Douglas Murray and Joe Rogan critique modern ideological movements, exposing how "white fragility" and "hereditary guilt" frameworks—pushed by figures like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo—demonize majority groups while distorting facts, such as exaggerated claims about police killings of unarmed Black Americans. They link this to Europe’s "tall poppy syndrome," where success breeds resentment, contrasting it with America’s celebration of self-made individuals, and warn that gratitude—not punitive measures—counteracts societal fragmentation. Murray’s refusal to engage in topics he lacks expertise on underscores a rare honesty amid polarized debates, while Rogan highlights how silencing dissent, like the Hunter Biden laptop suppression, erodes trust in institutions. Their discussion reveals how ideological zealotry and resentment fuel division, threatening democratic stability and shared truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I don't like to say exactly what I did, but I did decide that after lockdown one in my native country, the UK, I wasn't going through that again.
I mean, lockdowns are bad everywhere, but in the UK, they just kept doing them.
And those people, I don't know what we can do with them after this because they're going to lose their meaning because they've just had a whale of a time.
It's also fortunate that the people that went for it were CNN, and they're just so untrustworthy.
And people know how biased they are, and they know how...
Socially weird their fucking anchors are just these awkward Non-relatable people that no one feel like if there's someone on TV And that I mean pick a person like Jon Stewart is a great relatable person who I find to be a brilliant guy Who's a kind person if Jon Stewart thinks you're a piece of shit.
I'm gonna listen right, you know But if Brian Stelter doesn't like you That doesn't mean anything to me.
I mean, the ideological stuff aside, it's not very good.
I watched CNN a little while ago.
Early last year I just spent a bit of time watching it and everything in the coverage was horrible and inflammatory and everything in the advert breaks were for like adverts about the KKK's history in America.
So like all you saw all the time was like burning crosses and that was the relief from the interview stuff.
Because if you're dealing with a show that's only an hour long and it's supposedly a new show, you kind of have to pay attention to only the bad things because you have to be aware of those bad things.
Maybe those bad things are something like Russia invading Ukraine, something you actually have to pay attention to.
But it's not an accurate assessment of the world at large.
Is there a problem with just the idea of having news, just news in that way, like where you're just going to something to see what's happening in the world?
So it's almost always going to be negative.
Like there's no news channel of record that we're aware of ever that is focused on like really positive stories.
It wouldn't make the national news, but it's nice local stuff.
In my own lifetime, everything seems to have gone wrong since 24-hour rolling news.
I'm just sure of it.
I saw it myself.
It just, yeah, because of the need of the news to develop the story.
I mean, I used to get this, uh, when I started off in journalism, people would phone you and say, um, uh, would you be willing to come on and call for X now that Y has happened?
And then, so say, say somebody's got into a scandal.
Would you come on and argue that we should now call for an inquiry?
And then you have people like, would you be willing to come on and call for the resignation?
I always joke about that one that they do where they say, now here's an incredibly important issue and it's a world important issue and that's why we're going to discuss it for three minutes.
Like, that interviewer would ask the tough questions and would prod you about your personal life and then get deep and make you uncomfortable, you know?
The Strange Death of Europe they interviewed me on.
I remember because a friend of mine in America said I almost drove my car off the road.
When they said you were coming on.
Oh, wow.
And then Madness of Crowds, I was told actually by somebody who knew somebody on the inside that they, when I suggested that they should interview me about the Madness of Crowds, the person who suggested it almost lost her job.
And it's happened that fast in my own life, in my own career.
But no, when you did used to sort of do NPR, there was always that, in that sort of media, there was always that sort of funny thing where the interviewer would interview you about your book, having not read it, and try to catch you out on it.
And she then complained that I and others doing that had led to death threats against her, which then became the news.
Because within 24 hours it became poor Kathy Newman suffers death threats as a result of interview with alt-right hero, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, all that had happened was that it turned out that what they claimed to be a death threat was somebody wrote on YouTube, one person wrote on YouTube, R.I.P. Kathy Newman's career.
And one of the things I think I'll never get over about his career to date Is that none of these people who tried to take him down ever spent any time trying to work out why he'd risen.
And I just, I always felt like if somebody who I was very ideologically opposed to or really had a lot of differences with was like packing out arenas of young Like, cool, clever, smart people night after night.
Well, there's this narrative that gets bandied about in certain social circles, and the narrative with him was alt-right, anti-trans, misogyny.
And it was, this is who he is, and then you can look at his supporters, and you see how his supporters attack people who criticize him, and this is who he is.
And that narrative, if you went against that narrative, you faced a lot of blowback.
You know, like I still will speak to people occasionally who are not in the same line of business, the same line of work, and they will say like, so do you think like J.K. Rowling is a transphobe?
You know, because there's just a slime trail after these attacks, which you never completely clean up.
But if I didn't know him and someone tried to say something terrible about him, I'd have to take that into consideration.
It probably worked on people who didn't like me already or people who would be more inclined to form a stereotype or something based on their appearance.
I'm problematic.
I host cage fights.
That's one of my side jobs.
I commentate and explain how people are beating the fuck out of each other.
Especially if you have a job, and you get fired from that job.
That's the big one.
If you're self-sufficient, if you have a podcast or something like that, you might lose some advertisers, but hopefully if your show is still good, you'll still gain numbers, and after a while the residue will die down, then you'll get advertisers again.
I know people where that has happened, where they've lost advertisers due to being air quotes canceled.
But if you have a job, it's frightfully easy to fire someone.
Or you've offended a certain number of people that work there.
And the thing about work is people don't like working.
They don't like being stuck in a cubicle.
They don't like being stuck in an office.
And they feel a certain innate sense.
There's a level of frustration that's undeniable.
And one thing that people would do when they encounter a level of frustration is they lash out.
And if they can lash out inside the rulebook.
Like, what's the rulebook?
I was offended.
Fuck him.
Get him fired.
They're just tense.
And they're just...
They have like a certain level of a lack of compassion already just because of the fact that they have a low-level subtle torture that's being put on them every day just by having to show up there.
I mean, I have some things I know a lot about, a few things I know a lot about, a number of things I know a bit about, and just masses of stuff I don't know anything about.
And so, obviously, my rule, wait for this, my rule is not to talk about things I don't know about.
You know, the thing is An enormous number of people don't follow that last year.
I mean, they actually do think that they have to know about everything.
So it is like, and then there's one of the reasons why the last couple of years have been so terrible for so many people, you know, has been this thing of like, well, what do you think about pandemics?
And what do you think about vaccines?
And what do you think about ivermectin?
And what do you think about BLM? And what do you think about Trump?
I didn't write anything very much about the pandemic because, as I occasionally said to critics, I just...
I had not spent any of my life writing about pandemics or thinking about it before.
And I should have done.
Definitely because it became a big thing.
Would have been useful to have studied it.
But I mean, literally it was one of those things where if I was at some conference and there was a panel on pandemics, it was one of the ones you knew you could step out from.
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Because I kind of thought, it's not what I know about.
But this thing of holding forth on everything, everyone moving from being COVID experts to Afghan withdrawal experts to Ukraine experts back to something else.
Well, that's great because one of the things that people appreciate about you is your honesty.
And that's a great way to reinforce that.
Never talk about anything that you're not really sure of.
You can be completely...
In the face of controversy and in the face of extreme criticism, you're able to stand your ground and have logical discussions about pertinent issues.
And some of them are these hot button topics that people just, they have these takes that you're supposed to accept and you're supposed to adopt, and then you're supposed to broadcast that out to let everyone know that you're a good person and send that signal out so everybody knows that you're on the right team.
And you have always been the guy that's like, actually...
I was once told by a policeman in Northern Ireland, never shut a door entirely.
And it's a quite useful piece of advice and it's one I've tried to keep in mind in the last couple of years as I've seen people going off what I regard as a reservation.
I just try to be, you know...
Never closed the door entirely, but it's been tricky in the last couple of years.
Well, you learn about character when people encounter adversity.
And this was the first time on a global scale where we encountered a universal enemy.
That was scary to some people and not as scary to others.
So there was a debate on how to deal with it and how to react.
And there was certain places that were just saying, we're just going to go business as usual and protect the people that are in danger.
And then there's other places to go, fuck that.
We're going full authoritarian.
Like we were talking about Singapore earlier today.
And I have a friend who's a trainer in Singapore.
He trains UFC fighters at the Performance Institute in Singapore.
Totally locked down.
Everyone's locked down.
He caught COVID. He tested positive.
He had no symptoms.
He had to be fully isolated in a quarantine facility for 12 days.
Never had a symptom.
Nothing.
All their athletes, they have to work out by themselves.
So they're doing solo workouts to prepare for fights.
It's crazy.
So they're in rooms, like they're quarantined in a single room or an apartment, and they just have to do push-ups and sit-ups and shadow-box, no sparring, no technique training, and then they're going to have a cage fight soon.
It was so confusing, the whole thing, I thought, because after that first bit, when you sort of thought, okay, it's not what we thought it might first be.
Right.
You know, there was that moment at the beginning of the pandemic, which was almost, a friend of mine said, it's almost romantic, isn't it?
Everything, the whole atmosphere changes in the world.
Everything's put in a different perspective.
And then that sort of moment of realizing it wasn't that, but it was hard to tell when that turn happened.
And in the meantime, we were all, as I say, isolated.
We lost all our social antennae.
And then a whole set of crazy things happened, which, I mean, would derange large numbers of people.
You know, I mean, I think the fastest whiplash one was the movement from everybody stay in your houses to everyone go out onto the streets and protest against racism.
I mean, that was a whiplash.
Even if...
You didn't completely follow the logic of people who said the pandemic is the pandemic and then who said no, racism is the pandemic.
And I was like, oh, it's like pandemic season.
We just get to find different pandemics.
And what's the next one?
Even if you didn't do that, you had the moment of watching and thinking, okay, hang on, thousands of people are out on the streets.
And they're packed in.
Screaming.
Screaming.
And they're not masked.
And if this is what we're being told it is, this is going to cause a massive spike.
And I think that's one of the reasons why now, I mean, we're in a situation where, I mean, I don't know about you, but I mean, among my friends, there are people who believe almost anything now.
I mean, you know, my favorite are friends who I know have put illegal drugs in their body.
I don't want to shock you, Joe.
I don't want to shock you.
Friends who I know have put illegal substances in their body who have suddenly become all my body is a temple about the vaccines.
I am unsympathetic to some of that too, but I know people that have had horrible adverse effects that people want to bury their head in the sand about.
They want to pretend that that's not a real thing.
They were all saying that John Kerry got the election stolen from him.
I think that there are very...
Righteous people, that they're ideological zealots, and if they're working in some sort of an election poll place, they can fuck with things, and they can hide ballots, or if they're in a very Democrat-heavy place, they might throw some of the ballots away.
It can have an effect, but the question is how much of an effect does it have?
Well, it's a brilliant strategy if you're a foreign country and you want to sow the seeds of despair.
And that's one of the things that they've proven that the Internet Research Agency in Russia does.
That's right.
All these troll farms in Macedonia, I'm sure in China and other countries as well, they're doing things to exacerbate these arguments and to make sure that people...
They're exacerbating them, but they don't necessarily cause them.
And that's where some of the dispute lies.
I just think that, you know, if in my own country of birth, in Britain, if we had had no elections for 20 years, which the losers had agreed they'd lost in, that would be pandemonium.
Because I always say the thing with elections is it's not just that you win and you know you've won and that's great and you get to run the country.
It's that if you've lost, you try to work out why you've lost.
So the Democrats wasted four years not working out why maybe they hadn't put the most lovable candidate forward in 2016 and maybe Maybe there was a reason they lost to Donald Trump.
If you actually had to work out why you'd lost to Donald Trump, you could do some really interesting soul searching.
What is it he taps into?
That would be really good for the Democrats to have done.
And they didn't do it.
And I worry about that on the Republican side too now.
It's like, what was wrong with our campaign in 2020 that meant that we lost?
If you don't accept you did, you can't work that out.
And so you just go round and round with the same bullshit.
Because if no one thinks that the elections are real, if people think it's rigged and then less people participate in them, and then more people are into QAnon or January 6th, that kind of shit, that can exacerbate, could really fuel those fires of militias and all these people that think they're patriots.
There's a wild, unsophisticated group of people that are not very thoughtful about all this.
They're not introspective.
They don't take into consideration nuance or just the sheer volume of data you're dealing with when it comes to elections, when it comes to politics, and all the factors, special interest groups and lobbies and all that.
They don't think like that.
They think good guys and bad guys.
There's an unsophisticated group of people in this country that only think in terms of good and bad, and there's a lot of them.
I don't know if they're real, but there's a lot of these people that have like, when I see an American flag in someone's Twitter bio, I automatically assume they're a bot or they're one of these people.
Either you're one of these people that just is all in on good versus bad, and you have this very narrow bandwidth of understanding when it comes to just human psychology and the way the world works in terms of influence and politics.
People are susceptible to a guy like Trump.
And that's one of the things that I think people found very scary is that this cult of personality thing happens.
And this one person gets all these rallying people.
And you would see the people at his rallies, at his conventions and these things where he would do.
And they were that person.
They were that person who was very easily manipulated.
It's very sad to see some of the people, and obviously some of the people on January 6th were disgusted and deserved what they got.
But some don't deserve what they got and are being treated really roughly.
It's very sad seeing them when they do speak about it because, you know, part of you is also like, you were kind of willing to give your life for Donald Trump.
Yeah.
Jordan and I spoke after January the 6th, and it didn't go down very well with either of our followers, but it wasn't the point.
The point was partly to say, this is what's gone wrong.
And one of the conclusions that we helped each other come to was, if you'd have gone back five years in American public life and said, in 2020 there's going to be...
You're not going to be able to believe anyone in the country.
This, whatever it was, 80 people from the NSA and the CIA and so on, they all gave their view about something they knew nothing about to help Joe Biden win the election.
So in that year and a half, so many new issues have come to the forefront that it's almost impossible to give all of your attention to this Hunter Biden laptop story because that laptop story was pertinent at the election time.
All your tech platforms deciding to assist one candidate and a massive amount of your intelligence community assisting that candidate in order to stop getting out the story of corruption in what is now the first family.
Well, I thought that I could get myself banned from Twitter quite fast if I said the following, and I was very tempted, but I was just like, I need to keep my Twitter account.
I kind of wanted to say, look, Leah Thomas isn't a woman.
I can tell you why, because I think she's quite hot.
It's a very strange standard, but you can still have a functional penis and have sex with women and still be considered a woman in some people's eyes, like this transgender inmate that impregnated two women inmates.
I owe the insight to Camille Padlier, who I think made it first, that yes, there's a sort of weird fluidity issue.
I think it is...
I think it's a case that there are certain basic things which, if they start to fall apart, you can feel how everything else can as well.
And...
Sex is like the first thing we know.
Boys and girls.
It's not gender assigned at birth.
It's not like a bigoted doctor.
It's just like there are boys and there are girls.
And tiny, tiny numbers of people who it's less easily determined.
But that's not anything to do with trans.
And yeah, and if you take that away, I think it is true that there is a sort of demoralization, everything becomes murkier.
As I say, just like an average day's news becomes, you feel, I feel like almost anything can be shoved on you if you agree to that.
Or pretend you don't notice it.
That's the thing.
I think we talked about this before in relation to the communist era in Eastern Europe.
That sort of part of the point that the humiliation of going along with things you know aren't true ends up having an effect down the road because you just nod anything along.
Yeah, I have a friend who grew up Mormon, and one of the things she said to me once, it was really interesting, she said, because she left the church, and she said, I'm really susceptible to bullshit.
She goes, because I grew up agreeing to things that are nonsensical.
And because of that, because I had just, like, given all of my, you know, when you just, like, all of your opinions are decided by a church, and the church was written by a 14-year-old boy in 1820. Yeah.
But it's sort of the same principle sort of applies when people just accept, you know, like with wokeism, when you accept these ideological givens that aren't logical.
And it seems to me very clear that, for instance, you take Christianity out and other things will be put in.
And they don't even need to be identifiable religions.
Right.
I mean, our own age has decided in much of the West that There's this sort of form of watered-down spillover of Christianity, which will become the sort of religion, which is the kind of diversity, inclusion, equity world, where you constantly struggle for greater justice, all of which is a sort of very watered-down version of a little bit of Christianity.
And I remember watching this guy give this speech, this fucking boring speech, on this sort of establishing this idea that because you don't have a religion, so we're going to be atheists, but with plus, we can establish sort of a moral framework.
All those new atheists who sort of started off in the 2000s, Sam Harris and others, in my experience, they all got a little bit nervous about what was on their shoulders.
Christopher Hitchens certainly did.
He started, I think, latterly in his life to get a little bit nervous about what was happening.
I remember once asking him what He said people were starting to ask him to officiate at their weddings.
Yeah, and that was like, he didn't say anything of what he said was wrong.
He still obviously believed everything he believed.
But that's a slightly troubling...
It's a place to be in because you start to sense people are wanting you to replace the vicar or the priest.
And that's not the point.
Then you're in life of Brian territory, aren't you?
You should all think for yourselves.
Yes, we all think for ourselves.
It was always a problem of atheism.
It was an invitation to not do one thing.
But nothing follows from it as to how you should live your life.
Do you think that's just an inherent thing about being a tribal primate, that we have this desire to have someone wiser, a leader, and then even better, if you can have a godlike figure who gives you a set of rules that you have to follow, or they're...
Horrendous consequences, and it keeps everyone in line.
In the 2000s, I started to think, if somebody came along and declared prophethood at the moment, they could do quite well.
I mean, think of those hucksters on US television who still take money from people, saying that they can only build the church and have their helicopter if you send in your dollars, you know?
Those people still exist.
There's a guy who's still selling his silver water that he blesses from the River Jordan or something.
I think if someone came along and had a really good cult, like a real solid cult, like really well laid out, be rational, think for yourself, be kind, examine all evidence, people would join into that and then it would...
And that's like a lot of the people that complain online and they think of themselves as activists because they're on Twitter and they think they're shaping culture by just complaining about stuff online on Twitter.
Yeah, and they think that if they kick really hard and nastily, That's really good because it'll cause a reaction.
I'm fairly convinced that this is one of the explanations for the really horrible behavior of a lot of people in our time who do things in the name of goodness, which they should just be ashamed of.
If a boy thinks a dog getting murdered in front of its owner, when a lady blacks out and the dog's screaming for its life as its intestines are getting pulled out.
I went to a zoo once in Denver, and I'll never forget, they had this small primate cage.
There was, like, a couple different primates that were in separate cages, but the cage where this one monkey was in was no bigger than this room, and this monkey was screaming, just, like, in agony, like, ah!
I'm very excited that you're out there because, like I said earlier, I think it's so important that someone's courageous in these times where there's certain taboo subjects or there's certain subjects that you're not allowed to objectively discuss.
You have to follow these ideological patterns or you get chastised.
Well, what I started to realize in recent years was that too many people were allowing really bad people a free pass on certain things.
And the one that started to really worry me was this thing Like a man who calls himself Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo of White Fragility Frame.
I just noticed they started saying things that were just wicked, like really wicked things to say about groups of people.
And it's really started to worry me in recent years because if you were to tell any group of people that there was something wrong with them from birth, Make something evil about them.
You're setting them up for a real problem in their life, like a psychological problem, social problems, relationship problems, STEAM problems, all sorts of things.
When I started reading people like this, these people who called themselves anti-racists in the modern era, I just couldn't believe they were getting away with it.
And I started to get really worried about this because this started to pump itself into the system very deep, particularly after Floyd.
Departments across the US, departments of government across the US started to teach this stuff.
Schools started to teach versions of this stuff.
Universities obviously did.
And it was sort of out there in the popular culture.
And I started to think, this is...
This is going to lead somewhere really dark if there isn't a stop put to it.
Because you couldn't do that, you couldn't do that, shouldn't do it, about any group of people.
But it's a wild thing to attempt to do against majority populations.
I don't think it's possible to say to a minority group in a country, because of your skin colour, you're evil, and you can never get out of your skin colour and think they're going to love you.
So you take advantage of the fact that there is this white guilt out there because it's recognition that this country was, in fact, founded with slavery.
It was a major part of this country.
And that, in fact, laws were set in place after slavery was over that completely disenfranchised black people, locked them into terrible neighborhoods, redlined so that they couldn't buy homes.
So there's all this reality to the racism of the past and then the current racism.
But then to try to paint it with this insane broad brush that says everybody.
Did you see what happened with him when he was saying that a disproportionate number of white people were identifying as minorities to try to get into colleges?
You fucked up because you just said that it's an advantage for being a minority.
And she said, excuse me, but if white men could have solved racism, you've had 400 years to do so, so we don't need to listen to you.
She thought she was so damn smart.
Turns out she throws these...
She's the person that I thought was a legendary figure that didn't exist, like a mythical figure.
She's the person who does these dinner parties where she charges rich white ladies $4,000 to come to dinner at her white woman's house and be lectured to about their racism.
Anyhow, this large lady was the mythical beast in question.
And there she was, like shouting down Andrew Sullivan.
And anyhow, but no, I just think this...
It's got really, really ugly because as you say, I mean, there's been racism throughout American history and it'd be idiotic to deny it, but it's not the story of America.
Racism is a part of the story, but it's not the story.
It's the same thing like slavery is part of the story of America, no doubt about it, but it's not the only story of America.
And one of the things I became interested in was like why this race hustle Ended up going through everything.
So it's now gone through all of our understanding of the past.
And in America, this is just catastrophic because everybody in the American founding was living at a time where slavery was normal everywhere in the world.
And so, yes, they were complicit in slavery, for sure.
Everybody was complicit in slavery.
And every society was doing it, which is no excuse for it.
But there's this American version of this, which now is like, this is the only lens through which we can look at the past.
Everybody on the north side and the south side in the Civil War.
Now gets the same treatment.
Abraham Lincoln, who obviously was, until this generation, one of the great figures of American history, literally gets pulled down from his plinths across America.
And it's all for the same accusations.
It's all for accusations of racism or slavery.
In Britain and Europe, it's about colonialism, obviously.
And it becomes this weird thing where white people are the only people who acted badly in history.
Therefore, you have to punish them now.
One of the points of writing The War on the West was to warn against this because I just think it has such catastrophic consequences because there's obviously going to be a blowback.
There's no way people are going to put up with that.
It's a version of what I describe in The Madness of Crowds that happened in the other arenas.
I write about sex and all that stuff.
You're an idiot if you deny that women weren't able to make their own choices as much as men in history.
Definitely, women had less freedoms in countries like America until quite recently.
But if you think that the answer to that is to punish men for a bit, you're a fucking idiot.
Same thing with gay.
Nobody denies that gay people were prejudiced against until very recently.
If you think the answer to that is to beat up on the straight people, You're a fucking idiot.
And it's the same with this.
You should be able to accept that racism happened in American history without thinking, as the new race hucksters do, that the answer is to address it now by beating up on white people for the fact that they happen to be white.
I think it's a moral disaster that's happening.
And I think that the whole way in which the past is being rewritten To mean that, in America in particular, that you don't have the right to feel pride in your past is just terrible because everybody basically wants to be able to feel pride, particularly if they have reason for it.
If you've got a good reason to feel pride in your country and you've not got everything right, of course, but by and large you've done some good things, you should be able to feel pride in that without being made to feel like you're some kind of bigot and Well, what's fascinating is that this is a rare discussion, although it's logical.
Like, just the points you're laying out, pushing back against this idea, because these ideas are very much like religious ideas.
And people just accept them, and they know they're illogical, and they just accept them, and then quietly, in private, maybe they discuss it like, I'm not privileged.
And I worry about those because subterranean conversations, if you don't do something about them, have a tendency to blow out in a really ugly way.
But you can't do this crap.
You can't do the white privilege stuff, the hereditary guilt and all that stuff without thinking it's going to have an effect.
Donald Trump is the least of the effect you might get from that.
As I say, there seems to be no viability in telling majority populations to think horribly of themselves for the rest of time.
To say, for instance, the best thing you can do is to sidle through life without anyone noticing you and without causing any harm to anyone who...
It has been oppressed or, you know, historically looks like somebody who has historically been oppressed.
I mean, I go into this with the issue of reparations, but I mean, that is such a damn minefield.
And all the leading Democrats before the in the runoff in 2020, we're talking about reparations.
I do understand what that means.
I mean, at this stage, reparations in America means a massive wealth transfer from people who look like people who did something in the past to people who look like people to whom the things were done.
How are you going to arrange that?
People don't want to do voter ID. You're going to get them to do like DNA ID to work out where they came from.
And what do you do with the people who are half descended from slavers and half from slaves?
What do you do about the people?
I mean, Voltaire said in the 18th century that the only thing worse than what the Europeans were doing to the Africans was what the Africans were doing to the Africans.
Selling their brothers, going and kidnapping their neighbors and selling them.
What do you do with the people descended from those people?
Did you see the image where Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer got on their knees and they were wearing the African garb, but unfortunately the pattern that they picked was from a tribe that was very much involved in the slave trade?
I mean, the weird gerontocracy in America is just bizarre.
Fair, very weird.
But these people are all trying to hold onto it.
Everything they do about it is just like Tony.
Look at Nancy Pelosi coming out after the trial of Derek Chauvin.
And you remember she comes out in her mask and she stands on the steps with members of the Black Caucus and she looks into the skies and she says, Thank you, George Floyd.
unidentified
Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for social justice.
When every other country and every other democracy talks about corruption, they have nothing on the corruption within the top ranks of American politics.
But people like this, moments like that, when they do this...
I think it was at that same event where they had to be winched back up off their knees, where she did the thing of say their name.
Like, say the name of the people who've been killed by the police.
And it happened in a show I saw recently on Broadway.
Somebody did this show, and I said...
A friend I was with, I was like, the thing is, there's something odd about this, because everyone says it as if no one knows the names of, like, Breonna Taylor and people.
Well, you know them all!
And, like, everybody knows the name of Freddie Gray.
I mean, there was a time in the past when they would have been, but this is not now.
And it's got this provable result now in the American people where you...
I mean, it's something I write about in the book.
If you look at the stats on...
The year that George Floyd was killed, the opinion polls asking Americans how many people they thought, how many unarmed black Americans they thought were killed by the police in a year.
The people who described themselves as liberal, a vast number thought it was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000.
People who described themselves as very liberal, A large number said they thought the figure was over 10,000 unarmed black Americans killed every year by the police, and the figure was 10. So Americans...
I know there was 10 people who were unarmed and shot by the police, and I know that there were more policemen shot that year by armed black men.
I don't know exactly what the number is on armed.
But the point is that the American public's perception of this, and I think this is a media thing, funnily enough, I think it's like the Washington Post and others rightly at the beginning of the 2010s realized this is something we may have underplayed in the past, and we should do more on it.
One of the things that seems to have happened is that by deciding to concentrate more on it, they've given the American people a significantly wrong-headed view of what's going on in their country so that the focus actually makes people think something else worse is happening than what is happening.
And if you're off by several orders of magnitude like that, In your perception of what's happening in your society, like something is wrong.
And I can only think it goes back to this thing that in 2020, when when the news first came about George Floyd, I remember isolated in the UK at the time, I remember thinking, wow, I mean, can you do that in America?
Like, do they do that?
And the answer, obviously, is that day, yes.
No, you can't.
The policeman went to prison for the rest of his life.
But there is this moment like, is that our country?
Is that what we do?
It's a very disorientating moment, particularly if you're in isolation and you have not got your social antennae out there, and the only way you've got to communicate and imbibe ideas and facts is through social media, which of course is the worst possible way.
So it's actually provable that Americans have a distorted view of what's going on in their own country in relation to these matters, which is not helping matters.
Because I think it's one of the things that is causing this view that as a result, we have to do like nasty stuff to white people publicly, which is like a moral catastrophe built upon a misunderstanding.
And that is not to downplay anything that's happened in this country.
But we are now in the realms of overcorrecting something.
Which has a vision of what America is that is at the very least very out of date.
And I have a section in the book about the moral panics that have happened consistently in the last decade on American campuses.
Where, like, for instance, there's one of the campuses in America, Minnesota, goes into lockdown because students report a member of the KKK is sighted on campus walking around waving a whip.
There are numerous other examples I give of similar weird incidents.
Somebody finds a shoelace It's a noose.
It's been put up as an attempted lynching.
And on another occasion, another campus, there's a tie that's found from a rubbish sack and everyone goes into lockdown.
There's another lynching attempt on campus.
My point is that, first of all, this always happens in the places least likely for that to happen.
If the KKK were to gather in public, let alone be walking out on their own, solo, It seems unlikely they would choose a liberal arts college campus to do it.
But the point is that the places where it's least likely to happen, it's like the evergreen thing, are the places with this distorted...
I mean, you know America better than I do, but it doesn't feel like a country where the KKK is any longer able to just congregate and walk around campuses and carry out hate crimes.
And you've got to pretend that people who aren't racists are racists.
And that is just a horrible position to be in for lots of reasons.
But one of them is the sheer equality issue.
I remember at the beginning of the Floyd era, Eric Weinstein said, Brett's brother said, if I can't tell you that you're wrong, you're not my equal.
I thought it was a very neat way of saying it.
I have a way of saying that.
The point of equality isn't that you make up for the past by making one group better in the present, which is the Kendi route, the Angelo route.
It would be to say, look, I mean, as a white person, and I hate the idea that people I have to identify like that, but it's like being asked, how do you think of yourself?
And saying, well, I'm a male.
I was like, well, I don't really spend my time thinking about myself.
But if we have to think of ourselves in these terms, I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of my skin color.
All the main medical journals in America, I cite them, have all fallen for this racism stuff, the new racism.
And now you have people actually saying, hospitals saying, they're going to prioritize people based on skin color in order to make up for historic racism.
That is going to lead America to hell.
You can't do this stuff.
You can't tell a group of people that they're worth less.
This all seems to be a thing that has left the university and then infected corporations and infected institutions and infected other things.
This used to be a thing that, years ago, you would hear people, they would complain about this ideology that was running amok on college campuses, and people would be like, hey man, why are you complaining about stuff that college kids are doing?
They're thought experiments, they're trying out ideas, it's no big deal.
But there was other folks that were sounding the alarms.
They're saying, these people are going to leave.
They're going to graduate.
And they're going to get jobs in corporations.
They're going to shape the culture of these corporations.
And then they're going to shape the overall culture of this country.
Because these young people are indoctrinated into this very, very rigid ideology.
Because conservatives in the U.S. used to say very smugly, In recent years, they're going to go and they're going to do their degree in lesbian dance and knitting and then they're going to find out they're going to enter the real world.
There's always this very right-wing talking point thing.
Turned out to be totally untrue.
Those people left and they got jobs like that.
They went into HR departments.
They've got lots of work and it's a self-reproducing organism.
It also became because of the fact that it's this ideology where if you push back against it, particularly like the racism stuff, you get labeled as a racist, which is one of the worst things you can be labeled.
Well, by the way, I mean, being called a racist is still the worst thing you can be called in American society, or any Western society, actually.
It is the worst thing, other than being a child abuser.
And being a child abuser, you can prove.
This is the thing.
Something that increasingly disturbed me in recent years was But aside from that, the biggest reputational damaging things that could be leveled against you were neither provable nor disprovable.
Now that's a problem.
So he's a misogynist.
It's quite hard to prove somebody's a misogynist.
He's a homophobe.
It's quite hard.
Like, he might just not be bored with gay marriage.
There's a very, very small minority of people who are just like, yeah, yeah.
And you can't disprove it ever completely.
And that's where the same happens.
And people say, well, you could sue...
You're going to sue over whether this unprovable allegation that's highly damaging is true or not?
And it is damaging.
Of course it's damaging.
Because it says that you're a bigot and you think of some people as being less than you.
And that is your worldview.
And indeed the driving thing in your worldview.
And it's a horrible thing to have thrown at you.
And And one of the only ways I've ever found for, like, trying to counter it is how about if we got to a position where the people who throw those allegations around and know they're not true pay a reputational price of equivalent size.
So, for instance, when CNN attacks you, the people who do it end up losing their jobs for saying something that's totally untrue.
And if in general that could happen, That there was a reputational cost for levelling accusations that are not true.
That era would be righted.
But at the present moment, it's a totally cost-free exercise.
It is, but do you think that ultimately people will course-correct, like they'll recognize the folly of this sort of pattern of thinking and behavior and accepting these kind of ideological narratives, and they will shift back and forth because they're upset with it,
that maybe there's been this overcorrection, And that this will lead to, unfortunately, a rise of more far-right ideology, and then it'll eventually, like, meet somewhere in the middle?
It's like, you know, everyone who believes in progress as if it happens is something we're all going towards, you know, always has to account for the fact that things like, you know, Russia sends tanks into Ukraine, it starts bombarding Ukrainian cities and its civilians.
Didn't they get the memo?
No.
That's how the Kremlin behaves.
You saw the video from Shanghai the other day of people screaming from their windows.
Is you can do what the hell you want with the people.
So we're incredibly lucky in a country like America, any Western country, that we even care about complaints of human rights.
We're really lucky we live in societies like that.
And it's not normal.
And it's not the median historically.
And it's not the median in the world today.
It is highly, highly unusual.
And so therefore, it's worth protecting.
And it's worth making sure that you don't overcorrect and provoke really ugly stuff in reply.
And I do have some hope on that, because I do think that the hucksters I tried to take apart in the War on the West, I... I also say, towards the end, I give examples of the people who are obviously going to replace these people.
They're a really good, much better, much more intelligent, much more thoughtful, much better writer black Americans than Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates coming along, or already there.
People like Coleman Hughes and Thomas Chatterton Williams and these people.
They give me enormous hope for America because these are just – they're the people you want.
And if all these people who are doing the overcorrection and believe the way to harmony in America is to punish white people and tell Americans they have no right to be proud of their history and so on, if those people could get out of the way and we could have a reasonable conversation about these things, it's fine.
But I do think there is this group who are white and black in America who are trying to lead America to a real precipice.
And I suppose some of them are making money, some of them really believe it, some of them just want to see the whole damn thing burn.
But you cannot war on the foundations of an entire society and think that you're going to get away with it without any repercussions.
They just think about what is beneficial to them currently.
And if they can push whatever they're pushing, whether it's anti-racism, whatever it is, if they can profit off of pushing that, and it seems like they get a lot of attention doing that, they make a lot of money doing that, then that becomes their business.
That's what they're in.
I mean, if either one of these people that you talked about, Robin DiAngelo, if she wanted to, like, adjust and change her perspective and write a new book, like, maybe I got it wrong.
Like, this is my new take.
I did Mushrooms one day, and I had a new take on white racism, and here's what the real problem is.
I wonder where this all goes, you know, and I wonder what your perspective is, because I feel like the COVID crisis and the pandemic was just a perfect storm of isolation, Fear, anxiety, all these things.
And authoritarianism, the rise of control by these governments that decided what you could and couldn't do as far as work and where to go.
And all these things, they also exaggerated this feeling of helplessness that people already had.
They pumped up the anxiety of these people.
There's a lot of people in 2018 and 19 that were already fucked.
I think that the atomization is going to be much worse than anyone realizes.
Much, much worse.
And the atomization, not just of views, but of information, of facts.
You know, having different views is so last century.
You know, we all have different facts now.
And actually, if you think of the last few years like a family tree, just people we know in common, You start there, vaguely in the same space, and you go down and you go, let's say, COVID, and George Floyd, and Afghanistan, and Ukraine, and you take that...
Almost nobody in that family tree of things ends up in the same place on everything.
And some of them end up in such a different place that it's just, I don't know how I can reach them, apart from, as I say, never shutting the door entirely.
And there are people now who just, like, they have their thing, and they're in a kind of unreachable place.
And I think that's very likely to be what the future's going to be like for a long time.
I had a late friend, Deepak Lal, a wonderful Indian-born economist who I remember towards the end of his life, he used to say, you know, everyone says, Douglas, that the era of atheism will just sort of continue.
He said, it won't.
We're entering an era of polytheism.
Everybody has their own gods.
And I think that's true.
It's not just they have their own gods, they have their own obsessions.
And they have their own versions of everything and how they got there and what they're meant to be doing.
And so I think it's going to be a huge cacophony.
I mean, what we have at the moment is a cacophony.
But it's going to get worse and worse.
I mean, let me give you one quick example.
It's a kind of personal one.
But I found in recent years, even before we were locked away, when I did public events, I found it increasingly hard to prepare for them.
And in part, that's because, I don't know if you experienced this, my experience is that the older you get, the harder things like public speaking become.
And it's exactly the opposite of what people think.
They think it must get easier and easier.
And I find it gets harder and harder because First of all, you know all the things that can go wrong.
It's like comedians who have heard all the hecklers and get more and more nervous about going out on stage.
But the other reason is that I became aware in recent years I was less and less confident that I knew what my common reference points were with the audience.
Like if I mention a certain person, do they know what I'm talking about?
If I mention this person or this event, have I totally lost them?
And the answer I think increasingly is yes.
It's very hard today to know what your common reference points are with 100 people even in a room.
You would have to work out, for instance, even just on mundane stuff like who wins elections, you'd have to work out roughly, who am I speaking with about that?
Do people think this happened and that happened?
Are there people who think this is the case and that's the case?
And that's even before you get on to just whether they know anything about the past.
And so I feel that atomization very, very strongly to the extent that when somebody says something that I don't expect them to know about or a reference point I also have and share, you know, I'm thrilled.
I think, good, it's like we've drunk from the same well.
And increasingly, you can't rely on that.
You don't know if you've drunk from the same well, whether you have the same background of knowledge and references, and whether you've got anything in common other than just the very basic starting point of being two human beings.
And I think that's going to get worse and worse.
There are going to be people who just won't speak to people because they didn't share their views on something.
And they're going to drill down and down and down.
This French writer I'm very fond of, Michael Welbeck, predicted that at the beginning of the 2000s about the atomized society.
We are living through it and it's going to get so much worse.
And that's why the only way to reverse that is to try to think of things that you can agree on.
That's why elections, it's like, it's useful to agree on them.
But there are other things as well, like, you know, it's good to agree on roughly, you know, I don't agree on it, but are you a force for good or a force for bad?
Do you have things to be proud of that you're all proud of?
Common reference points.
A friend of mine says, if you talk as a nation about we, you're talking about the widest group apart from, much wider even than the sports team and its supporters, of feeling, you know, some kind of kinship with something which you might not have actually done something for.
So somebody says, my team won.
We won on Saturday.
It's great.
You didn't do anything but yourself.
Maybe you stood on the terrace and shouted at the team.
But it's we.
And that's a very, very human need.
And it's like that with nations as well.
People like to be able to say, we, you know, we did that.
We stopped this.
We did this good thing.
And I think people should work on that, on those things.
In America, it would be great if people could just agree on a few good things America's done.
Same thing in my own country of birth, in Britain, where it's a little less bad at the moment.
It's nice to agree on a few good things we've done.
We've also conned people into thinking that everyone is special and that sort of – When you add that to this feeling of not having agency or not having...
They're not treating you the way you deserve to be treated.
There's this feeling that people have.
Because there's this sort of...
There's an enforcement in this country that everyone is unique and special.
Everyone's amazing.
Everyone's doing such a great job.
But no, there's a lot of mediocre people.
They're lazy.
They have no energy.
They eat bad food.
They don't sleep enough.
They're addicted to your phone.
And the output that they have is unexceptional.
The work that they do is not that good.
And you have a hard time saying that to them if you're their employer.
If you're their employer, it's hard to fire those people.
They have to do something really wrong, or they'll sue.
They go to HR about issues, and then they'll just change their gender.
And then you have to deal with that.
Or they'll become non-binary, which is my favorite.
Tim Dillon loves that one.
Because we were talking about it, he goes, it is the best way for someone who's like a white woman to claim victimhood.
I hate that one because I hated the term that was used in a derogatory way about gay people.
And now people are like, there's a guy, teachers at the university in the UK who recently said like, oh, I had a student come up to me after a supervision and say it's so good to see a visibly queer member of faculty.
Because if someone doesn't work as hard, but they want the same amount of attention, that becomes a problem.
And that is where this world of everyone's special and everyone's doing amazing stuff.
No, it doesn't make you a better person to be a person who's more successful or a person who's more driven or ambitious or disciplined, but it makes you better at those things.
Doesn't make you a better person.
You're no more valuable.
You shouldn't be treated better.
You shouldn't have better laws that apply to you.
But you're better at that.
And that's why there's people that, you know, when a basketball game is in the final quarter, you hope LeBron James has the fucking ball, right?
You hope an elite athlete Rises to score for the team that you're rooting for, because that person is measurably better.
They've put in the effort, they're measured.
Are they equal in terms of like, you know, the way you think about your friends or a guy that works?
Yes, as a human.
Yes, in terms of the law, in terms of consideration and love.
Yes, yes, equal.
But not in terms of what they've accomplished or what they're capable of because of the amount of effort and focus and drive that they put towards a specific thing.
Some people don't want to do that work.
So those people find these cultural shortcuts for getting exorbitant amounts of attention.
And it could be you paint your nails and call yourself queer.
But then a lot of it is, and it's underplayed, is you also work hard.
Yes.
And I realized some time ago that I use, because I'm Born in Britain, I have that natural tendency to underplay something.
Well, I'm just lucky in that.
And somebody said to me, you shouldn't do that.
You do work very hard.
And I thought, yes, but saying, well, I've been lucky in that, is a nice way to say to other people, oh, I haven't really had any input, and you don't need to particularly.
It's a sort of...
It's a flattering thing to say to somebody else, which ignores...
Something I quote at the end of the book, one full phrase of Branch Ricci I came across, he said, luck is the residue of design.
Luck is the residue of design.
A lot of what we call luck has come about through something other than chance.
So I used to say, you're lucky to be born in America, right?
And on one level that's true, which is like you could have been born in the Great Pool, and you could have been born in Mogadishu, and it would be a lot worse.
But there's also something that covers up, which is the luck is that people before you made good choices that meant that you are in a situation which is more optimal.
And it's not simply luck that you have in America the right to freedom of speech.
Like that's not simply luck.
It's luck in that you were born here as opposed to Mogadishu.
But it's not luck that America ended up with that situation.
It is the residue of design.
It's the consequence of men and women making good decisions, prudent decisions, like not being crazily short-termist, setting up a state well, You know, there's a great description in a novel by Hilary Mantel about the French Revolution in the first days of the meeting of the Parliament after they've killed the king.
And she says, you know, they wanted to talk about rights.
She says, I'm paraphrasing, she says something like, This was the day to talk about laws, but rights were more attractive to talk about.
So they put off the discussion of laws for another day.
And that's how you get what you got in the tarot and everything else.
And this is the thing is that we have to find a better way to understand what we often mean by luck.
You have luck in your life sometimes because other people have made good judgments that are effectively for you before your time.
Which is really strange because American exceptionalism was always predicated on the idea that you work hard and you can make something in this country.
There was a big part of the motto of what it meant to be an American.
That this is a place unique in that we celebrate winners.
We were talking about Steve Hilton earlier, my friend Steve.
I've known Steve for a long time.
We actually met in Hawaii.
Our families became friends on the beach before he was ever a political commentator for Fox.
Great guy.
But one of the things he said about moving to America from England is that he said, in England, it seems like people don't want you to succeed.
He said there's like an active resistance to you succeeding, whereas in America...
One of them is to do with the perception of, well, class in the UK in particular, the perception that is not totally unfair, that there are, you know, again, fortunate and less fortunate places to be born, fortunate and less fortunate backgrounds to be coming from, and that you sort of shouldn't class shift too much.
That is kind of there.
And now this view is outdated, but the money is held by people who've inherited it.
It's not totally outdated.
We still have a monarchy and a sort of system of aristocracy that that does happen with.
Whereas in America, you...
People are self-made.
There's a guy in the UK who I met a couple of years ago who was very early into North Sea oil, and an American friend said, you're the only person of your class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur.
And he said, I'm the only person of my class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur.
Because people who had money just sort of sat on it and spent it and gambled it and had less.
And I notice it all the time in America in the system.
I really do love it in America.
There is this feeling of...
You know, it's like everybody.
It's not, look at that guy in the car, that bastard.
He's taken his money off the backs of oppressed workers.
Because he was the guy who'd really made it from there.
And he'd left.
And the other guys were there.
And so the funniest guy in the pub in Glasgow still...
Wasn't great once Billy Connolly returned.
And I had friends from Australia, like Barry Humphries and that generation of Australians.
When they left Australia, which was for similar reasons, they found that like back home in Australia, people hated them or like very distrustful of them.
But there is this sense that there are paths to victory, that you can work really hard, and if you have a vision and you get to that pinnacle of success, people will celebrate you.
Well, you know, I write a chapter in the Wall of the West on resentment, which I think is a huge, huge human driver, which has only one answer to it.
As I say in the book, it's gratitude.
It's to turn around resentment into gratitude.
But resentment is one of the biggest drivers that human beings have.
And I was reading a lot on the nature of resentment for this book.
And I found a very powerful passage in Nietzsche where he says that one of the only ways to deal with the person of resentment, as he describes it, is to turn around to the person and to say, you are correct.
There is a reason why you have resentment.
There is a person you need to blame.
There is a reason why your life isn't what it is meant to be.
The reason is you.
Now, the problem is that is the last thing anyone wants to hear.
But it is the most important thing that a person filled with resentment should hear.
You are the person you have become because that's you.
How many decisions did you make to be who you are now?
How many times did you fuck it up?
How many times did you stay in bed and hit the snooze button?
How many times did you not take a risk, not take a chance, when people around you did and they became wildly successful?
How much anger do you have towards them instead of recognizing that you had made an error and now it's time to use that information and apply it to the rest of my life?
The amount of effort that you put into it is generally proportionate to the amount of success that you get.
Because if you put a lot of effort into it and you're doing it correctly, you're doing it better all the time, people tell people about it and then it spreads.
But if you're in a business where it requires you to be hired by a corporation, well yeah, you can't really fuck up.
You can't make mistakes, and you can't be the person that says, this is my error.
Because people just fire you.
And then, you know, why'd you get fired from that job?
Well, I fucked up, and this is what I did wrong.
Well, why'd you do that?
Well, I thought I was right, and it turns out I was incorrect.
The prison of being confined to someone else's expectations or what they require of you in terms of the way they want you to behave and think and do, that is so restrictive.
It's so difficult to break out of that and find your own, whether it's, I hate that, to find yourself or find your identity, but there's something to that, right?
What do you actually enjoy?
What should you be doing?
If you could wave a magic wand and give yourself a perfect path of life and career, what would it be?
Do you even know?
Or are you so locked in this system that you find yourself entrenched in?
We're trying to climb this corporate ladder and it requires you dressing a certain way, behaving a certain way.
All those things are the enemies of freedom because they're so restrictive.
But I hate it when you see people who, and that's the people who become really resentful, is I thought I could achieve it and I never bothered to try to take the risk.
Angry about other people and angry about how fast it all went.
You know, that's my favorite thing.
Norm Macdonald's book, the semi-memoir book, he says, there's a beautiful phrase somewhere, he says, the only thing an old man can say to a young man is...
It goes fast, so fast.
And the tragedy is that the young man will never believe him.
No, as I say, my British answer to that would be, My answer I've learned from being in America is, yes, first of all, people have no idea how much you have to put in and how much you actually have to go through to do some of the things that make you successful.
They have no idea of the amount of early mornings and late nights and constant work.
Only people close to you see what it looks like.
The old iceberg Thing of achievement and work.
Only people very close to you see the amount that has gone on under the surface to get anything in this life.
I think the ones who are willing to get up at six in the morning and the ones who hit the bag harder and the ones who sprint up that extra hill, there's demons.
I don't think it's true, but when you're writing about monsters and demons and terror and murder and torture and the horrible, horrible instincts of the worst kind of people, I feel like you need a little chaos in your life.
You need to do a little fucking bump of coke and throw down a couple of beers.
Stephen King was completely unconscious when he wrote Cujo.
And the older you get, the more you can make your peace with things and the more you can see things in a clearer light, including yourself.
Most of us don't have any idea what motivates ourselves, but the older you get, the more you can see yourself in some kind of reasonable light.
And among other things, be kinder to yourself, you know.
Learn not to beat up on yourself.
But at the beginning, you've got to work damn hard.
And any writers watching, listening, by the way, should not take the Stephen King route because most of them will not write a masterpiece if they do a pile of coke and a load of beer.
They will be like, as I quoted Billy Connolly earlier, one of the favorite things he ever said was he said once, he said when he used to drink really heavily.
And he said, he said, I've got all these fantastic ideas, you know.
He just bought a bed, I found out I would be a millionaire, fantastic.
Wake up in the morning, I said, damn it, I've forgotten that idea, and I was going to be rich.
And he said, so he decided to have a notebook by his bed with a pen, and he'd like come back from the apartment, really smash, and he'd go, I was going to write down that idea of how to be rich.
And you wake up in the morning and go, oh God, Dan, that idea's gone.
No, it hasn't.
I've got my notepad.
And you look over and it'll be like, buy a tractor.
Yeah.
Most people drunk or high cannot achieve very much in the way of discipline in work.
But then Hunter Thompson, I mean, he wrote a lot of his shit.
Hammer, too.
A lot of it on acid.
Have you ever seen the list of things that he did?
Like, there was a guy, and probably a little bit of his performative, because he knew that there was a journalist that was following him around.
But this journalist came to him and wanted to find out what Hunter Thompson did in a day.
And it's like, you know...
From waking up in the afternoon to doing cocaine, Dunhill's, all the alcohol that he drank.
Here it is.
Hunter Thompson's daily routine.
3 p.m., rise.
3.05, Chivas Regal with morning papers.
Dunhill's cigarette.
3.45, cocaine.
3.50, another glass of Chivas.
Dunhill.
4.95, first cup of...
What is it?
4.05, rather.
I'm like, what is 4.95?
First cup of coffee, Dunhill.
4.15, cocaine.
4.16, orange juice, Dunhill.
4.30, cocaine.
4.54, cocaine.
5.05, cocaine.
5.11, coffee, Dunhill.
5.30, more ice in the Chivas.
5.45, cocaine.
6 p.m., grass to take the edge off.
705, Woody Creek Tavern for lunch, which I went to when I was in town, just out of respect.
Heineken, two margaritas, two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries, a plate of tomatoes, coleslaw, taco salad, a double order of onion rings, carrot cake ice cream, bean fritter, Dunhills, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone.
Glass of shredded ice over which poured three or four jiggers of Chivas.
3 p.m.
Oh, is that 8, I guess?
9?
Oh, it's just scratched out.
9 p.m.
Cocaine.
10 p.m.
Drops acid.
11 p.m.
Chartreuse.
Cocaine.
Grass.
11.30.
Cocaine.
Midnight.
Hunter is ready to write.
So from 12.05 to 6am, chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, 6am in the hot tub, champagne, dove bars, fettuccine Alfredo, 8am, halcyon, 8.20, sleep.
And that's why, I mean, that is one of the reasons why he wrote great things.
It's because he was just fucking, just diving into the madness of this chaotic life and absolutely not living like the standard American, absolutely not living like a normie.
But when you look at that list, even just you reading it, my brain feels fuzzier just thinking about the idea of going through the day and then meaning to sit opposite your typewriter.
Everything about writing, particularly books and articles, You can do whatever the hell you want, but the discipline needed to get thoughts on the page in an orderly fashion that is readable by other people.
That's a crucial thing.
You may think you've got your thoughts in the best imaginable fashion, but it's a bloody mess.
For it to be in a readable fashion that other people want to read, almost nobody can do that on that.
And the sad thing is that the people who can end up dying young.
That became, like, literally their first open mic night, almost.
Like, they would go up there, hi, I'm Bob, I'm an alcoholic, and...
Today marks my 45th day.
I'm still hiding from my Coke dealer because I owe him $1,000 because we went to Atlantic City.
They'll tell these crazy stories.
They were telling these stories and people were howling, laughing.
My friend, he's passed.
His name is Dave Fitzgerald.
He was a really funny guy.
He lived in Boston.
He was a guy who didn't even get started in comedy until he was deep into his 30s.
and his life was a fucking disaster up until that point because he was just always drunk and fucked up and then he got into Alcoholics Anonymous, he got clean and sober and then started telling these stories and those stories were so funny that people demanded that he go and do comedy.
And then there was this guy Dick Daugherty who also was in the program who inspired a bunch of other sober people to try it too and they tried it from...
It's interesting how much the whole AA thing reflects on a load of other things in life for people who are not addicts of some kind.
I discovered since this book came out that the gratitude thing, I didn't know this, that gratitude is one of the things that Alcoholics Anonymous, they urge people going through the program to write down things they're grateful for.
And it was just such a, it was a wonderful moment of mutual enthusiasm about something that if you're a New Yorker, you get used to every day, but you shouldn't be used to it.
It's like there's big buildings, but there's not that many of them.
It's not crazy.
Like you're in, when I was, you know, when I was, I was a teenager, whatever it was, I was in Manhattan and I was like, I can't believe there's a place like this.
That's why I think one of the ugliest things anyone ever said was, I mean, Gore Vidal, who was brilliant in lots of ways, but Gore Vidal famously once said, whenever a friend succeeds, something within me dies.
But the thing is, like, how often would you be there?
I thought about it, too, because whenever I'm in a place that I really enjoy, like in my family, we went to Ravello for like five years in a row before the pandemic.
Well, they figured out a way to get people engaged on serious issues and to have these two intellectuals from completely polar opposite ideologies debate on national television and essentially in podcast form.
And a mutual friend said that's because he was an early user of contact lenses.
You know, remember those hard contact lenses?
So that's what I thought.
And he said that's what he did.
He was always, you know.
And I said, I'm not sure that completely explains it because Buckley does it whenever he scores a palpable hit.
So if you see his debate with Chomsky in the 70s, he says at one point Chomsky something about, he says something about some revolutionary movement in South America or something.
And he says, And they hate America, so you must love them, Mr. Chomsky.
But he was, you know, he was forced censoring people that had dissenting opinions about COVID. And there was like a lot of, you know, his thoughts on isolating people or unvaccinated were just like, it was really weird.
Yeah, there was his positions on either forcing people or restricting their rights and I don't want to paraphrase you.
Well, we should probably, now that I brought it up, probably should say, because I know a lot of people who are hardcore lefties that I'm friends with were upset at him.
Like, this is Noam Chomsky?
Like, how is this Noam Chomsky?
And I'm like, man, old people are fucking scared of COVID. Like, really scared.
In a way, like, a healthy, fit guy like yourself is not going to be scared of.
Well, no, I just thought that, for me, the turn onto having these views on every American military escapade that he had, it was all very idiosyncratic, very, I thought, conspiratorial a lot of the time.
And he got horrible stuff about the Balkans, about Cambodia and stuff, and just...
I thought he stepped wildly out of his area of expertise and made himself an expert in something which he was unreliable on, which was American foreign policy.
And weirdly, that became the thing he became most famous for and became a guru on.
If you're a hero like Noam Chomsky, to a lot of people, an intellectual hero, eventually you're going to get something wrong and then you'll be captured by it.
I would normally say that's just nonsense and superstition, but there's so many videos of people talking about forcing mandates, forcing vaccines, and then they black out while they're doing it.
When you do an audio version of a book, and I did it for the Manners of Crowds as well, the best thing is when you quote crazy shit other people have said, If you type it out, it's funny.
And actually a lot of people, as you know, a lot of people listen to audiobooks now and they realize quite rightly that it's the same thing as reading the book.
The thing that drives me mad is when you have someone who's very good at reading, but the publisher, in their infinite wisdom, decides to hire an actor.
And so you have someone completely disconnected from the work who's just reading it, and you're like, oh no, don't do this.