Academia Has Fallen - Dr Paul A. Taylor
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 47 minutes
Words per minute
175.71124
Harmful content
Misogyny
17
sentences flagged
Toxicity
68
sentences flagged
Hate speech
36
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode of Trigonometry, Francis Foster and Constantine Kissan are joined by Paul Taylor to discuss the state of the academic world, and how the media have contributed to it, and why it s so hard to get a grip on it.
Transcript
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I was in infant school, so I must have been about five, and we had books got delivered every month.
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So I'm sat next to this lad, and he had this bright yellow book that was about Red Indians.
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Sorry, I can't say that. Native Americans, Red Indians at the time.
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I could see they had an ink drawing of a Native American with his arm on the ground.
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He was lying down listening, and I read enough even at that age to know he was listening for things in the distance.
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And he said, no, he's dead. I said, he's not. He's listening for things in the distance.
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And it was in the context of the chapter. It was pretty obvious.
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And I started calling, you're thick. You're thick.
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So the teacher came over, and she basically, I was hoping, she was this authority figure.
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And to me, even at that age, the truth mattered.
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And she said, oh, leave him, Paul. It's like everyone's entitled to their opinion.
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So in that one moment, I think from the age of fives, you're talking 50 years later on, that's never left me,
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because I've witnessed it at universities, that authorities who are guardians of the truth is, you know, putting too fine a spin on it.
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But the truth does matter, and learning does matter, and they've turned their backs on it.
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Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our brilliant guest today is a retired academic who's absolutely fed up with what he's had to deal with his entire career.
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And he's come on Trigonometry to drop some truth bombs.
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It's great to have you on. You're going to blackpill us about the state of the academic world.
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But before we get into that, tell us who are you, how are you, where you are,
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what has been the journey through life that leads you to be sitting here talking to us?
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Well, until a couple of months ago, I was an academic at Leeds University.
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And before that, I'd been at Salford, and I studied, I did my degree and PhD at University of Edinburgh.
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And the reason, I'd split it into two, there's my motivation to wanting to speak,
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and it was basically, I think I was on the risk of having an aneurysm watching the television
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That's a very common condition nowadays, I tell you.
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Well, we'll get on to hopefully some of the good aspects of this.
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So, for example, I went through a phase where I kept shouting,
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And then Andrew Doyle wrote his book on the New Puritans.
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So I thought, well, at least I'm not going mad.
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And this is the type of thing, and it's mostly the media's inability.
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So if I can talk about what annoyed me most about the media,
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and I'll try and do that as quickly as possible.
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But one of my main points is the way in which the media dumbs down everything.
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So I know that's a bit of an obvious point to make, but I can go into specifics.
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And I just sometimes think of getting a tattoo on my forehead saying it's more complicated than that.
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And if there was a machine to make things unduly simple, it would be places like the BBC,
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which I can, you know, you can hands off commercial TV or radio because it's not their remit
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But the BBC, it's supposed to be part of their historical remit.
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And I just remember him watching terrible things.
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So, for example, without going into the politics of Brexit, which is easier said than done,
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If I can remember, it stands for Trans-European Automatic Real-Time Gross Settlement Express Transfer System.
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And it's because in the EU, when they used to have float, before they had the euro,
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So if you're buying loads from a foreign country, your currency depreciates,
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they become more expensive, and there's a balancing mechanism.
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The Germans typically export loads, and this means that in the old days,
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the Deutsche Mark would have appreciated, and that would have balanced things out.
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Because they got rid of that, they have a paper trail.
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They have, within the EU, that everything in euro still has to be paid.
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And it wasn't too bad until about 2008 with the Lehman banking crisis.
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And then you can check out, it's a while since I looked at them,
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but it's about Germany's owed, inverted commas, about 1.4 trillion euros by the rest of Europe.
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So if, for example, a country ever wanted to leave, Italy wanted to leave,
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and I know there's jokes about the Hotel California,
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But this is one of the reasons Italy are on the hook.
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But there are huge balances which show the inequalities that,
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because of variable exchange rates, are no longer there.
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Now, forgive me that it's a slightly technical economic analysis of what's going on,
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who's supposed to be the godfather, so to speak, of economics within the EU,
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He's gone on record as saying it's one of the most first things he looks at each morning
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and this idea that the ignorance was always on one side,
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when I think it's quite clear, I mentioned it to a few colleagues,
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I know you've been reading Thomas Sowell, I think you've said in the past,
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where intellectuals give themselves credit for things they don't know
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So that's just the default position of the media, as far as I can see.
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And there's instances, so I was getting slightly annoyed,
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I think on one of the Roars, you've had to go with Alistair Campbell.
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And that was the other thing that was risking giving me an aneurysm,
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because you made the very valid point, why is he being spoken to?
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This is a guy who should be in The Hague, not in the television studio.
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something like The Late Show, and Nigel Farage was on with him.
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And I've only watched a small segment, but the antipathy,
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if there's a live audience, the antipathy towards Nigel Farage,
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but Alistair Campbell gets quite angry, and is talking over everybody.
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And he says, Nigel, this is a direct quote,
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And the audience gives a spontaneous round of applause,
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Just the inability, the level of way in which civil discourse,
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the way in which to have an, not even an intellectual,
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has become completely ruined by people's tribal affinities.
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the way in which the Irish give themselves a free pass
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which now they're trying to get rid of their tax haven status,
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that some of these things might come to the fore.
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And your point about Alistair Campbell and Nigel Farage
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because if you think about public consciousness,
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which of those two people is considered more immoral,
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Certainly Iraqis, I think, would agree with that.
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before I talk about how terrible the universities are.
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So he handed me just an adult non-fiction book,
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Constantine, you're addicted to your bloody mobile.
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You know, your attack is like an umbilical cord,
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You know, wooden toys and loops and hoops, whatever.
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and then we can just call the interview to a halt
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And it was like, you know, one of these book clubs.
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It's still, it's like Proust and his bloody Madeleines.
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There's a phrase, all fur coat and no knickers.
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So we had a nice house, but we weren't spoiled as kids.
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So I'm sat next to this lad who I've subsequently,
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I now know in my head, excuse the vulgarity,
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And he had this bright yellow book that was about Red Indians.
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Native Americans, Red Indians at the time.
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And it was all about, I had it over his fat shoulder,
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And it was about Indian culture and what they did.
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And I could see they had an ink drawing of a Native American
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And I, you know, read enough even at that age to know
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And she basically, I was hoping, she was this authority figure.
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And to me, even at that age, the truth mattered.
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It's like everyone's entitled to their opinion.
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And so in that one moment, it was, I think, from the age of five.
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That's never left me because I've witnessed it at universities.
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And the authorities who are guardians of the truth is, you know, putting too fine a spin on it.
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I went to a, it was a, I got the 11 plus, did a grammar school in Liverpool.
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And it would have been a grammar school, but it turned into an independent school when I was already at it because they threatened turning it into a comp.
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So, but everyone who was already there was sorted.
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And that, we might get onto that later, but that taught me about the selection procedure because I benefited from my, it was in West Derby, my school.
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And, but people from all over Liverpool went to it and it was the top one or 2% of, you know, Liverpool who got to that school.
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So it was just, and I know there are issues about everyone, arguably everyone should be educated together, but there's undoubtedly advantages when the teacher doesn't have to explain the most basic things to people.
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I absolutely adore maths, but I'm not particularly good at it.
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When I say not particularly good, I got maths O level a year early and I got an A.
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So nationally I was good at maths, but in my, I was in the A set for maths.
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So when something was explained to me in class, I knew very quickly that these people are, they're getting it in 10 seconds.
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I don't have a comparative advantage on this topic, but that didn't stop me loving it.
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But that also, I've always had in my life as well, educationally, this trade-off between, it sounds like an American advert doesn't be the best you can be, versus everyone should have access.
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So I understand the dilemma, but I am a massive advocate.
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I think Peter Hitchens has just done a book called The Revolution Betrayed about grammar schools and what they achieved.
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And, you know, someone like Anton's, you know, a ne'er-do-well from recent times, but, you know, Liverpool in the 80s, that was rough.
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And, you know, I'm not kidding, boys from the black stuff, all that type of stuff.
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I know it's not Soviet Union levels of poverty, but it was...
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No, it was pretty rough, but everyone I knew, I was going to say, who made it out of Liverpool, went to a grammar school.
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And insofar as there was any social mobility in those days, it was grammar school assisted.
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And I think that's a massive argument in Peter Hitchens' book.
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So, ironically, if I'd gone to my local comprehensive school, it would have been...
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It would have been much more homogenous in terms of the local catchment area.
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So, ironically, I went to an independent school that had a much, much better mix of people from around the city.
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And you've got a sense of how, you know, I was hothoused as a kid to read.
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You know, I went and put money in the electricity meter to get the lights on, which some, you know, people I studied with did.
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So, I was just very, very conscious, but that was their way out, was by education.
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So, you know, this sounds like I'm talking about the developing world, but in parts of England specifically that I know most about, that's true.
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So, that was, I did A-levels, I went on to do A-levels, I did, and I'll only mention them because I want to pick up on some of the themes.
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I did Spanish, English literature, and economics, and we did, everyone did general studies.
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But the English and Spanish, in those days, we did about a good third of it was literature and history.
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So, I did the Conquistadores, so I learned all about that, which was fascinating.
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And for today's knowledge, it's interesting that when they went to Mexico, I think it was Cortes,
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they managed to bring down the whole Aztec empire with very few people, a few rottweiler dogs and a few horses that scared the locals.
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But that was because of various complex reasons, the weakness of the Aztec empire.
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And the idea that nowadays, small vocal groups are doing so much damage.
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If there's a rotten culture, there's something wrong with the dominant culture.
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And also, I did some existential, Ernesto Sabato, El Tunel, which was an existential novel ahead of its time.
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So, it's better than Sartre, in my humble opinion.
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So, I got a taste for things like, and just reading in a foreign language.
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I think you've done translation work in the past, Constantine.
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And one of my frustrations teaching was, let's put it this way, if I saw an essay that was really grammatically really good,
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I'd look to see which part of Scandinavia they came from.
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Because British students don't have facility with their own language.
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So, the idea that they'd have facility with other languages, I think that's one of the saddest things about...
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You get lots of good inputs from overseas students.
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But I think the UK as a whole, I think language teaching is getting worse, not better, in terms of resources, the amount of language teachers.
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But I've started looking at Midrash, which is a Hebrew biblical studies technique and body of literature.
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Because I'm fascinated by how meaning is constructed.
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And that approach to language, and when you look at the...
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We'll hopefully get on to the issues about the canon and, you know, the books that we should be reading.
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But when you look at Old Testament or Hebrew writings, and often it will have gone from Aramaic to Hebrew to Greek to English.
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And at every single point, someone's made a translation judgment that's got profound consequences on what the thing means.
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And if you don't have facility with language...
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So, you know, history, a historical context has been driven out of public discourse.
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And the subtlety, the complexity of what's truly there.
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So, I'll give you one little example before I go on.
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So, I think it's Ecclesiastes, which is also known as Kohelet, Proverbs, and the Book of Job.
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I think we're talking off camera about once you're retired, you can read all the things you've wanted to read.
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And I never would have read, you know, Old Testament type...
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And there's a guy in America called Robert Alter, who's a biblical scholar.
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And he's done a retranslation of the wisdom books.
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And I think in Ecclesiastes, there's a famous...
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There's a constant phrase, O vanity, O vanities.
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But he translates it as mere breath, mere breath.
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And it's existential literature from two and a half thousand years ago.
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But in order to engage with that, you have to have a frame of reference, which that's what those...
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But having said all that, and this is why I've learned as my career progressed.
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Because I'd done economics, I thought my father was an accountant.
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I thought, well, I'll go off and do an economics and accounting degree.
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Realised very, very quickly accountancy wasn't for me.
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And through the politics over the years, I've drifted more and more to the literature,
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which is what I should have done from the get-go.
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But in the first year of Edinburgh, one of the highlights for me was we had a...
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But basically, people across the social sciences, you had to do a statistics course.
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And there was this guy, I think you've spoken in the past, Francis, about teachers and the importance of them.
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There's a load of grumpy public school boys and people like me.
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And it was like listening to someone verbally describe the visual manipulations of a Rubik's Cube.
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I've never heard anyone speak about maths the way he did.
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And I think statistics is quite specific because it has a social context.
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And if, you know, Neil Ferguson and the COVID bunch had done any proper statistics,
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we wouldn't have been in lockdown for what seemed like five years.
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So jumping around, but that would be, if you're going to say, what's your recommendation that everyone does?
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Forget all this government or let's learn what democracy is.
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Every student that can possibly be force-fed a statistics course should be.
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So you're in agreement with Rishi Sunak then, Paul?
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I think he just wants everyone to turn everyone into an investment banker.
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So we are jumping around now, but you pointed me in that direction.
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You know, the grooming gang scandal, I remember seeing a discussion, one of the very few discussions on Channel 4.
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And she was talking with, is it Nazir Afzal, who was the Northwest Director of Public Prosecutions.
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And at one point, I think she was trying to argue.
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And forgive me if it wasn't Cathy Newman, but it sounds like the type of thing she'd do.
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She was trying to argue that because the vast majority of child abusers are white, that it's completely unfair to focus on the grooming gang scandal.
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And I'm thinking the overwhelming number of child abusers are white because the overwhelming numbers still in this country are white.
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And then she actually said, he said, it's undeniable that the overwhelming demographic of these child abusers are South Asian, men of South Asian origin.
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And I remember she said, that's a bold statement.
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But anyway, that statistics would have helped massively if Channel 4 reporters had ever done any or paid attention.
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But then in second year, the highlight of my whole university career, and you might like this, Constantine,
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I did a year-long course on 19th century Russian studies that involved literature and history.
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So you didn't do these little bitty, you know, do a module here and a module.
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It wasn't just, oh, you'll do Tolstoy and that's it.
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We did all the Dostoevsky, we did a war and peace, we did Anna Karenina.
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So the intellectual ambition and scope, and you got people from within the humanities and social sciences got to do it.
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In today's universities, you can do like discovery courses or something.
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And you'd be lucky, they'd probably give you a few chapters of war and peace.
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Because obviously the whole book's far too tiring and too difficult.
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So that, in those days, what really struck me compared to now was the level of intellectual ambition.
00:24:22.620
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Talk to us briefly about your academic career, because we haven't got there yet.
00:25:02.880
And I spent, I wrote some books on my PhD, sorry, I didn't mean, PhD Edinburgh.
00:25:12.360
I struggled to get, I got the PhD published, but it took a while.
00:25:17.640
They said, because no one's written on computer hackers before, we don't have a market for it.
00:25:22.780
Which I thought was a bit odd, because surely they want to sell things that haven't been written about.
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But it was a sociological study of hackers, or as I would say, hackers, and how they went about it.
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Then I did a book on hacktivism, which is politically motivated hacking.
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And that was all at Salford, based upon my PhD.
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And then I moved more into, so what's interesting about that is in my early academic career, and in my PhD, it was about how people interact with and try and control technology.
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So I wasn't arguing that technology dominates us.
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I was actively trying to seek ways in which people can take control of technology.
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But as my academic career progressed, I realized more and more, I became much more of a determinist.
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I think technology has very determining features that are massively underestimated.
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So I moved more into what's known as the culture industry, what's known as, ironically, it's portrayed nowadays as cultural Marxism.
00:26:28.640
Frankfurt School, I wrote a book with a co-author called Critical Theories of Mass Media, then and now.
00:26:34.400
So it was in the past and brought up to the modern era.
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And then I got, I moved to Leeds and got very interested in Slavoj Žižek's work, again, labelled by some as a cultural Marxist.
00:26:47.080
So what makes my career slightly unusual is I've studied technology in depth from a sociological point of view.
00:26:55.500
But I'm very, very critical, and I think universities use technology in ways that are quite unthinking and uncritical.
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We used to sit there in Edinburgh, and it was like the Bible.
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I remember specifically the edition of Das Kapital.
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We'd all reverentially go through it line by line.
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And it was John Holloway who taught me there, who was quite a well-known Marxist.
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So I've got all this Marxist background, and I treat it more as literature, though.
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To me, it's fascinating analysis of capitalism.
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But the idea that the assumptions are often bonkers, the analysis is great,
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So I am in this slightly interesting situation where I'm immersed in this type of stuff,
00:27:57.720
But I also think some of the so-called postmodern stuff gets a very bad rap
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And my sense is that some of the issues you talk about on this show,
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about how do we break through, how do we have this rational discourse in good faith,
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how do we relate to each other better, how do we have proper debates.
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One of the things you might want to talk about is the way in which people don't understand
00:28:38.040
I think he's doing what Richard Rannan would call shadow work on postmodernism.
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I think he's misrepresented it, and he's put on loads of bogeyman aspects.
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I think he distinguishes between postmodernism and applied postmodernism.
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he was someone linked with the Revolutionary Council.
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So if there's ever another, you know, revolution with the Ayatollahs,
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my book might be waved in the streets of Tehran.
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But my point is, you don't know how your work's going to be used.
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You don't know how your work's going to be misinterpreted.
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if the ivory tower was the old-fashioned ivory tower
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that was quite tightly circumscribed and there weren't.
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I think it was about 12% of people went to university.
00:30:03.700
And, you know, some of the concerns you've discussed on this show
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about how bad ideas percolate into society at large.
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Well, first of all, the ivory tower was more ring-fenced.
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the stupidity of professors is long-studied for and earned.
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I've spent a bit of time with Slavoj Žižek.
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when he gave some talks in the north of England.
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that conservative thinkers aren't particularly interesting
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because their intellectual ambition, by definition,
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well, we could talk about them potentially later on,
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because I don't even think necessarily they're left-wing,
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of where you could take theory in a practical sense.
00:31:20.600
But I don't see necessarily why it has to be that way
00:31:32.860
the more you've let all that toxic theoretical discharge
01:03:51.080
people like you racist bigoted northerners
0.98
01:06:21.740
americans but some of them are quite portly
1.00
01:06:43.220
is what i was going to say yeah he tested it and
01:06:55.000
whittle and he said the person who's serving at
01:06:59.100
the counter of the hotel knew what he was doing and
01:07:04.520
thousand yard stare and why i say that is you
0.93
01:07:22.600
this look and there's a brilliant brilliant book
01:07:25.560
it's not i think it's been reissued because i've
01:07:27.820
got a relatively modern copy but this guy called
01:07:44.760
1960s but he did his research 1950s because i know
01:07:57.960
and maybe the chinese example doesn't get spoken
01:08:01.240
of enough but he did this study um of basically
01:08:06.200
brainwashed i think in chinese it's she now
0.85
01:08:08.820
um and there'll be mandarin speakers at home thinking
01:08:30.780
is the he was the most eminent professor of formal logic
01:08:37.520
and he did a um a confession a written confession
01:08:43.640
and one of the things that mentioned in china they did curriculum reform
01:08:48.480
and he gets accused and this is why i get slightly defensive
01:08:52.600
when people go on about post-modernism because he's accused
01:08:54.860
he has to do this explanation where he says i was accused
01:09:01.920
because i should have only thought in a way that helped the people's republic
01:09:06.500
um so the idea was there are limits to how you can think
01:09:11.020
and i just make the suggestion when people are slagging off post-modernism
01:09:13.820
just be aware telling people the limits to which they should take thought
01:09:18.020
has a bad heritage as well as well as the misuse of these things in
01:09:22.960
totalitarian societies so in victor klemperev the nazi example
0.88
01:09:27.640
he was a jewish philologist a studier of language
01:09:32.240
and he makes he's done a book called the language of the third reich
01:09:35.600
um and it's a it's poignant as hell because the very beginning is he talks
01:09:40.380
about greek definitions of heroism in the classics
01:09:47.040
because in germany at the time heroism that was the word that was used
01:09:50.360
like today they're a buzzword and he said his wife was um so-called
01:09:55.140
arian and he was jewish so he said she her life was worse
01:10:00.640
it was unbelievably bad because she was voluntarily giving up
01:10:03.960
all her privileges and being spat out in the street
1.00
01:10:07.340
and i know it's not worse just because she didn't happen to be jewish
01:10:11.200
but she was not jewish and could have just walked away
0.92
01:10:15.480
and she went through all this as he said that is heroism
01:10:19.060
but one of the things he says was we have this misunderstanding you know propaganda
01:10:22.120
is so powerful he said he'd be he'd be sat there in an apartment
01:10:36.260
and he said they were talking about what they're going to get the shops the next day
01:10:39.660
but he said what did have an effect as a professional philologist he noticed certain words got redefined
01:10:46.040
and in nazi germany it was the constant repetition of words in daily life
01:10:50.940
that his professional experience said and his horrible personal experience
01:10:58.920
so in this robert j lift and his analysis of these um various people who've escaped
01:11:04.380
they had different methods but he said there were two basic chinese government methods
01:11:09.540
one is you're deconstructed to use a post-modern term as an individual
01:11:18.440
so ideally they'd get you in thought reform prison but they're not just prison
01:11:21.980
the uh government did thought reform classes that people voluntarily signed up for
01:11:26.680
so if you wanted to get ahead in china you'd sign up for your certificate
01:11:31.260
and in modern universities what's happening is people decide
01:11:36.380
the only way to get have a very successful career you know despite what they tell you
01:11:45.540
as a teacher i could have told you that right at the start of this interview
01:11:49.120
yeah but they don't they play in all of glossy brochures
01:11:52.020
yeah um what the only thing they're bothered about is publications
01:11:55.880
and if you can bring in research money and they they really don't care
01:12:01.700
so those people they they've i've seen it happen and i think you know the guy who wrote
01:12:07.440
darkness at noon arthur kessler it's a brilliant book about being imprisoned and a totalitarian
01:12:12.080
it's a novel but he did this very funny little short article where he called i think he called it
01:12:17.100
the commissars and the yogi he said people are divided into two types the yogi
01:12:21.500
is the spiritualist dreamer and the commissar you'll know them from if you've you you'll know
01:12:27.500
constantine but if you've ever had any engagement with any bureaucracy you know what a commissar is
01:12:33.140
he's the person with the clipboard and the power and the universities have created
01:12:38.420
these institutions within the university where you don't have to be that good you can climb the
01:12:46.020
greasy pole by being a commissar by enforcing language codes and guess what you set up a
01:12:52.520
language code unit i think leeds has now got some harassment units so good job i left
01:12:58.180
but um and guess what when you have a unit devoted to finding harassment you'll know this from the
01:13:05.260
soviet example guess what an awful lot of harassment is found because they have to justify their own
01:13:10.520
existence and then the inefficiencies so tell me whether this is just made up but the um they
0.97
01:13:16.360
measure productivity by stupid like for example weight of light bulbs so what they did is they
0.73
01:13:21.520
make the light bulbs heavier and then you find you can't see through them but they've met their targets
0.99
01:13:26.280
because they've just produced bloody heavy light bulbs so and these these irrationalities you're
01:13:31.220
asking you know what's going wrong you've got these people in institutions within institutions
01:13:36.800
that are pushing and then it becomes a question of again and ironically this is where post-modernism
01:13:42.400
helps it doesn't matter if they believe in it so this concept of belief there are various fascinating
01:13:49.540
post-modern ways of thinking about it you've got a young child and i'm guessing he is nicolai isn't he
0.90
01:13:54.580
doesn't know i'm stalking you he doesn't know you've done more research for this interview than we have
01:14:00.000
um he doesn't know christmas yet but oh sorry that's a bit of an odd i don't know whether you
01:14:08.040
will celebrate christmas it is i'm thinking i'm trying to desperately scramble new year yeah
01:14:14.000
panic or whatever no no new year father frost right father frost sorry yeah but if you wanted to
01:14:20.080
explain that you will eventually explain that to him or he'll get his presence and be all chuffed
01:14:24.160
but there's a concept where zizek writes about the concept of we pretend to pretend to believe
01:14:29.960
and what he means by that yes as adults no one will say we believe in father christmas but
01:14:36.640
actually we believe in the children's innocence even when the children have worked out this is all
01:14:41.820
nonsense we need to believe in those children believing so there are levels of belief and there's
01:14:48.400
another funny example i think there's an ethiopian tribe called the drose i think it is and they're
01:14:53.400
christians and they believe in fast fast days and they believe for some bizarre reason the leopard is a
01:14:59.560
christian animal so but on fast days when the leopard's supposed to be fasting which they believe he does
01:15:05.940
they still guard all their livestock so we have this idea that primitive people have primitive beliefs
01:15:12.480
no they have beliefs that they realize tie the in the community together and they pick and choose what
01:15:19.300
they truly believe it's actually quite sophisticated and we as thicker westerners patronizingly
01:15:25.200
but apply this to modern institutions and what you get is there will be some of these commissars
01:15:31.120
and you'll have experience or know of this from the soviet union who are born again nutty commissars
0.76
01:15:37.100
but there are others who are doing it for completely manipulative of course cynical reasons of course and
01:15:42.640
this is why you have to look you've got those people who are true believers and they are the ones that are
01:15:50.100
driving this and they have created in the universities and in the media and in the corporate world and in spore
01:15:57.100
and we could go on an incentive structure and remember people respond to incentives above all that's that's what
01:16:02.560
drives human behavior to a large extent people will do the thing that benefits them when to the extent that
01:16:08.260
they're able to assess that so you've got these true believers and then the rest of us we are fighting over that
01:16:16.060
80 85 percent in the middle of people who will go in either direction which is why a small number of
01:16:22.460
extremists can change the course of history because if they can persuade brainwash manipulate inspire
01:16:28.980
whatever the words you want to use that big majority in the middle they get to do whatever their program
01:16:34.780
is whatever their agenda is that that small group and i think it's much worse than you say to the to in the
01:16:41.800
sense that if these were evil people who in their technocratic elitist vision that got together and
01:16:48.280
were doing blah blah blah that'd be quite bad but you can get you can get a lot more done and you can
01:16:54.400
inspire a lot more people if you truly believe the crazy thing that you're selling and i think
01:16:58.960
these these people it's a religion it's a cult that they uh some of them are true believers and then
01:17:06.240
there's a large group of people who will go along with it because it's convenient for them
01:17:09.800
i'm not disagreeing i think one slight nuance i'd add is that there's um there's a thing called i
01:17:16.220
think it's seeper link is it seeper linsky the song's called solar linsky no no sorry it's some like
01:17:22.960
seeper linky triangles they're called all right and it's this weird thing is if you if you basically do
01:17:28.300
three dots and then do something in the middle and join it up and basically you can get by the time
01:17:32.640
you finish bisecting all these angles you get a fractal shape and all you're doing is repeating
01:17:38.980
um a pattern a very simple pattern so one interpretation of this is that again some of
01:17:45.940
these people don't believe but if you're in an environment where there's a certain it goes without
01:17:49.860
saying you do this in your local environment if you do one little act a similar act happens
01:17:55.280
somewhere else and across society you get there's immensely symmetrical fractal pattern agreed um so
01:18:01.400
that again is slightly it doesn't it it's not so much about belief but it's a it's about the power
01:18:09.100
and the enforcement of the belief on other people i agree with you but then but what i'm trying to
01:18:12.980
suggest is the enforcement can be quite subliminally it's in the nazi case in nazi germany within jewish
01:18:20.320
holocaust scholars there is a slight division i think they're called the intentionalists who interpret
01:18:26.160
what happened mostly as hitler's personal but there's also a group called structuralists and i'm
01:18:31.720
giving a broad divide but there's a guy called raul hilberg who wrote this it's a it's a it's in some
01:18:37.600
ways horrible uh beautiful writing but horrible it's a three volume you can get a one volume but
01:18:44.520
the whole thing is three volumes called the annihilation of the european jews and what's unique
01:18:49.620
about it is he was obsessed with the bureaucratic evidence so it's the evidence of at the most lowest
01:18:56.940
level and there's a small pamphlet he did separately about the reichsbahn which is the um the state
01:19:02.760
network system railway and get how sick this is he was talking about the bureau the bureau the bureaucracy
01:19:09.600
creates an environment where structurally things happen that never would have on their own
01:19:15.340
and he gives the haunting example of um they had an internal accounting system when people moved to
01:19:22.480
the death camps as if they were bags of grain and if you were under 11 you went free on the internal
01:19:30.700
accounting system this is how divorced from humanity but the point raul hilberg and he's been criticized
01:19:37.020
from other people who prefer to emphasize the intentionality of all these things and like most things
01:19:42.400
in life my suspicion is the truth somewhere in the middle but i just think it's a slight mistake
01:19:49.260
sometimes to fail to pay very very close attention to the way these things can occur on their own
01:19:55.740
because they're part of a structure they're not on their own though you still have to have the hit
01:20:00.220
layer at the top and then the structures will provide whatever the hit layer at the top wants
01:20:06.780
provided so it's a combination like you say the truth is in the middle the bureaucracy of
01:20:11.500
in its on its own has the ability to carry out the worst of things or the best of things depending
01:20:17.840
on what it is that is being sent down from the top right but it is the ideologues at the top that
01:20:23.360
determine the course of how that goes and that's why alternative institutions to what we've got now
01:20:28.740
are so important that's why new media is breaking the mold you talk about dumbing down well what are we
01:20:33.460
doing here we're dumbing up right no no and can i give you a personal example because i'm reading all
01:20:39.500
this bizarre stuff there's a guy in the state called henry abramson who's a rabbi um who does
01:20:45.120
some amazing because i'm getting into old testament type scripture stuff from a literary point of view
01:20:51.180
and he breaks down the talmud and the torah and the midrash and there's a brilliant scholar david
01:20:57.600
boyerin sorry daniel boyerin who's i give him the prize for the best title i've read in recent times
01:21:03.900
it's socrates and the fat rabbis he's written a book and he's a fascinating devout rabbinical scholar
01:21:11.320
and it's your point i'm i can get all this on the tinternet it's absolutely amazing but without
01:21:18.980
sounding pompous why i will sound pompous if you've got pre-existing reading skills and cultural
01:21:25.060
hinterland and background you can make use of all this stuff but there are a whole generation of
01:21:31.460
students i've left behind who don't have this and frank ferrady makes a really funny comment he
01:21:37.860
said in one of his books he was he criticized the fact that some of his students in the humanities can
01:21:42.760
get a whole degree without having read a complete book he said this is outrageous and he said after
01:21:48.040
he'd published the book he got contacted by university administration thought oh god what's going to be
01:21:53.080
said now and the administrator said yes you're correct and he's like what he goes you're correct and
01:21:58.800
this is a wonderful thing because it just shows we have multi-learning platforms
01:22:02.700
and this is the point if there are struck i'm not i don't mean to bang on about the structural
01:22:10.020
elements but if the and what you know why you are a critical theorist after all yeah but why am i here
01:22:16.100
because i believe in this i but what did i tell my first story is i believe in the truth i agree with
01:22:20.180
you and we can all we can do is what we can do but i've also thought it made me think because i think
01:22:26.540
you you you sometimes get frustrated it strikes me because you want you do want practical answers
01:22:30.060
now you understand why here's just a slightly odd thought i just think we could all be a bit more
01:22:34.900
canny you know um on big radio for i'll stop listening to that as well um is it robinson in the
01:22:40.940
morning the guy who does the interviews nick robinson and have you ever heard him let anyone speak for
01:22:47.760
more than five words before he interrupts them i have actually i think nick robinson is not as bad as
01:22:52.820
others but i take your point they all interrupt all right sorry well i might have picked the wrong
01:22:56.240
person but it is one of the reasons i just stopped listening was it's not because i'm being petty it's
01:23:01.540
just i want to listen to people speak i was just wondering whether there are more techniques whereby
01:23:06.020
the one thing on radio they can't stand is silence when they've interrupted you for the third time
01:23:11.880
just don't say anything until they say are you there can you say something i'll say i'll respond when
01:23:17.140
you stop interrupting me i do think they're very practical it sounds like a very small example
01:23:21.080
but i do think there are practical things and you've um because i stalk you online there's the
01:23:27.680
one where you're discussing this interview gets more troubling every minute there's london stop being
01:23:33.580
english the whole john clues yeah and there's a fascinating it is you've got it on your site where
01:23:38.640
you highlight but it was the power of logic and forgive me it's not been snippy but you weren't saying
01:23:46.020
anything it wasn't you know every day well my entire the tragic of my entire career is i say
01:23:51.040
very obvious things and everyone goes oh my god that's amazing but don't think it's funny you just
01:23:55.660
said yeah if scotland sorry if london was 50 scottish would it be fair to say it's less english
01:24:02.920
and but you had you were forgive me i think you got in on that discussion because you have an
01:24:08.660
ethnic background yeah but wasn't to white there's two mixed race presenters um three people from
01:24:16.880
ethnic minorities discussing has london stopped being white something and um but you just said
01:24:24.100
if we use the example of scottishness uh would that would it be like and the look of absolute confusion
01:24:30.320
but it's your point about that's why i said it's a night it's a cult it's a cult that's why it produces
01:24:35.920
the blank stare when i give them the logical example because suddenly they're confronted with
01:24:41.140
it's with reality or maybe they're using a stadium mate well to touching on universities and
01:24:49.260
isn't the problem that what this system produces is an absence of meritocracy from my own industry
01:24:57.420
not teaching but comedy i saw well we both saw it this cult ideology whatever you want to call it
01:25:04.100
come in and infect an entire industry and what happened in the edinburgh festival the moment i
01:25:09.320
knew that the edinburgh festival was finished as an institution was because you go and see shows that
01:25:14.800
are patently not four and five star shows they were then given four and five stars because they espouse
01:25:21.380
the ideology they said the right words they had the right views the right opinions etc and once that
01:25:26.620
happens meritocracy is done because you're not it's not an accurate reflection of the quality of the
01:25:33.840
work isn't that what's happening at universities yeah there's layers layers to respond to that and
01:25:41.160
before i forget it was talking about comedy i came across it was in nietzsche's birth of tragedy
01:25:46.660
he referred to comics they're the toxic discharge of absurdities nausea
01:25:52.700
which i thought was uh doesn't sound like a compliment but no but then the meritocracy
01:25:59.700
i went because i lived in edinburgh for all that time i went to um a lot of the the fringe and it
01:26:07.180
strikes me that it's very similar to the bbc it's not what you know it's who you know
01:26:13.880
and it is surprising though because i think there's a there's a bit of unity between us in the sense of
01:26:20.340
background in the sense you're in a comedy industry if i can call it that and you would have thought
01:26:26.780
the most basic thing you do in comedy is tell jokes and the most basic element of a joke is and this is
01:26:32.380
just obvious to comedians that you don't know in advance what's funny you push the boundaries or you
01:26:37.720
turn into michael mcintyre or the weirdest i'd love to get your opinion on frankie boyle what happened
01:26:44.860
to him um from a seemingly normal you know telling terribly cruel jokes to going full-on woke um strange
01:26:55.080
things happen but anyway but just before you go on and i i know i've been hogging the microphone i
01:27:00.060
should say michael mcintyre is a fantastic comedian he's absolutely brilliant he's technically brilliant
01:27:04.920
he's fantastic at making a large number of people laugh he's not necessarily an intellectual
01:27:09.920
person's comedian but but you know if you're going to be selling out stadiums that michael mcintyre is
01:27:17.420
brilliant francis and i both have a lot of respect for him no i have my it's completely personal
01:27:23.100
this is why i mentioned frankie ball in the same sentence when he was funny i'm a dark you know my
01:27:30.140
interior monologue is notes from the underground dostoevsky going around in my head so i'm not a yardstick and
01:27:36.680
i'm not a professional comic no and i can imagine to do what he does he's incredible michael mcintyre
01:27:42.480
is a supremely skilled comedian yeah just it's just not for you yeah but the point i was trying to
01:27:49.600
make is the absence of meritocracy or when you erode meritocracy the institution collapses and that's
01:27:56.700
any institution and my point is isn't that's what's happening at universities now where you do a
01:28:02.700
literature degree you don't have to read the book you know you don't have the depth of study you don't
01:28:08.200
have the intellectual rigor if you don't have the intellectual rigor then you're then it's not going
01:28:13.660
to be an accurate reflection of your ability in that particular subject if it's not an accurate
01:28:18.900
reflection of your ability in that particular subject then ultimately the degree that you were
01:28:23.780
given is worthless yeah and that i mentioned i went to university in 85 and it was about 12 percent of
01:28:32.580
people and then my career actually matched when i was doing my phd it was in the second year my phd
01:28:39.160
which i think was about 91 i personally benefited because there was a massive expansion and i got to
01:28:44.700
do tutorials and this is 1991 i think in edinburgh i was paid 18 pound an hour it was like happy days
01:28:51.440
i did as many hours as i possibly could but that was because they expanded the numbers and that's
01:28:57.220
when you notice it's your point when you expand the numbers in and of itself that reduces quality
01:29:04.160
because you've gone away from this selective and i've always joked that you know i'd have loved to
01:29:08.460
play for liverpool the main football team the main thing stopping me is fat and talentless so i could
01:29:14.660
probably still play for everton you're gonna get destroyed after this interview by anton i'd like
01:29:22.220
to say i'm a fast runner but i'm not even there um but so that's the sheer expansion dilutes and but
01:29:28.680
then i i i've got mixed views because i'm a massive believer in elitism so it really annoys me that
01:29:36.520
richard grannon had this it's a spartan life coaching system doesn't it because i had this concept
01:29:40.780
of spartan therapy you leave businessmen on their underpants on the top of the hill in wales where
01:29:46.060
i live and shout at them a lot and they'll either recover or like the spartans that they die on the
01:29:51.300
mountainside but um where was i going with this yeah we were talking about meritocracy within the
01:29:56.760
university system yeah so it's it's the expansion the numbers the sheer numbers so and then there's the
01:30:04.800
fact the minute they start paying so i remember there was one point in my career where i was
01:30:10.680
marking and one of the commissars said to me uh there's a massive disparity between the marks we're
01:30:17.540
both giving so i showed him the comments i'd made said oh i see i said what do you mean said
01:30:22.800
you're marking the old way so i missed the memo that said we're now but this is how it what did that
01:30:31.700
mean what's the old way i was using before the expansion what would have been a first two one
01:30:37.920
and a two two nowadays then this is the guardian which i know you two are massive fans of they'd
01:30:44.100
have things like the guardian university league table well we're back to the soviet manipulation
01:30:48.140
statistics and the guardian league table one of the criteria for how high you are is how many firsts
01:30:53.800
do people leave the university with because that is a sign of the quality of the institution
01:30:58.640
not if that feeds back there's a feedback loop tell you what lads if we give out a lot more first
01:31:05.500
we go up the table everyone's like everyone's doing it and why if if you're recruiting let's just say
01:31:11.820
you you you use my old standards and the students and their parents the helicopter parents who by the
01:31:19.680
way now attend i think frank frady again writes about this they attend open days so i remember saying
01:31:25.380
any questions i used to do open days with the admissions tutor and any questions and the parents
01:31:31.120
and the kids are just sat there i'm thinking i was gonna say you do know you're gonna have to come to
01:31:36.340
university and write some essays on your own but i don't think that's true because i do know of
01:31:41.980
parents helping this you know professional parents helping those kids write essays paul one of the
01:31:48.880
things that i noticed in my career in education is towards the end it was a realization that what schools
01:31:55.280
were was essentially a factory for harvesting data which then successive governments used to prove that
01:32:03.120
they were doing a good job in education so we for instance the the way that the government deduced that
01:32:11.840
they were doing a good job in primary schools is a sats which kids took at the age of 11.
01:32:19.880
We had to teach them grammar now the way we taught them grammar didn't in fact help them in any
01:32:24.700
particular way with their writing didn't take teach them how to be better writers how to construct a
01:32:29.680
sentence punctuation or any of that all it taught them was how to pass a grammar test so we used to
01:32:36.820
cram the kids full of this useless information that in two weeks time they would have forgotten about
01:32:41.280
simply to pass a test but once they pass a test and the kid and the school gets 85 percent the
01:32:47.420
government can go look up what a good job we're doing tick is that what the university sector is
01:32:52.100
like yeah i've mentioned it before the idea of the soviet when everything's driven by statistics you know
01:32:57.240
statistics are eminently fakeable and this is why i read the very beginning everyone should be trained
01:33:02.420
in statistics to know their weaknesses statistics are incredibly powerful and they get a bad rap because
01:33:07.820
they're so often misused because people don't know how to interpret them if you don't know the difference
01:33:11.620
in the median you know the the arithmetic arithmetic average i might know it but i can't say it
01:33:16.800
um this has this has an impact and you're completely correct what that allows when everything's data
01:33:23.260
driven the people in charge of the data are all powerful but at leeds for example that was one of the
01:33:30.180
former i believe it was one of the former vice chancellors sir alan langland um he was going to
01:33:36.700
get rid of the classics department at leeds and they had to get an international petition to stop him
01:33:42.240
and at the moment uh university of turku in finland which i've been to their classics department's under
01:33:48.940
threat and it's because of you why if you're obsessed with the statistics and um guess what the
01:33:55.500
classics are quite difficult so to commit to teaching student the classical which i would argue
01:34:00.660
is the single most important thing we could do on a practical level to improve things so for a slight
01:34:07.460
tangent the whole issue about non-binary stuff and trans read ovid's metamorphoses and it relates to
01:34:15.580
narcissus but um is it lario lario p um is the mother of narcissus and she asks a blind seer
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um a forecaster of the future what her son's outcome was going to be and he's blind because
01:34:30.680
initially he stood on no he was he was um juno and jupiter there's a point to this but it's because
01:34:37.660
juno and jupiter the god jupiter and his wife juno teresis is the name of the seer he stood on two
01:34:44.620
snakes copulating and because of the coitus interrupters they um made him turned him into a woman
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as a punishment don't shoot the messenger so he's turned into a woman so june uh he then manages to
01:35:00.920
get the snakes back he's turned back to a man so juno and jupiter arguing over who has most sexual
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pleasure a man or a woman so they thought i know we'll ask teresis teresis i think his name is uh we'll
01:35:13.100
ask him what he thinks as he's experienced both and then he gives the wrong answer he says the woman
01:35:18.300
has too much pleasure so she makes him blind so then he makes the prediction about narcissus when
01:35:24.240
narcissus comes along it says in ovid's metamorphoses narcissus was beloved of men and women
01:35:28.980
so he's basically sam smith ahead of his time um but my point is the by the you know there's a clue in
01:35:36.060
the title metamorphoses it's about changing it's about fluidity if these poor kids could read ovid
01:35:43.940
and have it explained to them intelligently oh that's interesting about identity is fluid this has
01:35:49.960
been known since the beginning of time it's when you get the mermaid ideologues that these type of
01:35:58.380
ideas get a it's the dumbed down version b it has no roots with actual community knowledge which is what
01:36:05.700
the greek myths had and it's just hilarious because the greek gods were they intervened and were
01:36:12.060
jealous of humans they did loads of mad stuff because guess what the greeks understood their
1.00
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gods were just ways of thinking it wasn't ideological and the gods would do contradictory things
01:36:26.180
guess what life's contradictory life fate you never know all the point about hubris and nemesis
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all these things life's gonna bite you in the ass that is what the greeks taught now my point would be
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when universities because we're talking about how could the bbc improve how could universities
1.00
01:36:44.180
improve they'll tell you what next time some stupid ignoramus from hr and well that's basically anyone
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01:36:50.420
from hr comes to give us a training course what why you know classics departments around the world
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are under threat i would pay for the classics department to teach internal training using the
01:37:02.480
socratic method like richard grannon said using greek myths and provide substantial stuff worth
01:37:09.500
engaging with i could imagine a load of academics and this is the bad faith part of it academics sit
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on these training courses and the vast majority aren't stupid and they're not ideological and they're
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01:37:20.480
sat there thinking i don't believe we're doing this and the vice chancellor of university of leeds will
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01:37:26.520
say we're a wonderful community and we're all doing and look you've just been trained on gender
01:37:30.700
fluidity and she must know her staff think most of them think this is nonsense on stilt and that's
01:37:37.840
the bad faith gets replicated but she it's it's a dutch woman who's in charge of leeds and she'll be on
1.00
01:37:43.960
hundreds of thousands of pounds for propagating what she must know deep down her staff think is
1.00
01:37:51.980
intellectually vacuous so if that's the leader of a matter leeds is a big university approximately 35 000
01:37:57.800
students if that's the leadership and it goes back to my advice point if he's a lord
01:38:04.020
and he's espousing bad faith and he's showing no moral character and it's you're totally right
01:38:13.660
programs like this the fact that douglas murray puts himself out there i worry i think richard
01:38:18.900
grannon has said i worry about uh jordan peterson his own health because i think it seems to have taken
01:38:24.580
on an awful lot like a savior complex um but it does it i think you're right constantin that
01:38:31.760
perhaps we could go both ways but obviously you keep doing this type of stuff but i don't think
01:38:36.740
we should ever stop holding them to account because they're not doing their jobs
01:38:40.300
yeah uh yeah i just i don't think you're going to get very far with that i think you have to
01:38:45.740
we have to let go of the old institutions well you but then forgive me that's the type of defeatist
01:38:51.040
thing i was saying it's not defeatist at all the end of one thing is always the birth of something
01:38:55.120
new well why couldn't we though as a society and as public figure well i'm not a public figure but
01:39:02.080
public figures why couldn't we argue for things like proper teaching of classics you can argue for
01:39:07.960
anything no no you're just not going to get it no no well i'm saying strategically so for example
01:39:11.520
your your idea about the internet if you look at what jordan peterson's doing with the book of
01:39:15.540
genesis um that and it's it's interesting it's it's it is he's been criticized because it's a
01:39:22.320
certain type of male demographic who are lost so the incel type community but he can sell out stadium
01:39:28.440
when uh i think it goes beyond the incel community his audience no no no no i said he'd been criticized
01:39:34.100
for that yeah yeah but my point is that particular demographic feel lost they lack meaning yes and i think
01:39:39.880
it's the beginning of your book on love letter to the west available all good bookshops you actually
01:39:45.180
quote solstin and say when when the when a tree is rotten at its core and it's about spirituality
01:39:51.420
and i think you've both said you say grace before meals now there's there's a loss of spirituality and
01:39:58.580
i understand you're not going to get the toothpaste back in the tube you can't expect everyone suddenly
01:40:02.700
to become religious but you can connect with the wisdom of the classics absolutely but my point is and
01:40:10.120
i think we could do it more aggressively i don't think it's pie in the sky um for example with
01:40:14.900
russian um again jordan peterson and others um i was going to say bang on but i'm a massive
01:40:19.640
dostoevsky fan where there's an institute uh cervantes instituto cervantes spanish culture
01:40:25.880
there's the academy francais etc where's the russian is the one timing's not great for that
01:40:31.180
but paul but we have to wrap up because you can see how much we've enjoyed this because we've
01:40:36.260
overrun by about 45 minutes but the answer to the problem that you're talking about is for you
01:40:41.940
to get on the internet and give people that classical education in the form of youtube lectures
01:40:46.620
that's how this gets addressed starting there and working our way up to bigger institutions over time
01:40:52.040
there are universities that are starting up that are going to offer a different type of curriculum
01:40:56.080
that's how this gets solved it's people like you going out there and making something for people to
01:41:01.540
enjoy because as we've seen with this and with all sorts of other shows there's an appetite out
01:41:05.980
there for that so uh i i challenge you uh yeah but you know why i'm not tempted to because there's
01:41:12.200
people like chris watkins henry aberson i think there's too many people doing too much stuff in a
01:41:17.220
way i'd much rather try and help them because he chris watkins is just brilliant the the level
01:41:24.260
he can explain derrida and fuko at such a level of relative simplicity given the difficulty of the
01:41:29.860
content that i think people would be shocked suddenly um why is this why the fuko is a
01:41:37.500
bogeyman why is this so fascinating but paul my point to you would be um i think everybody has a role
01:41:44.160
to play in this so for instance constantine can write and deliver a speech much better than me that
01:41:49.740
will go viral i will i'm not going to go into the oxford union write a speech and deliver it
01:41:55.080
what i can do is i can write comedy that lampoons the sacred cows of the day the jacindas all the
01:42:02.620
rest of it and that people will share and that people and i read the comments and people go
01:42:07.600
nailed it spot on absolutely we've all got our part to play well except can i give you an example
01:42:14.080
of online yeah uh unheard magazine which i really like we all do the great great publication so there's
01:42:22.540
a belgian i think he's a postdoc he wrote a brilliant article i'm a massive fan of jean
01:42:26.440
baudrillard's work who again he's like an old testament prophet he's been misinterpreted he
01:42:30.100
really slagged off modern life yeah brilliant article about jean baudrillard and how he's relevant to
01:42:36.120
modern day america i normally don't look at the comments look down at the comments and someone said
01:42:41.360
he could have said this in three paragraphs it's like no he couldn't and it's like he's belgian it's
01:42:47.360
probably his fifth language brilliant i thought it was a very good article yeah i'm a baudrillard
01:42:51.840
to pump myself up but i'm basically a baudrillard expert i thought it was brilliant um snotty
01:42:58.200
comment so i wrote and i normally don't and the irony is that my uh online pseudonym is theodore
01:43:03.200
adorno because i don't like using my real name who's a cultural marxist so i wrote your comment is
01:43:09.880
typical of the twitter generation everything has to be said in so many characters it's a great article
01:43:14.720
leave him alone so he basically replied theodore adorno happened to be a great musicologist so he
01:43:20.440
said if you are the spirit of theodore adorno go off and tinkle your ivories and i said i will go
01:43:26.340
off and tinkle my ivories if you go off and scrub your nan full stop and my point is this isn't
01:43:33.120
great even i understand that's not socratic method yeah but this is the point that online
01:43:39.200
and that i do think there's uh peter slaughtered like the german philosopher said that more communication
01:43:44.520
builds more conflict this idea that necessarily do more i think no you do more targeted stuff do
01:43:52.380
better stuff you know fail try again fail better um so sometimes i think you shouldn't have below
01:43:59.780
the line comments so there's magazines compact magazine is one of them in in the states um the
01:44:06.100
critic is another magazine here online great stuff that you're talking about they actually don't
01:44:10.880
there's no comment and that's something else maybe that could be addressed as the idea this
01:44:16.100
i what the technology does brilliantly is encourage loads and loads of interactivity
01:44:20.740
i would argue significantly too much and we actually need to find ways to winnow it to filter it
01:44:26.980
um and that would improve things well paul it's been a sensational interview we've both
01:44:32.600
it's been brilliant we've loved every second of it thank you so much for coming on the question
01:44:36.940
that we always end our interviews is with is what is the one thing we're not talking about as a
01:44:42.740
society that we really should be gonna cheat and give you two very quick ones go and we will do a
01:44:47.580
couple of questions for our locals only that only they will get to see as well um i said one of them
01:44:52.780
i said i wouldn't do because i've got a friend in the village becky and her husband's called adolf
01:44:56.100
which is another story um but becky i said uh dog poo bags i live in the countryside and i just think
01:45:05.480
it's the perfect embodiment so to speak of um virtue signaling people will leave them
0.88
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full of dog crap because that's what they're there for in the middle of nowhere because there isn't a
0.99
01:45:16.840
bin now can you explain to me why is that a passive aggressive why do people do that um it strikes me
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01:45:23.740
that it's this passive aggressive there isn't a bin i'm making some type of point but it just strikes me
01:45:29.460
it's this failure to think through the consequences that will now be there unless somebody else picks it up
01:45:34.120
moves it there aren't any bins because it's called the countryside you're muppet um so that will be
01:45:39.140
there for the next thousand years unless it's a biodegradable bag the other thing is tea bags
01:45:43.680
which no offense was a lovely cup of tea but um it's such a simple thing that tea you know the tea
01:45:50.800
they put in tea bags is absolutely atrocious quality everybody uses tea bags and if you're woke and
01:45:57.880
economically focused it the the tea they put into crap so people in the developing world who grow
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01:46:03.440
tea don't get a good price because it's the fannings off the floor of the factory and it's so you can buy
01:46:08.840
great quality tea use a teapot use a strainer hardly any more effort and the whole world of tea is out
01:46:15.820
there but tea bags are it's this encapsulation of the easy i don't think it is particularly easy
01:46:22.000
it's bad for you bad quality tea bleach bags glue in the bags so you're all killing yourselves and i
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01:46:28.300
drink great tea and on that note thank you so much for coming on if people want to find you online
01:46:33.560
ironically enough where is the best place to do that this is what's funny you're gonna have to
01:46:36.880
deal with all the complaints i don't have a mobile phone yeah um i don't have an online presence
01:46:42.300
um i'm like heidegger's run off to the german forest i live in the welsh hills
01:46:47.440
so anyone who wants to have a go please just bother you too sounds good to me that is what
01:46:53.600
they usually do we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our supporters that only they
01:46:57.320
will get to see an answer on our locals too but for now paul been great to have you on thank you so
01:47:01.820
much does the doctor think that the lack of access to universities from the working classes
01:47:07.120
has resulted in the current situation with mostly middle class upper class kids going into uni
01:47:13.100
in creating strange woke religions as they have never known in inverted commas proper hardship
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