TRIGGERnometry - September 28, 2019


Douglas Murray on Why Identity Politics is Dangerous

Topics
male power equivalents creepy male feminism blackface re-racialization of society
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Douglas Murray Justin Trudeau Donald Trump Martin Amos Thomas Sewell Kingsley Amis Jesus Christ Christine Lagarde Peggy McIntosh James Baldwin Jeremy Corbyn David Reich Constance
Political Persuasion From Blair to Trump Rod Liddle Unfiltered： Political Correctness, Brexit & the Liberal Elite

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 11 minutes

Words per minute

160.66

Word count

11,520

Sentence count

428

Harmful content

Misogyny

33

sentences flagged

Toxicity

47

sentences flagged

Hate speech

50

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of Trigonometry, we speak to Douglas Murray, journalist and author of The Madness of Crowds, about intersectionality, identity politics and identity politics in general. We discuss what identity politics is, why it's important, and why it needs to be talked about.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin. And this is a
00:00:10.120 show for you if you're bored with people arguing on the internet over subjects they know nothing
00:00:14.820 about. At Trigonometry, we don't pretend to be the experts, we ask the experts. Our fantastic
00:00:21.060 guest this week needs very little introduction. He's a journalist and an author of an upcoming
00:00:25.220 book. In fact, it's out already, The Madness of Crowds. Douglas Murray, welcome back to
00:00:29.380 trigonometry it's a great pleasure to be back with you well here we are we spoke to you only a few
00:00:33.340 months ago and it seems things have evolved not only with you but with the world in general
00:00:37.680 and one of the things we wanted to talk to you about the book which is absolutely fantastic i
00:00:42.180 recommend it to anyone who's watching or listening to this is some of the bigger issues behind what
00:00:46.860 you're talking about because you break it down you go into the gay the women the trans the race
00:00:51.340 stuff but the bigger issue i think behind what you talk about in the book is we now we almost
00:00:56.080 it's not that we don't we live in a post-truth society we almost live in an anti-truth society
00:01:00.800 you know in a society in which saying things which are patently true scientifically verifiable
00:01:05.680 has become dangerous yes yes that's right that's um that's really why i wanted to write the madness
00:01:12.580 of crowds because i'm aware just as you're aware that there's an awful lot of things that we're
00:01:17.300 expected to believe and certainly a lot of things we're expected to say which basically people don't
00:01:22.980 believe. And, uh, I think that's a very unhealthy thing for society to do. I think it's an unhealthy
00:01:30.040 state for any group of people to be in, but that's, that's good terrain for a writer like
00:01:36.580 it is for a comedian because, you know, I, I've, I've developed this realization while writing the
00:01:43.280 book that almost everybody is vulnerable. Um, when I started writing the madness of crowds and
00:01:50.500 looking into all of the intersectionalism and all of this madness. I knew it had spilled out
00:01:58.700 a long time ago from the American Academy, from Berkeley and these places. I knew it had gone
00:02:02.600 a long way into the popular culture. I knew all of that. One of the things I was surprised at was
00:02:07.240 the extent to which it has just washed across the corporate world, washed across places which you
00:02:12.780 would think, you might not like, but you would have thought would have been grown-ups. Oh my
00:02:16.840 Like, oh, no, they've all imbibed the whole thing.
00:02:20.240 And what I realized was then that almost nobody could speak the truth.
00:02:28.000 Nobody could even think aloud apart from, as it turns out,
00:02:33.860 the small number of people who don't have a wobbly hierarchy above us.
00:02:36.940 Because basically in this society at the moment, if you have a hierarchy above you,
00:02:41.980 it is very likely to be wobbly.
00:02:43.820 It is likely to, if a new demand is made of everyone today, to do it by tomorrow.
00:02:51.980 And if you stand up against that, you're toast.
00:02:57.420 So this weird thing is emerged where people who don't have a wobbly hierarchy are the only people able to say what everybody knows.
00:03:08.240 And that turns out mainly to consist of writers and comedians.
00:03:13.820 That is a, that's a perilous thing for a society.
00:03:17.820 We might be really screwed if that's who we've got to rely on, but I think it is.
00:03:23.140 I think it is.
00:03:24.120 And I think that people like you, people like me, have a strange, disproportionate burden
00:03:31.360 and indeed duty to keep speaking.
00:03:34.980 And I'm just thrilled by the fact that that is happening.
00:03:38.180 you know just in recent weeks we've seen dave chappelle break out on some of these things
00:03:46.640 and we've seen a few other people do it and you know fine if if if the adults in the room all go
00:03:53.780 mad and they tell the young people to go mad as well then maybe it's just a few comedians and
00:03:59.480 writers who can say not doing it do you think that this in a way is a sort of divide and conquer
00:04:06.040 especially with identity politics
00:04:07.940 it's white against black 0.92
00:04:09.100 straight against gay 1.00
00:04:10.100 in the gay community
00:04:11.380 it becomes even more fractured
00:04:12.860 with the whole trans issue
00:04:13.860 yeah yeah yeah
00:04:14.700 they say the L's
00:04:15.940 the L's don't get on with the G's 0.98
00:04:17.680 and the L's and the G's 0.91
00:04:18.880 are very suspicious of the B's
00:04:20.600 and all of them
00:04:21.380 kind of
00:04:22.080 about the T's 0.81
00:04:23.180 so even the LGBT thing 0.68
00:04:25.160 doesn't work
00:04:26.460 as a group
00:04:27.620 I think there is
00:04:29.900 there are several things going on
00:04:31.380 and I try
00:04:32.780 in the matters of crowds
00:04:34.120 I try to explain
00:04:35.140 what I think the main bits are.
00:04:38.380 There is one part of this that is a very straightforward post-Marxist agenda,
00:04:43.640 which is the working class let them down.
00:04:47.840 The working class never did come up with the revolution properly. 1.00
00:04:52.940 And they failed to totally transform human society
00:04:56.620 and indeed made the biggest mess in history everywhere they tried it.
00:05:01.620 So the working class let the Marxists down.
00:05:03.700 And they're very, again, until I was reading all the texts on this, I was surprised that I was surprised I discovered them how frank some of the Marxists were in the 80s, even straightforward.
00:05:17.000 They stated in terms, and I quote them, the working class let us down. 1.00
00:05:22.580 We need a new revolutionary set of groups.
00:05:26.100 And these will include women, sexual minorities, racial minorities, and we need to make them the vanguard of the revolution.
00:05:33.700 so that's one group that's one group of things that are going on another group i would say are
00:05:40.380 people for whom this is just brute politics you know the people who say you're not gay
00:05:47.440 if you're gay and not a revolutionary marxist uh the people who say people aren't black anymore
00:05:56.460 i have by the way i i i give in the race chapter a set of what i just regard as being 0.95
00:06:02.760 unbelievably hilarious examples of this i think my favorite of which is you know the assumption
00:06:08.900 that black is about being political which is such a racist idea and all these sort of woke figures 0.81
00:06:15.540 do it um but my favorite my favorite one by the way i should tell you is is um the london school
00:06:21.480 of economics has a um review of a book by thomas soul the um the amazing american academic and
00:06:28.460 thinker. Thomas Sowell of course
00:06:30.480 is black and
00:06:32.400 quite
00:06:34.360 conservative and there was this review
00:06:36.400 of a book of his, I think it was Society and His
00:06:38.380 Discontents. It was published on the LSE
00:06:40.000 book review site a few years ago
00:06:42.240 and it has what I think of as being the best
00:06:44.400 correction of any correction
00:06:46.220 ever published
00:06:47.400 because this review
00:06:50.260 just runs straight at Thomas
00:06:52.340 Sowell. It's all bigotry, it's all disguised
00:06:54.420 bigotry, it's all wolf, you know
00:06:55.580 it's all dog whistles
00:06:57.940 not wolf whistles
00:06:59.460 it's all dog whistles
00:07:02.420 and all this
00:07:04.760 but at the bottom of this
00:07:06.180 full frontal attack on Tom
00:07:07.640 is a little errata thing
00:07:10.100 at the bottom
00:07:10.520 which says
00:07:10.960 an earlier version
00:07:12.720 of this article
00:07:13.840 included the phrase
00:07:15.880 that's easy for
00:07:17.100 rich white man to say
00:07:19.080 the reviewer hadn't even
00:07:23.400 looked at the dust jacket
00:07:24.780 it turned out
00:07:25.520 but I say this
00:07:27.900 because there is this amazing, amazing thing where people get told they're not black if they
00:07:36.400 have the wrong politics, just like some people told them they're not gay if they have the wrong
00:07:38.860 politics. And some people are told they're not women if they have the wrong politics. Because 1.00
00:07:42.600 of course, you would expect 50% of the species to have entirely lockstep views. And this is
00:07:50.060 brute politics. This is nothing more. This is using identity groups as a battering ram for
00:07:57.540 political gain. And I think it's disgusting, but we need to call it out. But the other group,
00:08:02.120 so the final group on that is, and this is the one I know where I want to most address,
00:08:07.220 is young people who believe this for perfectly good reasons. As in, you know, you're starting
00:08:14.580 off in life. You are told that you live in an incredibly oppressive society. You don't have,
00:08:20.520 as we don't have when we're growing up, much sense of historical comparison to make. You do tend to
00:08:26.820 believe the things you're told by authority figures. And if the authority figures tell you
00:08:30.280 that you live in an unbelievably patriarchal, racist, cis, sexist society, and so on, then
00:08:36.660 you'll sort of imbibe that. And then you're told, you know, to find meaning in your life, 0.79
00:08:40.620 you should fight against that and take on those forces and you should triumph over them and you
00:08:45.140 should destroy them. I can see the attraction in it. And one of the necessary tasks, I think,
00:08:54.360 will be to try to de-escalate those people and help them reorient their lives onto lives of
00:09:03.180 greater meaning. Do you think part of this is the fact that we do live in a society where
00:09:08.760 people talk about intergenerational unfairness? We live in a society post the crash, for example,
00:09:14.880 where it's very difficult, and I've been saying this for a while now, to expect young people to
00:09:18.620 be capitalists when they don't have a chance of having the one form of capital, the historically
00:09:24.040 ordinary people have ever had, which is to own their own home. If we live in that society, 0.99
00:09:28.540 I think it's going to be quite difficult to de-escalate and convince young people now that
00:09:32.960 they don't live in that kind of society. Because if they look around, they feel like, well,
00:09:37.900 maybe life is unfair in this way. Yeah. I say this in the introduction,
00:09:42.160 that it's not clear why people who don't have any ability to accumulate capital will love
00:09:46.100 capitalism. It's not clear why... Oh, it is clear to me, however, why if you don't think you,
00:09:53.520 for instance, ever have a chance of owning a flat and apartment, you might find an ideology which
00:09:59.980 claims that it can solve every inequity on earth has an appeal. It's obvious what the appeal could
00:10:08.220 be. And I don't particularly blame people for falling into that, at least for a period.
00:10:15.260 I think they should fall out of it if they can. But yes, I mean, the assumption, historically,
00:10:22.360 I think we've all understood, haven't we, that if the economics goes bad, other things go bad
00:10:27.120 in quite fast order. And one of the things I think I try to show in the madness of crowds is
00:10:34.020 the economics went bad and we sort of pretended that that wouldn't have consequences.
00:10:40.000 But I think that among the consequences of it is that bad ideas that were waiting in the wings
00:10:48.400 flooded into the system because our immune system was low and we are we are suffering for that you
00:10:58.320 know all this stuff when i started reading a few years ago the sort of the basics of what we now
00:11:04.480 call intersectionism the academic bases for it i assumed i'd find you know impenetrable badly
00:11:13.640 written, not that well argued, but serious texts. No. I mean, one of the most prominent
00:11:22.580 foundational texts of intersectionism is by Peggy McIntosh. It's called Unpacking the Knapsack.
00:11:30.180 And I urge people to have a look at it because it's a few pages long and it is just a list of
00:11:36.120 assertions. It's not even an argument. It's a list of assertions. And that's where our idea
00:11:42.080 of why privilege comes from,
00:11:43.220 just from that little essay.
00:11:44.520 Yeah.
00:11:45.160 I thought at least they'll have
00:11:46.940 really tried to work this out.
00:11:49.300 And before they tried to impose it
00:11:51.180 on every society on earth,
00:11:54.580 I'd have thought they'd have done a bit of work.
00:11:57.680 There isn't that much work to it.
00:12:00.960 And as I say,
00:12:03.280 this stuff was lying there in the wings,
00:12:06.280 but it's only in the last 10 years
00:12:08.700 that it comes whooshing through.
00:12:09.900 And then the last five years,
00:12:11.340 And you can show this in online activity among other things.
00:12:14.640 In the last five years, it becomes absolutely the weaponized tool of politics.
00:12:21.060 And that did surprise me.
00:12:23.220 But as I say, it's happened for what I think is a clear historical reason, which is that we were vulnerable to such a movement.
00:12:34.400 Why?
00:12:34.500 i mean we couldn't be the first human beings in history who had no explanation for what we should
00:12:41.400 be doing on earth i mean you can get by with that it is my view you can get by with not having an
00:12:49.800 explanation for what to do so long as the economics are going quite well as long as basically you're
00:12:55.640 always getting richer and you you know every generation's richer than their parents and
00:12:59.280 there were various ways around that we sort of coped with for a while or put out there for a
00:13:03.780 while such as, well, it's true, it might be harder for this generation to get on the housing ladder
00:13:08.200 than their parents, but they've got iPhones. Some of that might do it, some of it clearly doesn't.
00:13:15.260 But this thing about meaning, about what are we actually doing, you can have the distractions,
00:13:23.880 you can enjoy yourself. God knows I'm not being a Puritan about this, but that's probably not
00:13:31.800 enough. And so anything that has an appeal to meaning has a good chance in such an era.
00:13:40.260 And here is probably the, it's not a great idea system, the intersectional social justice warrior
00:13:46.780 identity politics system. It's not a great idea system, but it's probably the most ambitious
00:13:53.380 and plausible one to come up since the end of the Cold War. There hasn't been another newish
00:14:00.580 idea, maybe green
00:14:03.020 ideology
00:14:05.340 and green politicking
00:14:06.940 and green meaning
00:14:07.880 but other than that there's not much
00:14:11.040 else that's washing around
00:14:12.260 so I'm not surprised
00:14:14.540 and do you think it's become so successful
00:14:16.820 because it appeals primarily to the emotions
00:14:18.900 to the heart, in certain instances
00:14:20.960 we all feel cheated, we all feel looked over
00:14:22.880 we all feel frustrated and if somebody
00:14:24.960 comes along and offers you a very
00:14:26.820 simple solution to that, it's because you're 1.00
00:14:28.900 black, gay, whatever it is 0.99
00:14:30.200 it's easy to go along with
00:14:32.860 I'm very interested in the way in which
00:14:36.860 this era
00:14:38.840 I think we talked about this a little when we last met
00:14:40.700 this era aspires to go
00:14:43.020 down
00:14:43.540 I mean it's a fascinating thing
00:14:47.020 that we talked about I think last
00:14:49.020 time in terms of you know the wanting
00:14:50.980 to be insulted
00:14:51.860 wanting to be like oh my god have you seen what I get
00:14:54.980 on Twitter
00:14:55.360 I have to lie down
00:14:56.940 and that there's no particular advantage to heroism
00:15:00.660 whereas there is of being a victim, you know.
00:15:03.460 And this sort of downward aspiration is a number of things,
00:15:13.600 but one is obviously that it's a flag sent up to ask the mob to pass over you.
00:15:22.640 You know, I think there's some survival mechanism in some of this
00:15:26.480 which is really fascinating um i talk about this in the book in terms of the cuttlefish
00:15:32.420 um which uh fascinated me i was having this discussion with i was one of the chapter on
00:15:38.400 women is to some extent the one that probably well may get me into most trouble 1.00
00:15:44.020 surprise yeah because i mean the trans one is already getting me into some 1.00
00:15:51.560 trouble for saying in a really, I think, an honest and humane way. I'm not trying to just
00:15:58.520 insult you or anything. Well, actually, before you go on, that's one of the things that struck
00:16:02.260 me about the chapter on trans. Anyone who would read your critics, Douglas Murray's right-wing
00:16:09.280 bigger, blah, blah, blah, I think would be quite shocked by how compassionate and thorough and
00:16:15.160 careful you are to delineate a lot of these things and to show that you are actually trying to
00:16:19.960 understand why people may choose to
00:16:22.000 transition rather than just
00:16:23.900 dismissing this whole thing, oh these people
00:16:25.840 mental illness, whatever.
00:16:28.000 I've spoken to a lot of people
00:16:29.800 and I've read a lot of people's
00:16:31.800 testimonies and accounts
00:16:33.380 and I do try very, very carefully
00:16:35.780 I want to say salami
00:16:37.940 slicing but it's not quite the right metaphor
00:16:39.640 but I want to just
00:16:41.840 carefully
00:16:42.520 trace what is plausible
00:16:45.540 and what is dementing
00:16:47.560 in the demand because at the moment they're all put in
00:16:49.720 the same thing so that somebody born with genital abnormalities is put in the same category as you 0.98
00:16:59.060 know say the big bearded man with the penis is a woman or or you're a bigot and that's not fair 1.00
00:17:03.760 it's not a fair to the fair to the first group just to begin with so yeah i do try i try really 0.98
00:17:09.500 hard to in all of these cases to to look at what the plausible bit is and then say what are we
00:17:15.160 leaning too heavily on and what are we pretending we know about which we really don't know about
00:17:20.020 And I think there's twin problems, which I try to identify in this book and to answer,
00:17:25.540 which is we have in our society the problem of pretending we know about things that we don't really know about.
00:17:32.540 And I put the trans one in there. 0.94
00:17:34.020 We pretend to be really sure now, and we shouldn't be sure because we're not.
00:17:39.260 But the flip side of that is we also pretend not to know about things we all knew till yesterday.
00:17:43.880 And I mean, maybe we're not allowed to say this, but because this is three men talking,
00:17:54.620 obviously men shouldn't talk about women because what interest could men have in women?
00:18:00.260 But a lot of the stuff about relations between sexes, it's complicated, but it's not that complicated.
00:18:10.400 There are a load of things we pretend we don't know, which we knew till yesterday, and we could do with remembering.
00:18:19.920 And I, as I say, I think some of this might get me into most trouble because there's a lot of women who have quite enjoyed the overcorrection. 0.74
00:18:28.380 and quite enjoyed not looking at some of the, let's say,
00:18:35.980 more difficult things that we actually need to think about.
00:18:43.280 What's the forgotten knowledge?
00:18:45.520 Anyhow, but to get back to my cartel fish.
00:18:47.680 I was hoping for the bit that's going to get us demonetized.
00:18:50.600 I thought you were going there.
00:18:51.980 We were there already.
00:18:54.100 We were there from the start.
00:18:56.340 No, but seriously though, on the men and women thing, it's been one of the staples of comedy throughout the decades, the differences between men and women. 0.97
00:19:07.800 Yeah, like a man who's a bit of a klutz.
00:19:09.740 Yeah. 1.00
00:19:10.260 The pathetic, silly man who can't do the stuff and the woman has to show it. 1.00
00:19:14.680 Yeah. 1.00
00:19:15.500 The exciting thing about that in comedy is that is once hack.
00:19:18.220 Now that's groundbreaking.
00:19:20.140 You go on stage, the difference between men and women, there's a tension in the air.
00:19:23.300 Can you say it?
00:19:24.020 Can you not?
00:19:24.540 I mean, we don't know where we stand anymore.
00:19:26.640 It's very exciting.
00:19:27.780 But it is very interesting, isn't it?
00:19:29.380 Particularly for both of us, because we live with women. 0.98
00:19:32.100 It's like you go home and you suddenly, 0.99
00:19:33.720 even if you bought into all this crap, 0.98
00:19:35.800 you go home and you go, no, no, we're not exactly the same. 0.99
00:19:38.720 We think about things very differently.
00:19:40.160 We have different attitudes.
00:19:41.480 And if you have a son and a daughter, you'll notice it.
00:19:45.500 But yes, I mean, the...
00:19:48.060 But what are we not talking about there, Douglas?
00:19:49.780 Just give us a few juicy details.
00:19:52.720 How about this one?
00:19:53.700 And everything in the ideology we've been imbibing relies on the idea there's only one form.
00:20:01.980 Well, firstly, that power is the single most important thing in the world.
00:20:05.720 And it's the means through which you understand everything.
00:20:10.000 And I think we got this through a version of Foucault and other things and really ugly reading of the past and indeed of the present.
00:20:20.340 Power is the one thing that matters, the one means by which we understand the world.
00:20:24.860 I think this is wrong because, as I've probably said to you before, I think that for most
00:20:28.880 people, if you said to them, what's the thing in their life that matters most, they'd probably
00:20:31.320 say love, or some version of that.
00:20:35.040 My husband, my wife, my children, my family, my God, you know, all sorts of things.
00:20:41.400 But very few people, unless you've got an absolute maniac in front of you, would say
00:20:45.360 power. 1.00
00:20:46.200 Well, then that would be the thing that would tell you they're a fucking maniac. 1.00
00:20:48.960 Absolutely. So it's a dementing thing for a society to take a maniacal view and assume it's true. 1.00
00:20:58.320 And so that's the first thing.
00:21:00.020 But the first thing is we have this idea that power is the thing.
00:21:04.680 But then secondly, we've fallen into this thing that there's only one real type of power in the world.
00:21:10.280 And it is white heterosexual male power, mainly old. 0.65
00:21:14.980 now of course we all know some of the ugly things that that leads to such as the presumption that
00:21:21.260 you know the unemployed steel worker in the north of england is just unbelievably privileged and 0.59
00:21:27.840 powerful you know and can be lectured to by a millionaire so long as they are black or a female 1.00
00:21:35.780 or gay and the power structure is still that way around um but one of the things i address in the
00:21:44.820 chapter on women which is as i say i mean this is this is when all men get nervous but
00:21:51.100 what if there are other types of power what if what if there are types of power that only women 1.00
00:21:58.040 wield what if they actually have more power and okay not in every situation in some situations
00:22:07.980 and you know one way i might refine this is to say
00:22:11.660 again just got to hope people recognize this because if they don't you're toast
00:22:16.460 but is there any form of male power any form of legal male power equivalent to the power that
00:22:26.520 a very attractive woman in her late teens early 20s has when speaking to a man two to three times 0.99
00:22:33.680 her age um i'm uncomfortable are you yeah carry on why it's it's a fact isn't it yeah it is a fact
00:22:45.720 we all we all know it because we've all seen it okay how about like a ceo the the epitome of white 0.74
00:22:53.000 male power wealth uh with two people in front of him one an incredibly beautiful attractive 0.99
00:23:03.120 woman who knows how to use it and the other one a man with not much in the looks department
00:23:10.460 do we actually think that the powerful male looks at these two people in exactly the same way
00:23:17.920 do we think that no woman knows what she might have in that scenario and none of them have ever
00:23:25.560 weaponized it or would seek to weaponize or use it or in any way i don't think so i think we all
00:23:32.660 know that there are things you can do. I don't think, by the way, there's almost any male
00:23:38.580 equivalent of that. A very successful woman in her 50s is much less likely, if meeting 0.87
00:23:49.060 a hot guy in his early 20s, let alone late teens, to risk everything in her life and
00:23:57.500 career in order to have a few minutes of fun. It's almost impossible. And it doesn't have to
00:24:05.280 be that sinister either. I mean, my wife and I, for example, whenever we need to go and talk to
00:24:09.560 someone to get a favor or whatever, she'll always go and do it because she's going to have a better 0.93
00:24:13.940 time of it. Yeah, absolutely. Would you mind speaking to him because I think it'll come out
00:24:18.280 better. Yeah. And it's just a fact. And it's not necessarily a sinister form of power. It's just
00:24:23.260 how human beings relate to each other based on our sexual evolution,
00:24:27.280 that's the human beings that we are.
00:24:29.500 Are we going to pretend that's not the case?
00:24:31.460 Right.
00:24:32.080 But it's amazing that this narrative has been created,
00:24:35.120 and we all know that parts of this narrative, or a lot of it, are false,
00:24:37.880 and yet we talk about this fear constantly about exposing the narrative.
00:24:42.600 Yes.
00:24:43.380 And the dementing thing is it's in front of us all the time.
00:24:47.460 um and particularly i mean i want to say some of this stuff and explain some of this stuff and
00:24:54.980 write about some of this stuff because i know how difficult it is for instance for a young
00:24:58.140 heterosexual male to do any of it and i think it needs to be done in a way on their behalf 0.59
00:25:04.380 um to make it easier um but you know we have this thing at the moment where
00:25:12.080 a young man is assumed to be the one wielding power in any relationship with a woman, that the
00:25:18.280 woman has no power, and that a set of things happen which I think are impossible to do. I mean, 1.00
00:25:26.580 one of the things I do through this book is, what are the impossible demands that are being asked of
00:25:31.000 us? And one of the impossible demands, perhaps one of the, in some ways, one of the least
00:25:35.660 significant because there's some of them that are total but one of the one of the demands that's
00:25:41.700 that's still important is um i should be able to be sexy without being sexualized
00:25:49.160 and that's that's a really interesting modern uh demand because actually we all know that basically
00:25:58.100 if you're being sexy you're in the sex game somehow you're in you're playing with a thing
00:26:05.920 you know about the other party knows about it doesn't mean the other party can do whatever
00:26:09.880 they like obviously not but stuff is in the air now the current thing is that if a woman puts that 1.00
00:26:19.880 in the air the man is barely allowed to respond unless the woman gives the absolutely clear 0.97
00:26:28.560 sign and indeed explicit sign that that is what is being asked for now i am i go into this in the
00:26:35.720 book via the perhaps surprising route of nikki minaj um i'm told by the way that people who've
00:26:42.500 bought the audiobook for this which i did myself are particularly pleased with my recitation of
00:26:47.000 The works of Miss Menard.
00:26:53.320 That's worth paying for, to hear you do the Kim Menard lyrics.
00:26:56.240 I don't sing them, I just...
00:26:57.800 But even the reading of them.
00:27:02.160 But I find this fascinating,
00:27:05.200 because there's one video in particular of hers called Anaconda,
00:27:08.280 which really shows this demand that's being made.
00:27:13.540 she crawls on all fours 0.96
00:27:17.440 towards a very handsome young black guy
00:27:19.220 sitting in a chair
00:27:20.520 she does a kind of lap dance for him 0.99
00:27:22.120 it's more than a lap dance
00:27:23.720 it's not just like a stripper bar thing
00:27:27.020 it's a full on
00:27:30.180 demonstration to him 0.79
00:27:32.100 that she is in the sex game 1.00
00:27:33.560 her legs are around his neck 0.99
00:27:34.840 she's twerking her bottom 0.94
00:27:38.140 his face and all this stuff
00:27:39.880 and towards the very end
00:27:41.520 he's clear he wants to touch her
00:27:42.860 And then at the very end, he puts one hand on her hip.
00:27:47.080 She turns, whips around, smacks him away and walks off. 1.00
00:27:51.440 It's, I will play the sex game as much as I like and you have no right unless I ask you to, to even put a hand like that. 0.93
00:28:01.440 But that's, that's dementing for the male.
00:28:04.220 I mean, it is actually saying to the male, well, summed up in the words, make him drool.
00:28:11.360 I have an interest in these memes that we all know about, but which we pretend we don't.
00:28:17.160 Make him drool is a particularly fascinating one because you can see this online.
00:28:21.960 There is no male equivalent.
00:28:23.500 If you type make him drool into Google, and this is a well-known sort of meme, derange the man, make the man mad with desire for you,
00:28:38.080 whether it's high heels or, you know, famous examples of lipstick
00:28:42.460 and all sorts of other things.
00:28:43.240 There are all sorts of ways to do this.
00:28:46.020 But make him drool is a recognized meme.
00:28:51.120 By the way, if you type make her drool,
00:28:55.680 I mean, the very idea that men were like,
00:28:57.860 God, I'm going to make her drool. 1.00
00:29:00.000 You're going to iron your polo shirt particularly well?
00:29:03.680 What are you going to do?
00:29:05.560 um uh the the dishes that make her make her drool comes up with how to stop yourself drooling in 1.00
00:29:15.060 bed when you're asleep and one searches for cats that drool and i'm saying i'm not saying there's
00:29:23.600 no way of obviously there are ways for men to make women find them more attractive but
00:29:28.340 it's not quite the meme of dement the woman we're not the same as the point right yeah but it's not
00:29:35.020 And also, I mean, there's a counter argument to this would be, look, this is just a readdressing of the balance.
00:29:39.740 Men have had it far too good for too long.
00:29:41.980 They could get away with, you know, grabbing a woman and nothing would ever happen.
00:29:47.180 And now it's our turn to feel a little bit of it.
00:29:49.880 So this argument, I do hear it, is it's an overcorrection, but we're due an overcorrection.
00:29:56.320 And this goes on in the gay argument and it goes on a little bit in the racial argument as well.
00:30:02.660 Are we after equality or are we after better?
00:30:08.540 In each of these cases, it's a really dangerous one, this.
00:30:11.740 I would argue in each of these cases, we have wittingly or unwittingly gone to better.
00:30:17.700 We think we're doing better for a time to make up for lost time, to overcorrect.
00:30:23.200 But my question to that is, how do you know when the overcorrection's gone on long enough
00:30:30.400 and who announces time.
00:30:36.200 How long do, for instance, young men have to be made 1.00
00:30:39.400 to go through the overcorrection game
00:30:41.680 in order to get back to the equality bit?
00:30:47.720 And will the overcorrection industry be interested in saying,
00:30:52.480 oh, time, that's it, we're there.
00:30:53.700 Does everybody who benefited from the overcorrection
00:30:57.380 voluntarily go back to equal.
00:31:01.880 I mean, again, we have these ones that we've agreed on.
00:31:05.360 Again, maybe I can say this,
00:31:07.280 but there's definitely a sense in the society
00:31:11.120 in which gay is a bit better. 0.84
00:31:14.440 A bit better. 0.84
00:31:15.700 Not in every way, not in every way,
00:31:17.920 but a bit better.
00:31:19.840 It's a bit cooler.
00:31:21.680 A bit like, oh, it's a bit different.
00:31:23.720 It's a bit different.
00:31:24.240 Not like they're boring straight people
00:31:26.240 who don't have anything to say for themselves
00:31:27.900 in their straight way.
00:31:29.660 Well, Douglas is saying he's a lot younger than us.
00:31:32.200 I'm not saying I am as it happens.
00:31:33.980 I think this is almost a demonstration
00:31:35.640 that there are things that buck.
00:31:41.540 The exception that proves the rule. 0.95
00:31:44.660 No, but I mean, the sort of gays 1.00
00:31:47.280 are a bit more glamorous or interesting
00:31:49.660 or talented or fabulous, that sort of thing.
00:31:52.100 Not just equal, a little bit better in some ways,
00:31:54.700 not in every way, but in this way.
00:31:56.120 Now, we have that with the women one. 1.00
00:31:58.460 Are women exactly the same as men or better? 0.99
00:32:01.420 Now, we're running several programs at once in our society.
00:32:04.960 Women are absolutely the same and a bit better. 1.00
00:32:08.280 How?
00:32:09.420 Not small sources.
00:32:10.880 Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF,
00:32:13.660 repeatedly said in the decades since the crash
00:32:15.900 that if Lehman Brothers had been Lehman sisters,
00:32:18.500 it might not have happened.
00:32:19.780 Why?
00:32:21.200 Why?
00:32:21.500 either women are have equal competence to men in the financial system or they're different 1.00
00:32:29.080 or they're different and better so which is it christine lagarde head of the imf
00:32:35.020 keeps on pumping out this idea they're better we wouldn't have financial crashes if we had
00:32:40.020 women uh more prominent in finance uh it's very hard to sustain all of these ideas in your head
00:32:47.920 at the same time and not go a bit mad well that's the point isn't it because that that her argument
00:32:52.000 is actually one that i personally agree with which is i think if we had more women in those 1.00
00:32:56.560 industries in the top positions right because women are less they're more risk averse right 1.00
00:33:02.540 on average right and there are other differences between men and women on average you may well end
00:33:08.520 up with with a company behavior that is different if you have more women in those positions but what 0.99
00:33:14.300 And what that requires you to accept, of course, is that men and women are different.
00:33:18.180 Are different.
00:33:18.780 Great bit of virtue signaling there, Constance.
00:33:21.120 I'm not sure that's a virtue signaling.
00:33:22.420 I'm going to get in trouble just for saying it.
00:33:24.160 But also, I mean, again, if we got to that stage, you then have to work out, do we want
00:33:30.060 less risk in the banking sector?
00:33:32.980 And if so, is it the case that we need to pump women in in order to do that more? 1.00
00:33:38.540 What are the sectors where we need the...
00:33:40.920 This isn't a new motif, the idea of the pacifying female force to stop the rampaging male.
00:33:47.940 But where are, for instance, the occasions when we might need the rampaging male?
00:33:53.160 You know, there must be times.
00:33:55.480 Oh, loads.
00:33:56.580 Firefighters, you know, police officers, etc.
00:33:59.140 And we have all of these endless painful, dementing campaigns to get more women in the fire service and, you know, persuade them that this is the career for them. 1.00
00:34:10.440 And then we're just horrified at the fact that the stats don't seem to be going up in enough order.
00:34:15.280 And and I just think it's again, it's it's it's it's it's something we know, it's something we can't talk about.
00:34:23.400 And so we've decided to lie about. But but one of the interesting I'm going to get on the cuttlefish if it kills me.
00:34:33.040 Douglas has been trying for 35 minutes to get to the cuttlefish.
00:34:35.860 But it's a great example. And I do want you to talk about it.
00:34:39.060 Because I think the clever people, the socially advantaged people as well, you might say, work out how to get through dementing eras a bit faster and can do so and then lambast the people who didn't make it, didn't catch up in time, didn't alter their behavior and their language fast enough.
00:35:03.200 and uh the most the clearest example of this i would say is in the behavior of males towards
00:35:13.180 women in the sort of post me too era and uh i when i was researching the madness of crowds i 0.95
00:35:21.740 had the great pleasure of speaking through some of the themes of it with a bewildering array of
00:35:26.940 friends in a bewildering array of different disciplines one of my favorite conversations
00:35:31.660 was with a friend who was a biologist who just one day was describing to me
00:35:37.360 the behavior of the cuttlefish as a form of this, which is a mimic octopus as well.
00:35:41.340 But the cuttlefish have an extraordinary interesting thing about them,
00:35:48.400 which is that there is a type of cuttlefish where,
00:35:51.580 because the male-to-female ratio is bad, it advantages the females against the males,
00:35:56.500 and because the females tend to go around with their male cuttlefish, 0.98
00:36:01.660 it's hard for the male cuttlefish who are single,
00:36:05.220 bachelor cuttlefish, you might say, to...
00:36:08.280 Incel, I think.
00:36:09.160 Incel cuttlefish.
00:36:10.200 No, no, no.
00:36:10.680 These are not yet incel cuttlefish.
00:36:14.140 They could become incel cuttlefish.
00:36:16.500 But they have a strategy, and their strategy is
00:36:18.880 that because the female cuttlefish is smaller than the male cuttlefish,
00:36:23.220 the male cuttlefish, in search of a bit of action,
00:36:27.020 can pretend to assume the form of a female.
00:36:31.660 and they they become smaller and because the woman is going around with her consort male
00:36:38.020 cuttlefish and the male cuttlefish is alert for other cuttlefish competition um they pretend to
00:36:44.980 be smaller they go around the female the male thinks that they're not a threat and by being
00:36:49.320 small and diminutive they get through and then they have their wicked way now the the the moment
00:36:58.600 this friend said this to me i just said oh my god it's i know so many men doing that i know so many
00:37:06.640 men it's a creepy male feminist yeah that's what it is this is the creepy male feminist and by the 0.98
00:37:13.060 way i had a very specific example of it a colleague of mine the spectator freddie gray 0.98
00:37:16.820 uh had covered the um uh pussy hat protests the anti-trump uh protests the women's march
00:37:23.680 just immediately after the inauguration in 2017.
00:37:27.040 And he had told me that among very interesting things that happened that day,
00:37:31.520 and again, none of this is to say, you know,
00:37:33.360 what people were complaining about, that Donald Trump wasn't, you know,
00:37:35.480 didn't have any legitimacy, you know,
00:37:37.520 or that he'd behaved like a perfect gentleman.
00:37:40.200 You know, I think we can probably all agree that wasn't the case.
00:37:43.900 But what was interesting to me was what this colleague told me
00:37:48.200 about something that happened at the end of the day,
00:37:49.860 because all these young men from the sort of, you know,
00:37:53.680 Ivy League young men, among others, who are on the Women's March.
00:37:58.460 And there's a party afterwards that this colleague friend turns up at.
00:38:03.800 And all these men are standing around.
00:38:06.320 I can't do the American accent, but I can do the British equivalent, 1.00
00:38:09.380 which is like, yeah, yeah, so totally on board with this, like, yeah, fuck Trump. 0.99
00:38:13.820 And they're all doing this, and like, yeah, yeah, I totally support, like, yeah. 1.00
00:38:19.420 And that's when the women are around. 1.00
00:38:23.680 And when the last woman leaves this particular group to go off and get some beer, 1.00
00:38:29.320 one of the other guys goes to the other, 1.00
00:38:32.660 oh, my God, dude, I can't believe how much pussy there is in this room. 1.00
00:38:38.340 It's funny, isn't it? 1.00
00:38:39.320 Like, we have an example of it right now.
00:38:41.720 We're recording this in the moment of Justin Trudeau being chased and harassed and whatever for...
00:38:48.960 I mean, how much did he black up?
00:38:50.780 it was almost a fetish
00:38:53.620 we've got three on video already
00:38:56.520 but presumably they were just evenings
00:38:57.760 he just sat at home
00:38:59.120 not on video, just enjoying a bit of
00:39:01.860 blacking up
00:39:02.680 well he actually said he doesn't know how many times
00:39:05.840 he's done it
00:39:06.520 I've been branding up all my life
00:39:09.760 everyone's got to have a hobby, haven't they?
00:39:12.060 but the thing with that is
00:39:13.520 dressing up as Aladdin to me
00:39:15.740 I don't see what's racist about that
00:39:17.400 I don't think
00:39:18.420 I don't think we need to actually destroy Justin Trudeau for that reason. 0.81
00:39:22.120 But the hypocrisy of it, this woke chieftain of the universe being the guy who's been doing the blackface, to me, is an inevitable reality. 0.93
00:39:34.320 Don't you find it might be evidence of the existence of God?
00:39:38.740 We've all been searching for it.
00:39:41.300 We've all been searching for it and it comes in the form of Justin Trudeau blackface.
00:39:46.580 Justice and karma. I love it.
00:39:48.420 Well, actually, none of the three of us are believers, of course,
00:39:50.400 but perhaps we'll be converted by this very incident.
00:39:54.320 The iconography would be really confusing in future generations.
00:39:57.780 Well, he does work in mysterious ways, so there we go.
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00:42:26.260 douglas the one thing i'm worried about with this is is the backlash because it's going to
00:42:33.880 be a backlash, and it could actually be incredibly
00:42:36.000 ugly. Yeah, I think so.
00:42:37.580 I think I warn about this, because
00:42:39.660 as I say, correcting the
00:42:41.860 overcorrection, if that's what it is, as I think it is,
00:42:44.840 means
00:42:45.360 probably the best way to do it is to
00:42:49.640 argue and urge people to see
00:42:51.680 what comes if this goes on.
00:42:54.280 I think that's the case
00:42:55.580 with the male-female 0.69
00:42:57.620 relations. We should
00:42:59.840 be able to have a more reasonable
00:43:01.860 discussion than we have. We should be able
00:43:03.840 to remember things we all knew
00:43:05.320 we shouldn't end up
00:43:07.800 in the sort of themes of things like
00:43:09.660 believe all women 1.00
00:43:11.020 we should try to get
00:43:15.540 to a believe people
00:43:17.780 if they appear to be telling the truth
00:43:20.080 something like that would be
00:43:21.820 salt fashioned
00:43:23.040 and I think
00:43:28.060 the one that's in a way
00:43:30.120 clearest, the one I worry about most
00:43:32.000 in a way is the
00:43:33.540 race one. Because, again, I mean, this is just a really hellish subject, but
00:43:41.960 there is something very dark starting to go on with this. And it comes, I think you see the
00:43:52.040 start of it in what is called whiteness studies. Whiteness studies is the only such study in the
00:43:59.260 American Academy, which studies something not in order to, in some ways, celebrate it,
00:44:06.060 but in order to destroy or denigrate it. It's a very, very sinister movement. It's been going on
00:44:12.120 for a few decades now. And it comes out of other forms of studies. But you see, gay studies came 0.53
00:44:22.180 up because there was a feeling, I actually oppose all such studies. I don't think any of them have
00:44:27.360 done that much good. I think they've done
00:44:29.160 quite a lot of provable harm. But gay studies 1.00
00:44:31.340 for instance came up with the idea that there were authors who had
00:44:33.320 not been focused upon because
00:44:35.160 they were gay. They'd been sort of forgotten and that
00:44:37.180 this was sort of forgotten.
00:44:39.440 This was something that could deserve
00:44:40.800 light being brought and it being brought
00:44:43.280 above the surface a bit more. And the same
00:44:45.380 thing happened with black studies.
00:44:47.240 There were authors and others,
00:44:49.640 figures from history, who'd been overlooked
00:44:51.480 because of the color of their skin and in an
00:44:53.340 age of racism, in a racist
00:44:55.240 age had not been able to get the attention they deserved. Now, there is something in
00:45:02.700 this, undoubtedly. But once you get to a certain point where like, James Baldwin is just one
00:45:10.020 of the great writers of the 20th century. And you wouldn't want him to be in a canon
00:45:14.520 of black writers. You'd want him not even to be in a canon of American writers. You
00:45:19.420 just want him to be in the canon of 20th century writers. And, you know, again, there
00:45:27.560 are lots of gay writers. There's not been a paucity of them in history, as it happens.
00:45:34.240 But you don't want them to be in the LGBTQ section. You want them to be in everyone else. 0.99
00:45:41.420 Maybe there's a little bit of correction that was needed there in its day. But all of these
00:45:45.140 things were designed to try to bring out something that had otherwise potentially been suppressed in
00:45:50.460 some way and to celebrate it all of them do that except for whiteness studies and whiteness studies
00:45:58.080 is explicitly an attempt to problematize being white this is really toxic stuff and i show in
00:46:08.400 in the chapter on race, the sort of consequences, because if you problematize any group of people,
00:46:16.440 if you problematize any skin color, it means you are problematizing some people,
00:46:21.960 the people who have that skin color. And you see this in the culture now, the use of the term
00:46:29.560 white as a derogatory term. You see these ones with gammon and things like that, you know,
00:46:36.140 hilarious hilarious you know when racism is hilarious um and i'm not i'm not saying you know
00:46:45.580 people say oh well you're probably just saying this because you're a white gamony uh so on so
00:46:49.600 no i i'm noticing it because it disturbs me and i don't like the tone of it and what's more i can
00:46:57.420 start to see what's going to happen back because just as surely as with any group of people
00:47:05.180 if you say your skin color is a problem there will be some people who will go along with that 1.00
00:47:13.080 and there will be a lot and i would suggest the majority actually who say excuse me excuse me
00:47:21.400 this is a hardware thing it has nothing to do with my character or my life choices it's neither
00:47:29.460 good nor bad. It is a moral nothing, just like, I would submit, the position we should be in
00:47:36.860 on issues to do with sexual identity and issues to do with being a man or being a woman. It is not
00:47:43.740 the way to look at me, and it doesn't say anything either good or bad. But with the whiteness studies 0.98
00:47:53.120 thing, it pushes this idea, no, being black is better. Being anything is better than being white. 0.63
00:47:58.940 And I just know already what's going to happen with this.
00:48:04.100 You can see little glimpses of it.
00:48:06.780 I give the example of the Harvard case of the Asian students suing Harvard University for discriminating against them.
00:48:15.160 But I see it from the fact that in the last, I'd say, three years in particular, everywhere in the world I go,
00:48:23.040 I'm in a different country every week and have been for the last few years.
00:48:27.960 um i travel very widely and i get to speak i'm very fortunate i get to speak to an awfully large
00:48:33.260 number of people one of the things i have noticed is that everywhere i go there are people starting
00:48:39.180 to ask questions about iq and it um if it doesn't come up in q a and it almost never does then it
00:48:48.320 comes up afterwards or somebody afterwards in a pub or in a bar somebody will ask about it
00:48:54.000 And I know what's happening, and I say this explicitly in the book.
00:48:58.380 I think this is a sign of the sort of grabbing for weapons, ideological weapons, to hit back at the problematization of whiteness. 0.54
00:49:11.500 We don't need to get into it, but whatever view you take on the debate about IQ and hereditary characteristics, it's a really ugly, ugly thing. 0.66
00:49:21.420 and just a hellish, hellish subject.
00:49:27.960 And David Reich at Harvard and others have explained very clearly why that is.
00:49:35.140 But there are reasons why things come to the surface
00:49:38.680 and become a bit popular at a particular time,
00:49:41.360 let alone sort of everywhere.
00:49:42.960 When I started to notice it, I thought, why?
00:49:46.320 I'm pretty sure.
00:49:48.120 I'm pretty sure this is what's happening.
00:49:49.880 It is saying, right, we're going to find the weapon nearest to hand that hurts you the most in our view, and we're going to wield that back.
00:50:00.080 So I say, on this, as on all of these other subjects, please let us step back from leaning on them this much.
00:50:10.560 Let's try to go back to colorblind.
00:50:13.600 Let's go back to raceblind if we can. 0.98
00:50:16.800 let's go back to not caring about the characteristics if we can
00:50:23.900 because it's definitely preferable to what's coming otherwise
00:50:29.520 and can we go back is there a way to solve this because this is what i've been worrying about and
00:50:34.660 you know the fact that we're all in these tribes and in order to be black you have to be liberal
00:50:38.760 and if you're not what you know woe betide you is there a way to go back i try to towards the end
00:50:44.300 of the book, I try to explain what I think are some of the ways out. And I'm particularly concerned
00:50:48.960 about this for what I said at the beginning was that third group of people, young people growing
00:50:53.000 up in this very confusing world, wanting to do good and thinking this is good. I'm very keen to
00:50:59.380 try to encourage them out of this way of thinking. And so I try to give some of the examples of what
00:51:06.140 you might do to try to get out of it. One of them, one of them is to do, I have a chapter on this
00:51:12.840 about forgiveness and this is a really this isn't a great subject for comedy but it's a great
00:51:17.880 subject we um we live in a very very unforgiving society and you know some people talk about
00:51:25.960 things like snowflakery and someone of the generation coming up and i uh i think that
00:51:32.940 it's slightly unfair unkind if you live in a world where acting in the world can come back
00:51:39.760 at you at any stage, and you never, ever have any mechanisms to be forgiven, you are going to fear
00:51:46.300 everything, because everything is so damn dangerous. Every word is undoable, is un-undoable.
00:51:53.400 Every action is un-undoable. And nobody wants to help you out. Nobody. And we all have a little
00:52:02.180 bit of this, you know, when somebody errs and strays or does something terrible, we are inclined
00:52:11.160 to forgive them if we already agree with them, if they are of our group or tribe, or if they are of
00:52:17.180 our political view. But when it happens with our opponents, we destroy, destroy and make sure they
00:52:26.200 never come back that's why the trudeau thing is actually quite a useful moment because i'm quite
00:52:34.640 encouraged by some of the response some of the partisan response which is saying don't let's do
00:52:41.560 this but don't let's do back to him what we know he would do to us so it's true that if donald trump
00:52:49.440 had repeatedly...
00:52:52.260 We were just talking about this before you got here.
00:52:55.360 Jesus H. Christ, the kind of...
00:52:57.700 I reckon that an apology wouldn't have quite done it.
00:53:03.320 If Donald Trump had said,
00:53:04.740 well, you know, I don't know how many times,
00:53:06.820 but sometimes I just used to put my feet up
00:53:08.760 at Trump Tower and just black up.
00:53:12.160 And Melania...
00:53:13.700 I don't reckon that would have...
00:53:15.160 We'd just be there on the tambourine.
00:53:16.520 I reckon he'd have trouble
00:53:25.920 in the Republican primary
00:53:27.180 I reckon that the left
00:53:29.740 wouldn't let go of that
00:53:30.720 so it's interesting
00:53:33.660 because this could be an opportunity
00:53:34.980 to try to pretend
00:53:36.200 that Justin Trudeau
00:53:37.220 is in fact a racist 1.00
00:53:39.160 white supremacist 0.99
00:53:40.860 KKK hood wearing 1.00
00:53:43.120 maniac and bigger
00:53:46.500 And a lot of Canadian politicians are doing that.
00:53:49.320 Some are doing it, yeah.
00:53:51.640 The wiser ones will realize that this is a very important opportunity to show magnanimity in victory.
00:53:59.920 To say, you, Justin Trudeau, wanted to make us play these silly, reductive political games.
00:54:10.340 And, you know, God knows there's reason enough to dislike the guy. 0.63
00:54:13.280 he
00:54:14.800 you know
00:54:15.500 I mean
00:54:15.700 I still think
00:54:16.480 that moment
00:54:17.420 a few years ago
00:54:18.080 when a young woman
00:54:19.680 in the audience
00:54:20.320 refers to mankind
00:54:21.520 and he said
00:54:23.640 he
00:54:23.940 the Prime Minister
00:54:25.220 of Canada
00:54:25.620 says
00:54:25.860 I think you'll find
00:54:27.380 we refer to
00:54:27.980 humankind
00:54:28.760 these days
00:54:30.180 and so
00:54:31.080 first of all
00:54:33.100 no we don't
00:54:34.160 or almost
00:54:34.920 nobody does
00:54:35.580 and secondly
00:54:37.200 so you're the Prime Minister
00:54:38.520 and you're using
00:54:39.380 the platform
00:54:39.780 to sort of
00:54:40.280 correct
00:54:40.940 and sort of
00:54:41.660 browbeat
00:54:42.100 and mansplay
00:54:43.260 uh some you know poor nice young woman is just asking a question you know i mean like have some
00:54:49.480 decency and just basic you know i mean there's a power dynamic that's gone wrong anyhow but
00:54:54.380 at such a point whenever that guy gets this wrong by turning out to have a bit of a thing for
00:55:01.580 doing blackface i just i can't believe our luck still but you know we could do the dishonest thing 0.67
00:55:10.660 to him that he would do or we could say okay let's use this as an opportunity to learn about
00:55:15.940 how we could have a better better thing going forward and i i give this example with the with
00:55:20.720 the in the forgiveness chapter with the how do we how do we how do we try to read other people's
00:55:27.280 words including the words of people who we might disagree with in a more honest light
00:55:31.540 we've had this thing i may have said to you before we've had this strange thing in our society in
00:55:35.780 recent years writers comedians and others used to operate on the basis that we spoke and acted
00:55:43.280 in a way that no honest critic could honestly misrepresent and then we entered at some point
00:55:50.060 in recent years this era in which we had to try to speak and act in a way in which in such a way
00:55:56.180 that no dishonest person couldn't dishonestly misrepresent our actions and that can't be done
00:56:02.620 or at least it can't be done without driving yourself mad and so we need to we need to work
00:56:09.360 out how with our opponents as well as our allies and friends and and so on actually behave in a
00:56:17.340 more reasonable manner and i by the way just a quick example i had a i had an example of this
00:56:20.940 the other day somebody told me uh uh that it was a social some social thing it's quite a very wide
00:56:28.400 array of people of different backgrounds and all that sort of thing and somebody said to me who
00:56:32.780 happened to be um happened not to be white themselves said that somebody at the same thing
00:56:38.780 had referred to that the you know you know the colored girl um and this this uh this friend
00:56:46.580 mentioned this to me and was clearly just sort of like um do you think he was being a bit you know
00:56:54.420 do you think he's a bit racist and i didn't know the person well but i said from my little
00:56:58.760 interaction with him i said i know i wouldn't i don't think so and and i sort of we sort of
00:57:06.920 talked about it a bit because it was interesting that i said to her well i reckon he's just of that
00:57:13.320 generation where you still said colored people not people of color which i think is a distinction
00:57:20.000 without much of a difference but you know fine you know um he probably didn't get that memo and
00:57:25.660 why don't we assume he just misspoke and doesn't know the latest thing but doesn't hate black
00:57:32.800 people why don't we assume that rather than oh my god there was a racist incident at that party
00:57:39.720 i just think that's probably for all of us a more that doesn't mean you don't call out bigotry when
00:57:46.180 you actually find it but we should we should probably try to find a more reasonable way along
00:57:51.500 those lines well some of so much of it is about intent i had a an incident very much like that
00:57:57.380 in my comedy club which i run uh after a show which i book uh an older gentleman came up to me
00:58:04.320 and he said oh i loved the first act that you had on the you know the colored chap
00:58:09.020 and and and i thought about it yeah in this modern way and then i went well hold on what
00:58:15.060 is his intention there yeah his intention is quite clearly to compliment this person and their
00:58:19.880 performance right they just haven't been updated on the language yeah and this is what i don't
00:58:24.760 understand is when did racism stop being about what you said which is hating black people right
00:58:29.360 and became this failure to comply with the linguistic code issued two weeks ago by the
00:58:35.740 the commissariat do you know what i mean yeah i think well obviously the most common explanation
00:58:41.320 is it's being done by people who want to win on something else.
00:58:45.720 And it's very much the left, the vanguard of this.
00:58:49.460 I'm on the left, a trade union member, former teacher, all the rest of it.
00:58:54.260 And I've just been driven to despair by their behavior.
00:58:57.820 We're the worst side a lot of the time.
00:59:00.080 Yeah, it's a horrible thing to see this.
00:59:04.720 And as I say, we need to lean back from what we're trying to lean into at the moment.
00:59:11.320 I mean, here's a tricky one to say, but why didn't I do it anyway?
00:59:17.280 You know, I grew up in London in the 80s, and London was already very diverse.
00:59:24.440 And maybe, you know, we're never the best analysts of our own actions.
00:59:29.300 But when I look back, I can say with absolute honesty, I didn't think skin color was of any significance.
00:59:36.240 In fact, I remember one of my parents telling me that one of my grandparents was rather
00:59:42.820 struck once by mentioning that, you know, I was in primary school or something, and that
00:59:46.000 when I was, I had mentioned a friend to this grandparent, and he said, which friend is
00:59:53.140 that? And I tried to describe that when I was describing this girl, I didn't at any
00:59:56.980 point say she's black. And he was just very struck by that, that it was like, oh, you
01:00:01.800 You know, I was like, you know, the girl with black hair that, you know,
01:00:05.020 and glasses or something, but it didn't, that wasn't.
01:00:08.040 Very woke of you, Douglas.
01:00:09.460 I know, pre-woke, pre-naturally woke.
01:00:12.660 But my point is that if you grow up like that,
01:00:14.680 you don't think it's of any importance or that interesting.
01:00:20.420 So I sort of particularly resent the re-racialization of society 1.00
01:00:26.540 because I think it is making everybody notice things.
01:00:32.660 And let me give you an example.
01:00:35.280 You know, Martin Amis once said that his father, Kingsley,
01:00:40.020 was a little bit anti-Semitic.
01:00:42.240 And Martin Amis once said that he said to his father,
01:00:45.920 who was a self-confessed, slightly anti-Semitic person,
01:00:48.980 what's it like being mildly anti-Semitic?
01:00:51.240 and Kingsley Amos said to his son Martin
01:00:56.540 well you know it's nothing
01:00:58.140 it's nothing very serious
01:00:59.640 but he said just things like
01:01:01.400 you know he said I watch the television
01:01:02.840 and you know when the credits roll
01:01:05.140 you know I look at all the names
01:01:06.080 I go oh there's one
01:01:07.200 now again I mean
01:01:12.940 now we know where Jeremy Corbyn
01:01:14.320 gets his ideas from
01:01:15.420 but again I mean you actually
01:01:17.700 you have to know
01:01:18.900 if you grow up around a lot of people and none of them are jewish you wouldn't know if you grew up
01:01:27.540 with a lot of people and some of them were jewish the likelihood you just wouldn't notice that and
01:01:32.900 i remember again i mean took i was quite old before i knew what a particular name would be
01:01:39.260 that that would probably denote that the person was jewish you know i mean because it wasn't a
01:01:44.400 thing now the reason i mention this is because increasingly in recent years the way in which
01:01:50.700 race has been weaponized i noticed that everybody is becoming a little bit like that thing that
01:01:56.280 kings of the amos was trying to describe so people now take the advertising thing all adverts have
01:02:04.960 mixed race couples and the children are black or mixed race and it's a very common meme in
01:02:13.740 advertising in fact if you have an advert where there's no one everybody's white like that company
01:02:19.680 is going to be in serious trouble and the thing is it makes perfect sense in one way because first
01:02:24.800 of all you're trying to reflect an increasingly diverse society and secondly you you know you
01:02:31.120 want to sort of show people look this is this normal to have you know mixed race marriages
01:02:35.040 which it is and so but there's something sometimes about it where you go oh come on just lay off it
01:02:41.520 bit you know where you can predict exactly what they're going to do in terms of the racial quota
01:02:47.280 for the advert and i just noticed that everyone ends up noticing race yeah and it's because it's 0.98
01:02:55.180 something we didn't notice strangely enough by trying to correct it in this way we all notice it
01:03:01.680 and i just speak for myself i think it's horrible yeah yeah i just think it's horrible you used a
01:03:08.100 very interesting example in your book with the google searches oh yeah google that's terrifying
01:03:15.580 people can do it themselves at home although maybe if enough attention is paid to it google
01:03:20.700 will change the algorithm i mean i discovered whilst i spent some time in silicon valley whilst
01:03:26.020 researching this book and um uh you know i got very interested in this thing called machine
01:03:30.240 learning fairness which is mlf is uh um how you assuming because human beings i do have
01:03:37.200 some instinctive prejudices and biases and so on and if you're programming you don't want to
01:03:43.020 put your biases into the program so if it is the case that most physicists historically have been
01:03:50.380 men you don't want all physicists that come up on the search to be men because that might suggest
01:03:55.720 to a young woman who might want to be a physicist if she searches that she can't be because they're
01:04:00.060 all male in the physics business. So the good bit of this problem is you don't want to put 1.00
01:04:07.380 off people with a competency and an ambition from doing whatever they want. The problem
01:04:13.280 is that the MLF thing comes up with some very weird things with history. It produces, for
01:04:18.580 instance, surveys of the past that are just not reflective of the past, which suggests,
01:04:25.300 for instance, that Europe was basically a highly multicultural society throughout, you
01:04:29.800 know the last millennium which is just it's just not the case i mean you might people might wish
01:04:34.760 it's the case or not wish it's the case but it just it just wasn't the case but there is something
01:04:41.420 which i identify which is machine learning fairness plus some human agency and it clearly
01:04:46.080 happens with google image searches so that and as i try this at home uh um search for uh gay couples
01:04:55.120 on google image search and you get lots of happy healthy gay couples some of them are men male
01:04:59.380 couples some of the female couples and there's an awful lot of adoption and you know uh children
01:05:04.340 as well just to show happy gay families sort of thing but they're basically no sort of nice 1.00
01:05:09.200 cute sexy sweet couples do straight couples and you get gay couples a lot a lot this gets darker 1.00
01:05:21.880 um do black couples or black families and you get lots of nice photos of nice happy healthy
01:05:29.380 black couples and black families do white couples or white family no no no you don't get it you get
01:05:38.400 a lot of black couples interracial couples you get a lot of gay couples you if you type white 0.80
01:05:46.980 couple you will get a black gay couple why silicon valley has decided that only a bigot 1.00
01:05:57.040 would be searching for white couples or straight couples and they're saying fuck you fuck you 1.00
01:06:02.920 we'll show you we'll taunt you we'll dement you we know what you're about be good now the thing 1.00
01:06:10.660 about this is like we didn't we don't know this is happening mainly and it's only a sped up version
01:06:19.680 of something that is happening elsewhere in the media and politics i lay that out the slow version
01:06:24.040 of it is happening elsewhere the fastest version is the online one but this again this is dementing
01:06:29.780 and this is very very bad for a society to unwittingly be imbibing a very distorted
01:06:38.260 picture which selects groups of people who do not deserve to have the thing they might be searching
01:06:45.720 for but deserve instead to be punished and demented and told they can't access it and again
01:06:53.560 Asian couples, you'll get happy Asian couples. 0.86
01:06:55.880 The Asians deserve to see happy Asian couples.
01:06:59.900 But that's not the case with everyone.
01:07:01.840 Why?
01:07:02.360 Because we know in Silicon Valley that there are some people who are bigoted,
01:07:06.040 and we know who they are, and we're going to get them.
01:07:09.040 Well, it's almost like the tech companies have an agenda for us.
01:07:11.580 We wouldn't know anything about that, obviously, on the show Douglas.
01:07:14.540 On this highly demonetized show.
01:07:16.560 I mean, you'll probably, for this show, you'll have to pay them money.
01:07:20.480 You'll get money taken from your bank accounts,
01:07:23.000 and given to youtube in order to allow you this as our time always is with you is such a pleasure
01:07:28.200 we would be prepared to pay it on this again yeah you're flatterer just the truth you you speak
01:07:35.240 about the importance of truth and i'm giving it to you unvarnished um but thank you so much for
01:07:39.860 coming on the last question we always ask is what is the one thing that we're not talking about that
01:07:45.120 we should be talking about i know it's weird to ask you given you've just written the whole book
01:07:48.680 about things that we should be talking about but uh give us something last time you said it was
01:07:52.880 your book so we've talked about your book for an hour i i think the thing we should be thinking
01:07:58.620 about is that that one i i raised earlier which i've tried in recent days to put out there a bit
01:08:06.320 and with with a lack of success with some of my opponents in this discussion but i really urge
01:08:10.520 them and everyone else to think about it what what would what would overcorrection look like
01:08:17.120 and when would you know and who would call it
01:08:19.500 and how could we get back to equal?
01:08:21.940 How could we escape better and get back to equal
01:08:24.820 on all of these rights issues?
01:08:26.920 It's got to be possible and we've got to think about it.
01:08:31.220 And so we should work out what the warning signs would be
01:08:34.140 that we've overreached and work out the way back
01:08:38.660 to basically having the equalities that most of us want
01:08:44.640 and then get on with doing better and more interesting things with our lives
01:08:50.340 and more meaningful things because it's just not going to be good for this generation
01:08:57.800 to be playing these games of privilege there is so much for them to do
01:09:03.920 and so much good that can be done and i think we should be getting on with that
01:09:10.220 I think that's a very good message to leave the interview on thank you so much
01:09:13.980 for coming on make sure you get the madness of crowds it's an absolutely
01:09:16.940 brilliant book we both really enjoyed it we will see you very soon and leave us a
01:09:21.500 nice review iTunes spread the word bye-bye
01:09:40.220 Thank you.
01:10:10.220 Thank you.
01:10:40.220 Thank you.
01:11:10.220 Thank you.
01:11:40.220 You