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Nov. 3, 2017 - Get Off My Lawn - Gavin McInnes

01:10:19

Get Off My Lawn Podcast #6 | Good Day and Welcome

Let’s meet Gavin’s dad, Jimmy McInnes who stopped in on his way to Florida to tell us all about life in the slums of Glasgow. He busted out of that hellhole and moved to England where he made Gavin and then brought the whole family to Canada. Jimmy’s life provides a good backbone to measure the ways the West has changed over the past 70 years.

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	Good day and welcome back!
	To Get Off My Lawn, a podcast that is free weekly.
	It should be on iTunes momentarily, but until then you should access the podcast through crtv.com.
	Today is the first day we're going to have a very special guest.
	And that is my own patriarch, Mr. Jimmy McInnes.
	James, are you there, my boy?
	I'm here, Gavin.
	Now, you're meant to face the microphone, if you would.
	It vastly improves the audio quality.
	Got it.
	So, Dad, welcome to the show.
	It's a pleasure to have you aboard.
	You know, we drink beer together quite often when you're around.
	You weren't around much in my childhood and it's nice to have you here for a change.
	Catch up on all those years you were gallivanting around selling shower curtain rings.
	And then you think, well let's record some of this, because this is just so scintillating, but inevitably it never turns out, and it's never as fun when you take it from the pub to the microphone.
	True.
	Um, so let's just stick to what we know.
	Write what you know.
	And, uh, you know, I was, I think a lot about your upbringing, and especially as a father, you, you sort of go over everything you know from your dad again.
	It's, it's like you, you rewatch the movie with a different context.
	And I'm thinking about your education.
	And how, you know, today in the West, and I include Europe and North America, it's everyone needs an education.
	That's so important.
	We should don't learn welding, don't learn a trade, go and get a liberal arts degree.
	Whereas when you were a kid, it was everyone should have the opportunity to be educated.
	But if you're not smart, don't bother.
	Well, I think that's true from when I went to university.
	Something like 4% of high school kids carried on to university.
	Sorry, Dad.
	Interrupt.
	Can you bring the mic closer to your face?
	I'll move my chair.
	There we go.
	Yeah, sorry.
	So, as I was saying, when I went to university, only 4% of high school kids went on to university.
	You know, Scotland had a very elitist education system.
	You know, that really believed in equal opportunity, but now it's moved from equal opportunity to equal outcome.
	So now, as you say, you've got, I think, something like maybe 40 or 50 percent of high school kids carry on for further education.
	Well, a lot of the courses are just basically silly.
	You know, women's studies, Social science studies, political science, you know, and they're not, you know, political science and social science, they're not sciences.
	Remember I took that class at Carleton University, Philosophy of Science?
	Oh yes, I remember that and I read the textbook and I phoned up your dean in the science department And I was telling him, you know, this textbook is absolute nonsense.
	So he says, OK, read me a few passages out of it.
	So I read out some passages over the phone and he says, oh yes, yes, that's a problem.
	You've got to remember, you're talking to the Flat Earth Society.
	That story shocks me too, because there's the Dean conceding that an entire department of his school is a complete write-off that there's no arguing with.
	Sorry, that's already done.
	It's like a post-apocalyptic school.
	Exactly, you know.
	And where I think the education system has also failed, is in there because of, I think, flower power children.
	When they eventually went on to education and went into things like a journalism school, you know, they now have kids coming out of a journalist school with no clue what journalism is.
	Yeah, and they also became professors and teachers and then taught our kids and us that Che Guevara is cool and that Marx was a genius.
	Oh yes, and you get all this nonsense about, look at what's happening in South America.
	It's terrible.
	Chavez was ruined, ruined his country.
	And of course we have our Prime Minister who thought Chavez was wonderful.
	Now just to not confuse the folks at home, this is a Scotsman who moved to England and then to Canada.
	So when he says we, he means we as a Canadian.
	Yes, indeed.
	In fact, you know, it's kind of interesting.
	I moved to England when I was about 22, 23, just graduated, and I found a culture shock moving from Scotland to England.
	A greater culture shock than moving from England to Canada.
	Well, Canada's really just a colder Scotland in many ways.
	Well, no, no, I think it's a colder England.
	I think what's in terms of the differences here, you know, Scotland was, well, perhaps it's not fair to talk about Scotland.
	I came from Glasgow, and I think perhaps Glasgow has quite a different culture from the rest of Scotland.
	See Glasgow, that's the city of culture by the way!
	Well, I mean that's just absolute nonsense.
	It's, well, Glasgow at one point was, you know, quite an incredible city.
	But of course, when it's lost its shipbuilding, and when it lost its heavy industry, it very soon became an economic backwater.
	Right.
	And so the rates of unemployment amongst the youth in, and certainly Clydebank, the Glasgow area, is frightening.
	Yeah.
	It's a forgotten... It's like Detroit in many ways.
	It's just violent teenagers on welfare who want to stab you and make babies.
	Oh, yes.
	It's terrible.
	I had a cousin who was a teacher, and she was teaching recreology.
	And I said, what?
	Recreology?
	You're teaching... What's that?
	She says, well, a lot of the children We'll never have a job.
	We have to teach them what they can do with the spare time that they have.
	Oh my god.
	So they teach them how to enjoy yourself.
	Like how to play Monopoly and shuffleboard.
	I mean I don't know the exact courses but that's what the course was called.
	Recreology.
	Remember when we were in Cuba or somewhere like that and you were at a bar and you said Or I can't remember if it was Glaswegian or Scots, but he said, Glaswegians are stupid, ugly, and violent.
	And then some hideous woman, who was Scottish, screams at you, you see you, you stupid man, I'll murder you so I will!
	And you said, you just proved my point.
	Yeah, well, let's say, I mean, I just, I say these things just to rile people.
	Oh, that sounds familiar.
	But you two became best friends.
	Well, we certainly, I'm not sure about best friends, but she eventually got the joke.
	Right.
	Well, it's funny because the class system in England is bizarre, and it's very unique.
	I mean, I'm sure they have it in India, but India is just mimicking England.
	You don't really see that in Canada.
	You see, you know, Stephen Harper seems to sound like the plumber.
	The accents are similar.
	In America, you do sort of have old money.
	They'll have, my kid goes to Harvard as a bumper sticker, but they don't really posture the way that the Brits do trying to get up the ladder.
	It was ludicrous.
	And of course, the thing that determines your class is your accent.
	And the accent was incredibly important.
	I lived in a little village in Buckinghamshire, and I lived on a lane, and there was four homes on the lane.
	And I was right at the end of the lane, and my house was next to an orchard, so I would pass up and down everybody's home.
	I got to know my immediate neighbor and played golf with him on a regular basis.
	You sound like such a ponce right now.
	You sound like an aristocrat.
	Well, believe me, my background is not aristocratic.
	But however, so I was talking to one day and he mentioned the name of the other neighbor.
	I said, oh yes, yes, I know him.
	Talked to him a few times.
	He says, well, you know, we really worry about him.
	Have you heard his accent?
	It's East London accent, you know?
	That'll cause the home prices here to go down.
	Oh my god, it's like the black of accents.
	So I said to him, now wait a minute, I've got a Scottish accent.
	You know, where does that put me?
	He says, oh well, with a Scottish accent you really never know, so we just ignore it.
	It's off the books.
	Yes, I guess it's beyond the pale.
	But there was sort of a strange classism in Scotland, where if you were a student, it's the worst thing you could possibly be.
	And you were poor, but you had a high IQ, so you got scholarships.
	But that meant you had a private school blazer on.
	Oh, but it's terrible, you know, because...
	You know, I had to wear the uniform at all times, going, but what I'd do, I wouldn't wear my cap, because typically people would, boys, other kids would snatch the cap off you and kick it around.
	Right.
	So I had to hide my cap.
	But I was getting into an awful lot of fights as kids, you know, mocking me for wearing a school uniform.
	Yeah, I used to get a school uniform as a Christmas present.
	But I never had, you know, when my mother would buy me a uniform that would be like two sizes too big.
	And she'd say, oh you'll grow into it.
	So, by the time I grew into it, the uniform was in tatters.
	So with the choice, a brand new uniform that didn't fit me, or a uniform in tatters that did.
	Well, you know, physically you can see it when you just look at you.
	Your feet are disgusting because you were wearing shoes that were too small your whole life.
	So your toes are mangled like some sort of Chinese foot binding.
	And then your nose is just like a flat triangle.
	You look like a jack-o'-lantern because it's been broken so many times.
	Ah, yes.
	I got my nose operated on in Canada.
	It was an Eastern European doctor with quite a heavy accent.
	And if he said it once, he said it three or four times, if not more.
	He says, you have a grossly deformed nose.
	OK, I mean, I get the message.
	No, no, it's a grossly deformed nose.
	They're very sensitive about your feelings, those Eastern Europeans, aren't they?
	Well, I don't think he thought very much of me.
	Because I was heavily sedated just before I go in for the operation, and he brought in a paper for me to sign, and he's explaining it.
	He says, well, you see, you may not have enough cartilage in your nose, so we'd like your permission so that we can take out a portion of your bone from your thigh.
	I said to him, look, I came in here with a grossly deformed nose.
	I'm not leaving with a grossly deformed thigh.
	Yeah, where did you get it in your head that I wanted to be gorgeous?
	For what purpose?
	Yeah, you know, but I must say that I do worry about that.
	I remember I was telling my next door neighbor, not next door, but one of my neighbors, She was a lesbian, you know, and I guess we had a... I don't think she particularly liked me at all, but stop and say hi.
	So one day I was out, you know, in my driveway doing whatever and she stopped to say hello.
	She said, how are you Jim?
	I said, well, to be honest with you, I'm very concerned.
	I'm concerned that I may lose my looks before I lose my mind.
	And she says, Jim, you don't have to worry.
	I want to get back to the student thing.
	Why are these Glaswegian kids in the slums beating up students?
	Why is student the worst thing you could be called in 50s Glasgow?
	I'm not sure.
	I'm not sure.
	They were seen as very privileged.
	I remember, this is in Glasgow, I was walking back from a dance, you know, near the university, and a policeman started following me, and he obviously had been drinking, and he started to click my heels as I walked Oh, yeah, I remember this.
	So I kept tripping and not falling down, but stumbling.
	And then I walked on a bit more and he clicked my heels again.
	So I stopped and said to him, you know, obviously, you're looking for a fight.
	Let's just go up this lane here and we'll sort it out.
	He says, right on.
	And he started to walk up the lane.
	So, of course, I took off like a bat in hell.
	That's amazing that there's a world where cops want to fight you.
	But again, that cop wanted to fight you because you were a student.
	Yes, because he saw that, you know, you were, you were essentially, you were an elitist, you got all kinds of privileges, and they had to work.
	And as though you weren't going to need to work.
	But you would say, I got a scholarship!
	I'm not one of them!
	Well, I don't know.
	Well, you've got to remember that there's only 4% at that time.
	There was only 4% of us going on.
	So I guess within that 4%, only a fraction of 1% were the ones who got scholarships and weren't rich.
	Oh, I'm not sure about that.
	Education was, if you went to public schools, Which means private schools.
	No, no, well I meant by non-private schools.
	Okay.
	Education was free.
	Right, of course.
	Right through university, education was free.
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	And actually you got assistance from the government for textbooks.
	So it sounds like it wasn't really a financial thing, it was an IQ thing.
	Very much, that's what I said, it was an elitist thing.
	So why is this cop clicking your heels?
	Oh, well I didn't talk to him about it.
	But the more I hear about this system, the more reasonable it sounds.
	At 14, you basically know if you're smart or not.
	So let's give everyone a test, and if you do badly on this test, you get a trade.
	And I look around at people I know, and my friends' kids, you know, older friends' kids that are 2030, and I think you have nothing going on.
	If you were a welder or a plumber or you had a trade, you'd have your gang, you'd have your Friday night bowling, you'd have a life, you'd have a culture.
	But instead, you're sitting on your ass, you're playing video games, and your stupid liberal arts degree hasn't benefited you whatsoever.
	In fact, it pulled you out of a whole full life.
	Like, didn't your brothers not do well on the test and they went on to have normal trades?
	Yes, I mean, I think it doesn't make any sense.
	My local bar, where I go, is mostly blue-collar guys, but they're blue-collar guys that own their own plumbing business, or electricians, you know, they're contractual, contract people, you know, they'll work for different organizations under contract.
	But some of them own their own business outright.
	There's people who work in car body shops that own their businesses.
	Everyone seems to have a job that makes A contribution of consequence to the economy.
	Right.
	So that's why it was a better system.
	And as you say, yeah, the blue collars are almost upper middle class in New York.
	Remember Tommy, the electrician?
	Oh, yes.
	He's making $120 a year on a good year.
	Now, a lot of lawyers, they don't get up to those kind of numbers until they're doing it for decades.
	Yes.
	You know what?
	It's really surprising that it is not as cherished as it should be.
	Well, it's this myth of equality, really, where we're all exactly the same, we all have the exact same skills, and all we have to do is get in a classroom.
	But anyone who's sat with someone in, say, university math, goes, all right, this is not an acquired taste, this is out of my league, goodbye.
	It's like the MLB.
	Well, I know that.
	I had a math professor at university who actually said to us, You know, some of you will find this very difficult, and I'm not surprised.
	It's a very difficult subject.
	Well, what's the matter with that?
	I mean, I like the old days where you would beat up a student.
	Now I'm on their side.
	You'd be a nerd.
	Let's go beat up some nerds.
	Even in the 70s, even the 80s, it wasn't necessarily cool to have an IQ.
	It was cool to talk like a New Yorker who's Italian and has a leather jacket on and gives nerds a noogie.
	And then in the 90s, all of a sudden everyone had to be an academic.
	And so you have to lower the bar.
	It's just like the Marines or FDNY.
	Fire Department.
	If everyone's coming in, all right, well then you no longer have to do 50 pull-ups and carry a pack on your back.
	Now you can just carry a sandwich bag on your back and do half a pull-up.
	Well, it's not, it's no longer so important that you can meet any of these standards.
	What is important is that you constitute something that would make it diverse.
	Right.
	You know, diversity seems to be the major qualification Well, you wonder when the free market's gonna kick in.
	You know, I have this friend, Charles Johnson, and every time he sees that a workplace, a corporation, has a diversity initiative, he goes, alright, well, you've clearly just made meritocracy your second priority, and you have a different priority on over-success, I'm gonna bet against you in the stock market, and he's making a killing!
	Well, yes.
	What's Obama's wife?
	Michelle.
	I thought Michelle Obama was a VP of diversity in some hospital organization.
	Right.
	But when she left, when Barack became president, They never replaced her.
	So many jobs!
	She was getting hundreds of thousands of dollars as VP of Diversity.
	There's so many jobs where if you took that person away, the world wouldn't just be different, I mean exactly the same, it would be better off.
	You look at all these HR departments.
	Remember when you got in trouble for making a penis joke?
	I talked about this on my other Well, it's strange.
	And they went to the woman that you had offended, and she was unaware that the transgression had occurred.
	Well, it's strange.
	You know, the whole business of sexual harassment has become ludicrous.
	You know, everybody seems to-- everybody wants to be somewhat to complain about sexual harassment.
	I don't think you can make a pass at a woman now without being accused of sexual harassment.
	So I don't know how you can get together.
	Maybe the only way is one of these dating Well, it's an unfashionable time to be saying that, but it's true that there's a lot of them are just total BS.
	A lot of them are real too, but I don't know.
	With the Hollywood thing, you think, just we talked about this on another podcast, just call the cops.
	If you're looking for a way to differentiate between fake allegations and real allegations, we have that.
	We've had it since the Magna Carta.
	It's called the law, but Yeah, I think what's happening to a lot of young men now is all this meddling has made them sort of not want to get involved in anything and they just stay at home and masturbate to pornography and they've sort of given up on life.
	And I'm meeting these interns where they're 24-year-old virgins and there's no stigma there.
	They're not particularly embarrassed.
	And I haven't heard of a virgin that old, well, since you.
	Well, you know, to be fair, I tried desperately to give away my virginity.
	You know, didn't have much success.
	It was marked half off.
	It was in the clearance bin.
	You could have it free.
	I'll even pay you to take it away.
	No, I think it's, as I say, obviously there's a lot of it real.
	A lot of it real.
	But I do think you've got to be able to differentiate between what is a pass and what is harassment.
	I mean, obviously if you continue to make unwanted passes, that's harassment.
	Right.
	Well, it's harassment if you're ugly, it's courting if you're handsome.
	Yes, but I mean, I was brought up in the day where, you know, the joke was, if a lady says no, she means maybe.
	If she says maybe, she means yes.
	If she says yes, she's no lady.
	Yeah, we always said no doesn't mean no.
	Three no's means no.
	So, you get a pretty good education and you're living in Glasgow.
	You got a degree in physics or something from Glasgow U?
	Yes.
	Which, wait a minute, you were partying so much that you went to do your final exams and it looked like it was written in Chinese.
	Well, that's not true.
	That's not true.
	I went and I realized that I really hadn't gone to enough classes.
	I mean, I lived in a bedsitter near the University, and I would listen to the... I didn't have a watch, but a clock.
	I just listened to the University chiming.
	The bells.
	The bells.
	And I remember one day I was lying in bed, and so the bell started to chime.
	And it got to about ten chimes, and I'm saying, oh for goodness sake, I'm going to miss all these classes, but maybe I can get to class by eleven.
	Then another chime, and I'm saying, oh God, that means that at least I can go to a lab at one o'clock.
	And it carried on, and then No, no, no.
	No, I'm sorry.
	I've got the story wrong.
	Oh, boo.
	Sorry.
	Great podcast.
	Great podcast.
	Tune in, guys.
	Sorry about this.
	No, it started, it started the time as one.
	So, that wasn't a problem.
	I knew that, you know, it's going to be... I certainly haven't missed any classes yet.
	Then it got to two, and I said, well, that's okay.
	It's still all right.
	Got to three, no problem.
	Got to 4 and then stopped.
	So that was the day gone.
	4pm, done.
	I had a similar experience.
	I partied my ass off till the wee hours, woke up, and the clock said seven.
	And it was dark out, and I thought, oh, shoot, I've missed the entire day.
	And this is when I ran Vice, so I couldn't get fired, but it was very poor form.
	So I thought, I'll just work from seven till midnight, work my ass off, and I'll make up for the fact that I missed work.
	And I had the TV on in the background, and as I'm pummeling away on the keyboard, I noticed that the evening television was very cheery.
	Very upbeat.
	And then I noticed that outside it was getting lighter as the night wore on.
	And I realized I had gotten up at 7 a.m.
	after two hours sleep and had assumed the day was gone.
	I had a full day ahead.
	I was in the wind.
	That story's much better than yours.
	Much snappier.
	I think so.
	I think so.
	So what brought you to England from Scotland?
	Oh, I wanted to go into computer design.
	And although there was quite a lot of computer manufacturing in Scotland, there was no computer design.
	So I joined a company called International Computers and Tabulators, and there, we, you know, the engineers, we did actually everything.
	You know, the same engineer would write software, design hardware, lay out the circuit cards, Lay out the circuit card manually with a pen and rulers and stuff.
	Yes, we did.
	Our circuit cards, we had a... There was two layers inside.
	We had a power layer and a ground layer.
	Then on the outside, we had the interconnections on either side of the card.
	So we would draw one side of the connections, we'd draw that in red.
	And the other side would draw it in green.
	And of course, the reds should never cross over.
	Right.
	And the greens should never cross over.
	So it really got to be a bit of a kind of a puzzle trying to make these connections.
	But you loved it because you were a young man.
	Were you married to mom at the time?
	No, I was single at the time.
	I married quite soon after that.
	But as I said, we did it all.
	But that was really interesting.
	And then, you know, I think the first memory chip, we used core memories.
	We didn't have solid state memories.
	So memories were core.
	I have no idea what you're talking about and haven't for the past five minutes.
	Well, a core, it's a magnetic core, you know, so it's a wire wound around a metal ring.
	Okay.
	And of course as you put the current through it, it magnetizes the core in one direction or the other.
	And that's how you store ones and zeros.
	So this is, this is, I mean, it's strange because you hear about computers discussed in the 50s and 60s.
	We had the first personal computer way out into the, what, late 70s, early 80s.
	What the hell were you guys making?
	What did those things do?
	They were the sizes of a fridge.
	And what did they do?
	Multiply things?
	Oh, well, as you know, I mean, the first computer, what that was doing was solving ballistic problems for the artillery.
	That was really the first computer.
	But no, we did, our computers did everything.
	They did salaries, they did financial, they did mathematical computations.
	So it's not, I don't think there's anything, we didn't have things that you have today, but we had the basics.
	And as far as I'm concerned, I think the computers today, although they've got obviously very, very significantly smaller, I don't think the architecture has changed dramatically.
	Okay, well yeah, I guess they still have motherboards, they still look like those microchips if you were to bust them open and look inside.
	Yes, well we still have, you know, we've got arithmetic units, we've got memory, we've got, you know, processors.
	Alright, boring.
	So you made a bunch of computers, and then, uh, what made you come to Canada?
	We were just a bit bored.
	Why, were you talking about microchips too much?
	No, no, no.
	I think the only... I'd only been out of the country once when I started to work.
	I went on a hitchhiking trip with my wife.
	She was my wife then.
	We hitchhiked from Glasgow to Greece, actually to the Greek islands.
	We did take a train from Vienna to Athens, but other than that we hitchhiked.
	Tell that story about the train getting stuck, because I think it's indicative of an important lesson there.
	Well, what happened was the railway workers went on strike, and we were in northern Greece at the time, so we were wondering what to do.
	In the particular carriage I was in, it was mostly students.
	Wait, they went on strike as the train was on the tracks?
	Well, during the trip, you know, it was a long trip, so the train got to one, it got into Greece, and then that was the strike was in Greece.
	Oh, I see.
	But then we, so, I thought, well, let's be adventurous here.
	Let's go, there was an island Just off where we were.
	So we managed to get there.
	I honestly can't remember exactly how we got to the coast, but there was a ferry.
	And I remember, we didn't have very much money, and I remember hanging off the side of the ferry.
	So this guy must have been huge!
	Oh yes, very large ferry.
	So how big was this homosexual man you were holding onto the edge of?
	So, as I'm hanging on to this ferry, a ferry with the E-R-R-Y, the Greek passengers pointed me out to the conductor, so he could get my fare.
	I've been telling that story all wrong for decades.
	I thought it was the train stopped in the middle of rural Greece, no one knew why and so they thought we can stay here and swelter in this car because you were jumping the train or we could go out and just explore and you went out and you found an oasis with a lake and all this fun and everyone had a great time skinny dipping and then you all went back and as soon as you got back on the train it pulled out.
	No, no, no.
	When I told you is what happened.
	But it was great fun.
	Now, I'm not sure how we knew that we could go back to the train, because there were no cell phones then.
	All right.
	So that story is nothing like I remember.
	So you decided, because the story I got was, and this might be wrong too, but that Canada wanted to build up their computer industry.
	They didn't have the human beings.
	They just didn't have the population, especially qualified.
	So they went over to Britain and said, who's got an education?
	As opposed to today, by the way, where Justin Trudeau goes up and says, who's Muslim?
	I want 34,000 Muslim refugees.
	Back in 1975, it was, who's remarkably qualified and will improve my country?
	Well yes, I mean that's mainly true.
	Canada didn't really have much of a, really essentially no computer industry.
	So that the only place where you could get people with a computer background was in Europe.
	And when I came to work in Ottawa, a lot of the people there were Englishmen.
	Oh yeah, I remember that as a kid.
	All our friends were... In fact, all my friends I have now, today, this is, so I moved here in 73.
	People, I'm still friendly and see them often.
	People whom I met in 73, 74.
	Englishmen.
	Well, you see that with the Rhodes and stuff.
	They all have McAdams and McClure names.
	That's Scots, but it seems like the Canadians, they love to talk about diversity.
	They tend to trivialize the fact that this influx of Brits in the early 70s kind of shaped the entire country.
	Oh, and it was shaped long before that.
	Scots made a tremendous contribution to Canada in terms of obviously the fur trade, the Hudson Bay Company and what have you, and indeed universities and banks.
	But in the natural In the History Museum in Ottawa, there's virtually no mention of the Scots.
	The Chinese have a Chinese laundry there.
	Lots of the voyagers are, you know, lots of room to the voyagers and the Inuit and the natives, but the Scots go unheard of.
	So Lorraine, my wife and your mother, called and started corresponding with the director there.
	And here, at a most curious attitude, he says, well, you know, we have to have diversity.
	We have to have Okay, I'm fine with that.
	Let's just stick to mathematics.
	How many came?
	How much did they contribute?
	How much did the Chinese laundromat contribute?
	Let's just go purely by numbers if you want to have no feels about it.
	Well, it's about diversity.
	As our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, says, our strength is our diversity.
	That is true of restaurants.
	Well, I like Mark Stein's comment, you know, about diversity.
	You know, seven old Jews on a panel is not very diverse.
	Six old Jews and a jihadist is much more diverse, but not necessarily better.
	But, I mean, it's not.
	I mean, diversity doesn't work.
	Multiculturalism doesn't work.
	No, I don't think it does.
	And there's a reason that everyone wants to come here.
	I think that the West, through trial and error, has created a culture that is not necessarily ethnically pure.
	It doesn't really put ethnicity at the top.
	It puts values at the top, and that's a unique trait.
	Oh, but that's changing.
	That's changing dramatically.
	Right.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	I'm talking about pre, you know, 1970.
	Right.
	Well, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, told immigrants they shouldn't assimilate.
	He said it's not necessarily something you want to do.
	Well, they're obviously following his advice.
	And what you have is blocks of places where, indeed, I think in every major city in Europe, there are no-go zones.
	There are young Muslim males saying, this is Muslim territory.
	You mustn't drink here.
	You must dress modestly.
	But even within their own community, they'll be telling women that they can't be in this cafe.
	This is a man's cafe.
	I don't care if you're Muslim and you're wearing a hijab.
	Even though you totally support us, you can't come in here.
	There's a lot of places in Europe you'd think you were in Islamabad.
	Right.
	Didn't you recently scream that in a restaurant?
	Well, I didn't scream it.
	I remarked upon it.
	I'm listening to your accent here as you say, no go zones.
	And I'm wondering, because I've heard you in your sleep say, I don't want to go!
	Ach, I'll bart you, you wee prick, so I will!
	And then you wake up and you go, good morning my boy!
	How, absolutely A1, like Sean Connery with a monocle.
	How did we get from the Gorbals to Sean Connery?
	Well, I have a theory about accents.
	My theory is, and I've only got one example, namely myself, to support my theory.
	My theory is, I mean, the reason you have an accent, obviously, you copy, you're just aping your parents and your peers.
	Yep.
	That's how you develop an accent.
	And of course, the only way you can copy that, if you have a good enough ear to, you know, see the various intonations within all the harmonics and what have you, within the sound.
	But if you have, if you're tone deaf, which I am, It's very, very difficult to copy these accents.
	So, after spending, you know, the first 20 years of my life, or first 25, 22 years of my life, developing this Glasgow accent, It's very difficult to lose it.
	Dad, I'm saying the opposite.
	You don't have a Glasgow accent.
	Well, I... It's... This is a Glasgow accent.
	She used people, by the way.
	Hanging's too good for youse.
	No, no.
	No, no.
	That's... No, that's... A lot of that is not so much accent as slang.
	Okay.
	So, you know, so I don't use Glasgow slang.
	But, you know, in Canada, People view my accent as a very strong Scottish accent, where in Glasgow, people view my accent as some affectation.
	Right, yeah.
	Maybe they're both right.
	Yeah, because you were only in England for a few years, but that seems to have had a major impact.
	Is it possible that you secretly liked their classism and agreed?
	No, no.
	I was in England for six years.
	Now what I did was, I don't think I changed my accent in England, but I had to change my diction, because Glaswegians are very lazy speakers.
	Right.
	And typically they don't finish the word cleanly.
	So I had to improve upon that.
	Yeah, they sort of kill all the consonants.
	Puerto Ricans do this when they speak English too, and they say, Hey, why are you sure got me van?
	Hey, why are you doing?
	It's going to be pie mini.
	And the Glaswegians is like, wait, you're going to be there in two days, you know?
	Well, I feel that a lot of Glaswegians talk as though they have a fist in their mouth.
	Yeah.
	You know what I've noticed too about Glaswegians?
	They have this worship of the underdog that is an obsession, and it trumps logic, it trumps everything else.
	They love Palestinians because they see them as an underdog.
	Now, Palestinians using children as terrorists, bombing people, murdering Israelis, that's unfortunate.
	But they, they still, you have, you've got, I think it's Celtics?
	I can't remember what soccer team it is, that wears kafayas, just because they, they, they go with the underdog.
	Or when I bring, brought Emily, my American Indian wife, to, to Strachan, my uncle's pub, he says, one of the guys says, ironically, he's pretending, I mean, he's trying to be as un-racist as possible.
	He goes, can I ask you, what's with your eyes there?
	They look a bit chunky.
	And she goes, oh, I'm an American Indian.
	And he goes, oh my God!
	And he grabs her hand and he starts kissing the top of it and crying.
	He has real tears on his face and he goes, sees what we did to these people.
	That was bloody terrible.
	So it was.
	And I just thought, this is, this is irritating.
	It irritates me about the Scots.
	Well, I don't know if that's a Scottish thing or not.
	It was just this one Glasgow drunk.
	No, Dad.
	It's a pattern.
	Everything is out of spite.
	They're like Canada.
	The way Canada says, oh, who are you?
	Well, I'll tell you what.
	I'm not a good old boy.
	I'm not a, I don't drive a pickup truck.
	I'm not shooting my guns.
	You go, no, I didn't, I didn't say what aren't, what isn't American about you?
	I said, what are you about?
	Well, I was called the Elvis's brother syndrome, where if you were to ask, Kenny Presley, what he is.
	He said, well, I don't wear blue suede shoes, that's for sure.
	And Scotland is like that with England.
	They say, oh, we don't celebrate Christmas.
	That's English.
	We're Hogmanay.
	We do New Year's Eve.
	Well, there is a lot of animosity against England and Scotland.
	And to me, it's just absolutely silly.
	I don't know.
	That MD in Scotland has ever been harmed by any Englishman or any English policy.
	That's not what it said in Braveheart.
	Well, you know, I don't believe in reliving all those ancient historical fights.
	Otherwise, you know, that's the major problem with Some of the issues we have today, especially with Muslims, they go back to the 7th century for their quarrels.
	Right.
	Obama encourages them.
	He says, you know, you might want to remember the Crusades.
	Well, exactly.
	And of course, that's every Muslim apologist.
	That's their comeback.
	What about the Crusades?
	I'm happy to get into the Crusades.
	They were a reaction to Muslim tyranny.
	They were a rebellion.
	Yes.
	And then you have this, the other line they bring up is the Spanish Inquisition.
	So we've made, and I think Obama said exactly that, you know, we've made mistakes too.
	Oh yeah, sorry about that.
	It literally won't happen again, unfortunately.
	You know that, but there is something that we're doing right now that is linked to William Wallace.
	And that is drinking beer.
	Now, Dr. Drew said this, and I thought it was very profound.
	He said, the reason Scots have a predilection to booze is they were under siege for 700 years, and the ones that don't enjoy conflict are extinct.
	The ones that prevailed tend to enjoy conflict.
	And what is booze but giving yourself a handicap and turning walking downstairs into a battle?
	And the next thing you know, your life is a war.
	No, I think he's stretching it there.
	Well there is something unique about Scotch though.
	Even my Mexican relatives notice a strange clenched fist when they drink Scotch.
	There's just, there's something about us that's unique.
	Well, I hope so.
	I mean, I hope there's something unique about all cultures that make them a culture.
	You know, if you didn't have something unique, how would you identify yourself?
	Well, yeah, I don't understand how... You know, with just some kind of amorphous, you know, nothing that you could actually point to and say, well, that defines who we are.
	If you're not in a position to define who you are, then you don't have a culture.
	Yeah, well, it's okay for gay pride parades or anything else, but Westerners aren't allowed to be proud of their accomplishments.
	Well, but, you know, homosexuals, that's not a culture.
	It's not an accomplishment either.
	It's your God-given libido.
	Well, I'm not sure anything is God-given.
	I'm sorry, you're naturally born gay, and why are you dancing in the streets?
	That's like dancing in the streets because you have diarrhea when you're hungover.
	It's just your body dealing with the hand it was dealt.
	Jumping back to 1975, what was your first impression of Canadians when you got there from England?
	Eh, that really, I didn't see any significant cultural difference.
	There's nothing really that struck me as, you know, this is very different.
	You've got to remember that most of the people that I worked with, a lot of them were British, of British background, and certainly all were of European background.
	And of course, I was working in an engineering environment, and I didn't see any real difference between this group of engineers and the group I worked with.
	In England?
	In England.
	Well, didn't you find that the Canadians weren't hard enough drinkers?
	Well, no, because I drank with Brits.
	Well, I thought the story was you met, you became middle class pretty quickly, and you noticed that the middle class don't drink as hard as the blue collars, so you went to a bowling night.
	Oh no, that's in England.
	In England, that's where I felt there was A substantial difference between the cultures that I was exposed to, the culture I was exposed to in Glasgow, and the culture that I met in England.
	You know, in Glasgow, it was very common, you know, you go into a bar, and you might start talking to the chap next to you.
	Right.
	And within a few beers, he'd be your best friend.
	And then, a few beers later, he would be in tears.
	Then another few beers, he'd want to punch the hell out of you.
	That never happened to me.
	I don't think I saw a drunk in a pub in England.
	Really?
	I don't remember seeing someone drunk in a bar in England.
	You know, I noticed that about Fox News.
	You'd go to the pub across the street from Fox, and you'd never see any co-workers there before 8 or 9, and it was only after they were done their shows.
	God forbid they would have some beers before their shows.
	But at Rebel, uh when we were shooting up there you'd go out to the pub at say 12 30 p.m and the place would be replete with rebel cameramen anchors everyone and then when everyone was done at six oh my god we had an entire wing and i couldn't help but think this is canada Taking on Scottish traditions, in a sense.
	Like, at the airport, you go to an American airport, and there's no one really drinking at noon, one, two, but you go to a Glaswegian airport, at 11am they're bringing their wine glasses to the gate, which is allowed because it's so common, and it's the same with Canada.
	Every Canadian airport, the bar is full at noon, but not in America.
	Well, I mean, let's see, there's a...
	There's a boat, it's called the Waverly.
	Oh yes.
	It's a paddle steamer.
	The world's longest running paddle steamer.
	And they have trips down the Clyde and I think the trip starts about nine in the morning.
	The bar downstairs in the ship It's full.
	Jammed.
	And people, people stay there for the whole trip.
	It's a sightseeing tour.
	It's all about what you see on deck.
	The deck is a ghost town.
	But, you know, there are portholes that you can look out and see the, see the Clyde.
	Well, I thought the story was with Canada where you went, my middle class co-workers Excuse me.
	Don't party enough.
	They took you bowling and you went, wait, where's the bar?
	No, no, no.
	That's in England.
	English bowling?
	English.
	In England.
	Oh yes, they have ten pin bowling in England.
	So, as I got to know these fellow engineers, I was invited on a Friday to go bowling.
	Oh, great.
	Let's be sociable.
	So I go along to go bowling.
	And I was amazed.
	This is a Friday night.
	In Glasgow, people would be pounding the booze back.
	And there's no bar in this bowling... Alley.
	Alley.
	Oh, God.
	Well, I think what happened in Canada is you went, maybe you gave up on them immediately, and you ended up with all the technicians at the computer company.
	No, no.
	It's a curious... I think it's still true today.
	There seems to be, it's a real difference between hardware engineers and software engineers.
	And I'm sure I'll be proven to be right, but in general, software engineers don't drink.
	But hardware engineers drink.
	So you go to a bar after work, and there's all these hardware engineers there, but not software engineers.
	And this might anger you, but what's a hardware engineer?
	A guy who screws a hard drive together or something?
	No, a hardware engineer is someone who actually designs the chips and puts the chips together to make the system.
	Whereas a software engineer is one who writes code.
	Right, okay.
	Okay, so he's a writer.
	And the other one is a carpenter of sorts.
	Well, that analogy is really a really poor analogy.
	So, because I grew up in the slums, basically the gorbals of Ottawa, but it was because you would drive me out to these poor technicians' homes, and I would hang out in trailer parks because you wanted to drink with their dads.
	So I had a very blue-collar life, even though we had a beautiful home with a pool, and I had everything I wanted, except the bionic man, of course.
	You got me Oscar fucking Goldman, his boss.
	Well, I wanted you to get into the management side of things.
	I like how mom says, that Oscar Goldman is probably worth a fortune now.
	And I looked it up and it was $20.
	I could buy it right now on eBay for $20.
	And wasn't she right then?
	No.
	No, that's not a lot of money anymore.
	But it was true that we'd go to Bayshore and stuff.
	And I loved those kids.
	I loved hanging out with them.
	We would do stuff like there were these beautiful girls, Debbie and one of them-- I forget her name, but they would make us go buy them cigarettes.
	This is the '80s, and they had feathered hair and lumberjack jackets and skinny jeans.
	And we'd buy them cigarettes, and they'd give us kisses in exchange.
	I mean, it was a much more fun childhood than what was going on in the middle-class suburbs.
	So thank you for that.
	Although I have to admit, when we were riding in the van of some of these parents and the pot smoke was wafting back, my little seven-year-old lungs would get nauseous from the smoke.
	Well, I remember one of the She had a marijuana plant in her garden, and someone stole it, and she reported it to the police.
	Remember that, because her contention was she was concerned it would get into the wrong hands, like kids.
	What if kids, what if eight-year-olds stole it?
	Then they smoke some marijuana, as eight-year-olds are wont to do.
	Alright, we're running out of time here Jimmy.
	So you made the trek from the slums of Gorbals to rural Ottawa.
	You had two wonderful kids.
	One of them is basically a male model on the outside.
	Breathtaking to look at.
	Mile-high cheekbones, bee-stung lips, swimming pools for eyes, thick flaxen hair that looks like an Adonis.
	And that's why I'm beginning to wonder if you're really my kid.
	Yeah.
	Was there a male model that lived next door when I was born?
	Certainly the insurance agent was gorgeous.
	Gorgeous with a low IQ.
	Kind of everything.
	So how, I'm sorry I'm getting texts from Emily here, so if you could go back and change anything out of these various exedi, I don't know what the plural of exodus is, these various pilgrimages, would you change anything from 1950 to now?
	Yes, I think what I would do is I would have immigrated to Australia.
	Whoa!
	That's a big, that's not a subtle change.
	No, I think, I don't like the way Canada is going now.
	Canada is, we've got Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister, who is really just, his father ruined Canada.
	His father was the most highly educated moron I've ever encountered.
	His son takes after him, but he's not even highly educated.
	Right, yeah.
	I think he was a part-time drama teacher and a snowboard instructor, which is just exactly the kind of experiences you need to head up a country.
	To run the second largest country in the world as far as landmass goes.
	Yeah, so we've got that, and we've got Kathleen Wynne, who is the Premier of Ontario, in my province, and she believes that man-made global warming is the greatest threat to the Earth.
	And we now have, we have now signed this Paris Accord that for us to meet the Paris Accord will cost tens of billions of dollars.
	Wow.
	Because we're nowhere near meeting the commitment.
	And Canada's responsible for what percent of the Earth's global warming?
	Even with the extremist leftist scientists, I think they say it's something like 1.5%.
	It's of that order.
	It's of that order.
	It's a trivial amount.
	No matter what Canada does, no matter what Canada does, it will have zero effect.
	So, to me, I think Trump, you know, for all his frailties, got the most, the key elements right.
	He got man-made global warming right, withdrawing from this nonsensical Paris Agreement.
	It's ridiculous that unless China and India and America do something, even if it was true that man-made global warming was a concern, nothing's going to happen.
	And you can't try and hold India back.
	You know, India needs energy.
	Right.
	So Trump got the man-made global warming issue right.
	He got the Islam issue right.
	You have to ensure that people who are coming into your country are not bent on destroying you.
	And three, he got the borders right.
	You know, you can't have a country without borders, where Justin Trudeau has got all these issues wrong.
	He's totally into this man-made global warming nonsense.
	He's welcoming in 35,000 Syrian refugees with no ability to vet them.
	No ability to vet them whatsoever.
	Well, how do you vet a jihadist?
	You say, do you promise that you're not a jihadist?
	What do you do?
	You give them a CAT scan?
	No, no.
	I hear this argument all the time.
	And it's just, I mean, the argument goes back to, well, Why charge someone with a crime?
	All they have to say is, I didn't commit the crime.
	No, no, no.
	You don't pay attention to what the person is saying, you pay attention to what has he done, what is his background, who are his friends, where was he?
	You know, so you amass that amount of information to make the decision, and if that information is not available, then the answer is no, you can't come in.
	So it's nonsense to pretend that you, if you say to a Muslim, do you believe in Sharia And if you believe in Sharia law, you can't get in.
	You know, because what you have to do is find out what, how has he lived his life?
	No, but dad, I'm adding a third option here, where I think a lot of them are too easily radicalized.
	Look at Fort Hood, where the guy joined the military and he was clearly pro-American and then decided he wanted to kill people.
	And you have to take action against these mosques which preach this nonsense, you know, and you have to take action against what's on the internet which supports all this nonsense.
	So you have to do something, and you have to do many things, you know, and so unless you're doing whatever you can, you're not doing enough.
	So Canada has got this 35,000 Muslims, they've got global warming, and Justin Trudeau is welcoming everyone to come to Canada.
	So we have, you know, thousands of Haitians crossing from the U.S.
	Those are Haitian hyenas?
	Haitians then, Haitians.
	Thousands of them coming over to Canada and we're not stopping them.
	And they're not refugees.
	They're in the U.S.
	Well, it sounds like we're disagreeing about this vetting thing, but I'm saying don't have as many Muslims coming in.
	What about Christian refugees from northern Iraq?
	What about Coptic Christians from Egypt?
	What about whites that are being attacked in South Africa?
	We've got plenty of people who have similar values to us who are dying to come here.
	Why are Muslims even on the list?
	Then prioritize it.
	Yes.
	You know, look at these poor buggers in Syria that The Yazidis.
	Oh my God.
	Welcome them and because they, they are indeed refugees.
	They're being annihilated.
	Yes.
	Raped and God knows what.
	Oh, the Ezra Levant was telling me about these women describing their ordeals and after the first hundred rapes, they just lie there begging for drone strikes to take them out because they'd love to die.
	Oh, it's horrendous.
	Horrendous.
	And Justin Trudeau refused to prioritize that.
	Refused to.
	He's a vile human being.
	Oh, no, it's not he's a vile human being.
	He's just an incredibly stupid man.
	And who is vile is the people he has in his office.
	He's got a Muslim And he's the one who dictates what Trudeau does with respect to Muslims.
	He's the one who promised Trudeau that he would get him the Muslim vote.
	And then we have... But he did!
	Yes.
	And then we have Gerald Butz.
	And as far as I'm concerned, Gerald Butz is really our Prime Minister.
	And not only is he our Prime Minister, he's our Finance Minister.
	Well, they were best buddies at McGill College.
	This is just his old college buddy he's decided to put in the helmet.
	And Gerald Butz has a degree in political science.
	Yeah, it's like Valerie Jarrett in the White House.
	She's the sort of Rasputin who does the whispering into the ear.
	But I'm interested that you chose Australia and not America.
	Because I loved when I went to... Well... Because Australia, I feel, is... I liked the attitude.
	of the people in Australia.
	You know, I really, I mean, I go to America, I stay in America five and a half months of the year.
	Right.
	In Florida.
	So, I love America, and I've got some fabulous American friends, but I felt that Australia was more adventurous than the U.S.
	In what sense?
	Well, it's, I mean, trivial reasons.
	It's much further away.
	Oh, I see.
	So, from your perspective, it's more, not the culture is more adventurous, No, no, no, no.
	That's, you know, he's going to, you know, traveling all that way.
	I didn't know what to expect.
	Didn't you look up, weren't you considering Amsterdam for a while?
	No, no.
	I really, all I did was, I decided that I was going to go somewhere for a year.
	Somewhere abroad for a year.
	And I just applied to jobs that I saw, and the first two jobs I saw, there was a job with Philips in Holland, and a job with another company in Canada.
	And I applied for both jobs, and the company in Canada came through first.
	Huh.
	But I thought Philips, I thought was kind of interesting because... What's Philips?
	Sorry.
	Philips was a very, very large company involved in both in defense and in commercial business.
	It was a technical company.
	It actually was a defense company as well.
	And they got rid of the defense business.
	But there in Philips, although it was in Holland, the language of the company was English.
	So all my interviews were in English.
	I thought it was funny because I talked to the technical people in the morning and then the personnel manager took me to, for lunch, into the Phillips dining area.
	And of course it was a normal Dutch meal where it's cold meats and what have you.
	You make up the sandwich yourself.
	So I make up a sandwich and I go back to the table.
	And I take a bite out of my sandwich and look up and the personnel manager is saying grace.
	Oh, right, because they're such religious Protestants.
	Oh, yes.
	So I had to quickly...
	Put the sandwich down and cover the bite I'd taken out of the sandwich with a napkin.
	Well, you also said that Dutch seemed phenomenally boring.
	Well, it was strange.
	You know, in Amsterdam, the Red Light District, there was all kinds of activity.
	You know, women, prostitutes, posing in shop windows.
	You know, the place was at midnight, the place was going mad.
	All your favorite stuff.
	Yeah, then I went to this little town where Phillips headquarters were, and at nine o'clock at night, the whole place was deserted.
	Streets were deserted.
	Everyone was home.
	So, if you had stayed in Scotland, would your life have been miserable?
	I certainly would not ever, ever go back to Scotland now.
	Scotland is very, very depressing.
	You know, I think something like over 50% of people who are employed work.
	With some government level or other, whether it's European, British, Scottish... Oh, it's English Charity.
	Didn't they move all the banks up there just to appease them?
	Well, I really mean, the Scots had a tremendous reputation at one point for their ingenuity.
	I haven't seen that lately.
	So you think your life would have been missed?
	Well, there's no hypothetical because you would never stay there.
	Well, I'd had to move because there is no work in my business there.
	Right.
	Yeah, it's funny how the Scots have that fake parliament and they're still talking about separating and you think it just sort of seems like a rich kid whose dad gives him a fake job at his corporation to make him feel good and he just goes around and pushes numbers around at a desk.
	Well, I think we see this a lot in these various local governments wanting to separate.
	And what it is, is politicians, they'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.
	Right, like with Quebec.
	Exactly.
	And of course, Quebec is in the same position as Scotland.
	They can't survive without their parent.
	You know, the kids in the parents' basement.
	Yeah, it's a spoiled brat saying, and this is so true of American liberals and the liberal movement in general, is it's these spoiled brats saying to their daddy, I hate it here, running upstairs and slamming their bedroom door as loud as they can because they're mad, yet they're still in his house and they're old enough to move out.
	That's why I had you on the show today, because this show is trying to bring back the patriarch and take the stigma out of being a dad.
	But I feel like you may have accidentally set us back in time.
	Quite a bit, by just being so profoundly unlikable.
	Well, I think it's a talent I have.
	The best argument to smash the patriarchy yet was hearing you open your gob.
	Smash the patriarch, more like.
	Well, you know, that's why I'm not in politics.
	I have no clue who would actually vote for me.
	Alright, Dad.
	Thanks very much for doing this, and I'll see you in about eight seconds when I walk into the engineering room.
	Okay, my dear.

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