The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

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00:00:45.300 So a couple of announcements.

00:00:47.120 First, I'm on tour again.

00:00:49.280 And so if you go to jordanbpeterson.com, you can find out cities and dates.

00:00:53.620 And that starts in December and runs through April.

00:00:56.020 So check that out if you're inclined.

00:00:58.080 The tour deals with the issues that I raise in my new book,

00:01:01.600 which came out on November 19th.

00:01:04.060 It's called We Who Wrestle With God.

00:01:06.100 And in that book, I take apart a sequence of Old Testament stories

00:01:10.780 and explain, at least as far as I'm concerned, at least part of what they mean.

00:01:16.440 And I try to do that in a way that's comprehensible and as profound as I could make it,

00:01:22.380 but also very practically applicable.

00:01:25.280 And so that's a good combination of high-level abstraction

00:01:28.620 and immediate practical applicability.

00:01:30.740 You need to know these stories because they're the stories that are fundamentally about you

00:01:34.640 and about everybody that you know and about how society is structured

00:01:37.400 and our relationship with nature and the divine.

00:01:41.000 So come to the tour.

00:01:42.660 Pick up the book if you're inclined.

00:01:43.840 And today, I had a chance to speak with Andrew Doyle, with whom I've spoken before.

00:01:49.660 We've been in touch for a number of years now.

00:01:51.960 Andrew's a comedian in the UK, the infamous creator of Titania McGrath,

00:01:57.240 who was one of the most effective characters ever devised to satirize the woke left.

00:02:01.640 And Andrew's been at that for a very long time.

00:02:03.900 So we spent a fair bit of time discussing what he's up to as an immigrant to Phoenix.

00:02:09.600 And along with Andrew, I spoke with Graham Linehan, who is joining Andrew in the establishment

00:02:15.800 of a new entertainment enterprise in Phoenix with Rob Schneider and some other people.

00:02:20.700 Their hope is that they can actually do some things that would be funny.

00:02:25.220 And that would be a lovely thing to see since humor is in short supply in the woke,

00:02:29.020 totalitarian world that we inhabit now.

00:02:31.380 Although maybe the comedians, the true comedians like Joe Rogan, will in fact have their last laugh.

00:02:36.920 So we talked about Graham's life in a fair, in fair detail at the beginning of the podcast,

00:02:43.300 because he went from riches to rags, right?

00:02:46.320 Quite traumatically.

00:02:48.320 Graham was maybe the most successful sitcom writer in the UK and the man who penned a number

00:02:56.280 of shows that were beloved by, well, by, by very large audiences.

00:03:01.000 And despite that, when he had the temerity to have some perfectly reasonable opinions about

00:03:05.660 perfectly reasonable subjects, he, his life was demolished.

00:03:09.420 As marriage ended, he was persona non grata in the artistic community, which is a complete

00:03:15.280 bloody catastrophe.

00:03:16.680 And eventually was inclined, not by, at least by necessity, to sever his ties with his home

00:03:24.340 country.

00:03:25.180 Everyone he knew virtually turned the other way.

00:03:28.720 And that's a terrible thing.

00:03:30.960 And Andrew, by contrast, has sort of ridden the woke wave, I would say.

00:03:36.140 He's one of the few individuals, particularly in the UK, who has managed to turn the fact

00:03:41.320 of the woke mob into something approximating enhanced commercial success.

00:03:46.240 And so as Graham's ship was sinking, Andrew's star was rising.

00:03:51.540 In any case, they have joined forces now.

00:03:53.980 And with Rob Schneider to start this new enterprise, we talked about the dismal state of the UK

00:04:00.020 and Europe.

00:04:01.900 We've seen a revolution in political, in the political landscape in the United States.

00:04:06.060 There's one coming to Canada, but man, things are looking rough in the UK.

00:04:10.120 The true home of common law and the tradition of free speech and the home of at least once

00:04:16.840 of the greatest comedians the world has ever seen, I think.

00:04:19.280 And so that's a terrible thing to see.

00:04:21.880 And the same dismal fate at the moment appears to await Europe.

00:04:26.420 And so we delved into that in some detail, touching along the way the absolute pathology

00:04:31.280 of the Canadian liberal landscape under our head narcissist, Justin Trudeau, who's fated

00:04:37.160 for an electoral defeat of unimaginable magnitude, but not for a whole year during which he'll do

00:04:43.180 plenty of damage in precisely the way that a wounded narcissist would.

00:04:46.900 Anyways, if you're interested in any or all of that, join us on this podcast.

00:04:52.900 So, gentlemen, welcome.

00:04:54.980 I think the first thing we should probably do is let everybody know what you have done

00:05:00.940 in the past to be sufficiently reprehensible to be a worthwhile guest on this particular

00:05:05.800 podcast.

00:05:06.500 Graham, why don't you let everybody know, well, yeah, the nature of your sins and crimes.

00:05:12.400 Well, I was, for most of my adult life, I was a sitcom writer, comedy writer, and quite

00:05:22.220 a successful one.

00:05:24.300 You know, got a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Comedy Awards, Standing Ovation.

00:05:29.460 I think I've won about five BAFTAs personally, one Emmy, done about five sitcoms, three of

00:05:39.480 which are kind of, you know, near household names.

00:05:43.960 What were they?

00:05:45.040 Father Ted was the main one.

00:05:46.520 Father Ted actually was so influential that they say it had a little bit to do with the

00:05:52.140 Irish church releasing its hold in the 90s on Ireland, you know, just because we weren't

00:05:59.960 very satirical. 0.97

00:06:01.620 We were very silly. 0.98

00:06:02.960 We were always a surreal and silly show. 0.95

00:06:05.600 And so that had more effect, something I am in two minds about now, and actually kind 0.63

00:06:14.360 of just helped limit the church's influence to some extent by simply throwing a banana peel

00:06:20.320 in their way, you know.

00:06:22.120 So everything was going great.

00:06:23.880 I was asked to write an accompanying play for a Peter Schaefer farce, which I love, called

00:06:30.840 Black Comedy, which has got the most extraordinary premise.

00:06:36.480 And that was the first thing, I think, oh, and I was supposed to go and teach comedy in Australia.

00:06:41.920 That was the first...

00:06:42.620 They need that.

00:06:42.940 They need somebody to teach comedy.

00:06:44.840 That was the first thing that went.

00:06:46.340 And they said they couldn't...

00:06:49.060 I heard something I heard over and over again, that it was security problems, you know.

00:06:52.800 They couldn't afford the security.

00:06:54.680 You'd hear that a lot.

00:06:56.520 Then the...

00:06:58.280 Security for you or for the people that you were going to offend?

00:07:01.480 Well, that's the thing.

00:07:02.520 You know, that was the first time I said, can I speak to my accusers?

00:07:06.720 Can I see if I can...

00:07:09.280 I know, yeah.

00:07:10.080 I was very...

00:07:10.780 How old-fashioned could you get?

00:07:12.460 Well, this was the very earliest days when I still felt that there were people of good

00:07:18.320 faith within things like gender ideology, and they, you just, if you just explained certain

00:07:25.840 things, they would, like, for instance, one of the things that I started talking about,

00:07:30.120 because I was paying attention to women who were being bullied offline, who were called 1.00

00:07:33.800 TERFs, you know, and I was trying to figure all this out, but I saw that women were getting 1.00

00:07:39.700 death threats and rape threats for even discussing it, and one of the earliest things I saw was

00:07:44.560 actually a Canadian story that the Vancouver Rape Relief had a dead rat nailed to their door

00:07:50.960 because they wouldn't accept men in their sessions, you know, or whatever they're called.

00:07:58.200 Was that before or after the government cut off their funding for refusing to accept men?

00:08:02.520 I think it was after, and, you know, I helped raise money for them, and I just thought, as soon as

00:08:10.820 some people saw it, they would go, what? A rat nailed to the door of a rape crisis center?

00:08:18.480 A dead rat. 1.00

00:08:19.540 A dead rat. What can we do to help? And there was none of that. No one stood up for me. I just started,

00:08:26.720 the kind of propaganda piece, Paper Pink News, published, has now published over 75 stories

00:08:33.700 about me. They famously did 42 stories on J.K. Rowling in a single week, you know, so seven

00:08:42.200 stories, six stories a day for seven days.

00:08:44.960 The world's most famous TERF?

00:08:46.440 Yeah, absolutely.

00:08:47.560 Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, right? 0.62

00:08:49.860 Yeah.

00:08:50.280 That's the acronym of the day?

00:08:51.880 Yeah. And as far as I could make out, it did not seem exclusionary. The feminism these 1.00

00:08:59.080 women were practicing was basic feminism that I've... 1.00

00:09:02.680 You mean the kind that believes that women exist?

00:09:04.880 That women exist. 1.00

00:09:05.520 Yeah, that kind of feminism. 1.00

00:09:06.500 That they have value, that sex is important, and that men shouldn't be allowed in women's 1.00

00:09:11.980 sports, and all this type of thing. And I started saying...

00:09:14.620 Especially fetishistic men? These sorts of men?

00:09:16.920 Yeah. And especially the kind of men who would want to do it.

00:09:20.940 Yeah, right. Especially those kind, yeah.

00:09:23.260 Yeah. So, yeah, so it was almost instantaneous. I lost. Every job I got would just disappear

00:09:32.600 within moments sometimes. I'm the shortest term director on any project, I think, when

00:09:39.640 I was asked to direct Steve Martin's Only Murders in the Building, and then, you know, put

00:09:46.100 down the phone, and a few minutes later got an email saying, actually, someone else has

00:09:49.720 stepped in. And I suspect that the real reason for that was that he, being excited, announced

00:09:55.720 to his colleagues, we've got Graham Linehan. And someone put up their hand and said, he's

00:10:00.780 a bigot. And I think that that's basically what means I can't really work in the UK at

00:10:06.040 the moment. I had a musical based on Father Ted that would have made millions. And they just

00:10:12.440 took it from me, refused to make it if my name is associated with it.

00:10:15.880 Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, I've often thought that, you know, when people are no longer, what would

00:10:22.760 you say, cynical and evil enough to be greedy, we're really, really in trouble.

00:10:27.080 That's right.

00:10:27.960 Definitely. Definitely. Definitely.

00:10:28.980 I hate you. See, I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to, you know, take over.

00:10:34.860 But basically, maybe, maybe we should get rid of, I should leave the rest of my, because

00:10:38.240 there's so much.

00:10:38.960 Well, I want to, I want to just get the story exactly straight, so everyone knows. So, were

00:10:43.700 you the most successful sitcom writer in the UK? Is that, is that a reasonable statement?

00:10:48.260 Or in the top five? Like, what do you think's fair?

00:10:51.360 I think it's, I don't know.

00:10:53.720 I'd say, I mean, definitely top five.

00:10:55.700 Okay.

00:10:56.000 No, that's hard for me to...

00:10:57.080 So, definitely that. And, and, okay.

00:10:59.280 There's probably not even five good sitcoms.

00:11:00.920 No, there probably isn't. No.

00:11:02.460 Okay.

00:11:03.320 You know.

00:11:03.860 Right, right. The tallest midget in the world. Right, right. And so, okay, now, and you said 1.00

00:11:09.820 you had three extremely famous sitcoms, one of which was Father Ted. What were the other

00:11:13.720 two?

00:11:13.940 The other was one called The IT Crowd, which was set, was about IT, an IT department.

00:11:21.360 Because I, it was, we wrote it in around 2005, and I noticed the internet becoming a thing,

00:11:27.740 and I was always told, well, I went to an early Danny Simon course, who was one of the

00:11:32.920 writers on Bilko, and a lot of things that Woody Allen worked on, Neil Simon's brother,

00:11:38.740 you know, and he said a sitcom should always be about social change. So, if you see something

00:11:44.640 coming around the corner, write about it. So, I always had my ear to the door.

00:11:47.800 Like the Jeffersons, or All in the Family, right?

00:11:50.140 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:11:51.940 Kind of on the cutting edge of social inquiry.

00:11:54.640 Yeah.

00:11:54.740 Like, those were extremely well-timed.

00:11:56.900 Yes. The one example he gave was Mary Tyler Marshall.

00:12:00.480 Right. Yeah, another great example. Yeah, absolutely.

00:12:02.600 Although he used the phrase women's livers, which was very funny. He's this old guy. 1.00

00:12:06.200 I know. It's like 90-year-old people use that phrase.

00:12:08.680 Exactly. But, so yeah, so I wrote the IT crowd. Like, we have an early parody ad for Facebook.

00:12:16.680 It was so unusual to us. And I still feel that about the internet, that we've still all got

00:12:23.160 whiplash, and we don't really know what it's done to us as a species.

00:12:26.920 So, Father Ted, the IT crowd, and?

00:12:29.720 I'd say the one that might be well-known is called Black Books. The other is a show called

00:12:37.440 Motherland that was quite successful recently.

00:12:40.220 That's quite a string of hits.

00:12:42.320 Yeah.

00:12:42.580 Okay. So now, what exactly did you do that was so unforgivable? And when?

00:12:49.460 I think it was about 2016 or 17.

00:12:55.400 Yeah. Well, that's when things really went insane.

00:12:57.840 Yeah. Well, also, I had a bit of, you know, Trump derangement syndrome. I don't know how

00:13:01.560 you were when he won the first time, but I thought the world was going to end. I was fully

00:13:05.100 taken in by the, you know, the way he was being portrayed. In fact, what was being done to him

00:13:11.920 was about to be done to me, you know?

00:13:14.300 Well, he said, they're after you. I'm just in the way.

00:13:16.760 Yeah.

00:13:17.260 Right? There's some real truth in that.

00:13:18.840 Did he really say that?

00:13:18.860 Absolutely. 100%. It became quite a famous statement during this election cycle.

00:13:23.320 Right.

00:13:23.880 Yeah, yeah. It appealed to a lot of, well, a lot of megatypes and a lot of people who

00:13:28.480 had been cancelled unexpectedly by their friends and compatriots.

00:13:33.320 Well, I always think of that Muhammad Ali line where he said, you know, the Vietnamese never

00:13:39.420 called me no N-word. And I feel the same way about the left. You know, the right never

00:13:43.780 called me a bigot.

00:13:44.860 Right, right, right, right.

00:13:45.640 And they called me a bigot for basic things like saying, hey, you shouldn't be cutting 0.98

00:13:50.760 the breasts off little girls. You shouldn't be... 1.00

00:13:53.860 Yep. There's one non-hate crime incident.

00:13:55.940 Yep.

00:13:56.320 We can keep piling them up.

00:13:57.940 There shouldn't be men in women's prisons. It's actually against the Geneva Convention 1.00

00:14:02.860 to put men in women's prisons. 1.00

00:14:04.420 Yeah, but what is a man, sir?

00:14:05.920 All over. Yeah. There's a terrible story in Ireland. This bloke who was, you know, he

00:14:13.520 had an awful childhood. He was forced by his father to rape his mother and he was severely 0.96

00:14:18.420 disturbed. His name was Barbie Kardashian. And because Ireland sneaked in self-ID without 0.95

00:14:25.360 allowing the people of Ireland to really discuss it, Barbie Kardashian, who hates women with 1.00

00:14:31.660 a completely tunnel, with complete tunnel vision.

00:14:35.720 In a manner you would not want to imagine ever, even in your darkest nightmares.

00:14:40.040 Exactly. Exactly. He's now sharing living space with female prisoners. 1.00

00:14:45.780 Well, no psychopaths would pretend to be women just to get access to women. They're not that

00:14:50.620 sort of people, you know.

00:14:51.760 I used to say about the Catholic Church, at least priests had to learn Latin. You know,

00:14:56.020 these guys, all they have to do is put on some eye shadow. And every door is open to them.

00:15:02.200 Or complain about the fact that the bigots are using eye shadow as a marker of gender

00:15:06.400 and that's not fair.

00:15:08.100 Right.

00:15:08.620 Yeah. Well, the rules change all the time. And that's something I didn't realize as well,

00:15:12.660 is that the rules were very fluid.

00:15:16.020 Just like identity.

00:15:17.620 Yeah.

00:15:18.080 Yeah.

00:15:18.360 But it's like, it's like they try and pretend that identity is fluid by making the conversation

00:15:24.260 fluid and hard to understand. I mean, part of me is very angry for the fact that no one

00:15:28.960 stood in my career, stood up for me, you know. But another part kind of understands because

00:15:35.100 the language around this issue is so deliberately confusing.

00:15:39.040 They did a...

00:15:39.760 And the cost of standing up is high. Of course, the cost of not standing up is higher.

00:15:44.120 But it is understandable why people... You can understand why people choose to remain

00:15:50.860 silent. That doesn't excuse it, but you can understand it.

00:15:54.520 Well, there's an interesting... I can't remember who did the... People are wondering,

00:15:58.840 who the hell is this guy on the ground left?

00:16:02.320 Hello.

00:16:02.840 No, it's everyone that's fine.

00:16:03.180 I know, I feel terrible that I'm talking so much.

00:16:07.520 But this guy, I can't remember who said it, but he said that during the Nazi years,

00:16:13.440 there's a kind of widespread assumption that everyone was afraid of being terrified of

00:16:17.600 being tortured by a guy with a scar on, a dueling scar on his face. And he says, no,

00:16:23.140 the reason that ordinary Germans went along with it for the most part was because of career 0.90

00:16:28.680 advancements. They did not want their careers to be stalled.

00:16:31.000 Well, you can understand ever since COVID, ever since all this cancellation, you can understand

00:16:35.160 exactly what happened in Germany. And I think they actually had far more excuse because

00:16:39.180 it was a lot easier to make sure people didn't know what the hell was going on when

00:16:43.100 everyone wasn't connected to everything all the time.

00:16:46.020 That's it.

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00:17:56.360 Crimes that the Nazis were undertaking were of sufficient magnitude so that it's not surprising 0.99

00:18:01.320 that people didn't believe they were happening. I mean, you know, what's his name? Michael

00:18:05.300 Schellenberger, when he broke the WPATH files, he told me that he had listened to the conversation

00:18:11.000 I had with Abigail Schreier, which was a very early conversation on the child mutilation and

00:18:15.760 sterilization front. And he said that his response, you know, and he's liberal in his orientation

00:18:20.960 fundamentally, was that there was no way that that could be happening. And then, you know, two years

00:18:26.580 later, well, he investigated it in great detail and came to the conclusion that, yeah, in fact,

00:18:31.180 it was happening. It was led by a pack of the most reprehensible people you could possibly imagine.

00:18:36.240 Insane. 0.93

00:18:36.780 It's not worse than insane. Truly malevolent and fetishistic and demented in the way that we've 0.57

00:18:43.180 been describing WPATH people and unforgivable. So you were standing up for, like, normal reality,

00:18:51.300 and that was that, and it happened very quickly.

00:18:53.720 Yeah.

00:18:54.380 Okay, so let's turn to Andrew for a moment. We'll get back to you right away. So, Andrew,

00:18:57.800 I think people probably on this podcast are a little bit more familiar with you in all likelihood than

00:19:02.860 they are with Graham, not least because of your famous character. Now, of course,

00:19:08.900 your name is going to escape me.

00:19:10.020 It's Titania McGram.

00:19:10.920 Titania, yes, of course, of course. And you wrote a book as her, which was very comical,

00:19:15.420 and you had it and still have? How active is Titania on X now?

00:19:22.000 Less active than she used to be. But, you know, I was very active as her for a long time.

00:19:25.980 I wrote two books as her. We did a live show where I had an actress play her. We got to do

00:19:31.240 a West End show in London. We only got to do one because we were booked for a week,

00:19:36.000 but the person who runs the theatre found out and scotched that. So we ended up with a deal,

00:19:40.540 so we only did one.

00:19:40.860 That's funny. It's very funny that Titania McGrath got cancelled.

00:19:44.080 Yeah, well, there's that. Exactly, yes. She probably wanted to cancel herself. 1.00

00:19:47.520 Yes.

00:19:47.800 But I'm in a different position from Graham because I was never feted or successful in

00:19:51.820 the way that he was, so I wasn't cancelled in a sense. All it means is that, you know,

00:19:55.500 I was satirising this movement, and that kind of meant that I was put in the bad pen.

00:20:03.220 Right, right. So you were an early part of the movement to monetise the social justice warriors.

00:20:07.580 Exactly. It was as cynical as that, yeah.

00:20:09.200 Someone absolutely wanted to do that. So, yeah, so explain. Let's go back to the time of Titania

00:20:15.560 McGrath. Explain what you were doing, and then also tell everybody all the other things that

00:20:19.980 you've been involved in. Well, not...

00:20:21.900 Well, I suppose, I mean, like a lot of people within the comedy industry, because my background

00:20:25.740 is stand-up comedy and playwriting and writing musicals and that kind of thing. A lot of people

00:20:30.100 in the creative arts got dragged into this culture war because by virtue of what we do,

00:20:34.320 we're on the front line of it, insofar as creative people are often either teasing the

00:20:38.940 boundaries of tolerance or addressing issues, certainly with satire, when you're holding

00:20:44.560 up to ridicule and scrutiny the most powerful elements of society. But all of a sudden,

00:20:50.000 this movement came along, which we might call wokeness or critical social justice or whatever

00:20:54.260 you want to call it, which was effectively a new powerful force in society, which no one

00:20:59.500 was ridiculing. It was as though for all of us, this one closed system of thought had somehow

00:21:05.860 successfully portrayed itself as the underdog and therefore became ring-fenced from satirical

00:21:11.100 attention, which is an interesting, unprecedented thing. You know, normally we know the church,

00:21:15.260 the state, the government, whatever. We know who the powerful people are, and we know where the

00:21:18.980 satirist's target will be. But this was a group that said, if you mock us, you're actually punching

00:21:23.500 down. You're a bully. 1.00

00:21:24.480 You're a bully. Even though, of course, their whole movement was legitimizing bullying. And because of 1.00

00:21:29.880 the whole thing was played... Well, it's also a movement that was based on the belief that virtually

00:21:33.760 every form of interaction can be construed as a kind of bullying, given that there's no human

00:21:38.720 motivation fundamentally other than that of power.

00:21:41.800 Yes, exactly. So it's this power-obsessed, identity-obsessed movement that plays with language,

00:21:47.840 plays elaborate word games so that they can...

00:21:50.240 Very effectively, too.

00:21:51.400 Hugely effectively. So they can be the bullies and say that any criticism is bullying. They can

00:21:55.680 be regressive and call themselves progressive. They can be illiberal and call themselves liberal.

00:21:59.820 They can twist everything linguistically around.

00:22:02.100 They can be men, call themselves...

00:22:03.140 Men and women. So everything is up for grabs in that.

00:22:05.840 Yeah. But that, I think, is the real danger, especially if you're a writer, that if you can

00:22:10.960 change the meaning of fundamental word combination like men and women, then everything falls apart.

00:22:17.140 That's exactly right. I think, like, I've looked into this quite deeply at a psychological level,

00:22:22.260 and I think you can make a strong biological case at the level of perception that there is no

00:22:28.120 distinction more fundamental than the distinction between male and female. It's more fundamental than

00:22:34.960 up and down. It's more fundamental than black and white or night and day. And if you can get

00:22:39.900 people to swallow the equivalence of that fundamental pair of opposites, there is absolutely no lie

00:22:45.400 whatsoever that they'll resist.

00:22:47.060 And in a sense, that would be fine if it was confided to the flesh pots of academia. If it 0.94

00:22:54.720 were just the old postmodern theorists... 0.85

00:22:57.260 Or a gay club. 0.79

00:22:58.360 Oh, well, fine, yeah.

00:22:59.400 Do you know what I mean? Or there's certain things that have been weaponized, and one of them is the

00:23:03.640 empathy that gay people feel for outsiders. You know, they've always been very protective of them.

00:23:08.360 Well, that's not quite my point. My point is that if it was just at the level of theorizing,

00:23:12.340 which it was at some point until the late 80s, and then all of a sudden it became applied into

00:23:17.180 society. What I mean is the government now pursues policies based on this inversion of what man and

00:23:23.340 woman means, what truth and fiction is. It wouldn't matter if it was just theorists and activists. 1.00

00:23:28.180 Yeah, absolutely. That's my point.

00:23:29.840 It's the compulsion, too, that's the problem, right? The fact that this is why I objected to Bill C-16 back

00:23:36.740 in about 2016. It's like, you know, I can say whatever I want, fundamentally, but the government

00:23:44.040 doesn't get to compel it, and I don't care if the reason is hypothetically empathy and compassion.

00:23:50.480 It's like, first of all, I doubt that, and second, it doesn't matter.

00:23:53.780 Well, actually, to Graham's point, there was a recent, a couple of weeks ago,

00:23:57.080 the government spokesperson for equalities in the House of Lords, is Baroness Jackie Smith,

00:24:01.560 was asked explicitly, what is gender identity? What is the government's working definition

00:24:05.980 of gender identity, given that so many public health policies are being implemented on the

00:24:10.400 basis of this concept? What is your definition? And she's turned it around and said, that's a gotcha.

00:24:15.280 She said, you know, you should take this seriously, you know, in other words, not answering the

00:24:19.880 question, fudging the answer, and turning it around and blaming the person for asking in the first place.

00:24:24.800 And, you know, we have this similarly just today in the House of Commons.

00:24:29.820 We have a member of the House standing up calling for blasphemy law, calling for

00:24:34.740 the desecration of the Quran to be illegal. We've had cross-party discussions in the UK

00:24:40.980 on the definition of Islamophobia, and it was agreed by both parties that Islamophobia is a type of

00:24:46.800 racism based on Muslimness or perceived Muslimness, whatever that means. But it's not racism because

00:24:52.860 Islam is not a race. It is a very ethnically diverse belief system. So when you have governments,

00:24:58.920 and I know it's very bad in Canada, but when you have governments actually proceeding on this

00:25:04.140 slippery linguistic terrain, where even they don't understand the terms that they are deploying,

00:25:09.300 then that means that those activists that I'm talking about have won. They've won out. And they

00:25:13.360 are the most powerful, which is why, you know, we've been satirizing them. That's why we've been

00:25:18.100 mocking them, because they're in charge.

00:25:21.140 We have a YouTube channel where we talk about, you know, the gender issue. And one of the important 0.99

00:25:25.820 things we felt was, you've got to show people it's safe to laugh at this stuff, you know, because 0.98

00:25:29.760 it is ridiculous. One of the things I got into trouble for was Eddie Izzard said that he would

00:25:37.400 have been a victim of the Holocaust. And I said, yes, the Nazis famously bigoted against straight

00:25:44.840 white men with blonde hair, you know. That got me called a Holocaust denier by trans rights activists.

00:25:51.140 And didn't J.K. Rowling sort of, or other people supported that point of view, and they got

00:25:56.160 called Holocaust deniers as well?

00:25:57.660 Yeah. Oh, yeah. Rowling is now a Holocaust denier because, you know.

00:26:01.340 Well, what can you expect from a turf?

00:26:05.080 Isn't that crazy? 0.50

00:26:06.280 But my point, just to come back slightly to my point about gay clubs, I think this is a really 1.00

00:26:11.500 important one, because I heard one of, you're going to have to tell me the details, but Foucault,

00:26:16.760 is that how you pronounce his name?

00:26:17.560 Foucault, yeah.

00:26:18.360 Foucault's, one of his observations is that in a small village, there might be a guy who 0.97

00:26:25.900 calls himself mayor, but he's not the mayor, he's just a crazy guy. But everyone says,

00:26:29.940 oh, hello, mayor, and they listen to him and they take his advice and stuff like that.

00:26:33.560 Now, that seems to be what affirmation is.

00:26:36.400 Yes.

00:26:36.800 Right?

00:26:37.080 Yes.

00:26:37.400 But the thing is, once you widen it throughout society, it falls apart. It's untenable once you

00:26:42.140 get outside of that small village. And what I think gay clubs were, was a place

00:26:46.340 where outsiders could come. You wanted to dress as a woman, you wanted to dress in ridiculous 1.00

00:26:50.520 clothes. The gay club was a safe place to do all that. 1.00

00:26:53.880 Yeah. 0.84

00:26:54.040 But that empathy has been weaponized by straight white men in, you know, AGPs, who are basically 0.56

00:27:01.400 manipulating the empathy that both women and gay people have for the outsider.

00:27:07.240 There's a problem there, fundamentally, that's akin to the problem of the center and the margin.

00:27:13.240 Now, the postmodernists, the French intellectuals, assumed that the reason that any center was

00:27:21.340 established was for no other reason than that of power. And so, they construed the center against

00:27:28.180 its opposite, let's say. That's like a dialectic of thesis and antithesis. But there's a problem

00:27:34.300 with that conceptually, because the center is always a unity. And any unity is surrounded by a

00:27:41.060 margin right now. And there's an uneasy balance between the center and the margin, because

00:27:45.420 all centers have a margin. And the margin is where all the experimentation takes place that's

00:27:51.940 necessary for the center to propagate itself across time, because it has to change somewhat as it moves.

00:27:57.800 But the problem with the margin is that every element of the margin has a margin. And then every

00:28:04.620 element of the fringe of the margin has a margin. And if you go out far enough into the margin,

00:28:10.520 you don't encounter the oppressed, you encounter the truly monstrous. And that's a very big problem.

00:28:17.700 Yeah. But maybe part of the problem is that we no longer tolerate the eccentric. I mean,

00:28:22.260 John Stuart Mill writes about the importance of the eccentric within society.

00:28:25.120 The UK was always great at that, too.

00:28:26.640 Right, exactly. Great at that.

00:28:27.820 But if you don't, and if you problematize eccentricity and demand conformity, in other

00:28:33.480 words, you empower those further marginal states that you're talking about, those realms

00:28:37.640 of the monstrous.

00:28:38.760 Is that so much, I think that they're, it seems to me more that they're giving eccentrics too

00:28:45.160 much power. I'm sorry, that's what you said.

00:28:47.600 Well, I'm saying that those aren't eccentric. I'm saying the ones that they're empowering.

00:28:50.520 But there's people like, there's one guy, a famous guy in the UK, he's got a beard,

00:28:54.080 he appeared on this video that a wonderful Scottish TERF, who died very young, 34 years

00:29:00.920 old, Magdalene Burns, absolutely wonderful, was first on the scene of the crime. And her 1.00

00:29:05.480 videos are amazing. I really recommend everyone watch them. But she did a famous one about

00:29:11.460 Stonewall, where this, it was the early days, so they were quite kind of upfront about saying 0.88

00:29:17.440 these ridiculous things. And it was a guy with a beard named Alex Drummond. And he was 0.57

00:29:21.980 saying things like, I want to expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman, you know? And

00:29:27.920 Magdalene said very, you know, in one of her many famous lines, why don't you expand the

00:29:33.200 bandwidth of what it means to be a man, you know? And there's people like him in any normal

00:29:40.460 world, someone like that would just be an eccentric whose friends tolerated him. And oh, it's just

00:29:46.880 Alex being Alex. But now he's like the figurehead for a movement. Well, a bearded woman, a bearded man

00:29:53.760 woman. That also might be a consequence to some degree, an unintended consequence of the technology 0.99

00:29:59.220 that unites us, the internet. Because before, if you were an eccentric, by definition, there was one

00:30:04.720 of you. But now online, you can find the other thousands sprinkled throughout the world, and you're

00:30:10.260 no longer an eccentric, you're a movement. And we have no idea what it means, what that possibility

00:30:17.480 of, what would you say, aggregation of the truly, not even the eccentric, but the monstrous. We have

00:30:23.660 no idea what that aggregation means. I suppose what I mean, though, is that if we don't cherish

00:30:27.880 the eccentricity, we don't have the arts. We don't have creativity. And so we've been demanding

00:30:34.880 conformity from artists from the most free-thinking types. And I don't think it's a coincidence that

00:30:40.980 at the same time in our history, we've empowered these extremists. Yeah, well, maybe one of the

00:30:48.320 ways that you can tell when empathy for the marginal has exceeded its boundaries is when

00:30:53.500 the marginalized who are being empathized with start to restrict eccentricity, right? When the now

00:31:00.820 included marginalized become intolerant, the empathetic endeavor has gone too far. Because

00:31:05.820 they've become the powerful. Yes, exactly. Because they're now making the rules. Well,

00:31:10.020 Graham said to me once, you said to me once about the jester now sitting in the king's throne. Right,

00:31:14.600 right. And I think that's sort of what's happening. It's a complete inversion, you know? So we don't

00:31:19.660 have, I mean, this is why Graham and I are now in America, because we have to, we're going to work

00:31:24.340 in America rather than, we don't think the creative arts in the UK are really fostering.

00:31:30.460 Parted for places unknown too, into the United States for exactly the same reason.

00:31:35.880 Well, yeah. Well, exactly. I mean, we've-

00:31:37.820 Hopefully not exactly.

00:31:38.600 No, no, no. We've ended up in this situation, I suppose I should clarify, because Rob Schneider

00:31:43.400 is setting up a new company with myself and another producer I've worked with a lot called

00:31:47.680 Martin Gourlay. And we've brought Graham in as well, because Graham's in a similar situation.

00:31:52.460 We're all over in Arizona. We never expected to be here. We're working on various projects now.

00:31:57.620 I genuinely don't think it's an exaggeration. It sounds histrionic, but I don't think we

00:32:02.060 could have the kind of artistic freedom in the UK now.

00:32:04.120 Oh, I haven't written in five years. I haven't written comedy in five years. I had to write

00:32:07.380 my memoir for free, basically, to be paid a bit on the back end.

00:32:11.040 I don't think it's histrionic. Like, you need a substantive amount of creative freedom and a

00:32:18.200 certain amount of, like, supportive social infrastructure in order to think creatively,

00:32:24.760 because you really have to be free to think creatively, because it's risky. And you're

00:32:28.100 going to, certainly, you're going to transgress against boundaries explicitly and implicitly,

00:32:33.300 because while you're casting about for humor, you're going to go too far from time to time,

00:32:37.680 like, obviously. Yes. You know, and you know, too, that the best comedy is the closest it can

00:32:43.420 possibly be to being offensive without quite managing it. There's a great phrase that a

00:32:49.660 Seinfeld writer has. He says, laughter is a very strong spice. So if you can make someone laugh at

00:32:54.760 something, then they probably will forget to be offended. Have you noticed, though, Graham,

00:32:58.180 that the shift within the comedians, well, you've noticed more than most, but within comedians

00:33:02.740 themselves, I mean, I remember years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, there was a one club in London

00:33:08.420 that had a document, a contract you had to sign, which sent out a list of the topics you couldn't

00:33:12.700 discuss. And that was widely ridiculed within the comedic community. No one thought this was a good

00:33:17.600 thing. And now there's a club in London. Now it's kind of standard. Kind of. I mean, I wouldn't say

00:33:21.560 it's standard insofar as most clubs don't do that. But the clubs that do, the few clubs that do,

00:33:26.560 are not ridiculed. They're given awards and they said, this is the ideal now. And you also have

00:33:31.500 more than a signed contract anyway. You have comedians kind of policing each other in a more

00:33:36.420 surreptitious way. There's only one kind of comedian that thrives in that kind of environment.

00:33:42.460 And that's a mediocre comedian. You know, I call them regime comedians. That's a great phrase. 1.00

00:33:47.140 Well, they're also thrilled about the regime because it's the only, see, one of the things I've

00:33:51.080 noticed about woke books, especially the ones for children, is the illustrations are, they're

00:33:57.380 absolutely hideous. They're talentless, dull, and like they're monstrous in their, in their what? In

00:34:05.620 their incompetence. They're so bad. Well, the only possible reason you got to illustrate that book 0.99

00:34:11.240 and have it published is because it has the right political message. Because no one in their right

00:34:14.700 mind would look at a drawing that you made for more than two seconds without turning aside. And so

00:34:19.180 you see the same thing is that this is one of the, this is certainly one of the things that I saw

00:34:23.520 in universities, and it was awful, is that ideological purity was the best possible

00:34:29.020 camouflage for appalling mediocrity. It's like, well, I can't do what I'm supposed to do, but I

00:34:33.640 can certainly toe the bloody party line. And if you need an enforcer, well, here I am, partly because

00:34:39.940 I have nothing better to do or nothing better or nothing that I would like to do more, which is even

00:34:45.800 worse. Yeah. But what's great about all of this is none of this really ever caught on with the

00:34:49.520 audiences insofar as I think generally, even though when you go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival now,

00:34:53.520 most of the shows you go and see will be lectures dressed up as comedy shows, sermons in disguise.

00:34:58.000 Oh, I was supposed to do a gig and they closed every venue that I tried to do.

00:35:01.780 Yes, I remember that when I was, yeah, yeah.

00:35:03.900 It was just unbelievable. Right.

00:35:05.660 Like, you know, you can see here, I'm not like...

00:35:09.720 You're not evil.

00:35:10.420 I'm not rude or anything. I try and put myself across character.

00:35:13.780 Wait until the beast will be unleashed later.

00:35:16.060 No, that's what I'm hoping.

00:35:17.080 But like, basically, this picture has been built of me. The way I describe it is that I'm the victim

00:35:22.420 of village gossip on a global scale.

00:35:24.660 Yeah, definitely.

00:35:25.360 You know, like Wikipedia, my Wikipedia page. The thing it puts at the front is that I once

00:35:32.460 compared...

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00:35:58.260 Gender surgeries to Nazi experiments on children. But it's like, what they... 0.82

00:36:07.780 It's not so much a comparison as an identity, I would say. I'm serious. Like, I've looked

00:36:12.660 into medical atrocities a lot and into the psychological motivations of the people that

00:36:17.400 commit them. And I don't think the only things that I've read, and I truly believe this is

00:36:22.500 the case, the only things I've read on the medical side that are worse than what the trans-surgical 0.93

00:36:27.860 butchers are doing right now are the experiments conducted on the Chinese by Unit 731 in Japan.

00:36:33.660 And that is like the... For everyone watching and listening, do not go and read about Unit 731.

00:36:39.460 You will seriously regret it. And that is the only trigger warning I've ever offered publicly

00:36:44.540 or to my students. And I mean it, so beware. But that comparison is entirely apt. It's entirely

00:36:50.940 apt, and so... Well, the first vaginoplasty was performed by a guy, I think his name was

00:36:56.820 Gephardt, who was in the Luftwaffe and performed hypothermia... Is that how you say it? Experiments

00:37:05.580 on prisoners at Dachau.

00:37:07.280 Uh-huh. Yeah, well, that's Unit 731 right there. Oh, is it?

00:37:10.020 Right there. Yeah, because that was what they specialized on in China as well.

00:37:12.940 That's the first vaginoplasty. And now they're just practicing it everywhere on mentally unstable 0.68

00:37:18.620 people, on people who have autism, on people who have depression.

00:37:22.620 Even the intervention of puberty blockers, I mean, even that isn't justifiable. If you're saying that

00:37:26.780 we all have a gender identity, something we cannot define, some esoteric essence within

00:37:31.640 ourselves, and you're blocking the puberty of a child on the basis of that pseudo-religious belief,

00:37:38.760 I mean, that's already unjustifiable on any metric, I would have thought.

00:37:42.640 I was assuming you accept the principle of non-contradiction, and we're way past that.

00:37:47.100 It's like, gender is entirely fluid, and it's divorced from sex, except in the case of children

00:37:51.500 who are confused about their gender, who have to be surgically transformed into the opposite sex. 0.98

00:37:56.700 Yes.

00:37:56.940 Like, I see, so I'm supposed to accept all of that, including the logical impossibility,

00:38:01.820 to say nothing of the absolute bloody barbarism that's part of the surgery.

00:38:05.900 Yeah.

00:38:06.140 I mean, those surgeries, it's no wonder Schellenberger wouldn't believe it, because

00:38:10.940 you don't want to know anything about those surgeries. Once you

00:38:14.060 clamber into the dismal realm of their actual reality, and the side effects, and oh my god, 0.94

00:38:20.620 and the absolute foolish and preposterous notion that surgeons are capable of creating something 0.99

00:38:26.620 as complex as a vagina or a penis, the bloody things barely work when you have one that's 1.00

00:38:31.100 actually real. So, well, seriously, man, it's like, we're going to make one. It's like, 0.99

00:38:35.980 no, I don't think so.

00:38:37.100 Well, you know, in a lot of the photographs you see of the young girls who've had double 0.88

00:38:41.420 mastectomies, we always see lots of tiny little scars along their arm.

00:38:45.580 Yeah, right, right, right. 0.98

00:38:46.620 And you know the way they farm the skin from the arm to make the false penis? 0.99

00:38:50.300 Yeah. 0.99

00:38:50.700 I once saw one of them, those false penises, and they had those little, 0.99

00:38:54.780 tiny, self-harming scars all over them. 0.99

00:38:57.420 Yeah, that's about right. 1.00

00:38:58.540 This young woman was having a fake penis that would never work, that they put in through 1.00

00:39:02.780 the side. I think they have to come in from above to create the hole that the fake penis 1.00

00:39:07.100 goes into. 1.00

00:39:08.540 Jesus.

00:39:09.500 You know, does a young girl-

00:39:10.060 I mean, that's the stuff of body horror, that's-

00:39:12.140 It is. It's like, one of the other things I got in trouble for early on, I said, this is

00:39:17.500 a Cronenberg movie.

00:39:18.940 Yeah, right.

00:39:19.420 This is medical horror and body horror.

00:39:21.500 Yeah, definitely, definitely.

00:39:22.700 And all these kids are not being told any of the consequences of puberty blockers.

00:39:27.660 I talked to, I talked to Chloe, I don't remember Chloe's last name at the moment,

00:39:32.220 but she was one of the very- 0.83

00:39:33.500 Cole, yes, one of the very early sisters, let's say.

00:39:39.420 A very nice girl, and very straightforward.

00:39:42.940 And the interview I did with her devolved quite quickly, or evolved into essentially

00:39:48.700 a clinical interview, because I was interested in what she had been told prior to embarking

00:39:55.580 on puberty blockers and hormonal transformation, and then ultimately at a very young age, surgery.

00:40:00.540 And I asked her, so it's well known in the psychological community by anyone with even

00:40:07.020 a modicum of training that negative emotion increases in women when they hit puberty.

00:40:12.140 So if you measure levels of negative emotion, which include bodily self-consciousness, by the

00:40:17.100 way, in boys and girls, they're pretty much the same. But once they hit puberty, women are more 1.00

00:40:22.060 sensitive to negative emotion than men, and they stay that way for the rest of their life.

00:40:26.940 And so there's various theories about that. One is sexual risk, one is the difference in body

00:40:33.660 size that emerges between men and women at puberty, because boys and girls are about the same in

00:40:37.740 strength, but juvenile adolescents obviously aren't, certainly men and women aren't. And of course,

00:40:42.780 sex is way more dangerous for women, obviously, and maybe the world as such is, plus they have 1.00

00:40:48.060 to take care of infants. So they're more sensitive to negative emotion. And in women, more than in 1.00

00:40:53.820 men, negative emotion tends to take the form of bodily shame and self-awareness. And there's all

00:41:00.220 sorts of reasons for that as well. Maybe one of them being that women are judged more harshly on 1.00

00:41:04.540 their looks than men are. And it's a big difference. Anyways, this is well-established, and no one who's

00:41:10.540 trained is unaware of it. Women have more anxiety disorders, more depression worldwide. These are

00:41:16.380 cross-culturally stable findings. Everyone knows this. And it's known that it emerges at puberty.

00:41:22.060 And I asked Cole, I said, well, you know, you were unhappy with your body. What she told me was

00:41:27.020 she had had fantasies of having a body like Kim Kardashian, very curvy, right? And she realized

00:41:35.100 early on, correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't really matter, that she was likely to have a

00:41:40.220 boyish figure. Now, she's a very attractive girl, and men have a very wide range of, what would you

00:41:48.060 say? Types. Absolutely. Absolutely. There's a wide range of feminine beauty. So there was no reason for 1.00

00:41:55.820 her to be concerned on that front any more than any other girl might be. And I asked her if anyone had

00:42:02.460 ever told her that an increase in negative emotion was common in puberty for girls, or that it often

00:42:10.060 took the form of body dysmorphia, because that's extremely common in women. It might even be the 1.00

00:42:14.700 norm in pubertal women. It's extremely common. And those are the first things she should have been 1.00

00:42:18.940 told. Third thing, first two things, the third thing should have been, do you know that 90% of people

00:42:25.660 with body dysmorphia, which is very common in puberty, desist by the time they're 18? They just,

00:42:32.940 and that's been the standard approach for so-called gender dysphoria for like four decades. And again,

00:42:38.620 no one trained, remotely trained, doesn't know that. Yeah. She was told none of that. Yeah. 20-minute

00:42:47.020 bloody consultation session, and she ended up with a double mastectomy. And even more fun, you might say, 0.99

00:42:54.380 is that the surgical scars on her breasts never healed properly. Yeah. So that's her life, you know,

00:43:00.300 and compared to someone who's had a reconstructed penis, she got away lucky, you know, and that's a 0.98

00:43:09.020 terrible thing to say. And so, yeah, it's just... Someone I heard from... I think her name is... 0.98

00:43:15.660 That when these mothers who have had double mastectomies and gone on to have children, 0.93

00:43:22.620 when the baby cries, there's still fibers from the breast muscle in their chest, and it reacts,

00:43:29.020 and it hurts them when the baby cries, but they can't do anything about it because...

00:43:32.780 Wow.

00:43:33.580 They've cut off their breasts because, you know... 1.00

00:43:35.660 Well, the surgeons will reassure the girls that you can always have new breasts installed if you 1.00

00:43:40.940 change your mind. And that's one of the marketing ploys of people who are promoting this absolute

00:43:46.460 bloody butchery.

00:43:47.460 Did one person... I can't remember who said it, but one person said your breasts would grow back, 1.00

00:43:52.040 you know?

00:43:52.560 Really?

00:43:53.020 Yeah. I can't remember who said it, but like... I mean, there's all sorts of kooks in this movement

00:43:57.080 as well. Like, it shares with...

00:43:59.840 Yes, but the a priori presumption should be not only kook, but what would you say? Manipulative, 0.66

00:44:05.560 narcissistic, and malevolent kook. 1.00

00:44:07.780 Opportunists, you know? I mean, it just goes... Like, you know, I always think about the line 0.83

00:44:12.280 of men outside the courtroom going into the Giselle Mercure... Is that her name, Mercure?

00:44:19.560 Giselle, you know, the woman who was raped in her sleep, her husband?

00:44:22.740 Right, right, right.

00:44:23.900 I always think about that line of men going in, you know?

00:44:26.400 And I just think, well, you know, that's opportunity. And we all think that we're all

00:44:32.340 kind of good, but there's always going to be men who, if you move the line a little bit,

00:44:36.680 they're going to follow the line.

00:44:39.100 Well, there's another thing to point out on that side, too, is that our default assumption

00:44:44.400 when we see a man participating in women's sports is that that person is a malignant narcissist.

00:44:50.320 Because, first of all, obviously, because all you have to do is think about it for 15 seconds,

00:44:54.880 and I'm dead serious about this. It's like, okay, you're Leah Thomas. I think that was William,

00:45:01.040 if I remember correctly.

00:45:01.860 Yes, that's right.

00:45:02.400 And that's a non-crime hate incident for those of you in the UK who want to report it.

00:45:06.700 And so, he's 6'4", I think. That's about right. Massive shoulders, you know, a fairly powerful

00:45:13.520 swimmer. I think he ranked 400th in the US among American swimmers of his age, which is not bad,

00:45:19.160 right? I mean, it's not number one, and he definitely wanted to be number one. But then

00:45:23.400 you think, just put yourself in this position for a minute. You're like a foot and a half taller than

00:45:28.080 the people that you're competing against and six inches broader in the shoulder. And when you get

00:45:33.300 up on the podium and there's a claim, not only do you enjoy it, which is a sign that there's something

00:45:39.900 seriously wrong with you to begin with, but you also are so deluded that you think you deserve it

00:45:46.860 and that you're a brave once victim for managing it. Now, just contemplate that. Imagine writing a

00:45:55.660 script about that. Do you know how staggeringly narcissistic you have to be to accept even one 0.71

00:46:02.280 of those propositions, let alone to play yourself off as a heroic victim while you're doing it?

00:46:09.020 Well, not to be embarrassed. You knock these poor women off their podium and it's like, 0.89

00:46:13.060 you're the forthright champion of what? Civil rights or something. It's so sickening. 0.99

00:46:20.160 Laurel Hubbard, the weightlifter in New Zealand, was the son of a billionaire. He's like the son of,

00:46:26.280 like, the equivalent would be Kellogg's, you know, something like that in New Zealand. And he beat

00:46:31.520 two Indigenous women who had worked their whole lives, you know, to get to where they are. And now

00:46:37.520 they've got second and third. And this man, this clear man, got first.

00:46:43.200 He's an average man, but he's a hell of a woman. 1.00

00:46:45.500 But what I can't, what I find difficult to explain, I'd love to see what you think of this,

00:46:50.660 is the people who really confuse me are the people who stand by and just let it happen. I don't,

00:46:58.180 I don't understand psychologically why there was such an agreement for the last five years

00:47:03.260 amongst all my friends and, and some, even some family members that, that I had become evil.

00:47:10.980 Well, I think there'd be, I think there'd be two reasons. Well, the first thing we need to

00:47:15.200 understand is that the camouflage in which the narcissists and butchers that we're describing

00:47:22.820 enmesh themselves is in the camouflage of empathy. And empathy is a cardinal moral virtue. Now, 0.89

00:47:32.560 the problem is, the problem starts when you believe that the fundamental essence of goodness

00:47:39.220 is empathy, because that's wrong. Goodness is much more complex than a mere one-dimensional

00:47:44.020 analysis would presume. But if you're, if you're, if I can accuse you of being non-empathetic,

00:47:51.880 that's a pretty decent slur. Now, empathy also was a valid impetus or motivation for many things

00:48:01.260 that were laudable. So, the American Civil Rights Movement, for example, right? Now, the problem is,

00:48:07.020 is that it can, and this is the problem, this is being demonstrated time and again by game theorists

00:48:12.760 working in the biological realm. Imagine you have a community of cooperators, a game that's set up so

00:48:18.760 that people only cooperate. If everyone cooperates, the game can sustain itself and improve as it's

00:48:25.760 played. But if you throw one shark into the tank, then it takes everything. So, there's a, empathy is a

00:48:33.560 very useful foundation for social interactions. I trust you, and I trust you. Great, now we can cooperate.

00:48:40.220 The problem is, is that if you get a community of cooperators established, non-cooperators can move

00:48:47.260 in and dominate. And so, there's an ambivalence between trust and skepticism that's bound to emerge.

00:48:54.460 Okay, so, we produced a society that was very trust-based, in which empathy could function very

00:49:01.340 effectively. And then it got weaponized. Now, it got weaponized by psychopaths and narcissists,

00:49:06.940 fundamentally, and sadists. We know their type. They're Machiavellian, so they use language to get 0.95

00:49:11.920 what they want. They're narcissistic, so they want undeserved attention. They're psychopathic,

00:49:18.080 so they're predatory parasites, and they're sadistic. So, they're fun people, and they weaponize empathy, 1.00

00:49:24.500 and it's unbelievably effective. Now, part of the reason it's effective, and part of the reason I think

00:49:29.540 that people didn't stand up, they didn't stand up for me in Canada, although some people did,

00:49:33.680 and some journalists, none of my professional colleagues to speak of, almost no psychologists,

00:49:39.220 virtually no physicians. Agreeable, empathetic people don't believe that the parasitic, predatory,

00:49:47.520 Machiavellian narcissists exist. They don't have that space in their imagination, and for them,

00:49:53.000 so their default assumption is that anyone who's misbehaving is a victim.

00:49:57.880 Yes. Now, even that's understandable, because you can say, look, 80% of the people in prison

00:50:06.500 were victimized. Now, not everybody who's victimized turns into a criminal. In fact,

00:50:11.840 quite the reverse, so that's a rather weak demonstration, but that still also leaves the

00:50:17.600 20%, right? And they're the 20% that include the psychopathic rapists who, when the Scottish 0.97

00:50:25.020 national parliament decides that men and women are the same, decide that it's time for them to go 0.98

00:50:30.220 into the women's prisons, all the agreeable people think, oh, those people don't exist. They're just 1.00

00:50:34.900 misunderstood.

00:50:35.880 But then why don't they exist?

00:50:37.240 No, I think there's other factors in your case, though. No, because there are two other factors,

00:50:41.820 I think, and one of which is that psychopaths are scary. And I think that to stand up for Graham in

00:50:46.860 that situation would have made yourself a target. I think that can't be underestimated. I think that's

00:50:51.560 very, very important. Oh, definitely. But I think also, you know, just hearing you...

00:50:55.600 Especially now that they've aggregated online, right?

00:50:57.960 Yeah, exactly. They can really attack effectively with almost no... You can't even face your accuser.

00:51:02.560 There's zero consequences of accusing someone, so that also enables everybody who delights an

00:51:08.020 accusation. You think, oh, there's no people like that.

00:51:10.640 They've got a digital militia. They've got that, but there's also the... I mean, when you're talking

00:51:15.460 about some of the things you're describing, about the body horror stuff, about the beliefs that we're

00:51:19.780 expected to swallow, I think if you would have played this conversation to someone 15, 20 years

00:51:24.900 ago, it would have been incomprehensible to them, what they're hearing. I think a lot of people just

00:51:29.040 simply did not understand what was happening.

00:51:31.360 I think it's incomprehensible to most people now.

00:51:32.880 Did not comprehend the... Exactly. So how can you stand up for... How can you expend that energy

00:51:38.980 to understand the incomprehensible in order to defend you? I think a lot of it is simply that

00:51:44.680 no smoke without fire. So many people are saying Graham Lennon is a bigot. That's readily

00:51:49.940 comprehensible in one sentence. I can understand that, but I cannot understand this whole other

00:51:54.960 thing that was manifested. Well, it's also cost-free.

00:51:57.120 Yes.

00:51:57.380 Like the cost to any given person for writing you off, you know, now you might argue about

00:52:01.920 that with regards to your very close friends, but like when we met at a restaurant the other night

00:52:07.840 and I mentioned to you that I'd been following you on X for a long time, and it was probably...

00:52:12.100 Probably took me six months of following you before I trusted you.

00:52:17.440 Oh.

00:52:17.920 Well, because even though I know that this thing happens all the time...

00:52:23.100 Oh, yeah.

00:52:23.620 I know what you're going to say.

00:52:24.680 And even though I know that I knew that in all likelihood you were one of the people that

00:52:28.940 it happened to, I still wondered, well, you know, as everyone does, where there's smoke,

00:52:33.780 there might be fire, and it's just, that's in addition to Andrew's point. It's like...

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00:53:33.560 You're asking a lot of people to defend you. They have to admit to the existence of an evil

00:53:38.860 that, first of all, they can't comprehend, and second of all, they do not want to admit

00:53:42.640 to. And no bloody wonder. It's not surprising.

00:53:45.940 So, I mean, it happened recently where a well-known author, Boyne, John Boyne, came out in defense,

00:53:51.380 who was someone who had attacked. He wrote The Boyne in the Striped Pajamas, a very famous

00:53:54.420 novel. He had attacked Graham back in the day. And I saw this, it was an incredible post.

00:53:59.300 He wrote an apology online and said he now understands it. He's now looked into it. He

00:54:04.760 says, I was wrong. You were right. I'm sorry. He said that to you. It's quite a brave thing for

00:54:09.160 him to do. By doing that, he's also put himself in the fire online to a degree. But of course,

00:54:13.820 every time someone does that, and every time they are piled on and destroyed and demonized and

00:54:17.580 monstered, it sends a message out to everyone else that you don't want to be that person. It takes

00:54:22.000 a certain kind of strength.

00:54:23.060 Well, it's also the case, too, that a lot of this is now instantiated in law.

00:54:27.160 So, for example, in Canada, if you're a physician or a psychologist and you object to

00:54:34.180 gender-affirming care, which is one of those phrases that's so pathological that it's truly 0.55

00:54:39.580 a miracle of deception, then the probability that you'll be reported by an activist somewhere and

00:54:46.580 that you'll face, at minimum, years of legal entanglement at your expense with a high probability

00:54:53.480 of losing your professional status in your license. The probability of that is virtually

00:54:58.000 100%.

00:54:59.140 Is it worth exploring? I mean, the weaponization of the law in the UK.

00:55:02.620 Yeah.

00:55:02.900 You've mentioned non-crime hate incidents.

00:55:04.900 Would it be worth me explaining what that is? Because that's the key weapon that activists

00:55:08.960 have.

00:55:09.160 Well, we do want to delve into that because one of the things we also want to explore is why

00:55:13.860 you guys decided to move to the United States.

00:55:16.720 Yes.

00:55:16.960 And I'm spending a lot of my time in the United States for very similar reasons and know of

00:55:22.400 very many other people who are doing the same thing.

00:55:24.960 It's no bloody wonder this country thrives, say, because whenever any other place becomes

00:55:29.880 unstable, you can flee, so to speak, if you're the least bit creative and pursue whatever it

00:55:36.340 is you want to pursue here and actually be, I would say, actually be appreciated for it.

00:55:41.180 Okay, so talk about the situation in the UK and define this non-crime hate incident.

00:55:47.480 I think people here find it incredible because obviously you have the First Amendment in the

00:55:50.680 US. We don't have a codified constitution.

00:55:53.520 It's not quite as central in the UK, freedom of speech.

00:55:56.520 Yeah.

00:55:56.860 Even though it's basically an English principle that the Americans adopted.

00:56:00.620 That's an understatement, which is why a lot of us were so disturbed when in that vice

00:56:04.360 presidential debate with Tim Waltz and J.D. Vance, Tim Waltz effectively said that hate speech

00:56:08.620 wasn't covered by the First Amendment. A comment, by the way, which didn't make it to the official

00:56:13.060 transcripts, I noticed. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

00:56:14.980 Did it not?

00:56:15.420 It didn't. No, I think it was because he was speaking at the same time as Vance. That might

00:56:18.660 be the excuse. Chilling thing to say, though.

00:56:21.160 Yeah.

00:56:22.020 Well, especially when the question, who the hell defines hate, immediately exists.

00:56:27.280 And the answer is the person that you least want to.

00:56:30.940 Exactly.

00:56:31.500 Always. Yeah, yeah. That's leveraged immediately.

00:56:34.020 Absolutely. And also Waltz has a lot to cover up, you know, because it's going to come out

00:56:39.580 what's been happening to these kids. And he kind of made that possible in his state.

00:56:44.340 Yeah, absolutely. But I think, I suppose to explain what happened in the, because I don't

00:56:48.300 think people in the US will understand how the police, well, so what happened, there was a horrific

00:56:53.840 murder of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence in the early 90s. And that was racially

00:56:59.480 motivated. And there was a failure among the police to take it seriously in the way that

00:57:05.320 they should have done.

00:57:06.060 It was phrased or terrified them, which was institutionally racist.

00:57:09.340 Right, exactly. So there was a report commission called the Macpherson Report, which came out

00:57:14.460 in 1999, which did find that there was institutional racism within the police, or there was certainly

00:57:19.180 a problem within racism. That was the first time that we had a document which outlined the

00:57:24.660 difference between crime, racist incidents as being defined as criminal and non-criminal.

00:57:29.260 It didn't use the phrase non-crime hate incidents, but it made this distinction and it said that

00:57:33.620 both ought to be reported. This was the recommendation of Macpherson in that report.

00:57:38.480 But then you have to fast forward a long time. You go forward to 2014. 2014 is the time when

00:57:45.500 the College of Policing, this is the body in England and Wales, which is responsible for

00:57:49.660 training all police forces across England and Wales. And they are a kind of quango. They are 1.00

00:57:54.480 an administrative body that effectively the government has outsourced the responsibility to

00:57:59.100 train police in the law in this country. They invented this idea of non-crime hate incidents

00:58:05.560 with one eye on the Macpherson Report. So that's the origin of it. And they decided that if anyone

00:58:13.460 perceived that a non-crime had been committed, something offensive, something that hurt them,

00:58:18.640 if they perceived that it had been motivated by a prejudice or hatred against one of the protected

00:58:24.220 groups, which it keeps expanding. In Canada, it includes gender expression, which is fashion.

00:58:32.640 In UK law, it includes gender reassignment. But it's interesting that the College of Policing

00:58:39.620 changed that to trans identity. So they actually made it up as they went along.

00:58:43.820 So you had now a system implemented in UK law, not in law, sorry, implemented among the UK police,

00:58:52.000 where the police were told, if anyone contacts you and says, I've been offended, and I perceive it was

00:58:57.560 to do with this, you report it, record it as a non-crime hate incident against someone's name.

00:59:02.820 It's on file. You don't notify the person who's being recorded as such.

00:59:07.920 It doesn't come up in a superficial search, but it can come up in a deep search, I believe.

00:59:12.540 There's a thing called a disclosure and barring service check, where if you apply for a job,

00:59:17.060 which is sensitive in some way, say you want to be a teacher or a carer, you have a DBS check,

00:59:22.100 it will come up there. And if it is flagged there-

00:59:25.760 So that's a social credit system.

00:59:27.560 You won't get the job.

00:59:28.500 Yeah.

00:59:28.820 There's no headmaster or headmistress in the world who's going to see something flagged and

00:59:32.320 then employ.

00:59:32.960 Zero. You're done.

00:59:34.240 So you have a situation now where members of the public with a grudge can weaponize this

00:59:40.820 against anyone they like for whatever reasons.

00:59:43.440 Or systems of activists with grudges.

00:59:45.260 And the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the College of Policing have explicitly

00:59:49.260 said that no evidence is required for hate to be recorded. There doesn't need to be evidence

00:59:54.260 of hate. It's just solely about the perception of this.

00:59:57.840 Now, this all came to a head recently because it's-

01:00:00.340 How could that go wrong?

01:00:01.420 Oh, well, sure. By the way, I should note that this isn't just about McPherson. The chief

01:00:07.840 executive of the College of Policing at the time that non-crime hate incidents were implemented

01:00:12.180 in 2014 was a man called Alex Marshall, I think. He'd won the previous year Stonewall's

01:00:20.200 top award in the country. He became an LGBT envoy. So in other words, he's an activist. You have

01:00:26.260 high-ranking activists within the police, within the College of Policing, who are effectively

01:00:31.120 dragging the police force along in their wake, often reluctantly. But the reason why this is,

01:00:37.400 I think, so chilling now, and it's become- a lot of people are talking about it now,

01:00:42.020 because it's effectively a form of pre-crime. It's effectively Philip K. Dick's idea of pre-crime.

01:00:46.660 Their justification is non-non-sorry, what do they say? They say that unless we record non-crime

01:00:52.660 hate incidents, we won't be able to monitor them in case they escalate into actual crime.

01:00:56.700 But of course, all crime is preceded by non-crime, and it cannot be any other way.

01:01:01.460 You know, we've actually superseded you characters in the UK and Canada.

01:01:06.300 I know about this, yes.

01:01:07.340 You know about Bill C-63?

01:01:08.200 Yes.

01:01:08.340 I've got to tell you about this bill. It's in second reading in the House,

01:01:11.880 and I think the bloody liberals will pass it before Trudeau gets turfed. 0.83

01:01:15.220 Right. 0.66

01:01:15.740 And so, not the T-E-R-F turf, but the other kind. 0.99

01:01:19.320 Okay, so this is sandwiched in the layers of a bill that purports to protect children

01:01:28.540 from online sexual abuse. Okay, so, and who could object to that, obviously,

01:01:33.440 even though the bill does almost nothing to actually make that,

01:01:37.080 to decrease the probability of that.

01:01:40.920 I've read this like five times, because I can't believe it's actually true.

01:01:44.140 I keep thinking, I can't say this, because it can't be true.

01:01:46.580 So, it's, but here's what I understood.

01:01:49.980 I can take you in front of a provincial magistrate.

01:01:53.840 And if I can convince that magistrate that you might commit a hate crime in the next year,

01:02:00.120 so a non-crime hate incident.

01:02:01.280 Yes.

01:02:02.000 But you might, not even that you have.

01:02:03.740 You might.

01:02:04.100 I might.

01:02:04.600 That I'm afraid that you might.

01:02:06.860 Yes.

01:02:07.160 If I can show that my fear is justified, whatever the hell that means,

01:02:11.660 then you can have an electronic bracelet affixed to your ankle for a year.

01:02:17.420 You can be confined to your house.

01:02:19.680 Your communication with the outside world, including social media,

01:02:23.560 can be restricted to virtually nothing.

01:02:25.900 And, for reasons that I really can't understand at all,

01:02:29.680 you will be required to provide samples of your bodily fluids to the authorities on a regular basis,

01:02:35.720 I think, to determine whether you've been consuming alcohol or marijuana.

01:02:40.280 It's like, marijuana doesn't make you commit hate crimes.

01:02:42.600 Alcohol might.

01:02:43.440 But I think they probably got that from domestic abuse law, right?

01:02:47.900 Yes.

01:02:48.100 Because if you're a drunk and you're a domestic abuser, you're much more likely to re-offend.

01:02:52.740 Right.

01:02:52.940 But, so we've surpassed the non-crime as a precursor to crime.

01:02:57.980 We have fear of non-crime as a precursor to crime.

01:03:00.240 Okay, can I put, let's have a competition then.

01:03:03.680 I think you're winning at the moment. 1.00

01:03:05.020 A competition of stupidity. 1.00

01:03:05.840 Canada's really in the forefront of this. 1.00

01:03:07.920 A competition of authoritarianism and stupidity. 1.00

01:03:09.660 I think we've got a few more cards to play in the UK. 0.99

01:03:12.980 Okay, insofar as, for instance, there have been estimates around a quarter of a million non-crime hate incidents recorded against UK citizens.

01:03:21.020 They happen at the dinner table all the time.

01:03:22.320 I think it's like 62 a day or something is the average.

01:03:24.820 Especially in the UK, because you guys are so cutting with your tongues. 0.97

01:03:28.260 I mean, it's like a national sport.

01:03:30.100 Exactly.

01:03:30.800 But worse than that is that the College of Policing has been instructed twice by the Home Office to stop doing this.

01:03:37.220 Two Home Secretaries in succession, Priti Patel and Suwala Bravaman, said to them, you can't do this anymore, issued new guidelines.

01:03:45.700 Not only did they ignore the guidelines, but incidents of non-crime recording has gone up since the government has said you can't do this.

01:03:52.140 In addition to that, the High Court ruled that it was effectively, they said it was a chilling, it had a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

01:04:00.060 The judge compared it to the Stasi, said we've never had a Gestapo in this country.

01:04:04.340 They effectively said, you know, this is not lawful.

01:04:08.260 And so, in other words, the College of Policing, an individual activist group that trains the police in our country, has ignored the government twice and the High Court once and has fudged the language.

01:04:18.300 And now we have a Labour government that has said it wants to ramp up non-crime hate incidents.

01:04:24.420 We've had Yvette Cooper saying these are really important.

01:04:26.980 We need to record non-crime.

01:04:28.220 Now, you might still be winning on the candidate front because we haven't got to the point where, if I think you might commit a crime.

01:04:36.260 But to give a very specific example, which is why it's been written about a lot over the last few weeks, is because a journalist in the UK, Alison Pearson, Telegraph journalist, was visited on Remembrance Sunday morning by two police officers.

01:04:48.920 And they said, we are investigating you for a crime of stirring up racial hatred.

01:04:53.740 And she said, what is the complaint against me?

01:04:56.540 What is the crime?

01:04:57.220 We can't tell you what the crime is or what the tweet is.

01:05:00.320 It was a tweet from a year ago.

01:05:02.640 So you don't need to know the crime or the accusers, right?

01:05:05.280 She asked about the accuser and they said, it's not the accuser, it's the victim.

01:05:09.540 So in other words, we don't have due process either.

01:05:13.600 Now, you'll know the novel, The Trial.

01:05:16.660 There's no presumption of innocence.

01:05:18.140 Right.

01:05:18.540 Because who needs that?

01:05:19.340 Exactly, exactly.

01:05:20.480 But in The Trial by Kafka, the first scene is two police officers turning up at his house and he says, what have I done wrong?

01:05:27.460 We cannot tell you that.

01:05:28.420 You do not need to know that.

01:05:29.540 This was a replay of that.

01:05:31.000 So when she describes it as Kafkaesque, she's not being hyperbolic.

01:05:34.120 It's straight out of the first chapter of The Trial.

01:05:36.620 And he never finds out what he's done wrong in that novel, right until the grisly end of that novel.

01:05:41.280 So go on, sorry, Graham.

01:05:42.220 No, I was just going to say, I've had three visits.

01:05:44.820 I've had two visits from the police, one on a Sunday morning.

01:05:47.700 As befits a bigot.

01:05:48.800 Yes, tell him because it'll beat Canada if you tell him about this.

01:05:51.040 Well, we'll see.

01:05:51.520 I've got one up my sleeve still.

01:05:52.880 Oh, yeah, that's true.

01:05:53.680 Okay, so yeah, tell the story.

01:05:55.520 Well, I started reporting on the activities of a serial con man.

01:06:02.500 Victim.

01:06:03.640 Victim.

01:06:05.180 Who was taking women to court, getting them put in prison cells and so on.

01:06:10.040 And he called that harassment, used it, first of all, to call the police on me, then sent me a summons.

01:06:21.000 He sued me at the same time because he's what I call a prison lawyer, you know.

01:06:25.020 Oh, yeah.

01:06:25.340 He knows about the law.

01:06:27.380 And that's what he does.

01:06:28.840 He just puts people under the stress of a...

01:06:34.120 Called malignant narcissism, by the way.

01:06:36.240 That's it, yeah.

01:06:36.460 And then just at the end, he drops it, you know.

01:06:39.920 He owes me costs.

01:06:42.020 He owes everyone costs.

01:06:43.180 Anyway, found out recently that, apart from all this, he was a sexual offender.

01:06:49.060 He was imprisoned for sexual offenses against a 14-year-old boy, you know.

01:06:53.440 This is the guy who has the British police working for him, going to people's houses and knocking on doors.

01:06:59.580 Did they tell you...

01:07:00.440 Actually, to be...

01:07:01.660 They told you your sin, though, didn't they?

01:07:03.460 They told me that, yeah.

01:07:04.280 Oh, well, it's nothing then.

01:07:06.500 You could hear it in the voice of the guy, of the policeman on the other end of the phone.

01:07:11.260 This was the first time.

01:07:12.720 It was just a phone call.

01:07:14.080 And you could tell he did not know what was going on, you know.

01:07:17.480 And he said...

01:07:18.960 Yeah, that's even worse.

01:07:20.260 Yeah.

01:07:20.680 It's kind of like, it's just pure procedure.

01:07:24.140 And he said to me, can you block them on Twitter or something?

01:07:29.120 Yeah.

01:07:29.400 And I said, I already have them blocked.

01:07:31.300 I knew immediately this was a malignant and appalling person.

01:07:35.640 I blocked them.

01:07:36.200 I said, I blocked them years ago, you know.

01:07:38.240 Yeah.

01:07:38.540 And he was confused by that, you know, because he didn't...

01:07:41.420 He didn't...

01:07:42.200 He just didn't really know what was going on.

01:07:44.280 So they just...

01:07:45.300 These activists just say the right words to wind them up.

01:07:48.900 And they go to people's doors.

01:07:50.020 The real fear I have is that you can't vote it out because all of this came about during the Tories.

01:07:54.620 And now we've got Labour.

01:07:56.100 And so, you know, whatever you get, because the College of Policing and because the police are...

01:08:01.380 They do their own thing.

01:08:02.180 They decide their own thing.

01:08:03.300 They don't care about what they're told to do by the government.

01:08:05.560 It's not a right or left issue.

01:08:06.900 Both are bad.

01:08:07.840 But I do think...

01:08:08.420 And we've had conversations about this.

01:08:09.680 I do think that with a Labour government in the UK, things are getting a lot worse, a lot quicker. 1.00

01:08:14.280 So no matter how stupid the Conservatives are, the Labour Party can do worse. 1.00

01:08:18.020 Well, it's not just now about non-crime. 1.00

01:08:21.220 We've had a lot of cases since the riots in the summer after the murder of those three children in Southport.

01:08:26.520 By that Christian Welshman. 0.92

01:08:28.620 The ethnically... 0.91

01:08:29.960 No, this is a...

01:08:30.720 Yes, I know what you're doing there.

01:08:31.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:08:32.380 He, you know, we've had people who wrote...

01:08:35.680 The Risen and the Al-Qaeda... 0.95

01:08:36.920 He had an Al-Qaeda training manual.

01:08:39.260 Every Christian Welshman has that.

01:08:41.040 Standard Welsh practice to have that.

01:08:42.840 But he...

01:08:44.760 There were riots.

01:08:46.200 There was anger.

01:08:46.720 There was a lot of obvious, justified anger.

01:08:49.260 There were also some horrendous people opportunistically turning up from the far right to attack and destroy and defame.

01:08:55.960 All of that is true.

01:08:57.340 But the problem is we've had people who've, in anger, have tweeted things out that I do find objectionable.

01:09:02.260 You know, things that are racist, things that are unpleasant.

01:09:05.640 And there's...

01:09:06.360 Let me give you an example.

01:09:07.100 There's one woman, Lucy Connolly, and she wrote out,

01:09:09.520 I don't care anymore, we should burn down the hotels that they're in, we should just, you know, I don't care.

01:09:13.820 Yeah, I remember that. 0.79

01:09:14.680 Not pleasant.

01:09:15.180 Yeah.

01:09:15.780 31 months in prison.

01:09:17.000 Said in anger, by the way.

01:09:18.960 Deleted very quickly.

01:09:20.100 Said in anger.

01:09:20.820 Deleted quickly.

01:09:22.340 31 months in prison.

01:09:23.920 There have been a number of cases like that.

01:09:25.680 Yeah.

01:09:25.900 And one of the common factors is that all of the judges have said,

01:09:29.520 we are setting an example.

01:09:30.740 We're giving you the harshest jail term to set an example to others.

01:09:34.760 Yeah.

01:09:34.860 And this is...

01:09:35.380 Those were the court cases that were sped along so...

01:09:38.060 They were.

01:09:38.380 So efficaciously.

01:09:39.520 And previous to that, Keir Starmer had said that he wanted judges to do this.

01:09:44.560 So it's all...

01:09:45.580 There's a weird...

01:09:46.340 Sex offenders removed from their cells to make room for these women. 0.79

01:09:50.160 My problem with this is...

01:09:51.000 They were victims.

01:09:52.280 My problem with this is manifold.

01:09:53.380 I mean, firstly, the draconianism of the jail terms is a problem in and of itself for language, for speech.

01:09:58.740 I don't approve of the speech, but there is no evidence whatsoever that that tweet by that woman caused any violence in the real world.

01:10:06.200 None whatsoever.

01:10:06.920 And no one can tell you different.

01:10:08.200 We've had decades of research into this.

01:10:10.840 We know that that's not how it works.

01:10:13.160 People don't tweet and then violence happens as a direct result.

01:10:16.760 You know, we know that that's not true.

01:10:17.740 Otherwise, we'd be knee-deep in violence.

01:10:18.900 It's why in the US you have the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, which would mean that, you know, that firstly, there has to be an intention to cause violence, that it is likely to cause violence, and that there is imminent risk of violence.

01:10:34.420 So none of these people currently languishing in prison cells in the UK for tweets meet anywhere near the threshold of the Brandenburg test.

01:10:41.840 We don't have that.

01:10:42.900 So the chilling effect that this has, not just on people who are saying nasty things, the chilling effect on people expressing themselves in any way.

01:10:51.460 We've got a guy who's just been found guilty of stirring up hatred because of a Halloween costume that he wore.

01:10:57.760 He dressed up as the Manchester bomber, which is sick and unpleasant.

01:11:02.400 That's the point.

01:11:02.840 But it's Halloween, too.

01:11:03.660 It's Halloween.

01:11:04.420 Which is like when you do...

01:11:05.740 It's about horror.

01:11:06.760 ...when you dress up in sick and unpleasant costumes.

01:11:08.780 There's a kind of joke in that.

01:11:10.540 It's that you're trying to outgross everyone else.

01:11:13.280 He's waiting the prison sentence.

01:11:15.440 We don't know how long he's going to be in prison.

01:11:16.900 Whoa.

01:11:17.440 But why is someone...

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01:12:17.520 Who was the comedian who got nailed for teaching his dog to do the hippie slew? 0.91

01:12:23.700 Oh, I'm involved in that story.

01:12:25.480 Count Dankula. 0.84

01:12:28.180 Graeme should tell this because you made it worse.

01:12:31.540 Well, these were the days just before I got cancelled.

01:12:37.740 And I believed everything that was being told to me about the new right, you know, or the online right or whatever.

01:12:45.360 Which you are now an honorary member of, by the way.

01:12:47.460 So I understand.

01:12:48.480 And this guy was doing these kind of videos and he did one video where he got his dog, he had a pug.

01:12:58.020 It was his girlfriend's dog.

01:12:59.280 It was his girlfriend's dog.

01:12:59.780 Right, and he didn't like it.

01:13:00.880 And he shouldn't have because it was a pug.

01:13:02.740 Yes.

01:13:03.480 That's a lovely dog.

01:13:04.240 I've met it.

01:13:04.660 So he secretly taught her to do a Hitler salute.

01:13:07.680 And I, rather than saying this as quite a funny gag to play on your girlfriend, saw it as hidden messages, anti-Semitism, all this sort of stuff.

01:13:19.400 And he really was just messing about and having a joke.

01:13:23.620 Well, it's not like a pug is a testament to Hitler.

01:13:26.980 Yeah.

01:13:27.380 You know, I mean, seriously.

01:13:29.060 But I had to do one of my many apologies.

01:13:31.740 I don't want to drop you in.

01:13:33.000 It's called My Apology Tour.

01:13:34.380 Didn't you try and stop his crowdfunder from getting?

01:13:36.800 I did.

01:13:37.560 I did.

01:13:38.180 Something for which I'll spend a few years in limbo.

01:13:41.940 Even better, by the way, for this conversation.

01:13:44.080 I, at the time, wrote a satirical piece.

01:13:46.500 I was writing this character called Jonathan Pye.

01:13:48.460 I was the co-writer of this character.

01:13:50.200 And we wrote this satirical piece mocking the court's decision where the character, you know.

01:13:54.900 Oh, no.

01:13:55.680 And Graham attacked me for that online.

01:13:57.960 Oh, yes, he did.

01:13:58.340 I think you called me alt-right or fascist or something.

01:14:00.000 Oh, I'm so sorry.

01:14:01.200 No, no, no.

01:14:01.580 I'm not saying it to embarrass you.

01:14:02.980 I think it's quite funny.

01:14:03.840 It's a nice little connection we have.

01:14:05.340 Back in the day before we were friends, I was a fascist.

01:14:09.440 But, you know, I did that.

01:14:11.120 Now, it's important to highlight these sorts of things, though, because you want to see

01:14:15.240 where you're, just like I said, it took me like six months to trust you on X.

01:14:19.300 You want to see, it's not like only those people are susceptible to this like mass hysteria.

01:14:25.400 It's, you got to watch and see where you're susceptible.

01:14:28.180 And if you, and if you have been susceptible in some manner, you should admit it.

01:14:32.920 Well, you know, at one point during the COVID epidemic, the so-called COVID epidemic, I got

01:14:42.320 vaccinated twice.

01:14:43.380 Now, in my defense, I was very ill at the time and wasn't really able to think.

01:14:48.660 But I did get vaccinated.

01:14:50.900 But I also said at the end of one podcast, and I would say in some ways, despite some 0.99

01:14:57.620 inner prompting, that people should just get the damn vaccine. 0.99

01:15:01.560 You know, and my thinking at the time was, was seriously, I was like, I'll take the shots. 0.99

01:15:09.220 Here's the deal.

01:15:09.940 I'll take the shots. 0.99

01:15:11.060 You leave me the hell alone. 0.98

01:15:13.660 And then I found out instantly that the deal was you take the shots and then you take six

01:15:17.740 more and forget about being left alone.

01:15:20.600 And that was the end of that as far as I was concerned.

01:15:23.340 But still, I made a mistake.

01:15:25.420 You know, I made a mistake.

01:15:26.380 And I would say it was very difficult for me at that point to believe that the pharmaceutical

01:15:32.020 companies had become so corrupt that you couldn't trust their vaccine policy.

01:15:37.040 Yeah.

01:15:37.200 You know, it was, it was easier to think that it was the more conspiratorially minded, you

01:15:43.120 know, alt-right types that were pushing this doctrine.

01:15:45.720 And saying something cures that cognitive dissonance, even briefly.

01:15:50.920 Yeah.

01:15:51.280 You get to turn it off just for a few seconds and think, oh, at least I've made a decision.

01:15:54.860 Yeah.

01:15:55.080 Yeah, right.

01:15:55.980 There's that too.

01:15:56.600 All of this is suggestive of this idea that there is a real problem we have at the moment

01:16:00.160 where there's an expectation of moral purity from all sides.

01:16:04.160 I've seen a similar thing there, like where people have, people either, you know, didn't

01:16:07.700 understand what was going on during the pandemic and maybe supported lockdowns or et cetera.

01:16:11.760 And they get piled on and attacked by these very sort of, almost like an equivalent of

01:16:16.700 the woke on the sort of lockdown skeptic side as well.

01:16:20.060 I don't think any particular group is immune to this idea, this kind of expectation.

01:16:25.420 Everyone must think the same way as me on every single point.

01:16:28.600 Well, it's part of group identity, really.

01:16:30.640 Right.

01:16:30.760 Like, I mean, it's necessary for human beings to cooperate, to reach consensus that's almost

01:16:36.940 universal on everything rapidly, right?

01:16:39.160 Because otherwise we can't cooperate.

01:16:41.260 No, but something's changed because I remember being at university, debating friends late

01:16:46.780 into the night, drinking, rowing, but in a good-natured way.

01:16:51.060 We didn't not be friends the next day because we fundamentally disagreed.

01:16:54.540 We actually relished the fundamental disagreements and they were part of the friendship.

01:16:58.580 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:16:58.940 That's not possible now.

01:17:00.720 The net has enabled the reputation-savaging psychopaths.

01:17:04.460 So, you know, the female pattern of bullying, because there's a female pattern of antisocial 1.00

01:17:08.840 personality, the female version isn't violence. 1.00

01:17:12.340 The female version is reputation-savaging. 1.00

01:17:14.740 Right.

01:17:15.080 And men can also partake in reputation-savaging.

01:17:19.080 Of course.

01:17:19.360 If they do that in real life, they get into a fight.

01:17:22.280 Women don't because women won't fight physically, but men will. 1.00

01:17:26.320 But online, there's no consequences to reputation-savaging whatsoever.

01:17:31.460 In fact, it's probably amplified by the social media companies and the algorithms.

01:17:35.480 And so I think not only can the reputation-savagers aggregate, they can do so anonymously.

01:17:41.360 They can levy accusations without any consequences whatsoever.

01:17:45.060 And the consequences of that are rapid and devastating, partly because it's easy to write

01:17:49.880 someone off.

01:17:50.480 Is it as mobilized as that, though?

01:17:51.920 I don't think it's mobilized.

01:17:53.620 I think it's more something has changed in the air.

01:17:56.320 I think it's mobilized, too.

01:17:58.160 There are definitely aggregations of activists who are weaponizing the professional colleges,

01:18:02.540 for example.

01:18:03.160 Yeah, sure.

01:18:03.680 No, no, I think that is happening.

01:18:05.160 But I think for a lot of people, they are being caught in a wave of societal change,

01:18:08.600 where this is just now the norm.

01:18:10.260 But can I say...

01:18:10.820 Go on.

01:18:11.120 Sorry, Graham.

01:18:11.560 Yeah.

01:18:11.620 I think it's like...

01:18:13.280 It's not just that it's weaponized.

01:18:14.820 It's that the panopticon, or whatever you want to call it, is frictionless.

01:18:19.880 Right?

01:18:20.540 Like, there's a very funny Onion thing about arson at a party being disproved by the 60,000

01:18:27.680 photographs that were taken at it, you know?

01:18:29.820 Yes.

01:18:30.140 And everyone just has a different angle of a cigarette falling to the floor, you know,

01:18:33.880 that was taken in the foreground or two.

01:18:35.260 Yeah, and it's just because we, without realizing it, have become the apparatus of a police state,

01:18:41.900 you know?

01:18:42.400 But it's all just part of the fabric of our lives.

01:18:46.060 We would not...

01:18:47.080 Like, recently I found out...

01:18:49.060 Do you remember Pokemon Go was big for a while?

01:18:51.540 So people were going down the street and they were finding Pokemons.

01:18:54.680 Well, apparently, that was a company who wanted to get people to do their GPS work for them.

01:19:00.600 So they got all these...

01:19:02.240 They put Pokemon in places where there wasn't a GPS record of it.

01:19:08.400 And they got all these people to go out and film it for them.

01:19:11.160 That's smart.

01:19:11.840 You know what I mean?

01:19:12.620 So the...

01:19:14.440 So, you know, in the story of the Tower...

01:19:16.660 The story of the Tower of Babel is a very interesting story in this regard.

01:19:20.160 Because...

01:19:21.220 So what happens in the opening chapters of Genesis is you have an account of the two ways that society collapse.

01:19:27.360 So it's propelled by the sin of Cain.

01:19:31.260 And he becomes vengeful and bitter because his offerings to God are rejected.

01:19:35.320 So he's a bitter and resentful individual who isn't offering his best.

01:19:39.580 And he becomes murderous and his descendants become genocidal.

01:19:43.920 Okay, so that's the individual pathology.

01:19:46.520 The disintegration of the descendants of that pathological individual.

01:19:51.380 And then you have the flood.

01:19:52.960 And so the flood is a descent into utter chaos, right?

01:19:55.840 But then you have the Tower of Babel. 0.80

01:19:58.040 And the Tower of Babel is equally catastrophic but opposite. 0.82

01:20:01.580 It's the imposition of the all-seeing eye of Sauron or the Panopticon, right?

01:20:07.460 And it's literally built by engineers because the people who build the Tower of Babel in the biblical accounts are the descendants of the people who build cities and machines, right?

01:20:17.460 So they're aiming at the wrong goal, right?

01:20:21.700 And they build this massive machine that's dedicated to the wrong ideal.

01:20:27.700 And the immediate consequence of that is that words lose their meaning and everyone is at odds with one another.

01:20:34.300 Yes.

01:20:34.580 And we've got this problem, right?

01:20:38.360 We've built this new Tower of Babel, which is this interconnected world, which is biologically revolutionary, right?

01:20:44.240 Yes, yes.

01:20:44.840 What happens when everyone's immediately connected?

01:20:47.380 Well, maybe bad ideas spread 50 times faster than good ideas.

01:20:51.140 Like, we have no idea, right?

01:20:52.380 Maybe the psychopaths are unleashed.

01:20:54.380 And, you know, maybe there's an infinite possibility to educate everyone.

01:20:58.600 Like, there's a lot of things on the table.

01:21:00.160 But we have no idea what we're doing.

01:21:02.020 And it's certainly the case that words, in many ways, have lost their meaning.

01:21:07.220 We've talked about exactly that.

01:21:08.800 We can't assume that we're referring to the same thing no matter what we talk about.

01:21:14.380 And so, you know, you see in China, of course, they're much farther along the totalitarian road than we are.

01:21:21.380 And maybe we won't go down that road, but 600 million CCTV cameras, right, which is about one for every two people.

01:21:29.040 And they can do perfect face recognition.

01:21:31.400 But if you cover your face, they can recognize you with unerring accuracy merely by gate.

01:21:36.480 Every bloody thing you do is tracked.

01:21:38.940 And that's certainly a road we could walk down.

01:21:41.980 I mean, you go into an airport now, and before you board a plane, your picture is taken. 0.96

01:21:46.360 Now, you can opt out for now, and the gates are increasingly automated, which is all well and good and convenient when the goddamn thing's open. 0.85

01:21:54.840 But pretty rough on you if they don't. 0.88

01:21:57.420 Because then what?

01:21:58.920 We're going to talk.

01:21:59.640 What are you going to do?

01:22:00.160 Talk to the gate?

01:22:01.360 Yeah.

01:22:01.700 Seems unlikely.

01:22:02.780 And so, I mean, it's easy even to point to the hypothetical political causes of this.

01:22:10.960 It's the progressive left.

01:22:12.440 It's like, yeah, partly, but it's certainly partly the fact that we don't know what the hell we're doing in this interconnected world.

01:22:20.200 It might be that period of time when we have this revolutionary new technology that we don't know how to handle.

01:22:24.880 We don't know what it will produce.

01:22:26.300 I did read somewhere that at the invention of the printing press, there were similar moments of hysteria.

01:22:30.500 Yeah, 100 years of it afterwards, wasn't it?

01:22:32.320 In other words, it took a kind of calming down, readjustment process before we understood how to deal with books.

01:22:38.140 Well, it also blew Christendom apart, right?

01:22:42.220 Because you had the massive, what, altercations between the Protestants and the Catholics.

01:22:48.080 It was a direct consequence of the printing press.

01:22:50.500 Something very freeing about that.

01:22:51.740 All of a sudden, you can read God's Word in the vernacular, which the Church was protecting its power by preventing that.

01:22:59.120 Well, it also meant, eventually, that the entire world was made literate.

01:23:02.720 Like, it was a major league transformation.

01:23:04.520 So maybe, to be positive, maybe this Tower of Babel at the moment that we're building, maybe this period we're in, will have a settling down period in its wake.

01:23:12.780 Well, it depends on how we conduct ourselves.

01:23:15.200 Like, if you guys move to Phoenix, and you start your entertainment consortium, and you start making comedy that can actually be viewed by people, and that's genuinely funny and free,

01:23:25.960 then you're going to tilt the world a little farther away from the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the Tower of Babel and towards something approximating freedom.

01:23:33.380 Now we just need to turn that into a logo.

01:23:36.160 Yeah, that's right, if you can think of anything.

01:23:38.060 You can use the Tower of Babel, although the EEC has already managed that, right?

01:23:43.100 But there's something about tilting the world in that direction.

01:23:46.380 I do love that.

01:23:47.460 It's not new.

01:23:48.260 I mean, what you're identifying, really, is the enduring appeal of authoritarianism throughout human history.

01:23:53.960 Forever.

01:23:54.760 Forever, which will manifest itself in one way or another.

01:23:57.200 And it just so happens that, at the moment, it's manifesting itself in this way.

01:23:59.980 And it seems to me that it…

01:24:01.760 And fast.

01:24:02.340 And quicker than ever before.

01:24:03.960 Yeah, that's right.

01:24:04.780 So it's been catalyzed in this strange way.

01:24:07.940 But it feels to me as though the struggle in and of itself between liberty and authority is one thing,

01:24:13.180 but the struggle to recognize the threat of authoritarianism seems to be another battle you have to have.

01:24:18.600 In other words…

01:24:19.500 Well, sure, because the attack doesn't come from the position you expect, not if it's going to be effective.

01:24:24.880 Well, the Labour government don't think that they're authoritarians.

01:24:27.460 They think that they're doing good.

01:24:29.500 When Keir Starmer said in Parliament today that he felt that desecrating a holy book was unacceptable and divisive and awful,

01:24:37.120 he wasn't thinking of the bigger picture in terms of this is a gateway to authoritarianism, blasphemy laws,

01:24:42.360 you know, once you start down that line.

01:24:43.840 In other words, it's the well-intentioned authoritarian, which is particularly what we have to challenge at the moment.

01:24:50.240 Or the one who wants to appear well-intentioned in the moment with no further thought or effort. 0.97

01:24:55.700 Right, they were the religious hypocrites fundamentally. 0.99

01:24:59.000 It's the psychopaths who are proceeding along that line. 0.96

01:25:03.160 What concerns me more is the fellow travellers who are benevolent and who subscribe to this tyranny 1.00

01:25:10.420 out of a sense of this is better for the world.

01:25:12.880 Those are the ones that I find harder to deal with.

01:25:14.800 I have less sympathy for those people, I would say, too, because the problem I have with them,

01:25:22.680 and I think Keir Starmer, certainly Justin Trudeau, fits into this category,

01:25:26.060 is they want the moral approbation for being good people without doing the work.

01:25:30.680 It's actually really hard to be a good person.

01:25:33.020 You have to work at it all the time and against your, what would you say, alternative inclinations.

01:25:39.140 So, I want to tell you another story that's relevant to your venture here in the United States, too.

01:25:45.020 So, there's a story in the biblical texts, in the story of Abraham,

01:25:49.080 that has to do with the probability that a city will be destroyed for ethical impropriety.

01:25:54.440 And cities are destroyed for ethical impropriety all the time, right?

01:25:58.020 They go to hell in a handbasket and then all hell breaks loose and that's the end of that.

01:26:03.780 That happens all the time. 0.57

01:26:04.940 Sodom.

01:26:05.180 So, well, this is the story.

01:26:07.220 So, angels of God visit Abraham or God, it's ambivalent in the story,

01:26:12.440 and they tell Abraham that Sodom and Gomorrah are going to be destroyed in totality.

01:26:18.980 And Abraham says, that's not fair.

01:26:21.700 What if there's good people there?

01:26:23.420 And God or the angels say, I don't think there are.

01:26:27.180 And Abraham says, well, what if I can go to the city and find 50?

01:26:30.960 And God says, you find 50, no problem. 0.98

01:26:33.940 And Abraham, who's a stubborn bastard, says, well, what if there's 40? 0.98

01:26:38.320 And God says, you know, you're pushing your luck. 0.99

01:26:42.140 And I think Abraham gets him down to 10.

01:26:46.060 And it's a fascinating story because this is what I think it means.

01:26:49.300 And this is also why I think your venture is so crucially important.

01:26:52.780 And I also think this is relevant on the day after Jay Bhattacharya was elected to head the NHS,

01:27:00.400 after being an outsider and, what would you say, cancelled.

01:27:05.500 The moral of that story is if there's 10 people in the city that are still willing to tell the truth,

01:27:10.800 the city won't be destroyed.

01:27:12.040 And I believe that's true because I think the truth is so powerful that if a culture hasn't become so totalitarian

01:27:20.760 that everyone is silenced, there's still hope.

01:27:24.080 And I do think there's still hope in the West.

01:27:26.080 And the fact that you guys can come here to Phoenix, right, home of rebirth, so to speak.

01:27:32.420 Yeah.

01:27:32.560 And you can do your thing.

01:27:34.480 You can do what comedians have always done, which is to tell the truth.

01:27:37.320 And God only knows what the consequence of that will be.

01:27:39.900 More than, possibly more than you think.

01:27:42.480 Yes.

01:27:42.820 It's possibly, there's a reason stand-up comedy is so entertaining and so popular.

01:27:48.800 It's possible because it's possible that it's because it's really necessary.

01:27:52.640 It's really necessary for you to be allowed to be funny.

01:27:56.340 Because one of the things that's so cool about comedy is that people don't laugh on purpose.

01:28:01.280 Right?

01:28:01.720 You can't, you can pretty much tell when someone laughs falsely.

01:28:06.500 And so it's actually a form of spontaneous honesty.

01:28:10.380 It's pre-conscious.

01:28:11.740 Yeah.

01:28:11.900 That's very interesting.

01:28:13.320 Yeah, it's very interesting.

01:28:14.200 Well, I saw recently a clip of one of the, I won't name names, but one of the very woke comics in the UK in a BBC audience.

01:28:21.360 You could tell the audience were forcing themselves to laugh because they wanted to show approval for the message that was being.

01:28:27.440 The moral virtue.

01:28:28.040 And I felt like, I think it was maybe Leo Curse at GB News.

01:28:31.320 He was saying that that's the punishment for the woke. 0.99

01:28:33.460 Yeah.

01:28:33.580 They have to sit through these things and force themselves to laugh.

01:28:36.620 Yeah.

01:28:36.800 It's that distinction between what they call claptor, you know, when you see where people are applauding out of approval for what is being said.

01:28:42.300 Aren't they good guys?

01:28:43.400 What's much better is that involuntary laugh when you think, I really shouldn't have laughed at that.

01:28:47.540 Well, that's the thing.

01:28:49.000 It's even better than the best kind of laughter is when you're ashamed of yourself for laughing.

01:28:54.200 It's like, oh my God, or for saying it.

01:28:56.360 It's like, oh my God, I can't believe I said that.

01:28:58.420 But it was like necessary and it was funny.

01:29:00.900 But also, it's an escape valve, you know, and we've known there's been, I've never seen riots in Dublin until last year.

01:29:05.880 You know, I think it was last year they happened.

01:29:07.280 Yeah, that's right.

01:29:07.760 It wasn't earlier this year.

01:29:08.500 Yeah.

01:29:08.720 Yeah.

01:29:08.920 I've never seen riots in Dublin.

01:29:10.180 I grew up in Dublin.

01:29:11.240 I've never seen a riot in Dublin, you know.

01:29:12.960 Montreal, too, by the way.

01:29:14.700 Really?

01:29:15.020 Yeah, horrible.

01:29:15.760 Oh, God, yes.

01:29:16.320 And I'm not saying, I'm not making any great claims for comedy, but one of the things that it does do is that it lets a little bit of steam out when everyone notices the same thing at the same time, right?

01:29:26.700 Yeah.

01:29:27.200 And maybe people aren't talking about it elsewhere.

01:29:30.260 So comedy and satire is a great place to let this steam out.

01:29:33.460 But we have a show called Have I Got News for You in the UK.

01:29:36.540 And if it was, if it's supposed to be, collect the news of the recent week, and you could watch it and not have a clue that any of the stuff we spoke about today is going on.

01:29:49.540 Yeah.

01:29:49.960 You know, because they deliberately avoid anything that will get them complaints.

01:29:54.380 And as a result, it's like completely toothless as a satirical show.

01:29:58.740 We need things that make people, that just make people feel a bit sane.

01:30:03.120 I mean, that's what we tried to do with my YouTube about the gender issue. 0.63

01:30:06.660 Yeah.

01:30:06.960 Just wanted to make people, yeah, you have noticed that.

01:30:09.200 People are.

01:30:09.760 Yeah, right, right.

01:30:10.660 You know what I mean?

01:30:11.140 Well, that's the reestablishment of a consensus of truth.

01:30:13.940 Like, you know.

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01:31:00.300 Plus, it's much harder to make 10 people laugh in a crowd if there's only 10 than 1,000, right?

01:31:06.620 And so there's something about the anonymity of a crowd.

01:31:10.040 But there's also something about the fact that when everyone laughs together,

01:31:14.280 it's the establishment of a new consensus of the previously unspoken based on the self-evident truth.

01:31:21.320 Because everyone wouldn't be laughing if it wasn't true, right?

01:31:23.940 It has to, and if that wasn't a true response.

01:31:27.840 And it's also sudden and uncontrollable.

01:31:30.180 Yeah.

01:31:30.380 You know, there's another weird thing about laughter.

01:31:32.420 I used to do this as a joke with a couple of my friends when we were lifting weights in the gym.

01:31:36.840 Because if you make someone laugh when they're in the middle of a bench press,

01:31:40.180 that they'll drop the weight on the chest. 1.00

01:31:41.880 You'll kill them. 0.98

01:31:42.180 Well, you lose all your muscular control when you laugh, which is also extremely interesting, 0.99

01:31:47.460 because it means that in the moment of laughter, you render yourself defenseless and vulnerable,

01:31:53.560 which is also extremely interesting, right?

01:31:55.900 Especially because it's also intensely pleasurable.

01:31:58.620 Yes, exactly.

01:31:59.800 It's a very weird...

01:32:00.920 But don't you find it depressing, though, that so many comedians,

01:32:03.180 you call them regime comedians,

01:32:04.760 but comedians in the UK don't recognize that this is a problem.

01:32:07.360 They don't think it is a problem because their opinions are the orthodox opinions.

01:32:10.020 But also, I mean, we did a stand-up gig in Dublin, what, four months ago or something,

01:32:14.380 which was canceled on us.

01:32:16.600 Activists phoned up the...

01:32:17.760 Graham and I were both performing that night, a couple of other comics.

01:32:20.620 It was part of my Comedy Unleashed thing.

01:32:22.020 Right, right.

01:32:22.600 And activists phoned up the venue and they said,

01:32:25.260 OK, we won't put it on then.

01:32:26.820 They're too scared.

01:32:27.780 Yeah.

01:32:28.280 And then we found another venue at the last minute and it was fine.

01:32:31.440 But how can you talk to...

01:32:32.540 How can any comic today say that that is a situation that...

01:32:34.820 Well, you answered that question earlier.

01:32:38.000 It provides an avenue to success for absolutely mediocre people.

01:32:42.640 Right, and then they can say two things.

01:32:45.260 I'm just as funny as Graham Linehan, for example.

01:32:48.100 Plus, I'm definitely morally superior.

01:32:50.700 And that's a big...

01:32:51.620 That's a huge accomplishment.

01:32:54.080 Or do they genuinely think that we are spreading hate through the medium of humor?

01:32:58.880 Do they believe that Count Dankler was trying to recruit people to neo-Nazism

01:33:02.360 through the medium of pugs?

01:33:04.000 Well, I did.

01:33:04.420 Look, it's...

01:33:04.940 I can answer that.

01:33:05.860 I did.

01:33:06.140 He did think that, you see?

01:33:07.740 I know, I know.

01:33:08.740 I know.

01:33:09.120 It's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

01:33:11.380 Right, OK.

01:33:11.820 You never want to underestimate the, what would you say,

01:33:14.880 the attractiveness of unearned moral virtue.

01:33:17.100 Like, in the gospel accounts, for example,

01:33:20.120 the people who end up crucifying Christ are the Pharisees, right? 0.85

01:33:23.960 It's Pharisees. 1.00

01:33:25.120 That's religious hypocrites. 1.00

01:33:26.820 Those are the people who are claiming to be good when they're not. 1.00

01:33:30.340 It's the scribes.

01:33:32.300 Those are the academics, right?

01:33:34.000 Who use truth in the service of their own self-interest.

01:33:37.560 And the lawyers.

01:33:38.760 And they're the ones who use legalism as an alternative to morality.

01:33:42.440 That proclivity has been around forever.

01:33:44.840 Yes.

01:33:45.220 The temptation...

01:33:46.120 See, one of the commandments is do not use the name of God in vain.

01:33:51.340 And everyone thinks that means don't swear.

01:33:53.720 That isn't what it means.

01:33:55.220 It means don't claim to be doing the work of the divine

01:33:58.260 when you're pursuing your own self-interest.

01:34:00.760 Right.

01:34:01.000 And it's really necessary to understand that that's a temptation. 1.00

01:34:04.760 You know, so for example, when I said, just get the damn vaccine. 0.99

01:34:10.520 Now, was I being good or was I signaling a kind of moral virtue? 0.99

01:34:14.420 And I would say, I think I wasn't being good at all in that situation.

01:34:18.600 I think I was signaling a form of moral virtue.

01:34:20.900 It's like, come on, all the sensible people like me are going to do this.

01:34:25.220 And you can tell that in consequence of the fact that I've already done it.

01:34:28.960 You know, like I said, I can plead illness at the time.

01:34:32.120 But that's still...

01:34:33.360 But there's also the apparatus that I was talking about earlier.

01:34:38.120 Yeah.

01:34:38.460 You just take it as a normal thing that you would issue a statement on it.

01:34:43.060 And we all do.

01:34:44.420 I remember that in the before times on Twitter.

01:34:47.780 If everyone's talking about something, you sit there thinking,

01:34:50.260 oh, I better come up with a joke.

01:34:52.020 Yeah.

01:34:52.360 You know, who cares if you talk or not?

01:34:54.260 I don't really like knowing, you know, the way in the old days,

01:34:58.820 you'd watch a show like The Monkees.

01:35:01.360 Like I used to love The Monkees, the TV show they had, you know.

01:35:06.280 And then you'd wonder about these people and you'd hear from them

01:35:08.880 every so often for the rest of your life, just in little spots.

01:35:11.160 Yeah.

01:35:11.320 And then when they died.

01:35:12.480 But now they are telling you their political opinions all day every day.

01:35:15.940 Which you don't want to know.

01:35:16.940 Which you either don't want to know or maybe you think you want to know and you actually don't.

01:35:21.000 Well, worse still, they're not necessarily their opinions.

01:35:22.940 They're the opinions they feel they have to transmit.

01:35:24.960 Well, they're also no more interesting than anyone else's opinions.

01:35:28.720 Absolutely.

01:35:29.140 You know, I went and saw John Cleese, who, like, I love John Cleese.

01:35:32.480 He was like a savior to me in my adolescence.

01:35:35.560 All of my friends were John Cleese freaks, you know.

01:35:38.220 And he's so funny.

01:35:39.920 And I went and saw his live show five years ago.

01:35:42.420 And he talked about making Life of Brian and about, well, all the great movies they made.

01:35:48.240 And that was so interesting.

01:35:49.240 And then he talked about Trump, which was, like, not interesting.

01:35:53.040 It was like listening to your neighbor talk about Trump.

01:35:55.740 And it's, well, I suppose that's another one of the cataclysmic problems of this interconnectedness.

01:36:05.020 Well, yeah.

01:36:05.700 But what I'm saying is that we're all on a stage now, you know.

01:36:09.420 As soon as you have a Twitter account or Facebook or whatever, you step onto a stage.

01:36:13.180 You know, and I think that always being audience-facing is perhaps not the best thing for us.

01:36:20.680 Yeah, definitely.

01:36:21.460 You know?

01:36:21.880 Well, can you imagine having that problem when you're a teenager?

01:36:24.560 Yes.

01:36:25.000 And having that follow you for the rest of your life?

01:36:26.700 How many lives have been ruined?

01:36:28.280 But I would say that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a celebrity expressing an opinion.

01:36:33.100 And I think there's a distinction to be drawn.

01:36:34.920 I mean, I've spoken with John Cleese about his, he has sincerely held convictions that he's entitled to express.

01:36:42.020 But I think that is very different from, for instance, to give an example, an actor friend of mine during the Black Lives Matter riots was contacted by her agent saying,

01:36:51.200 you haven't put up a black square in support of Black Lives Matter.

01:36:55.180 If you don't do that, I won't be able to find work for you.

01:36:58.120 That's not going to happen.

01:36:58.860 So therefore, you have someone in the arts industry now feeling they have to convey an opinion that they don't sincerely hold.

01:37:07.200 Otherwise, their livelihood will be taken away from them.

01:37:09.020 Now, I think that's the risk.

01:37:12.580 Well, part of the problem here might be, and I've certainly had this problem on Twitter.

01:37:16.880 It's like, Twitter is like talking to your friends or your roommates in college, except that it's not.

01:37:26.040 Because it goes out to millions of people.

01:37:28.020 Well, it's a performance.

01:37:28.660 It's like seriously not that, even though it feels like that.

01:37:32.880 And so, you know, maybe one of the rules with X, for example, or social media in general, is if you play with fire, you're going to be burned.

01:37:41.360 And you're playing with fire whether the match is hot or not on social media.

01:37:45.940 You know, my son has told me, he said, Dad, you have to remember when you're on X that you're actually publishing.

01:37:50.900 Right.

01:37:52.100 And it's certainly the case that I spend a lot less time on any given tweet than I would on any sentence that's in one of my books.

01:37:58.800 Well, I'm often catching myself in that.

01:38:01.980 If I get into a Twitter spat, an argument, which I do more than I should.

01:38:06.100 Yeah.

01:38:06.340 Sometimes I think, I catch myself and I think, am I trying to be seen to win?

01:38:11.940 Right.

01:38:12.900 More than getting to the truth of the point.

01:38:15.240 Right.

01:38:15.580 And that's the point.

01:38:16.320 Well, anger will certainly, anger will certainly motivate that.

01:38:18.900 And that's when I tend to withdraw from it.

01:38:21.100 If I think it's, I'm messing up now.

01:38:23.240 I'm trying to humiliate this person.

01:38:24.940 It's a power game now.

01:38:25.800 Right.

01:38:25.980 And I don't like that about myself.

01:38:27.480 I'm sure everyone has it.

01:38:28.940 Oh, yeah.

01:38:29.280 But I think being aware of the performative element of social media, it's just not.

01:38:34.760 It's hard to be aware of it, though.

01:38:36.040 It is.

01:38:36.500 Because you just have to go click and away you go.

01:38:38.760 You know, it's like there's no lag.

01:38:40.780 It's not the forum for discussion.

01:38:41.960 It just isn't.

01:38:42.940 Something about it, it rewards extremism.

01:38:45.100 Well, it rewards impulsive behavior.

01:38:46.780 It does.

01:38:47.160 Right.

01:38:47.560 It's set up to incentivize impulsive behavior.

01:38:49.820 Yes.

01:38:50.340 We have no idea.

01:38:51.480 Like, impulsive behavior is a bad medium to long-term strategy.

01:38:55.260 Yeah.

01:38:55.400 And that's the sign, QAnon, of Twitter.

01:38:57.540 And so it just might be a game that degenerates as you play it.

01:39:00.920 I'm kind of confused by Elon's decision to put in the For You tab.

01:39:06.140 Which seems like a surefire way to create kind of discord and arguments.

01:39:10.680 I just don't look at that tab.

01:39:11.660 I look at the things that I'm following.

01:39:12.860 A lot of people are saying...

01:39:13.440 I also don't look at it because it's too pathological.

01:39:16.300 Yeah.

01:39:16.720 Like, it just aggregates bad actors.

01:39:18.740 Well, they're trying to...

01:39:20.260 No one knows what to do with Twitter.

01:39:22.760 Like, and they're...

01:39:24.380 So I have to ask you another question because my daughter won't forgive me if I don't.

01:39:29.260 Okay.

01:39:29.540 And there are other reasons too.

01:39:31.060 You taught a course for Peterson Academy.

01:39:33.240 I did.

01:39:33.580 We live in a time when many of us think that human progress is inevitable.

01:39:39.160 When it comes to the arts, this is a kind of wishful thinking.

01:39:43.680 It's the psychological complexity of his characters and his insights into human nature.

01:39:48.320 Not the plots.

01:39:49.600 He wasn't interested in plots.

01:39:51.040 Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Remy and Juliet.

01:40:00.020 This is a girl on a balcony, a lover below.

01:40:02.700 Could you change a single syllable and improve it?

01:40:05.360 It's not possible.

01:40:06.760 You can read Shakespeare.

01:40:08.140 I don't care who you are.

01:40:09.280 These are plays about human beings.

01:40:10.840 This is why they've never stopped being relevant.

01:40:12.440 He broadens our sense of what it means to be human.

01:40:15.540 People found it very uncomfortable because it doesn't have poetic justice.

01:40:18.520 His characters, Iago, Cleopatra, Titus, Cordelia, Brutus, they all think differently.

01:40:25.240 I do think that Shakespeare has the capacity to illuminate our modern world.

01:40:29.580 As Solzhenitsyn said, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

01:40:34.260 I like the fact that Shakespeare absolutely doesn't attempt to preach at you.

01:40:38.600 It's incumbent on us to have a familiarity with, well, the greatest writer who ever lived.

01:40:48.520 Tell us about the course.

01:40:53.100 So the course is on Shakespeare's tragedies.

01:40:55.620 And we filmed it in London.

01:40:57.820 Was it last year?

01:40:58.580 I think, yes.

01:40:59.320 My sense of time has completely gone.

01:41:01.440 And it was excellent.

01:41:03.620 And I'm not saying that just to be a sycophant.

01:41:05.500 But the whole premise, I'm so 100% behind, which is that I was told you can teach this course and in whatever way you want.

01:41:13.860 You can focus on the things you want, which I think is the way to get the best out of people who want to teach.

01:41:19.340 Well, we only invite people to participate who we want to hear from.

01:41:23.860 And so this is something I definitely learned in academia.

01:41:27.240 It's like, once you have the right person, leave them the hell alone.

01:41:31.600 And if they're not the right person, then fire them, right?

01:41:36.220 Well, what's great about it as well, because that's my background.

01:41:39.400 That was, you know, that was my doctoral degree was in Shakespeare.

01:41:43.780 I used to teach Shakespeare at Oxford University part-time while I was completing the doctorate.

01:41:49.420 It's everything.

01:41:50.080 And obviously, I've retained the love of Shakespeare, and I continually read him all the time.

01:41:55.360 But so it's, I tell you what it is, it's, I've been dragged into this culture war stuff by virtue of my creative work, comedy, playwriting, etc.

01:42:07.220 Because you have to address this as a creative.

01:42:09.440 If there's such an obstacle, such an impediment, you have a kind of duty to address it.

01:42:14.700 Right, but the political is an obstacle to your creativity.

01:42:17.800 You can't ignore it.

01:42:18.900 But it then becomes an obstacle to other enthusiasms in your life.

01:42:24.440 Right.

01:42:24.880 And for me, Shakespeare...

01:42:25.860 And more lasting enthusiasms, hopefully.

01:42:28.180 And actually, I think the study of the likes of Shakespeare, who the activists are trying to problematize.

01:42:35.960 You know, the Globe Theatre in London, which is supposed to be the custodian of his work, has an annual anti-racist Shakespeare webinar, where sort of anti-racist experts gather to berate Shakespeare for his problematic elements.

01:42:49.580 And you think...

01:42:50.560 I'm morally superior to Shakespeare.

01:42:52.180 I'm better than Shakespeare, right.

01:42:53.400 I'm better than Shakespeare, yeah.

01:42:54.580 And I think one of the great things...

01:42:55.560 So in the course that I did for you, for the Petitian Academy, I started the first lecture with a question, which is, why has Shakespeare, as a playwright, never been bettered?

01:43:04.640 How can that be the case?

01:43:05.860 You know, this is...

01:43:06.700 He began in the late 1580s.

01:43:09.840 The public theatres had only been around for about a decade.

01:43:12.520 This is a new thing.

01:43:13.940 This is a new medium.

01:43:15.060 How is it that a man, right at the start of this new thing, isn't ever bettered for four centuries?

01:43:20.580 How does that happen?

01:43:21.380 And I hope by going through it, we sort of get to some kind of answer.

01:43:24.440 But I think it's that prioritization of genius, which has now become suspect within the Academy.

01:43:30.160 You know, the idea that his work can be reduced to the idea of just a white male effectively trying to empower other white men through his work.

01:43:39.880 That's how they see art.

01:43:41.660 That's how they see creativity as just a kind of conduit.

01:43:44.380 Can you imagine a temptation more profound than the one that would allow you to be morally superior to the great geniuses of history just because you hold the same cost-free political opinions?

01:43:55.740 Exactly.

01:43:56.040 I mean, that is a good deal. 0.78

01:43:57.480 I can barely tolerate going to museums now because you have a masterpiece and then an explanation by someone whose subtext is how they're morally superior to this person who's so outstanding that it's shitting them.

01:44:11.120 There was an exhibition of Hogarth in London where there was a self-portrait.

01:44:14.880 And because he was sitting on a chair which was made of wood, the panel explained that the wood had probably come from a plantation and it's connected to slavery.

01:44:21.960 And therefore, we need to judge Hogarth.

01:44:23.680 I also, and I think, so I think these little lectures that you get, it's so of this, it says so much about our time but nothing about the art.

01:44:32.860 Yes.

01:44:33.240 And nothing about the transcendent capacity of art.

01:44:36.820 And that's why I'm very careful now.

01:44:38.680 It's so rooted to the year.

01:44:40.820 It is, absolutely.

01:44:41.920 Yeah, yeah.

01:44:42.160 And whenever I see, I research it very carefully now, if I go and see a production of Shakespeare, because nine times out of ten, it will be a mangling of Shakespeare to promote the ideology.

01:44:53.580 And by the way, I don't think that's a problem if you want to, people do all sorts of things with Shakespeare.

01:44:57.800 Yes.

01:44:58.100 And that's fine.

01:44:59.140 They're free to do that.

01:45:00.060 And I don't care if you want to turn it into a pro-Marxist thing or a pro-consider, whatever you want to do with it.

01:45:04.780 Or queer Shakespeare. 0.85

01:45:05.580 Or queer, but everyone's doing the same thing. 1.00

01:45:07.780 Because that's what you want, is you want Shakespeare's comedies to be even more confusing.

01:45:13.200 Yeah, well, and the other thing that happens, of course, is that as soon as the theatrical presentation becomes woke, no one watches it.

01:45:22.940 Yes.

01:45:23.180 And then all the activists say, well, obviously Shakespeare is passé because no one's paying any attention to him anymore.

01:45:30.560 But why is it that all, in our current culture, I think all art at the moment is, as you say, mandatory in terms of it must be conveying the message.

01:45:39.220 It feels like state-sanctioned art, propaganda rather than art.

01:45:43.520 And that's the only way you're going to get commissioned.

01:45:45.860 That's the only way you're going to get a play on.

01:45:47.460 Well, no, in the UK.

01:45:48.640 Oh, it's increasingly the case in classical music and everywhere in the arts and theatrical productions all across the United States.

01:45:56.320 It's, I think, 50% of the theatres now in the United States are, the prophecy is that they'll go broke within the next two years.

01:46:04.760 And it's like, the problem with propaganda is no one wants to watch it.

01:46:09.860 Well, Graeme, if you were working, if they were letting you work today, all of your scripts would be passed by a sensitivity reader in advance.

01:46:15.680 You would be told which bits you have to take out.

01:46:17.700 Yeah.

01:46:17.820 You know, even the poet Kate Clanchy, who's, you know, on the left and, you know, et cetera, she wrote this piece about sensitivity readers, her experience.

01:46:25.380 She'd written a, and I will not do it justice, but she, as a poet, had used the word disfigurement relating to the landscape, relating to the, she was doing something poetic.

01:46:34.100 Right, right.

01:46:34.920 And the sensitivity reader said that's an ableist slur.

01:46:38.100 So all they can see when they read these texts is how does this either promote or oppress people on the basis of identity groups?

01:46:45.820 And that's not art.

01:46:47.240 I met a guy who was writing a biography of, I can't say who it is because it'll get him into trouble, but a very famous figure in the 50s.

01:46:55.660 And he, I believe he had a heart attack from dealing with sensitivity readers because the two, because the correspondence that he unearthed.

01:47:03.580 Another dead, another dead white man.

01:47:05.580 Yeah.

01:47:06.300 Was he old?

01:47:07.300 Hopefully. 1.00

01:47:08.020 Another old, dead white man. 1.00

01:47:09.880 Yeah. 0.97

01:47:10.160 But all the stuff, all the information that he unearthed, the letters, you know, they were all using, you know, the F word for gay men or the, you know, N word and stuff like this.

01:47:21.320 But this is the past.

01:47:22.940 It is the truth.

01:47:24.220 What's that story you tell in your book about Tom Stoppard?

01:47:27.500 Oh, yeah.

01:47:28.300 It was so funny.

01:47:29.280 But Tom Stoppard, this was when Sonia Friedman, who was going to produce the TED musical, which, by the way, we have exactly the same kind of problems with theatre in the UK in terms of funding.

01:47:38.660 And the TED musical would have kept people employed for years, you know, so it's just an outrageous act of censorship that they've destroyed it, you know.

01:47:48.480 But Tom Stoppard was, it was, I was very flattered because I was following a meeting she had with Tom Stoppard and she said, oh, he's complaining because he doesn't, you know, he doesn't think there should be black people in the Warsaw ghetto, you know.

01:48:01.680 And she said, but he's having them whether he likes it or not, you know.

01:48:06.080 And I thought, well, would you have Jewish people in a play about the, you know, the Bronx, you know, like, what are the rules here?

01:48:15.540 Is diversity only one way?

01:48:17.240 Is it just visual diversity?

01:48:19.160 You know what I mean?

01:48:20.060 But it's extremely important.

01:48:21.260 There's a diverse range of diversities, unfortunately.

01:48:23.660 Yeah, but you know, you were talking about Monty Python, but Terry Gilliam, because the Old Vic Theatre is now run by the people who sell its ice creams, had to take the Stephen Sondheim musical out to Bath to get it on.

01:48:38.480 Well, and Cleese also had trouble with part of the life of Brian because there's a character in it, I think, is it Chapman?

01:48:44.560 Oh, Loretta.

01:48:45.160 Yeah, Loretta, right, which is a very funny part of the movie, which is also a very, very funny movie.

01:48:50.180 But yeah, he decides that he's a man or a woman, right? 0.56

01:48:52.620 I think he said that that was overblown, that was a headline.

01:48:54.980 Well, not quite, what happened?

01:48:56.200 Oh, no, no, no, no.

01:48:57.520 Well, I've spoken to him about it.

01:48:58.720 Me too, and I know that they had trouble with that when they were bringing the play on stage, right?

01:49:03.760 It was the actors, they did a read, so John has done a stage version of Life of Brian.

01:49:08.460 Yes.

01:49:08.660 He's written a stage version, and in the reading, I think it was in New York, the actors then said, you have to take out the bit where the man says he wants to be a woman.

01:49:16.020 Oh, really?

01:49:16.600 Where he wants to be called Loretta, and he wants to have babies, and they say, and John's character says, but you can't have babies, and they say,

01:49:22.300 no, but we want to fight for his right to be able to have babies.

01:49:24.720 Yes, exactly.

01:49:25.140 And it's so prescient.

01:49:26.340 It's perfect.

01:49:26.780 It's so perfect, yeah.

01:49:27.940 But he said he won't take the scene.

01:49:29.640 No, that's right.

01:49:30.340 He said he wouldn't do that.

01:49:31.280 Which is fantastic.

01:49:32.300 Yeah, absolutely.

01:49:33.060 But that...

01:49:33.820 I think Eric Idle bedded the knee, though.

01:49:36.080 Oh, did he?

01:49:36.560 I think so, yeah.

01:49:37.360 It's so sad that the...

01:49:39.300 But I wonder about this, and it's a broader question, is, is it possible for artistic genius to even emerge within the conditions that we are currently creating?

01:49:48.540 Well, how much artistic genius emerged in the Soviet Union?

01:49:52.040 Well, that's the point, isn't it?

01:49:53.900 Yeah, well, none.

01:49:54.920 That's pushing it, but virtually none.

01:49:56.600 So, there's a great book by Victor Hugo about artistic genius, and he estimates that about three or four major artistic geniuses emerge in every generation.

01:50:06.400 That's his view about this.

01:50:07.660 He says that this is...

01:50:09.100 How does he describe it?

01:50:10.020 He says this is God distributing himself on Earth.

01:50:12.580 He says every masterpiece is a kind of miracle.

01:50:15.000 It's a really beautiful idea.

01:50:16.940 But what I think Hugo...

01:50:18.160 And he's probably right.

01:50:18.820 He's talking about the big one, like Iskynos and Homer and Dante and Shakespeare.

01:50:22.380 And I think he's right about...

01:50:24.420 Not me.

01:50:25.320 I'm sorry about that, Grant.

01:50:26.960 But you will reach Homer's heights at some point.

01:50:29.680 But I think he's talking about these...

01:50:32.260 He's saying that this will inevitably happen within humankind.

01:50:35.840 Three or four a generation, you'll get a Mozart, you'll get a whatever.

01:50:39.700 But that won't...

01:50:40.980 I think Hugo takes for granted...

01:50:42.600 Yes.

01:50:43.080 ...that we live in a culture that values the arts and doesn't value this...

01:50:47.300 It doesn't punish it.

01:50:48.500 Quite.

01:50:49.060 Yeah, definitely.

01:50:49.460 So I don't think within the grip of this movement, with the arts so captured by this movement,

01:50:57.220 those people cannot emerge because the conditions are simply not there.

01:51:01.040 They're probably there.

01:51:02.340 There probably are those genes.

01:51:03.580 I would say, though, at the time of Hugo, there would have been just as many impediments to creating art.

01:51:09.540 Right.

01:51:09.940 You know?

01:51:10.400 So that's the question.

01:51:12.360 So how is it that under the oppression of medieval Christendom, great artists still emerge through it?

01:51:18.800 What does Michelangelo do with the Sistine Chapel?

01:51:21.320 He's given narrow parameters in terms of what he can represent.

01:51:24.620 But he finds a way to...

01:51:27.440 Well, as a manifestation of God on earth, so to speak, it's very hard to stop.

01:51:33.080 You know, I collected Russian realist art from the 20th century, a lot of it.

01:51:38.140 Like, I have like 500 pieces of it.

01:51:39.940 And I looked at tens of thousands of paintings from the Soviet Union.

01:51:44.860 A lot of it rough impressionism.

01:51:47.200 It wasn't exactly realism.

01:51:48.580 And many of the pieces I got are spectacular from an artistic and technical perspective,

01:51:55.420 even though to some degree they're subordinated to propaganda.

01:51:59.000 But what was really cool about having the pieces around is that as we recede from the propagandistic milieu of the work,

01:52:07.820 the art shines through, right?

01:52:09.720 And in 100 years, these will just be pieces of art.

01:52:12.180 There'll be no propaganda left in them at all.

01:52:14.100 So that's so interesting, the way that true creative genius finds a way through the impediments.

01:52:19.240 Yes, it's like a flower on a pavement stone.

01:52:22.640 Yeah, right.

01:52:23.300 But I love that.

01:52:24.120 Like, so for instance, with Shakespeare, you know, he can't write, produce his narrative poems,

01:52:29.660 Venus and Adonis or Raphael of Cris, without patronage.

01:52:31.920 So each poem is preceded by this effusive praise of Henry Ruthley, his patron,

01:52:38.080 which you could say, well, that's dispensable.

01:52:39.880 But the beauty then comes through in the poem in and of itself.

01:52:43.040 Well, you could argue as well that like cinema is a very interesting one

01:52:46.380 because cinema is such a strange marriage of art and economics, you know?

01:52:50.020 Yes.

01:52:50.480 And it's like, but still we have these classic films that broke through.

01:52:53.600 Well, the other thing, we should probably stop with this.

01:52:56.580 Yes, sorry.

01:52:57.660 I know I'm very happy about it.

01:52:59.200 I mean, one of the things, and this is very much worth considering,

01:53:02.500 no doubt you gentlemen have already considered it,

01:53:04.280 but, you know, the way that you circumvent the propagandists

01:53:07.920 isn't by explicit political statement.

01:53:10.040 You do it by story.

01:53:11.600 Yes, yes, yes, yes.

01:53:12.380 And you tell a great story and a great, if a story is great,

01:53:15.960 it isn't subservient to propaganda because that would destroy the greatness.

01:53:19.400 And there isn't anything that's more destructive to propagandistic totalitarianism than greatness.

01:53:25.720 Yes.

01:53:25.840 And so this is why I'm so excited,

01:53:27.640 partly why I wanted to invite you on the show too.

01:53:29.580 I'm so excited that you've come to Phoenix

01:53:31.740 and that you're starting this new enterprise

01:53:33.440 and that you found each other

01:53:34.680 because God only knows what you could accomplish.

01:53:37.140 And who knows what the consequence of actually producing some things

01:53:40.460 that are genuinely funny might be again.

01:53:42.520 It's not like there's not a market for it.

01:53:44.540 I mean, Rogan's comedy club in Austin is just thriving

01:53:47.200 and he's fostering a whole new generation of comedians

01:53:50.680 who will say anything as long as it's funny.

01:53:54.660 You know, and they don't allow cell phones in the crowd.

01:53:57.240 You can't record any of it.

01:53:58.640 Yeah.

01:53:58.840 And so people go, and it's such a fun place to go

01:54:01.440 because everyone knows that there's trouble afoot

01:54:05.380 and that all sorts of things that can't be said will definitely be said.

01:54:10.020 Isn't it quite an exciting time?

01:54:12.480 All of this oppressive woke stuff actually could produce something amazing.

01:54:18.500 Well, if there's one thing we do as a species, it's overcorrection.

01:54:22.600 So I quite like the idea of a comic overcorrection.

01:54:24.860 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:54:25.780 Well, maybe that's what's happening.

01:54:26.960 I think that's happening already

01:54:28.320 because there's so many things that are happening

01:54:30.220 even within the Trump administration that are comic overcorrections.

01:54:33.800 Right?

01:54:34.100 It's like, really?

01:54:35.400 They appointed him?

01:54:36.920 That's the maximally possible,

01:54:39.120 that's the maximally comical possible outcome, right?

01:54:42.120 Yes.

01:54:42.640 So, all right, gentlemen, we should probably stop on this side.

01:54:45.580 So thank you very much for coming in to talk to me.

01:54:48.160 Absolute pleasure.

01:54:49.800 We'll meet again, I suspect, on the podcast,

01:54:53.040 especially once you guys get up and rolling

01:54:54.680 because everyone's going to want to know just exactly what the hell...

01:54:58.400 Oh, yeah, what we've done.

01:54:59.560 They have all sorts of plans, by the way,

01:55:01.760 which we didn't discuss today

01:55:03.080 because it's a little bit premature to announce them,

01:55:05.080 but those announcements will be coming soon.

01:55:07.640 Thank you to everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side

01:55:10.480 and to the Scottsdale crew here for making this possible

01:55:12.860 and also for putting this together on relatively short order

01:55:16.160 because we decided to do this podcast, what, yesterday?

01:55:19.960 Yeah.

01:55:20.240 The three of us, anyways,

01:55:21.600 and so that worked out extremely well.

01:55:23.480 And we're going to continue on the Daily Wire side.

01:55:26.140 I think probably what we'll do there

01:55:27.740 is delve a little bit more into the ugly underbelly

01:55:30.480 underbelly of totalitarian wokeness,

01:55:34.180 especially, I think, especially in the UK and in Europe

01:55:40.020 because a correction has obviously already occurred in the United States

01:55:43.400 and, God willing, that will actually have some teeth

01:55:45.720 and we'll see what happens.

01:55:47.100 And in Canada, Trudeau's days are absolutely numbered.

01:55:52.400 There isn't a chance that he's going to survive beyond next October.

01:55:55.360 Now, he'll be able to do a lot of damage in the intervening year,

01:55:57.740 but he's pretty much done.

01:55:59.620 But Europe is in rough shape and the UK, they're in rough shape.

01:56:03.000 And so I think we'll turn our attention on the Daily Wire side

01:56:05.860 to a discussion of that situation

01:56:07.900 and also what might be done about it that would be practical and useful.

01:56:11.820 So join us for that.

505. Europe Imploding ｜ Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan

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