Triggernometry Meets Guilty Feminist
Episode Stats
Length
2 hours and 22 minutes
Words per Minute
193.0292
Summary
Deborah Francis White of the Guilty Feminist podcast joins me to discuss her new book, Six Conversations We're Scared to have, and why she thinks it's important to have conversations with people on both sides of the divide, and across the divide.
Transcript
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you wouldn't say elon musk or donald trump were far right definitely not but he hasn't been saying
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anything positive about gay people lately has he um has he said anything negative about gay people
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we killed them yes we committed a genocide why were we able to do that
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my visceral reaction yeah to a white man sitting and saying to me and why were we able to commit
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genocide on them and then just pausing yes is very visceral to me it's interesting that you
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brought up my skin color because it's i thought that was the exact opposite of what the point
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you're trying to make in the book you're very productive i thought you're a lot more intellectual
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than this i think this is very revealing so you're not reaching anyone who's listening to this
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conversation by doing that well my point so you don't know that if you listen to what i was saying
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it's actually perfectly logical and reasonable controlling what you're doing now well what you
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said was quite significant offensive it was quite it wasn't it's not that it was offensive it was it
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get to me investing is all about the future so what do you think's gonna happen bitcoin is sort of
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inevitable at this point i think it would come down to precious metals i hope we don't go cashless i
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would say land is a safe investment technology companies solar energy robotic pollinators might be
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a thing a wrestler to face a robot that will have no have to happen so whatever you think is going to
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happen in the future you can invest in it at wealth simple start now at wealth simple.com
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deborah francis white of the guilty feminist podcast welcome to trigonometry thank you so much
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for having me well uh this is a surprise surprising meeting of the minds because um i think it's fair to
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say that your podcast is one of the kind of arch pillars of progressive thought in certainly in
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our space um and you reached out to us saying you have a book out you want to come and talk to us
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it's fair to say that we're not one of the pillars of the woke space in in our space uh so what are you
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doing here well what a great question um uh my good friend johann harry told me i should come on your
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show and i think um had it been with my book the guilty feminist i would have said probably not this
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isn't the right space for it but my new book is called six conversations we're scared to have
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and it's it's about how i feel about the landscape now i feel like the the political landscape now i
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feel like progressive movements and people who are broadly on the left are fragmenting by
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constantly having i i would say being being obsessed with trivial pursuits small level
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slights this use of language that use of language meanwhile there's this huge polarizing gap that is
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increasing every day and we've seen this you know in the last couple months in america and an
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extraordinary chasm has opened up between the left and the right i feel like the far right which is
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quite sinister is is really making gains and so my book is about how to have conversations better
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both with people on your side of the divide but also reaching across the divide so i can't really
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then say oh you think differently from me i don't want to come and talk to you i that's exactly what i
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need to be doing and i listened to your podcast and i also felt like you guys were like reasonable who
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and i could have a good chat to you what i'm not interested in doing is uh is you know when you go on
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the bbc and they say oh you've got to talk to this person for balance and there's somebody that is
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actually quite um like for me someone who goes i don't believe in climate change at all i uh i think
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feminists are bitches and witches i'm like well it's it just would take too long in a 20 minute
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interview to get there so what are we doing and then i think we're just doing gladiatorial arena
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sports so but i want to talk to people who i think are intelligent who think differently from me
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because otherwise what are we doing just sitting there congratulating ourselves in our little group
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um and ultimately the reason i wrote this book is because when i was 14 my family joined the jehovah's
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witnesses and the jehovah's witnesses are a cult um i say that because it's true yeah it is true a
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useful definition of a cult is any group that won't let you leave with your dignity intact
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and it's a shaming and shunning group so if the elders come around and tell you and the elders are
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just some men who nominate each other in the congregation um that they have regular jobs they're
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not particularly trained or anything and if they come around and tell you your skirt's too short or
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you've got an attitude problem um and you don't listen you can be formally shunned it means people
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cross the road to avoid you pretend they can't see you um it's a name shame shun religion it's
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it's very patriarchal it's run entirely by men and i lived in that i had to get out of it and i lost all
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my friends i couldn't speak to anybody i knew and loved for many years and i had to start over again
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and then in the last 10 years i have been feeling like i am in a cult again um because i think the
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world is now a series of interconnecting cults where we're all in our little group and in order
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to be part of this group we have to say these things repeat these things if we have questions
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about these things or we think i don't think that part of it's right can i have a reasonable discussion
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about that we're often going to be shouted down and i see that on both sides of the political divide i
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see that on the left and i see that on the right well if you think that you're with them then and so
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that's why i wrote this book that's a very good point and i think uh right now uh that is clearly
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happening on the right as well like i experience this on a daily basis there's there's a whole bunch
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of narratives that people on the right in america have about ukraine and anytime i'm like well
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factually actually oh you're with them then i see that a lot and i think that's human behavior
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what i found interesting is and this is what i'd be keen to explore as part of this conversation if
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you don't mind is you said in the blurb for your book that you're not anti-woke um i don't think i
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would have did i say anti-woke i don't think i would have used the word woke but maybe i did
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um it says in the blurb of the book but we um i guess i guess definitely not anti-woke no yes but i i
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what i was going to ask you is why is that why aren't you anti-woke um well i think what does
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woke mean to you i that's my question what are all the very things that you you said are the reason
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you wrote your book the reason that people would say we're anti-woke i'm certainly anti-woke i have
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no issue describing it is i'm anti the oh you use this wrong phrase oh you made fun of this thing
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that i don't like oh you're not sufficiently inclusive of this blah blah blah oh you know you're
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a man you need to be quiet while other people talk all of this stuff i i reject this entirely i
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reject the identity politics of it i reject the censorship aspect of it i reject the um the
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obsession with with victimhood which i think is damaging and it's making people into victims
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that's what i mean by woke and that's what i'm against uh so i so i i think the reason i would
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describe myself as not anti-woke is because i think what a lot of people mean by woke and it's all
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it's a soup it's a rich soup so you can take out certain things and go that's woke but i think a
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lot of people see it and go well woke is you know an idea about gender or an idea about feminism
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that i haven't fully explored it just sounds new or it just sounds you know like something that i
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don't have any particular uh knowledge of or empathy for so that goes to the woke basket because it's new
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so to name something that uh to pull something out of a hat off the top of my head um there's a lot
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of uh diverse casting now so i see people getting very angry when they see um a cast on television
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and they might there might be you know a couple of brown and black people in the cast and they say
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well they don't need to be there or this is not historically accurate and i get very very angry about
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that and i i feel very strongly that we want our television to represent the people in our
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community i live in london and i have very close friends chosen family who are black and brown some
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of whom are actors and i want to see them on tv they're brilliant and i really notice that when it
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first happened i might have noticed it and then you get into a show and you you don't notice so
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even if something's set in victorian times and you think well they might not have been black or brown
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you just stop noticing and you just see that it's a great performance and then the other thing is if
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when you look a bit deeper you find out of course there were black and brown people in victorian
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london at that time and sometimes people say that person wouldn't have been black or brown and
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historically when you look into it they actually were so that's an example of something that i think
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people just go woke and i think no that that needs more analysis surely fine but i i i there's a lot
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to quibble with that which we can but i guess to most people i don't think your characterization is
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quite accurate i don't think most people's view of what woke is is this thing that they don't
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understand but because it's new they don't like it it's more like suddenly we all have to pretend that
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if you say something that about your identity now it's true like if i say i'm a woman i become a
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woman in that moment and a lot of people don't dislike that because it's new a lot of people
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don't dislike that because they think it's factually inaccurate sure well that's a very very big subject
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there's a very very big um chunky chapter on that in my book and i think that's something that
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what's your argument on that so what you just said there is uh is if someone says they're a woman
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you have to accept it is that what is that yeah but that's been the line trans women are women
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right and if you say otherwise you're a bigot okay so what i'm arguing in my book um is i am looking at
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the the the historical fight for two other sorts of rights that has happened and i say in the
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introduction actually um this is a book of ideas and i know a lot of people will go to this chapter
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first it's called the conversation about gender non-conformity and i say ideally read it in order
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because i'm building an argument but if you do go here first and if you are triggered to use the
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the name of your podcast by this if this is something that you feel very very strongly about
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um whatever side of this wherever in this kaleidoscope of this discussion you're coming from
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please be aware this is some ideas in a book of ideas this is not the first first to last word
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this is not a new doctrine that i'm delivering for a new cult this is some ideas in a book of ideas
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so this is a complex discussion so anybody coming in and going you're not a woman that's the end of
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it i don't need to hear anything more about that or anybody coming in and going you're not allowed to
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ask any questions about sport that's just the end of it both of those i would i would question and i
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would say this is a big complicated topic and in my book this is a book of idea this is a book of ideas
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and this is some ideas about gender what are your ideas about it so i want to bed that down there okay
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okay um what i'm doing is first of all looking at how the brain works and why our brain is sort of a
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prediction machine it's it's the autocomplete on your phone really it's always going through the world
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and it's looking for things that aren't as the brain would expect them to be
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so if you got on a bus and the bus driver was dressed like a clown you would double take now
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there's no reason to suspect that clown is going to hurt you or that there's anything there's nothing
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pejorative about the bus driver being dressed like a clown but you would notice if you got on the bus
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driver was dressed as a bus driver you probably wouldn't notice the bus driver at all if you you
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know if you're in london where you get on off buses and you don't say anything to the bus driver so
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many people and someone said later who was the bus driver what they look like you probably wouldn't
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know but as soon as they're just like a clown your brain goes what i've got questions now the reason
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your brain can't do that every time like a bus you know like toddlers go a bus a bus driver that's
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because they're still learning what's normal what's what's to be expected so we can't do that our
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brain's got stuff going on all the time and it needs to save itself for all this other work so if it's
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what's expected it doesn't remark um so if 30 percent of bus drivers dress like clowns for a year
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you would stop noticing i don't think i would know you you i would continue to notice that they're
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for how long for all eternity because i know what a bus driver is supposed to look like ah
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interesting that's so your brain works different from other human beings then in that case uh because
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if if we accept your premise of how people's brains work yes okay my my assertion to you is that a lot
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of people have a standard that they expect that they learn at a certain point and they don't stop
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noticing things being different to that like if everybody started walking around naked i wouldn't
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start i wouldn't at one point go actually i don't remember a time when nobody you see what i mean
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uh i do but um i think there's a whole different bunch of semiotics that go with nudity that don't
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go with clown costumes fine uh whatever let's carry on with you please okay here's an example
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in 19 in the 1960s mary tyler moore had to fight really hard to be allowed to wear trousers on screen
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because people double distilled double taking at women wearing trousers when women first started
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wearing trousers women were arrested in trousers now and i'll tell you and it's because
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that's a gender signifier and it repulsed people made it looked weird same as long hair um
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uh think about a victorian man have you got a picture of victorian man oscar wilde in your mind
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how long is his hair pretty long pretty long right um why is short hair masculine
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um i any ideas take us back to the trans bit because i'm not following the connection okay so
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i'm taking you somewhere trust me it's all right we're getting there okay um so the reason short
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hair is masculine is because in the first world war men went into the trenches had to have short hair
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because the lice and then other men who hadn't been down in the trenches wanted to demonstrate they
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could be as masculine they could have survived the trenches by the 1960s hair like oscar wilde's long
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victorian hair was so femme that when men walked down the street with that longer hair that came in
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the 60s other men would shout oh gives you hernberg love and sort of sexist uh heckles so that's how long
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it takes to get uh something to be normal or for something to be seen as femme or mask that's why i say
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if for all eternity you continue to notice clowns as bus drivers even if you you know you still had
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comments on them you would start to edit them out because that's because nobody now looks at a man with
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this sort of length hair and double takes or looks at a woman in trousers and double takes
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because as a as a society we get used to something so anything that's outside the norm
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um what happens is we notice it and each generation has those alarm alerts which is this could be
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dangerous because it's different and we have that with gender in you can see it again and again and
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again and again and we know it's arbitrary because women were wearing trousers in asia for hundreds of
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years when western women that didn't look it's not it's not something absolutely normal or natural
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all so uh what we have to do then is look at is there any history of transgenderism throughout the
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ages and i looked into this because i looked at indigenous societies and i i thought well there
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will be some you know people fear what's different so there will be indigenous societies where there weren't
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transgender people accepted and i looked and i looked and i looked and i could not find any
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it was completely normal in most societies for this to be not a binary thing for it not to be
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male and female but for it to be more like a scale so if you walk past a building and you know a bar and
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someone says is it loud in there you understand that that person is saying yes it is loud in there but
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they've been loud for them because there's loud and there's soft there's high and there's low there's
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young and there's old we're all old to someone and we're all young to someone right we're all old to a
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seven-year-old we're all young to an 80-year-old right so we we there's very few things where we go
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it's this or it's that you might have had the american two-spirit people and a native american two-spirit
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you hope you guys said that yeah um that was it created like around in the the 90s at a conference
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an lgbtq plus conference when indigenous people native american people were like we have to explain
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it to the westerners because they keep using it was like a a sort of slur for indigenous queer people
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that was often used and they said right they see it as this and that so let's say we're two so
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whenever you hear that third gender in indigenous spaces it's not really that's that's that's done
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through a western framework of two and therefore a third but if you talk to people in indigenous
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cultures it's usually it's like it's not a third for us because it's more like a piano scale
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so if that is in indigenous cultures it seems unlikely that there are no people in the west
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who also fit somewhere up and down this gender scale and i think what's happened in the west is
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the legal framework is you've got to say you're male or you've got to say you're female and that's
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it so if i have to be in one of these boxes in order to get any rights this is the one i belong in
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because that's the one that feels more like me but if you take it back to its kind of human roots
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we're so obsessed with our own frameworks that we really do think there's no truth outside them
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but one of the the lenses i'm looking at this through is i'm adopted i was given away at birth
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in any other time before now i would have been an orphan um oliver twist had one living parent it
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doesn't necessarily mean both your parents are dead it means no one in your family can or will look
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after you um and i'm i orphan rights is a fantastic something i've written about in the book if you
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look at orphan rights it's absolutely fascinating orphans were massive scapegoats in victorian times
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if you adopt one it will infect your children with immorality uh they're not a natural child
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uh they their mothers were immoral and poor and they will be too and so if you were lucky enough to
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be adopted in victoria times you were jane eyre so you had to say mr and mrs reed you didn't call
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them mum and dad and so if i had been adopted even some decades earlier i couldn't have said
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mum and dad and i wouldn't have thought of my brother and sister as my brother and sister i would
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have been constantly told i was a charity case i was a waif i was a stray i was a bastard i was an
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orphan and my parents would have been my guardians and i would have been their ward legally and if my mum
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and dad had gone around saying to people this is our daughter and people had found out i was adopted
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they would have thought they were fantasists or liars because you can't argue with biology now at
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some point society just decided that because orphans had such terrible so low self-esteem and 70 percent
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of the the um criminal population in the uk in victorian times were orphans and because of stories
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like jane eyre and oliver twist yeah social activism all that just decided that children like
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me should be fully endorsed and so we did argue with biology and we won and that is why i have
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self-esteem and have had a good education and feel completely endorsed by society and i didn't even
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realize i was an orphan until i found my biological mother and found out that from that time some of
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baby newborn babies of my generation went to orphanages and i cried for like 48 hours because
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i was just like fuck i'm an orphan and i could have gone to an orphanage from birth and children who
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are in orphanages from birth have massive issues as you can imagine because they don't have that
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attachment and that made me feel really really really sad and really like oh i would be a totally
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different person and then you can parallel that with gay rights if you look at the history of gay
00:21:36.660
rights in the 60s many gay men were broken you know you watch something like the boys in the band
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which is a play in a you know it's been made into a movie about gay men in the 60s in new york
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and how miserable they were and how much self-loathing there was and how they kind of
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went went for each other because there were two options one was be in the closet be married come and
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get handjobs under the bridge the other was be out and be giving the handjobs under the bridge
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and that was it and so the misery those men lived with and the suicide rate and the mental health
00:22:10.880
breakdown so we've seen what's happened since we've endorsed and legalized and for gay men who now
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live in our society freely and women but it's easy to see with gay men because of criminalization
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and decriminalization and so i mean you know you're my gay friends now will be you know running the pta and
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you know living their living their lives on the outside and being their full selves and not living
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in depression and marginalization this doesn't mean there's no homophobia but it means the legalization
00:22:43.420
and the endorsing of language has functionally changed who is capable of being productive happy
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whole members of society and that's great for society as well as the individuals so i'm looking
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at trans rights from both of those those avenues and saying what would happen if we realized that our
00:23:06.000
model is not the only model there is absolute precedence for human beings to be uh fluid in gender
00:23:12.980
and uh for for them to be gender non-conforming just as much with orphans um indigenous societies don't
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have many indigenous societies they don't have the concept of orphan because the whole community will
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look after you and your aunt is also your mum type feel and so it's a western framework that delivers us
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orphans yeah do you see what i mean i see what you mean but i don't agree and the reason is that i'm
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not a western person by birth and francis has experiences of outside and the idea that male and
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female are western categories is just not it's not true in fact i would not just western but you see
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what i mean about indigenous societies yes but indigenous societies are like 0.0001 percent of the
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entire population of human beings on the planet and the more east you go the more the traditional
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societies are and the more the male and female rigidity is enforced actually the west is actually
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pretty loose about them the other thing that i don't understand about the argument is that
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i think it sounds to me like we're confusing gender non-conformity in other words a feminine man or a man
00:24:14.580
who doesn't comply with the stereotypes of what we expect of a man and a woman who doesn't comply
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and wears trousers or whatever with claiming that you are the opposite sex these are completely separate
00:24:24.700
things and the third thing is and we've obviously had a lot of people on the show to talk about this
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um the gay rights model doesn't work very well as a comparison not least because
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um it's actually gay people that are at the forefront of opposing trans ideology
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who and say if i had been alive today as a young person people would have told me i'm trans
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even though i'm gay or even though i'm autistic or even though i'm this and the fourth difference is
00:24:52.760
that um decriminalizing homosexuality was about preventing the ill treatment of gay people
00:25:00.200
when we're talking about uh transgenderism the way that we've been talking about it in our societies
00:25:05.820
until recently until we're streeting banned puberty blockers is that because we have this ideology of
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compassion for people who may feel differently we then would prescribe very significant medical
00:25:16.840
treatments to young children who are not actually capable of making rational decisions about their
00:25:22.240
long-term future so for all of those reasons i don't really see the argument that you're making
00:25:27.680
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that's pure-gold.co slash trigger take control of your financial future today i think you can see the
00:27:07.100
argument that i'm making you don't agree with the argument i'm making but you've made four points
00:27:10.620
there so i need to take them one by one what was the first one so the first well i don't remember
00:27:14.540
the order in which i made them uh i think the first one was that in the idea that the male female
00:27:20.780
binary is a western concept it's just not factually accurate okay so stop there yeah um i'm talking
00:27:26.860
about indigenous people who lived all over the world yeah until we had so when you when you say
00:27:33.900
the trouble the trouble with uh saying it's not western yeah is colonization did bring a lot of
00:27:40.940
more fixed ideas so i'm no hold on a second i'm sorry no i'm not gonna let that pass are you saying
00:27:46.300
people in in the duchy of muscovy 2000 years ago no no no but i only just started the sentence so i said
00:27:52.940
for example colonization did export a lot of very christian quote-unquote christian not not necessarily
00:27:58.940
christian ideals around the world so my example was i think it's hard to talk about the whole globe
00:28:04.540
but um my example was in australia um you may know australian aboriginals have the idea of brother
00:28:10.540
boys uh brother brother boys and sister girls and they are genderqueer people but of course when you
00:28:17.820
know let's be honest white christian colonizers came and turned up they said that's not a thing and
00:28:22.380
you're not allowed to do that and and said that that's that's wrong and there was a lot of
00:28:27.820
shaming that's gone on now that obviously has infiltrated into the aboriginal population now
00:28:32.220
there's still brother boys and there's still sister girls but there's a lot of homophobia
00:28:35.340
in the aboriginal population that didn't exist before it was imposed but you're not addressing
00:28:39.660
my argument my argument is not that there aren't indigenous communities where these practices exist
00:28:44.140
my argument is that that is by far and away a tiny minority of the global population of humans i
00:28:50.700
don't really understand how that matters though because it's still the it's still the archaic way
00:28:55.020
people people have behaved 99 of people do something and 0.1 of people do something
00:29:01.180
different do you know why indigenous populations are so small though uh isn't it the point i'm
00:29:07.580
trying to make do you know why this is hold on hold on a second you do you know why this is
00:29:10.700
small you're deflecting from the argument that i'm making the argument yes you are the argument
00:29:14.780
that i made to you is when you said this is a western concept i gave you examples yeah for
00:29:19.900
example the duchy of muscovy or russia 600 years ago so when i say western yeah i'm speaking because
00:29:27.020
that's where i'm having the arguments is in the west okay now obviously there are eastern places too
00:29:32.460
but i'm talking about you know western frameworks it's unlikely i'm going to come in here in kent
00:29:37.820
and start talking about you know if far eastern i think you're missing i think you're mishearing what i'm
00:29:43.660
saying you made the claim that outside of the west yeah in indigenous societies these things are very
00:29:49.980
normal and the point i'm making to you is while it it may be the case in certain tiny communities
00:29:55.580
that exist hold on hold on a second that exists in certain tiny communities bless you francis uh
00:30:01.180
outside of the west there are also lots of other civilizations outside of the west where the gender
00:30:06.300
binary that you are talking about as a western concept is actually much more firmly enforced than it is
00:30:11.740
in the west in the islamic civilization in the chinese civilization uh in in russia all over the
00:30:17.500
world in south pretty much everywhere so the bringing up tiny indigenous communities doesn't
00:30:23.180
does not prove the case but indigenous communities tend to be i think more it's more archaic it's more
00:30:29.900
what it what it was before we brought in all these religious framework frameworks you're still talking
00:30:34.940
about the the the muslim world you're still talking about an abrahamic framework what about the chinese
00:30:40.620
i don't know i haven't looked into the chinese enough about 1.4 billion sure but if you have
00:30:45.900
probably looked into indigenous chinese culture you know that archaic before we had a lot of um
00:30:51.100
um china now is not a great example i think you'll understand why because of a fairly extreme regime
00:30:57.820
with ex with not great human rights so i don't i think what i'm trying to look at if you literally look
00:31:02.780
at what i'm saying is that there are other frameworks that are perhaps more human that are more
00:31:07.580
what makes them more human well they're less they're less driven by control by controlling
00:31:11.820
regimes or controlling i get it but i don't i don't think that makes them more human if 99 of
00:31:16.620
humans do a it seems to me that a is more human you must know you're a bright man you must know you
00:31:23.260
must know you're a public intellectual you must know that 99 given the recent population boom
00:31:31.100
of of of people under draconian governments under draconian religious binary religious ideals
00:31:40.620
doesn't dwarf an indigenous culture that has been there australian aboriginals are the oldest
00:31:45.900
indigenous culture in the world do you know why there's so few of them we killed them yes we
00:31:52.140
committed a genocide why were we able to do that why were we able to do that what are you implying
00:31:59.500
i'm just asking you the question are you implying because we're better no what are you implying
00:32:03.980
we were technologically far more advanced that's what i'm implying
00:32:11.420
what's not clear about that so you're saying i'm saying we were technologically more advanced
00:32:17.820
so you're saying we're superior to australian aboriginals that's quite the opposite of what i'm saying
00:32:22.140
i'm not saying we were superior i'm saying we were technologically more advanced so how how is that
00:32:26.140
the opposite superior implies a moral quality i'm not making any moral implication what you seem to be
00:32:31.980
but okay what i'm saying is i think most people would hear it that way no again you're a very
00:32:36.380
intelligent man how would most people hear that most people would hear what i'm saying for what i'm
00:32:40.300
saying which is somebody who comes my mother's south america and i have indigenous heritage i don't see it
00:32:47.260
that way a lot of my my grandmother's ancestors were wiped out by the conquistadors whether it's by
00:32:54.220
they came in executed them or it was disease brought in by conquistadors yeah so i don't
00:33:00.220
interpret it that way so so why what's the point of this question the point of this question is is
00:33:05.500
because we came in with our better gendered binaries and therefore we were able to work a lot better if
00:33:11.500
you just hear the point i'm making instead of getting i really cannot understand what it could
00:33:15.020
possibly be other than we are better uh well let me explain it to you what it could possibly be and
00:33:19.980
what's it got to do with the gender binary uh your argument i'm we're just talking about the argument
00:33:24.780
and you seem to get quite heated about this which is completely unnecessary um do you think it's
00:33:30.700
necessary uh i i i am i'm a bit stunned by what you're implying no you you're acting in a kind of
00:33:37.420
passive aggressive way which indicates that you're not i genuinely be and being a hundred percent
00:33:42.860
authentic my visceral reaction yeah to a white man sitting and saying to me and why were we able to
00:33:49.500
commit genocide on them and then just pausing yes is very visceral to me well let's go back first of
00:33:55.740
all it's interesting you brought up my skin color because it's i thought that was the exact opposite of what
00:34:00.460
the point you're trying to make in the book but anyway let's come back to the argument you haven't
00:34:03.420
read my book so you wouldn't know what the point is you said that the point of your book is it's all
00:34:07.820
about you can't say this as of this person and whatever but anyway it doesn't matter you're very
00:34:11.500
productive i thought you're a lot more intellectual than this i think this is very revealing but let's
00:34:17.100
come back to the argument the argument you were making was that the aboriginal society and other
00:34:23.180
indigenous societies as you call them were more human because whatever reason and they were
00:34:31.580
therefore models for emulation i don't think i said more human i said there is something fundamentally
00:34:35.900
human yeah about there's something fundamentally of of how humans are before there's a whole heap of
00:34:45.500
religious imposition and a whole heap of totalitarian imposition that's what i'm saying i think we can learn a
00:34:51.020
lot from indigenous societies i don't think you can say there's fewer of them therefore they don't
00:34:56.220
count when they said when they would i didn't say they don't count what i said is if 99 of a population
00:35:03.820
if if 99 of pandas eat bamboo shoots it's fair to say that eating bamboo shoots is the standard panda
00:35:11.100
behavior it's the more panda behavior than the one percent or the 0.1 percent they eat dog turds for a living
00:35:18.700
okay so what what about if pandas had been in an artificial environment for a long time and couldn't
00:35:23.260
get bamboo shoots and we're eating something else but i could show you that pandas originally and some
00:35:29.180
pandas for thousands of years old the oldest pandas in the world live in australia and those pandas still
00:35:35.500
eat bamboo shoots and always have done that would be something interesting for you as an intellectual
00:35:39.980
wouldn't it uh so the fact that pandas at 1.8 but something other than bamboo shoots i mean your idea
00:35:47.980
that everything since the aboriginals is an artificial environment well those societies were artificial in
00:35:53.900
their own way too yeah i'm not saying anything as as rigid as what you're imposing onto me i am i'm
00:35:59.660
talking through things and around things right at the top remember when i said yeah this is some ideas
00:36:04.460
and a book of ideas in a way though what you're doing is you're going ah you've said this thing
00:36:10.540
and this thing isn't isn't everything and so i would love it if we could genuinely talk i'm trying
00:36:16.780
and you could i'm trying to address your argument right i gave you four arguments in response to the
00:36:22.700
things that you said and i we've only really got to one well yes because you got upset at me saying
00:36:28.540
something about the aboriginals but what were you meaning what i was what were you meaning by why
00:36:33.100
were we able to i already told you what i meant by that genocide we were technologically far more
00:36:38.540
and what's that got to do with it well if a civilization is able to produce things like penicillin
00:36:44.140
and the i the ability for its children not to die in childbirth i think that indicates that
00:36:49.500
that civilization has something positive about it the fact that the western civilization has created the
00:36:55.340
incredible material benefits and also other benefits of every kind that we now enjoy says
00:37:00.700
something about the utility of that civilization and that world view which is that it is very good
00:37:06.300
for human beings which is one of the reasons that millions of people travel many of them risking their
00:37:11.100
lives from other parts of the world to our societies today okay so so all okay so aboriginals didn't need
00:37:18.300
penicillin because they didn't have any of the diseases and they were living an incredibly brilliant
00:37:23.260
nomadic life so that they would what they would do is it would use a certain area then they would move
00:37:27.980
on and then they would come back so they didn't have any problems with holes and ozone layers any
00:37:31.580
problems with climate change the incredible raging bushfires across america across australia right now they
00:37:36.940
didn't have that so we brought in as more problems than we did solutions right uh well i don't know i
00:37:45.740
don't know that that's true it depends which indigenous community is talking about if you look at
00:37:50.140
native americans for example they were doing they were just as brutal as westerners in many ways they
00:37:55.340
had slavery they they murdered each other on a regular basis they went to war all of these things
00:37:59.980
existed and they had of course their own diseases it's a completely different discussion no it's not
00:38:04.700
a completely different discussion we brought the diseases that required the penicillin well i didn't
00:38:09.900
certainly not invented when we committed genocide on australian aboriginals
00:38:14.220
i don't understand your point my point is we are we were technologically far more sophisticated so
00:38:21.500
this celebration of indigenous cultures as these possessors of all things of value from which we
00:38:26.780
should now take learnings and apply them to our society and that's why we need to give 12 year
00:38:31.740
olds puberty blockers is not a very strong argument that's not anything like what i said though is it
00:38:36.220
well that was the argument that i brought up i really thought you were going to be open to me
00:38:41.020
i'm extremely open to you but you have to make a rational argument that persuades me okay so i
00:38:45.340
made lots of really interesting new arguments you'd never heard i have heard lots of those arguments
00:38:49.180
you haven't you haven't heard you haven't heard about which arguments i've heard because it's because
00:38:55.500
i live in this world and the adoption argument is i'm the first one making it that i am i don't know
00:39:01.020
that argument is not one i've ever heard and i it was interesting but that wasn't the argument
00:39:05.100
that i responded to i remember i responded to your argument about native indigenous people having
00:39:10.700
some kind of great wisdom that we should learn from that was the argument we were talking about
00:39:14.460
hold on a second you believe that i i do that's fine i don't but look at look at the if you look
00:39:20.140
if you go to if you go to peru yeah it's the indigenous people who are who are who are looking
00:39:25.740
after the amazon and who are defending it from just huge swathes of it being destroyed sure with all
00:39:32.940
with all that they can yeah i should actually take back what i said in that i don't think we have
00:39:36.620
nothing to learn from them uh but i think the implication that because they're indigenous we
00:39:41.340
should learn for everything but i'm i am suggesting this is something we could learn it is not i'm
00:39:46.620
saying it's not the only framework the only framework isn't women men it's not the only framework so i'm
00:39:51.900
i'm demonstrating to you through my research that there are other frameworks that you may be interested
00:39:57.900
in examining in case there's something interesting yes so how is it that they woke up and felt like
00:40:03.580
that but nobody now in the 21st century is going to wake up and feel like that it's impossible it's
00:40:08.620
impossible that we all fit into one of these boxes and the same people who don't like um trans people
00:40:13.820
saying i'm a woman don't like the non-binary category which is an attempt to say hey i don't
00:40:18.860
feel like either of these categories go no you can't be that either you have to be in the one box we put
00:40:23.580
you in i've never said that at all uh you may not have right so but we're having the conversation
00:40:29.100
with me so let's just stick with that the second argument i made was about you're unbelievable
00:40:33.500
like what you literally started by saying why am i not woke and i said because people these are the
00:40:38.940
kinds of things that people who say i'm anti-woke say and you might not say that but you do know a
00:40:44.860
lot of people who are anti-woke say non-binary isn't a category they do uh yes definitely so i am
00:40:52.060
suggesting that it is not possible that indigenous cultures that have survived to this day aboriginals
00:40:59.820
being the oldest in the whole of the history of the planet have people within it who have have a
00:41:05.180
tradition of gender fluidity but nobody feels gender fluid today or nobody feels gender non-conforming
00:41:11.500
today of course some people feel gender non-conforming what are they meant to do of course and if you
00:41:15.660
remember at the very beginning i said that there is some confusion i think in in our discussion here
00:41:20.700
between people who don't fit into the stereotype of what a man should be and a stereotype or a woman
00:41:26.300
should be and someone who claims to be the opposite sex that's the i think quite an important
00:41:30.860
distinction i don't see it as the opposite sex i don't think there's opposites i think that i think
00:41:34.620
it is far more fluid than that and i think you don't think there's the opposite sex so you don't think
00:41:39.100
there's male and female i i just think it is more fluid than that and i and i trust people when they
00:41:44.700
tell me that is not how they feel inside and much like the idea of an orphan which again did not
00:41:51.980
exist in the in the indigenous cultures i've researched that just didn't that wasn't really
00:41:55.740
a thing it wasn't something you could identify as it it's you were taken care of by the community it's
00:42:01.100
our framework that requires i've got to feel like one of these two and so some people have now said can
00:42:09.020
i be this third category and then people go no you've got to be one of these two and it has to be the
00:42:13.660
one you say you are and that makes people unhappy the way it made gay men unhappy to not be able to
00:42:18.860
say who they were it's making them unhappy and i don't understand why we need to scapegoat people
00:42:24.940
who say that they're telling you i definitely don't think we should be scapegoating anyone
00:42:29.420
at the same time because we treat men and women in society differently
00:42:33.580
the claim that you're a woman has consequences not only for you personally but also for the rest of
00:42:38.700
society it entitles you to certain protections that men don't enjoy and entitles you to access to
00:42:43.340
certain spaces that men don't have access to and that's really i think that the big debate when
00:42:48.140
it comes to adults when it comes to children there is a question about whether children are able to
00:42:52.860
make these decisions uh in a way that the decisions that they make which then have lifelong implications
00:42:59.180
particularly when it things it comes to medical uh sure which i talk about in my book that um uh very
00:43:05.740
very very very very very very few tiny percentage of uh of it's not children but of teens uh do ever
00:43:14.620
seek medication and even a tinier percentage of those have have gotten medication um if if
00:43:22.860
if uh puberty blockers have been given incorrectly have been pushed on anybody
00:43:28.460
um which they have then that is malpractice and that should be stopped that is that is that is
00:43:35.500
malpractice but it's a logical consequence of the claim that if somebody says that they feel a certain
00:43:40.220
way then they are that thing it's not what the it's not what doctors who prescribe them have said to me
00:43:44.940
they they've said that they only give uh puberty blockers if that child if that young person
00:43:50.300
is absolutely adamant and on the cusp of you know self-harm and they just can't live any other way
00:43:58.380
if you it's it is just not common here who did the bbc report into all of this and she was told that
00:44:05.820
at the tavistock clinic some children were given uh puberty blockers if i'm not mistaken after two
00:44:10.700
consultations yeah well i talk about the tavistock um the tavistock in my book but but what i'm saying
00:44:16.140
to you is it's a logical consequence but that's that's it's not a logical consequence it's malpractice
00:44:21.020
okay malpractice is two consultations and we give you no it's not a logical consequence it's
00:44:26.060
malpractice and if we find that there's a hospital near here and they've there's been malpractice in
00:44:32.700
you know hip surgery you don't close it down and say no more hip surgery for anyone we say we need
00:44:38.060
more safeguarding we need more training we need to make sure there's no malpractice
00:44:42.380
far more people regret surgery hip surgery than they do surgery to transition actually
00:44:49.100
all right we're about half an hour in and francis hasn't said a word so how about you this reminded
00:44:53.580
me of my childhood so thank you guys um the thing that the issue that i have with with wokeism
00:45:01.340
is i think you're very accurate in the way you describe it as a cult and by the way like we've said
00:45:05.860
before we see the same things on the right particularly when it comes to the right in america
00:45:09.820
where some very ugly thing very ugly things are starting to manifest things that we both feel
00:45:16.140
deeply uncomfortable with but let's just focus on wokeism for the moment the the thing that i have
00:45:22.220
the most the thing that wokeism really makes me feel really uncomfortable is cancel culture which
00:45:30.140
seems to be part and parcel of that particular ideology and as somebody who has seen communism and the
00:45:37.580
ultimate form of cancel culture i find it deeply sinister and the fact that it's marketed as being
00:45:43.900
kind or progressive i think is actually gaslighting it's not kind and it's not progressive i'll use an
00:45:50.780
example joe lycett the very famous uk comedian said that cancel culture has made the uk comedy industry
00:45:57.420
a kinder and better place it's done none of those things to strip somebody of their livelihood
00:46:02.380
and destroy their career and impact not only them but their families their children
00:46:07.100
i'd see nothing kind or better about that so i have a chapter about this in my book um a whole
00:46:12.540
chapter on cancel culture and um the problem i have with cancel culture is the same problem i had with
00:46:22.140
being a jehovah's witness um the wisdom is dispensed from on high if you don't agree with it you're told
00:46:31.820
to listen to apologize if you won't apologize you kind of get marked uh if you continue not to apologize
00:46:39.900
and you're even even though you know you're not really allowed to present your side of the story
00:46:44.860
and you can be completely shunned and that's the same model as a high control group
00:46:52.140
and then we have to ask the question what do we do if we know we have a predator in our midst if if
00:47:00.860
you know i'm on certain comedian whatsapp groups and women look out for each other and they say look
00:47:06.300
this happened to me it was an unpleasant experience i don't want to say anything about
00:47:09.100
it he's quite powerful comedian but i just want you to know that if you are in a car with him or you
00:47:14.300
you know you might want to get a lift with somebody else so that goes on all the time we tell each
00:47:18.220
other don't want to say anything about it can't prove it but we give each other those heads ups
00:47:23.980
and because say joe license talking about the comedy community the comedy community had has for many
00:47:28.700
years before the me too movement it was just a free-for-all there was literally nothing you
00:47:33.420
could say even if you made a sort of mild remark about i remember doing it about things being harder
00:47:40.060
for women or there being no women invited onto this bill even though so and so and so were free and
00:47:45.260
they're very well known to be good you would be i mean i was basically shunned once in edward for
00:47:51.020
saying something like that about an improv thing and people would not talk to me in the bar because
00:47:55.260
that that was the stranglehold any time you get a kind of absolute power model that power will be
00:48:01.500
abused and that power has been abused and it was abused so i think the me too movement was very
00:48:05.660
important to address that so what do we do when there's a predator in our midst and the law doesn't
00:48:10.060
really want to do anything about it or they say well there's no evidence for that or there's no will
00:48:15.020
um to do anything about it or you can't prove it what do we do and so that's what that's what that
00:48:21.260
chapter is analyzing but ultimately we there's a there's a whole section i've got on jurisprudence
00:48:28.780
and how um there's a there's a there's a lot of evidence that prisons are really they're sort of an
00:48:36.060
overhang from victorian times when when we warehoused people we didn't know what to do with
00:48:39.820
so you'd put children in the orphanage and you'd put poor people in the workhouse and you'd put
00:48:45.620
people who had mental health issues into a sanatorium and throw away the key and prisons
00:48:51.020
are sort of the only one left and certainly there are some people who need to be taken away from
00:48:57.320
society because otherwise they will really hurt people but most people are better off with community
00:49:03.380
intervention because otherwise what happens is you take someone out of the community it was causing
00:49:07.680
trouble in the community or hurting people in that community you put them in a place that is
00:49:12.320
totally lacking in empathy and so their problem was they were lacking in empathy you put them in a
00:49:18.200
place where they are brutalized where they are even if they're not physically brutalized they're
00:49:22.700
emotionally brutalized then you say okay you've done your time and we now having made you less
00:49:26.880
empathetic put you back into that community we know that community intervention is better
00:49:31.900
and crime doesn't go up so i talked to um a really interesting guy called jared bartle who's a
00:49:38.140
jurisprudence expert in um australia and he said in during covid they let a lot of people out of prisons
00:49:44.260
and gave them ankle bracelets and you know did community intervention stuff instead and the crime rate
00:49:49.300
didn't go up at all people are most people are much better off in their own communities and so
00:49:57.660
what the problem with counterculture is is we go we don't want that comedian in our midst anymore
00:50:03.280
so we shun him and he goes over there where does he go he doesn't leave earth so if he is a predator
00:50:09.740
he's now going over there to do predator predator things he's not left he's just you've moved the problem
00:50:15.180
on over there but now he's getting more and more and more and more bitter and he probably hangs out
00:50:19.800
with the two or three other guys who are in the same position they exacerbate each other they get
00:50:22.940
less empathy not more what they needed was more empathy to go don't do that that's really horrible
00:50:28.240
for them and then you've they get sidelined in the comedy community so you make the problem worse
00:50:33.680
you just shifted over there so what we need in the comedy community i think is is community intervention
00:50:39.220
if someone's done something criminal we need to act on that but if someone hasn't done something
00:50:44.760
criminal they're just uh they're just making life awful for the people around them then we need
00:50:51.380
community intervention ask 10 people to define capitalism and you'll probably get 10 different
00:50:57.340
answers it's a word that gets thrown around constantly but how many people actually know
00:51:02.220
what it means that's why i've been watching the free online course from hillsdale college called
00:51:07.160
understanding capitalism in seven lectures it breaks down not just what capitalism is but also why it
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works i found the course does an incredible job of making complex concepts like the market economy
00:51:19.720
understandable you'll learn about the role of profit and loss why capitalism depends on private
00:51:25.640
property rights and the rule of law and why despite what you might hear online capitalism is a system that
00:51:31.940
encourages morality not undermines it and this is just one of over 40 free online courses that
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00:52:06.260
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wells theater get tickets at mirvish.com but i think the problem is and we've had many psychiatrists
00:52:41.500
talking about this when it comes to sex-based crimes it is pathological it's very likely that if you are
00:52:47.800
a sex offender you're a sexual predator you're a rapist it escalates and you will remain like that
00:52:53.520
for the rest of your life we had dr steve peters talk about this so if somebody is a rapist
00:52:59.740
i don't think that's the same as i'm not saying it's difficult they're they're they're there were
00:53:06.340
lots of men in comedy before me too and some of them still do but who were kind of predatorial i
00:53:12.720
think that's a totally that's what i said if it's something criminal we need to work on that we need to
00:53:17.380
we need to actually get that sorted and get that solved that person does need to be removed
00:53:23.080
uh and whatever rehabilitative work can be done should be done i think that our whole justice
00:53:30.720
system is screwed in that way and our whole idea of prison making anybody get better is absolutely
00:53:36.800
screwed on that i think um but that's a whole dismantling of a system but there are all sorts of
00:53:44.500
things on the spectrum there again it's a spectrum it's not you are or you aren't you're in or you're out
00:53:49.900
and so i think cancel culture a lot of people who are abolitionists and want to you know don't don't
00:53:59.560
like the way don't like prisons don't like the way the police operate are really really happy to have
00:54:04.560
some quite brutal cancel culture moves made and i think they they are at odds aren't they yeah to me
00:54:10.860
and this was my problem with me too not at the beginning but where it ended up where i had a friend
00:54:16.520
who was in the comedy community who was in the comedy industry he's no longer in the comedy industry
00:54:20.460
and i'm not using his name but he was effectively cancelled because women said that they felt awkward
00:54:28.260
around him female comedians did because he stood too close to them and talked to them he had autism
00:54:34.300
that's what he did to everybody that's what he did to me and this entire campaign was then started
00:54:39.480
his reputation was destroyed he nearly had a breakdown he nearly lost his job because he's socially
00:54:45.080
awkward well if that's the case that's terrible like i i don't know that i don't know the details
00:54:49.840
of that case or what else what else women were saying so i don't want to no i don't want to overly
00:54:54.080
you know you can't say his name and i don't know the details but if that's the case that's terrible
00:54:58.940
and so i the thing is i i am a progressive person who's known to be a public feminist yeah and i am
00:55:09.140
i it got to the point where i couldn't do the kind of work i'm doing anymore in that space
00:55:13.900
without saying what's going on with council culture because at the beginning of me too it was
00:55:21.000
really writing historical wrongs and drawing attention to something and shining a light
00:55:25.840
but like anything any any tool in the world can be used as a weapon and will be used as a weapon
00:55:33.680
that's how human beings are so someone can have a you know great tool to get the weeds out of the
00:55:40.540
garden or plant tomatoes or whatever but that can be used as a weapon and me too is an incredible tool
00:55:46.180
that has been used for great things otherwise harvey weinstein would still be out
00:55:51.040
destroying careers and and sexually assaulting people
00:55:54.960
but like any tool it can be used as a weapon and if we don't want the baby
00:56:01.220
to be thrown out with the bathwater we are going to have to let the baby grow up
00:56:05.000
i agree and then also there was this and it's still happy now let's take the case of alfie brown
00:56:11.760
do you remember do you remember that case of alfie brown so i'll explain to you what happened to alfie
00:56:16.300
and then we can and then we can discuss it and i'm going to be factual alfie was doing a preview
00:56:21.080
at a comedy club of his show he did a number of jokes basically jives very funny actually jokes about
00:56:28.660
corbyn the corbyn easter government insinuating that he was anti-semitic
00:56:33.280
it then went on to twitter there was a back and forth on twitter people then started to dig up
00:56:39.840
old interviews of alfie during in podcasts they also an old routine was dug up where the premise
00:56:47.580
of the routine was i think that if you wanted to have a good slur you needed a hard consonant a good
00:56:56.060
racial slur you needed a hard consonant that's why all the racial slurs had hard consonants in them
00:57:01.600
and he just went through all of them and he said and that's that is why all all slurs have
00:57:08.800
hard consonants he didn't execute it particularly well this was a routine that was over eight years
00:57:14.900
old it was then dug up and it was then used to prove that he was a racist and then it was then
00:57:21.040
used to cancel him his shows got pulled lost opportunities blah blah blah i have a real issue
00:57:27.980
with that and people claiming that they were offended and that's the reason as somebody who
00:57:32.720
has been called many of those slurs as someone who uh looks jewish i get more than my version of
00:57:38.760
anti-semitism online and as someone with a latin american background i also get that as well online
00:57:45.120
twitter x whatever you want to call it social media is accessible as we all know
00:57:48.680
and i have a real issue with that i have a very very real issue with that that suddenly
00:57:55.020
you can claim to be offended by something by something that happened years before and then
00:58:00.760
use it to destroy somebody's career just because you felt offended well i'm gonna go on a large limb
00:58:07.420
here and say i don't think alfie's career is is destroyed alfie's a working company he's doing all
00:58:12.220
right no he lost a lot of opportunities at the time gigs were cancelled sure i'm sure it was i'm sure it was
00:58:18.100
unpleasant but i don't think it's in the realm of it's it's not in the realm of a louis ck who is
00:58:24.920
also back and has won a grammy so i think that's the other thing we do need to contextualize
00:58:29.000
that's an unfair comparison because alfie did nothing wrong and louis ck did do something wrong
00:58:34.560
but i'm that's what i'm saying it's a spectrum so like let's talk about it as a spectrum it's not
00:58:39.600
it's not a it's not a kind of black and white i think if people are going to go back in time and
00:58:46.100
dig stuff up and um uh you know with with an agenda um it's because they know what they're
00:58:54.700
doing and that's a decision they're making and that is a that is a part of modern life
00:58:59.140
um that it's unpleasant in terms of i'd say it's more than unpleasant it's more than unpleasant it's
00:59:08.660
reputation destruction that is no i understand what you're saying i'm just trying to think it through
00:59:12.780
i think i think it's uh as i say alfie's working and alfie's alfie's very successful i don't think
00:59:21.620
it's i think it's it's not as um it's it's not like a permanent cancellation but i also think
00:59:29.180
so i have a book i have a chapter in the book called freedom of speech in comedy
00:59:33.240
and one thing that i say in that because i i'm a i mean i think people always you know sometimes the
00:59:39.180
bbc will ring me up and say they can't you know uh they they uh baby it's cold outside is being
00:59:46.580
banned on the radio um and uh we want you as a feminist to say that that's a good thing basically
00:59:53.200
is what they're saying and i'm like i'm not going to like what why do you think they want me to be
00:59:57.300
mary whitehouse and i'm like i'm a gen x comedian i'm not in for banning stuff it's just not who i am
01:00:02.520
but they misunderstand they see feminist and they go you'll want to ban baby it's cold i won't want
01:00:06.660
maybe it's cold outside and when you look into it it's not being banned it's uh they've it's you
01:00:11.140
know it was the me too era where they were like let's curate something else this year let's just
01:00:15.080
do jingle bell rock instead it's probably a little tone deaf at this particular time in history is all
01:00:20.100
that's going on um but uh i don't want to ban stuff i don't want to dig stuff up on people i also find
01:00:27.680
it slightly disturbing when i see uh but you know this guy's going to be booked on snl but 10 years ago he
01:00:33.800
did this tweet that was clearly an edgelord joke but it also i don't think that that man is genuinely
01:00:40.640
gets up every morning is motivated by racism so it's a it's it's a it's an area where i go i feel
01:00:47.940
like it's it's it feels like a really unpleasant part of modern life that people are on line trying
01:00:56.580
to be private detectives to try and destroy you over this because i really want to get you for that
01:01:02.340
and i don't i don't like it i don't endorse it i also think comics
01:01:14.760
they don't really understand or care how how what they are saying might land as every tool is a weapon
01:01:27.140
right so a joke can be a tool can also be used as a weapon um so i would say jimmy carr's joke
01:01:34.240
did you see that big thing about jimmy carr so in his big netflix special yeah in his netflix
01:01:40.500
special it's called his dark material and it's specifically it's about being able to do dark
01:01:45.760
material about edgy stuff that's what it is and he really contextualize it he goes this is the joke
01:01:49.700
that's going to end my career and uh he i break down the whole joke in the book but it's he goes
01:01:55.340
um he's like um in the holocaust and he looks to camera like yeah i'm going to go there
01:02:01.220
in the holocaust and he's he says uh people always talk about six million jews being killed
01:02:06.340
but they rarely talk about the i can't remember what it is but the the hundreds of thousands or
01:02:12.380
millions of um gypsies that were killed and then there's a gap and then he goes because no one
01:02:17.900
wants to talk about the positives when people talk about the holocaust they talk about the tragedy
01:02:22.680
and horror of six million jewish lives being lost to the nazi war machine but they never mention the
01:02:29.140
thousands of gypsies that were killed by the nazis no one ever wants to talk about that because no one
01:02:33.460
ever wants to talk about the positives right and uh then he tries to explain why that joke is very
01:02:44.180
clever very funny while it's educational and why it's so good and of course it caused a huge fury and
01:02:49.880
even the comedians that kind of stood up for jimmy on a basic jimmy's my mate uh sort of basis no one
01:02:56.440
really stood up for the joke because the joke is not funny enough it's not it's not to be worth that
01:03:04.100
that that level of nastiness when amnesty international have said that romany people
01:03:11.340
traveling people who jimmy calls gypsies and um some people own that term some people don't so i
01:03:16.440
won't um that uh amnesty says romany people are the most disenfranchised the most overly criminalized
01:03:23.520
population in this country they have the least protections they don't have famous people standing
01:03:27.880
up for them and famous they don't have representation now that joke we know will no doubt be used in the
01:03:36.520
playground against a kid because jimmy said it the audience has laughed because it's edgy
01:03:41.580
and they've laughed in shock they can't believe jimmy said that that's where the laugh's coming
01:03:45.380
from and that's where jimmy wants the laugh to be coming from jimmy doesn't want to hurt romany people
01:03:49.060
jimmy doesn't care about that he just doesn't that's not what he's doing he's doing a shock joke
01:03:54.160
and that's his joy and that's his bliss and that's what he wants to do
01:03:57.560
but what i'm asking is um i don't want anything banned but i want comedians and i want
01:04:05.380
broadcasters to ask about what they're curating and to again like i say to the me too movement if
01:04:13.440
you're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater let it grow up because that will be used
01:04:17.860
as a grenade for sure in the playground against you know romany kids that are there it's like oh
01:04:23.000
never one wants to talk about the positives and then the teacher comes along they go it's just
01:04:26.640
saying what jimmy carr said and if multi-millionaire jimmy carr and his amani suit standing on stage
01:04:32.780
at the home of apollo with a multi-million dollar netflix special can say it why can't this kid
01:04:37.060
so it and and that kid may come from a community where he hears a lot of racism about romany people
01:04:43.440
right so i'm asking i'm not saying ban anything but i'm just saying think about what we're saying
01:04:50.700
because yes we should be free in comedy to go wherever we want that's the art form blah blah
01:04:55.600
blah but we're also free to drive a car but we also understand there are rules and and also
01:05:03.200
conventions about not driving like an asshole if it's going to really inconvenience or hurt somebody
01:05:08.840
else we know that that's that's understandable a lot of comedians are better people driving to the
01:05:12.400
gig than they are at the gig and that just makes me go hmm i wonder why you're doing that i wonder
01:05:18.800
why you're not choosing to be as funny about something else that isn't going to probably
01:05:25.880
have a real world knock-on effect so i would say to alfie i bet you anything alfie would go that joke
01:05:31.860
wasn't good enough and i don't know why i did it and i was experimenting with being edgy i doubt
01:05:36.460
alfie would stand behind the joke or is still doing the joke about all the slurs and are they hilarious
01:05:41.420
years ago he no longer does that exactly when he was a younger man and this is incredibly pertinent
01:05:46.140
to the argument at a different time societally absolutely absolutely this is going to sound
01:05:50.460
weird coming from me but i think you're on the on the most of it you're actually agreeing so me
01:05:54.060
playing peacemaker here is strange but i i think actually what i'm hearing from debra is you agree
01:05:59.000
cancelling people is a bad idea but what i this is something francis and i have said from day one which
01:06:04.140
is i think cancel culture first of all it's a human thing anyway but also it emerges from the gap
01:06:09.860
between what we can prosecute legally and what we know is wrong and immoral behavior that can't be
01:06:15.780
punished through the legal system the legal system does not cover all forms of bad behavior
01:06:20.340
effectively right and so it was an attempt to deal with things that were sitting under the surface
01:06:25.980
that couldn't be dealt with through the criminal justice system and sometimes just aren't like they
01:06:31.540
yeah you know let's be incredibly honest about the rate the the rape rape conviction is so low most
01:06:37.820
people won't even most women won't report a rape because they just know their lives are going to be
01:06:41.920
destroyed and they will not get any satisfaction that's what prima facie the play was about it's just
01:06:47.460
so rare so yes there will be men for example in the comedy community who are you know criminals but
01:06:57.180
there's nothing we can do about it because they're not going to be convicted or we can't prove it in
01:07:01.380
a way that you know the court expects us to and actually everyone also in in the british judicial
01:07:07.620
system now has to watch prima facie before they do a rape trial to understand that is policy to
01:07:14.540
understand how difficult it is for someone to come forward and then how difficult it is to go through
01:07:21.780
that and how unlikely it is that they'll ever get any justice so um you know we are we are dealing
01:07:31.060
with an incredibly broad spectrum of from and this is the problem with it really we all know that
01:07:37.360
that man has been accused of rape by a number of women but nothing is done nothing continues to be
01:07:42.500
done and somebody made a really quite nasty tasteless joke but it was eight years ago he doesn't stand
01:07:50.300
behind it he'd like to get it taken off the internet he's happy to apologize for it and someone's dug it
01:07:55.740
up because they've got a different beef with him now yeah and can we see the kind of the spectrum that
01:08:00.980
we're playing in and this is why i think we need we just need more nuance and in all of these things
01:08:06.320
i just think we need more discussion because it's not either or and it's not this or that
01:08:12.280
it's it's crunchy stuff that we want to think it all through we want to we want to we want to really
01:08:19.340
sit with it and go what kind of society do we want to be and we want to take into account all of these
01:08:27.180
things we do want to take into account how indigenous people lived and if there's anything we can learn and
01:08:32.180
we do want to take into account that comedy is crunchy and contravening norms is something that
01:08:38.700
comedy has always done but but society has changed and now you know it used to be that lenny bruce would
01:08:45.660
say the unsayable and there was one space for that and it was a basement comedy club and now look at the
01:08:51.360
internet what is unsayable there's nothing that you're saying that's so edgy that isn't said every single
01:08:57.040
day on reddit you do not need to perform the service of saying the unsayable every day anymore
01:09:02.860
people are saying all sorts of nasty stuff and i think you know the idea that that comedy is for
01:09:11.400
you know oh we've got to all be transgressive in this space i'm like the most transgressive thing now
01:09:16.360
is to be not transgressive actually when you look at people's daily life and what they're looking at
01:09:20.540
on porn hub and and quorum quorum reddit and you know all of these different different spaces if
01:09:26.740
you if you're still on x bloody hell like everything is every unsayable thing is being said all of the
01:09:32.860
time well the left did a thing about uh it obsessed with virtue signaling for ages which is signaling how
01:09:38.800
good of a person you are what's happening on the right now is there's an obsession with vice signaling
01:09:43.140
which is uh the the more transgressive the thing you say the cooler you are and so people are
01:09:50.180
starting to say all this moronic stuff not even often because they believe it or anything else not
01:09:56.120
even if it's funny or not they're just saying it because it's transgressive and that's the only
01:10:00.620
purpose of it um which is obviously totally pointless and and a giant waste and it's made
01:10:05.820
i uh it's made a lot of social media which i actually always always enjoyed there's always been
01:10:12.680
robust debate and all of this stuff i never mind people having a go at me and whatever um but i think
01:10:18.880
it's just made the whole environment very um first the most the worst thing about it is made
01:10:24.620
a very inauthentic it's made a very inauthentic in that you're not actually talking to human beings
01:10:29.420
you're just talking to people who are trying to say something like that but anyway uh we've talked
01:10:34.240
about two of the six conversations we talked about trans as much as we could and we talked about
01:10:39.320
cancel culture what else have we not covered um so uh the first chapter there's some interesting
01:10:46.280
stuff in there about how modern life is um modeling cults um and one of the things that said a lot is
01:10:54.360
just just picking up on what you said there is that people often say uh the internet makes us less
01:11:00.200
empathetic or social media makes us less empathetic and there was in fact a study done in 2009 that said
01:11:05.820
people are getting less empathetic and actually when you look into it and i've broken it down on in
01:11:09.700
the book um it didn't really prove that at all um but it you know you can read about in the book
01:11:17.740
but what i'm arguing there's then there was another study it didn't say that the internet had made it
01:11:23.300
just posited that but it didn't actually look at that and then it was another study that looked into
01:11:27.100
it and found that social media made children more empathetic and uh so i started looking at that
01:11:33.900
and i've what i discovered and what i'm arguing is that every single day social media which we think
01:11:39.900
oh it makes you less empathetic trolls and keyboard warriors every single day it demands that you be
01:11:47.300
more and more empathetic but to fewer and fewer people yes yeah so uh i one thing i argued about
01:11:54.640
argued against in 2016 when it came up so i started the guilty feminist in end of 2015 2016 it was kind of
01:12:02.140
in full swing and this men are trash hashtag came up and i was like guys what do you think
01:12:09.400
a 14 year old boy who's just trying to figure out how to be a man just i don't know he's a nice guy
01:12:17.260
or he isn't in his little self but he's probably just a little complicated person who isn't anything
01:12:23.260
yet he's just figuring out how to be a human being and how to be a man how is that how is that landing
01:12:27.700
with him i'll be honest with you deborah as someone who was in their mid-30s at the time and has
01:12:31.680
always you know i'm not saying that i've succeeded but i've always tried to be a good person and do
01:12:36.780
my best that really pissed me off it pissed me off because i and what i was saying at the time was
01:12:42.360
okay so there's there's again it's not binary i don't really believe in this sort of it is that or
01:12:48.000
isn't that we're all on a spectrum we're all flawed we're we're all fucked we're all doing our
01:12:55.080
best there are some people probably on polar opposites who just get out of bed every day to make
01:12:59.960
other people happy or some people who are blatant sociopaths and who um you know psychopaths who are
01:13:07.160
not empathetic at all but most of us are in the middle we we've got some love we've got some fear
01:13:13.320
and all the other emotions are those two emotions in costumes um that's what i think it's just we're
01:13:19.860
all we're trying to struggle through so for me a 14 year old boy hearing that just to use the most
01:13:24.580
extreme example probably i i feel like what he's hearing is you can't be any better than you are
01:13:34.040
on your worst days and if you're on your best day and you're really trying hard or you advocate for
01:13:40.200
somebody else um it doesn't really matter because we're going to see you as trash anyway
01:13:44.660
and i said at the time and i said it on other people's podcasts i was begging people to stop using
01:13:49.860
it begging feminists to stop using it and they i think they were kind of riding high a little bit
01:13:55.220
on what was happening in the world and you know there was a time of you know a little bit of
01:14:00.820
getting our own back i think that's what was going on at that time because women had felt not listened
01:14:05.740
to not heard it was before me too um we all we'd had is a march if we'd even had a march then we had
01:14:13.480
probably hadn't even had a march then we did we have our march 2018 so we probably hadn't even had a
01:14:17.440
march it was it was so it was such a time of kind of clawing for something but i was saying at the
01:14:25.280
time that 14 year old boy that's what he's hearing and guys who are really bad who hurt women
01:14:32.280
when they are um caught i know this is true psychologists and also i had somebody in my show
01:14:39.520
from the government where they specifically work on this problem um this is absolutely true men who hurt
01:14:45.340
women when psychologists work with them truly believe that all men do it or want to do it but
01:14:55.040
just aren't man enough quote unquote that's what they think so when you tell men men are trash the
01:15:03.120
ones who do hurt women are hearing that and going yeah all men are trash so when men say to me not all
01:15:10.620
men i go yeah we know a hundred percent of the men i've been with have not killed me i i know i live
01:15:17.260
with men i work with men i get in a cab i know it's not all men i want men who are basically good guys who
01:15:24.480
wouldn't hurt women to tell the other ones not all men because the ones who do hurt hurt women they
01:15:31.040
think it is all men they're the ones you need to tell you don't need to tell me i know it's not all
01:15:35.020
men i think it is the minority of men who are violent towards women and by the way male on
01:15:41.660
male violence is a is you know much higher than male on female violence it is a male problem but
01:15:46.320
the truth of the matter is if men stop killing killing would stop very very few deaths are from
01:15:51.840
women and generally it's either women in self-defense or in coercive control situations
01:15:56.500
under the group of a man that is the that's the fact so it is not all men please tell the men it is
01:16:04.060
it's not all men because i they don't hear me because i am the other to them
01:16:08.160
we'll get you back to the interview in just a sec but first imagine this you're walking down the
01:16:15.200
street there's a giant billboard with all your personal details on it your passwords your credit
01:16:20.460
card numbers your bank logins just there for anyone to see sounds insane right well that's basically
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wide open hackers don't need to be evil geniuses either a smart 12 year old with cheap gear could steal
01:16:46.140
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that's e-x-p-r-e-s-s v-p-n dot com slash trigger to find out how you can get up to four extra months
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free one more time expressvpn.com slash trigger sorry do you have no no no the point that i was
01:17:33.280
going to make was that the the thing that i knew was going to happen was there was going to be a
01:17:40.700
backlash there is only so long you can tell a group of people that they are wrong evil stupid
01:17:49.660
disgusting simply through the fact that they have these immutable characteristics before they turn
01:17:55.400
around and go you know what fuck you and i see andrew tate as part of that backlash if i'm being
01:18:03.880
honest well what because and people and by the way i am no fan of tate i want to make that absolutely
01:18:09.940
clear but to me when people go this is awful of course he's awful that is a symptom of a backlash
01:18:16.780
tate isn't the problem the problem is what is underneath that that has given rise to his
01:18:22.120
prominence i would suggest that we cannot blame feminism for the manosphere the manosphere is
01:18:26.860
is far too i'm not blaming feminism i'm blaming all men are trash and that kind of punitive vengeful
01:18:33.200
those punitive vengeful movements i think have created a backlash that's my argument i would say
01:18:38.240
that misogyny is a deep and vast mine and i don't think you can really blame very recent feminist
01:18:44.520
marches and some hashtags for it it's much deeper than that andrew tate is much deeper than that
01:18:49.120
it hasn't helped i'll give you that and i was saying i was saying all through that i was going
01:18:54.880
you know those 14 year old boys now they were 16 then how old are they now going to be 24 25 yeah
01:19:00.640
and a lot of them are looking to jordan peterson a lot of them are looking to andrew tate and that to
01:19:05.160
me again is a spectrum of manosphere ideas and then that bleeds into zuckerberg going we need more
01:19:12.080
masculine energy at facebook i've worked at facebook they do not need any mom well actually
01:19:16.040
it's interesting you bring up jordan and andrew in the same sentence because i actually see the
01:19:20.280
distinction between the two of them as very telling jordan peterson was a a male role model
01:19:27.400
for men of our generation some men of our generation a very constructive figure who told
01:19:34.440
them how to be better um and taught them certain values and importance of you know there's a clip
01:19:40.620
we had the somebody on our team who had a baby recently and i sent him a video of jordan's uh
01:19:45.980
talking about uh the most important thing when your child is born is to look after your wife
01:19:51.000
uh that's your job yes your number one job so he he had a very positive impact on young men
01:19:56.760
uh the next generation's male role model is andrew tate and i think that that difference and that
01:20:03.220
negative evolution is precisely the point of francis's making i never really felt that the all men are
01:20:08.840
trash thing was an attack against me but there are a lot of young men younger than us who did feel
01:20:14.780
that and that thing you're talking about about vengefulness it's the thing that we find very
01:20:18.540
of putting about the right nowadays particularly in america uh they're like oh now we have the power
01:20:23.120
and now we're going to show them and that's exactly what men felt when a lot of men felt especially
01:20:28.440
young men who are not as advantaged as people like to pretend in our society we've just had various
01:20:34.020
reports come out about the fact that the gender pay gap now works the other way and all sorts of other
01:20:38.300
things i i would like to see that yeah you should look into i would like to see that yeah you should
01:20:42.780
look into it so uh the point i'm making is that evolution from jordan peterson to andrew tate
01:20:48.520
is exactly the thing that francis is talking about as the backlash i see i do you not think jordan
01:20:54.340
jordan peterson has missed the turnoff now i've seen him say some really unpleasant things about women
01:20:58.540
like what oh just that um men can't control insane women you know that kind of thing it's a i mean no
01:21:04.400
one can control insane women that's for sure i mean do you not find that no one can control insane
01:21:10.180
men either insane people are quite difficult to control well yeah but it's it's it's said in a
01:21:15.360
context of you know that's what they like you can find if you look if you google jordan peterson
01:21:20.280
quotes about women you'll find anyone's quotes you can find things i have seen him say stuff that i
01:21:25.580
i find unpleasant i know jordan very well uh i've been on tour with him uh i've seen 10 000 people turn
01:21:31.460
out for his shows well dressed uh who and i've seen him talk to the people who come to his shows
01:21:36.620
afterwards and all of them to a person say you've made me a better person here's the girlfriend i
01:21:41.560
met because of you etc he's made an incredible positive impact i'm not saying he has i'm not
01:21:47.060
saying he has not said anything wise i'm saying i i find it kind of a bit scarier sometimes when
01:21:55.200
somebody has this sort of um respectability element of look at all my well-dressed fans
01:22:02.020
and then they can start to say almost anything because they have jordan's done quite the opposite
01:22:07.360
though he's become far more considerate and careful over time maybe i missed that phase of jordan and
01:22:13.920
i'll i'll look back into it but i i have i've seen things that i've i haven't got them to hand and i
01:22:19.580
don't want to be misquoting okay um so but i've seen things that have troubled me about jordan peterson
01:22:25.440
oh i'm sure i'm sure but but that doesn't mean he's a bad person it just might mean that you have
01:22:31.020
a different view of things right it like you and i have a different view of things but i i doesn't
01:22:36.560
necessarily mean that i come away from this conversation thinking you're a bad person or
01:22:39.960
you hate men likewise the other way around right so uh what i'm saying the point i'm making
01:22:45.360
is not jordan's human i'm sure he said things that you don't like i'm sure he said things i don't like
01:22:50.440
but on balance he's someone who's made a huge positive impact on men andrew tay i see is very
01:22:57.000
much the opposite of that right and the point francis is making is i think there's a lot of truth to the
01:23:03.740
idea that this constant the thing that you were against the thing that you were speaking against
01:23:08.800
is what's created that shift so that now we've gone from jordan peterson to andrew tay i think it's a
01:23:14.640
lot more sinister than that i think it's i i don't think it's helped and i've i opened by saying
01:23:18.680
this didn't help this did not help and the constant uh them and us-ing the cult like them and us-ing
01:23:26.280
and i do see this on both sides i see it i see it across the board across the political scape
01:23:31.760
and i feel like my side is the progressive left yeah and therefore i want to keep my own house in order
01:23:38.200
and i also think the progressive left are meant to be empathetic and helping other people up that's the
01:23:43.500
that's the whole name of the game for us what are we doing saying anybody is trash it's dehumanizing
01:23:49.960
i don't know why we're doing it and i fought against it for years and i feel angry that it has
01:23:56.960
exacerbated the situation however um i also think when you look at project 25 and the heritage foundation
01:24:04.920
in america and the rise of the trad wife and the it's the increasing um unpleasantness of far-right
01:24:15.200
politics that is rising up and elon musk trying to buy elections across america for the far across
01:24:21.460
europe for the far right i think it's just so much more sinister the andrew tate of it all is so much
01:24:26.860
more sinister than well if you're gonna say we're trash we're gonna build a an uber misogynist i think
01:24:34.960
there's so much else driving it and going on and i think it's a little cosmetic to say so what is
01:24:39.440
the fault of um honestly i uh i think um i had a really interesting conversation which is in the book
01:24:48.400
i've got it as an interview in the book with a guy called neil data who is the head of uh the
01:24:53.860
european a forum for sexual reproductive rights um in europe so it's european obviously in europe
01:25:01.620
and so it's basically a forum and he gets all the mps that care that women have it's really that women
01:25:07.360
have um access to birth control abortion and cervical smears you know for stop cancer and you know just
01:25:15.000
basically that kind of uh package and um it it's basically he explained to me and then i looked
01:25:26.660
into it and this does check out um that around 2012 um there was i mean i don't know how much i
01:25:35.360
really want to say about this and maybe i should just let people read it in the book but basically
01:25:39.460
there was a there was some christian far-right nationalists who got very angry that they were
01:25:44.680
losing based on the fact that both the uk and france uh brought in equal marriage and it was around
01:25:52.840
that time and they went okay if it's the mad scandies the danes will marry a chair that's nothing to do
01:25:58.400
with us but when it's the united kingdom and when it's france we've got to we've got to do something
01:26:03.400
here and they came over and they had a forum in um they had a sort of conference in the uk um around
01:26:09.540
2011 2012 that time and they said we got to stop asking what what do we want and we've got to start
01:26:16.840
asking what can we get because if we come into the uk saying no abortion anti-gay rights we'll we'll be
01:26:23.720
laughed at as crackpots and one of the questions they asked was what do feminists disagree on and do
01:26:28.680
you know what they came up with trans rights but they'd always been a little bit of a uh well back
01:26:35.320
back to the 60s is that gay rights is that queer rights is this how is this related sorry i don't
01:26:41.020
follow so it's all part of the same um sort of bubbling up of uh this is this is not how we want
01:26:49.800
it to be and i think there's a real you can really draw a line between the um the kind of bubbling
01:26:57.540
up of this extreme misogyny and at the same time that heritage foundation family values um and
01:27:04.860
there's evidence that the that the the heritage foundation are funding the trad wives like you
01:27:09.340
know that but do you know that um ballet farm yeah forgive me i'm genuinely not being just like a
01:27:15.400
i don't follow how andrew tate comes from that i think it's just like a landscape well here's an
01:27:20.960
example andrew tate has now been given the he was he was uh he was here somewhere in he was in florida
01:27:29.040
florida he's been moved to florida but he was moved no no he wasn't moved to florida he went he was
01:27:33.740
granted leave by the romanian courts and he's a u.s citizen so he went on holiday to florida i thought
01:27:39.660
that was that that was somehow given to him by trump or no no it wasn't okay no no no i think deborah's
01:27:46.340
right i think um the trump administration put pressure on romania to release him to be able
01:27:52.820
to go back that's what i thought happened yeah that's what happened and that's i mean that's
01:27:56.380
what i read and you know one must always check one sources on the internet but that's what i read and
01:28:00.080
i think that is accurate um but and it just feels like a sort of rising tide to me okay let me give
01:28:08.340
you a different version because that sounds a little wishy-washy but actually what you're getting
01:28:11.900
i think is not inaccurate a right-wing person of whom i know many would say that what you're
01:28:17.920
describing is an a reaction to progressive overreach um now i don't think gay marriage is progressive
01:28:26.200
overreach uh but many of the things by the way i think uh part of the part that we've talked about
01:28:32.080
that's missing from this is the social media aspect which comes along around 2014 and you see
01:28:36.760
the rise of all of this stuff happening um but there are lots of other things that people will
01:28:41.100
describe as progressive overreach to which they're reacting and um andrew tay and all sorts of other
01:28:46.540
social movements are certainly a reaction to that which is the sense that like you know uh you said it
01:28:52.780
yourself you know we we now finally have the opportunity to get our message across and there
01:28:57.520
was a kind of crudeness to that there was a vengefulness to that there was a a but that in itself is a
01:29:02.680
response as a response to patriarchal overreach which has been intact for a very long time like you
01:29:07.920
you know you can't expect people to have no voice for so long and be then we're stuck in this doom
01:29:13.080
loop and then if no one not come out and have something to say about if no one wants to forgo
01:29:17.920
vengeance then we are stuck in this doom loop i think it's unfair to say that women took vengeance
01:29:22.940
they took some glee i would say some women took some glee but again this is some women feminists
01:29:29.700
this tiny group really when you look at the most people in this country are watching
01:29:33.500
so the far right it's just some men it's just some men but it's some very powerful men
01:29:38.820
some very powerful women look that hashtag was trending and it wasn't just a hashtag let me just
01:29:44.760
you cannot equate you cannot equate some power very powerful men so who's the equivalent of donald
01:29:49.280
trump and elon musk who can actually change our lives name me that woman and i'll tell you what it
01:29:53.320
isn't it's not hillary clinton it's not kamala harris who is that woman well set aside those two i so i
01:29:58.820
certainly wouldn't say those of those two men is far right uh but you wouldn't say elon musk or donald
01:30:03.080
trump or far right definitely not they're literally cancelling everything anything they're cancelling
01:30:08.880
they're destroying life okay perhaps i perhaps we have a different different definition of what
01:30:12.940
far right is what would you say what's the definition of far right in your head what what about them
01:30:17.100
isn't far right is i would ask you but what what is what about what they're doing isn't far right i
01:30:22.120
understand your question in order to answer your question we both have to agree on a definition of
01:30:25.780
far right they've literally said no they've taken they've taken pause just pause for a moment what is
01:30:31.220
your definition of far right it's it's far further than um fiscal conservatism okay it's uh it is social
01:30:43.240
conservatism that says there is there is one proper way to live and that way is a heteronormative
01:30:50.420
family 2.4 children women should be having babies this is all heritage foundation values this is all
01:30:57.540
project 2025 staff and this is this is well and also if you don't agree with this here's an example
01:31:05.520
of something far right that trump and musk are doing if you don't agree with this um if you go to if if
01:31:13.180
if um universities allow illegal protests by which they mean protests the students will be instantly
01:31:21.720
dismissed this is what the american government are saying if if so you you're at harvard you want to
01:31:28.240
protest that government side as a legal protest the students will be instantly dismissed if they're
01:31:33.680
foreign students they'll be sent home um they may be arrested and imprisoned no matter where they're
01:31:37.860
from and if the if the university is allowed at all federal funding will be pulled from that
01:31:42.700
university does that or does that not seem to you to be verging into fascism uh no i don't think it's
01:31:48.920
verging into fascism uh but but so uh what what what what would cause your alarms to go off then
01:31:56.200
the right the right to protest is incredibly important um and if without it what do we have
01:32:00.840
what kind of government do we have hold on a second i'm answering your question the uh the right to
01:32:05.280
protest is incredibly important i think the the interesting thing about those particular cases that
01:32:09.220
you're referring to is whether there is celebration glorification or promotion of terrorism which
01:32:14.400
is illegal both in this country and in the u.s and i think that's probably where the dividing line is
01:32:18.860
on on that issue um but uh i i'm a little bit confused please do not think for one second this isn't going
01:32:26.620
to hit uh queer people lgbtq plus people it is hitting them right now there are states where they are
01:32:34.720
arguing to take um take back the right to equal marriage and their estates which are putting in
01:32:41.600
putting forward these sort of um i can't remember what they call them now but sort of some kind of um
01:32:46.940
special trust marriages where we give you a tax break but the marriage is one from which a woman cannot
01:32:54.060
divorce a man basically without these really old-fashioned like we're literally talking about the rights
01:33:01.460
that women fought for that unless you can prove that your partner's been faithful or you can prove
01:33:06.060
that they've been significantly abusive you cannot divorce them yes i mean we are in we are heading
01:33:11.940
into gilead uh we really are that's not none of those are things that anybody here supports but um
01:33:17.860
i'm just coming back to this idea of uh trump and musk being far right uh you initially talked about
01:33:23.300
the heritage foundation traditional marriage trad all of that stuff and then we talked about fascism so
01:33:28.800
is your definition are you saying trump and musk are fascists i'm saying that the the government is
01:33:36.420
is making moves which makes anybody who is frightened of fascism which should be all of us
01:33:43.480
very scared like i feel like saying if it's an illegal protest and what kind of protest does trump
01:33:50.600
like you know trump what does he like i don't know trump well you know you've seen him in power
01:33:55.600
before if the students were all out protesting in a state where they were taking away equal marriage
01:34:03.140
and there were loads of gay year students trump is pro equal marriage isn't he and elon certainly
01:34:09.940
i would imagine they're all pro wellness social capital in it but he hasn't been saying anything
01:34:14.280
positive about gay people lately has he uh has he said anything negative about gay people i'm pretty
01:34:19.720
sure which way is the wind blowing be honest in america oh yeah but but and then who's in charge
01:34:25.980
yeah but this is the interesting thing because uh it's the worrying thing about the right now
01:34:31.620
trump seems like a moderate compared to some of the people um who are outside of the the halls of
01:34:37.800
power then in that case someone else is pulling the strings and he's allowing them to be pulled because
01:34:41.240
it is it is fast going towards i don't like neither does francis a lot of the things that are
01:34:48.800
happening uh in america in particular on the right you don't need to convince anyone here of that i'm
01:34:53.420
just i i'm kind of a bit of a stickler for definitions because i think it's important and
01:34:57.300
one of the things this is one of the big things that's happened uh that really always worried me
01:35:02.320
with wokeness and i think we're now seeing unfortunately the tragic results of that which is
01:35:06.900
when people throw around labels like fascist and nazi and and bigot and or whatever irresponsibly as
01:35:14.420
they did and they continue to do uh what then happens is there are now actual nazis actual nazis
01:35:21.560
not people who who who say you know trans woman isn't a woman or whatever but people who actually
01:35:27.020
are doing holocaust denial people who are actually uh saying oh hitler was a good guy all of this stuff
01:35:32.720
and we can't call them a nazi anymore and be credibly believed because the left spend years
01:35:37.180
calling people a nazi for you know thinking pronouns are funny or whatever do you see what i mean
01:35:41.220
i i think you can and it has no effect on the right anymore it has no effect i don't really
01:35:48.500
think you can i don't really think you can blame some young people who like the internet is a vicious
01:35:54.740
place it wasn't young people david lammy called the erg he went on national television in britain
01:36:01.580
with andrew mar and said that the erg the basically a group of conservatives who are pro-brexit
01:36:07.640
are worse than nazis it wasn't young people it was the entire left i was the entire left
01:36:13.920
we do know that boris johnson um is with steve banyan who is a white supremacist we do know that
01:36:22.060
there are links between victor orban salvini and others i'm not backing off on this never when i back
01:36:28.060
off on off on this on behalf of my constituents and the bbc should not allow this extreme hard
01:36:36.760
right fascism to flourish and often the well these are these are elected conservative mp i don't care
01:36:44.080
how elected they were so was the far right in germany they're often elected often giving a cover
01:36:51.400
for the thugs on the ground look i don't know that it was the entire left i don't remember calling
01:36:56.160
anyone a nazi and i would say myself on the left i think i think we've all got a problem that we go
01:37:01.820
on the internet and whatever the worst things that we see even though there's fewer of them than the
01:37:07.040
best things and there's fewer of them most people most people aren't even on social media in that
01:37:10.820
capacity they're just sharing their holiday snaps and then they're you know pictures of their
01:37:15.420
grandchildren and we decide that's who society is and that's who the left is true but david lammy and
01:37:21.080
prominent left-wing politicians and prominent left-wing activists and prominent left-wing
01:37:25.740
campaigners and prominent left-wing figures all used these words and threw them around
01:37:30.920
deeply irresponsibly in my opinion and now we have lost the language to describe the things that are
01:37:36.580
happening well that may be the case i'm not i'm not suggesting that people should have called people
01:37:43.700
nazis who were in fact uh who they felt a vociferous disagreement with or were perhaps in my opinion
01:37:51.860
taking steps towards the space we're in now but i don't think you can blame that for people if i hear
01:38:00.800
somebody described as a as a nazi it doesn't make me go i'll show you what a real nazi is nobody
01:38:06.460
becomes a real nazi who wasn't no no i understand you're right you're right who wasn't seething with
01:38:12.120
those thoughts that's not my argument i'm not saying we've created nazis i'm saying we now can no longer
01:38:16.720
call out nazis for being nazis because the word nazi no longer has the meaning that it did because
01:38:22.500
it got eroded that's what i'm saying but it sounds like you agree which is fine and that's why i picked
01:38:26.940
up on the far right point because i don't think donald trump is far right i just don't the guy was
01:38:32.020
a democrat he's if you look at his policies some of which i like and some which i don't like
01:38:36.420
on the scale on the broad scale of it he's a pretty moderate center right guy i don't think
01:38:42.080
donald trump has any ideology except more power and glory for donald trump i don't think i think we
01:38:48.220
you we impose we impose far more intellectual rigor on that man than then there's just nothing there
01:38:57.720
except more for me more elon musk is the same it's just more for me more money for me how could anyone
01:39:02.920
need that many more billions and still want more billions i think it's about money and take a
01:39:07.140
chainsaw no but it's about what money represents which is i'm the best i'm the biggest i'm the most
01:39:11.040
powerful take a chainsaw like lol i'm going to cut all the literacy programs i mean when you have
01:39:17.100
that much about what like one thing that i think does point to fascism is who is elon musk why is
01:39:26.660
he there why is he making these why is he making these it wasn't making any recommendations like this
01:39:31.200
is well the steel man argument would be that he is a very very very successful businessman who knows
01:39:37.040
how to run and create things very but an unelected man who is it's pretty normal for governments to
01:39:42.960
bring in business people to run certain things sure but there's certain things and there's this is my
01:39:48.300
right hand dr evil there's certain things and there's what's going on now and i i haven't met
01:39:52.440
anyone on any side of the political divide and i am a pretty um i'm a pretty um i talk to lots of
01:39:59.860
people from lots of you know i i'm open to all discussions i'm here today um i haven't met anyone
01:40:08.460
who's not scared of elon musk who isn't going oh my god that guy's unhinged that guy is uh that guy is
01:40:15.400
shouldn't be in the position of power that he's in he's he's making fast decisions about things he
01:40:22.720
doesn't understand and the economy is an ecosystem and you can't just go we'll cut every community center
01:40:29.660
in america because the government aren't funding that shit and they're not understand but the
01:40:33.820
corner shop around the corner where the kids go and buy their coke is and they're they're you know
01:40:39.380
their sandwich is now going to go out of business and the lady who lives across the road who does
01:40:45.520
the manicures and so on that where the mums come when the kids are in the community center is going
01:40:50.000
to go out of business it what are they doing what are they doing i think everyone i know is looking
01:40:55.140
at that and going this isn't wise and this is insane and this is really going to cause uh an
01:41:02.800
an terrible a terrible collapse of the economy and i don't know what an unelected person is doing
01:41:09.240
at this right hand in the white house now apparently in charge of everything um and the the way the wind
01:41:16.000
is blowing towards queer rights towards women's rights is it's is scary women are dying in states
01:41:23.680
where abortions are banned or now are virtually inaccessible they're dying and women coming in
01:41:29.600
i've talked to doctors about this women are coming in going i'm miscarrying please can you
01:41:34.540
and their doctors are saying we cannot do anything until it is life-threatening and if we do it we have
01:41:40.460
to sit there and watch and wait till the point of life-threatening or we can lose our medical license
01:41:44.600
and we can go to jail and that's a very very real fear for these doctors doctors are leaving the state
01:41:49.180
because they're like i can't do my job anymore i don't want to watch women die and watch women bleed
01:41:53.320
out and or have to prove in court she would have died so women are already dying in america and that's
01:42:02.520
this is why i would never say i was anti-woke because to me sometimes people what people lump into wokeness
01:42:10.200
is the concern that people have when people who are not they don't have representation in the big
01:42:19.140
buildings that count for people like them they don't have anyone in there going but people like
01:42:24.280
me are dying and that to me is why the word woke is misused to sort of like oh well somebody criticized
01:42:32.200
me because i forgot jenny's pronouns is not the same as this is you know i mean obviously use jenny's
01:42:41.280
pronouns what's costing you but but it's not the same as we don't need to worry about women dying on
01:42:46.540
tables of miscarriages because they're not allowed to have an abortion i've never heard anyone
01:42:50.860
make that argument you know but that's what i'm saying i'm anti-woke because i want to prevent
01:42:56.120
people from having an abortion but it's just people do categorize it people do categorize it all
01:43:01.820
the same thing it's all your kind your kind of values when people say to me that i'm woke it's
01:43:06.340
like you care about these things the main things feminist feminism should be caring about is are
01:43:12.820
are people's lives appreciably worse or appreciably better are people is there unfairness that's what
01:43:20.320
feminism should be about is that can there be justice where there is unfairness agreed agreed i think
01:43:25.640
what you when you're talking about how people categorize wokeness i think that's people who don't
01:43:30.600
actually understand what it means to be woke i think that's people who just have a very surface
01:43:35.360
level analysis of it and your definition is going to be different from mine i mean i i anyway let's
01:43:41.360
get off the topic of what because what we're doing is nuance of a word and that's what we're criticizing
01:43:44.560
other people for that's not the problem the problem is we have two ways of looking at the world and then a
01:43:51.080
million ways in between yeah and and we are reducing and reducing and reducing to them and us and we need to
01:43:58.520
understand we are the human race and our world is getting hotter my friend's house burnt down in
01:44:04.800
la my i've got friends in a cyclone in australia at the moment the world is getting worse in so many
01:44:11.200
different ways that we are at risk of war in europe we need to get on our own team and our own team is
01:44:17.340
humanity i also think as well deborah and we talk about this a lot on the show i think it's also people
01:44:23.320
need to show courage i think for for too long we've seen either side go off the deep end and a large
01:44:30.620
part of it is because people don't say we're going off the deep end part of the reason the whatever
01:44:36.900
you want to call that side of the left went off the deep end is because not enough people on the
01:44:41.960
center left went hang on a minute can we can we just calm down a bit here maybe not all men are trash
01:44:47.500
maybe we don't destroy someone for a joke they made eight years ago this is not the correct way
01:44:53.000
of doing it and it's the same on the right we need the people in the center which i see you as broadly
01:44:59.140
being center left us wherever we may identify as being we need to actually be able to hold that center
01:45:07.240
i'm pretty hard left that's what i was going to say i don't think she is
01:45:11.020
i'm pretty hard left but i'm but i also but i've been in a cult and i know when i'm in one
01:45:17.920
yeah and so i i want i want to prioritize what's important by being in the center i mean that not
01:45:24.440
these fringe little movements that i'm happy to be on the left i just want to build bridges to the
01:45:28.860
right and what i don't want to do and at least at least not burn the bridges we already have
01:45:33.600
and i feel like we have we have suffered from burning some of the bridges we already had
01:45:39.260
most people are just cracking on with their day and watching the traitors and getting looking at
01:45:44.860
what's two for one in sainsbury's and worried about where they're you know what their kids
01:45:49.820
doing at school and all of that that's what most people are doing and so for me it's those people
01:45:54.240
in the middle where i want to say hey we we are in danger in this country of losing our abortion rights
01:45:58.580
we are like there are moves here to be anti-abortion moves and bring the weeks down and then bring the
01:46:03.580
weeks down then they bring the weeks down and they want it to be like america and there are
01:46:06.560
there are forces in this country so i want to appeal to people for whom that would matter who
01:46:12.960
are not politically activated right at the moment because they're just cracking on with their lives
01:46:18.900
and they've never had the time or the you know the you know it hasn't been a priority that's who i
01:46:26.020
think we should be talking to and i think we need to be building bridges and i think if we if we want
01:46:30.620
a fairer world for people who are gender non-conforming for gay people for women who do
01:46:36.700
have different needs then we have to start building bridges to people who are in the middle and not
01:46:43.320
immediately scold them because they've come online and said something with the wrong turn of phrase
01:46:47.520
well and i think we need to be really figuring out how to build bridges to people on the on the
01:46:52.920
rights that are reachable well if you want to do that then i i have one suggestion for you based on
01:46:57.800
what you've just said which is i think the one thing that you will never reach people anywhere
01:47:02.960
outside the hard left with is the idea that we want to build a fairer world for people from this
01:47:07.660
community or this community or that community if you want to reach people across the political
01:47:11.640
spectrum should be talking about a fairer world for everybody and this is the problem that the left
01:47:16.700
has made over the last 10 years in particular which is this obsession with identity it's incredibly
01:47:22.940
divisive because anyone who listens to what you've just said what they will hear is you want
01:47:27.400
a better world for these subsets of the population okay well i'm not one of the subsets of these
01:47:32.920
subsets for the population what does that mean for me and they might and i don't know reasonably
01:47:37.680
unreasonably hold on assume from that that what you want is to take something away from them and give
01:47:44.000
it to these people that's what it sounds like um and this divisiveness along racial lines sexual lines
01:47:50.120
it's just it's not going to bring people together it's it's the reason i'm against identity politics
01:47:55.480
it's not because i want whatever my identity is to be well protected it's because i know that when
01:48:00.680
people disappear down these down these rabbit holes and only care about this group and this group and
01:48:06.160
this group that's when everybody suffers doesn't have to be only but but can you imagine a world
01:48:11.580
in which gay people have the rights that they do in this country now that you agree with where gay
01:48:18.160
people didn't get up and fight and say we don't have any rights and we're going to make that our focus
01:48:23.100
when you look at how gay people got rights in this country they had to say sure yeah for now
01:48:28.540
this is what we're focused on that was identity politics we just didn't call it identity politics
01:48:32.900
we didn't have that name how would they have got them otherwise if they'd been like but also for
01:48:36.260
straight people because straight people had rights fine then you're never going to reach the people
01:48:41.740
that you're trying to reach what do you mean fine what do you mean fine what do you mean fine
01:48:45.680
how would they have got them whatever you agree with them having them how would they have got them
01:48:49.120
see you're demonstrating and early in the interview exactly the opposite of what you
01:48:53.280
claim you're trying to do which is the moment i say something you don't like you become
01:48:56.860
aggressive and highly emotional aggressive and highly emotional i'm just having a debate with you
01:49:01.600
no i'm showing passion no not especially not at the beginning you weren't but anyway
01:49:05.680
what i'm saying to you is i didn't like one thing that you said in a way that i found unpleasant
01:49:11.700
yes and i did react to that yes but if i don't so you're not reaching anyone who's listening to
01:49:15.860
this conversation by doing that it's my point so you don't know that you don't know who i know i
01:49:20.720
know i know i know i'm pretty well i know it is pretty well i mean can i just let me just finish
01:49:26.280
but but you're asking me to sit here as if it's just entirely intellectual and and talk like this
01:49:31.740
sometimes i'm not asking you to do anything what i'm saying is your claim is you want to reach people
01:49:37.020
and i'm saying to you if you want to reach these people that you're currently probably not reaching
01:49:42.060
here's some thoughts i have about how better to do that but then you what you can't do then is just
01:49:47.620
go i just sit i just push to the side you're an intellectual you have to intellectually i'm not
01:49:54.820
pushing anything to the side i'm saying the method that you are using is not going to be effective
01:50:00.040
for reaching this particular group of people i don't really believe you i think passion is passion
01:50:04.420
is always loved i think people don't want to see people go yes and i think people want to see
01:50:10.500
people go no but how can you say that i'm not against passion i think you're misunderstanding
01:50:13.400
what i enjoy debate i don't find it i don't find it i don't find it off putting it all if i see
01:50:17.820
someone go no but how can you say that as long as they're being good not do i and that's not what
01:50:21.220
i'm saying what i'm saying is you become uh especially hysterical an hysterical woman is that
01:50:27.440
what you're saying well see you're demonstrating again now you're trying to put words in my mouth
01:50:30.760
you're trying to put me onto a template that already exists which is a man calling you yeah yeah you are
01:50:36.360
but every joke is only half joke as we all know right so you're you are doing the thing that is
01:50:41.620
going to put a lot of people off what i'm saying to you is if you want to reach across the spectrum
01:50:45.840
yeah across the spectrum okay well look let's be honest right you're very good at reaching people
01:50:52.320
on the hard left and you're very good at reaching women and that's why they love your show but a lot
01:50:56.540
of my people will turn in to see this as well and because i'll tell them it's all you're not trying
01:51:00.760
to reach them you already reach them right you claim you might be you want to reach people on
01:51:05.300
either side right that's what you're saying now i think it's fair to say that i'm probably better
01:51:10.200
than you at reaching people who are on the center and center right would that be fair um yes well
01:51:15.980
because you agree with them it's not because i agree with them it's because i articulate arguments
01:51:19.920
that resonate with you seem really pissed off i'm not i'm not i'm not even remotely pissed off i'm just
01:51:25.720
trying to make clarity on this issue right so what i'm saying to you is if you want to reach those
01:51:30.660
people who i know how to reach right so i should agree with you no you shouldn't agree with me i'm
01:51:37.260
just saying the strategy that you are displaying with your behavior is not going to be effective
01:51:42.480
for reaching i i feel like am i am i i don't know francis am i shouting am i swearing or am i just going
01:51:48.520
how can you say that i didn't i didn't say that you were shouting or swearing what is the behavior
01:51:53.380
it's just me leaning forward and going come on now that's not that's not the way you behaved early
01:51:58.500
in the interview anyway well what you said was quite significant it was quite it wasn't it's not
01:52:04.620
that it was offensive it was it scared to me okay so and so i it that that did right that did so
01:52:11.600
anytime i say something that scares you this is how you react whereas if you listen to what i was
01:52:15.440
saying it's actually perfectly logical and reasonable controlling what you're doing now
01:52:19.320
controlling the way that i operate in the interview space where i've done nothing
01:52:22.980
inappropriate i've just debated you most of the time i've agreed with you and i've agreed with you
01:52:28.220
i found masses of agreement and i found with you and where i haven't i may have shown some passion in
01:52:34.180
a debate but this to sort of say now i control your behavior i don't control your behavior remotely
01:52:39.020
you made the claim that you want to reach people on the other side and what i'm saying is this is not
01:52:44.280
a way that's going to work for the following reasons because identity politics is divisive by its
01:52:49.480
very nature that's what i'm saying to you so okay but but then i as i what i pointed out to you yes
01:52:55.060
the gay rights movement succeeded by focusing on gay rights right so i'm asking you how could they
01:53:00.900
have done it i'm not talking about how they could have done it i'm talking about now but how could
01:53:05.680
they have done it otherwise because if you can't show me any other way then you're just saying
01:53:10.460
it's divisive so sit back and take what you've got i didn't say so what what's the other way what's
01:53:16.380
the other way is what i'm asking you i did tell you what the other way is which is to emphasize as
01:53:21.080
much as possible our shared common humanity that's literally what i did i said we're all going to be on
01:53:25.800
the same side but what i literally say well i want a fairer world for this group and this group
01:53:31.140
but i do i also want a fairer word for men for men i've said okay great i've said that at other
01:53:36.020
points of this interview but there are i have i literally said i don't i i fought actively in my
01:53:42.760
feminist community against the men but i have argued on national radio many times that women
01:53:49.620
and children first is what an odd rule and what it means is if i'm in a rescue situation and i'm in
01:53:59.040
a dinghy and uh out in the ocean and there's a 19 year old young man who is got his whole life ahead
01:54:07.800
of him and is probably weighs less than me and is about i'm not going to open up another branch men
01:54:13.420
and women women and their children first is exactly the right policy anyway uh let's move on to
01:54:17.540
substack i mean say your final thing and then we'll move on to substack where we'll continue the
01:54:23.680
conversation is he always i am always like this it's very controlling um yeah it's very controlling
01:54:30.500
um no i produces laughing i um if if if if i'm if i'm if i'm if i am out in the ocean i hope i would
01:54:39.520
get out of the boat and say look you're 19 you you stay in the boat i'll drown okay but it's hard to
01:54:46.680
get out of a boat of privilege and society tells me that that's my right i don't have any children why
01:54:51.140
am i in the boat why isn't he in the boat i don't understand it but it's hard to get out of a boat
01:54:55.160
of privilege and it's hard for men to get out of their boats of privilege or even see them so there
01:55:01.200
are spaces in which i argue for men's rights all the time men's rights activists always think women
01:55:06.280
feminists don't do that i do i argue for men's rights all the time where i see that there's a
01:55:10.420
disparity and so i i am not someone who's going i'm only i'm only fighting for this i'm only fighting
01:55:17.020
for that but if you go onto the street and say more for everyone and you don't say gay people
01:55:21.580
can't get married straight people can it's never going to happen the only reason we have gay rights
01:55:26.720
in this country is because somebody got out and fought for them on a specific platform so there is
01:55:32.340
also room for specific platforms it is just not there's just there's just not a helpful way forward
01:55:40.460
by going we only feel for each other and everyone else is dehumanized
01:55:45.200
the argument with gay rights is different because what gay people wanted was equal rights with
01:55:51.180
everybody and all you have to say today is i want equal rights for everybody you don't have to talk
01:55:55.760
about this community and that community you that's that that implies that all because gay people can
01:56:02.040
get married all other rights are sorted no but if there is legal discrimination let's point it out
01:56:08.280
and fix it okay so that's what feminism is doing abortion in america okay and fight fighting to keep
01:56:14.300
our reproductive rights abortion is never a case of equal rights because it's highly specific to one
01:56:20.300
sex although as you say everything is a binary but um the it doesn't work that way okay because
01:56:28.680
it's different because men can't have children right so therefore we need to fight for a community
01:56:34.640
and that community has an identity you talk about that the more you push away everyone else which
01:56:39.300
is the point i made okay so we can't fight for abortion rights i didn't say you can't i said the
01:56:43.880
messaging ought to be as much as possible abortion is a different issue but on all the other issues that
01:56:49.720
you're talking about this marginalized community that marginalized community etc the focus ought to be
01:56:55.840
on the fact that we want everyone to have equal opportunities and equal rights sure and where where it is a
01:57:01.220
where it is a problem that all human being climate change that's all human beings would benefit from
01:57:07.120
trying collectively to fix that problem right um but abortion is specifically about women and people
01:57:16.780
of minority genders so there are times when we do have to advocate yes but but there are times when
01:57:21.640
we don't and we have been dei for example is a perfect example of this right when you push people
01:57:27.420
onto we started this conversation right with this very thing where you push people into certain
01:57:32.660
positions to increase their representation often inaccurately you make the point about london it's
01:57:38.060
true uh you know bbc in the 1980s did not look like london today but bbc today doesn't look like hastings
01:57:45.260
today either right so when we talk about representations it's much more complicated than people who live in big
01:57:50.260
cities who have a particular vision of it um and my point is the more we emphasize our shared humanity
01:57:55.700
and the need for everyone to have equal opportunity the less divisive things become the more we focus
01:58:00.580
on individual communities the more divisive things become and that's just a fact you you may say that
01:58:05.780
you need to fight for this group i may agree with you it doesn't change the fact that it's divisive
01:58:09.480
um i feel very strongly that everything is not there we're not there yet we're not at a point when
01:58:18.740
where life is so equal we can just say oh i'm not human beings for the win i feel like there are still
01:58:25.140
many many things to be fought for and a lot we've lost stuff that we had you know you look at what's
01:58:29.460
happening in america they're losing stuff hand over fist right now and so and to me dei was only ever
01:58:38.080
about trying to right historical wrongs and i feel like the gutting of it is really about supremacy for
01:58:47.600
people like musk and trump i don't really think it's anything to do with the fact that we've overstepped
01:58:52.140
if we'd overstepped the representation would be very very very different than it how it is we
01:58:57.860
haven't overstepped and we're not talking about the casting of david copperfield on itv1 we're
01:59:02.000
literally talking about who's in the house of commons who's in who's in the who's in the who's in the
01:59:06.020
senate so i would i would argue against you want to enter politics fine but it's just it's divisive
01:59:12.480
i i mean you say things so categorically like it is and then but it's what everyone has to stop
01:59:20.140
talking no you don't have to stop talking i'm just saying it's the logical conclusion of the
01:59:24.640
thing that you're saying you think dei is about writing historical wrongs so you want dei you
01:59:30.740
think that certain communities don't have equal rights and you want to focus narrowly on those
01:59:35.420
communities to bring them up to whichever position you think that they should be in you want identity
01:59:40.580
politics that's fine but you have to acknowledge that it's divisive could it not be more nuanced than
01:59:46.160
that though that's what i was saying at the beginning it's it's not it's not this or that
01:59:49.300
it's it's a big crunchy squishy huge thing where we need this but this can cause this so then we try
01:59:56.980
and do that we try and do that it's you're very binary you're very it is or it isn't and it is and
02:00:02.120
there it is because some things are or they aren't like male and female and i i am going to go out on a
02:00:07.760
large limb and say there are lots of things that are very nuanced that that there are very nuanced and
02:00:12.720
one of those is people's people's gender identities and one of those things is how we manage to fight
02:00:19.860
for people like the history of gay rights how people fight and still manage to the hard work of creating
02:00:28.640
acceptance not just civil rights in their communities it's a it's a hard long fight and
02:00:35.640
the straight community has not really done a lot the gay community has done most of the work
02:00:41.580
to make sure there's an integration so that now most people in this country go yeah paul and jack
02:00:48.980
next door they're really nice um jenny's teachers are lesbian and it's no big deal that was a big old
02:00:54.780
hard fight and i just don't think we can minimize it by going it's divisive stop talking it's it wasn't
02:01:00.660
divisive in the end it brought a lot more humanity and and harmony to to this country and now you've got
02:01:07.340
donald trump and elon musk so you're blaming you're i'm saying we talked about this with andrew tate we
02:01:14.440
talked about this with other things progressive overreach is why donald trump is in power so you
02:01:18.020
would call gay marriage no not at all i'm saying all the things that happened with see again you keep
02:01:23.860
putting words in my mouth so that you can make me sound like i've said something offensive no no i'm
02:01:27.940
not saying you've said anything offensive yes i'm trying to i interrogate what you're saying
02:01:31.880
yes and i already sometimes you do a bit of a leap where you go yeah sorry so this and i'm like oh
02:01:37.060
hold on that's yes way over there the donald donald trump was elected effectively do you know what his
02:01:42.720
most effective campaign ad was uh i think it was um the trans it was it was the caramelist for them
02:01:49.460
donald president trump's donald trump was elected because people are propaganda it is propaganda
02:01:54.660
most people don't know an out trans person hold on a second most people don't know a trans person
02:01:57.320
that was propaganda that's that's exactly what i was saying before about the far religious right and
02:02:01.840
heritage foundation and project 25 most people in america reacted to that ad in a very powerful way
02:02:08.880
which is why it was the most powerful ad right the reason that it's happening the reason that donald
02:02:14.060
trump is in power is that many many people have had enough of this identity politics have had enough
02:02:19.900
of the obsession with victim who have had enough about all of this stuff that you are advocating for
02:02:25.660
more of and my point to you is if you carry on doing what you've been doing you're going to keep
02:02:31.000
getting the results you've been getting it's as simple as that now i don't like much of the over
02:02:36.580
correction that we're about to experience and i've been predicting for many years and opposing the
02:02:41.380
woke left for this very reason that this was inevitable i i think there's something more sinister
02:02:46.420
going on and which i've written about in my book and i did a lot of research i was quite surprised
02:02:50.400
by what i found actually um overall what i'm saying in my book is we're all in a cult whether
02:02:57.860
we're on the left or the right we've got to break out of it we do need to understand that we are being
02:03:03.660
asked to empathize more and more with fewer and fewer people that lack that erosion of our empathy is a
02:03:09.880
lack of is an erosion of our humanity we need to rejig the rethink the cancellation of the past and
02:03:17.780
instead figure out what we can learn from flawed figures in the past who are never going to agree
02:03:22.100
with us they're in the past i've tried to make a very human um uh i've tried to have a very human
02:03:30.880
look at gender non-conformity and try and make some new arguments that i think haven't been made before
02:03:35.740
um i am very interested in as a comedian in in um uh the freedom of speech in comedy and i do want
02:03:45.900
freedom of speech i don't want censorship but i am also interested in how audiences do often know
02:03:52.500
the difference between the punchline of the joke and the point of the joke and i am broadly arguing
02:03:59.840
that cancel culture has needs to needs to change and um and then i've got a chapter about what we
02:04:06.020
can do about it all um it is a i suppose a book from the progressive left that says we're doing a
02:04:14.140
lot of things wrong and we need to do a lot of things right i hope you're uh we need a lot of
02:04:18.320
things better great i hope your listeners like it all right well thanks for coming on uh should we do
02:04:25.780
like i we've has this been two hours yeah it's flown by but that's because there's been a lot
02:04:32.140
of disagreement so i think we'll just do the final question mate and wrap it up there okay uh deborah
02:04:37.040
we always end the show with the final question which is what's the one thing we're not talking
02:04:40.100
about that we really should be oh what's the one thing we should i i planned something for this and
02:04:46.120
now i think we've already covered it um this happens every interview does it yes yeah um okay the
02:04:52.560
one thing we should be talking about uh that we're not is i think have you watched couples therapy
02:04:59.280
no it's a show about with a new york analyst who's talking to couples and um basically you know romantic
02:05:07.780
couples and i don't know why they've agreed to have their therapy televised but it's absolutely
02:05:12.680
riveting it's fascinating and she always asks uh sort of gets what's underneath that so one of them
02:05:20.500
saying he he's a child he doesn't he i come home and you know the table's covered with stuff and
02:05:27.600
um he's you know been playing with the baby but he hasn't done anything else and why can't he clean
02:05:34.700
the bathroom like a grown-up and then she will go it's what's under that what's the feeling and sort
02:05:40.940
of like well it's it's that i have to do everything and what is that feeling it's that i have no help i'm
02:05:46.340
alone i'm lonely and is there a time in your childhood when you were lonely yes i i my mum
02:05:51.980
left me alone i was a latchkey kid and it will sort of she'll keep going underneath that is what we are
02:05:56.800
not doing like the three of us here today it's like if you push my buttons and i go i lean across
02:06:03.860
the table and go no but how can you say that you immediately go firstly my buttons are pushed like
02:06:09.340
what's this man telling me about the way to communicate and so what's behind that well behind
02:06:14.180
that is i was in a very patriarchal cult where men told me how to do everything i don't want to be
02:06:18.820
told by a man that i'm communicating incorrectly just because i'm leaning across the table and
02:06:21.920
showing some passion and that i need to you know calm down well what's behind that it's the fear that
02:06:27.160
i'm going to be controlled and i was controlled before and i'll never be controlled again and then
02:06:30.620
you get triggered and you go you go um i wasn't particularly triggered well you claim that you're
02:06:36.840
not but there are times when you really get cross no i get cross when people misrepresent what i say
02:06:41.560
that pisses me off and what's underneath that why when why what's that feeling i don't like when
02:06:46.200
people lie about me but okay so but do you think i'm lying or do you think i'm misunderstanding or
02:06:50.840
i i think that in being uh offended or upset by something that i've said you are then lashing out
02:06:58.000
and trying to misrepresent me okay so you think i'm trying to misrepresent you rather than
02:07:02.200
rather than you what you've said has landed with me in a way that i think that's what you've said
02:07:06.800
uh i think that's interesting well the reason for that is is to win an argument the easiest thing
02:07:12.080
to do is to to effectively say that somebody said something else for example like when you said are
02:07:16.980
you being hysterical now no you were partly joking i was joking i was spawning i know but well not
02:07:21.660
quite but part of that part of the the thing there is when you do a joke like that what you're really
02:07:26.960
doing is you're hinting at a stereotype that exists in people's head which is a man dismissing
02:07:31.860
something a woman says because she's being hysterical right so you're trying to push me
02:07:36.380
into that box that's about me what's going on for you what's going on for me is i don't want to go in
02:07:40.240
that box because all i'm doing is exploring your argument and why do you want to go in the box
02:07:44.040
what's wrong with the box what's what because the box is not representing what i'm actually saying
02:07:49.720
when i'm simply taking but what's the emotion of i don't like being in a box what's what's where's
02:07:55.040
that a box it's the box that you're trying to put me in which is a man who's telling a woman
02:07:59.660
she's wrong because she's being hysterical so so that box which is you don't like things projected
02:08:04.980
upon you basically i don't like people describing me in public in a way that's inaccurate okay but
02:08:09.560
that's a pretty reasonable thing to feel okay so you're not really playing the game which is what's
02:08:13.680
beneath that what's the human thing so my thing is behind that there's you might try and control me
02:08:18.360
that's nothing to do with you right that's me vulnerably going i and if i went below that i'd be
02:08:23.360
like why don't i like being controlled that makes me feel unsafe and why does i why do i feel
02:08:28.480
unsafe that's easy for me so look as a public person yeah what people say about me is what
02:08:33.640
people will then go and believe right so people putting out false narratives about me something
02:08:39.280
that's necessarily something i'm going to be guarded against sure okay so you're not really playing the
02:08:43.620
game because the game is the sort of vulnerability piece so it's sort of like it's it's yes but i'm
02:08:48.800
not going to make something up to pretend to be vulnerable i'm telling you that like what i regard
02:08:53.760
somebody misrepresenting the core of my argument right as something that is dishonest in honest
02:09:00.260
discussion do you understand is it is it clear to you that there were times when i felt you did that
02:09:06.100
to me that i misrepresented your argument or you just misunderstood it and i don't think i have a
02:09:12.000
misrepresented your argument okay i didn't do that that's so interesting to me so when i say something
02:09:16.740
and if you you you take it in your framework sometimes you'll present it back to me yeah and i'll go
02:09:21.880
but that's not what i said or that's not what i meant so when did i misrepresent your argument i
02:09:25.640
thought we're a bunch of times if you watch it give an example um you will you will like the thing
02:09:30.600
about um uh indigenous people well they're only such and such percent they're a tiny percent and i'm
02:09:36.580
like no but that's not what it's about it's not about what the percentage but that's not
02:09:39.460
misrepresenting your argument i don't think you can i don't think you can get there watch the show
02:09:44.240
though i think it'd be really really interesting i don't think you can get to the place that i'm
02:09:47.760
trying to get it's not about going over the arguments it's about how you feel like when
02:09:52.560
you say oh i get really that so that's why i think what we're not really talking about i already
02:09:57.560
answered the question when somebody misrepresents what i'm saying okay i'm naturally not going to
02:10:03.240
like doing okay i didn't try and misrepresent anything i had a feeling of that's not what i said
02:10:08.080
or that's what you meant or that's it was a feeling so i pushed the ball back to you no one was
02:10:12.480
trying to misrepresent you know what it reminds me of we had this guy called um imran imran akmad
02:10:18.580
imran akmad on the show and we talked about online censorship and he made some very good points and
02:10:23.940
we were agreeing for about 90 of the interview yeah and then i said something he didn't like
02:10:29.740
they didn't agree and suddenly the mask came off and he instantly came out as this like
02:10:33.980
not he started calling me names and all this stuff and your sophistry right now
02:10:39.880
is both transparent it's deeply disrespectful and i warn you that most of your listeners will
02:10:45.580
think themselves actually constantine's being a bit of a dickhead right now and to me i experience
02:10:52.940
that a lot with people who are arguing from the position of high empathy that happens quite a lot
02:10:58.760
where um somebody pretends to be reasonable and they're having an agreement and whatever but the
02:11:03.860
moment i say something that makes them uncomfortable yeah as i said with the indigenous people and us
02:11:08.660
being sophisticated suddenly they show a different side to themselves yeah but that's that's normal
02:11:13.280
and human if somebody says something that that is is sort of feels um what i'm trying to say to you
02:11:22.360
the thing we're not talking about yeah is what's behind all of this and so online when people like
02:11:28.320
you said this you said this you said this you should this you did this you did this you did this i'm
02:11:31.880
right you're left you're in that box i'm in that box i'm an andrew tate fan i'm a this
02:11:35.400
what's behind it all i think is i don't feel safe or i feel hurt or i feel i feel boxed or i feel
02:11:46.880
projected upon too and i think that's what we're not talking about really deep down that's not what
02:11:51.220
we're talking about so i didn't deliberately misinterpret anything you said but it's interesting
02:11:56.580
you thought i did but i didn't i genuinely can tell you this absolute honest place i didn't
02:12:01.420
deliberation is a complicated thing though because sometimes people do things subconsciously
02:12:05.720
sure but consciously i did not misinterpret anything i i heard it and then either i felt
02:12:12.240
like hmm i don't know what territory we're going into here but this doesn't seem great to me or that
02:12:16.660
happened once or all the other times i was sort of like wanted to like passionately engage sure no and
02:12:23.980
i don't respect that i and i know what's if i if i ask those questions of you know i'll ask you
02:12:30.700
francis when you feel upset about you know i don't know what you might categorize as wokeness
02:12:39.900
can you on can you dig down and go what's the uncomfortable feeling oh absolutely yeah what's
02:12:46.880
the feeling for you well i'm half south well my mother's from venezuela i saw the rise of communism
02:12:51.280
blm had the same slogans that chavis's government used the government that means i will never get
02:12:57.920
justice for my grandfather who was murdered i had family members thrown into prison uh leaders of blm
02:13:03.940
did a black power salute with uh maduardo who is the current dictator of venezuela i see i don't i see
02:13:11.740
that side of wokeness as akin to socialism slash communism which is what destroyed my country and means
02:13:19.580
that my family now live in constant fear so you feel like this is a very personal geopolitical
02:13:27.480
experiential fear yeah that you live with so you may see other things and uh link them together
02:13:36.820
in a way that you think is human and understandable and that i think there's a there's a political logic
02:13:43.920
behind that if you see the words abolish capitalism for example which was blm slogan i've actually seen
02:13:49.100
capitalism being abolished i've seen people being i've seen people be shot at during protests by
02:13:56.760
people using the same slogans i've seen jeremy corbyn openly support chavis's government i have a
02:14:02.780
very visceral reaction to that so it's very interesting so i mean this is too long but um but i think it's
02:14:11.460
interesting do you think do you see now that capitalism unregulated capitalism has gone too
02:14:17.820
far and it's not i think you do need to regulate capitalism absolutely there needs to be checks and
02:14:21.760
balances of course there is there needs to be a monopolies commission to make sure that there's
02:14:24.840
just not one company in charge of everything but do you fear what's happening with unregulated
02:14:29.300
capitalism around the world now yeah of course i do so it's do you think that blm could be having
02:14:33.860
a response to unregulated capitalism no i think blm are communists and they want to impose a
02:14:39.020
communist order that's why they say abolish capitalism they don't want to regulate capitalism
02:14:44.280
the this the the meaning lies in the words abolish capitalism if you say if you say something it's
02:14:51.420
like if i say uh i believe the white race is superior i will take you at your face value you
02:14:58.180
should take me at my face value when i say that just like when they say abolish capitalism which to me
02:15:03.080
is communism and when they go on and take photos themselves with eduardo maduro a dictator who has
02:15:10.500
effectively destroyed my mother's country and has imprisoned members of my family i take people at
02:15:16.320
their face value when they say such things this might be a whole other podcast i think well for me
02:15:22.840
it's exactly the same i mean uh we were talking about one specific incident my my grandmother was born
02:15:28.220
in a gulag and what's more i'm a first generation immigrant to this country so when i see all this
02:15:32.880
racial divisiveness being stood up i i think it's quite natural that i would be concerned about it
02:15:37.820
when you antagonize people along racial lines we know what happens if you actually read history you
02:15:43.420
know what happens which is when people are encouraged to go retreat into their identity boxes
02:15:49.080
they see each other as other and then you begin to have conflict it's it's very difficult though for
02:15:56.480
black people in america who are suffering from a different level of state violence and have you
02:16:06.340
know we it's only a few decades ago that the civil rights movement happened and that there were hoses
02:16:11.040
and dogs turned on them and they were up the back of a bus and not allowed to go to the same schools
02:16:15.380
and not enough has been done to address that so inevitably inevitably there will be uprisings
02:16:23.520
because they're still you know huge communities of black people are still stuck in socioeconomic
02:16:28.640
boxes so can i push but can i push back against that no i've not pushed back against that i agree
02:16:34.120
with what you're saying but that doesn't mean an organization like blm is a force for good and i'll
02:16:38.480
give you an example chavis's government was elected in 1999 due to the fact that society was
02:16:44.560
desperately unequal white people or what the version of whiteness in venezuela which is different to our
02:16:49.880
whiteness but anyway uh were in charge there was a whole swathe of people who felt they didn't have
02:16:55.140
access to resources society was deeply unequal unfair if you were born in what is called los
02:17:00.980
ranchos the ghettos you're going to die there all perfectly valid criticisms he came to power
02:17:08.360
in saying things like we're going to abolish capitalism and people thought that it was going
02:17:13.040
to be better for them it wasn't it just made everything in far far worse which is what communism
02:17:18.760
does just because people have been marginalized and they have concerns and they want better outcomes
02:17:25.900
for them all perfectly natural it doesn't mean that an organization that purports to represent them
02:17:33.760
is my argument i would suggest though if unless that the powers that be are going to create
02:17:41.920
fairness justice space and allow socioeconomic growth and prosperity amongst those communities
02:17:51.120
there will always continue to be uprising do you not see that that's exactly what the far right is
02:17:55.260
saying that's exactly what they're saying i word for word you cannot word for word is what they're
02:18:01.340
saying you you literally cannot keep people suppressed without those people that's why they're voting for
02:18:08.980
trump and that's why they follow andrew yeah i feel like that there is a different um there is a
02:18:15.540
different sort of uh marginalization for black people in america because of the not that long
02:18:22.380
ago history of slavery definitely of course you can't enslave people bring them there strip them
02:18:27.440
everything strip them of their names and then never let them get ahead and then you know in the 60s
02:18:33.520
we all know what happened this is not when the 60s is living memory definitely it's not that long ago
02:18:38.040
so what do you what do you what are you suggesting those people do what i'm suggesting is martin luther
02:18:44.060
king was right yeah well martin luther king was a complicated figure we don't have time to get
02:18:48.100
into everything i'm not saying he was right about his relations with women i'm saying he was right
02:18:51.680
about i'm not saying the core message of what he was saying which is he dreamt of a place where
02:18:57.360
everybody would be treated on the show but that's not all he said he also said that the silence
02:19:01.760
of the moderate white was uh in some ways worse than the i don't know the exact quotes i shouldn't
02:19:08.060
say it but is you know the the silence the moderate white going everything's fine now you've got what
02:19:12.420
you've got you've got that's not what people are saying when francis says he has problems with blm
02:19:17.660
he's not saying everything is fine he's saying blm is not a constructive force and it isn't and it
02:19:23.000
wasn't okay you're and it isn't and it wasn't that's not debate you can't just say isn't wasn't that's
02:19:28.880
not debate that's not debate that's not debate it's my opinion yeah in my opinion and in francis
02:19:33.040
opinion that's great isn't and it wasn't that really helps me when you say it's my opinion
02:19:36.420
okay because when you say it isn't and it wasn't the i'm making a truth claim absolutely yeah and i
02:19:42.600
feel like your truth claims close down debate so like it makes you're free to say you don't agree
02:19:49.300
you just did but i do and then you go it isn't and it wasn't and that's it's slightly um
02:19:55.320
it's a it feels against the intellectual ethos of this show how so because you just go it isn't
02:20:01.800
and it wasn't and it's not like well of course there are some ways in which and you can say
02:20:07.940
whatever you want the the intellectual ethos of this show since it's our show i can tell you what
02:20:12.160
it is is you present a set of ideas yeah we interrogate those ideas we present a set of ideas you
02:20:21.100
interrogate those ideas and we all and our viewers most importantly come away with a better
02:20:25.900
understanding of what you think and what i think and it's not necessarily to create agreement between
02:20:30.360
you and i i don't think it's possible what i think is possible is to expose my argument in all its
02:20:35.920
falsity and accuracy and to expose your argument and that's why i'm making truth claims in the in the
02:20:41.480
way that i invite you to make your truth claims okay well thanks for the truth claim opportunity
02:20:46.780
i've enjoyed it kind of um yeah well it's hard isn't it in a book you can be so nuanced and rigorous
02:20:57.300
and you can argue both sides and then as soon as you're out freewheeling you're like hold on but i
02:21:01.600
didn't say that and now i haven't got time and now we've moved past the argument so you've had more
02:21:05.640
time than any guest we've ever had on the show well that's very kind um it's more it's i know
02:21:11.600
it's my fault because i've written a book called six conversations for scared to have and there's
02:21:14.700
six conversations and most people come with a book with one conversation that's that that's what
02:21:19.380
they're talking about so i'm very sorry that i've taken up so much time and uh i hope that there's
02:21:24.240
absolutely no need to be sorry they might have tuned out by no no no no if they have they're not
02:21:29.200
hearing your apologies so you're fine it's true yeah and if we wanted it to stop we would have
02:21:33.680
stopped it and it was good it was good it was yeah it was the intention was not to harangue you
02:21:39.280
about stuff but what we do is we try to interrogate ideas and sometimes people interpret that as them
02:21:45.620
being interrogated that's not absolutely not the intention um so on blm since we you don't agree
02:21:54.980
are we done now or is this a post thing are we still recording well i think we should wrap it up
02:22:00.120
yeah i think we should wrap it up i think i think we've all okay i think we've i think we've covered
02:22:04.440
i think otherwise you end up going into this other whole big subject and i think we've both
02:22:08.020
said something about blm my that was my feeling i think yeah that's absolutely fine that's fine
02:22:12.600
we're done we're done um do you need to say goodbye or anything no no okay we'll leave it there
02:22:18.720
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