＂Activism is Often About Revenge＂ - Mike Nayna
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Summary
In this episode, we chat to award-winning Australian filmmaker Mike Nena about his new film, "Grievance Studies" and the controversy surrounding it. We discuss how he got into the field of cultural studies, how he became interested in the internet and activism, and what it means to be a filmmaker in the digital age.
Transcript
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hello and welcome to trigonometry i'm francis foster i'm constantin kitchen and this is the
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show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people our guest today is an
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australian filmmaker mike nena welcome to trigonometry hey how you doing it's good to
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have you on the show man uh thank thanks for coming on we met you uh about a year ago now
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i think it was exactly a year ago wow that long okay cool yeah and we've been very keen to talk
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to you since and really one of the reasons we were particularly keen to talk to you is so james
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lindsey our mutual friend uh sent us uh your film uh did you all right okay yeah it was like you
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must watch this um and we both did and felt that it was really really incredible so they kind of
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made it um extra special for us to to chat with you but for anyone who hasn't seen the film who
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doesn't know who you are just give us a little bit of a background as who are you how are you
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where you are what has been your journey through life okay um i'm an australian filmmaker and i'm
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interested in the internet and what's that do what's that doing to us as humans and activism
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i guess this digital part of activism that we're seeing a lot of and yeah i've made several films
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now in that area i guess how we came to meet at some point was i started looking into activism
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um a strange kind of activism kind of destructive in my opinion activism it wasn't doing what it
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said on the box i started looking at that in here in australia and i started hanging out with
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in activist circles and and monitoring activists on uh on social media and i followed a lot of
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their concepts and language to the academy it seemed like they were there was an intellectual
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engine underneath a lot of the things that we're talking about and from there I guess that meant I
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spoke to a lot of academics and I stumbled into what could be considered a an academic underground
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I guess with a lot of people who were concerned about certain fields in cultural studies and they
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weren't i mean they would open up to me behind the scenes but they were very uh concerned about
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speaking publicly about this kind of stuff so i had a lot of experiences where i'd meet academics
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and we'd be in their office and they would lock the door and we'd speak in hushed tones or
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we'd start email threads that would start on their um this happened twice actually it started on
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their academic their official academic inbox professor so-and-so at deacon.edu.au and then
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they would take it halfway when we got into the nitty-gritty they would take it to their personal
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accounts and this started happening I thought that was that was very strange that academics
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wouldn't feel open about talking about something like that particularly because they were so
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passionate about it and that eventually led me to cross paths with Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay
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and Peter Boghossian who were just about to take part in this academic hoax scandal that later
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became known as the grievance studies scandal and I guess I've been making films in this area
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it's like a rabbit hole that keeps on opening up further and further into new and interesting
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things and interesting people i guess we met in london last year as a result of this and i seem
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to be heading into some strange kind of reluctant pundit role um find myself on stages and being
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invited on things like this it's not exactly what i want to be doing but it's it's where i am right
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now well that's the first time a guest has said they don't want to be on the show while on the
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so that's fantastic usually we get the rejections by email you've decided to come on and tell us
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you don't want to be on it reminds me of many a date that i've been on mike
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persons opposite me i like what you guys are doing i respect it it's just it's a
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i just kind of want to hide away and make films you know like do it in my own time and then show
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you something and maybe do a q a it's quite strange to be caught up in this political mess
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and be talking about these things and why were these academics scared mike um well there's there's
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many reasons i mean why why are a lot of people scared to say things that they're concerned about
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right now um i think that these particular fields in cultural studies they have uh connections to
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diversity boards and things like that and it's um it's it's got quite a quite a they uh what would
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you call it like a hushing um effect an intimidator intimidating kind of uh kind of
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entities within the university that make people feel weird about saying things openly
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and it's it's i mean it's the same in arts and entertainment you guys would experience that
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over there there's certain things that you just don't talk about and if you talk about them
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publicly then um it's not like anyone will tell you face to face but you do get a sense that there
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are whispers around and things like that so um there that's very much taking place within academia
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um in in a big way and the more i'm looking into this the more and more that seems um like that's
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what's going on mike and just so people understand like what is it that these academics are scared to
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talk about are they people who want to measure black people's dimples skulls or like what is it
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that the people are terrified to discuss well that there's forbidden knowledge i guess there
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are areas of inquiry that people want to go into race iq being one of them um even just talking
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about biological sex you can get into trouble there's a guy named bruce gilley over in uh he's
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a colleague of peter bogosians who wrote something about a case for colonialism so let's look at some
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positives that took place as a result of colonialism like he never said it was a good
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thing he just said some there were certain parts of it and this guy's an academic um and he got
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driven out of his uh his profession he got shamed um and there's a lot of these kinds of stories
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brett and heather from um brett weinstein and heather hein from evergreen state college i made
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a series about that i spoke to them about it where um brett stood up to this this orthodoxy
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i guess his moral orthodoxy that was emerging within his school and an equity plan that they
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were trying to put in place which um overstepped the bounds i think into his stem field so he
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started talking up speaking up about that and then uh you've just got to see the series to
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see what happened there I can't actually do it justice here having a in conversational form but
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if you go to my channel and check it out you'll see some strange things took place
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and what we're seeing in academia is people being forced out now these people would argue that what
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they're doing is good and right and it's the morally correct thing to do after all racism
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is bad isn't it sexism is bad the more diversity the better what are your opinions on it Mike
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well it depends there are reasonable edges of this and then there are it's it's difficult
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to draw lines around there's some pretty hardcore post-modern uh sections of the academy that are
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studying quite strange things um it's it's almost like it's a fundamentalist sect of the new left
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um so it is it's not it's not that simple it's it's actually hard to speak about on
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in simple terms because you have to you you go down layers of this stuff there is a there are
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surface level arguments that people are having and it's like oh yeah that seems perfectly
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reasonable but then if you go back in the scholarship uh maybe one decade or two decades
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or three decades you're getting into some very strange philosophies they've got a different
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conception of how humans are put together they have this kind of blank slate philosophy of uh
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human beings, that humans can be reshaped, I guess,
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through the discourses and the way that we speak about things
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And so right now we're dealing with, we're probably three decades
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into some very, very strange conceptions of reality in humans
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and where we're talking about surface-level things
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It's all rooted in this 30-year-old philosophy that's been,
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Mike, just so you know, what we're going to do is we're going
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to clip that and Francis is going to say, well, racism is bad, isn't it?
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It depends on what your definition of racism is, right?
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Like if you've got the traditional definition of racism
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where it's discrimination based on immutable characteristics,
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then that is horrific and let's work against that.
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But if you're talking about systems of power and privilege
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where waking up in the morning and buying a coffee
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then we're going to have to have a bigger conversation.
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and it's getting to the point where it's just capturing people
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And, Mike, there'll be lots of people who would say,
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you know it's just students being students let's be fair students and knobs um i was a knob when i
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was that age i think we all were um what what is your argument to that that it has no real effect
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on sort of the wider culture i guess it's all it just always seemed obvious to me that the culture
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is down downstream from the academy our our elite classes our cultural producers they all go through
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the academy and they learn these things and then they come out and they produce art they produce
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journalism they create the they produce the templates for how we think and so it's it's not
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it's never really struck me as something that's kind of off in the corner of of our culture
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that producing strange things it's it um all our all our best and brightest minds go through it
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and they come out and then they create culture and so we live downstream from the academy so
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whatever happens there uh it will eventually happen within the culture it'll manifest in some
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sense i mean you know it'll be pushed back upon from people who don't who who haven't gone through
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that way of thinking but um it's there it's there it's definitely there i don't exactly know how to
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articulate that but it just seems so obvious to me i know man it's interesting because uh probably
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a year and a half ago now i got this offer to do a comedy show at university and they sent me like
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a massive contract with the list of 50 things that you aren't supposed to joke about um and when i
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turned it down and it became quite a big story over here people were having a go at me and saying
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well why why why you know why do you feel so strongly about it these are just some silly
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students and i was like well they're not just some silly students they're gonna grow up and become
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you know mps uh lawyers journalists and they're gonna be shaping the world of tomorrow and i don't
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and so what year was that when when did that take place that was literally the last few days of 2018
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2018 right right yeah well yeah so not that long ago at all man yeah and it's it's and you know
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and i was saying at the time that yes slippery slope arguments don't always necessarily accurately
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reflect reality but if we allow people to censor comedy uh you know whatever we're going to start
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to find that you know uh we start to go back through history and erase things that were done
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and and cancel shows that have been on on tv for a long time and question everything uh and uh
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it's been 18 months and look where we are now man yeah yeah and it's it's it's one way right
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it's uh when pushing back is seen or even just hold up let's talk about this is seen as immoral
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then you're on a freight train to something very strange and i mean anyone's picked up a history
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book this kind of behavior happens and then famines and death and genocide happens so it's not it's
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not clear to me why why so many people are like hey bring it on man bring it on let's get on this
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freight train do you think it's just cowardice mike in the sense that i think a lot of most
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people are busy and they've got busy lives and they don't have time to delve into this stuff
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But what they do know, as you said in academia,
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is if you speak out against this stuff, you will be punished.
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And so if you don't really know what's going on and you're scared
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and you have a reason to be scared, why would you get involved?
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Well, they keep saying this word cultural appropriation,
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they keep saying uh white privilege they keep saying like all these things that i don't really
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know i'm not an expert but if i question the stuff i'm gonna get fired you know my reputation is
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gonna be ruined i'm gonna be well i mean there's there's even a different population that um are in
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the middle of that they hear it and it speaks to their moral sensibilities it's it's it still
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speaks to my moral sensibilities there's this kind of care harm moral access that it's speaking to
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And so if you haven't done your homework, you would hear a lot of this stuff and go, hey, this is just some kind of extension of the civil rights movement.
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But if you do your homework and see what's underneath it, it's not at all.
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And so I find that a lot of people whose moral instincts are being spoken to, poked and prod, they're playing apologetics for it.
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They must mean and then they say what they must mean.
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and in in that sense there is this cover for this this strange radical thing that's moving up and
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it's like hey just look at the look at what they're actually saying abolish police let's get
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rid of they're actually saying that they're not it's not reform i'm down for reform i'm progressive
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but but it's not actually what they're saying if you if you go uh if you just do a little homework
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just get into it that's so true that is so true man because this is the point i've been trying to
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make to a lot of people and on radio and whatever like the lives of black people matter and everybody
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supports that but if you look at the organization of black lives matter and that their own stated
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goals and what they're demanding and what they're suggesting and their agenda and who found it and
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is there a drinking game here is there yes when we cash in on our ethnicity people drink do they
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yeah exactly exactly so so it's your turn mate but mike we like constantin said we touched on
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you know black lives matter uh yesterday was the first day back for premier league football and
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literally every footballer took a knee imagine if a footballer particularly like a white footballer
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just didn't i mean that's career over isn't it he's done yeah right right right yeah i mean how
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have we got to this point where even saying something like saying you don't agree with
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all aspects of a political organization means cancellation well i suspect it's been sold quite
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well like people don't look at what's what's underneath it they're not looking at they're
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looking at the individual arguments um they're not looking at the constellation of what's going
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on like if you take a few steps back and you realize it's not just this it's this and this
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and this and this you start to notice hang on a second there is some kind of revolution afoot
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um you know on the individual uh case in the individual case it's often very reasonable but
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if you're if you're losing moving ground on 10 000 different um fronts then all of a sudden
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you're heading towards some kind of revolutionary uh into joining a revolutionary enterprise so it
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is it is strange because i i'm all my friends and family are experiencing this from the surface
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level and they're all yeah black lives they do matter i was like yeah yeah that's that's true
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i can see where you're coming from but let's go let's go to their website and look what they're
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actually about this is quite kind of scary but people don't want to do that do they that's the
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thing that terrifies me is people and and again i keep saying this in our interviews in the last
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few weeks this this sends me back to echoes of what we went through in the soviet union where
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people knew what they were supposed to not look at and what information they didn't it's a bit
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of knowledge right right and and not even so much forbidden knowledge more like i don't want to
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expose myself to this information because then i would have to have the wrong opinion right right
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right right and then i will be punished you know and that's i see so much of that flying around at
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the moment you know what i mean yeah yeah and mike moving swiftly on to your film uh digilanti which
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we both watched we loved i mean that was very very interesting as well in that it was you know
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talking about digital activism which you were involved with um for people who haven't seen
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the film could you just give a brief synopsis about what it's about and then we'll delve into
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it you're like little gesture i did that was quite nice anyway all right so the film is i guess it's
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about an experience that i had where um a racist incident took place racist and sexist incident
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took place on a bus and i filmed it and i was it was 2012 so it was a time when viral videos were
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just started to enter the kind of uh public consciousness and so i'd had success with a
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couple of viral videos i kind of knew how you could poke and prod them in a certain way um
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uh you know seed them on the back end and then and get these things going and so i applied that
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to this video to get revenge on the guys that that were uh being horribly racist and sexist
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they were they were they were they were doing the wrong thing and so um and they weren't just
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being racist and sexist they were also being threatening that's yeah yeah yeah it was
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inexcusable behavior right like it's way out of line these people were way out of line yeah yeah
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it's horrific um so what then happened was the video did go viral and it turned into this kind
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international press incident i think part of it was the zeitgeist about the racism and sexism that
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really put an engine underneath it but also because viral videos were only just starting
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to come out and so it turned into this really really big international incident and my experience
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of it was being on the inside of this press incident and then seeing how it was communicated
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and how it was talked about was very different to how i experienced it um and so i would meet
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someone in the street and talk to them about it and their impressions of the incident and everything
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that was going on around it was very different and so it was it's a very strange experience to
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be in the middle of a press explosion because you get a first-hand experience of how disconnected
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a meteor incident incident can become from the actual reality of the event itself and so it's
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the story is it's a short documentary and it's just uh it's just about that experience and i
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caught up with some of the the racists uh he wasn't racist he was just being violent um one
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of such a great excuse he wasn't racist he was just violent only violent or otherwise known as
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embracing australian culture yeah exactly yeah yeah it's a big sunny day and we're all drinking
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and so yeah that's that's where it leads to usually um yeah so i guess that's what the film
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is about it's a short documentary i showed it a long time ago it was like 2015 and it only just
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recently got picked up by atlantic because i think it just becomes uh more and more relevant as as
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time goes on and the internet keeps delivering these incidents well i mean i think you've
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described it factually in terms of the storyline but i actually think that to me that wasn't what
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it was really about in the sense that for me it was much more about your journey of going from
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here's a racist incident i filmed it how do i make this go viral to oh shit this is now viral
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and i'm not happy with what i've done here yes yes and um it's about it's about also having
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control over something you don't have control over that you can something that goes viral
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something you put out on the internet you have control of the preconditions and that's it so
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you once you let it go then it'll turn into something and it did turn into something it
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turned into something quite ugly i felt and uh the conversations that were happening around
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racism uh that it sparked they didn't seem to make any sense to me they were it wasn't
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constructive either i didn't think it was doing any good it was just doing um it was just causing
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more harm and making people pissed off and so i was looking at that and it kind of made me rethink
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the dynamics of of these kind of viral incidents and how all this stuff worked and i guess that's
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why i'm looking at what i'm looking at now because it's it's very much it was an insight into how
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strange the public discourse is how strange and unproductive the public discourse is around race
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um and that was and how the media plays into that and how social media plays into that and so
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So that has launched me into this new thing I'm working on now.
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And one of the things that I found very interesting about it
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was this desire, and I don't know whether it's innate in us,
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of the desire for revenge, where you saw what happened to these men
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who did, let's be fair, they were awful, awful, reprehensible behaviour.
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But then the reaction, I would say, was even worse
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Well, there was this bus incident that took place in real life
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and then there's this digital incident that looked a hell of a lot
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And so it's such a strange thing that it kind of echoed
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into this giant mythological event where the anger that was on the bus
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and the thing that people were angry about, they were just replicating.
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So it was just creating more destruction and more anger
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and more threats and violence and saying horrible things about people.
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And so, yeah, I think something that I noticed from that experience
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And so I guess that's the position I have now with this new kind
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It looks a lot like it looks more like revenge to me
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And so I think that a lot of modern day activism has revenge deep inside it.
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And the internet has a way of looking after that.
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You know, it's kind of the internet selects for emotion and revenge is a deep, deep, deep, deep emotion.
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And so I think that is echoing through our current situation more and more.
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And I guess that's why the Atlantic was picked it up because it's become more relevant,
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not less relevant over the years yeah it has and you mentioned that one of the things you
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realized is the way we talk about race and racism and all of the discrimination all of these things
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uh particularly in age of social media isn't actually constructive we're not trying to get
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to a better place would that be fair to say uh i think we're trying but it's uh but it's not
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a good method so so what i see from these uh these disciplines these kind of fundamentalist
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sect of the new left i've been i've been talking about it um i think as polite society we all agree
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that racism sexism homophobia they're bad things but we don't agree on how to remedy them and i
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think that in the past uh liberal ethics or treating everyone the same was something that
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delivering gains on those fronts on their civil right like culturally and socially i think a lot
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of people became a lot more accepting because of liberal ethics universal liberal ethics and so
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this new post-modern ethics that these people have is a completely different um remedy for
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the problem and i don't think it's going to work i think it'll make things much worse and so
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So the way I look at it is that if racism and sexism, homophobia is a flu
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and we're looking at a patient and we're both like,
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And then the rest of us are like bed rest, maybe some antibiotics.
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But they're like, let's just throw everything at this thing.
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and i don't think it's constructive or it's going to kill the patient and secretly when you actually
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look at what they're on about they want some kind of total revolution so they secretly do want to
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kill the patient because the afterlife is the left-wing utopia that they that they want to
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take us to mike but you say that as you say most people won't be familiar with that so what's your
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evidence for that what's your evidence for them wanting to to you know overthrow society or
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whatever it's there the thing is they're very explicit and so you can just go to um i think
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james lindsey has he has a great resource on this new discourses so he's he james helen peter
00:27:19.760
bogosian uh were the subjects of my new film but i didn't want to take what they were saying uh on
00:27:25.760
face value i didn't want to be like a glorified cameraman that was just like recording what they
00:27:29.500
were saying and delivering that to the people i wanted to figure out what the hell was going on
00:27:32.740
myself just out of interest and so over the course of the last few years we've kind of morphed into
00:27:39.800
this weird um startup think tank where we're mapping the landscape and trying to figure out
00:27:45.880
what the hell is going on here uh mapping out these disciplines from the outside and where
00:27:50.220
they come from what's the intellectual history behind it and james is starting to run out creating
00:27:57.900
a uh platform new discourses and it's just it's he's he's aggregating all the all the proof that
00:28:03.660
you you were talking about what proof do you have so it's it's in the literature it's all through
00:28:08.220
the literature it's um i've spent a lot a lot of time reading this stuff and i can i mean i can
00:28:13.280
email you stuff we can uh we can sort it out but it's it's there and they're quite explicit about
00:28:17.760
this um so what is it that they want exactly a revolution they want to change everything
00:28:24.580
but it's strange because you've got it's almost like there are foot soldiers that don't know who
00:28:30.280
the generals are so if you go back further in time you real that they're talking about totally
00:28:35.540
they're they're uh disaffected marxists i guess and they want a new they want a new way to jimmy
00:28:42.720
up the population into uh creating the new marxist utopia um and so they changed the way
00:28:52.580
the new left changed the way that that would take place um yeah and so and so then you've
00:29:00.280
got then you've got generations upon generations that are kind of moving along with with this way
00:29:05.200
of thinking and uh expanding upon it and then moving into further further uh details and and
00:29:12.480
smaller smaller papers smaller um uh arguments and all of a sudden you've got you've got this
00:29:19.240
whole entity that's actually it starts in this strange revolutionary enterprise but if you're
00:29:23.920
reading the today's paper in your in your hands it's about cornbread being racist or something
00:29:28.960
like that it's it doesn't it's hard to figure out what what the enterprise is when you look at the
00:29:35.740
the surface level arguments that we're swimming in now we're swimming in these surface level
00:29:40.060
arguments we're swimming in the meme level of this thing where if you look underneath it and
00:29:44.220
you go further and further down there is a revolutionary philosophy underneath it and why
00:29:49.160
do you think it's resonated so so much especially with these this current generation because look
00:29:55.440
there must be a reason is it a dissatisfaction is it the fact that capitalism isn't working
00:30:01.040
for young people why do you think it's resonating so strongly mike well um there's a lot there's a
00:30:09.160
lot to go into like we can look at it from a philosophical angle we can look at it from a
00:30:13.680
uh an economic angle like things are harder to it's harder to advance now we can look at it from
00:30:20.120
uh an overproduction of elites that are they're trying to find new ways to advance within our our
00:30:26.780
our centers of cultural production you can look at it from a moral perspective that we're god is
00:30:32.260
dead and we're all dealing with the existential weight of not having a plausible uh external
00:30:38.840
source for morality and so um any any external doctrine for morality will the market value of
00:30:47.860
that will go right up in a time like that like you meet people who are just staunch vegans it's like
00:30:52.280
i'm i'm i'm grabbing onto this one moral thing and that will define me that's like my the one
00:31:00.040
thing that i can i can grab onto and so you see all these these doctrines popping up which are
00:31:05.900
moral communities saying hey look you can you don't need that existential weight of um creating
00:31:13.740
your own moral system we have a moral system over here and i think it's something to do with i mean
00:31:18.860
i sound like a madman i know but um if you the more of the philosophy you dig into the more you
00:31:25.440
you realize that there's some there's some strange big tectonic shifts taking place in our culture
00:31:30.720
right now uh what is there anything in particular that you could pinpoint any of these big tectonic
00:31:36.880
shifts that you'd be able to explain to our audience who might not be aware of it um that's
00:31:43.220
why i want to make films like i can go and make films and be a weird guy and then just drop it
00:31:47.280
and people can understand because it's got uh it explains it in a different way i don't think i
00:31:51.880
don't know how to articulate some of these things but it's um i mean people it's just moral
00:31:58.700
communities, moral communities that are evangelizing and people want to become part of a moral
00:32:03.320
community. It's a dearth of religion. It's a spiritual problem that we've got. And so people
00:32:10.840
are trying to solve it and they're trying to solve it. Certain people are trying to solve it
00:32:15.920
politically. And do you think as well, it taps into our latent narcissism as well, especially
00:32:22.480
the virtue signaling, especially the online activism. And it's a narcissism that we all
00:32:27.300
have like when you created your video part of it was like you talked about that when in the film
00:32:32.620
you saw the guy walking away and that made you feel angry that in a sense you got away of his
00:32:36.400
crime but also part of it and let's be fair i share this as well it's like i want to make my
00:32:41.960
video go viral yeah exactly yeah yeah yeah well the thing is is that there's a level of if you
00:32:48.980
have moral standing you have like a divinity role in your moral community and so that that's a
00:32:54.340
status and so i'm also part of uh building um if you look at letter.wiki i'm building um
00:33:02.240
uh social media networks and if you look behind the scenes of what social media actually is it's
00:33:08.580
it's status as a service so if people are using social media to mature to a point where people
00:33:13.420
are kind of uh using social media in order to ratchet up their status and so when you've got
00:33:19.680
this kind of moral system uh that's got its own language and it's it's ready to go and it's
00:33:24.700
zeitgeist friendly then that's a resource for uh for ratcheting up your divinity factor within your
00:33:32.580
moral community and so there's a lot of people who i mean you look at the instagram models kind
00:33:38.280
of going black lives matter and they're like taking all these photos of themselves at rallies
00:33:43.760
and things like that this is part of that that is it is about creating some kind of moral standing
00:33:49.260
within um within the community so this i mean the cynical ways to look at it there's there's um
00:33:56.320
there's there's there's kind of people searching for answers ways to uh look at it there's economic
00:34:03.620
ways to look at it we're just in this kind of maelstrom of change and it's uh i mean it's
00:34:08.660
fascinating but also scary it is and uh by the way francis has never had a video go viral so
00:34:17.120
Next time he is being racist, I'm going to record it.
00:34:20.500
I'm going to send you the footage and we're going to make a little film.
00:34:25.500
Red-faced gammon being racist against somebody.
00:34:43.080
But this is a question that we always ask people,
00:34:46.360
but I would really be interested to get your opinion on it.
00:34:49.120
All political movements inevitably burn themselves out.
00:34:52.160
They have their peaks and then they sort of fizzle out.
00:34:57.820
or do you think it's just going to continue to get stronger?
00:35:02.720
Well, from what I've been looking at, it's a billion-dollar industry.
00:35:07.760
There's a doctrine that's been sitting there for 30 years.
00:35:12.500
and so it's not it's not i can't see it going anywhere it's these people have careers and
00:35:16.900
jobs built around this stuff um there is a a lot of these kind of non-profit organizations popping
00:35:23.780
up um with this doctrine underneath it and so it doesn't it doesn't go away we we have to develop
00:35:30.660
tools to live with it and to understand it i think well that's interesting i hadn't thought
00:35:36.660
of that before because my up to this point i think our position has very been very much
00:35:41.780
this stuff is nonsense we've got to fight it and defeat it but you think it's well
00:35:49.220
no it's new it's like i'd be very surprised if it if it disappears you know it'll continue on
00:35:55.540
in some sense i think it's part of the enterprise that uh jim and i are getting into is we can
00:36:00.260
potentially draw lines around part of it like i don't we're talking about this huge phenomenon
00:36:04.900
but we're looking at this kind of fundamentalist new left sec set which i think is the dangerous
00:36:09.940
part of it right there's there's all sorts of culturally woke people but there's there then
00:36:14.900
there's the clergy um and so we if we look at that and we can draw lines around it and um actually
00:36:21.000
talk about it as some kind of religious entity then maybe it will get ratcheted down and we can
00:36:27.360
apply separation of church and state principles to it but i don't know i don't imagine i know it's
00:36:33.020
funny and it's it's almost ludicrous that we're living in a time like that but um strange times
00:36:41.020
call for uh for odd solutions i guess it's you've got we've got to do something i can't imagine it
00:36:46.600
disappearing i just said it's it would be very strange because this has been i mean i know it's
00:36:52.540
going to sound incredibly stupid and naive now that i'm saying it out loud but that is how stupid
00:36:57.100
and naive i am i've been sitting there for the last few years going look look at this new thing
00:37:02.520
they're saying that's really obviously stupid more people are going to realize that this stuff is
00:37:07.960
nonsense now and then look at this other thing you know they're banning sombreros from uh from
00:37:13.240
university parties you know that's or they're now they've now they've banned clapping at some
00:37:18.360
universities because it's triggering and it's a microaggression now they're doing this now they're
00:37:22.920
doing that not you know and and i was thinking well like eventually all of that is going to stack
00:37:29.240
up to a point where enough people are going to go this is bullshit you know let's wake up let's
00:37:35.560
stop this but but it's not happening no it's a but it it's not just some thing that popped out
00:37:43.140
of nowhere it's got it's it's it's got decades of academic work underneath it it's it's a it's
00:37:49.800
a sophisticated worldview um and i mean we can laugh at it we can we can poke at it and give
00:37:56.220
it shit because it is kind of crazy and weird but it's um it's it's also sophisticated they view the
00:38:03.040
world in a different way and the more you realize what what the way they view their what the way
00:38:08.040
they view the world you realize how different it is from the way that you view the world it's like
00:38:12.440
hold on a sec we're uh we're gonna have you i think you realize how deep that the the schism
00:38:20.620
actually is it's not political anymore it's philosophical it's um we're heading into a new
00:38:26.380
strange territory i think and mike this has been frequently described as the culture war
00:38:33.400
and if it is a war who is winning is it that side that's winning or is it the other side
00:38:39.540
well i would find it very difficult if if this phenomenon is
00:38:45.700
not as widespread spread as i think it is i would find it very difficult to gauge that because i've
00:38:54.620
been looking at it for several years now and obviously we're kind of hooked up in some kind
00:38:59.320
of network and so all my algorithms are bent toward it and because i've started speaking
00:39:04.840
publicly about it all my inbox is full of people with stories about um how it's entering their
00:39:10.060
workplaces and um how they feel totally alienated by certain uh groups they have knitting groups
00:39:17.940
and things like that it's coming it's coming into all these areas of the world and i just get a
00:39:23.020
constant influx of people going can you help me help me out i don't know what's happening here
00:39:28.240
and i'm concerned about it so my world view is is is just flooded with this so it looks it looks
00:39:37.440
huge so if it wasn't as big as i think it is then i'm kind of stuck in this little bubble that i
00:39:43.300
can't get out of but i do i will put my hat in the ring and say this is quite large this is i think
00:39:50.460
there's enough evidence to suggest that that uh there is there is something afoot um so i don't
00:39:58.120
i don't see it in view in terms of winning and losing i don't i don't it's not exactly how i
00:40:03.420
look at it yeah well my i know that you feel like you know your primary way of expressing what you
00:40:09.820
feel and you think uh is through making films uh but actually i have to say i think uh this
00:40:16.000
interview has been really really insightful and helpful for russ and for a lot of our viewers
00:40:22.180
and listeners as well because you've really narrowed it down to to what it is you know
00:40:27.800
like you said these people want a revolution it's based on 30 years of academia uh and longer but
00:40:34.360
yeah but maybe it started getting harder in 30 yeah yeah they started getting serious after 30
00:40:39.560
years exactly and it's not going away and we're all going to have to find some way of dealing with
00:40:44.540
it um i think it's been it's been really really great to have you on um so before we uh ask our
00:40:51.420
last question which i really i'm keen to hear your answer to just tell everybody where can they
00:40:56.440
they find some of your work on the on these issues where can they watch you know your primary way of
00:41:01.600
expressing yourself which is of course your film yes um check me out on on twitter and then youtube
00:41:09.960
just mike nana n-a-y-n-a um i want to spend more time on youtube but i'm behind the scenes i'm
00:41:16.840
obviously researching this stuff with the guys and i'm working on a feature-length film that i want to
00:41:23.260
um release through other distribution networks uh channels so i can kind of break the bubble
00:41:29.540
that we're kind of stuck in so hopefully i can throw it out and get a netflix or something like
00:41:33.880
that who knows how the way that things are going right now yeah so what's that sorry i said they're
00:41:40.060
not work at all yeah look look it's gonna be a i'll have to trojan horse it or something i have
00:41:47.840
to do something in order to get that in but anyway uh so i'm i'm gonna put more time into the uh
00:41:52.980
the YouTube channel as soon as I can find time.
00:41:56.080
And so subscribe to that and wait, there'll be some more stuff.
00:42:01.420
Well, we'll put out all the links to the video.
00:42:04.040
Digilante is absolutely fantastic, genuinely enjoyable.
00:42:07.380
And the last question we always finish with is what's the one thing
00:42:10.740
we're not talking about as a society, Mike, that we really should be?
00:42:15.260
Well, I was just thinking before how much my inbox is full of people
00:42:20.960
who are having trouble with this stuff and who feel alienated
00:42:28.940
So I think that there is this sense that public conversation
00:42:32.940
and private conversation are two very different things.
00:42:35.900
Even public persona and private persona are two very different things.
00:42:39.480
And so I don't distinguish between the two and so I get myself
00:42:44.500
into a lot of trouble by bringing my private persona to the public.
00:42:49.120
But I think that if we can just talk more, like talk the way you're talking at home in your workplace and stop being so afraid to say what you think, I think of that.
00:43:04.640
If we can have more conversations around that so people feel empowered just to be themselves, I think that's something.
00:43:10.480
fantastic it's a really really important point because the more we silence our thoughts the
00:43:18.080
more we don't engage the more we don't share ideas the bigger this problem will be and the
00:43:22.480
more it will embolden a very very angry minority who want to in your words and i believe it as well
00:43:29.780
start a revolution and for those of you've never experienced one they're not fun so thank you very
00:43:36.080
much for coming on it depends what you like mate it depends what you like if you like killing
00:43:40.180
people and chaos and and all of that they're quite fun for you so there is a section of
00:43:45.800
population that would like that and a lot of people don't a lot of naive people think that
00:43:52.880
they don't exist but they they really do i've met a few of them and i don't want that i don't
00:43:57.520
want that guy in charge that guy is that's that's not the guy you want looking after things absolutely
00:44:03.120
no uh well mike thank you so much for coming on make sure you head over to twitter follow mike
00:44:08.000
he puts up some great stuff and of course check out his work and the movie we were talking about
00:44:13.940
is Digilante but he's also got a range of other things and we look forward to the feature film
00:44:18.480
Mike Nenna thank you so much for coming on the show cool thanks for having me man it was good