR, there was always that, in that sort of media, there was always that sort of funny thing where the interviewer would interview you about your book, having not read it, and try to catch you out on it.
00:14:23.000And she then complained that I and others doing that had led to death threats against her, which then became the news.
00:14:33.000Because within 24 hours it became poor Kathy Newman suffers death threats as a result of interview with alt-right hero, you know, blah, blah, blah.
00:14:42.000And, of course, all that had happened was that it turned out that what they claimed to be a death threat was somebody wrote on YouTube, one person wrote on YouTube, R.I.P. Kathy Newman's career.
00:16:23.000And one of the things I think I'll never get over about his career to date Is that none of these people who tried to take him down ever spent any time trying to work out why he'd risen.
00:16:38.000And I just, I always felt like if somebody who I was very ideologically opposed to or really had a lot of differences with was like packing out arenas of young Like, cool, clever, smart people night after night.
00:17:01.000None of those critics ever bothered to work out, like...
00:17:04.000He must be onto something, otherwise this wouldn't be happening.
00:17:07.000Well, there's this narrative that gets bandied about in certain social circles, and the narrative with him was alt-right, anti-trans, misogyny.
00:17:19.000And it was, this is who he is, and then you can look at his supporters, and you see how his supporters attack people who criticize him, and this is who he is.
00:17:28.000And that narrative, if you went against that narrative, you faced a lot of blowback.
00:18:48.000But if I didn't know him and someone tried to say something terrible about him, I'd have to take that into consideration.
00:18:54.000It probably worked on people who didn't like me already or people who would be more inclined to form a stereotype or something based on their appearance.
00:19:45.000If you're self-sufficient, if you have a podcast or something like that, you might lose some advertisers, but hopefully if your show is still good, you'll still gain numbers, and after a while the residue will die down, then you'll get advertisers again.
00:19:59.000I know people where that has happened, where they've lost advertisers due to being air quotes canceled.
00:20:04.000But if you have a job, it's frightfully easy to fire someone.
00:20:51.000They have like a certain level of a lack of compassion already just because of the fact that they have a low-level subtle torture that's being put on them every day just by having to show up there.
00:21:04.000Vengefulness in general is one of the nastiest human instincts to try to get around.
00:21:42.000Although, you know, you do end up with this problem that everyone's got at the moment, which is then, you know, who people do go to to rely on.
00:22:13.000I mean, I have some things I know a lot about, a few things I know a lot about, a number of things I know a bit about, and just masses of stuff I don't know anything about.
00:22:23.000And so, obviously, my rule, wait for this, my rule is not to talk about things I don't know about.
00:22:36.000You should talk confidently about almost everything and just let the chips fall where they may.
00:22:43.000You know, the thing is An enormous number of people don't follow that last year.
00:22:48.000I mean, they actually do think that they have to know about everything.
00:22:51.000So it is like, and then there's one of the reasons why the last couple of years have been so terrible for so many people, you know, has been this thing of like, well, what do you think about pandemics?
00:23:53.000Definitely because it became a big thing.
00:23:57.000Would have been useful to have studied it.
00:23:59.000But I mean, literally it was one of those things where if I was at some conference and there was a panel on pandemics, it was one of the ones you knew you could step out from.
00:24:07.000Because I kind of thought, it's not what I know about.
00:26:05.000But this thing of holding forth on everything, everyone moving from being COVID experts to Afghan withdrawal experts to Ukraine experts back to something else.
00:26:39.000In the face of controversy and in the face of extreme criticism, you're able to stand your ground and have logical discussions about pertinent issues.
00:26:54.000And some of them are these hot button topics that people just, they have these takes that you're supposed to accept and you're supposed to adopt, and then you're supposed to broadcast that out to let everyone know that you're a good person and send that signal out so everybody knows that you're on the right team.
00:27:09.000And you have always been the guy that's like, actually...
00:28:55.000Lack of humility, pride, jealousy, all that sort of thing.
00:29:02.000And when it comes to saying, actually, I got that wrong, or I've changed my mind on that, it requires you volunteering up a bit of your pride.
00:29:13.000And if you had a choice between those two things and you could get away with not having a hit on your pride, you kind of would for most people.
00:29:21.000That's why they hold on to things they know are kind of indefensible still.
00:29:24.000It's very unfortunate because it ruins all your opinions after that if people know that you're that guy that won't admit that you were incorrect.
00:29:34.000There are some very prominent examples in the United States.
00:29:38.000Well, this pandemic really opened up that book, right?
00:29:41.000You got to see a lot of initial suspicions that were proven incorrect and people are still hanging on to them.
00:29:48.000I was once told by a policeman in Northern Ireland, never shut a door entirely.
00:29:55.000And it's a quite useful piece of advice and it's one I've tried to keep in mind in the last couple of years as I've seen people going off what I regard as a reservation.
00:31:20.000So they're in rooms, like they're quarantined in a single room or an apartment, and they just have to do push-ups and sit-ups and shadow-box, no sparring, no technique training, and then they're going to have a cage fight soon.
00:31:34.000This is a pretty good way to drive people mad.
00:31:38.000It's about the best, if you think about it, isn't it?
00:31:40.000Lock people up and isolate them completely.
00:31:43.000Also in this case, because it's so illogical, because you're talking about something with this new strain that's essentially like a cold.
00:31:53.000And yes, for some people who are immunocompromised, it still can be dangerous.
00:31:56.000But it's not nearly as dangerous as, say, Delta or what we thought the initial wave, the first wave.
00:32:05.000It was so confusing, the whole thing, I thought, because after that first bit, when you sort of thought, okay, it's not what we thought it might first be.
00:32:48.000And then a whole set of crazy things happened, which, I mean, would derange large numbers of people.
00:32:54.000You know, I mean, I think the fastest whiplash one was the movement from everybody stay in your houses to everyone go out onto the streets and protest against racism.
00:33:49.000And I think that's one of the reasons why now, I mean, we're in a situation where, I mean, I don't know about you, but I mean, among my friends, there are people who believe almost anything now.
00:33:58.000I mean, you know, my favorite are friends who I know have put illegal drugs in their body.
00:34:41.000I am unsympathetic to some of that too, but I know people that have had horrible adverse effects that people want to bury their head in the sand about.
00:34:50.000They want to pretend that that's not a real thing.
00:34:52.000That's kind of the problem with everything, isn't it?
00:36:23.000Righteous people, that they're ideological zealots, and if they're working in some sort of an election poll place, they can fuck with things, and they can hide ballots, or if they're in a very Democrat-heavy place,
00:36:40.000they might throw some of the ballots away.
00:36:43.000It can have an effect, but the question is how much of an effect does it have?
00:37:32.000All these troll farms in Macedonia, I'm sure in China and other countries as well, they're doing things to exacerbate these arguments and to make sure that people...
00:37:42.000They're exacerbating them, but they don't necessarily cause them.
00:37:44.000And that's where some of the dispute lies.
00:37:52.000I just think that, you know, if in my own country of birth, in Britain, if we had had no elections for 20 years, which the losers had agreed they'd lost in, that would be pandemonium.
00:38:03.000Because I always say the thing with elections is it's not just that you win and you know you've won and that's great and you get to run the country.
00:38:09.000It's that if you've lost, you try to work out why you've lost.
00:38:13.000So the Democrats wasted four years not working out why maybe they hadn't put the most lovable candidate forward in 2016 and maybe Maybe there was a reason they lost to Donald Trump.
00:38:28.000If you actually had to work out why you'd lost to Donald Trump, you could do some really interesting soul searching.
00:38:58.000Because if no one thinks that the elections are real, if people think it's rigged and then less people participate in them, and then more people are into QAnon or January 6th, that kind of shit, that can exacerbate,
00:39:14.000could really fuel those fires of militias and all these people that think they're patriots.
00:39:33.000They don't take into consideration nuance or just the sheer volume of data you're dealing with when it comes to elections, when it comes to politics, and all the factors, special interest groups and lobbies and all that.
00:39:51.000There's an unsophisticated group of people in this country that only think in terms of good and bad, and there's a lot of them.
00:39:58.000I don't know if they're real, but there's a lot of these people that have like, when I see an American flag in someone's Twitter bio, I automatically assume they're a bot or they're one of these people.
00:40:09.000Either you're one of these people that just is all in on good versus bad, and you have this very narrow bandwidth of understanding when it comes to just human psychology and the way the world works in terms of influence and politics.
00:40:55.000They have this very narrow view of stuff.
00:40:58.000It's very sad to see some of the people, and obviously some of the people on January 6th were disgusted and deserved what they got.
00:41:05.000But some don't deserve what they got and are being treated really roughly.
00:41:11.000It's very sad seeing them when they do speak about it because, you know, part of you is also like, you were kind of willing to give your life for Donald Trump.
00:41:24.000Jordan and I spoke after January the 6th, and it didn't go down very well with either of our followers, but it wasn't the point.
00:41:32.000The point was partly to say, this is what's gone wrong.
00:41:36.000And one of the conclusions that we helped each other come to was, if you'd have gone back five years in American public life and said, in 2020 there's going to be...
00:41:49.000You're not going to be able to believe anyone in the country.
00:42:59.000This, whatever it was, 80 people from the NSA and the CIA and so on, they all gave their view about something they knew nothing about to help Joe Biden win the election.
00:43:58.000All your tech platforms deciding to assist one candidate and a massive amount of your intelligence community assisting that candidate in order to stop getting out the story of corruption in what is now the first family.
00:44:12.000And it's being released by one of the oldest newspapers in America, the New York Post.
00:45:07.000If you look from whenever they first started banning people on Twitter and then instigating censorship, Twitter is still not as bad as some platforms.
00:45:58.000Well, I thought that I could get myself banned from Twitter quite fast if I said the following, and I was very tempted, but I was just like, I need to keep my Twitter account.
00:46:04.000I kind of wanted to say, look, Leah Thomas isn't a woman.
00:46:07.000I can tell you why, because I think she's quite hot.
00:46:13.000Well, we were trying to find out whether or not this is true, but she still prefers ladies and has a penis.
00:46:37.000That hot swimmer who thinks he's a girl.
00:46:40.000It's a very strange standard, but you can still have a functional penis and have sex with women and still be considered a woman in some people's eyes, like this transgender inmate that impregnated two women inmates.
00:47:22.000When did they start getting that ability?
00:47:24.000And anyhow, the same week, like the day before, there was this great story in the metro in the UK. You can probably bring it on the screen.
00:47:32.000If you type in, wait for it, sex toy wheelie bin...
00:50:57.000You had the best take on this, and I repeat it all the time.
00:51:00.000And you have said that when a civilization is in a downward spiral, when it's the end of the civilization, they become obsessed with gender.
00:52:23.000I think we talked about this before in relation to the communist era in Eastern Europe.
00:52:28.000That sort of part of the point that the humiliation of going along with things you know aren't true ends up having an effect down the road because you just nod anything along.
00:52:41.000Yeah, I have a friend who grew up Mormon, and one of the things she said to me once, it was really interesting, she said, because she left the church, and she said, I'm really susceptible to bullshit.
00:53:10.000She goes, because I grew up agreeing to things that are nonsensical.
00:53:15.000And because of that, because I had just, like, given all of my, you know, when you just, like, all of your opinions are decided by a church, and the church was written by a 14-year-old boy in 1820. Yeah.
00:54:02.000But it's sort of the same principle sort of applies when people just accept, you know, like with wokeism, when you accept these ideological givens that aren't logical.
00:54:45.000I mean, our own age has decided in much of the West that There's this sort of form of watered-down spillover of Christianity, which will become the sort of religion, which is the kind of diversity, inclusion,
00:55:00.000equity world, where you constantly struggle for greater justice, all of which is a sort of very watered-down version of a little bit of Christianity.
00:55:12.000There's a clear genesis of that, too, in the woke world.
00:55:16.000There was a group at a certain point in time.
00:55:18.000Do you remember when the atheist movement had hit this atheist plus movement?
00:55:51.000And I remember watching this guy give this speech, this fucking boring speech, on this sort of establishing this idea that because you don't have a religion, so we're going to be atheists,
00:56:07.000but with plus, we can establish sort of a moral framework.
00:56:24.000All those new atheists who sort of started off in the 2000s, Sam Harris and others, in my experience, they all got a little bit nervous about what was on their shoulders.
00:57:30.000It's not by any means a beginning of a policy.
00:57:33.000Do you think that's just an inherent thing about being a tribal primate, that we have this desire to have someone wiser, a leader, and then even better, if you can have a godlike figure who gives you a set of rules that you have to follow, or they're...
00:57:49.000Horrendous consequences, and it keeps everyone in line.
00:57:54.000In the 2000s, I started to think, if somebody came along and declared prophethood at the moment, they could do quite well.
00:58:03.000I mean, think of those hucksters on US television who still take money from people, saying that they can only build the church and have their helicopter if you send in your dollars, you know?
00:59:07.000I think if someone came along and had a really good cult, like a real solid cult, like really well laid out, be rational, think for yourself, be kind, examine all evidence, people would join into that and then it would...
00:59:24.000It always ends up with a massive orgy, doesn't it?
01:00:49.000And that's like a lot of the people that complain online and they think of themselves as activists because they're on Twitter and they think they're shaping culture by just complaining about stuff online on Twitter.
01:00:59.000Yeah, and they think that if they kick really hard and nastily, That's really good because it'll cause a reaction.
01:01:11.000I'm fairly convinced that this is one of the explanations for the really horrible behavior of a lot of people in our time who do things in the name of goodness, which they should just be ashamed of.
01:02:34.000I thought you were talking about a different thing than I wrote years ago.
01:02:37.000But no, that was just someone was at a fucking zoo and a monkey climbed on a pole and snatched a seagull out of the sky and beat it to death.
01:04:20.000If a boy thinks a dog getting murdered in front of its owner, when a lady blacks out and the dog's screaming for its life as its intestines are getting pulled out.
01:04:29.000We're going to read about that boy in the papers.
01:04:55.000I went to a zoo once in Denver, and I'll never forget, they had this small primate cage.
01:04:59.000There was, like, a couple different primates that were in separate cages, but the cage where this one monkey was in was no bigger than this room, and this monkey was screaming, just, like, in agony, like, ah!
01:06:26.000I'm very excited that you're out there because, like I said earlier, I think it's so important that someone's courageous in these times where there's certain taboo subjects or there's certain subjects that you're not allowed to objectively discuss.
01:06:41.000You have to follow these ideological patterns or you get chastised.
01:06:48.000Well, what I started to realize in recent years was that too many people were allowing really bad people a free pass on certain things.
01:06:55.000And the one that started to really worry me was this thing Like a man who calls himself Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility Frame.
01:07:06.000I just noticed they started saying things that were just wicked, like really wicked things to say about groups of people.
01:07:17.000And it's really started to worry me in recent years because if you were to tell any group of people that there was something wrong with them from birth, Make something evil about them.
01:07:31.000You're setting them up for a real problem in their life, like a psychological problem, social problems, relationship problems, STEAM problems, all sorts of things.
01:07:43.000When I started reading people like this, these people who called themselves anti-racists in the modern era, I just couldn't believe they were getting away with it.
01:07:53.000Did you ever read Robin DiAngelo's work?
01:08:58.000This is going to lead somewhere really dark if there isn't a stop put to it.
01:09:04.000Because you couldn't do that, you couldn't do that, shouldn't do it, about any group of people.
01:09:08.000But it's a wild thing to attempt to do against majority populations.
01:09:14.000I don't think it's possible to say to a minority group in a country, because of your skin colour, you're evil, and you can never get out of your skin colour and think they're going to love you.
01:09:32.000So you take advantage of the fact that there is this white guilt out there because it's recognition that this country was, in fact, founded with slavery.
01:09:42.000And that, in fact, laws were set in place after slavery was over that completely disenfranchised black people, locked them into terrible neighborhoods, redlined so that they couldn't buy homes.
01:09:55.000So there's all this reality to the racism of the past and then the current racism.
01:10:01.000But then to try to paint it with this insane broad brush that says everybody.
01:10:08.000Well, Ibram X. Kendi says the answer to past prejudice is present prejudice.
01:10:15.000Did you see what happened with him when he was saying that a disproportionate number of white people were identifying as minorities to try to get into colleges?
01:10:26.000You fucked up because you just said that it's an advantage for being a minority.
01:11:58.000She's the person that I thought was a legendary figure that didn't exist, like a mythical figure.
01:12:03.000She's the person who does these dinner parties where she charges rich white ladies $4,000 to come to dinner at her white woman's house and be lectured to about their racism.
01:12:19.000Anyhow, this large lady was the mythical beast in question.
01:12:24.000And there she was, like shouting down Andrew Sullivan.
01:12:27.000And anyhow, but no, I just think this...
01:12:31.000It's got really, really ugly because as you say, I mean, there's been racism throughout American history and it'd be idiotic to deny it, but it's not the story of America.
01:12:42.000Racism is a part of the story, but it's not the story.
01:12:47.000It's the same thing like slavery is part of the story of America, no doubt about it, but it's not the only story of America.
01:12:55.000And one of the things I became interested in was like why this race hustle Ended up going through everything.
01:13:02.000So it's now gone through all of our understanding of the past.
01:13:05.000And in America, this is just catastrophic because everybody in the American founding was living at a time where slavery was normal everywhere in the world.
01:13:16.000And so, yes, they were complicit in slavery, for sure.
01:13:42.000Abraham Lincoln, who obviously was, until this generation, one of the great figures of American history, literally gets pulled down from his plinths across America.
01:13:55.000And it's all for the same accusations.
01:13:59.000It's all for accusations of racism or slavery.
01:14:02.000In Britain and Europe, it's about colonialism, obviously.
01:14:06.000And it becomes this weird thing where white people are the only people who acted badly in history.
01:14:12.000Therefore, you have to punish them now.
01:14:15.000One of the points of writing The War on the West was to warn against this because I just think it has such catastrophic consequences because there's obviously going to be a blowback.
01:14:22.000There's no way people are going to put up with that.
01:14:24.000The problem is people are terrified to push back against it because when they do, it seems as if they're minimizing racism.
01:17:19.000I mean, there's all sorts of reasons we have privilege in our lives, and it's pretty much impossible to break down where and how it comes to you.
01:19:24.000You should be able to accept that racism happened in American history without thinking, as the new race hucksters do, that the answer is to address it now by beating up on white people for the fact that they happen to be white.
01:19:38.000I think it's a moral disaster that's happening.
01:19:43.000And I think that the whole way in which the past is being rewritten To mean that, in America in particular, that you don't have the right to feel pride in your past is just terrible because everybody basically wants to be able to feel pride, particularly if they have reason for it.
01:20:01.000If you've got a good reason to feel pride in your country and you've not got everything right, of course, but by and large you've done some good things, you should be able to feel pride in that without being made to feel like you're some kind of bigot and Well,
01:20:18.000what's fascinating is that this is a rare discussion, although it's logical.
01:20:22.000Like, just the points you're laying out, pushing back against this idea, because these ideas are very much like religious ideas.
01:20:30.000And people just accept them, and they know they're illogical, and they just accept them, and then quietly, in private, maybe they discuss it like, I'm not privileged.
01:20:43.000And it is a kind of subterranean thing.
01:20:46.000And I worry about those because subterranean conversations, if you don't do something about them, have a tendency to blow out in a really ugly way.
01:20:57.000You can't do the white privilege stuff, the hereditary guilt and all that stuff without thinking it's going to have an effect.
01:21:07.000Donald Trump is the least of the effect you might get from that.
01:21:13.000As I say, there seems to be no viability in telling majority populations to think horribly of themselves for the rest of time.
01:21:20.000To say, for instance, the best thing you can do is to sidle through life without anyone noticing you and without causing any harm to anyone who...
01:21:30.000It has been oppressed or, you know, historically looks like somebody who has historically been oppressed.
01:21:37.000I mean, I go into this with the issue of reparations, but I mean, that is such a damn minefield.
01:21:43.000And all the leading Democrats before the in the runoff in 2020, we're talking about reparations.
01:21:54.000I mean, at this stage, reparations in America means a massive wealth transfer from people who look like people who did something in the past to people who look like people to whom the things were done.
01:22:27.000I mean, Voltaire said in the 18th century that the only thing worse than what the Europeans were doing to the Africans was what the Africans were doing to the Africans.
01:22:37.000Selling their brothers, going and kidnapping their neighbors and selling them.
01:22:41.000What do you do with the people descended from those people?
01:22:45.000Did you see the image where Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer got on their knees and they were wearing the African garb, but unfortunately the pattern that they picked was from a tribe that was very much involved in the slave trade?
01:22:59.000You touch on one of my conversational G-spots.
01:23:44.000But these people are all trying to hold onto it.
01:23:46.000Everything they do about it is just like Tony.
01:23:48.000Look at Nancy Pelosi coming out after the trial of Derek Chauvin.
01:23:52.000And you remember she comes out in her mask and she stands on the steps with members of the Black Caucus and she looks into the skies and she says, Thank you, George Floyd.
01:24:01.000Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for social justice.
01:24:33.000When every other country and every other democracy talks about corruption, they have nothing on the corruption within the top ranks of American politics.
01:25:17.000A friend I was with, I was like, the thing is, there's something odd about this, because everyone says it as if no one knows the names of, like, Breonna Taylor and people.
01:25:50.000The year that George Floyd was killed, the opinion polls asking Americans how many people they thought, how many unarmed black Americans they thought were killed by the police in a year.
01:26:05.000The people who described themselves as liberal, a vast number thought it was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.
01:26:13.000People who described themselves as very liberal, A large number said they thought the figure was over 10,000 unarmed black Americans killed every year by the police, and the figure was 10. So Americans...
01:26:31.000I know there was 10 people who were unarmed and shot by the police, and I know that there were more policemen shot that year by armed black men.
01:26:42.000I don't know exactly what the number is on armed.
01:26:46.000But the point is that the American public's perception of this, and I think this is a media thing, funnily enough, I think it's like the Washington Post and others rightly at the beginning of the 2010s realized this is something we may have underplayed in the past, and we should do more on it.
01:27:02.000One of the things that seems to have happened is that by deciding to concentrate more on it, they've given the American people a significantly wrong-headed view of what's going on in their country so that the focus actually makes people think something else worse is happening than what is happening.
01:27:24.000And if you're off by several orders of magnitude like that, In your perception of what's happening in your society, like something is wrong.
01:27:35.000And I can only think it goes back to this thing that in 2020, when when the news first came about George Floyd, I remember isolated in the UK at the time, I remember thinking, wow, I mean,
01:28:14.000It's a very disorientating moment, particularly if you're in isolation and you have not got your social antennae out there, and the only way you've got to communicate and imbibe ideas and facts is through social media, which of course is the worst possible way.
01:28:29.000So it's actually provable that Americans have a distorted view of what's going on in their own country in relation to these matters, which is not helping matters.
01:28:39.000Because I think it's one of the things that is causing this view that as a result, we have to do like nasty stuff to white people publicly, which is like a moral catastrophe built upon a misunderstanding.
01:28:56.000And that is not to downplay anything that's happened in this country.
01:29:00.000But we are now in the realms of overcorrecting something.
01:29:05.000Which has a vision of what America is that is at the very least very out of date.
01:29:11.000And I have a section in the book about the moral panics that have happened consistently in the last decade on American campuses.
01:29:17.000Where, like, for instance, there's one of the campuses in America, Minnesota, goes into lockdown because students report a member of the KKK is sighted on campus walking around waving a whip.
01:29:49.000There are numerous other examples I give of similar weird incidents.
01:29:53.000Somebody finds a shoelace It's a noose.
01:30:01.000It's been put up as an attempted lynching.
01:30:04.000And on another occasion, another campus, there's a tie that's found from a rubbish sack and everyone goes into lockdown.
01:30:12.000There's another lynching attempt on campus.
01:30:14.000My point is that, first of all, this always happens in the places least likely for that to happen.
01:30:19.000If the KKK were to gather in public, let alone be walking out on their own, solo, It seems unlikely they would choose a liberal arts college campus to do it.
01:30:28.000But the point is that the places where it's least likely to happen, it's like the evergreen thing, are the places with this distorted...
01:30:37.000I mean, you know America better than I do, but it doesn't feel like a country where the KKK is any longer able to just congregate and walk around campuses and carry out hate crimes.
01:32:38.000And you've got to pretend that people who aren't racists are racists.
01:32:41.000And that is just a horrible position to be in for lots of reasons.
01:32:45.000But one of them is the sheer equality issue.
01:32:49.000I remember at the beginning of the Floyd era, Eric Weinstein said, Brett's brother said, if I can't tell you that you're wrong, you're not my equal.
01:33:00.000I thought it was a very neat way of saying it.
01:33:05.000The point of equality isn't that you make up for the past by making one group better in the present, which is the Kendi route, the Angelo route.
01:33:17.000It would be to say, look, I mean, as a white person, and I hate the idea that people I have to identify like that, but it's like being asked, how do you think of yourself?
01:35:13.000All the main medical journals in America, I cite them, have all fallen for this racism stuff, the new racism.
01:35:19.000And now you have people actually saying, hospitals saying, they're going to prioritize people based on skin color in order to make up for historic racism.
01:35:30.000That is going to lead America to hell.
01:35:49.000This all seems to be a thing that has left the university and then infected corporations and infected institutions and infected other things.
01:36:03.000This used to be a thing that, years ago, you would hear people, they would complain about this ideology that was running amok on college campuses, and people would be like, hey man, why are you complaining about stuff that college kids are doing?
01:36:17.000They're thought experiments, they're trying out ideas, it's no big deal.
01:36:21.000But there was other folks that were sounding the alarms.
01:36:23.000They're saying, these people are going to leave.
01:36:43.000There was a joke on conservatives in this.
01:36:45.000Because conservatives in the U.S. used to say very smugly, In recent years, they're going to go and they're going to do their degree in lesbian dance and knitting and then they're going to find out they're going to enter the real world.
01:36:59.000There's always this very right-wing talking point thing.
01:37:09.000They've got lots of work and it's a self-reproducing organism.
01:37:15.000It also became because of the fact that it's this ideology where if you push back against it, particularly like the racism stuff, you get labeled as a racist, which is one of the worst things you can be labeled.
01:37:34.000Well, by the way, I mean, being called a racist is still the worst thing you can be called in American society, or any Western society, actually.
01:37:43.000It is the worst thing, other than being a child abuser.
01:37:46.000And being a child abuser, you can prove.
01:37:53.000Something that increasingly disturbed me in recent years was But aside from that, the biggest reputational damaging things that could be leveled against you were neither provable nor disprovable.
01:39:07.000And indeed the driving thing in your worldview.
01:39:10.000And it's a horrible thing to have thrown at you.
01:39:13.000And And one of the only ways I've ever found for, like, trying to counter it is how about if we got to a position where the people who throw those allegations around and know they're not true pay a reputational price of equivalent size.
01:39:30.000So, for instance, when CNN attacks you, the people who do it end up losing their jobs for saying something that's totally untrue.
01:39:39.000And if in general that could happen, That there was a reputational cost for levelling accusations that are not true.
01:39:51.000But at the present moment, it's a totally cost-free exercise.
01:39:55.000It is, but do you think that ultimately people will course-correct, like they'll recognize the folly of this sort of pattern of thinking and behavior and accepting these kind of ideological narratives, and they will shift back and forth because they're upset with it,
01:40:12.000that maybe there's been this overcorrection, And that this will lead to, unfortunately, a rise of more far-right ideology, and then it'll eventually, like, meet somewhere in the middle?
01:40:58.000It's like, you know, everyone who believes in progress as if it happens is something we're all going towards, you know, always has to account for the fact that things like, you know, Russia sends tanks into Ukraine, it starts bombarding Ukrainian cities and its civilians.
01:41:52.000And so therefore, it's worth protecting.
01:41:54.000And it's worth making sure that you don't overcorrect and provoke really ugly stuff in reply.
01:42:01.000And I do have some hope on that, because I do think that the hucksters I tried to take apart in the War on the West, I... I also say, towards the end, I give examples of the people who are obviously going to replace these people.
01:42:21.000They're a really good, much better, much more intelligent, much more thoughtful, much better writer black Americans than Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates coming along, or already there.
01:42:35.000People like Coleman Hughes and Thomas Chatterton Williams and these people.
01:42:40.000They give me enormous hope for America because these are just – they're the people you want.
01:42:47.000And if all these people who are doing the overcorrection and believe the way to harmony in America is to punish white people and tell Americans they have no right to be proud of their history and so on, if those people could get out of the way and we could have a reasonable conversation about these things,
01:43:07.000But I do think there is this group who are white and black in America who are trying to lead America to a real precipice.
01:43:16.000And I suppose some of them are making money, some of them really believe it, some of them just want to see the whole damn thing burn.
01:43:23.000But you cannot war on the foundations of an entire society and think that you're going to get away with it without any repercussions.
01:43:34.000I don't think they even think about it.
01:43:36.000They just think about what is beneficial to them currently.
01:43:40.000And if they can push whatever they're pushing, whether it's anti-racism, whatever it is, if they can profit off of pushing that, and it seems like they get a lot of attention doing that, they make a lot of money doing that, then that becomes their business.
01:43:53.000I mean, if either one of these people that you talked about, Robin DiAngelo, if she wanted to, like, adjust and change her perspective and write a new book, like, maybe I got it wrong.
01:44:17.000Raise money for Robin DiAngelo to get mushrooms.
01:44:19.000I wonder where this all goes, you know, and I wonder what your perspective is, because I feel like the COVID crisis and the pandemic was just a perfect storm of isolation, Fear,
01:45:32.000And the atomization, not just of views, but of information, of facts.
01:45:37.000You know, having different views is so last century.
01:45:42.000You know, we all have different facts now.
01:45:45.000And actually, if you think of the last few years like a family tree, just people we know in common, You start there, vaguely in the same space, and you go down and you go, let's say,
01:46:00.000COVID, and George Floyd, and Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and you take that...
01:46:08.000Almost nobody in that family tree of things ends up in the same place on everything.
01:46:14.000And some of them end up in such a different place that it's just, I don't know how I can reach them, apart from, as I say, never shutting the door entirely.
01:46:24.000And there are people now who just, like, they have their thing, and they're in a kind of unreachable place.
01:46:32.000And I think that's very likely to be what the future's going to be like for a long time.
01:46:37.000I had a late friend, Deepak Lal, a wonderful Indian-born economist who I remember towards the end of his life, he used to say, you know, everyone says, Douglas, that the era of atheism will just sort of continue.
01:47:21.000But I found in recent years, even before we were locked away, when I did public events, I found it increasingly hard to prepare for them.
01:47:29.000And in part, that's because, I don't know if you experienced this, my experience is that the older you get, the harder things like public speaking become.
01:47:38.000And it's exactly the opposite of what people think.
01:47:40.000They think it must get easier and easier.
01:47:42.000And I find it gets harder and harder because First of all, you know all the things that can go wrong.
01:47:46.000It's like comedians who have heard all the hecklers and get more and more nervous about going out on stage.
01:47:52.000But the other reason is that I became aware in recent years I was less and less confident that I knew what my common reference points were with the audience.
01:48:01.000Like if I mention a certain person, do they know what I'm talking about?
01:48:07.000If I mention this person or this event, have I totally lost them?
01:48:15.000And the answer I think increasingly is yes.
01:48:19.000It's very hard today to know what your common reference points are with 100 people even in a room.
01:48:31.000You would have to work out, for instance, even just on mundane stuff like who wins elections, you'd have to work out roughly, who am I speaking with about that?
01:48:39.000Do people think this happened and that happened?
01:48:42.000Are there people who think this is the case and that's the case?
01:48:44.000And that's even before you get on to just whether they know anything about the past.
01:48:49.000And so I feel that atomization very, very strongly to the extent that when somebody says something that I don't expect them to know about or a reference point I also have and share, you know, I'm thrilled.
01:49:02.000I think, good, it's like we've drunk from the same well.
01:49:08.000And increasingly, you can't rely on that.
01:49:11.000You don't know if you've drunk from the same well, whether you have the same background of knowledge and references, and whether you've got anything in common other than just the very basic starting point of being two human beings.
01:49:27.000And I think that's going to get worse and worse.
01:49:32.000There are going to be people who just won't speak to people because they didn't share their views on something.
01:49:39.000And they're going to drill down and down and down.
01:49:45.000This French writer I'm very fond of, Michael Welbeck, predicted that at the beginning of the 2000s about the atomized society.
01:49:50.000We are living through it and it's going to get so much worse.
01:49:54.000And that's why the only way to reverse that is to try to think of things that you can agree on.
01:50:00.000That's why elections, it's like, it's useful to agree on them.
01:50:08.000But there are other things as well, like, you know, it's good to agree on roughly, you know, I don't agree on it, but are you a force for good or a force for bad?
01:50:22.000Do you have things to be proud of that you're all proud of?
01:50:31.000A friend of mine says, if you talk as a nation about we, you're talking about the widest group apart from, much wider even than the sports team and its supporters, of feeling, you know, some kind of kinship with something which you might not have actually done something for.
01:53:44.000You don't feel people are paying you enough attention or respect or something.
01:53:51.000Then you're kind of – yeah, those people.
01:53:54.000We've also conned people into thinking that everyone is special and that sort of – When you add that to this feeling of not having agency or not having...
01:54:05.000They're not treating you the way you deserve to be treated.
01:54:09.000There's this feeling that people have.
01:55:18.000I hate that one because I hated the term that was used in a derogatory way about gay people.
01:55:23.000And now people are like, there's a guy, teachers at the university in the UK who recently said like, oh, I had a student come up to me after a supervision and say it's so good to see a visibly queer member of faculty.
01:55:35.000And the guy in question is married to a woman.
01:55:38.000He probably just puts on a bit of nail varnish.
01:57:44.000Because if someone doesn't work as hard, but they want the same amount of attention, that becomes a problem.
01:57:50.000And that is where this world of everyone's special and everyone's doing amazing stuff.
01:57:56.000No, it doesn't make you a better person to be a person who's more successful or a person who's more driven or ambitious or disciplined, but it makes you better at those things.
01:58:17.000And that's why there's people that, you know, when a basketball game is in the final quarter, you hope LeBron James has the fucking ball, right?
01:58:25.000You hope an elite athlete Rises to score for the team that you're rooting for, because that person is measurably better.
01:58:34.000They've put in the effort, they're measured.
01:58:36.000Are they equal in terms of like, you know, the way you think about your friends or a guy that works?
02:00:18.000And I thought, yes, but saying, well, I've been lucky in that, is a nice way to say to other people, oh, I haven't really had any input, and you don't need to particularly.
02:00:49.000A lot of what we call luck has come about through something other than chance.
02:00:57.000So I used to say, you're lucky to be born in America, right?
02:01:01.000And on one level that's true, which is like you could have been born in the Great Pool, and you could have been born in Mogadishu, and it would be a lot worse.
02:01:11.000But there's also something that covers up, which is the luck is that people before you made good choices that meant that you are in a situation which is more optimal.
02:01:50.000Prudent decisions, like not being crazily short-termist, setting up a state well.
02:01:59.000You know, there's a great description in a novel by Hilary Mantel about the French Revolution in the first days of the meeting of the Parliament after they've killed the king.
02:02:08.000And she says, you know, they wanted to talk about rights.
02:02:13.000She says, I'm paraphrasing, she says something like, This was the day to talk about laws, but rights were more attractive to talk about.
02:02:22.000So they put off the discussion of laws for another day.
02:02:27.000And that's how you get what you got in the tarot and everything else.
02:02:31.000And this is the thing is that we have to find a better way to understand what we often mean by luck.
02:02:38.000You have luck in your life sometimes because other people have made good judgments that are effectively for you before your time.
02:02:58.000It's also make prudent decisions, make wise decisions, work hard and a lot more and you'll find that you are what we call lucky or luckier.
02:03:37.000There are countries we describe as unlucky, like Venezuela, where they weren't just unlucky.
02:03:44.000They had the people, the fucking unluckiest people in the world at the moment, practically.
02:03:48.000But it became what we would call an unlucky country because politicians made catastrophic decisions.
02:03:56.000You know, they have the same energy sources, same energy resources as Norway.
02:04:04.000It's better to be in Norway than in Venezuela.
02:04:07.000And there's a reason, which is that people made better decisions.
02:04:11.000And we are very unwilling to identify what those decisions are and what it is that leads to a good outcome or a bad outcome.
02:04:25.000Which is really strange because American exceptionalism was always predicated on the idea that you work hard and you can make something in this country.
02:04:32.000There was a big part of the motto of what it meant to be an American.
02:04:37.000That this is a place unique in that we celebrate winners.
02:04:43.000We were talking about Steve Hilton earlier, my friend Steve.
02:04:56.000But one of the things he said about moving to America from England is that he said, in England, it seems like people don't want you to succeed.
02:05:07.000He said there's like an active resistance to you succeeding, whereas in America...
02:05:31.000One of them is to do with the perception of, well, class in the UK in particular, the perception that is not totally unfair, that there are, you know, again, fortunate and less fortunate places to be born,
02:05:48.000fortunate and less fortunate backgrounds to be coming from, and that you sort of shouldn't class shift too much.
02:06:14.000There's a guy in the UK who I met a couple of years ago who was very early into North Sea oil, and an American friend said, you're the only person of your class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur.
02:06:30.000And he said, I'm the only person of my class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur.
02:06:34.000Because people who had money just sort of sat on it and spent it and gambled it and had less.
02:06:42.000And I notice it all the time in America in the system.
02:08:26.000And so the funniest guy in the pub in Glasgow still...
02:08:30.000Wasn't great once Billy Connolly returned.
02:08:33.000And I had friends from Australia, like Barry Humphries and that generation of Australians.
02:08:37.000When they left Australia, which was for similar reasons, they found that like back home in Australia, people hated them or like very distrustful of them.
02:09:34.000But there is this sense that there are paths to victory, that you can work really hard, and if you have a vision and you get to that pinnacle of success, people will celebrate you.
02:10:07.000But there's some people that don't like that because they're fucking lazy.
02:10:12.000And they are never going to be that exceptional person.
02:10:15.000So they will rail against exceptional people.
02:10:18.000Well, you know, I write a chapter in the Wall of the West on resentment, which I think is a huge, huge human driver, which has only one answer to it.
02:10:31.000It's to turn around resentment into gratitude.
02:10:34.000But resentment is one of the biggest drivers that human beings have.
02:10:39.000And I was reading a lot on the nature of resentment for this book.
02:10:45.000And I found a very powerful passage in Nietzsche where he says that one of the only ways to deal with the person of resentment, as he describes it, is to turn around to the person and to say, you are correct.
02:11:00.000There is a reason why you have resentment.
02:11:50.000How many times did you stay in bed and hit the snooze button?
02:11:52.000How many times did you not take a risk, not take a chance, when people around you did and they became wildly successful?
02:12:00.000How much anger do you have towards them instead of recognizing that you had made an error and now it's time to use that information and apply it to the rest of my life?
02:13:16.000And either people like it or don't like it.
02:13:19.000The amount of effort that you put into it is generally proportionate to the amount of success that you get.
02:13:27.000Because if you put a lot of effort into it and you're doing it correctly, you're doing it better all the time, people tell people about it and then it spreads.
02:13:36.000But if you're in a business where it requires you to be hired by a corporation, well yeah, you can't really fuck up.
02:13:43.000You can't make mistakes, and you can't be the person that says, this is my error.
02:14:30.000The prison of being confined to someone else's expectations or what they require of you in terms of the way they want you to behave and think and do, that is so restrictive.
02:14:44.000It's so difficult to break out of that and find your own, whether it's, I hate that, to find yourself or find your identity, but there's something to that, right?
02:18:12.000But I hate it when you see people who, and that's the people who become really resentful, is I thought I could achieve it and I never bothered to try to take the risk.
02:18:42.000Norm Macdonald's book, the semi-memoir book, he says, there's a beautiful phrase somewhere, he says, the only thing an old man can say to a young man is...
02:19:19.000No, as I say, my British answer to that would be, My answer I've learned from being in America is, yes, first of all, people have no idea how much you have to put in and how much you actually have to go through to do some of the things that make you successful.
02:19:43.000They have no idea of the amount of early mornings and late nights and constant work.
02:19:50.000Only people close to you see what it looks like.
02:19:53.000The old iceberg Thing of achievement and work.
02:19:57.000Only people very close to you see the amount that has gone on under the surface to get anything in this life.
02:20:22.000And so, no, I've now been in America long enough to say, screw you.
02:20:29.000Well, that's the unique thing about being independent, as you are, too, is that the amount of effort that you put into something is all on you.
02:25:06.000Fully fueled by this insane desire to achieve greatness, but also totally loved and completely confident.
02:25:16.000That's fantastic, because among other things, it gives us hope that to be successful, you don't have to feel like you've been screwed up in any way.
02:25:22.000I think there's a difference in our choices, though.
02:25:57.000I think the ones who are willing to get up at six in the morning and the ones who hit the bag harder and the ones who sprint up that extra hill, there's demons.
02:27:37.000They think that if you look under the bonnet the car will stop working.
02:27:41.000Yeah, I don't necessarily think that's true.
02:27:43.000I don't think it's necessarily true, but a lot of successful people have that fear.
02:27:47.000I don't think it's true, but when you're writing about monsters and demons and terror and murder and torture and the horrible, horrible instincts of the worst kind of people,
02:28:04.000I feel like you need a little chaos in your life.
02:28:08.000You need to do a little fucking bump of coke and throw down a couple of beers.
02:28:13.000Stephen King was completely unconscious when he wrote Cujo.
02:29:29.000And the older you get, the more you can make your peace with things and the more you can see things in a clearer light, including yourself.
02:29:36.000Most of us don't have any idea what motivates ourselves, but the older you get, the more you can see yourself in some kind of reasonable light.
02:29:45.000And among other things, be kinder to yourself, you know.
02:29:51.000But at the beginning, you've got to work damn hard.
02:29:54.000And any writers watching, listening, by the way, should not take the Stephen King route because most of them will not write a masterpiece if they do a pile of coke and a load of beer.
02:30:06.000They will be like, as I quoted Billy Connolly earlier, one of the favorite things he ever said was he said once, he said when he used to drink really heavily.
02:30:14.000And he said, he said, I've got all these fantastic ideas, you know.
02:30:19.000He just bought a bed, I found out I would be a millionaire, fantastic.
02:30:23.000Wake up in the morning, I said, damn it, I've forgotten that idea, and I was going to be rich.
02:30:27.000And he said, so he decided to have a notebook by his bed with a pen, and he'd like come back from the apartment, really smash, and he'd go, I was going to write down that idea of how to be rich.
02:30:37.000And you wake up in the morning and go, oh God, Dan, that idea's gone.
02:31:23.000Have you ever seen the list of things that he did?
02:31:27.000Like, there was a guy, and probably a little bit of his performative, because he knew that there was a journalist that was following him around.
02:31:32.000But this journalist came to him and wanted to find out what Hunter Thompson did in a day.
02:32:25.000705, Woody Creek Tavern for lunch, which I went to when I was in town, just out of respect.
02:32:30.000Heineken, two margaritas, two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries, a plate of tomatoes, coleslaw, taco salad, a double order of onion rings, carrot cake ice cream, bean fritter, Dunhills, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone.
02:32:45.000Glass of shredded ice over which poured three or four jiggers of Chivas.
02:33:08.000So from 12.05 to 6am, chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, 6am in the hot tub, champagne, dove bars, fettuccine Alfredo, 8am,
02:33:36.000And that's why, I mean, that is one of the reasons why he wrote great things.
02:33:40.000It's because he was just fucking, just diving into the madness of this chaotic life and absolutely not living like the standard American, absolutely not living like a normie.
02:33:54.000I would say that normal people, most people, Could do that and then stop and write about it, but not do that and write at the same time.
02:34:22.000But when you look at that list, even just you reading it, my brain feels fuzzier just thinking about the idea of going through the day and then meaning to sit opposite your typewriter.
02:34:33.000Well, I think he hated that part about it, but he knew that that was his job and he would just get fucked up before he wrote.
02:34:40.000I can't stress enough how uncommon that is.
02:34:42.000Everything about writing, particularly books and articles, You can do whatever the hell you want, but the discipline needed to get thoughts on the page in an orderly fashion that is readable by other people.
02:38:06.000He was a guy who didn't even get started in comedy until he was deep into his 30s.
02:38:11.000And his life was a fucking disaster up until that point, because he was just always drunk and fucked up, and then he got into Alcoholics Anonymous, he got clean and sober, and then started telling these stories, and those stories were so funny that people demanded that he go and do comedy.
02:38:38.000It's interesting how much the whole AA thing reflects on a lot of other things in life for people who are not Addicts of some kind.
02:38:46.000I discovered since this book came out that the gratitude thing, I didn't know this, that gratitude is one of the things that Alcoholics Anonymous, they urge people going through the program to write down things they're grateful for.
02:40:07.000And it was just such a, it was a wonderful moment of mutual enthusiasm about something that if you're a New Yorker, you get used to every day, but you shouldn't be used to it.
02:40:16.000The first time I ever saw New York City, I was living in Boston and we drove down for something.
02:40:58.000Like you're in, when I was, you know, when I was, I was a teenager, whatever it was, I was in Manhattan and I was like, I can't believe there's a place like this.
02:42:16.000You don't necessarily have to be praising this person.
02:42:18.000That's why I think one of the ugliest things anyone ever said was, I mean, Gore Vidal, who was brilliant in lots of ways, but Gore Vidal famously once said, whenever a friend succeeds, something within me dies.
02:44:41.000But the thing is, like, how often would you be there?
02:44:44.000I thought about it, too, because whenever I'm in a place that I really enjoy, like in my family, we went to Ravello for like five years in a row before the pandemic.
02:44:54.000That was like our spot for the summer.
02:45:21.000Well, they figured out a way to get people engaged on serious issues and to have these two intellectuals from completely polar opposite ideologies debate on national television and essentially in podcast form.
02:45:34.000And they both knew how to speak in paragraphs.
02:46:16.000And I said, I'm not sure that completely explains it because Buckley does it whenever he scores a palpable hit.
02:46:23.000So if you see his debate with Chomsky in the 70s, he says at one point Chomsky something about, he says something about some revolutionary movement in South America or something.
02:46:33.000And he says, And they hate America, so you must love them, Mr. Chomsky.
02:47:07.000But he was, you know, he was forced censoring people that had dissenting opinions about COVID. And there was like a lot of, you know, his thoughts on isolating people or unvaccinated were just like, it was really weird.
02:47:24.000Yeah, there was his positions on either forcing people or restricting their rights and I don't want to paraphrase you.
02:47:33.000Well, we should probably, now that I brought it up, probably should say, because I know a lot of people who are hardcore lefties that I'm friends with were upset at him.
02:48:07.000What about Chomsky is weird to you, the Chomsky of today?
02:48:12.000Well, no, I just thought that, for me, the turn onto having these views on every American military escapade that he had, it was all very idiosyncratic, very,
02:48:27.000I thought, conspiratorial a lot of the time.
02:48:34.000And he got horrible stuff about the Balkans, about Cambodia and stuff, and just...
02:48:41.000I thought he stepped wildly out of his area of expertise and made himself an expert in something which he was unreliable on, which was American foreign policy.
02:48:49.000And weirdly, that became the thing he became most famous for and became a guru on.
02:49:22.000Live long enough and you become a villain.
02:49:24.000If you're a hero like Noam Chomsky, to a lot of people, an intellectual hero, eventually you're going to get something wrong and then you'll be captured by it.
02:49:34.000Yeah, I saw a performer recently, I won't go into many details, who wasn't everything he had once been.
02:49:41.000And I said to a mutual friend, jokingly, I said, when I become like that, you will tell me, won't you?
02:49:49.000And this friend said, when I become like that, don't say a word.
02:53:00.000They'll hitch up their skirts, come running at you, and smack the living daylights out of you.
02:53:04.000I would normally say that's just nonsense and superstition, but there's so many videos of people talking about forcing mandates, forcing vaccines, and then they black out while they're doing it.
02:53:16.000There's got to be something in the fates.
02:54:06.000When you do an audio version of a book, and I did it for the Manners of Crowds as well, the best thing is when you quote crazy shit other people have said, If you type it out, it's funny.
02:55:06.000And actually a lot of people, as you know, a lot of people listen to audiobooks now and they realize quite rightly that it's the same thing as reading the book.
02:55:51.000And it's definitely better read than on the page.
02:55:59.000Well, especially that it's your voice.
02:56:00.000The thing that drives me mad is when you have someone who's very good at reading, but the publisher, in their infinite wisdom, decides to hire an actor.
02:56:08.000And so you have someone completely disconnected from the work who's just reading it, and you're like, oh no, don't do this.