The Joe Rogan Experience - April 22, 2022


Joe Rogan Experience #1807 - Douglas Murray

Topics
lockdowns in the UK CNN coverage rolling news and local stories work frustrations pandemic confusion election integrity exposed penis wheelie bin atheism and religious ideologies people demand the microphone new racism polytheism equality of outcomes luck is the residue of design resentment and gratitude freedom forcing mandates and vaccines
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Douglas Murray
Mentioned
Jordan Peterson George Floyd Douglas Murray Gore Vidal Donald Trump Stephen King Hunter S. Thompson Leah Thomas William F. Buckley Robin DiAngelo RIP Kathy Newman John Kerry Ibram X. Kendi Andrew Sullivan Billy Connolly Brian Stelter Steve Hilton Jon Stewart Kathy Newman Alcoholics Anonymous and 58 more
JRE MMA Show #122 with Jake Shields Joe Rogan Experience #1808 - Dan Soder

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 57 minutes

Words per minute

171.88

Word count

30,518

Sentence count

3,055

Harmful content

Misogyny

60

sentences flagged

Toxicity

379

sentences flagged

Hate speech

54

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.
00:00:05.000 Train by day!
00:00:07.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night!
00:00:08.000 All day!
00:00:12.000 Well, I guess we are going there.
00:00:15.000 We're up and running. 0.99
00:00:16.000 First of all, you look fucking great. 0.99
00:00:18.000 You look like you've been working out. 0.98
00:00:19.000 What's going on?
00:00:20.000 I have been.
00:00:21.000 You have been?
00:00:21.000 And I'm also not wearing suits.
00:00:23.000 Dude, you look jacked.
00:00:24.000 Well, that's very kind.
00:00:25.000 So do you.
00:00:25.000 You do.
00:00:25.000 But you look like the pandemic's been...
00:00:28.000 There's two different types of people during the pandemic.
00:00:30.000 The people that gained weight and the people that got fit.
00:00:32.000 And you look like a fit man.
00:00:34.000 I certainly tried not to gain weight during the pandemic.
00:00:36.000 Yeah, you look good.
00:00:37.000 Congratulations on that.
00:00:38.000 Thank you, you too.
00:00:39.000 On holding it down.
00:00:39.000 What does it feel like to be wandering the world now?
00:00:43.000 Yeah, I mean, I sort of was a bit during the pandemic.
00:00:46.000 Oh, you're a risk taker.
00:00:47.000 Well, 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.
00:00:58.000 I mean, lockdowns are bad everywhere, but in the UK, they just kept doing them.
00:01:03.000 Yeah.
00:01:03.000 And they started one of them in late December one year, and it was just like that.
00:01:09.000 You don't want to spend January locked in your house and, you know, it's bad enough in the UK anyway.
00:01:15.000 How did the UK handle lockdowns in terms of the restrictions?
00:01:18.000 Like, what did they do?
00:01:19.000 It was really strict.
00:01:20.000 Really strict.
00:01:21.000 I mean, just terrible.
00:01:23.000 And things like you were only allowed out once a day from your house for one bit of physical exercise.
00:01:30.000 One friend of mine called me one day and she said...
00:01:32.000 Do you have spies in your neighborhood?
00:01:36.000 I said, what do you mean?
00:01:39.000 She said, in my village, we have people who inform.
00:01:43.000 And I said, well, what does that look like?
00:01:44.000 She 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.
00:01:51.000 Wow!
00:01:51.000 I know.
00:01:52.000 She said, the embarrassing thing is I know him.
00:01:55.000 People were doing really crazy stuff like that.
00:01:57.000 I thought it was horribly revealing, and I loathed it, and I got out.
00:02:01.000 That's just a character issue that pops up whenever people have any kind of control.
00:02:07.000 You know, that's the Stanford prison experiments where they found it like almost immediately. 0.99
00:02:12.000 People just started ordering people around and treating people like shit. 0.99
00:02:15.000 Well, look at all these people who now love it. 1.00
00:02:16.000 I mean, they were shouting at us for years.
00:02:19.000 Yeah.
00:02:19.000 And they want to keep doing it.
00:02:21.000 Yes.
00:02:22.000 I was in the theater recently in New York.
00:02:24.000 I mean, they now treat you like you're going to Rikers Island when you've paid $100 going to see a show.
00:02:31.000 Really?
00:02:32.000 Show your papers.
00:02:35.000 It's like that.
00:02:36.000 You think, whoa.
00:02:37.000 This isn't a great start to the evening, you know.
00:02:40.000 Right.
00:02:40.000 I mean, this play better be funny.
00:02:42.000 You know, and they're doing that.
00:02:44.000 And 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.
00:02:51.000 Yeah.
00:02:52.000 All this sort of, you haven't remasked fast enough, those people.
00:02:57.000 Yeah, it became a way to communicate with people.
00:03:01.000 It's like a standard way to do it.
00:03:04.000 Like you have to bark at someone who's not wearing their mask properly, bark at someone, I can see your nose.
00:03:09.000 Yeah, yeah.
00:03:10.000 The one good thing in the UK was that we didn't have the crazy, complete politicization.
00:03:15.000 We have an America of, you know, if Donald Trump had been pro-mask, the other side would be anti.
00:03:22.000 So we didn't actually have that.
00:03:23.000 And masking wasn't quite as strict.
00:03:26.000 So if I forgot my mask and I was going into a shop, you know, I could easily, like, I had several techniques.
00:03:31.000 One was to pull my hat down a bit.
00:03:34.000 Another was I always felt if I walked a bit faster and frowned, that also kept COVID away.
00:03:39.000 I was at the gym in the middle of the pandemic, and there was a guy in the gym with a face shield on.
00:03:45.000 It was just this plastic thing.
00:03:47.000 But you could reach under there, and it's the same air.
00:03:51.000 It's like...
00:03:53.000 It didn't make any sense.
00:03:54.000 Did you?
00:03:54.000 Did you reach under there?
00:03:55.000 Are you tempted?
00:03:56.000 No, but it's- Say these are big COVID-y hands.
00:03:59.000 It was like, I used to have this cat that would hide under like a table, but her tail was sticking out.
00:04:06.000 I was like, you're not hiding.
00:04:07.000 You're right there. 0.98
00:04:08.000 This is so silly. 0.98
00:04:09.000 She thought that she was hiding because her head was under there. 0.97
00:04:12.000 She just wasn't very body aware.
00:04:14.000 That's what it felt like to be like, this is not hiding.
00:04:16.000 You're not hiding from COVID. Your hands go right in.
00:04:19.000 There's this big space.
00:04:21.000 It's just this plastic window in front of your face.
00:04:24.000 It doesn't make any sense at all.
00:04:25.000 But that was, it's like symbolic.
00:04:28.000 Like you had to have something on that showed that you're precautious.
00:04:31.000 For sure.
00:04:32.000 You had a good pandemic.
00:04:34.000 It was a fun time.
00:04:34.000 Yeah.
00:04:38.000 And you've been very quiet of late.
00:04:40.000 We haven't heard anything of you.
00:04:42.000 Really?
00:04:43.000 I'm being sarcastic.
00:04:44.000 Yeah, no, I mean, I'm basically doing the same thing.
00:04:46.000 You have been put through the ringer, Joe.
00:04:49.000 Yeah, I definitely got put through the ringer.
00:04:51.000 Since we last met, I mean, they did a number on you.
00:04:55.000 They did.
00:04:56.000 Wow.
00:04:56.000 It's interesting.
00:04:57.000 Wow.
00:04:57.000 But my subscriptions went up massively.
00:05:00.000 That's what's crazy.
00:05:01.000 During the height of it all, I gained two million subscribers.
00:05:04.000 I'm so pleased for you.
00:05:06.000 I'm pleased for everyone, actually.
00:05:08.000 When I watched what they were doing to you, I just thought, as long as you survive this...
00:05:14.000 Something's going to be okay in this world.
00:05:16.000 Yeah, they went for it.
00:05:18.000 They went for it.
00:05:18.000 And because it didn't work, it felt like everyone could sigh a bit of a breath.
00:05:25.000 It's also fortunate that the people that went for it were CNN, and they're just so untrustworthy.
00:05:31.000 And people know how biased they are, and they know how... 1.00
00:05:36.000 Socially 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. 0.98
00:05:57.000 I'm gonna listen right, you know But if Brian Stelter doesn't like you That doesn't mean anything to me. 0.99
00:06:05.000 One of my rules, try and never be mean about people because of their appearances.
00:06:10.000 But...
00:06:11.000 A friend of mine said to me the other day, do you know how old Brian Stelter is?
00:06:17.000 And I said, I don't know, 56 or something.
00:06:21.000 He said, look it up on your phone.
00:06:22.000 He's like 34 or something.
00:06:24.000 Yeah, something nuts.
00:06:25.000 I couldn't stop laughing for the rest of the evening.
00:06:27.000 I just couldn't stop laughing.
00:06:29.000 I don't know what...
00:06:31.000 Everything about the guy is strange.
00:06:33.000 Everything about him.
00:06:34.000 Very strange.
00:06:35.000 His pattern of communication is so strange.
00:06:38.000 It's like, do you listen to other people?
00:06:40.000 Yeah.
00:06:41.000 They talk very differently than you.
00:06:43.000 Yes, he has that, hmm.
00:06:44.000 Yeah.
00:06:44.000 And also, Crystal Ball from Breaking Points was making fun of him the other day.
00:06:48.000 She's like, why does he sit like this?
00:06:51.000 Because you ever notice, he sits like this.
00:06:54.000 Douglas Murray has a book out.
00:06:57.000 It's called The War on the West, and it's terrible.
00:07:00.000 The war on the West.
00:07:01.000 Is that really what's going on?
00:07:02.000 One of my favorite moments was him with Barry Weiss.
00:07:06.000 Where Barry Weiss...
00:07:08.000 How has the world gone crazy?
00:07:09.000 Oh, yes.
00:07:10.000 And she just rattles off one after another after another.
00:07:15.000 That's right.
00:07:15.000 When you say silence is violence, when actual violence is violence, the world has gone crazy.
00:07:21.000 The world's gone mad.
00:07:22.000 And she just rattled all these off.
00:07:24.000 We're speaking on this day where CNN... Yeah, CNN Plus went under.
00:07:28.000 Oh, CNN Minus.
00:07:30.000 Just went under.
00:07:31.000 They spent $300 million.
00:07:33.000 They got 10,000 subscribers.
00:07:36.000 Imagine the hubris of thinking that something that people don't want for free, that you're going to charge money for it.
00:07:46.000 We're going to have a Jake Tapper book club.
00:07:48.000 Jake Tapper seems like a great guy, but I feel like I don't have to pay for his book club.
00:07:53.000 I feel like you should put that on Twitter.
00:07:54.000 It's just not very good.
00:07:57.000 I mean, the ideological stuff aside, it's not very good.
00:07:59.000 I watched CNN a little while ago.
00:08:01.000 Early 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.
00:08:16.000 So like all you saw all the time was like burning crosses and that was the relief from the interview stuff.
00:08:24.000 It was just horrible to watch.
00:08:25.000 Is it a function of time, right?
00:08:27.000 Because 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.
00:08:37.000 Maybe those bad things are something like Russia invading Ukraine, something you actually have to pay attention to.
00:08:43.000 But it's not an accurate assessment of the world at large.
00:08:48.000 Like, there's so much great stuff going on.
00:08:49.000 It's like most of the world is wonderful.
00:08:52.000 Most of the world is people getting along.
00:08:54.000 Most interactions between people are fine.
00:08:56.000 Sure, sure.
00:08:57.000 Now, I mean, there was a British philosopher some years ago who tried to start a website which only did good news.
00:09:03.000 I felt really sorry for him because it was obviously going to fail.
00:09:07.000 It was a nice idea, but it was obviously going to fail because people don't really just want to hear that things are okay.
00:09:14.000 Is 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?
00:09:23.000 So it's almost always going to be negative.
00:09:25.000 Like there's no news channel of record that we're aware of ever that is focused on like really positive stories.
00:09:32.000 No, I mean, some local news used to do a bit of that, didn't they?
00:09:36.000 Yeah, local stories.
00:09:37.000 A nice local story, a bit of heartwarming stuff.
00:09:39.000 Kitting up a tree, gets rescued by the fireman.
00:09:41.000 Yeah, someone opens a shop, that sort of thing.
00:09:43.000 It wouldn't make the national news, but it's nice local stuff.
00:09:47.000 In my own lifetime, everything seems to have gone wrong since 24-hour rolling news.
00:09:51.000 I'm just sure of it.
00:09:52.000 I saw it myself.
00:09:53.000 Yeah.
00:10:08.000 And then, so, say somebody's got into a scandal.
00:10:12.000 Would you come on and argue that we should now call for an inquiry?
00:10:17.000 And then you have people like, would you be willing to come on and call for the resignation?
00:10:20.000 Say that, you know, it's enough and it's enough.
00:10:23.000 So they vet your opinions.
00:10:24.000 Oh yeah, of course.
00:10:25.000 And things like Sky in the UK, the BBC. Because they think their job is to move the story along.
00:10:34.000 Because otherwise it's just them all day saying the same thing, which it kind of is.
00:10:38.000 But the other thing is it's just a very bad way to absorb news.
00:10:42.000 I 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.
00:10:51.000 And if I was watching nightly news, that would take half an hour.
00:10:56.000 That's just not a good use of my time.
00:10:58.000 Well, even the way they handle debates or discussions They have too many people.
00:11:04.000 They'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.
00:11:08.000 I 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.
00:11:18.000 With five guests, all of whom get 15 seconds.
00:11:24.000 It's crazy.
00:11:25.000 That's not appropriate, the subject at hand.
00:11:28.000 It's terrible.
00:11:29.000 It's a terrible way to communicate.
00:11:31.000 There's no way you're ever going to get into depth about something.
00:11:35.000 No one knows when they can talk, so everyone's trying to just jump in.
00:11:40.000 And that presumption of the interviewer wanting to take the guest down...
00:11:47.000 Yes.
00:11:47.000 I mean, that's the worst one.
00:11:49.000 Yes.
00:11:49.000 That's the worst one.
00:11:50.000 Well, that was a lot of people's reputation.
00:11:53.000 Like, 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?
00:12:01.000 They'd throw you off center and all that sort of thing.
00:12:03.000 Yeah.
00:12:04.000 They would try to, like, trip you up.
00:12:06.000 My favorite used to be when people, like, when I was still out on NPR, which I was a couple of books ago, You're not allowed on anymore?
00:12:15.000 Nah.
00:12:15.000 They reject you?
00:12:16.000 Well, a couple of books ago I was still allowed on.
00:12:19.000 Had a very good ding-dong, as we'd call it in Britain, with the presenter.
00:12:24.000 It was good.
00:12:24.000 It was like 10, 15 minutes.
00:12:25.000 Which book was it?
00:12:27.000 Was it Islam and the Strange Death of Europe? 1.00
00:12:28.000 The Strange Death of Europe they interviewed me on.
00:12:30.000 I remember because a friend of mine in America said I almost drove my car off the road.
00:12:35.000 When they said you were coming on.
00:12:37.000 Oh, wow.
00:12:38.000 And 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.
00:12:51.000 Wow.
00:12:51.000 So it went that fast.
00:12:53.000 And it's happened that fast in my own life, in my own career.
00:12:56.000 But 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.
00:13:11.000 Having not read it.
00:13:13.000 So did they get questions that were prepared by the producers or something?
00:13:17.000 Barely even that. 0.97
00:13:18.000 It was usually an attempt to prove you were a liar.
00:13:22.000 So, a typical BBC interview would start with, so, Douglas Murray, thank you so much for joining us this morning.
00:13:27.000 You're clearly not that pleased, but thank you so much for joining us this morning.
00:13:30.000 And now, you say in your latest book, and then you say, well, I didn't quite say that.
00:13:34.000 Ah, so you're saying you didn't say that.
00:13:35.000 So, by the second question, you're in, like, this horrible mire.
00:13:40.000 And then, about, like, 90 seconds later, you're chucked out.
00:13:44.000 Yes.
00:13:44.000 And that was a normal interview until you and a few others came along.
00:13:48.000 Well, when the Cathy Newman, Jordan Peterson interview went viral.
00:13:52.000 So what you're saying is, he's like, that's not what I'm saying at all.
00:13:57.000 Is she after that interview?
00:13:58.000 Because I was one of the people who passed that around when that happened.
00:14:01.000 I watched it live, and I realized this was a car crash for Cathy Newman, but Channel 4 thought it was great.
00:14:07.000 They actually posted out a video of them mocking Jordan Peterson afterwards.
00:14:11.000 Oh, wow.
00:14:12.000 They thought it was good.
00:14:13.000 Their first thing was it was good.
00:14:15.000 And I tweeted something like saying, I don't know, there's another way to see this.
00:14:21.000 Get ready.
00:14:23.000 And she then complained that I and others doing that had led to death threats against her, which then became the news.
00:14:33.000 Because 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. 0.95
00:14:42.000 And, 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.
00:14:54.000 Isn't that amazing?
00:14:55.000 That is not a death threat.
00:14:56.000 That's amazing.
00:14:57.000 I'm like, as a connoisseur of the genre. 0.82
00:15:03.000 I'll show you a death threat. 0.98
00:15:04.000 I'll show you a death threat. 0.97
00:15:04.000 Let's go through my Twitter feed real quick. 0.97
00:15:06.000 R.I.P. That's not at all.
00:15:09.000 And they were like, we have to call in security now.
00:15:11.000 Because, of course, that means that then you haven't done the bad thing.
00:15:16.000 You're the victim.
00:15:17.000 Right.
00:15:17.000 She's a victim.
00:15:18.000 Well, it's a great strategy.
00:15:19.000 It's a great strategy for instantaneously becoming a victim.
00:15:22.000 But that's quite cute, that RIP Kathy Newman is a death threat. 1.00
00:15:26.000 Yeah.
00:15:27.000 I mean, how likely is it that that guy's going to follow through on that?
00:15:30.000 There was one moment in that interview, though, where she did show a sense of humor.
00:15:35.000 Because he asked a question.
00:15:36.000 She was asking about offensive, like, why should you...
00:15:40.000 I think it was like, why should you be allowed to offend people?
00:15:43.000 He's like, if you're allowed to talk and think, you have to risk being offensive.
00:15:46.000 And they had this conversation.
00:15:47.000 And then, I forget what it is, he caught her.
00:15:49.000 And she's in the moment, he goes, I got you, right?
00:15:52.000 And she goes, yes, you did.
00:15:53.000 It took quite a while, but you got me.
00:15:55.000 And they were kind of like joking around about it.
00:15:57.000 Because she was silent.
00:15:58.000 Yes.
00:15:58.000 But she went into that argument or that discussion with the goal of making it controversial.
00:16:05.000 The goal of trying to catch him and trying to press him.
00:16:08.000 That's the thing.
00:16:08.000 Instead of just having a conversation with someone, you don't know Jordan Peterson.
00:16:12.000 You're meeting him for the first time.
00:16:13.000 Let's talk to him.
00:16:14.000 Well, by the way, that's one of the things that I know Jordan pretty well, like you do.
00:16:18.000 And I have such huge respect for him and admiration, as well as just such a great guy.
00:16:23.000 He's a great guy.
00:16:23.000 And 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.
00:16:36.000 Right.
00:16:36.000 Like they never bothered.
00:16:38.000 Right.
00:16:38.000 And 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.
00:16:53.000 Yeah.
00:16:53.000 I think I'd want to find out what they were onto.
00:16:56.000 Yeah.
00:16:56.000 Instead of just, like, not even bothering with that.
00:16:59.000 And they never bothered with Jordan.
00:17:01.000 None of those critics ever bothered to work out, like...
00:17:04.000 He must be onto something, otherwise this wouldn't be happening.
00:17:07.000 Well, there's this narrative that gets bandied about in certain social circles, and the narrative with him was alt-right, anti-trans, misogyny.
00:17:19.000 And 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.
00:17:28.000 And that narrative, if you went against that narrative, you faced a lot of blowback.
00:17:34.000 So most people just accepted it.
00:17:36.000 And I've had these conversations with people.
00:17:38.000 They go, oh, God, Jordan Peterson.
00:17:39.000 Tell me why you don't like him.
00:17:40.000 What is it?
00:17:41.000 What did he say?
00:17:42.000 Even now, I mean, you can survive this like you did, but even now, these...
00:17:49.000 Yeah.
00:18:03.000 Yeah.
00:18:05.000 Yeah.
00:18:13.000 You never completely clean up.
00:18:16.000 I hope it is in your case.
00:18:19.000 You clean up with people who know you.
00:18:21.000 The fortunate situation for me is that I've been doing a podcast for 12 years and people hear me for hours and hours and hours every day.
00:18:31.000 And because of that, they know me.
00:18:33.000 You can't hide for hours and hours every day.
00:18:35.000 They know who you are.
00:18:36.000 So misrepresentations don't work. 1.00
00:18:38.000 Like if somebody tried to tell me my best friend was a piece of shit, I'd be like, what way? 0.99
00:18:43.000 He does this and he does that. 1.00
00:18:44.000 I'm like, no he doesn't.
00:18:44.000 I know him.
00:18:45.000 I know him really well.
00:18:46.000 What are you saying?
00:18:47.000 It doesn't work.
00:18:48.000 But if I didn't know him and someone tried to say something terrible about him, I'd have to take that into consideration.
00:18:54.000 It 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.
00:19:04.000 I'm problematic.
00:19:06.000 I host cage fights.
00:19:08.000 That's one of my side jobs.
00:19:10.000 I commentate and explain how people are beating the fuck out of each other.
00:19:15.000 That's part of my job.
00:19:16.000 It's great cover.
00:19:18.000 But it's a weird gig, you know, to also have, and then to be talking to people like you and political candidates and scientists.
00:19:25.000 I hope what it is is that you have enough work out there, like Jordan had enough work out there to survive.
00:19:32.000 I do worry that somebody's starting off.
00:19:34.000 If anyone comes for somebody who has not got a body of work behind them, that would be hard to survive.
00:19:42.000 Especially if you have a job, and you get fired from that job.
00:19:45.000 That's the big one.
00:19:45.000 If 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.
00:19:59.000 I know people where that has happened, where they've lost advertisers due to being air quotes canceled.
00:20:04.000 But if you have a job, it's frightfully easy to fire someone.
00:20:09.000 I know.
00:20:09.000 It's so easy.
00:20:10.000 All you've got to do is be called into that fateful HR meeting.
00:20:14.000 Yeah.
00:20:14.000 And be told that there's something you've done that's damaged the reputation of the company.
00:20:18.000 Or you've offended a certain number of people that work there.
00:20:21.000 And the thing about work is people don't like working.
00:20:25.000 They don't like being stuck in a cubicle.
00:20:27.000 They don't like being stuck in an office.
00:20:30.000 And they feel a certain innate sense.
00:20:34.000 There's a level of frustration that's undeniable.
00:20:37.000 And one thing that people would do when they encounter a level of frustration is they lash out.
00:20:42.000 And if they can lash out inside the rulebook.
00:20:44.000 Like, what's the rulebook?
00:20:45.000 I was offended. 1.00
00:20:45.000 Fuck him. 1.00
00:20:46.000 Get him fired. 1.00
00:20:48.000 They're just tense.
00:20:49.000 And they're just...
00:20:51.000 They 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.
00:21:04.000 Vengefulness in general is one of the nastiest human instincts to try to get around.
00:21:10.000 Lack of charitable takes on things.
00:21:12.000 There's a lack of the ability to have a charitable view on whatever has gone on.
00:21:18.000 You look at it in the worst possible light.
00:21:21.000 That's right.
00:21:22.000 That's what was clearly being done to you.
00:21:25.000 It's what's being done to lots of our mutual friends.
00:21:27.000 It's a deliberate attempt to not look at something in a charitable light.
00:21:32.000 The fascinating thing about it, though, it really does make those people look even less reliable.
00:21:39.000 Yeah.
00:21:40.000 Yeah.
00:21:41.000 I'd hope so.
00:21:42.000 Although, 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.
00:21:48.000 Right.
00:21:49.000 I mean, you know, I know you've discussed it.
00:21:51.000 Independent people.
00:21:51.000 The only thing that I count on, Glenn Greenwald, I count on people like Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points, Matt Taibbi.
00:22:02.000 Right.
00:22:02.000 There's a few people that I'll count on.
00:22:04.000 For an honest take on world events.
00:22:07.000 But there's not many.
00:22:08.000 Kyle Kalinske, there's not many.
00:22:09.000 Even then, the problem is that it doesn't cover everything.
00:22:12.000 Right.
00:22:13.000 I 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.
00:22:23.000 And so, obviously, my rule, wait for this, my rule is not to talk about things I don't know about.
00:22:30.000 That's crazy.
00:22:31.000 That's crazy.
00:22:32.000 That's holding you back.
00:22:36.000 You should talk confidently about almost everything and just let the chips fall where they may.
00:22:43.000 You know, the thing is An enormous number of people don't follow that last year.
00:22:48.000 I mean, they actually do think that they have to know about everything.
00:22:51.000 So 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?
00:23:00.000 And what do you think about vaccines?
00:23:01.000 And what do you think about ivermectin?
00:23:02.000 And what do you think about BLM? And what do you think about Trump?
00:23:04.000 And what do you think about election integrity?
00:23:05.000 And what do you think about Afghanistan?
00:23:07.000 And then China?
00:23:09.000 And then Ukraine?
00:23:10.000 And also ivermectin?
00:23:15.000 It's like, I don't know.
00:23:18.000 And very few people are willing to say, that's not my thing.
00:23:24.000 I can't form a strong view on that.
00:23:27.000 It is interesting that you're expected to have...
00:23:30.000 Deep knowledge about so many subjects.
00:23:33.000 Yeah.
00:23:34.000 Especially if you're publicly commenting on things.
00:23:37.000 I know.
00:23:37.000 I mean, various people...
00:23:39.000 I didn't write anything very much about the pandemic because, as I occasionally said to critics, I just...
00:23:46.000 I had not spent any of my life writing about pandemics or thinking about it before.
00:23:52.000 And I should have done.
00:23:53.000 Definitely because it became a big thing.
00:23:57.000 Would have been useful to have studied it.
00:23:59.000 But 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.
00:24:07.000 Because I kind of thought, it's not what I know about.
00:24:11.000 And so, yeah.
00:24:14.000 And I felt like, then some people say, I can't believe you didn't speak.
00:24:17.000 And my thing is like, look, I wish...
00:24:19.000 I wish I knew then what I know now.
00:24:23.000 But I didn't.
00:24:24.000 And I wasn't going to take a punt on it.
00:24:26.000 There's also this weird thing that whenever anything is going down, your silence is thought of as a negative.
00:24:34.000 Right.
00:24:35.000 If you're not commenting on something, like I rarely read comments, but occasionally I accidentally read one.
00:24:42.000 And I read one on my own Instagram.
00:24:45.000 I was posting something that I had to go back and edit it when I was editing it.
00:24:49.000 And I fucked up something and I went back to make sure that it was okay.
00:24:52.000 I read someone saying, like, why haven't you said anything about Ukraine? 0.88
00:24:56.000 And this was, like, one of the first weeks of the invasion.
00:25:00.000 And I was like, I don't know what's happening.
00:25:03.000 You're mad that I'm not, like, I know, you know, you don't care.
00:25:06.000 Like, you pretend to care.
00:25:08.000 I'm like, I don't know what's happening.
00:25:09.000 I like the people who say, like, you don't have the guts to talk about X. And they're, like, some anonymous account.
00:25:16.000 Yeah, exactly.
00:25:17.000 I can't believe you're not willing to...
00:25:19.000 But that's just the masses of humans, right?
00:25:22.000 It's like you're focusing on one person with a logical argument.
00:25:26.000 It's not logical.
00:25:27.000 Like, if you thought about it, like, why haven't you talked about Ukraine?
00:25:31.000 Maybe they're considering it.
00:25:33.000 Maybe they're looking at it and researching it and trying to find out what's going on.
00:25:36.000 And in the case of that, like, Ukraine is a complicated issue, and you have to find out, like, what is the conflict?
00:25:42.000 Like, why is this happening?
00:25:44.000 Is there natural resources that are at play?
00:25:47.000 Like, what's going on here?
00:25:48.000 It's a long process of trying to gather information if you spent, like I have, zero time thinking about Ukraine up until then.
00:25:55.000 Yeah, no, I think it's going to be very important that people are able to say, look, I don't know.
00:26:00.000 I'm thinking about this.
00:26:01.000 I'm interested in it, and I'll let you know if I do form any of you.
00:26:04.000 Yeah.
00:26:05.000 But this thing of holding forth on everything, everyone moving from being COVID experts to Afghan withdrawal experts to Ukraine experts back to something else.
00:26:16.000 I can't cope with that.
00:26:19.000 It's one of the self-imposed rules of my life.
00:26:22.000 I try not to ever contribute to that noise.
00:26:25.000 Well, that's great because one of the things that people appreciate about you is your honesty.
00:26:30.000 And that's a great way to reinforce that.
00:26:33.000 Never talk about anything that you're not really sure of.
00:26:36.000 You can be completely...
00:26:39.000 In 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.
00:26:54.000 And 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.
00:27:09.000 And you have always been the guy that's like, actually...
00:27:12.000 Yeah.
00:27:13.000 If my instinct kicks in and my brain kicks in and says, no, I know that's not true.
00:27:20.000 I just can't not.
00:27:22.000 Thank God.
00:27:23.000 I kind of lead a quieter life.
00:27:26.000 It's been very profitable.
00:27:28.000 Well, not that profitable.
00:27:32.000 No, I mean, I sort of have that feeling of like I couldn't look at myself in the morning if I knew it was not true.
00:27:40.000 That said, again, I couldn't look at myself in the morning if I'd said something I knew not to be true.
00:27:45.000 So it's not like you have a choice.
00:27:48.000 Yes.
00:27:49.000 If you're wired this way.
00:27:51.000 There's also this thing that people do where they're a prisoner to their initial suspicions or their initial ideas that they've adopted.
00:27:58.000 And then when things change and the landscape is clearly not what they thought it was, they're not willing to bend.
00:28:03.000 I was writing about this recently.
00:28:06.000 There was a study a few years ago.
00:28:08.000 I can't remember if we talked about this before.
00:28:09.000 There was a study at Harvard about what happens when people with a completely incorrect opinion meet the correct opinion.
00:28:14.000 And I don't mean like as in...
00:28:16.000 The era is saying this, and you're saying that.
00:28:19.000 No, I mean, like, literally, I know you think the world is flat, and you're introduced to the facts that show that the world is round.
00:28:25.000 This study found that, very disappointingly, you'd have hoped that people immediately had changed their mind.
00:28:33.000 But no, a vast number of people doubled down.
00:28:37.000 Well, of course they do.
00:28:39.000 Because we like to think that we're rational and reasonable people.
00:28:42.000 And we're capable of that.
00:28:44.000 But we're lots of other things as well.
00:28:46.000 We don't understand ourselves.
00:28:48.000 We're not transparent to ourselves.
00:28:50.000 And we are capable of reason and rationalism.
00:28:53.000 But we're also capable of...
00:28:55.000 Lack of humility, pride, jealousy, all that sort of thing.
00:29:02.000 And 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.
00:29:13.000 And 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.
00:29:21.000 That's why they hold on to things they know are kind of indefensible still.
00:29:24.000 It'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.
00:29:34.000 There are some very prominent examples in the United States.
00:29:38.000 Well, this pandemic really opened up that book, right?
00:29:41.000 You got to see a lot of initial suspicions that were proven incorrect and people are still hanging on to them.
00:29:47.000 I know.
00:29:48.000 I was once told by a policeman in Northern Ireland, never shut a door entirely.
00:29:55.000 And 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.
00:30:06.000 I just try to be, you know...
00:30:10.000 Never closed the door entirely, but it's been tricky in the last couple of years.
00:30:15.000 Yes.
00:30:16.000 It's been very tricky.
00:30:17.000 Well, you learn about character when people encounter adversity.
00:30:22.000 And this was the first time on a global scale where we encountered a universal enemy.
00:30:30.000 That was scary to some people and not as scary to others.
00:30:35.000 So there was a debate on how to deal with it and how to react.
00:30:37.000 And there was certain places that were just saying, we're just going to go business as usual and protect the people that are in danger. 1.00
00:30:45.000 And then there's other places to go, fuck that. 0.99
00:30:47.000 We're going full authoritarian. 0.99
00:30:49.000 Like we were talking about Singapore earlier today.
00:30:52.000 And I have a friend who's a trainer in Singapore.
00:30:54.000 He trains UFC fighters at the Performance Institute in Singapore.
00:30:58.000 Totally locked down.
00:30:59.000 Everyone's locked down.
00:31:00.000 He caught COVID. He tested positive.
00:31:02.000 He had no symptoms.
00:31:03.000 He had to be fully isolated in a quarantine facility for 12 days.
00:31:07.000 Never had a symptom.
00:31:08.000 Nothing.
00:31:09.000 All their athletes, they have to work out by themselves.
00:31:14.000 So they're doing solo workouts to prepare for fights.
00:31:18.000 It's crazy.
00:31:20.000 So 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.
00:31:34.000 This is a pretty good way to drive people mad.
00:31:38.000 It's about the best, if you think about it, isn't it?
00:31:40.000 Lock people up and isolate them completely.
00:31:43.000 Also in this case, because it's so illogical, because you're talking about something with this new strain that's essentially like a cold.
00:31:50.000 Yes, it's a contagious cold.
00:31:53.000 And yes, for some people who are immunocompromised, it still can be dangerous.
00:31:56.000 But it's not nearly as dangerous as, say, Delta or what we thought the initial wave, the first wave.
00:32:05.000 It 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.
00:32:13.000 Right.
00:32:14.000 You know, there was that moment at the beginning of the pandemic, which was almost, a friend of mine said, it's almost romantic, isn't it?
00:32:22.000 And I said, what do you mean?
00:32:23.000 He said, well, any of us could die at any moment.
00:32:25.000 That's true.
00:32:26.000 There's like a certain kind of wow.
00:32:30.000 Everything, the whole atmosphere changes in the world.
00:32:33.000 Everything's put in a different perspective.
00:32:36.000 And then that sort of moment of realizing it wasn't that, but it was hard to tell when that turn happened.
00:32:42.000 And in the meantime, we were all, as I say, isolated.
00:32:45.000 We lost all our social antennae.
00:32:48.000 And then a whole set of crazy things happened, which, I mean, would derange large numbers of people.
00:32:54.000 You 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.
00:33:07.000 I mean, that was a whiplash.
00:33:10.000 Even if...
00:33:12.000 You didn't completely follow the logic of people who said the pandemic is the pandemic and then who said no, racism is the pandemic.
00:33:18.000 And I was like, oh, it's like pandemic season.
00:33:20.000 We just get to find different pandemics.
00:33:21.000 And what's the next one?
00:33:23.000 Even if you didn't do that, you had the moment of watching and thinking, okay, hang on, thousands of people are out on the streets.
00:33:31.000 And they're packed in.
00:33:32.000 Screaming.
00:33:32.000 Screaming.
00:33:32.000 And they're not masked.
00:33:35.000 And if this is what we're being told it is, this is going to cause a massive spike.
00:33:42.000 Yeah.
00:33:43.000 And then that didn't happen.
00:33:44.000 And so we were all doubly, hmm.
00:33:47.000 Hmm.
00:33:49.000 And 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.
00:33:58.000 I mean, you know, my favorite are friends who I know have put illegal drugs in their body.
00:34:07.000 I don't want to shock you, Joe.
00:34:08.000 I don't want to shock you.
00:34:10.000 Friends who I know have put illegal substances in their body who have suddenly become all my body is a temple about the vaccines.
00:34:15.000 I am not having this.
00:34:17.000 This hasn't been through enough tests.
00:34:20.000 What?
00:34:21.000 You're doing heroin!
00:34:27.000 How well tested is that?
00:34:29.000 Yeah, do you have one of those test kits that they use at raves?
00:34:34.000 Like, what are you doing when you get your drugs?
00:34:35.000 CDC never looked through this.
00:34:39.000 So I'm unsympathetic to some of that.
00:34:41.000 I 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.
00:34:50.000 They want to pretend that that's not a real thing.
00:34:52.000 That's kind of the problem with everything, isn't it?
00:34:54.000 Yeah.
00:34:56.000 People don't want to admit that the vaccines aren't perfect, and they don't want to admit that they're not as bad as...
00:35:02.000 Right.
00:35:03.000 It's the same thing with, like, it's really hard for people to hold the line of...
00:35:07.000 American elections are not as reliable as a first world country's elections ought to be.
00:35:15.000 America sends election observers around the world.
00:35:18.000 It should be a bit better at doing it at home.
00:35:21.000 And then at the other end, there is no election integrity in the United States.
00:35:26.000 People find it very hard to say, we have problems with this, but it's probably not that.
00:35:31.000 I wish it was someone—I wish that this wasn't—it's so ideological when we deal with election integrity.
00:35:40.000 It's so ideological that if it's Trump, Trump saying that he lost, no one's even going to consider it.
00:35:46.000 No one's even going to—Trump saying that he shouldn't have lost, rather.
00:35:48.000 No one's going to consider whether or not anything he's saying is true.
00:35:53.000 I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and he said, do you think that they stole the election from him?
00:35:57.000 I go, I have no information.
00:35:59.000 I go, but I do think this.
00:36:02.000 There's definitely not zero election fraud.
00:36:05.000 And I think in every election, there's some percentage of election fraud.
00:36:09.000 And the Democrats used to admit that.
00:36:11.000 Yes.
00:36:11.000 Well, the John Kerry election.
00:36:13.000 It was a big one.
00:36:14.000 They were all saying that John Kerry got the election stolen from him.
00:36:18.000 I think that there are very... 0.59
00:36:23.000 Righteous 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,
00:36:40.000 they might throw some of the ballots away.
00:36:43.000 It can have an effect, but the question is how much of an effect does it have?
00:36:46.000 How much?
00:36:47.000 Is it enough to actually sway an election?
00:36:49.000 Well, it'll be interesting to see in the midterms, because if the Republicans do win, then part of the Trump narrative does fall apart.
00:36:56.000 Right.
00:36:56.000 Which is like, well, do they only fix elections every four years and not every two years?
00:37:02.000 Right.
00:37:02.000 That's going to be a problem for him.
00:37:04.000 It will.
00:37:05.000 But no, I know.
00:37:06.000 As you know, I live in the States now, and I find it...
00:37:10.000 The consequences to a society of having election after election which the losers don't think they've lost is just devastating.
00:37:18.000 Well, it's a brilliant strategy if you're a foreign country and you want to sow the seeds of despair. 1.00
00:37:25.000 And that's one of the things that they've proven that the Internet Research Agency in Russia does.
00:37:31.000 That's right.
00:37:32.000 All 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...
00:37:42.000 They're exacerbating them, but they don't necessarily cause them.
00:37:44.000 And that's where some of the dispute lies.
00:37:52.000 I 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.
00:38:03.000 Because 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.
00:38:09.000 It's that if you've lost, you try to work out why you've lost.
00:38:12.000 Right.
00:38:13.000 So 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.
00:38:28.000 If you actually had to work out why you'd lost to Donald Trump, you could do some really interesting soul searching.
00:38:34.000 What is it he taps into?
00:38:36.000 That would be really good for the Democrats to have done.
00:38:39.000 And they didn't do it.
00:38:40.000 And I worry about that on the Republican side too now.
00:38:43.000 It's like, what was wrong with our campaign in 2020 that meant that we lost?
00:38:48.000 If you don't accept you did, you can't work that out. 1.00
00:38:51.000 And so you just go round and round with the same bullshit. 0.98
00:38:54.000 Yeah, it's very dangerous for the future. 1.00
00:38:57.000 Yes. 0.90
00:38:58.000 Because 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, 0.94
00:39:14.000 could really fuel those fires of militias and all these people that think they're patriots. 0.97
00:39:21.000 Right.
00:39:21.000 There's a wild, unsophisticated group of people that are not very thoughtful about all this.
00:39:32.000 They're not introspective.
00:39:33.000 They 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.
00:39:48.000 They don't think like that.
00:39:49.000 They think good guys and bad guys.
00:39:51.000 There'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.
00:39:58.000 I 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.
00:40:09.000 Either 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.
00:40:27.000 Yeah.
00:40:44.000 And they were that person.
00:40:47.000 They were that person who was very easily manipulated.
00:40:50.000 They have these ideals, almost like a film.
00:40:53.000 Good guys wear white hats.
00:40:55.000 They have this very narrow view of stuff.
00:40:58.000 It'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.
00:41:05.000 But some don't deserve what they got and are being treated really roughly.
00:41:11.000 It'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.
00:41:22.000 Yeah.
00:41:24.000 Jordan 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.
00:41:32.000 The point was partly to say, this is what's gone wrong.
00:41:36.000 And 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...
00:41:49.000 You're not going to be able to believe anyone in the country.
00:41:53.000 All the media is polluted.
00:41:55.000 All of the state institutions are polluted.
00:41:57.000 All the intelligence communities are polluted. 1.00
00:42:00.000 The vice president is a traitor. 1.00
00:42:03.000 Everyone is a traitor. 1.00
00:42:04.000 There's only one virtuous man in the republic. 0.96
00:42:10.000 It's the you're fired guy from The Apprentice.
00:42:12.000 You just said, no, I can't see a scenario where that happens.
00:42:15.000 But it did happen.
00:42:17.000 And it did.
00:42:18.000 And again, the thing is, it happened for all those reasons.
00:42:20.000 I mean, like, I still can't get over this thing of Twitter and Facebook and co silencing the New York Post.
00:42:29.000 And what I can't get over most about it is the intelligence chiefs who signed the letter saying that the story was Russian disinformation.
00:42:37.000 Because in my opinion, every single one of those intelligence chiefs should lose their pension.
00:42:42.000 They should lose their reputations.
00:42:46.000 Whatever can happen.
00:42:47.000 You should never have members of the intelligence community becoming political actors like that.
00:42:53.000 And they did.
00:42:54.000 So that's why nobody trusts them.
00:42:56.000 And there seems to be no repercussions.
00:42:58.000 There's no repercussion.
00:42:59.000 This, 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.
00:43:07.000 It's like, that is totally corrupt.
00:43:10.000 Do you think that the strategy is to deny it until the news cycle has passed?
00:43:16.000 You know, they denied it for, it was a good solid year and a half, right?
00:43:19.000 Yeah.
00:43:19.000 And then they started admitting it.
00:43:21.000 Yeah.
00:43:37.000 Yes, that would have been when it would have hit.
00:43:40.000 Yes, and it would have been a giant issue, but because of the fact that they did lock it down.
00:43:45.000 I mean, they really did manipulate the elections by doing that.
00:43:48.000 Yeah, that's the problem, is that when people say there was manipulation, there was at that level.
00:43:52.000 I mean, even if you don't want to get into everything else.
00:43:55.000 That's a big level.
00:43:56.000 That's a big level.
00:43:58.000 All 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.
00:44:12.000 And it's being released by one of the oldest newspapers in America, the New York Post.
00:44:18.000 It's incredible.
00:44:19.000 That's what I just can't get over.
00:44:21.000 The New York Post, you think you can do it to that?
00:44:24.000 Right.
00:44:24.000 And they did.
00:44:25.000 And they did. 0.99
00:44:27.000 And the people that are doing it are these fucking woke 20-year-olds. 0.99
00:44:31.000 That's what's crazy. 0.99
00:44:32.000 I know.
00:44:33.000 It's like the people that are in charge over at Twitter.
00:44:36.000 Like, who's running that?
00:44:38.000 That was the decision?
00:44:41.000 You made that decision?
00:44:42.000 To not allow the sharing of a story because you think it's going to affect the election in a way that you don't desire.
00:44:50.000 Right.
00:44:51.000 Yeah.
00:44:51.000 That's crazy.
00:44:52.000 It's...
00:44:53.000 That should be illegal.
00:44:54.000 It should be illegal.
00:44:55.000 There should have been a punishment for it.
00:44:56.000 There should have been serious repercussions.
00:45:00.000 And there just never are.
00:45:03.000 Not only that, unfortunately it set a precedent.
00:45:05.000 It set a trend.
00:45:07.000 If you look from whenever they first started banning people on Twitter and then instigating censorship, Twitter is still not as bad as some platforms.
00:45:18.000 Do you think?
00:45:18.000 Oh, I thought it was the worst.
00:45:20.000 Instagram is pretty fucking bad. 0.99
00:45:22.000 Instagram is pretty bad. 0.99
00:45:23.000 They suspend people's accounts and shadow ban people.
00:45:28.000 There was a case I had recently.
00:45:29.000 The trans swimmer Leah Thomas.
00:45:33.000 Leah Thomas.
00:45:33.000 Yeah.
00:45:36.000 Leah Thomas, on Twitter, if you misgendered, you got suspended.
00:45:43.000 Dead named.
00:45:44.000 Dead named.
00:45:44.000 You don't get suspended.
00:45:45.000 You get banned.
00:45:46.000 What's the name?
00:45:47.000 Leah Thomas was born William Thomas.
00:45:50.000 Is that what it is?
00:45:50.000 Yeah.
00:45:51.000 I don't even notice that that was a real thing.
00:45:54.000 I just only see her as Leah forever.
00:45:57.000 Of course you do.
00:45:58.000 Yes.
00:45:58.000 Well, 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.
00:46:04.000 I kind of wanted to say, look, Leah Thomas isn't a woman. 1.00
00:46:07.000 I can tell you why, because I think she's quite hot. 1.00
00:46:13.000 Well, we were trying to find out whether or not this is true, but she still prefers ladies and has a penis. 1.00
00:46:22.000 Yes. 1.00
00:46:24.000 She definitely has a penis. 1.00
00:46:27.000 She definitely has a penis. 1.00
00:46:28.000 Fucking hell, I just did it, didn't I? Isn't it wild? 1.00
00:46:31.000 Do you have to say that?
00:46:32.000 You don't have to say that here, by the way.
00:46:33.000 Okay, thank you.
00:46:33.000 You can do whatever you want.
00:46:34.000 That hot dude.
00:46:37.000 That hot swimmer who thinks he's a girl. 1.00
00:46:40.000 It'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. 1.00
00:46:56.000 But she's a she. 1.00
00:46:58.000 I read about this the other day.
00:47:00.000 Did you see my favorite one? 0.99
00:47:02.000 God damn it. 0.99
00:47:03.000 I wish I could pull this up. 0.99
00:47:04.000 Maybe you can.
00:47:04.000 We can.
00:47:05.000 In the Metro newspaper in the UK, it was the same week as the female inmates impregnated in all-female prison.
00:47:15.000 I'd just woken up.
00:47:16.000 What?
00:47:17.000 They do what these days?
00:47:19.000 What? 1.00
00:47:21.000 Goddamn. 1.00
00:47:22.000 When did they start getting that ability? 0.98
00:47:24.000 And 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.
00:47:32.000 If you type in, wait for it, sex toy wheelie bin... 0.99
00:47:45.000 Woman. 0.99
00:47:45.000 Sex toy wheelie bin? 0.99
00:47:46.000 Sex toy wheelie bin woman and metro. 0.99
00:47:52.000 I bring you all of the most scholarly articles. 0.97
00:47:55.000 This is the good stuff.
00:47:56.000 This is the good stuff.
00:47:57.000 I'm really hoping we can get this. 1.00
00:48:06.000 Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used wheelie bin as sex toy in public. 1.00
00:48:12.000 Oh, exposed her penis. 1.00
00:48:15.000 I like the fact that that's what you see's done. 1.00
00:48:18.000 I mean, there's quite a lot going on.
00:48:19.000 Chloe! 0.79
00:48:19.000 Her name is Chloe. 0.79
00:48:21.000 42 was caught rubbing herself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself in an alleyway in Middlesbrough Tess... 0.98
00:48:32.000 How do you say that? 0.96
00:48:32.000 Teesside. 0.96
00:48:32.000 Fine, fine place. 0.96
00:48:33.000 Is it a shitty place? 0.85
00:48:35.000 I don't want to lose my middle. 0.97
00:48:38.000 On August 13th of last year, a couple shouted at her, and she ran away.
00:48:43.000 How many times are they going to use female pronouns? 0.99
00:48:44.000 On the same day, she exposed herself on the street where she lives and thrusts her hips into a fence. 1.00
00:48:49.000 Basically...
00:48:50.000 I mean, if you just... 0.96
00:48:50.000 Once inside the house, you expose her bum, thrust... 0.96
00:48:54.000 This is typically female behavior, as you can tell, Joe. 1.00
00:48:58.000 That's how girls act. 1.00
00:48:58.000 I mean, look, it's unladylike. 1.00
00:49:00.000 We can agree on that.
00:49:01.000 She exposed her bum and thrust against her window, which three children saw as they were in a car driving past. 0.98
00:49:09.000 That's they as in the children, of course. 0.73
00:49:11.000 It's very important to stress that.
00:49:13.000 Thompson was already on the sex offenders registry before she came out as trans when she was legally named Andrew McNabb.
00:49:20.000 Yeah.
00:49:21.000 You know, and it's like, I haven't even had my coffee yet, and I'm reading about this...
00:49:26.000 Oh my God, look at all the offenses, too.
00:49:28.000 Seventeen convictions for 22 offenses, including sexually assaulting an underage girl.
00:49:37.000 It's quite hard to read news like that on a daily basis and not feel like everything's falling apart.
00:49:43.000 It's just strange that you're just allowed to change genders. 1.00
00:49:48.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:49:48.000 With a penis, with a clear mental illness, history of assault, history of sexual assault. 1.00
00:49:55.000 You can just say, I'm a woman, and they put you in with women. 1.00
00:49:58.000 Yeah.
00:49:59.000 And you have a history of sexual assault, and no one cares.
00:50:01.000 It's very strange.
00:50:02.000 And you read a story like this, and you're like, I think that women often do this kind of stuff. 1.00
00:50:06.000 I've never heard of a woman using a wheelie bin as a sex toy and waving her penis at it and trying to fuck a fence. 1.00
00:50:13.000 She has to be that close to death. 1.00
00:50:15.000 Like that close.
00:50:16.000 She knows what a pistol tastes like.
00:50:19.000 She's that close.
00:50:21.000 And she's just...
00:50:22.000 So you've heard of these cases?
00:50:24.000 It's possible that you can get a woman who's just like... 1.00
00:50:29.000 You know, like just ready to go, ready to explode.
00:50:32.000 But otherwise it's a dude.
00:50:34.000 Otherwise it's a dude.
00:50:35.000 And if it's a dude, it's fairly common.
00:50:36.000 Like a guy doing something like that is not even outrageous.
00:50:39.000 I know, wouldn't even make the news. 0.95
00:50:40.000 Yeah, it's like, oh, crazy homeless guy. 1.00
00:50:41.000 He's out there trying to fuck a fence. 1.00
00:50:43.000 That's normal, you know? 1.00
00:50:44.000 It's like a woman doing that, you keep saying her, she, her, she. 1.00
00:50:48.000 You're saying, you're using female pronouns so often, and it turns out he exposes a dick. 1.00
00:50:53.000 There's a penis involved. 1.00
00:50:55.000 Like this is... 0.99
00:50:57.000 You had the best take on this, and I repeat it all the time.
00:51:00.000 And 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.
00:51:12.000 Yeah, I have said that.
00:51:13.000 I owe the insight to Camille Padlier, who I think made it first, that yes, there's a sort of weird fluidity issue.
00:51:22.000 I think it is...
00:51:24.000 I think it's a case that there are certain basic things which, if they start to fall apart, you can feel how everything else can as well.
00:51:34.000 And...
00:51:36.000 Sex is like the first thing we know. 0.71
00:51:39.000 Boys and girls.
00:51:41.000 It's not gender assigned at birth.
00:51:43.000 It's not like a bigoted doctor.
00:51:46.000 It's just like there are boys and there are girls. 0.94
00:51:49.000 And tiny, tiny numbers of people who it's less easily determined.
00:51:54.000 But that's not anything to do with trans.
00:51:57.000 And yeah, and if you take that away, I think it is true that there is a sort of demoralization, everything becomes murkier.
00:52:08.000 As I say, just like an average day's news becomes, you feel, I feel like almost anything can be shoved on you if you agree to that.
00:52:21.000 Or pretend you don't notice it.
00:52:23.000 That's the thing.
00:52:23.000 I think we talked about this before in relation to the communist era in Eastern Europe.
00:52:28.000 That 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. 0.98
00:52:41.000 Yeah, 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. 0.99
00:52:52.000 It's a real problem. 0.99
00:52:53.000 Wow.
00:52:54.000 And so she started, like, she had gotten mixed up with some, like, yogi-type people and guru-type people.
00:53:01.000 Right.
00:53:02.000 People that were running, like, these weird little sort of, like, self-help things that were very cult-like.
00:53:07.000 And she goes, I have a real problem.
00:53:08.000 I'm very susceptible.
00:53:10.000 Wow.
00:53:10.000 She goes, because I grew up agreeing to things that are nonsensical.
00:53:15.000 And 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.
00:53:27.000 Like, it's kind of nuts.
00:53:29.000 Yeah.
00:53:29.000 He'd already had a conviction for fraud.
00:53:32.000 Yeah. 1.00
00:53:32.000 He was already full of shit at 14. Yeah. 1.00
00:53:35.000 That was a giveaway.
00:53:36.000 Yeah.
00:53:37.000 That was a definite giveaway.
00:53:38.000 Well, it's, I mean, just if you read the tenets of the religion.
00:53:42.000 First of all, they're wonderful people. 0.98
00:53:44.000 Mormons are so more racist. 1.00
00:53:45.000 Yeah, I agree. 0.98
00:53:45.000 I agree. 0.98
00:53:46.000 I don't like beating up on Mormons.
00:53:47.000 They're so nice.
00:53:48.000 Because they're so nice.
00:53:49.000 Yeah.
00:53:49.000 It's like, actually, if there were more Mormons, it wouldn't be so bad, you know.
00:53:53.000 If you could just take out the crazy... 0.98
00:53:55.000 Yeah.
00:53:56.000 You got a good religion.
00:53:57.000 Yeah. 0.99
00:53:59.000 Wow, how much crazy.
00:54:01.000 Anyway.
00:54:02.000 But 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.
00:54:12.000 They don't make any sense.
00:54:13.000 I wonder if it's the same with societies.
00:54:15.000 You know, I think that it's a thing like post-religious peoples. 0.98
00:54:19.000 Just because you've lost the religion doesn't mean you've lost the religious instinct.
00:54:23.000 Right.
00:54:24.000 You're still looking for it.
00:54:25.000 It seems like that's an inherent part of being a person.
00:54:28.000 I agree.
00:54:28.000 And I don't say it's bad.
00:54:30.000 It's just it is part of what we are.
00:54:32.000 And it seems to me very clear that, for instance, you take Christianity out and other things will be put in.
00:54:41.000 And they don't even need to be identifiable religions.
00:54:44.000 Right.
00:54:45.000 I 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,
00:55:00.000 equity 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.
00:55:12.000 There's a clear genesis of that, too, in the woke world.
00:55:16.000 There was a group at a certain point in time.
00:55:18.000 Do you remember when the atheist movement had hit this atheist plus movement?
00:55:23.000 Do you remember atheism plus?
00:55:25.000 What was that?
00:55:26.000 It was weird.
00:55:27.000 And it was a bunch of these weird virtue signaling male feminist types that were adding, with atheism, adding a group of core values. 1.00
00:55:39.000 Oh, wow.
00:55:40.000 About, you know, being anti-discrimination, anti-sexist, anti-racist.
00:55:47.000 Their own Ten Commandments.
00:55:48.000 Yes.
00:55:48.000 And so they called it Atheism Plus.
00:55:51.000 And 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, 0.93
00:56:07.000 but with plus, we can establish sort of a moral framework. 0.98
00:56:11.000 Well, it's totally understandable.
00:56:14.000 And a disaster, of course.
00:56:17.000 Even if the ideas are good, it's like you're putting it in an ideology.
00:56:22.000 You're creating a dogma.
00:56:24.000 All 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.
00:56:36.000 Christopher Hitchens certainly did.
00:56:37.000 He started, I think, latterly in his life to get a little bit nervous about what was happening.
00:56:42.000 I remember once asking him what He said people were starting to ask him to officiate at their weddings.
00:56:51.000 Yeah, and that was like, he didn't say anything of what he said was wrong.
00:56:55.000 He still obviously believed everything he believed.
00:56:57.000 But that's a slightly troubling...
00:56:59.000 It's a place to be in because you start to sense people are wanting you to replace the vicar or the priest.
00:57:07.000 And that's not the point.
00:57:09.000 Then you're in life of Brian territory, aren't you?
00:57:11.000 You should all think for yourselves.
00:57:13.000 Yes, we all think for ourselves.
00:57:15.000 It was always a problem of atheism.
00:57:18.000 It was an invitation to not do one thing.
00:57:22.000 But nothing follows from it as to how you should live your life.
00:57:28.000 It's the start of something.
00:57:30.000 It's not by any means a beginning of a policy.
00:57:33.000 Do 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...
00:57:49.000 Horrendous consequences, and it keeps everyone in line.
00:57:52.000 Yeah, absolutely.
00:57:54.000 In the 2000s, I started to think, if somebody came along and declared prophethood at the moment, they could do quite well.
00:58:03.000 I 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?
00:58:16.000 Those people still exist.
00:58:18.000 There's a guy who's still selling his silver water that he blesses from the River Jordan or something.
00:58:23.000 It comes out of some hose in his garden in Texas.
00:58:26.000 And there are people who've been busted repeatedly and they're still selling their wares.
00:58:32.000 I always thought, yeah, if somebody actually made the profit claim in our era, I think people would be surprised how many...
00:58:40.000 People would go along with it.
00:58:42.000 The late George Steiner described a phrase I love, nostalgia for the absolute.
00:58:49.000 I love that phrase, a nostalgia for the absolute.
00:58:52.000 I think a lot of people have it.
00:58:54.000 I have it.
00:58:55.000 We all have it to some extent.
00:58:56.000 And the question is whether you can avoid it taking you to places that would demoralize you and lead you to a bad place.
00:59:05.000 Yeah, it's...
00:59:07.000 I 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...
00:59:24.000 It always ends up with a massive orgy, doesn't it?
00:59:27.000 Yes, it does! 1.00
00:59:28.000 It always ends up with, you've got to give me all your money, I don't get to fuck your wife. 1.00
00:59:31.000 Exactly. 1.00
00:59:31.000 Like Wild Wild Country. 1.00
00:59:32.000 It's like, oh, it's all about peace, and it's like, nah, you've got to school the women. 0.98
00:59:36.000 Wild Wild Country is amazing.
00:59:38.000 I love that.
00:59:38.000 That documentary is so good.
00:59:39.000 I love that.
00:59:40.000 That guy, Osho, had some really interesting quotes.
00:59:42.000 You still see his books in some places.
00:59:45.000 In the Netherlands, a while ago, they had his books still in the bookshops.
00:59:49.000 Oh, you can buy them on Apple, on the Apple bookstore.
00:59:52.000 I've read a couple of books.
00:59:54.000 I do like that bit where he says in one of his speeches, he says, The people are retarded by the people, for the people, of the people. 0.97
01:00:05.000 But the problem is, the people are retarded. 1.00
01:00:09.000 It should be by the retarded, for the retarded. 1.00
01:00:14.000 It's like, oh my god. 0.99
01:00:16.000 A guru saying that.
01:00:18.000 And it's something about the fact that he's dead now, and then he said it decades ago.
01:00:22.000 It's very funny.
01:00:22.000 But we are searching for things at the moment.
01:00:26.000 Yeah.
01:00:27.000 It seems very obvious to me.
01:00:28.000 I mean, what plenty of people have called things like the religion of anti-racism, the religion of social justice, all that stuff.
01:00:35.000 They are all something to do, you know.
01:00:38.000 Yes.
01:00:38.000 At some very, very deep level.
01:00:41.000 You've had your purpose today.
01:00:43.000 You've had your five fruit and veg.
01:00:44.000 You've had your meaning.
01:00:45.000 Yeah, you've had your meaning.
01:00:47.000 You're making a difference.
01:00:49.000 And 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.
01:00:59.000 Yeah, and they think that if they kick really hard and nastily, That's really good because it'll cause a reaction.
01:01:11.000 I'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.
01:01:23.000 Unquestionably.
01:01:24.000 And also the fact that they don't do it in person.
01:01:27.000 They're doing this thing.
01:01:28.000 They certainly don't do it one-on-one in person.
01:01:30.000 They're doing this thing in the online world where all the social cues have been eliminated.
01:01:38.000 You're not experiencing a person's emotions when you say something cruel to them.
01:01:42.000 You don't see it on their face.
01:01:43.000 This normal social reaction to correct.
01:01:47.000 You don't see it.
01:01:48.000 You, I imagine, very rarely get anyone saying I'm pleasant to your face.
01:01:52.000 Never.
01:01:53.000 Almost never.
01:01:54.000 Almost never.
01:01:55.000 Most people are very friendly.
01:01:56.000 Exactly.
01:01:57.000 Yeah.
01:01:57.000 Exactly.
01:01:58.000 But I'm very friendly.
01:01:59.000 Even if they have a bad idea of who I am, if they say hi, I go, hi, how you doing?
01:02:04.000 Right. 0.99
01:02:05.000 You're not an asshole. 0.99
01:02:06.000 You're not mean. 0.99
01:02:07.000 I'm not mean.
01:02:07.000 I'm nice to everybody.
01:02:08.000 When you take your wife and daughter to the zoo, I love that video.
01:02:11.000 The video of you taking your wife and daughter to the zoo for the day, and you saw nature in the roar.
01:02:18.000 Yeah.
01:02:19.000 That pleased me so much.
01:02:20.000 I couldn't stop laughing at that video.
01:02:24.000 One of the monkeys climbed to the top of the pole and just grabbed a seagull from the air and started smashing its brains.
01:02:31.000 Oh yeah, that wasn't my video.
01:02:32.000 Was that not your video?
01:02:33.000 No, that was a retweet of a video.
01:02:34.000 I thought you were talking about a different thing than I wrote years ago. 0.98
01:02:37.000 But 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. 0.98
01:02:47.000 That's a wild video, man. 0.99
01:02:49.000 I thought that was yours.
01:02:51.000 No, no, no, no.
01:02:52.000 I know of something similar happening at an English country fair a few years ago.
01:02:56.000 I went to visit some friends and they had three young children.
01:02:59.000 You could tell the difference between the sexes here, between the boys' reactions and the girls' reactions.
01:03:03.000 They had their local sort of country fair, which in England was a very nice affair.
01:03:06.000 You had an ice cream stall and a cake stall, and you had a competition for best bros and that sort of thing.
01:03:12.000 And there was also a nature display of a hawk display.
01:03:16.000 And this country fair just went horribly X-rated very fast because the hawk flew up from its...
01:03:26.000 Perch?
01:03:26.000 It's a perch on the arm of its guide.
01:03:29.000 And sat in a tree and then came zooming down and picked up the dog of a little old lady in the crowd. 1.00
01:03:37.000 Like a chihuahua thing. 0.82
01:03:38.000 Took it up into the tree and ate it in front of the horse. 1.00
01:03:43.000 Holy shit! 0.99
01:03:44.000 Like just sat there like ripping its intestines out. 1.00
01:03:47.000 And so everyone could just hear this dog...
01:03:50.000 I think?
01:04:06.000 Nature isn't everything you want it to be.
01:04:08.000 It's not as fluffy as you.
01:04:09.000 Not with birds, man.
01:04:11.000 But it was very funny because the girl was horrified and the boy's like, oh my god, it's so cool.
01:04:17.000 I'd keep an eye on that boy.
01:04:19.000 You know?
01:04:20.000 If 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.
01:04:29.000 We're going to read about that boy in the papers.
01:04:30.000 Yeah.
01:04:33.000 Yeah.
01:04:33.000 Birds.
01:04:34.000 They don't deserve to be in those things anyway.
01:04:36.000 No, of course not. 1.00
01:04:37.000 All those zoos are fucking gross, man. 1.00
01:04:39.000 They're animal prisons. 1.00
01:04:40.000 Yeah, I don't like them.
01:04:41.000 For innocent animals.
01:04:43.000 They did nothing wrong.
01:04:44.000 And the idea that it's good that you can go and see them.
01:04:49.000 That was great before video.
01:04:51.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:04:53.000 It's crazy.
01:04:53.000 You don't need it now.
01:04:54.000 No, it's horrible.
01:04:55.000 I went to a zoo once in Denver, and I'll never forget, they had this small primate cage.
01:04:59.000 There 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!
01:05:12.000 So horrible.
01:05:13.000 Just like mental illness. 0.98
01:05:15.000 And they look so much like us. 0.93
01:05:17.000 So much like us. 1.00
01:05:18.000 Just fucking tortured. 1.00
01:05:19.000 It's horrible. 1.00
01:05:20.000 It's horrible there.
01:05:20.000 Just tortured.
01:05:21.000 Just trapped and tortured.
01:05:24.000 It's a weird tradition that we have.
01:05:27.000 And also, that we take these animals and we eliminate all of the things that they like.
01:05:33.000 Like, you put big cats in a cage.
01:05:35.000 What do big cats like to do? 1.00
01:05:36.000 They like to kill shit. 1.00
01:05:37.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00
01:05:38.000 How come they don't get to kill anything?
01:05:39.000 Like, you're gonna feed them, so you're getting to kill it, and you take that thrill away from them, and you just give them meat?
01:05:45.000 Yeah. 0.81
01:05:45.000 Okay. 0.81
01:05:47.000 That's crazy. 1.00
01:05:48.000 You know, let them kill shit. 1.00
01:05:49.000 If you're gonna feed them a goat, like, let a little goat in there. 1.00
01:05:53.000 Talking of red meat.
01:05:56.000 Yeah.
01:05:57.000 Talk about the war on the West.
01:06:01.000 What about it?
01:06:02.000 Have you read it?
01:06:03.000 No, I haven't.
01:06:03.000 Have you not?
01:06:04.000 No.
01:06:05.000 I'm going to.
01:06:05.000 I was going to test you on it.
01:06:07.000 Oh, you're going to?
01:06:07.000 I would never lie.
01:06:09.000 I'm so glad you didn't lie.
01:06:10.000 Oh, my God.
01:06:11.000 No.
01:06:11.000 Authors can always tell very easily.
01:06:14.000 I'm sure.
01:06:15.000 Like, whenever anyone pretends to have read your book and you know they haven't, you're like, it's not.
01:06:19.000 I've read The Strange Death of Europe and I read Manus of the Cross.
01:06:22.000 I will read that, 100%.
01:06:24.000 I'm very pleased to hear it.
01:06:25.000 I love your work.
01:06:26.000 I'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.
01:06:41.000 You have to follow these ideological patterns or you get chastised.
01:06:48.000 Well, what I started to realize in recent years was that too many people were allowing really bad people a free pass on certain things.
01:06:55.000 And 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.
01:07:06.000 I just noticed they started saying things that were just wicked, like really wicked things to say about groups of people.
01:07:17.000 And 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.
01:07:31.000 You'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.
01:07:43.000 When 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.
01:07:53.000 Did you ever read Robin DiAngelo's work?
01:07:56.000 I've read chapters of it.
01:07:57.000 There's a moment in her breakthrough book, White Fragility, which sold half a million copies immediately after the death of George Floyd.
01:08:07.000 There's a moment in that book where she says, there is no good form of being white.
01:08:13.000 No good form of being white. 0.93
01:08:16.000 And it's inescapable. 0.82
01:08:19.000 Isn't she white? 1.00
01:08:20.000 She's white.
01:08:21.000 Oh yeah.
01:08:22.000 I mean, she also knows how to make... 1.00
01:08:24.000 But she... 1.00
01:08:25.000 When I read it, I was like, wow.
01:08:32.000 And I started to get really worried about this because this started to pump itself into the system very deep, particularly after Floyd.
01:08:44.000 Departments across the US, departments of government across the US started to teach this stuff.
01:08:49.000 Schools started to teach versions of this stuff.
01:08:52.000 Universities obviously did.
01:08:54.000 And it was sort of out there in the popular culture.
01:08:56.000 And I started to think, this is...
01:08:58.000 This is going to lead somewhere really dark if there isn't a stop put to it.
01:09:04.000 Because you couldn't do that, you couldn't do that, shouldn't do it, about any group of people.
01:09:08.000 But it's a wild thing to attempt to do against majority populations.
01:09:14.000 I 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. 1.00
01:09:26.000 But to do it to a majority?
01:09:29.000 That can't work.
01:09:30.000 But it's a majority that feels guilt.
01:09:32.000 So 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.
01:09:40.000 It was a major part of this country.
01:09:42.000 And 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. 0.73
01:09:55.000 So there's all this reality to the racism of the past and then the current racism.
01:10:01.000 But then to try to paint it with this insane broad brush that says everybody.
01:10:08.000 Well, Ibram X. Kendi says the answer to past prejudice is present prejudice.
01:10:15.000 Did 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? 0.97
01:10:26.000 You fucked up because you just said that it's an advantage for being a minority. 0.98
01:10:30.000 Didn't he withdraw the toy? 1.00
01:10:31.000 Oh, not only did he withdraw, but days later he had an explanation of it.
01:10:36.000 He was hacked. 0.86
01:10:37.000 You're a race hustler. 0.91
01:10:38.000 Yeah, of course he is. 0.99
01:10:39.000 You're a race hustler. 0.92
01:10:40.000 Of course he is.
01:10:40.000 There's a lot of those.
01:10:41.000 It doesn't mean that racism isn't real.
01:10:43.000 No.
01:10:43.000 But a person who only concentrates on race consistently over and over and over again.
01:10:48.000 And you make a living doing that.
01:10:50.000 And you don't just make a living, you make a very good living.
01:10:52.000 Oh, sure.
01:10:53.000 He charges like $20,000 an hour and things.
01:10:56.000 It's reasonable.
01:10:57.000 Yeah.
01:10:58.000 It's good to feel that guilty.
01:11:00.000 Well, there was this large woman who was on Jon Stewart's show, actually, with Andrew Sullivan the other week.
01:11:08.000 Is she large tall or does she eat a lot? 1.00
01:11:11.000 She eats a lot.
01:11:14.000 I thought you would be too gentlemanly to ask.
01:11:17.000 You never know.
01:11:18.000 She might be a giant. 1.00
01:11:20.000 Big bones. 0.67
01:11:21.000 She was a large lady, a white lady. 1.00
01:11:24.000 I couldn't understand who she was because she was on John's show, a really terrible show talking about, I used to really admire him. 0.98
01:11:30.000 They were talking about racism and just saying all the white people are all racist and like shut up whitey and listen about your racism. 0.97
01:11:36.000 It turned out this woman who actually shut Andrew Sullivan down I'm going to shut you down. 0.99
01:11:41.000 She said that?
01:11:42.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:11:42.000 She's like, who the hell do you think you are? 0.99
01:11:44.000 Shut you down. 1.00
01:11:45.000 I'm going to shut you down. 0.98
01:11:46.000 And she said, excuse me, but if white men could have solved racism, you've had 400 years to do so, so we don't need to listen to you. 0.98
01:11:55.000 She thought she was so damn smart. 0.96
01:11:57.000 Turns out she throws these...
01:11:58.000 She's the person that I thought was a legendary figure that didn't exist, like a mythical figure.
01:12:03.000 She'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. 1.00
01:12:15.000 $4,000 a plate?
01:12:16.000 Yeah, yeah.
01:12:16.000 That's a good hustle.
01:12:17.000 It's a good hustle.
01:12:18.000 But I always thought that...
01:12:19.000 Anyhow, this large lady was the mythical beast in question. 0.90
01:12:24.000 And there she was, like shouting down Andrew Sullivan.
01:12:27.000 And anyhow, but no, I just think this... 0.93
01:12:31.000 It'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. 0.65
01:12:42.000 Racism is a part of the story, but it's not the story.
01:12:47.000 It'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.
01:12:55.000 And one of the things I became interested in was like why this race hustle Ended up going through everything. 0.83
01:13:02.000 So it's now gone through all of our understanding of the past.
01:13:05.000 And 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.
01:13:16.000 And so, yes, they were complicit in slavery, for sure.
01:13:20.000 Everybody was complicit in slavery.
01:13:23.000 And every society was doing it, which is no excuse for it.
01:13:28.000 But there's this American version of this, which now is like, this is the only lens through which we can look at the past.
01:13:36.000 Everybody on the north side and the south side in the Civil War.
01:13:40.000 Now gets the same treatment.
01:13:42.000 Abraham Lincoln, who obviously was, until this generation, one of the great figures of American history, literally gets pulled down from his plinths across America.
01:13:55.000 And it's all for the same accusations.
01:13:59.000 It's all for accusations of racism or slavery.
01:14:02.000 In Britain and Europe, it's about colonialism, obviously.
01:14:06.000 And it becomes this weird thing where white people are the only people who acted badly in history.
01:14:12.000 Therefore, you have to punish them now.
01:14:15.000 One 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.
01:14:22.000 There's no way people are going to put up with that.
01:14:24.000 The problem is people are terrified to push back against it because when they do, it seems as if they're minimizing racism.
01:14:32.000 And that's what they're scared of.
01:14:33.000 They're scared of this idea that you're making light of racism or you're denying the significance of racism, the prevalence of racism.
01:14:43.000 You deny, you know, whatever it is.
01:14:46.000 People don't want to do that.
01:14:47.000 It's too scary.
01:14:48.000 Those waters are too fraught with peril.
01:14:50.000 But I mean, for instance, one of the things I get into in the book is, what do you do with this idea of hereditary guilt?
01:14:59.000 I wrote about that a bit in The Strange Death of Europe, because obviously in Germany that's still a massive subject.
01:15:06.000 But it's become this massive subject in our societies.
01:15:09.000 What is hereditary guilt?
01:15:11.000 Right.
01:15:11.000 What does that mean?
01:15:12.000 I mean, I'm white.
01:15:15.000 I'm a male.
01:15:16.000 I don't have any guilt about anything that I didn't do.
01:15:20.000 I have guilt for things I did do, for sure.
01:15:22.000 I have done.
01:15:23.000 And people should.
01:15:24.000 But I don't have any guilt for things that people did before me.
01:15:29.000 Or people who happened to look like me.
01:15:33.000 I'm like, you know, I'm in America.
01:15:36.000 I have no responsibility for anything that white people did in America in the 18th century or in the 19th century. 0.70
01:15:43.000 You just got here.
01:15:44.000 I just got here.
01:15:45.000 I crashed off the boat.
01:15:46.000 And I also start...
01:15:49.000 I resent it, and I notice how many other people are starting to resent it too.
01:15:52.000 Because you also get these follow-on ones, like the pathologizing of whiteness. 0.83
01:15:58.000 These things like white rage, you know, one of the recent inventions.
01:16:02.000 As if there's a specific rage which only white people can have or get.
01:16:08.000 And, of course, General Mark Milley, not an unimportant man in America, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he talked about white rage.
01:16:15.000 When he did that, what do you think was going on there?
01:16:19.000 That was strange to me.
01:16:20.000 It's really strange.
01:16:21.000 Because, first of all, why is someone in the military doing that?
01:16:26.000 To keep his job.
01:16:28.000 Those positions in the military are so political.
01:16:31.000 To get to those positions, you have to be such a mover and an operator.
01:16:35.000 And do you think that it's because the Democrats were in charge, and he's in this position, and so...
01:16:43.000 And he's white.
01:16:44.000 And he had to...
01:16:46.000 Yes.
01:16:47.000 Make the sacrifice.
01:16:47.000 He had to make the sacrifice and say, this is something I'm very interested in.
01:16:51.000 It was white rage.
01:16:51.000 I want to find out about it.
01:16:54.000 But this pathologizing of it, white tears.
01:16:57.000 I mean, do all that stuff.
01:16:59.000 I'm like, Imagine if we actually started talking.
01:17:01.000 It was such a horrible idea. 0.56
01:17:02.000 If we actually talked in the culture about black rage as being a separate pathology, or black tears, or black women's... 0.98
01:17:09.000 Oh, that's just black women's tears. 1.00
01:17:11.000 It would be really, really ugly. 0.97
01:17:12.000 And then the thing of privilege, which is one of the ones which I've come to resent the most.
01:17:18.000 The accusation...
01:17:19.000 I 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.
01:17:27.000 I mean, like...
01:17:28.000 Who's privileged and who isn't?
01:17:30.000 And there are people you look at and you think must be privileged and actually they have a hell of a time.
01:17:35.000 You can't judge other people's lives like that.
01:17:37.000 But when people talk about people in the past having white privilege, I was like, my ancestors didn't have white privilege.
01:17:46.000 They didn't benefit from slavery or colonialism.
01:17:52.000 Most of my ancestors were sitting on a remote Scottish island trying to eke out a tiny bit of farmland with a couple of sheep.
01:17:59.000 And a couple of times in the 20th century, the government came and asked them to come to war, and they went to war and got drowned at sea.
01:18:06.000 It wasn't very privileged, you know?
01:18:09.000 Well, even the privilege of white people in this country, that expression, white privilege, is...
01:18:16.000 I don't think it's looking at the problem.
01:18:19.000 The problem is actual racism.
01:18:21.000 The problem is not people who don't experience racism.
01:18:24.000 It's not.
01:18:24.000 It's their fault.
01:18:25.000 So even if you do isolate, look, white people, when they get pulled over, they're less likely to get fucked with. 1.00
01:18:33.000 Which is, that just means there's a problem with cops pulling over black people and fucking with them. 1.00
01:18:38.000 The problem is not the white people who don't get fucked with. 1.00
01:18:41.000 So you're making people guilty for nothing. 0.99
01:18:44.000 It's a version of what I describe in The Madness of Crowds that happened in the other arenas.
01:18:49.000 I write about sex and all that stuff. 1.00
01:18:52.000 You're an idiot if you deny that women weren't able to make their own choices as much as men in history. 1.00
01:18:57.000 Definitely, women had less freedoms in countries like America until quite recently. 1.00
01:19:05.000 But if you think that the answer to that is to punish men for a bit, you're a fucking idiot. 1.00
01:19:12.000 Same thing with gay. 1.00
01:19:13.000 Nobody denies that gay people were prejudiced against until very recently. 1.00
01:19:17.000 If you think the answer to that is to beat up on the straight people, You're a fucking idiot. 1.00
01:19:22.000 And it's the same with this. 1.00
01:19:24.000 You 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.
01:19:38.000 I think it's a moral disaster that's happening.
01:19:43.000 And 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.
01:20:01.000 If 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,
01:20:18.000 what's fascinating is that this is a rare discussion, although it's logical.
01:20:22.000 Like, just the points you're laying out, pushing back against this idea, because these ideas are very much like religious ideas.
01:20:30.000 And 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.
01:20:40.000 My parents were poor.
01:20:41.000 And they'll say things.
01:20:43.000 Yeah.
01:20:43.000 And it is a kind of subterranean thing.
01:20:46.000 And 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. 0.99
01:20:54.000 But you can't do this crap. 0.98
01:20:57.000 You can't do the white privilege stuff, the hereditary guilt and all that stuff without thinking it's going to have an effect. 0.99
01:21:07.000 Donald Trump is the least of the effect you might get from that.
01:21:13.000 As I say, there seems to be no viability in telling majority populations to think horribly of themselves for the rest of time.
01:21:20.000 To 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...
01:21:30.000 It has been oppressed or, you know, historically looks like somebody who has historically been oppressed. 0.97
01:21:37.000 I mean, I go into this with the issue of reparations, but I mean, that is such a damn minefield.
01:21:43.000 And all the leading Democrats before the in the runoff in 2020, we're talking about reparations.
01:21:50.000 I do understand what that means.
01:21:54.000 I 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.
01:22:09.000 How are you going to arrange that?
01:22:11.000 People don't want to do voter ID. You're going to get them to do like DNA ID to work out where they came from.
01:22:20.000 And what do you do with the people who are half descended from slavers and half from slaves?
01:22:26.000 What do you do about the people?
01:22:27.000 I 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.
01:22:37.000 Selling their brothers, going and kidnapping their neighbors and selling them.
01:22:41.000 What do you do with the people descended from those people? 0.99
01:22:44.000 Yeah, what do you do?
01:22:45.000 Did 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?
01:22:59.000 You touch on one of my conversational G-spots.
01:23:02.000 Yeah?
01:23:03.000 Yeah.
01:23:06.000 I loved it.
01:23:07.000 That was one of my favorite things.
01:23:08.000 It was such a great theater.
01:23:09.000 That was one of my favorite things that ever happened.
01:23:10.000 Also, did you see that after they'd done their kneeling for nine minutes, they all had to be winched up?
01:23:16.000 Because Pelosi was getting old.
01:23:19.000 She had to be pulled up.
01:23:21.000 Her knees had locked.
01:23:23.000 Schumer was being old.
01:23:26.000 Did they stay for nine minutes?
01:23:28.000 Yeah, they stayed for the amount of time that George Floyd was killed.
01:23:33.000 So then they did that.
01:23:34.000 And yeah, they wore the wrong triangle.
01:23:35.000 Because these people, they're all desperately trying to hold on to their power.
01:23:38.000 Yeah.
01:23:39.000 They're all way past their sell-by date.
01:23:41.000 I mean, the weird gerontocracy in America is just bizarre.
01:23:44.000 Fair, very weird.
01:23:44.000 But these people are all trying to hold onto it.
01:23:46.000 Everything they do about it is just like Tony.
01:23:48.000 Look at Nancy Pelosi coming out after the trial of Derek Chauvin. 0.97
01:23:52.000 And 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.
01:24:01.000 Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for social justice.
01:24:05.000 Ah!
01:24:08.000 What?
01:24:08.000 Like, you think he's headed out to the shop that morning thinking I'm going to do something good for my country today?
01:24:15.000 Like, how tone deaf do you have to be?
01:24:17.000 These people don't get any of this.
01:24:19.000 They're just trying to survive through it.
01:24:21.000 They're just trying to survive through it.
01:24:22.000 They're just trying to hustle, stay relevant, and keep making money in the stock market.
01:24:25.000 How much?
01:24:26.000 $800 million she's worth, whatever it is?
01:24:28.000 She's worth a couple hundred million, and she makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. 1.00
01:24:31.000 So damn corrupt. 0.99
01:24:33.000 It's so corrupt. 0.99
01:24:33.000 When every other country and every other democracy talks about corruption, they have nothing on the corruption within the top ranks of American politics. 0.99
01:24:40.000 It's quite shocking.
01:24:42.000 I just don't understand how she keeps getting elected.
01:24:45.000 Yeah.
01:24:45.000 I just don't get it.
01:24:47.000 I mean, is she unopposed?
01:24:48.000 Is there no one who wants to challenge her?
01:24:50.000 It doesn't make any sense.
01:24:52.000 But people like this, moments like that, when they do this...
01:24:57.000 I think it was at that same event where they had to be winched back up off their knees, where she did the thing of say their name. 0.80
01:25:06.000 Like, say the name of the people who've been killed by the police.
01:25:09.000 And it happened in a show I saw recently on Broadway.
01:25:14.000 Somebody did this show, and I said...
01:25:17.000 A 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.
01:25:24.000 Well, you know them all!
01:25:26.000 And, like, everybody knows the name of Freddie Gray.
01:25:28.000 Everyone knows, like, the Ballistics reports.
01:25:31.000 It's like a religious chant.
01:25:33.000 Yeah, and it's not like these are hidden names.
01:25:36.000 I mean, there was a time in the past when they would have been, but this is not now.
01:25:40.000 And it's got this provable result now in the American people where you...
01:25:45.000 I mean, it's something I write about in the book.
01:25:47.000 If you look at the stats on...
01:25:50.000 The 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.
01:26:05.000 The people who described themselves as liberal, a vast number thought it was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.
01:26:13.000 People 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...
01:26:26.000 Is it really 10?
01:26:26.000 It was 10 that year.
01:26:27.000 How many killed that were armed?
01:26:30.000 That I couldn't tell you. 0.94
01:26:31.000 I 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.
01:26:42.000 I don't know exactly what the number is on armed.
01:26:46.000 But 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.
01:27:02.000 One 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.
01:27:24.000 And 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.
01:27:35.000 And 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,
01:27:52.000 can you do that in America?
01:27:54.000 Like, do they do that?
01:27:57.000 And the answer, obviously, is that day, yes.
01:28:02.000 No, you can't.
01:28:04.000 The policeman went to prison for the rest of his life.
01:28:08.000 But there is this moment like, is that our country?
01:28:12.000 Is that what we do?
01:28:14.000 It'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.
01:28:29.000 So 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.
01:28:39.000 Because 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.
01:28:56.000 And that is not to downplay anything that's happened in this country.
01:29:00.000 But we are now in the realms of overcorrecting something.
01:29:05.000 Which has a vision of what America is that is at the very least very out of date.
01:29:11.000 And I have a section in the book about the moral panics that have happened consistently in the last decade on American campuses.
01:29:17.000 Where, 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.
01:29:30.000 What?
01:29:32.000 You'll be surprised to hear it turns out not to be the case.
01:29:35.000 But the campus goes into lockdown.
01:29:37.000 There's no picture of this person?
01:29:38.000 It's just a report?
01:29:39.000 They find the person.
01:29:40.000 The person turns out to be a Dominican monk carrying a rosary.
01:29:44.000 Oh, God.
01:29:45.000 Yeah.
01:29:49.000 There are numerous other examples I give of similar weird incidents.
01:29:53.000 Somebody finds a shoelace It's a noose.
01:30:01.000 It's been put up as an attempted lynching.
01:30:04.000 And on another occasion, another campus, there's a tie that's found from a rubbish sack and everyone goes into lockdown.
01:30:12.000 There's another lynching attempt on campus.
01:30:14.000 My point is that, first of all, this always happens in the places least likely for that to happen.
01:30:19.000 If 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.
01:30:28.000 But 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...
01:30:37.000 I 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.
01:30:48.000 Certainly not on campuses.
01:30:50.000 Yeah, the Evergreen situation is a perfect example of it.
01:30:55.000 Looking for the most minute signal of racism and people's unwillingness to stay home if they're white.
01:31:05.000 Right.
01:31:07.000 Yeah.
01:31:08.000 They had a day of absence of African Americans and people of color.
01:31:12.000 It was a day of appreciation.
01:31:14.000 They're going to stay home for the day.
01:31:15.000 They get the day off work.
01:31:16.000 And then you get to reflect on the fact that they are a minority and they're not treated as well.
01:31:21.000 That's not a bad idea.
01:31:23.000 Giving them a day off.
01:31:25.000 Not a bad idea.
01:31:27.000 But they turned it around and said, no, all you white people must stay home.
01:31:32.000 So instead of having the option, like if you're a person of color, you could stay home. 1.00
01:31:37.000 And we'll give you free money for the day, and we appreciate the fact that you deal with some bullshit that white people don't deal with. 0.99
01:31:45.000 That's reasonable. 0.99
01:31:46.000 That's not even an anti-racist perspective.
01:31:49.000 That's just a nice thing that you can implement.
01:31:52.000 It causes discussion and people think about things.
01:31:55.000 You're not saying anyone's guilty.
01:31:57.000 You're saying, like, let's appreciate these people and let's give them the day off.
01:32:01.000 That way you appreciate the contribution that they give when they're around.
01:32:06.000 But when they turned it into, no, instead, that's not good enough. 0.93
01:32:10.000 We want white people to stay home, stay out. 0.95
01:32:13.000 We're running things today. 0.94
01:32:15.000 Well, that's when, as I've said, that's when the demand for racists is bigger than the supply.
01:32:25.000 That's when you have to pretend that Brett Weinstein is a racist.
01:32:30.000 Because you just not got...
01:32:32.000 You've not got any racists.
01:32:34.000 You've got a small supply.
01:32:35.000 You've got a small supply of racists.
01:32:36.000 They're not anywhere near you.
01:32:38.000 And you've got to pretend that people who aren't racists are racists.
01:32:41.000 And that is just a horrible position to be in for lots of reasons.
01:32:45.000 But one of them is the sheer equality issue.
01:32:49.000 I 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.
01:33:00.000 I thought it was a very neat way of saying it.
01:33:02.000 I have a way of saying that.
01:33:05.000 The 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.
01:33:17.000 It 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?
01:33:28.000 And saying, well, I'm a male.
01:33:29.000 I was like, well, I don't really spend my time thinking about myself.
01:33:31.000 But if we have to think of ourselves in these terms, I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of my skin color. 0.98
01:33:39.000 It's the craziest damn idea ever. 1.00
01:33:41.000 It's stupid. 1.00
01:33:41.000 What, just because of your skin color, you're better than that person? 1.00
01:33:46.000 Never since I was born and brought up in multicultural London has that occurred to me.
01:33:52.000 But here's the deal.
01:33:54.000 I certainly don't believe that other people are better than me because of their skin color either.
01:33:59.000 I'm not better than them.
01:34:00.000 They're not better than me.
01:34:02.000 That's the deal.
01:34:03.000 That's controversial.
01:34:04.000 That's controversial now.
01:34:07.000 I mean, you know, it's...
01:34:10.000 And you see it in things like, oh, I can't believe you're moaning or you're whining about that.
01:34:16.000 You have all this privilege.
01:34:17.000 You have X, Y, and Z. People demand the microphone based on their oppression. 1.00
01:34:22.000 And then you create this society where people are searching for reasons to not be part of the majority and to claim to be victims.
01:34:32.000 Because you put, instead of heroism in your society, you make victimhood the prime way in which you gain status.
01:34:42.000 And unfortunately, that now has led America to these really, really ugly places.
01:34:47.000 And it's in every area that I thought it wouldn't reach.
01:34:50.000 I didn't think it would reach. 0.99
01:34:52.000 I always thought this bullshit stopped at STEM, for instance. 0.99
01:34:56.000 You know, like, you're not going to... 0.98
01:34:58.000 You might tell some of us nothing humanities people like this stuff, and we might play around with this.
01:35:05.000 There's no way you're going to get to mathematics.
01:35:07.000 And they have.
01:35:08.000 Boom, they have.
01:35:08.000 They have.
01:35:09.000 It's not going to happen in medicine.
01:35:11.000 Oh...
01:35:13.000 All the main medical journals in America, I cite them, have all fallen for this racism stuff, the new racism.
01:35:19.000 And 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.
01:35:30.000 That is going to lead America to hell.
01:35:34.000 You can't do this stuff.
01:35:37.000 You can't tell a group of people that they're worth less.
01:35:41.000 It doesn't matter who they are.
01:35:43.000 But I had to do this to the majority population. 0.98
01:35:46.000 It's just like, what a nuts idea.
01:35:49.000 This all seems to be a thing that has left the university and then infected corporations and infected institutions and infected other things.
01:36:03.000 This 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?
01:36:17.000 They're thought experiments, they're trying out ideas, it's no big deal.
01:36:21.000 But there was other folks that were sounding the alarms.
01:36:23.000 They're saying, these people are going to leave.
01:36:24.000 They're going to graduate.
01:36:26.000 And they're going to get jobs in corporations.
01:36:27.000 They're going to shape the culture of these corporations.
01:36:30.000 And then they're going to shape the overall culture of this country.
01:36:35.000 Because these young people are indoctrinated into this very, very rigid ideology.
01:36:41.000 And that's what we've seen.
01:36:43.000 There was a joke on conservatives in this.
01:36:45.000 Because 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.
01:36:59.000 There's always this very right-wing talking point thing.
01:37:02.000 Turned out to be totally untrue.
01:37:04.000 Those people left and they got jobs like that.
01:37:07.000 They went into HR departments.
01:37:09.000 They've got lots of work and it's a self-reproducing organism.
01:37:15.000 It 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.
01:37:28.000 Never was terrified of it.
01:37:29.000 Yeah, of course.
01:37:29.000 There was a fear attached to any sort of pushback.
01:37:33.000 Yes.
01:37:34.000 Well, 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. 0.91
01:37:43.000 It is the worst thing, other than being a child abuser. 0.86
01:37:46.000 And being a child abuser, you can prove. 0.86
01:37:50.000 This is the thing.
01:37:53.000 Something 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.
01:38:07.000 Now that's a problem.
01:38:09.000 So he's a misogynist.
01:38:13.000 It's quite hard to prove somebody's a misogynist. 0.99
01:38:16.000 He's a homophobe. 0.73
01:38:18.000 It's quite hard. 0.99
01:38:18.000 Like, he might just not be bored with gay marriage. 0.99
01:38:21.000 Does that make you a homophobe? 1.00
01:38:24.000 He's a racist. 0.96
01:38:28.000 You can't prove it with some exceptions. 0.97
01:38:32.000 There's a very, very small minority of people who are just like, yeah, yeah.
01:38:38.000 And you can't disprove it ever completely.
01:38:41.000 And that's where the same happens.
01:38:44.000 And people say, well, you could sue...
01:38:48.000 You're going to sue over whether this unprovable allegation that's highly damaging is true or not?
01:38:57.000 And it is damaging.
01:38:58.000 Of course it's damaging.
01:38:59.000 Because it says that you're a bigot and you think of some people as being less than you.
01:39:06.000 And that is your worldview.
01:39:07.000 And indeed the driving thing in your worldview.
01:39:10.000 And it's a horrible thing to have thrown at you.
01:39:13.000 And 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.
01:39:30.000 So, for instance, when CNN attacks you, the people who do it end up losing their jobs for saying something that's totally untrue.
01:39:39.000 And if in general that could happen, That there was a reputational cost for levelling accusations that are not true.
01:39:50.000 That era would be righted.
01:39:51.000 But at the present moment, it's a totally cost-free exercise.
01:39:55.000 It 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,
01:40:12.000 that 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?
01:40:25.000 I hope so.
01:40:26.000 I mean, the pendulum swing theory is always attractive, but it suggests that our natural leveling place is a sensible median.
01:40:37.000 Which it might not be.
01:40:38.000 It might not be.
01:40:39.000 I mean, especially if you look internationally at different cultures.
01:40:43.000 I mean, there's cultures that have these arcane values and archaic ideas of how women should be treated.
01:40:50.000 And they haven't changed.
01:40:52.000 They're not changing.
01:40:53.000 There's no debate about it.
01:40:54.000 It's just they're locked in.
01:40:56.000 That's who they are.
01:40:57.000 That's what they do.
01:40:58.000 It'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.
01:41:13.000 Didn't they get the memo?
01:41:14.000 No.
01:41:15.000 That's how the Kremlin behaves.
01:41:18.000 You saw the video from Shanghai the other day of people screaming from their windows.
01:41:22.000 Yeah.
01:41:22.000 Well, that's how the Communist Party of China behaves.
01:41:25.000 Yeah.
01:41:26.000 That's their median.
01:41:28.000 Is you can do what the hell you want with the people.
01:41:31.000 So we're incredibly lucky in a country like America, any Western country, that we even care about complaints of human rights.
01:41:40.000 We're really lucky we live in societies like that.
01:41:43.000 And it's not normal.
01:41:44.000 And it's not the median historically.
01:41:46.000 And it's not the median in the world today.
01:41:49.000 It is highly, highly unusual.
01:41:52.000 And so therefore, it's worth protecting.
01:41:54.000 And it's worth making sure that you don't overcorrect and provoke really ugly stuff in reply.
01:42:01.000 And 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.
01:42:21.000 They'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.
01:42:35.000 People like Coleman Hughes and Thomas Chatterton Williams and these people.
01:42:40.000 They give me enormous hope for America because these are just – they're the people you want.
01:42:47.000 And 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,
01:43:05.000 it's fine.
01:43:07.000 But I do think there is this group who are white and black in America who are trying to lead America to a real precipice. 0.99
01:43:16.000 And 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. 0.98
01:43:23.000 But you cannot war on the foundations of an entire society and think that you're going to get away with it without any repercussions. 0.91
01:43:34.000 I don't think they even think about it.
01:43:36.000 They just think about what is beneficial to them currently.
01:43:40.000 And 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.
01:43:53.000 That's what they're in.
01:43:53.000 I 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.
01:44:04.000 Like, this is my new take.
01:44:07.000 I did Mushrooms one day, and I had a new take on white racism, and here's what the real problem is.
01:44:12.000 I wish we could crowdfund for that.
01:44:16.000 We probably could.
01:44:17.000 Raise money for Robin DiAngelo to get mushrooms.
01:44:19.000 I 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,
01:44:35.000 anxiety, all these things.
01:44:38.000 And authoritarianism, the rise of control by these governments that decided what you could and couldn't do as far as work and where to go.
01:44:47.000 And all these things, they also exaggerated this feeling of helplessness that people already had.
01:44:55.000 They pumped up the anxiety of these people. 0.96
01:44:58.000 There's a lot of people in 2018 and 19 that were already fucked. 0.98
01:45:01.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.94
01:45:02.000 What about them now?
01:45:03.000 They're barely hanging on by threads now.
01:45:06.000 I wonder what your perspective is in terms of where is this headed?
01:45:12.000 Do you have a prediction?
01:45:14.000 Do you look at it and can you separate yourself from it and observe it as a pattern and see some sort of clear direction that it's headed?
01:45:24.000 I don't think there's any clear direction.
01:45:26.000 I think that the atomization is going to be much worse than anyone realizes.
01:45:31.000 Much, much worse.
01:45:32.000 And the atomization, not just of views, but of information, of facts.
01:45:37.000 You know, having different views is so last century.
01:45:42.000 You know, we all have different facts now.
01:45:45.000 And 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,
01:46:00.000 COVID, and George Floyd, and Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and you take that...
01:46:08.000 Almost nobody in that family tree of things ends up in the same place on everything.
01:46:13.000 Right.
01:46:14.000 And 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.
01:46:24.000 And there are people now who just, like, they have their thing, and they're in a kind of unreachable place.
01:46:32.000 And I think that's very likely to be what the future's going to be like for a long time.
01:46:37.000 I 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.
01:46:49.000 He said, it won't.
01:46:50.000 We're entering an era of polytheism.
01:46:53.000 Everybody has their own gods.
01:46:56.000 And I think that's true.
01:46:58.000 It's not just they have their own gods, they have their own obsessions.
01:47:02.000 And they have their own versions of everything and how they got there and what they're meant to be doing.
01:47:09.000 And so I think it's going to be a huge cacophony.
01:47:14.000 I mean, what we have at the moment is a cacophony.
01:47:17.000 But it's going to get worse and worse.
01:47:18.000 I mean, let me give you one quick example.
01:47:20.000 It's a kind of personal one.
01:47:21.000 But 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.
01:47:29.000 And 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.
01:47:38.000 And it's exactly the opposite of what people think.
01:47:40.000 They think it must get easier and easier.
01:47:42.000 And I find it gets harder and harder because First of all, you know all the things that can go wrong.
01:47:46.000 It's like comedians who have heard all the hecklers and get more and more nervous about going out on stage.
01:47:52.000 But 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.
01:48:01.000 Like if I mention a certain person, do they know what I'm talking about?
01:48:07.000 If I mention this person or this event, have I totally lost them?
01:48:15.000 And the answer I think increasingly is yes.
01:48:19.000 It's very hard today to know what your common reference points are with 100 people even in a room.
01:48:31.000 You 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?
01:48:39.000 Do people think this happened and that happened?
01:48:42.000 Are there people who think this is the case and that's the case?
01:48:44.000 And that's even before you get on to just whether they know anything about the past.
01:48:49.000 And 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.
01:49:02.000 I think, good, it's like we've drunk from the same well.
01:49:08.000 And increasingly, you can't rely on that.
01:49:11.000 You 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.
01:49:27.000 And I think that's going to get worse and worse.
01:49:32.000 There are going to be people who just won't speak to people because they didn't share their views on something.
01:49:39.000 And they're going to drill down and down and down.
01:49:45.000 This French writer I'm very fond of, Michael Welbeck, predicted that at the beginning of the 2000s about the atomized society.
01:49:50.000 We are living through it and it's going to get so much worse.
01:49:54.000 And that's why the only way to reverse that is to try to think of things that you can agree on.
01:50:00.000 That's why elections, it's like, it's useful to agree on them.
01:50:04.000 Who won, who lost.
01:50:05.000 Right.
01:50:06.000 It's quite a useful thing to have in a society.
01:50:08.000 Yeah.
01:50:08.000 But 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?
01:50:22.000 Do you have things to be proud of that you're all proud of?
01:50:29.000 Common reference points.
01:50:31.000 A 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.
01:50:48.000 So somebody says, my team won.
01:50:50.000 We won on Saturday.
01:50:52.000 It's great.
01:50:53.000 You didn't do anything but yourself.
01:50:55.000 Maybe you stood on the terrace and shouted at the team.
01:50:58.000 But it's we.
01:51:00.000 And that's a very, very human need.
01:51:03.000 And it's like that with nations as well.
01:51:05.000 People like to be able to say, we, you know, we did that.
01:51:08.000 We stopped this.
01:51:11.000 We did this good thing.
01:51:14.000 And I think people should work on that, on those things.
01:51:17.000 In America, it would be great if people could just agree on a few good things America's done.
01:51:22.000 Same thing in my own country of birth, in Britain, where it's a little less bad at the moment.
01:51:29.000 It's nice to agree on a few good things we've done.
01:51:32.000 Yeah, but people want to almost, on instinct, find the things you disagree with, concentrate on them first.
01:51:41.000 Do you find that socially?
01:51:42.000 I don't.
01:51:43.000 Some people. 1.00
01:51:45.000 I avoid those fucks. 1.00
01:51:46.000 Yeah, of course. 1.00
01:51:47.000 Keep a million miles away from them.
01:51:49.000 But they're out there.
01:51:49.000 There's some people that enjoy conflict.
01:51:51.000 And I always feel like it's usually generally people that don't have a lot of agency, either in their job or their relationship.
01:51:58.000 Exactly.
01:51:59.000 Exactly.
01:52:00.000 Frustrated people who want to...
01:52:02.000 I don't know about you, but I'm very hard to rile up in my spare time.
01:52:06.000 Yeah, me too.
01:52:07.000 Because I'm like, whatever.
01:52:10.000 I'm not going to have row over the dinner table.
01:52:12.000 Yeah, I'm so uncontroversial at dinner.
01:52:15.000 I'm like that.
01:52:16.000 I'm a real letdown.
01:52:19.000 Like they're hoping you're going to get into Islam. 1.00
01:52:21.000 Yeah, no, no.
01:52:22.000 I'm discussing like, you know, those fries are great.
01:52:26.000 Don't you love fries?
01:52:27.000 I'm very uncontroversial in my space.
01:52:29.000 We had dinner with Douglas Murray, so I was expecting so much more.
01:52:32.000 Exactly.
01:52:33.000 I was expecting a firebrand.
01:52:34.000 Yeah.
01:52:35.000 Lamb. 1.00
01:52:36.000 Yeah, well, people would probably bring you to a dinner hoping you start some shit. 1.00
01:52:40.000 It happens very rarely. 0.99
01:52:41.000 It happened a little while ago in New York.
01:52:43.000 It was quite...
01:52:43.000 Actually, Jordan Peterson and his wife were there.
01:52:45.000 It was very funny because there was one woman who just...
01:52:47.000 Who said, I've got to leave by 9.30 because I go nuts after 9.30.
01:52:50.000 They said this.
01:52:52.000 Like a pumpkin?
01:52:52.000 Yeah, like a pumpkin.
01:52:53.000 And it was very weird because Tammy said to me, she actually did go nuts after 9.30.
01:53:00.000 She went nuts on me. 0.98
01:53:02.000 Oh, really? 0.88
01:53:03.000 And then I had to defend myself.
01:53:04.000 Anyhow, I said to Jordan afterwards, I said, it was an unusual event.
01:53:08.000 Like...
01:53:10.000 He happened to step out of the room at that point.
01:53:11.000 I said, the mushroom cloud went off when you weren't there.
01:53:15.000 You know, that's unusual.
01:53:17.000 But yeah, so it's very, very unusual for me to be able to get a rise in my spirit.
01:53:21.000 I don't want that.
01:53:22.000 And generally, I mean, as long as you're dealing with good faith people, I want to hear what they have to say.
01:53:26.000 I mean, you know, you're like this.
01:53:28.000 I mean, if somebody says, I believe this to be the case, and it's like some crazy thing, wow, tell me...
01:53:33.000 Tell me why that, you know?
01:53:35.000 Right.
01:53:37.000 But if you're – I agree.
01:53:40.000 If you have a kind of like – you're very frustrated in your private life.
01:53:42.000 You're very frustrated in your work.
01:53:44.000 You don't feel people are paying you enough attention or respect or something.
01:53:51.000 Then you're kind of – yeah, those people.
01:53:54.000 We'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...
01:54:05.000 They're not treating you the way you deserve to be treated.
01:54:09.000 There's this feeling that people have.
01:54:11.000 Because there's this sort of...
01:54:13.000 There's an enforcement in this country that everyone is unique and special.
01:54:17.000 Everyone's amazing.
01:54:18.000 Everyone's doing such a great job. 0.97
01:54:20.000 But no, there's a lot of mediocre people. 0.99
01:54:23.000 They're lazy. 1.00
01:54:24.000 They have no energy. 0.99
01:54:25.000 They eat bad food.
01:54:26.000 They don't sleep enough.
01:54:28.000 They're addicted to your phone.
01:54:30.000 And the output that they have is unexceptional.
01:54:32.000 The work that they do is not that good.
01:54:35.000 And you have a hard time saying that to them if you're their employer.
01:54:38.000 If you're their employer, it's hard to fire those people.
01:54:41.000 They have to do something really wrong, or they'll sue.
01:54:44.000 They go to HR about issues, and then they'll just change their gender. 1.00
01:54:49.000 And then you have to deal with that.
01:54:51.000 Or they'll become non-binary, which is my favorite. 0.88
01:54:53.000 Tim Dillon loves that one.
01:54:54.000 Because we were talking about it, he goes, it is the best way for someone who's like a white woman to claim victimhood. 0.78
01:55:01.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:55:01.000 You just say you're non-binary.
01:55:03.000 You're like everybody else.
01:55:04.000 You're like trans people, or people of color, or immigrants. 0.99
01:55:07.000 Oh my god, you're so oppressed. 0.84
01:55:08.000 Fascinating.
01:55:09.000 Just non-binary.
01:55:10.000 That's all you have to do.
01:55:11.000 You know I always say non-binary actually means look at me.
01:55:13.000 Yeah.
01:55:13.000 That's all.
01:55:14.000 That's all it means.
01:55:16.000 That's crazy.
01:55:17.000 Queer. 0.99
01:55:17.000 I hate that one. 0.99
01:55:18.000 I hate that one because I hated the term that was used in a derogatory way about gay people.
01:55:23.000 And 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.
01:55:35.000 And the guy in question is married to a woman.
01:55:38.000 He probably just puts on a bit of nail varnish. 1.00
01:55:41.000 Screw you. 1.00
01:55:42.000 You're not queer. 1.00
01:55:44.000 You're a normal heterosexual guy.
01:55:46.000 There's nothing you need to be ashamed of.
01:55:48.000 With a little bit of skin.
01:55:49.000 Don't try to pretend that you've got skin.
01:55:52.000 Those people, yeah, the pay attention to me people.
01:55:55.000 That's the version.
01:55:56.000 But I agree.
01:55:57.000 What you've just described, by the way, is that is a result of the fact that there's a Christian ethic we can't do in a secular way.
01:56:06.000 And the Christian ethic is everybody being equal in the eyes of God.
01:56:10.000 It's a really important ethic.
01:56:14.000 Everyone is, and I believe this as well on the moral level, everyone is equally valuable as human beings.
01:56:22.000 The Christian religion has a good way of doing that, which is saying you're all equal in the eyes of God.
01:56:27.000 But if you drop the God bit out of it and you try to instill as a society the idea that everyone is equal, but that's not true.
01:56:38.000 Exactly.
01:56:39.000 And you can be equal in the eyes of God and Unequal in your capabilities.
01:56:45.000 But if you're just unequal in your capabilities and have to pretend everyone is equal...
01:56:50.000 Not just unequal in capabilities, but in accomplishments.
01:56:53.000 In accomplishments, I know.
01:56:54.000 In provable, measurable...
01:56:57.000 If you could see what this person's output has been. 0.96
01:57:01.000 This is why this whole idea of equality of outcome is such a fucked way of looking at things. 0.78
01:57:07.000 Where they're like, well, we need equality of outcomes, we need equity. 0.88
01:57:11.000 Well, you're never going to have...
01:57:12.000 First of all, we should take into consideration initially, right?
01:57:16.000 No one is coming from the same starting point.
01:57:18.000 So that's not equal.
01:57:19.000 And we can all agree that there's something wrong about that, right? 1.00
01:57:22.000 Some people are just fucked. 0.99
01:57:23.000 They have a terrible childhood, they have abuse, and they have so many things that are levied against them. 1.00
01:57:30.000 But then another thing that we don't have...
01:57:32.000 There's a cup if you want to use it.
01:57:35.000 The other thing that we have is there's an inequality of effort.
01:57:41.000 Oh, for sure.
01:57:41.000 And what do you do about that?
01:57:43.000 That's a big deal.
01:57:44.000 Because if someone doesn't work as hard, but they want the same amount of attention, that becomes a problem.
01:57:50.000 And that is where this world of everyone's special and everyone's doing amazing stuff.
01:57:56.000 No, 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.
01:58:07.000 Doesn't make you a better person.
01:58:09.000 You're no more valuable.
01:58:10.000 You shouldn't be treated better.
01:58:12.000 You shouldn't have better laws that apply to you.
01:58:14.000 But you're better at that. 0.98
01:58:17.000 And 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? 0.97
01:58:25.000 You hope an elite athlete Rises to score for the team that you're rooting for, because that person is measurably better. 0.95
01:58:34.000 They've put in the effort, they're measured.
01:58:36.000 Are they equal in terms of like, you know, the way you think about your friends or a guy that works?
01:58:41.000 Yes, as a human.
01:58:42.000 Yes, in terms of the law, in terms of consideration and love.
01:58:46.000 Yes, yes, equal.
01:58:48.000 We're good to go.
01:59:04.000 These cultural shortcuts for getting exorbitant amounts of attention. 0.87
01:59:09.000 And it could be you paint your nails and call yourself queer. 0.62
01:59:12.000 And, you know, and meanwhile you're heterosexual.
01:59:14.000 You're just doing something odd.
01:59:16.000 Got a wife secretly on the side.
01:59:18.000 Isn't that funny?
01:59:19.000 That's a shame.
01:59:22.000 How dare you?
01:59:23.000 But it's this...
01:59:25.000 When you have these cultural shortcuts where you're allowed to say, I'm non-binary.
01:59:31.000 And meanwhile, you look like a woman. 0.99
01:59:35.000 It's crazy.
01:59:36.000 You must get this a lot.
01:59:38.000 People say things like, I do this in a kind of self-deprecating way.
01:59:43.000 I often say, well, I've been lucky in this, that, and the other.
01:59:46.000 And you know very well that a lot of life is luck, for sure.
01:59:50.000 Some of life is luck.
01:59:51.000 A lot.
01:59:51.000 Being in the right place at the right time.
01:59:53.000 Just being able.
01:59:54.000 Just being able-bodied.
01:59:55.000 But then a lot of it is, and it's underplayed, is you also work hard.
02:00:00.000 Yes.
02:00:02.000 And I realized some time ago that I use, because I'm Born in Britain, I have that natural tendency to underplay something.
02:00:12.000 Well, I'm just lucky in that.
02:00:13.000 And somebody said to me, you shouldn't do that.
02:00:16.000 You do work very hard.
02:00:18.000 And 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.
02:00:27.000 It's a sort of...
02:00:28.000 It's a flattering thing to say to somebody else, which ignores...
02:00:35.000 Something I quote at the end of the book, one full phrase of Branch Ricci I came across, he said, luck is the residue of design.
02:00:46.000 Luck is the residue of design.
02:00:49.000 A lot of what we call luck has come about through something other than chance.
02:00:57.000 So I used to say, you're lucky to be born in America, right?
02:01:01.000 And 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. 0.73
02:01:11.000 But 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.
02:01:26.000 And it's not simply luck.
02:01:32.000 We're good to go.
02:01:50.000 Prudent decisions, like not being crazily short-termist, setting up a state well.
02:01:59.000 You 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.
02:02:08.000 And she says, you know, they wanted to talk about rights.
02:02:13.000 She says, I'm paraphrasing, she says something like, This was the day to talk about laws, but rights were more attractive to talk about.
02:02:22.000 So they put off the discussion of laws for another day.
02:02:27.000 And that's how you get what you got in the tarot and everything else.
02:02:31.000 And this is the thing is that we have to find a better way to understand what we often mean by luck.
02:02:38.000 You have luck in your life sometimes because other people have made good judgments that are effectively for you before your time.
02:02:49.000 Yeah.
02:02:50.000 You know, your politicians, your family and others.
02:02:53.000 It's not just...
02:02:55.000 It's not just some wild whirligig.
02:02:58.000 It'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.
02:03:11.000 Don't do any of that stuff.
02:03:13.000 Put everything off all the time.
02:03:15.000 Be lazy.
02:03:16.000 Be unmotivated.
02:03:21.000 You know, blame other people all the time for things that you think you could correct yourself.
02:03:27.000 And you will find you are the type of person that is described as unlucky.
02:03:35.000 And it's the same with countries.
02:03:37.000 There are countries we describe as unlucky, like Venezuela, where they weren't just unlucky. 0.99
02:03:44.000 They had the people, the fucking unluckiest people in the world at the moment, practically. 0.96
02:03:48.000 But it became what we would call an unlucky country because politicians made catastrophic decisions. 0.99
02:03:56.000 You know, they have the same energy sources, same energy resources as Norway.
02:04:04.000 It's better to be in Norway than in Venezuela. 0.98
02:04:07.000 And there's a reason, which is that people made better decisions.
02:04:11.000 And we are very unwilling to identify what those decisions are and what it is that leads to a good outcome or a bad outcome.
02:04:25.000 Which is really strange because American exceptionalism was always predicated on the idea that you work hard and you can make something in this country.
02:04:32.000 There was a big part of the motto of what it meant to be an American.
02:04:37.000 That this is a place unique in that we celebrate winners.
02:04:43.000 We were talking about Steve Hilton earlier, my friend Steve.
02:04:46.000 I've known Steve for a long time.
02:04:48.000 We actually met in Hawaii.
02:04:49.000 Our families became friends on the beach before he was ever a political commentator for Fox.
02:04:54.000 Great guy.
02:04:56.000 But 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.
02:05:07.000 He said there's like an active resistance to you succeeding, whereas in America...
02:05:13.000 They're like, good for you.
02:05:14.000 That's awesome.
02:05:15.000 Go for it.
02:05:16.000 Go after it.
02:05:17.000 It's completely true.
02:05:20.000 I see a friend Chris Williamson later.
02:05:22.000 He and I had this discussion recently.
02:05:27.000 Because he's just moved to American. 0.81
02:05:29.000 There are various reasons for that.
02:05:31.000 One 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,
02:05:48.000 fortunate and less fortunate backgrounds to be coming from, and that you sort of shouldn't class shift too much.
02:05:54.000 That is kind of there.
02:05:56.000 And now this view is outdated, but the money is held by people who've inherited it.
02:06:02.000 It's not totally outdated.
02:06:03.000 We still have a monarchy and a sort of system of aristocracy that that does happen with.
02:06:10.000 Whereas in America, you...
02:06:12.000 People are self-made.
02:06:14.000 There'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.
02:06:30.000 And he said, I'm the only person of my class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur.
02:06:34.000 Because people who had money just sort of sat on it and spent it and gambled it and had less.
02:06:42.000 And I notice it all the time in America in the system.
02:06:45.000 I really do love it in America.
02:06:47.000 There is this feeling of...
02:06:50.000 You know, it's like everybody. 0.99
02:06:52.000 It's not, look at that guy in the car, that bastard. 0.97
02:06:56.000 He's taken his money off the backs of oppressed workers. 0.97
02:07:00.000 It's like, wow, I'd love to own that car one day.
02:07:03.000 And that is still an American thing.
02:07:05.000 Yes.
02:07:05.000 That is still an American thing.
02:07:08.000 It was very funny.
02:07:09.000 And I come across it all the time.
02:07:12.000 And people are genuinely pleased for you when you do well.
02:07:15.000 And there is definitely in Europe and in Britain less of a sense of that and a kind of sense that...
02:07:22.000 Billy Connolly used to talk about that, that you're kind of somehow you're saying to people...
02:07:28.000 He said something very sad once.
02:07:31.000 Did you ever meet him?
02:07:32.000 No, I never did.
02:07:33.000 What a great, amazing man.
02:07:35.000 Did he pass?
02:07:36.000 No, he's very, very ill.
02:07:38.000 Very ill, right.
02:07:39.000 He's done his last stuff.
02:07:40.000 He's got dementia, I think.
02:07:42.000 He's just amazing in his heyday.
02:07:46.000 He wanted to do a documentary about going home to Glasgow, where he was from.
02:07:49.000 He worked in the shipyards.
02:07:51.000 And he said it was hard going back.
02:07:55.000 Not because we weren't policing.
02:07:56.000 He said he felt that if he went into the pub, there'd be another guy telling a great story at the bar.
02:08:03.000 And when he went in, that guy would feel less than he was.
02:08:10.000 Oh, wow.
02:08:10.000 Yeah.
02:08:11.000 Very sad observation.
02:08:13.000 Oh, that's so strange.
02:08:15.000 So he felt like he was taking away from someone's joy by just existing.
02:08:19.000 Exactly.
02:08:19.000 Because he was the guy who'd really made it from there.
02:08:22.000 And he'd left.
02:08:24.000 And the other guys were there.
02:08:26.000 And so the funniest guy in the pub in Glasgow still...
02:08:30.000 Wasn't great once Billy Connolly returned.
02:08:33.000 And I had friends from Australia, like Barry Humphries and that generation of Australians.
02:08:37.000 When 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.
02:08:45.000 Because what's not right with us?
02:08:48.000 Jim Jeffery said that when he became famous in America.
02:08:51.000 He found it shocking that he would go over back to Australia and he couldn't sell tickets.
02:08:55.000 Or couldn't sell as many tickets as he thought he should be selling.
02:08:58.000 Yeah. 1.00
02:08:59.000 He's like, this is fucked. 1.00
02:09:00.000 They do think that you've abandoned them because you think you're better than them. 1.00
02:09:05.000 They call it tall poppy syndrome.
02:09:06.000 Tall poppy syndrome.
02:09:07.000 And that's what it is in Britain as well.
02:09:08.000 They say tall poppy syndrome is you've got above yourself.
02:09:12.000 And that is a really central thing about America.
02:09:14.000 America doesn't have that industry.
02:09:15.000 It's not like, what do you mean above myself?
02:09:17.000 There's no above.
02:09:18.000 We like ballers.
02:09:20.000 We like it.
02:09:20.000 We take pictures in front of private jets.
02:09:23.000 With big watches and diamonds and stuff.
02:09:25.000 It's great.
02:09:25.000 I love that.
02:09:26.000 Some of the Americans love that.
02:09:28.000 I love that.
02:09:28.000 They love celebrating success over here.
02:09:31.000 It's such a big thing.
02:09:33.000 I mean, there's a lot of haters over here, too.
02:09:34.000 Sure.
02:09:34.000 But 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.
02:09:47.000 Like, look at him.
02:09:48.000 He went for it.
02:09:49.000 Absolutely.
02:09:49.000 And that respect for the fact that if you put the work in, then you deserve the rewards.
02:09:54.000 Yeah.
02:09:55.000 And you haven't made other people feel worse.
02:09:59.000 You've made them feel more optimistic about what they could achieve.
02:10:02.000 Yes.
02:10:02.000 That's just a great thing about America.
02:10:03.000 And it is still there.
02:10:05.000 Yeah, I think it's still there too.
02:10:06.000 They haven't killed that.
02:10:07.000 They haven't killed that. 0.99
02:10:07.000 But there's some people that don't like that because they're fucking lazy. 0.99
02:10:12.000 And they are never going to be that exceptional person. 0.98
02:10:15.000 So they will rail against exceptional people.
02:10:18.000 Well, 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.
02:10:29.000 As I say in the book, it's gratitude.
02:10:31.000 It's to turn around resentment into gratitude.
02:10:34.000 But resentment is one of the biggest drivers that human beings have.
02:10:39.000 And I was reading a lot on the nature of resentment for this book.
02:10:45.000 And 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.
02:11:00.000 There is a reason why you have resentment.
02:11:03.000 There is a person you need to blame.
02:11:05.000 There is a reason why your life isn't what it is meant to be.
02:11:08.000 The reason is you.
02:11:12.000 Now, the problem is that is the last thing anyone wants to hear.
02:11:17.000 But it is the most important thing that a person filled with resentment should hear.
02:11:22.000 You are the person you have become because that's you.
02:11:27.000 Yeah.
02:11:29.000 It wasn't other people.
02:11:30.000 We all in our lives have so many reasons to feel resentment.
02:11:34.000 Every day.
02:11:35.000 Every day.
02:11:36.000 Especially when you reach a certain age.
02:11:38.000 There's so many decisions that had to be made.
02:11:41.000 Right.
02:11:41.000 Made to whoever you are at 45 years old.
02:11:44.000 How many decisions did you make to be who you are now? 0.99
02:11:48.000 How many times did you fuck it up? 0.97
02:11:50.000 How many times did you stay in bed and hit the snooze button?
02:11:52.000 How many times did you not take a risk, not take a chance, when people around you did and they became wildly successful?
02:12:00.000 How 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?
02:12:10.000 Absolutely.
02:12:10.000 They don't do that because that's painful.
02:12:12.000 It's much, much more painful.
02:12:13.000 Much easier to take the other route.
02:12:15.000 But it is, like, societally as well as individually, it is the toughest pill, but it is a necessary pill sometimes to swallow.
02:12:22.000 It's very similar to what you were talking about earlier in that pill of recognizing that you're incorrect.
02:12:27.000 Right.
02:12:28.000 And saying, you know what?
02:12:29.000 I'm not right.
02:12:30.000 I thought I was right, and this is why I thought I was right, and now I realize I was wrong.
02:12:34.000 Yeah.
02:12:35.000 And that's very difficult for people to do.
02:12:37.000 I pride myself in that.
02:12:38.000 I take...
02:12:44.000 I think it's important.
02:13:00.000 It's not so easy.
02:13:01.000 I don't know.
02:13:02.000 They could do.
02:13:03.000 I don't know.
02:13:04.000 It just depends on what they do.
02:13:07.000 What business are they in and how are they doing?
02:13:10.000 If you're a young person and you have a podcast, you're a free person.
02:13:14.000 Yeah, that's true. 0.99
02:13:15.000 You can do whatever the fuck you want. 0.99
02:13:16.000 That's true. 0.97
02:13:16.000 And either people like it or don't like it. 0.97
02:13:19.000 The amount of effort that you put into it is generally proportionate to the amount of success that you get.
02:13:27.000 Because 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. 0.85
02:13:36.000 But if you're in a business where it requires you to be hired by a corporation, well yeah, you can't really fuck up.
02:13:43.000 You can't make mistakes, and you can't be the person that says, this is my error. 0.91
02:13:48.000 Because people just fire you.
02:13:50.000 And then, you know, why'd you get fired from that job? 0.99
02:13:52.000 Well, I fucked up, and this is what I did wrong. 0.97
02:13:54.000 Well, why'd you do that? 0.98
02:13:55.000 Well, I thought I was right, and it turns out I was incorrect.
02:13:58.000 Well, it also depends what you prioritize in your life.
02:14:01.000 And I suspect, like me, you always prioritize having freedom.
02:14:05.000 Yes.
02:14:06.000 It's everything.
02:14:07.000 Yeah, same for me.
02:14:09.000 Freedom and truth.
02:14:11.000 Without truth, you don't have freedom.
02:14:14.000 Because if you have freedom, but you're living lies, you still have no freedom.
02:14:20.000 Exactly.
02:14:20.000 But some people don't prioritize that.
02:14:22.000 Some people have other priorities.
02:14:24.000 And again, it goes back to your thing.
02:14:25.000 That's why you'll have different outcomes.
02:14:27.000 Different people will want different things.
02:14:29.000 Yeah.
02:14:30.000 The 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.
02:14:44.000 It'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?
02:14:53.000 What do you actually enjoy?
02:14:55.000 What should you be doing?
02:14:58.000 If you could wave a magic wand and give yourself a perfect path of life and career, what would it be?
02:15:04.000 Do you even know?
02:15:05.000 Or are you so locked in this system that you find yourself entrenched in?
02:15:09.000 We're trying to climb this corporate ladder and it requires you dressing a certain way, behaving a certain way.
02:15:15.000 All those things are the enemies of freedom because they're so restrictive.
02:15:20.000 I couldn't agree more.
02:15:21.000 I remember, and again, it is in all of our hands to some extent.
02:15:26.000 Sometimes the most important decision in your life, in my experience, is deciding something you're not going to do.
02:15:33.000 Shortly after I left university, I'd written my first book very early and I spent the advance very fast.
02:15:41.000 Of course.
02:15:42.000 And of course, if you're 19, you think, oh, I imagine this is going to happen all the time.
02:15:49.000 Then you're broke.
02:15:50.000 I basically did what a lot of NBA players do, but with less money.
02:15:55.000 Anyhow, and I had no money.
02:15:59.000 I didn't have any money to eat at one point, I remember.
02:16:05.000 A friend took me to the supermarket and bought food for me.
02:16:10.000 Anyhow, at this point, I realized I've got to get a job.
02:16:15.000 And I remember saying it to a friend, a very close friend, who said, Douglas, you say it as if this is a tragedy unique to yourself.
02:16:24.000 As if no other human being will understand.
02:16:28.000 A tragedy unique to yourself.
02:16:30.000 That's such a great one, because young people do feel like that.
02:16:33.000 But they do feel like that.
02:16:33.000 Anyhow, the point was is that there was something I wanted to write, and I knew I needed time.
02:16:42.000 But I also needed money and I needed a job.
02:16:44.000 And I remember applying for the job and I couldn't understand what it was.
02:16:50.000 I just didn't understand what the point of it was.
02:16:53.000 And I kind of got through an interview and I was still...
02:16:59.000 How does money move around?
02:17:02.000 I thought I'm going to cause one of these international disasters on the banking scene if I stay there.
02:17:08.000 Anyhow, they offered it to me like very lackluster.
02:17:11.000 And I turned it down.
02:17:14.000 And it's one of the things I'm most pleased in my life that I did.
02:17:17.000 And it ended up I had more to suffer through, as it were, in the short term.
02:17:23.000 But it was the best thing imaginable because I didn't get stuck...
02:17:28.000 There's a phrase of Philip Larkins I'm very fond of.
02:17:30.000 He describes people who get shunted to the edge of their own lives.
02:17:35.000 And I managed to make sure at an earlier stage as possible that I didn't get pushed to the edge of my own life.
02:17:43.000 But most people, if you say to them, what is it you really want to be?
02:17:46.000 They're embarrassed to tell you at a certain stage because the dream of what...
02:17:50.000 No, it's not even a dream.
02:17:51.000 The vision of what they thought they were going to be in their lives is too different from the reality.
02:17:56.000 That they don't want to admit it.
02:17:58.000 And often that vision is perfectly achievable.
02:18:01.000 It's not like I want to be the new Marlena Dietrich.
02:18:04.000 It's I want to work in this area of work, not that one.
02:18:10.000 Yeah.
02:18:12.000 But 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.
02:18:23.000 Yeah.
02:18:25.000 And then all of a sudden you're 60. You're 60 and you thought...
02:18:29.000 And it's not going to ever happen.
02:18:30.000 And you've kind of wasted your life and you're filled with resentment.
02:18:34.000 And in order to not think about that, you concentrate on other people and you're just angry about other people all the time.
02:18:38.000 Angry about other people and angry about how fast it all went.
02:18:41.000 You know, that's my favorite thing.
02:18:42.000 Norm 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...
02:18:53.000 It goes fast, so fast.
02:18:56.000 And the tragedy is that the young man will never believe him.
02:19:00.000 So true.
02:19:01.000 So true.
02:19:01.000 So true.
02:19:02.000 It goes fast, so fast.
02:19:04.000 Yeah.
02:19:04.000 So, like, try not to be stuck in the life you don't want to live any longer than you have to.
02:19:10.000 The thing that people say, oh, it's easy for you to say, Douglas Murray, you're a fucking successful author. 0.94
02:19:14.000 You got lucky. 0.97
02:19:16.000 Well, as I say, I have a counter to that. 1.00
02:19:18.000 Firstly, screw you. 0.64
02:19:19.000 No, 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. 0.99
02:19:43.000 They have no idea of the amount of early mornings and late nights and constant work.
02:19:50.000 Only people close to you see what it looks like.
02:19:53.000 The old iceberg Thing of achievement and work.
02:19:57.000 Only people very close to you see the amount that has gone on under the surface to get anything in this life.
02:20:04.000 Yes.
02:20:04.000 And secondly, no, I think that there is definitely an element of luck, good fortune and stuff like that.
02:20:14.000 But most of it is peddling fucking hard all the time. 0.77
02:20:19.000 To make sure you're living the life you want to live. 0.96
02:20:22.000 Yes. 0.99
02:20:22.000 And so, no, I've now been in America long enough to say, screw you. 0.99
02:20:29.000 Well, 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. 0.95
02:20:39.000 Yes, that's true.
02:20:40.000 And I like that.
02:20:42.000 I like that.
02:20:43.000 I do, too.
02:20:44.000 Sometimes people say, you could take your foot off the pedal a bit.
02:20:48.000 And I tend to think, well, yeah, but I like the feeling of my foot on the pedal.
02:20:53.000 Yes.
02:20:54.000 And it's fun.
02:20:55.000 And it's also, it's like, no, I can't, because then I'm not me.
02:20:58.000 Yes.
02:20:59.000 I said to a really good friend in America recently, I said, God, I'd love to take a break.
02:21:02.000 I don't have to write any articles for a couple of weeks.
02:21:04.000 She said, no, you wouldn't, Douglas.
02:21:06.000 You'd hate it.
02:21:07.000 You'd be bored after 48 hours.
02:21:10.000 After 48 hours, you'd be like the worst house guest ever.
02:21:13.000 Well, I resolved that by going on vacations.
02:21:16.000 Oh, yeah.
02:21:17.000 Are you any good at it?
02:21:17.000 Yes, I've become good at it.
02:21:19.000 My wife has taught me how to do it.
02:21:20.000 I'm terrible at it.
02:21:21.000 Well, I have children and that helps because I go and we hang out.
02:21:27.000 We'll go to like a beach or somewhere, some island or something.
02:21:31.000 And you manage to like put the phone away.
02:21:33.000 Yes, yes.
02:21:33.000 I'm good at it now.
02:21:35.000 I'm good at it now.
02:21:36.000 I get hammered.
02:21:38.000 That's what I like to do.
02:21:39.000 How do you get hammered?
02:21:40.000 Just get drunk.
02:21:41.000 Get high.
02:21:42.000 If I can get weed, I get weed.
02:21:44.000 If I can't, I'll just drink a lot of margaritas.
02:21:47.000 And I go to the gym every day and I just think.
02:21:51.000 And sometimes I'll read a book.
02:21:52.000 But a lot of times I've learned how to just be at peace.
02:21:56.000 And then around day five I start getting itchy. 0.80
02:22:00.000 And then when I come back, I'm fucking raring and ready to go and I'm diving back into it and I enjoy it. 0.75
02:22:05.000 Yes. 0.95
02:22:06.000 But I've learned how to like...
02:22:08.000 It's also like when you have children and you're talking about things going quickly.
02:22:12.000 Well, you want to talk about quickly when they become adults. 0.97
02:22:16.000 It's so fucking fast. 0.95
02:22:18.000 It's 18 years. 0.99
02:22:19.000 It's so quick.
02:22:20.000 How old are yours now?
02:22:22.000 Well, the youngest ones I have are 11 and 13, and then I have a 25-year-old.
02:22:27.000 Wow.
02:22:28.000 You've got a 25-year-old?
02:22:30.000 Yes.
02:22:30.000 So watching them grow and watching them become this...
02:22:36.000 You know, my 13-year-old's hilarious.
02:22:38.000 She's like this little adult.
02:22:41.000 And we're laughing at stuff, and she's got little sayings she says.
02:22:45.000 And it's like she's got her own little personality.
02:22:47.000 I'm like, man, she's only going to be around a few more years.
02:22:49.000 And then she's going to be out in the world.
02:22:51.000 And then hopefully I'll be close to her geographically where I can see her as often as I can.
02:22:57.000 And I want to make sure that I spend as much time with her now as I can.
02:23:01.000 So...
02:23:01.000 One of the beautiful things about vacations is it's the one time where we're together 24 hours a day for over a week.
02:23:08.000 So I love that.
02:23:09.000 You love being with them.
02:23:10.000 They love being with you, clearly.
02:23:12.000 It's fascinating. 0.99
02:23:13.000 Little people that you've made that came out of your own DNA are fucking so... 0.99
02:23:18.000 It's so bizarre. 0.99
02:23:19.000 You love them so much. 0.99
02:23:21.000 But also you get to see how much of my fucking personnel is genetic. 0.99
02:23:26.000 Because this kid is not... 0.99
02:23:29.000 Want for anything, but yet is so driven. 0.93
02:23:33.000 Like, why is she such a psycho? 1.00
02:23:35.000 It's so strange. 1.00
02:23:36.000 And it's like, oh, you just have my fucking crazy genes. 0.99
02:23:39.000 That's one of the reasons why people are always fascinated by hereditary. 0.99
02:23:43.000 That's why royal families are interesting to people, why dynasties of hereditary.
02:23:48.000 Because it's like, we're all very, very interested in seeing how DNA plays out.
02:23:52.000 There's more to it than just nature and nurture.
02:23:56.000 There's a lot going on there.
02:23:57.000 And there's some stuff that my kid has.
02:24:00.000 One of my kids has this artistic bend that's very similar.
02:24:04.000 I used to be an illustrator and I wanted to draw comic books and stuff.
02:24:08.000 And she's very talented as an artist.
02:24:11.000 But the other one, the athletic one, is the one that fascinates me the most.
02:24:15.000 Because she acts like... 0.98
02:24:19.000 She gets obsessed with things like someone who's not loved.
02:24:22.000 Someone who's trying to show the world that she's special.
02:24:26.000 But her personality's not like that at all.
02:24:28.000 She loves everybody.
02:24:30.000 She's easy going.
02:24:31.000 She's very confident and friendly.
02:24:33.000 But she's like me.
02:24:35.000 But I felt like I was like that because my parents broke up when I was young.
02:24:39.000 Right.
02:24:40.000 I moved around a lot.
02:24:41.000 I thought maybe my drive was all like, I'm going to show you that I'm special.
02:24:47.000 And I'm going to put in the amount of effort and work that a person with a good family is not capable of doing.
02:24:54.000 Because you're not going to be as crazy as me.
02:24:56.000 And so that was my fuel when I was younger. 0.91
02:24:58.000 But now it's confronted by this 13-year-old psycho who's Totally loved.
02:25:04.000 And also fueled.
02:25:06.000 Fully fueled by this insane desire to achieve greatness, but also totally loved and completely confident.
02:25:16.000 That'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.
02:25:22.000 I think there's a difference in our choices, though.
02:25:26.000 And this is the thing.
02:25:26.000 My daughter does gymnastics and a lot of other athletic things, and she's really good at it.
02:25:32.000 But I was interested in fighting.
02:25:34.000 Like, I was trying to hurt people.
02:25:36.000 And I was also doing this very dangerous thing where I was trying to learn about myself.
02:25:40.000 She doesn't have that desire. 0.98
02:25:42.000 And I'm like, I think that there's a thing about fighting where I don't think you excel at that.
02:25:48.000 I could be wrong here, too, though.
02:25:50.000 I don't think you necessarily excel at that, I should say, unless you have some pain.
02:25:55.000 I don't...
02:25:56.000 Oh, I'm sure.
02:25:57.000 I 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.
02:26:07.000 For sure.
02:26:08.000 By the way, I'm no damn good at boxing. 0.86
02:26:12.000 At all. 0.63
02:26:13.000 I can't do it.
02:26:13.000 Very, very bored by it and very unmotivated.
02:26:16.000 Motivated by most physical exercise, apart from boxing.
02:26:21.000 And a friend said, why do you think that is?
02:26:24.000 I said, I'm fairly sure it's because whatever that is that people take out, I use on my keyboard.
02:26:30.000 Writing.
02:26:31.000 If somebody does something that really pisses me off, I... Yeah, well, that's an outlet as well, right?
02:26:44.000 I'm fascinated by demons and how those demons manifest themselves in someone's work.
02:26:52.000 One of my obsessions with this is Stephen King.
02:26:56.000 Stephen King is one of my favorite authors.
02:27:00.000 His earlier work.
02:27:02.000 Carrie and The Shining.
02:27:05.000 Amazing.
02:27:07.000 But it was just cocaine and alcohol.
02:27:11.000 Really?
02:27:11.000 And then his new stuff, I just don't sync up with.
02:27:15.000 And I feel like he exercises demons.
02:27:20.000 They don't show up at work anymore.
02:27:22.000 That's one reason why a lot of successful people are very unwilling to go through things like rehab or therapy.
02:27:31.000 Because they think...
02:27:33.000 And I think mainly this is wrong.
02:27:35.000 There are cases where it's true.
02:27:37.000 They think that if you look under the bonnet the car will stop working.
02:27:41.000 Yeah, I don't necessarily think that's true.
02:27:43.000 I don't think it's necessarily true, but a lot of successful people have that fear.
02:27:47.000 I 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,
02:28:04.000 I feel like you need a little chaos in your life. 0.99
02:28:08.000 You need to do a little fucking bump of coke and throw down a couple of beers. 0.99
02:28:13.000 Stephen King was completely unconscious when he wrote Cujo. 0.99
02:28:17.000 He doesn't even remember writing it.
02:28:19.000 What?
02:28:19.000 He doesn't remember anything about it.
02:28:21.000 Really?
02:28:21.000 Yeah, yeah, it was all just cocaine and alcohol.
02:28:23.000 His book on writing is really fascinating.
02:28:26.000 It's a very, very interesting book.
02:28:28.000 But one of the things that he talks about is getting rid of all these things in his life.
02:28:33.000 Cigarettes are one of them, cocaine, alcohol, and his family intervened and saved him, and he's very thankful.
02:28:40.000 But the man he is now is this, like, guy who tweets about politics in this sort of obtuse way and then writes stuff that is good.
02:28:51.000 It's good.
02:28:52.000 He's a very good writer.
02:28:53.000 He's a great writer.
02:28:55.000 But it's not The Shining.
02:28:56.000 It's possible, of course, also that he just took it—he wrote himself out on that early.
02:29:01.000 It is.
02:29:02.000 It's also possible that he's old.
02:29:03.000 And then old people have less energy and they're not angry. 1.00
02:29:07.000 There's a hunger when you have a family and you're barely fucking feeding them. 0.73
02:29:12.000 And you're making your living off of your creativity. 0.97
02:29:15.000 There's some energy there.
02:29:17.000 Yeah.
02:29:17.000 And I do think that people write out rage.
02:29:20.000 Yes.
02:29:20.000 They get it out of their system, for sure.
02:29:23.000 For sure.
02:29:23.000 And when you're young, you're much more rage.
02:29:27.000 I suddenly was.
02:29:27.000 Of course.
02:29:28.000 Much more angry about things.
02:29:29.000 And 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.
02:29:36.000 Most 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.
02:29:45.000 And among other things, be kinder to yourself, you know.
02:29:49.000 Learn not to beat up on yourself.
02:29:51.000 But at the beginning, you've got to work damn hard.
02:29:54.000 And 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.
02:30:04.000 No, you have to be Stephen King.
02:30:06.000 They 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.
02:30:14.000 And he said, he said, I've got all these fantastic ideas, you know.
02:30:19.000 He just bought a bed, I found out I would be a millionaire, fantastic. 0.81
02:30:23.000 Wake up in the morning, I said, damn it, I've forgotten that idea, and I was going to be rich.
02:30:27.000 And 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. 0.94
02:30:37.000 And you wake up in the morning and go, oh God, Dan, that idea's gone.
02:30:41.000 No, it hasn't.
02:30:41.000 I've got my notepad.
02:30:42.000 And you look over and it'll be like, buy a tractor.
02:30:48.000 Yeah.
02:30:49.000 Most people drunk or high cannot achieve very much in the way of discipline in work.
02:30:56.000 That's a problem.
02:30:57.000 I have a never more than one drink rule if I'm working.
02:31:03.000 Never write after more than one drink.
02:31:05.000 Never speak after more than one drink.
02:31:07.000 That's a good rule.
02:31:08.000 Yeah, it's a very good rule.
02:31:09.000 Yeah, one drink is enough.
02:31:10.000 One drink, you achieve what you want.
02:31:12.000 You get a little looseness, a little social lubrication.
02:31:15.000 After that, it's like... 0.99
02:31:16.000 And you read it the next day and go, God damn. 1.00
02:31:18.000 But then Hunter Thompson, I mean, he wrote a lot of his shit. 1.00
02:31:21.000 Hammer, too. 1.00
02:31:22.000 A lot of it on acid.
02:31:23.000 Have you ever seen the list of things that he did?
02:31:27.000 Like, 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.
02:31:32.000 But this journalist came to him and wanted to find out what Hunter Thompson did in a day.
02:31:37.000 And it's like, you know...
02:31:39.000 From waking up in the afternoon to doing cocaine, Dunhill's, all the alcohol that he drank.
02:31:46.000 Here it is.
02:31:47.000 Hunter Thompson's daily routine.
02:31:49.000 3 p.m., rise.
02:31:51.000 3.05, Chivas Regal with morning papers.
02:31:53.000 Dunhill's cigarette.
02:31:55.000 3.45, cocaine.
02:31:56.000 3.50, another glass of Chivas.
02:31:58.000 Dunhill.
02:31:59.000 4.95, first cup of...
02:32:01.000 What is it?
02:32:03.000 4.05, rather.
02:32:04.000 I'm like, what is 4.95?
02:32:05.000 First cup of coffee, Dunhill.
02:32:07.000 4.15, cocaine.
02:32:08.000 4.16, orange juice, Dunhill.
02:32:10.000 4.30, cocaine.
02:32:12.000 4.54, cocaine.
02:32:14.000 5.05, cocaine.
02:32:15.000 5.11, coffee, Dunhill.
02:32:18.000 5.30, more ice in the Chivas.
02:32:20.000 5.45, cocaine.
02:32:22.000 6 p.m., grass to take the edge off.
02:32:25.000 705, Woody Creek Tavern for lunch, which I went to when I was in town, just out of respect.
02:32:30.000 Heineken, 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.
02:32:45.000 Glass of shredded ice over which poured three or four jiggers of Chivas.
02:32:49.000 3 p.m.
02:32:50.000 Oh, is that 8, I guess?
02:32:52.000 9?
02:32:52.000 Oh, it's just scratched out.
02:32:55.000 9 p.m.
02:32:55.000 Cocaine.
02:32:56.000 10 p.m.
02:32:57.000 Drops acid.
02:32:58.000 11 p.m.
02:32:59.000 Chartreuse.
02:33:00.000 Cocaine.
02:33:01.000 Grass.
02:33:01.000 11.30.
02:33:02.000 Cocaine.
02:33:02.000 Midnight.
02:33:03.000 Hunter is ready to write.
02:33:08.000 So 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,
02:33:24.000 halcyon, 8.20, sleep.
02:33:27.000 How the hell?
02:33:28.000 How the hell did he sleep?
02:33:31.000 Halcyon.
02:33:32.000 Sleeping pills.
02:33:33.000 What's Halcyon?
02:33:33.000 Oh, is it?
02:33:34.000 Yeah, sleeping pills.
02:33:34.000 That is crazy.
02:33:36.000 And that's why, I mean, that is one of the reasons why he wrote great things. 0.99
02:33:40.000 It'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. 0.94
02:33:54.000 I 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. 0.99
02:34:06.000 That is really...
02:34:07.000 He could only do it for a certain amount of time.
02:34:08.000 That's the other thing.
02:34:09.000 Towards the end of his life, his writing was not good anymore.
02:34:14.000 As you were saying that, as you're reading that list, let alone chartreuse, the nastiest, stickiest, sweetest alcoholic drink.
02:34:20.000 Like, why that?
02:34:21.000 In the middle of like...
02:34:22.000 But 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. 0.97
02:34:33.000 Well, 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. 0.91
02:34:39.000 It's really uncommon. 0.95
02:34:40.000 I can't stress enough how uncommon that is.
02:34:42.000 Everything 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.
02:34:57.000 That's a crucial thing.
02:34:58.000 You may think you've got your thoughts in the best imaginable fashion, but it's a bloody mess.
02:35:03.000 For it to be in a readable fashion that other people want to read, almost nobody can do that on that.
02:35:10.000 And the sad thing is that the people who can end up dying young.
02:35:14.000 And then also deteriorated horrifically towards the end of his life.
02:35:19.000 You know, I remember watching him on Conan O'Brien, and he was talking, and you could barely understand what he was saying.
02:35:26.000 He fired everything.
02:35:30.000 If the red line was at 7,000, everything went to 9. Bang!
02:35:35.000 Pistons were blowing. 1.00
02:35:36.000 Everything was fucked. 1.00
02:35:37.000 His hips were gone. 1.00
02:35:38.000 He couldn't walk anymore.
02:35:39.000 He was crippled.
02:35:40.000 He was in agony all the time.
02:35:42.000 I mean, everything was wrong.
02:35:44.000 There is a price paid for everything.
02:35:45.000 Yes.
02:35:46.000 I mean, Hitchens talked about that.
02:35:48.000 He talked about that when he's died.
02:35:50.000 He's like, I burned the candle at both ends, but what a lovely flame it created.
02:35:53.000 Yeah, yeah, I know.
02:35:55.000 I think about him a lot.
02:35:57.000 But he also said, I can't remember if he said it publicly or privately.
02:36:01.000 I can't remember.
02:36:01.000 I remember him saying before the end, I thought, I hoped I'd get another 10 years.
02:36:08.000 And he said, I thought I'd earned it.
02:36:13.000 Which I found very upsetting because he'd worked so hard.
02:36:16.000 And I used to have drinks with him.
02:36:18.000 I used to go out with him a lot.
02:36:20.000 Literally, all the stories are true.
02:36:21.000 He would write an article when you were barely able to get off the sofa.
02:36:25.000 He'd go and tap away next door.
02:36:27.000 And that's an amazing skill.
02:36:30.000 But it also meant we didn't have him as much as we could have done.
02:36:34.000 And he worked hard enough to have deserved to have been able to take the foot off his own.
02:36:38.000 You know, demon accelerator.
02:36:41.000 And he had hoped that he would have had his 70s, and he didn't.
02:36:45.000 Was it cigarettes and alcohol?
02:36:47.000 The problem with cigarettes is it's a cognitive enhancer.
02:37:01.000 And that's one of the things that Stephen King talked about, how difficult it was to write after he quit cigarettes.
02:37:07.000 It was one of his most difficult things.
02:37:09.000 The only people I know who've been through AA for drugs or drink, they don't give up cigarettes.
02:37:15.000 No.
02:37:16.000 They stick with the cigarettes.
02:37:17.000 Yeah, that's the thing that keeps them stable.
02:37:19.000 I knew a lot of people, because a lot of comedians back in Boston, they got into comedy from Alcoholics Anonymous.
02:37:29.000 Because Alcoholics Anonymous, you would go up there and speak, and you could tell your drunk stories to these people.
02:37:34.000 Oh, sure.
02:37:35.000 Yeah.
02:37:35.000 And I knew quite a few of them.
02:37:38.000 That became, like, literally their first open mic night, almost.
02:37:42.000 Like, they would go up there, hi, I'm Bob, I'm an alcoholic, and...
02:37:46.000 Today marks my 45th day.
02:37:49.000 I'm still hiding from my Coke dealer because I owe him $1,000 because we went to Atlantic City.
02:37:54.000 They'll tell these crazy stories.
02:37:56.000 They were telling these stories and people were howling, laughing.
02:38:00.000 My friend, he's passed.
02:38:02.000 His name is Dave Fitzgerald.
02:38:03.000 He was a really funny guy.
02:38:04.000 He lived in Boston.
02:38:06.000 He was a guy who didn't even get started in comedy until he was deep into his 30s. 0.96
02:38:11.000 And 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. 0.87
02:38:38.000 It'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. 0.99
02:38:46.000 I 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.
02:39:00.000 Yes.
02:39:01.000 I had no idea about that until recently, and people started writing to me.
02:39:04.000 I realized that's, of course, you'd be asked to do that.
02:39:08.000 It's just a good way to mentally balance yourself, too.
02:39:12.000 Like, we should all be grateful for a lot of things.
02:39:14.000 There's many, many, many things.
02:39:16.000 And it'll shift the balance off of constantly looking at things in a negative manner.
02:39:21.000 Right.
02:39:21.000 Particularly when you're comparing yourself to others.
02:39:23.000 Well, I saw, by the way, I saw a little bit of your podcast with Jordan a little while ago.
02:39:29.000 He mentioned the night we spent in New York together.
02:39:31.000 And when I saw that, I started talking about this. 0.98
02:39:33.000 I thought, oh, God damn, what's he going to say? 0.90
02:39:37.000 But actually, the thing that stood out for me most in the evening he described was that we were walking through Times Square. 0.97
02:39:42.000 And I remember I... I just love walking across Broadway.
02:39:46.000 And I stopped in the middle of it and I said to Jordan, isn't this fucking amazing? 0.86
02:39:53.000 And he grabbed me and he said, right man! 0.96
02:39:56.000 Yeah.
02:39:57.000 And we just, both of us were just like overtaken with joy about like, wow!
02:40:03.000 Yeah.
02:40:03.000 This is just like, what are the chances that anyone could create this?
02:40:06.000 Right.
02:40:07.000 And 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.
02:40:16.000 The first time I ever saw New York City, I was living in Boston and we drove down for something.
02:40:23.000 I forget exactly what it was.
02:40:24.000 I think it was for a martial arts tournament.
02:40:26.000 And we drove on the West Side Highway.
02:40:29.000 And there's this moment where you're driving and you start to see the buildings.
02:40:35.000 Oh yeah.
02:40:36.000 And then you're inside it.
02:40:37.000 And then you're up close. 0.99
02:40:39.000 It's like for me as a young kid, I was probably 15 or 16 at the time, like looking up like, This is fucking crazy. 0.97
02:40:46.000 That's right. 0.92
02:40:47.000 This is so big.
02:40:48.000 Yeah.
02:40:48.000 It's so immense because Boston is so small in comparison.
02:40:52.000 Right.
02:40:52.000 Boston is so quaint.
02:40:53.000 Provincial.
02:40:54.000 Yes.
02:40:54.000 It's like there's big buildings, but there's not that many of them.
02:40:57.000 It's not crazy.
02:40:58.000 Like 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.
02:41:07.000 Yeah.
02:41:08.000 Like it was so much different than seeing it in a photograph.
02:41:10.000 You could be ruined for life.
02:41:12.000 Some people get ruined for life by that because like, You can be like this.
02:41:16.000 Yeah, and you can live like this.
02:41:17.000 You can live like this.
02:41:18.000 I mean, it's fantastic.
02:41:19.000 Again, it goes back to your thing.
02:41:21.000 The people who are spurred and energized and things will orient themselves towards places that thrill them like that.
02:41:27.000 And the ones who are not will fear that they'll fail.
02:41:30.000 It's having those tools to look at things in a way that benefits you the most.
02:41:38.000 And to not be tripped up by thoughts and ideas that are limiting.
02:41:47.000 If you're upset that someone...
02:41:50.000 This is a very common one amongst certain people.
02:41:53.000 They're upset that other people are getting successful.
02:41:56.000 Upset at someone else's success.
02:41:58.000 That doesn't help you at all.
02:42:00.000 No.
02:42:00.000 There's no benefit to that thought.
02:42:02.000 Those thoughts are the opposite of the thoughts you need.
02:42:06.000 You can be inspired. 1.00
02:42:08.000 You can say, if that guy made it, I'm gonna fucking kill him. 1.00
02:42:13.000 Yeah, absolutely. 1.00
02:42:14.000 You could even do it in a shitty way.
02:42:16.000 You don't necessarily have to be praising this person.
02:42:18.000 That'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.
02:42:29.000 Gore said that?
02:42:30.000 Yeah.
02:42:30.000 Wow.
02:42:31.000 And I thought it was a pretty shitty thing to say. 0.98
02:42:32.000 That's super shitty. 0.77
02:42:33.000 But I mean, it wasn't like he minded coming across that way. 0.95
02:42:37.000 I always thought that was very...
02:42:38.000 I mean, I just...
02:42:39.000 I literally can't...
02:42:41.000 Among friends, I can't familiarize myself with that sentiment.
02:42:47.000 No.
02:42:47.000 Well, that's one of the reasons why you're so prolific.
02:42:49.000 Well, no, but when a friend does something well, you're like, that's fantastic.
02:42:54.000 Yes, yes.
02:42:55.000 And that's a great attitude.
02:42:57.000 And that's how we should all be.
02:42:58.000 And that should be...
02:42:59.000 We should shun people who think that way. 1.00
02:43:02.000 But maybe Gore was just fucking around. 1.00
02:43:04.000 I think he might have been. 0.99
02:43:04.000 I mean, he was no stranger to deliberately provoking. 0.99
02:43:07.000 His debates with William F. Buckley were fantastic.
02:43:11.000 That documentary is amazing.
02:43:13.000 That's a great documentary.
02:43:14.000 There's a film.
02:43:14.000 Really good.
02:43:14.000 There's a play that's opening about it as well.
02:43:18.000 But those are amazing debates.
02:43:19.000 I watched that documentary in Rovello.
02:43:22.000 No.
02:43:23.000 Yeah, because I was in Ravello for vacation.
02:43:25.000 You didn't visit the house?
02:43:27.000 No, I did not.
02:43:28.000 But we were staying at this resort in Ravello that overlooks the sea.
02:43:32.000 Oh, stunning.
02:43:33.000 Oh my god, it's like one of the most incredible views in the world.
02:43:36.000 It's heaven, that place.
02:43:36.000 And the food.
02:43:38.000 Oh my god!
02:43:40.000 The Italian food there is off the charts!
02:43:42.000 Positano, Ravello, it's amazing.
02:43:44.000 And I downloaded it on my laptop, so I was watching it up there.
02:43:49.000 And you know, because Gore Vidal lived there for a while.
02:43:52.000 He had that stunning house on the cliff with an external staircase.
02:43:57.000 I was in Ravello some years ago, like 10, 15 years ago, and I remember somebody pointing out Gore Vidal's house to me.
02:44:08.000 Wow, fantastic!
02:44:09.000 And they said, you know, a famous writer lived there.
02:44:12.000 Of course, it's Gore Vidal.
02:44:13.000 And they said it's on the market.
02:44:15.000 I was like, wow, that's fantastic!
02:44:17.000 And I immediately Googled, and it was 30 million dollars.
02:44:21.000 13?
02:44:21.000 Wow.
02:44:22.000 30 million euros.
02:44:23.000 And I was like, writers used to be much better paid.
02:44:28.000 Or it probably wasn't worth that much back then.
02:44:30.000 Yeah, it might not be, yeah.
02:44:32.000 Anyhow, it was a disappointing moment.
02:44:35.000 But I had a moment of thinking, wow, wouldn't it be great to move into Gore Vidal's old house? 0.80
02:44:39.000 That would be pretty fucking amazing.
02:44:41.000 But the thing is, like, how often would you be there? 0.53
02:44:44.000 I 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.
02:44:54.000 That was like our spot for the summer.
02:44:56.000 So beautiful.
02:44:56.000 Yeah, so before the kids would go back to school, we'd go to Rovello.
02:44:59.000 And I was thinking like, well, okay, if I had a house here, like how often, like it takes, how long does it take to get here? 0.97
02:45:05.000 It takes 16 hours by plane, whatever the fuck it is. 0.89
02:45:07.000 Like, how often would I do this? 0.98
02:45:09.000 I was like, I can't do this.
02:45:11.000 It's a wonderful dream, though.
02:45:13.000 It's a great dream.
02:45:14.000 Vidal was amazing.
02:45:16.000 And those debates with Buckley were really...
02:45:18.000 Television debates were good then.
02:45:20.000 Yes.
02:45:21.000 Well, 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.
02:45:34.000 And they both knew how to speak in paragraphs.
02:45:37.000 Yes.
02:45:38.000 I mean, they had a skill that almost nobody has today.
02:45:41.000 Right.
02:45:42.000 Both of them are so...
02:45:43.000 I mean, they're so lucid.
02:45:46.000 Yes.
02:45:46.000 Great writers.
02:45:47.000 And they were also...
02:45:48.000 They had...
02:45:49.000 They had great jabs at each other.
02:45:52.000 Oh, yeah.
02:45:53.000 And they would go back and forth and, well, that's because, you know.
02:45:57.000 And Buckley, I never met Buckley, but he had lots of friends in common.
02:46:01.000 He had that great, awful, weird eye thing.
02:46:05.000 Yes, yes.
02:46:06.000 And a mutual friend said that's because he was an early user of contact lenses.
02:46:10.000 You know, remember those hard contact lenses?
02:46:12.000 So that's what I thought.
02:46:14.000 And he said that's what he did.
02:46:15.000 He was always, you know.
02:46:16.000 And I said, I'm not sure that completely explains it because Buckley does it whenever he scores a palpable hit.
02:46:23.000 So 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.
02:46:33.000 And he says, And they hate America, so you must love them, Mr. Chomsky.
02:46:41.000 And he does the eyes thing.
02:46:43.000 He always did it when he was going to win.
02:46:45.000 Young Chomsky debating Buckley was very fascinating.
02:46:50.000 Wasn't it?
02:46:50.000 Because Chomsky was so measured.
02:46:53.000 Very measured.
02:46:54.000 Amazingly.
02:46:55.000 But he became so strange.
02:46:56.000 Well, he's strange now, but I feel like it's fear and age and a lot of things.
02:47:02.000 He hasn't helped a younger generation think their way through.
02:47:06.000 No.
02:47:07.000 But 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.
02:47:23.000 Really?
02:47:23.000 He went into that?
02:47:24.000 Yeah, there was his positions on either forcing people or restricting their rights and I don't want to paraphrase you.
02:47:33.000 Well, 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.
02:47:42.000 Like, this is Noam Chomsky?
02:47:44.000 Like, how is this Noam Chomsky? 0.98
02:47:45.000 And I'm like, man, old people are fucking scared of COVID. Like, really scared. 1.00
02:47:50.000 In a way, like, a healthy, fit guy like yourself is not going to be scared of.
02:47:54.000 It's a different kind of existential threat.
02:47:57.000 It's a different kind of danger.
02:47:59.000 But it comes back to that thing as well as I said earlier.
02:48:01.000 I mean, the likelihood of being lockstep on all of these issues now is very small.
02:48:06.000 Right.
02:48:07.000 Very small.
02:48:07.000 What about Chomsky is weird to you, the Chomsky of today?
02:48:12.000 Well, 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,
02:48:27.000 I thought, conspiratorial a lot of the time.
02:48:34.000 And he got horrible stuff about the Balkans, about Cambodia and stuff, and just...
02:48:41.000 I 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.
02:48:49.000 And weirdly, that became the thing he became most famous for and became a guru on.
02:48:54.000 And I never liked it.
02:48:57.000 I never liked the way in which it veered from... 0.95
02:49:03.000 No, that's people working on our gym are doing something stupid while the podcast is going off. 0.97
02:49:10.000 They must be banging on the wall. 0.99
02:49:12.000 They're saying it's time to work out or something.
02:49:14.000 I think they probably assumed we're done.
02:49:16.000 Bloody hell.
02:49:17.000 Because it's almost 4 o'clock.
02:49:20.000 You know, it's like...
02:49:22.000 Live long enough and you become a villain.
02:49:24.000 If 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.
02:49:34.000 Yeah, I saw a performer recently, I won't go into many details, who wasn't everything he had once been.
02:49:41.000 And I said to a mutual friend, jokingly, I said, when I become like that, you will tell me, won't you?
02:49:49.000 And this friend said, when I become like that, don't say a word.
02:49:56.000 Just say it's marvelous.
02:49:57.000 I mean, I think at a certain point in time, you've got to know and just step away.
02:50:02.000 But then, you know, there's people like Carlin.
02:50:04.000 Carlin performed until he died.
02:50:05.000 He died in a hotel room in Vegas.
02:50:08.000 You know?
02:50:09.000 Yeah.
02:50:10.000 Yeah.
02:50:11.000 It's also like, can you still do it?
02:50:13.000 Well, why don't you?
02:50:14.000 Right.
02:50:14.000 You know, are we just doing this because we do it at a certain level?
02:50:19.000 Yeah.
02:50:19.000 I mean, what is it?
02:50:20.000 Tommy Cooper died on stage.
02:50:22.000 Oh, wow.
02:50:24.000 Funniest man of his generation in the UK. And he died on stage, and the audience thought it was part of the act.
02:50:29.000 Did you see the video?
02:50:30.000 And they pulled the body away in front of the audience.
02:50:32.000 Oh, my God.
02:50:33.000 Last sight of him, the curtain came down.
02:50:35.000 His feet were on the wrong side, and they pulled the body.
02:50:38.000 Did they know, the people know at that point? 0.99
02:50:39.000 At that point they were starting to work out it wasn't that shit. 1.00
02:50:43.000 Jesus Christ. 0.99
02:50:44.000 But in a way, I mean, the old kind of how do you want to go.
02:50:47.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.88
02:50:48.000 How do you want to go other than having sex? 0.96
02:50:51.000 There was a recent... 0.94
02:50:53.000 Which is such a selfish thing to say.
02:50:55.000 It's very selfish.
02:50:56.000 Especially for the person you had sex with. 1.00
02:50:58.000 Like, what the fuck, they have to live with this for the rest of their life? 1.00
02:51:00.000 Now they're... 1.00
02:51:02.000 They're connected to this idea the last person they had sex with fucking died. 0.99
02:51:06.000 Yeah, the person they have sex with after that. 0.99
02:51:08.000 That's tricky.
02:51:09.000 Yeah, and they have to get a bunch under their belt before they start feeling normal about it again.
02:51:13.000 You know, have a bunch of sessions.
02:51:15.000 Like, okay, I think I'm not a jinx.
02:51:18.000 I think it's not me, you know?
02:51:20.000 There was a woman, her name's Heather McDonald, she's a comic, and she was on stage joking around about how vaccinated she was. 0.91
02:51:27.000 About she's vaccinated and boosted and, you know, and I even got the shingles vaccine or whatever the fuck it was. 0.96
02:51:35.000 And she's in the middle of doing this and blacks out on stage. 1.00
02:51:39.000 And bangs her head off the ground. 0.96
02:51:42.000 Like, watch this.
02:51:43.000 Let's play it.
02:51:44.000 Let's play it from the beginning.
02:51:45.000 And I still get my period.
02:51:47.000 I don't care, but I want you to know, double vaxxed, booster, flu shot, and I'm going to be honest, I have the shingle shot too.
02:51:59.000 And I still get my period.
02:52:01.000 What?
02:52:02.000 Yes!
02:52:05.000 Traveled.
02:52:06.000 Went to Mexico twice.
02:52:09.000 Did shows, meet and greets.
02:52:12.000 Never got COVID. Clearly, Jesus loves me the most.
02:52:17.000 Seriously.
02:52:18.000 So nice.
02:52:20.000 So nice.
02:52:28.000 I wish I'd seen that.
02:52:30.000 Well, it's not funny, really.
02:52:31.000 I laughed, unfortunately, because it was my friend Justin Martindale.
02:52:34.000 That was the guy, the comedian.
02:52:35.000 Did she die?
02:52:37.000 No, but she did crack her skull. 1.00
02:52:39.000 She literally bounced her skull off the hard stage and cracked her skull.
02:52:44.000 You see, I read a column recently saying, and this wildly backs up my view, I do slightly believe in the old gods.
02:52:50.000 There's something to that.
02:52:51.000 There's something to it.
02:52:51.000 How many of these people that are saying, we need to enforce vax mandates, and they're just like...
02:52:55.000 There's something to it that you just don't tempt the fates.
02:52:58.000 There's so many people.
02:52:58.000 Or they'll come running at you.
02:53:00.000 They'll hitch up their skirts, come running at you, and smack the living daylights out of you. 1.00
02:53:04.000 I 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.
02:53:16.000 There's got to be something in the fates.
02:53:18.000 So never boast like that.
02:53:20.000 Never.
02:53:21.000 Particularly not about your period.
02:53:22.000 Yeah.
02:53:24.000 Because that's a crazy one.
02:53:25.000 And I still got my period. 0.99
02:53:27.000 Like, what you're talking about is how many women don't get their fucking period. 1.00
02:53:31.000 Because it's a real thing. 0.99
02:53:32.000 Yeah. 0.98
02:53:33.000 You know, I have a friend who didn't get a period for six fucking months after she got her shot. 0.94
02:53:40.000 Yeah, it's a weird thing. 0.93
02:53:41.000 It's not for everybody, but it's a real thing.
02:53:43.000 It's like, she's joking around about this, and then God's like, ha-ha!
02:53:48.000 That's it.
02:53:49.000 Check, please.
02:53:50.000 Never tempt the fates.
02:53:52.000 No.
02:53:52.000 Yeah.
02:53:54.000 Are you doing an audio version of this?
02:53:56.000 I've done the audio version.
02:53:58.000 How stressful is that?
02:54:00.000 It's not stressful at all.
02:54:01.000 I love it.
02:54:01.000 Do you?
02:54:02.000 Well, you talk well.
02:54:02.000 I love it.
02:54:02.000 No, no, no.
02:54:03.000 It's not that.
02:54:03.000 I really love it because it's...
02:54:06.000 When 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. 0.60
02:54:18.000 Yeah.
02:54:18.000 And when you read it, it can be funny.
02:54:19.000 When you read it out loud, it can just be hilarious. 0.99
02:54:21.000 So there are people I quote just like crazy shit that people say. 0.98
02:54:25.000 And I find myself like having to say to the producer, I'm sorry, a corpse singer, laughing so much. 0.99
02:54:31.000 I'm not laughing at my own jokes. 0.75
02:54:33.000 I'm laughing at how ridiculous this is when you say it out loud. 0.95
02:54:37.000 Yes. 1.00
02:54:38.000 There's this woman from Yale who fantasizes about killing white men. 1.00
02:54:43.000 When I'm typing up what she says, it's like, this is crazy. 0.99
02:54:47.000 When you read it out loud, you go, this is a really deranged person who should be locked up very fast.
02:54:54.000 But it's great fun doing it. 0.96
02:54:56.000 Is she a white woman? 1.00
02:54:57.000 Yeah, of course.
02:54:58.000 It's always white women! 1.00
02:55:00.000 Why do women hate white people so much? 1.00
02:55:04.000 Yeah, but it's great. 0.93
02:55:06.000 I love doing it.
02:55:06.000 And 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.
02:55:14.000 Yes.
02:55:15.000 Only a few years ago people used to think it was like cheating somehow.
02:55:17.000 It's not.
02:55:17.000 You get all the same information.
02:55:18.000 I still feel guilty when I say that I listen to audiobooks mostly.
02:55:22.000 I do read occasionally, but it's like 8 out of 10 I'm listening.
02:55:27.000 I think it's a great medium.
02:55:28.000 I do too.
02:55:29.000 I think it's great fun to do.
02:55:30.000 And it's great fun to listen to.
02:55:32.000 And sometimes there are kind of jokes and things which come across slightly better read than on the page.
02:55:38.000 Oh, for sure.
02:55:39.000 Sarcasm translates so much better.
02:55:41.000 I had one in Madness of Crowds.
02:55:42.000 I referred to somebody who described something as being literally like Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.
02:55:47.000 And I say in the book, I say, not just any old Mein Kampf.
02:55:50.000 Adolf Hitler's in my account.
02:55:51.000 And it's definitely better read than on the page.
02:55:59.000 Well, especially that it's your voice.
02:56:00.000 The 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.
02:56:08.000 And so you have someone completely disconnected from the work who's just reading it, and you're like, oh no, don't do this.
02:56:14.000 Well, for me, it's a great pleasure.
02:56:16.000 And it brings you a whole new audience, you know, and I love that.
02:56:18.000 There are people who do jobs which, you know, they need to spend a lot of the day listening to stuff, and they listen to books.
02:56:25.000 Yes.
02:56:25.000 Like, what's better than that?
02:56:27.000 I just listen to them when I commute.
02:56:31.000 Right.
02:56:31.000 It's like, so I have an hour of that book every day.
02:56:34.000 Right.
02:56:34.000 Half hour here, half hour home.
02:56:36.000 And that is, I mean, you can get through a book pretty well that way.
02:56:40.000 Yeah, you can listen to this one if you'd like.
02:56:42.000 I will.
02:56:43.000 100%.
02:56:44.000 It's out now?
02:56:45.000 The War on the West.
02:56:46.000 The War on the West.
02:56:46.000 All formats.
02:56:47.000 I don't have anything signed for me.
02:56:48.000 Will you sign this one for me?
02:56:50.000 Yeah.
02:56:50.000 All right.
02:56:51.000 Feels nice.
02:56:51.000 Beautifully.
02:56:52.000 Please?
02:56:54.000 Well, thank you for being you, man.
02:56:55.000 I really appreciate you.
02:56:57.000 I love your work.
02:56:58.000 I love the fact that you're out there.
02:57:01.000 There's not a lot of you, Douglas Murray.
02:57:03.000 There's not a lot of people that I could point to and say, that guy's on to it.
02:57:08.000 So it means a lot to me.
02:57:10.000 Appreciate you're out there.
02:57:11.000 It means a lot to me.
02:57:12.000 And you can get this now along with all the other books, The Strange Death of Europe, Madness of Crowds, and this, The War on the West.
02:57:19.000 Do you have any other books?
02:57:21.000 I've been keeping busy.
02:57:23.000 You make it sound like I'm a...
02:57:24.000 Are those the three, though?
02:57:25.000 No, no, no.
02:57:25.000 I've written like seven books.
02:57:27.000 Okay.
02:57:28.000 If you buy these three, you're well set.
02:57:30.000 We're good.
02:57:31.000 All right.
02:57:31.000 Thank you.
02:57:32.000 Appreciate you, man.
02:57:33.000 Bye, everybody.