April 22, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:57:33
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
The Joe Rogan Experience. | |
| Train by day! | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night! | ||
| All day! | ||
| Well, I guess we are going there. | ||
| We're up and running. | ||
| First of all, you look fucking great. | ||
| You look like you've been working out. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| I have been. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have been? | |
| And I'm also not wearing suits. | ||
| Dude, you look jacked. | ||
| Well, that's very kind. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So do you. | |
| You do. | ||
| But you look like the pandemic's been... | ||
| There's two different types of people during the pandemic. | ||
| The people that gained weight and the people that got fit. | ||
| And you look like a fit man. | ||
| I certainly tried not to gain weight during the pandemic. | ||
| Yeah, you look good. | ||
| Congratulations on that. | ||
| Thank you, you too. | ||
| On holding it down. | ||
| What does it feel like to be wandering the world now? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I sort of was a bit during the pandemic. | ||
| Oh, you're a risk taker. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they started one of them in late December one year, and it was just like that. | ||
| You don't want to spend January locked in your house and, you know, it's bad enough in the UK anyway. | ||
| How did the UK handle lockdowns in terms of the restrictions? | ||
| Like, what did they do? | ||
| It was really strict. | ||
| Really strict. | ||
| I mean, just terrible. | ||
| And things like you were only allowed out once a day from your house for one bit of physical exercise. | ||
| One friend of mine called me one day and she said... | ||
| Do you have spies in your neighborhood? | ||
| I said, what do you mean? | ||
| She said, in my village, we have people who inform. | ||
| And I said, well, what does that look like? | ||
| She said, for instance, somebody leant over the garden wall the other day and said to me, you are aware this is your second walk of the day. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| I know. | ||
| She said, the embarrassing thing is I know him. | ||
| People were doing really crazy stuff like that. | ||
| I thought it was horribly revealing, and I loathed it, and I got out. | ||
| That's just a character issue that pops up whenever people have any kind of control. | ||
| You know, that's the Stanford prison experiments where they found it like almost immediately. | ||
| People just started ordering people around and treating people like shit. | ||
| Well, look at all these people who now love it. | ||
| I mean, they were shouting at us for years. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they want to keep doing it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I was in the theater recently in New York. | ||
| I mean, they now treat you like you're going to Rikers Island when you've paid $100 going to see a show. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Show your papers. | ||
| It's like that. | ||
| You think, whoa. | ||
| This isn't a great start to the evening, you know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, this play better be funny. | ||
| You know, and they're doing that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All this sort of, you haven't remasked fast enough, those people. | ||
| Yeah, it became a way to communicate with people. | ||
| It's like a standard way to do it. | ||
| Like you have to bark at someone who's not wearing their mask properly, bark at someone, I can see your nose. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The one good thing in the UK was that we didn't have the crazy, complete politicization. | ||
| We have an America of, you know, if Donald Trump had been pro-mask, the other side would be anti. | ||
| So we didn't actually have that. | ||
| And masking wasn't quite as strict. | ||
| So if I forgot my mask and I was going into a shop, you know, I could easily, like, I had several techniques. | ||
| One was to pull my hat down a bit. | ||
| Another was I always felt if I walked a bit faster and frowned, that also kept COVID away. | ||
| I was at the gym in the middle of the pandemic, and there was a guy in the gym with a face shield on. | ||
| It was just this plastic thing. | ||
| But you could reach under there, and it's the same air. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It didn't make any sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you? | |
| Did you reach under there? | ||
| Are you tempted? | ||
| No, but it's- Say these are big COVID-y hands. | ||
| It was like, I used to have this cat that would hide under like a table, but her tail was sticking out. | ||
| I was like, you're not hiding. | ||
|
unidentified
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You're right there. | |
| This is so silly. | ||
| She thought that she was hiding because her head was under there. | ||
| She just wasn't very body aware. | ||
| That's what it felt like to be like, this is not hiding. | ||
| You're not hiding from COVID. Your hands go right in. | ||
| There's this big space. | ||
| It's just this plastic window in front of your face. | ||
| It doesn't make any sense at all. | ||
| But that was, it's like symbolic. | ||
| Like you had to have something on that showed that you're precautious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| You had a good pandemic. | ||
| It was a fun time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you've been very quiet of late. | ||
| We haven't heard anything of you. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm being sarcastic. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, I'm basically doing the same thing. | ||
| You have been put through the ringer, Joe. | ||
| Yeah, I definitely got put through the ringer. | ||
| Since we last met, I mean, they did a number on you. | ||
| They did. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But my subscriptions went up massively. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
| During the height of it all, I gained two million subscribers. | ||
| I'm so pleased for you. | ||
| I'm pleased for everyone, actually. | ||
| When I watched what they were doing to you, I just thought, as long as you survive this... | ||
| Something's going to be okay in this world. | ||
| Yeah, they went for it. | ||
| They went for it. | ||
| And because it didn't work, it felt like everyone could sigh a bit of a breath. | ||
| 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. | ||
| One of my rules, try and never be mean about people because of their appearances. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| A friend of mine said to me the other day, do you know how old Brian Stelter is? | ||
| And I said, I don't know, 56 or something. | ||
| He said, look it up on your phone. | ||
| He's like 34 or something. | ||
| Yeah, something nuts. | ||
| I couldn't stop laughing for the rest of the evening. | ||
| I just couldn't stop laughing. | ||
| I don't know what... | ||
| Everything about the guy is strange. | ||
| Everything about him. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| His pattern of communication is so strange. | ||
| It's like, do you listen to other people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They talk very differently than you. | ||
| Yes, he has that, hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also, Crystal Ball from Breaking Points was making fun of him the other day. | ||
| She's like, why does he sit like this? | ||
| Because you ever notice, he sits like this. | ||
| Douglas Murray has a book out. | ||
| It's called The War on the West, and it's terrible. | ||
| The war on the West. | ||
| Is that really what's going on? | ||
| One of my favorite moments was him with Barry Weiss. | ||
| Where Barry Weiss... | ||
| How has the world gone crazy? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| And she just rattles off one after another after another. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| When you say silence is violence, when actual violence is violence, the world has gone crazy. | ||
| The world's gone mad. | ||
| And she just rattled all these off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're speaking on this day where CNN... Yeah, CNN Plus went under. | |
| Oh, CNN Minus. | ||
| Just went under. | ||
| They spent $300 million. | ||
| They got 10,000 subscribers. | ||
| Imagine the hubris of thinking that something that people don't want for free, that you're going to charge money for it. | ||
| We're going to have a Jake Tapper book club. | ||
| Jake Tapper seems like a great guy, but I feel like I don't have to pay for his book club. | ||
| I feel like you should put that on Twitter. | ||
| It's just not very good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was just horrible to watch. | ||
| Is it a function of time, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, there's so much great stuff going on. | ||
| It's like most of the world is wonderful. | ||
| Most of the world is people getting along. | ||
| Most interactions between people are fine. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| Now, I mean, there was a British philosopher some years ago who tried to start a website which only did good news. | ||
| I felt really sorry for him because it was obviously going to fail. | ||
| It was a nice idea, but it was obviously going to fail because people don't really just want to hear that things are okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, I mean, some local news used to do a bit of that, didn't they? | ||
| Yeah, local stories. | ||
| A nice local story, a bit of heartwarming stuff. | ||
| Kitting up a tree, gets rescued by the fireman. | ||
| Yeah, someone opens a shop, that sort of thing. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Say that, you know, it's enough and it's enough. | ||
| So they vet your opinions. | ||
| Oh yeah, of course. | ||
| And things like Sky in the UK, the BBC. Because they think their job is to move the story along. | ||
| Because otherwise it's just them all day saying the same thing, which it kind of is. | ||
| But the other thing is it's just a very bad way to absorb news. | ||
| I mean, I flick down a few news websites in the morning and I can get most of them and most of the news in like a minute maybe, an overview. | ||
| And if I was watching nightly news, that would take half an hour. | ||
| That's just not a good use of my time. | ||
| Well, even the way they handle debates or discussions They have too many people. | ||
| They'll have a panel with four or five people and they're all talking over each other and they're all trying to get a sound bite. | ||
| 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. | ||
| With five guests, all of whom get 15 seconds. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| That's not appropriate, the subject at hand. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| It's a terrible way to communicate. | ||
| There's no way you're ever going to get into depth about something. | ||
| No one knows when they can talk, so everyone's trying to just jump in. | ||
| And that presumption of the interviewer wanting to take the guest down... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, that's the worst one. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's the worst one. | ||
| Well, that was a lot of people's reputation. | ||
| 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? | ||
| They'd throw you off center and all that sort of thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They would try to, like, trip you up. | ||
| My favorite used to be when people, like, when I was still out on NPR, which I was a couple of books ago, You're not allowed on anymore? | ||
| Nah. | ||
| They reject you? | ||
| Well, a couple of books ago I was still allowed on. | ||
| Had a very good ding-dong, as we'd call it in Britain, with the presenter. | ||
| It was good. | ||
| It was like 10, 15 minutes. | ||
| Which book was it? | ||
| Was it Islam and the Strange Death of Europe? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| So it went that fast. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Having not read it. | ||
| So did they get questions that were prepared by the producers or something? | ||
| Barely even that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It was usually an attempt to prove you were a liar. | |
| So, a typical BBC interview would start with, so, Douglas Murray, thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
| You're clearly not that pleased, but thank you so much for joining us this morning. | ||
| And now, you say in your latest book, and then you say, well, I didn't quite say that. | ||
| Ah, so you're saying you didn't say that. | ||
| So, by the second question, you're in, like, this horrible mire. | ||
| And then, about, like, 90 seconds later, you're chucked out. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that was a normal interview until you and a few others came along. | ||
| Well, when the Cathy Newman, Jordan Peterson interview went viral. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So what you're saying is, he's like, that's not what I'm saying at all. | |
| Is she after that interview? | ||
| Because I was one of the people who passed that around when that happened. | ||
| I watched it live, and I realized this was a car crash for Cathy Newman, but Channel 4 thought it was great. | ||
| They actually posted out a video of them mocking Jordan Peterson afterwards. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| They thought it was good. | ||
| Their first thing was it was good. | ||
| And I tweeted something like saying, I don't know, there's another way to see this. | ||
| Get ready. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| That is not a death threat. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| I'm like, as a connoisseur of the genre. | ||
| I'll show you a death threat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll show you a death threat. | |
| Let's go through my Twitter feed real quick. | ||
| R.I.P. That's not at all. | ||
| And they were like, we have to call in security now. | ||
| Because, of course, that means that then you haven't done the bad thing. | ||
| You're the victim. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She's a victim. | ||
| Well, it's a great strategy. | ||
| It's a great strategy for instantaneously becoming a victim. | ||
| But that's quite cute, that RIP Kathy Newman is a death threat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, how likely is it that that guy's going to follow through on that? | ||
| There was one moment in that interview, though, where she did show a sense of humor. | ||
| Because he asked a question. | ||
| She was asking about offensive, like, why should you... | ||
| I think it was like, why should you be allowed to offend people? | ||
| He's like, if you're allowed to talk and think, you have to risk being offensive. | ||
| And they had this conversation. | ||
| And then, I forget what it is, he caught her. | ||
| And she's in the moment, he goes, I got you, right? | ||
| And she goes, yes, you did. | ||
| It took quite a while, but you got me. | ||
| And they were kind of like joking around about it. | ||
| Because she was silent. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But she went into that argument or that discussion with the goal of making it controversial. | ||
| The goal of trying to catch him and trying to press him. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| Instead of just having a conversation with someone, you don't know Jordan Peterson. | ||
| You're meeting him for the first time. | ||
| Let's talk to him. | ||
| Well, by the way, that's one of the things that I know Jordan pretty well, like you do. | ||
| And I have such huge respect for him and admiration, as well as just such a great guy. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like they never bothered. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think I'd want to find out what they were onto. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Instead of just, like, not even bothering with that. | ||
| And they never bothered with Jordan. | ||
| None of those critics ever bothered to work out, like... | ||
| He must be onto something, otherwise this wouldn't be happening. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So most people just accepted it. | ||
| And I've had these conversations with people. | ||
| They go, oh, God, Jordan Peterson. | ||
| Tell me why you don't like him. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| Even now, I mean, you can survive this like you did, but even now, these... | ||
| when they try them. | ||
| There is a residue for quite a long time afterwards. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I hope it is in your case. | ||
| You clean up with people who know you. | ||
| The fortunate situation for me is that I've been doing a podcast for 12 years and people hear me for hours and hours and hours every day. | ||
| And because of that, they know me. | ||
| You can't hide for hours and hours every day. | ||
| They know who you are. | ||
| So misrepresentations don't work. | ||
| Like if somebody tried to tell me my best friend was a piece of shit, I'd be like, what way? | ||
| He does this and he does that. | ||
| I'm like, no he doesn't. | ||
| I know him. | ||
| I know him really well. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's part of my job. | ||
| It's great cover. | ||
| But it's a weird gig, you know, to also have, and then to be talking to people like you and political candidates and scientists. | ||
| I hope what it is is that you have enough work out there, like Jordan had enough work out there to survive. | ||
| I do worry that somebody's starting off. | ||
| If anyone comes for somebody who has not got a body of work behind them, that would be hard to survive. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's so easy. | ||
| All you've got to do is be called into that fateful HR meeting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And be told that there's something you've done that's damaged the reputation of the company. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Vengefulness in general is one of the nastiest human instincts to try to get around. | ||
| Lack of charitable takes on things. | ||
| There's a lack of the ability to have a charitable view on whatever has gone on. | ||
| You look at it in the worst possible light. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what was clearly being done to you. | ||
| It's what's being done to lots of our mutual friends. | ||
| It's a deliberate attempt to not look at something in a charitable light. | ||
| The fascinating thing about it, though, it really does make those people look even less reliable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'd hope so. | ||
| Although, you know, you do end up with this problem that everyone's got at the moment, which is then, you know, who people do go to to rely on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I mean, you know, I know you've discussed it. | ||
| Independent people. | ||
| The only thing that I count on, Glenn Greenwald, I count on people like Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points, Matt Taibbi. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's a few people that I'll count on. | ||
| For an honest take on world events. | ||
| But there's not many. | ||
| Kyle Kalinske, there's not many. | ||
| Even then, the problem is that it doesn't cover everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| That's holding you back. | ||
| You should talk confidently about almost everything and just let the chips fall where they may. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And what do you think about election integrity? | ||
| And what do you think about Afghanistan? | ||
| And then China? | ||
| And then Ukraine? | ||
| And also ivermectin? | ||
| It's like, I don't know. | ||
| And very few people are willing to say, that's not my thing. | ||
| I can't form a strong view on that. | ||
| It is interesting that you're expected to have... | ||
| Deep knowledge about so many subjects. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially if you're publicly commenting on things. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I mean, various people... | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because I kind of thought, it's not what I know about. | |
| And so, yeah. | ||
| And I felt like, then some people say, I can't believe you didn't speak. | ||
| And my thing is like, look, I wish... | ||
| I wish I knew then what I know now. | ||
| But I didn't. | ||
| And I wasn't going to take a punt on it. | ||
| There's also this weird thing that whenever anything is going down, your silence is thought of as a negative. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If you're not commenting on something, like I rarely read comments, but occasionally I accidentally read one. | ||
| And I read one on my own Instagram. | ||
| I was posting something that I had to go back and edit it when I was editing it. | ||
| And I fucked up something and I went back to make sure that it was okay. | ||
| I read someone saying, like, why haven't you said anything about Ukraine? | ||
| And this was, like, one of the first weeks of the invasion. | ||
| And I was like, I don't know what's happening. | ||
| You're mad that I'm not, like, I know, you know, you don't care. | ||
| Like, you pretend to care. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what's happening. | ||
| I like the people who say, like, you don't have the guts to talk about X. And they're, like, some anonymous account. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I can't believe you're not willing to... | ||
| But that's just the masses of humans, right? | ||
| It's like you're focusing on one person with a logical argument. | ||
| It's not logical. | ||
| Like, if you thought about it, like, why haven't you talked about Ukraine? | ||
| Maybe they're considering it. | ||
| Maybe they're looking at it and researching it and trying to find out what's going on. | ||
| And in the case of that, like, Ukraine is a complicated issue, and you have to find out, like, what is the conflict? | ||
| Like, why is this happening? | ||
| Is there natural resources that are at play? | ||
| Like, what's going on here? | ||
| It's a long process of trying to gather information if you spent, like I have, zero time thinking about Ukraine up until then. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think it's going to be very important that people are able to say, look, I don't know. | ||
| I'm thinking about this. | ||
| I'm interested in it, and I'll let you know if I do form any of you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I can't cope with that. | ||
| It's one of the self-imposed rules of my life. | ||
| I try not to ever contribute to that noise. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If my instinct kicks in and my brain kicks in and says, no, I know that's not true. | ||
| I just can't not. | ||
| Thank God. | ||
| I kind of lead a quieter life. | ||
| It's been very profitable. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, not that profitable. | |
| No, I mean, I sort of have that feeling of like I couldn't look at myself in the morning if I knew it was not true. | ||
| That said, again, I couldn't look at myself in the morning if I'd said something I knew not to be true. | ||
| So it's not like you have a choice. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you're wired this way. | ||
| There's also this thing that people do where they're a prisoner to their initial suspicions or their initial ideas that they've adopted. | ||
| And then when things change and the landscape is clearly not what they thought it was, they're not willing to bend. | ||
| I was writing about this recently. | ||
| There was a study a few years ago. | ||
| I can't remember if we talked about this before. | ||
| There was a study at Harvard about what happens when people with a completely incorrect opinion meet the correct opinion. | ||
| And I don't mean like as in... | ||
| The era is saying this, and you're saying that. | ||
| No, I mean, like, literally, I know you think the world is flat, and you're introduced to the facts that show that the world is round. | ||
| This study found that, very disappointingly, you'd have hoped that people immediately had changed their mind. | ||
| But no, a vast number of people doubled down. | ||
| Well, of course they do. | ||
| Because we like to think that we're rational and reasonable people. | ||
| And we're capable of that. | ||
| But we're lots of other things as well. | ||
| We don't understand ourselves. | ||
| We're not transparent to ourselves. | ||
| And we are capable of reason and rationalism. | ||
| But we're also capable of... | ||
| Lack of humility, pride, jealousy, all that sort of thing. | ||
| And when it comes to saying, actually, I got that wrong, or I've changed my mind on that, it requires you volunteering up a bit of your pride. | ||
| And if you had a choice between those two things and you could get away with not having a hit on your pride, you kind of would for most people. | ||
| That's why they hold on to things they know are kind of indefensible still. | ||
| It's very unfortunate because it ruins all your opinions after that if people know that you're that guy that won't admit that you were incorrect. | ||
| There are some very prominent examples in the United States. | ||
| Well, this pandemic really opened up that book, right? | ||
| You got to see a lot of initial suspicions that were proven incorrect and people are still hanging on to them. | ||
| I know. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's been very tricky. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is a pretty good way to drive people mad. | ||
| It's about the best, if you think about it, isn't it? | ||
| Lock people up and isolate them completely. | ||
| Also in this case, because it's so illogical, because you're talking about something with this new strain that's essentially like a cold. | ||
| Yes, it's a contagious cold. | ||
| And yes, for some people who are immunocompromised, it still can be dangerous. | ||
| But it's not nearly as dangerous as, say, Delta or what we thought the initial wave, the first wave. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And I said, what do you mean? | ||
| He said, well, any of us could die at any moment. | ||
| That's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's like a certain kind of wow. | |
| 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. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And then that didn't happen. | ||
| And so we were all doubly, hmm. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| 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 not having this. | ||
| This hasn't been through enough tests. | ||
| What? | ||
| You're doing heroin! | ||
| How well tested is that? | ||
| Yeah, do you have one of those test kits that they use at raves? | ||
| Like, what are you doing when you get your drugs? | ||
|
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CDC never looked through this. | |
| So I'm unsympathetic to some of that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's kind of the problem with everything, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People don't want to admit that the vaccines aren't perfect, and they don't want to admit that they're not as bad as... | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's the same thing with, like, it's really hard for people to hold the line of... | ||
| American elections are not as reliable as a first world country's elections ought to be. | ||
| America sends election observers around the world. | ||
| It should be a bit better at doing it at home. | ||
| And then at the other end, there is no election integrity in the United States. | ||
| People find it very hard to say, we have problems with this, but it's probably not that. | ||
| I wish it was someone—I wish that this wasn't—it's so ideological when we deal with election integrity. | ||
| It's so ideological that if it's Trump, Trump saying that he lost, no one's even going to consider it. | ||
| No one's even going to—Trump saying that he shouldn't have lost, rather. | ||
| No one's going to consider whether or not anything he's saying is true. | ||
| I had a conversation with a friend of mine, and he said, do you think that they stole the election from him? | ||
| I go, I have no information. | ||
| I go, but I do think this. | ||
| There's definitely not zero election fraud. | ||
| And I think in every election, there's some percentage of election fraud. | ||
| And the Democrats used to admit that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, the John Kerry election. | ||
| It was a big one. | ||
| 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? | ||
| How much? | ||
| Is it enough to actually sway an election? | ||
| Well, it'll be interesting to see in the midterms, because if the Republicans do win, then part of the Trump narrative does fall apart. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is like, well, do they only fix elections every four years and not every two years? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's going to be a problem for him. | ||
| It will. | ||
| But no, I know. | ||
| As you know, I live in the States now, and I find it... | ||
| The consequences to a society of having election after election which the losers don't think they've lost is just devastating. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's very dangerous for the future. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They have these ideals, almost like a film. | ||
| Good guys wear white hats. | ||
| They have this very narrow view of stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All the media is polluted. | ||
| All of the state institutions are polluted. | ||
| All the intelligence communities are polluted. | ||
| The vice president is a traitor. | ||
| Everyone is a traitor. | ||
| There's only one virtuous man in the republic. | ||
| It's the you're fired guy from The Apprentice. | ||
| You just said, no, I can't see a scenario where that happens. | ||
| But it did happen. | ||
| And it did. | ||
| And again, the thing is, it happened for all those reasons. | ||
| I mean, like, I still can't get over this thing of Twitter and Facebook and co silencing the New York Post. | ||
| And what I can't get over most about it is the intelligence chiefs who signed the letter saying that the story was Russian disinformation. | ||
| Because in my opinion, every single one of those intelligence chiefs should lose their pension. | ||
| They should lose their reputations. | ||
| Whatever can happen. | ||
| You should never have members of the intelligence community becoming political actors like that. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| So that's why nobody trusts them. | ||
| And there seems to be no repercussions. | ||
| There's no repercussion. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like, that is totally corrupt. | ||
| Do you think that the strategy is to deny it until the news cycle has passed? | ||
| You know, they denied it for, it was a good solid year and a half, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then they started admitting it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes, that would have been when it would have hit. | ||
| Yes, and it would have been a giant issue, but because of the fact that they did lock it down. | ||
| I mean, they really did manipulate the elections by doing that. | ||
| Yeah, that's the problem, is that when people say there was manipulation, there was at that level. | ||
| I mean, even if you don't want to get into everything else. | ||
| That's a big level. | ||
| That's a big level. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it's being released by one of the oldest newspapers in America, the New York Post. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| That's what I just can't get over. | ||
| The New York Post, you think you can do it to that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| And they did. | ||
| And the people that are doing it are these fucking woke 20-year-olds. | ||
| That's what's crazy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It's like the people that are in charge over at Twitter. | ||
| Like, who's running that? | ||
| That was the decision? | ||
| You made that decision? | ||
| To not allow the sharing of a story because you think it's going to affect the election in a way that you don't desire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's... | ||
| That should be illegal. | ||
| It should be illegal. | ||
| There should have been a punishment for it. | ||
| There should have been serious repercussions. | ||
| And there just never are. | ||
| Not only that, unfortunately it set a precedent. | ||
| It set a trend. | ||
| If you look from whenever they first started banning people on Twitter and then instigating censorship, Twitter is still not as bad as some platforms. | ||
| Do you think? | ||
| Oh, I thought it was the worst. | ||
| Instagram is pretty fucking bad. | ||
| Instagram is pretty bad. | ||
| They suspend people's accounts and shadow ban people. | ||
| There was a case I had recently. | ||
| The trans swimmer Leah Thomas. | ||
| Leah Thomas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Leah Thomas, on Twitter, if you misgendered, you got suspended. | ||
| Dead named. | ||
| Dead named. | ||
| You don't get suspended. | ||
| You get banned. | ||
| What's the name? | ||
| Leah Thomas was born William Thomas. | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't even notice that that was a real thing. | ||
| I just only see her as Leah forever. | ||
| Of course you do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, we were trying to find out whether or not this is true, but she still prefers ladies and has a penis. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| She definitely has a penis. | ||
| She definitely has a penis. | ||
| Fucking hell, I just did it, didn't I? Isn't it wild? | ||
| Do you have to say that? | ||
| You don't have to say that here, by the way. | ||
| Okay, thank you. | ||
| You can do whatever you want. | ||
| That hot dude. | ||
| That hot swimmer who thinks he's a girl. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But she's a she. | ||
| I read about this the other day. | ||
| Did you see my favorite one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
God damn it. | |
| I wish I could pull this up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Maybe you can. | |
| We can. | ||
| In the Metro newspaper in the UK, it was the same week as the female inmates impregnated in all-female prison. | ||
| I'd just woken up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| They do what these days? | ||
| What? | ||
| Goddamn. | ||
| When did they start getting that ability? | ||
| And anyhow, the same week, like the day before, there was this great story in the metro in the UK. You can probably bring it on the screen. | ||
| If you type in, wait for it, sex toy wheelie bin... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Woman. | |
| Sex toy wheelie bin? | ||
| Sex toy wheelie bin woman and metro. | ||
| I bring you all of the most scholarly articles. | ||
| This is the good stuff. | ||
| This is the good stuff. | ||
| I'm really hoping we can get this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Got anything? | |
| Oh, yeah, there we go. | ||
| Yay! | ||
| Ex-soldier exposed her penis and used Willy Ben as sex toy in public. | ||
| Oh, exposed her penis. | ||
| I like the fact that that's what you see's done. | ||
| I mean, there's quite a lot going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Chloe! | |
| Her name is Chloe. | ||
| 42 was caught rubbing herself on a public wheelie bin before using a sex toy on herself in an alleyway in Middlesbrough Tess... | ||
|
unidentified
|
How do you say that? | |
| Teesside. | ||
| Fine, fine place. | ||
| Is it a shitty place? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't want to lose my middle. | |
| On August 13th of last year, a couple shouted at her, and she ran away. | ||
| How many times are they going to use female pronouns? | ||
| On the same day, she exposed herself on the street where she lives and thrusts her hips into a fence. | ||
| Basically... | ||
| I mean, if you just... | ||
| Once inside the house, you expose her bum, thrust... | ||
| This is typically female behavior, as you can tell, Joe. | ||
| That's how girls act. | ||
| I mean, look, it's unladylike. | ||
| We can agree on that. | ||
| She exposed her bum and thrust against her window, which three children saw as they were in a car driving past. | ||
| That's they as in the children, of course. | ||
| It's very important to stress that. | ||
| Thompson was already on the sex offenders registry before she came out as trans when she was legally named Andrew McNabb. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and it's like, I haven't even had my coffee yet, and I'm reading about this... | ||
| Oh my God, look at all the offenses, too. | ||
| Seventeen convictions for 22 offenses, including sexually assaulting an underage girl. | ||
| It's quite hard to read news like that on a daily basis and not feel like everything's falling apart. | ||
| It's just strange that you're just allowed to change genders. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With a penis, with a clear mental illness, history of assault, history of sexual assault. | ||
| You can just say, I'm a woman, and they put you in with women. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you have a history of sexual assault, and no one cares. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| And you read a story like this, and you're like, I think that women often do this kind of stuff. | ||
| I've never heard of a woman using a wheelie bin as a sex toy and waving her penis at it and trying to fuck a fence. | ||
| She has to be that close to death. | ||
| Like that close. | ||
| She knows what a pistol tastes like. | ||
| She's that close. | ||
| And she's just... | ||
| So you've heard of these cases? | ||
| It's possible that you can get a woman who's just like... | ||
| You know, like just ready to go, ready to explode. | ||
| But otherwise it's a dude. | ||
| Otherwise it's a dude. | ||
| And if it's a dude, it's fairly common. | ||
| Like a guy doing something like that is not even outrageous. | ||
| I know, wouldn't even make the news. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, oh, crazy homeless guy. | ||
| He's out there trying to fuck a fence. | ||
| That's normal, you know? | ||
| It's like a woman doing that, you keep saying her, she, her, she. | ||
| You're saying, you're using female pronouns so often, and it turns out he exposes a dick. | ||
| There's a penis involved. | ||
| Like this is... | ||
| You had the best take on this, and I repeat it all the time. | ||
| And you have said that when a civilization is in a downward spiral, when it's the end of the civilization, they become obsessed with gender. | ||
| Yeah, I have said that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And so she started, like, she had gotten mixed up with some, like, yogi-type people and guru-type people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| People that were running, like, these weird little sort of, like, self-help things that were very cult-like. | ||
| And she goes, I have a real problem. | ||
| I'm very susceptible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| 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. | ||
| Like, it's kind of nuts. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He'd already had a conviction for fraud. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He was already full of shit at 14. Yeah. | |
| That was a giveaway. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was a definite giveaway. | ||
| Well, it's, I mean, just if you read the tenets of the religion. | ||
| First of all, they're wonderful people. | ||
| Mormons are so more racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I agree. | |
| I agree. | ||
| I don't like beating up on Mormons. | ||
| They're so nice. | ||
| Because they're so nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's like, actually, if there were more Mormons, it wouldn't be so bad, you know. | ||
| If you could just take out the crazy... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You got a good religion. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow, how much crazy. | ||
| Anyway. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They don't make any sense. | ||
| I wonder if it's the same with societies. | ||
| You know, I think that it's a thing like post-religious peoples. | ||
| Just because you've lost the religion doesn't mean you've lost the religious instinct. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're still looking for it. | ||
| It seems like that's an inherent part of being a person. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And I don't say it's bad. | ||
| It's just it is part of what we are. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's a clear genesis of that, too, in the woke world. | ||
| There was a group at a certain point in time. | ||
| Do you remember when the atheist movement had hit this atheist plus movement? | ||
| Do you remember atheism plus? | ||
| What was that? | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| And it was a bunch of these weird virtue signaling male feminist types that were adding, with atheism, adding a group of core values. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| About, you know, being anti-discrimination, anti-sexist, anti-racist. | ||
| Their own Ten Commandments. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so they called it Atheism Plus. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it's totally understandable. | ||
| And a disaster, of course. | ||
| Even if the ideas are good, it's like you're putting it in an ideology. | ||
| You're creating a dogma. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's the start of something. | ||
| It's not by any means a beginning of a policy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It comes out of some hose in his garden in Texas. | |
| And there are people who've been busted repeatedly and they're still selling their wares. | ||
| I always thought, yeah, if somebody actually made the profit claim in our era, I think people would be surprised how many... | ||
| People would go along with it. | ||
| The late George Steiner described a phrase I love, nostalgia for the absolute. | ||
| I love that phrase, a nostalgia for the absolute. | ||
| I think a lot of people have it. | ||
| I have it. | ||
| We all have it to some extent. | ||
| And the question is whether you can avoid it taking you to places that would demoralize you and lead you to a bad place. | ||
| Yeah, it's... | ||
| 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... | ||
| It always ends up with a massive orgy, doesn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, it does! | |
| It always ends up with, you've got to give me all your money, I don't get to fuck your wife. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Like Wild Wild Country. | ||
| It's like, oh, it's all about peace, and it's like, nah, you've got to school the women. | ||
| Wild Wild Country is amazing. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That documentary is so good. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| That guy, Osho, had some really interesting quotes. | ||
| You still see his books in some places. | ||
| In the Netherlands, a while ago, they had his books still in the bookshops. | ||
| Oh, you can buy them on Apple, on the Apple bookstore. | ||
| I've read a couple of books. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I do like that bit where he says in one of his speeches, he says, The people are retarded by the people, for the people, of the people. | |
| But the problem is, the people are retarded. | ||
| It should be by the retarded, for the retarded. | ||
| It's like, oh my god. | ||
| A guru saying that. | ||
| And it's something about the fact that he's dead now, and then he said it decades ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very funny. | |
| But we are searching for things at the moment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It seems very obvious to me. | ||
| I mean, what plenty of people have called things like the religion of anti-racism, the religion of social justice, all that stuff. | ||
| They are all something to do, you know. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| At some very, very deep level. | ||
| You've had your purpose today. | ||
| You've had your five fruit and veg. | ||
| You've had your meaning. | ||
| Yeah, you've had your meaning. | ||
| You're making a difference. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Unquestionably. | ||
| And also the fact that they don't do it in person. | ||
| They're doing this thing. | ||
| They certainly don't do it one-on-one in person. | ||
| They're doing this thing in the online world where all the social cues have been eliminated. | ||
| You're not experiencing a person's emotions when you say something cruel to them. | ||
| You don't see it on their face. | ||
| This normal social reaction to correct. | ||
| You don't see it. | ||
| You, I imagine, very rarely get anyone saying I'm pleasant to your face. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Almost never. | ||
| Almost never. | ||
| Most people are very friendly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But I'm very friendly. | ||
| Even if they have a bad idea of who I am, if they say hi, I go, hi, how you doing? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're not an asshole. | ||
| You're not mean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not mean. | |
| I'm nice to everybody. | ||
| When you take your wife and daughter to the zoo, I love that video. | ||
| The video of you taking your wife and daughter to the zoo for the day, and you saw nature in the roar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That pleased me so much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I couldn't stop laughing at that video. | |
| One of the monkeys climbed to the top of the pole and just grabbed a seagull from the air and started smashing its brains. | ||
| Oh yeah, that wasn't my video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was that not your video? | |
| No, that was a retweet of a video. | ||
| I thought you were talking about a different thing than I wrote years ago. | ||
| But no, that was just someone was at a fucking zoo and a monkey climbed on a pole and snatched a seagull out of the sky and beat it to death. | ||
| That's a wild video, man. | ||
| I thought that was yours. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| I know of something similar happening at an English country fair a few years ago. | ||
| I went to visit some friends and they had three young children. | ||
| You could tell the difference between the sexes here, between the boys' reactions and the girls' reactions. | ||
| They had their local sort of country fair, which in England was a very nice affair. | ||
| You had an ice cream stall and a cake stall, and you had a competition for best bros and that sort of thing. | ||
| And there was also a nature display of a hawk display. | ||
| And this country fair just went horribly X-rated very fast because the hawk flew up from its... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Perch? | |
| It's a perch on the arm of its guide. | ||
| And sat in a tree and then came zooming down and picked up the dog of a little old lady in the crowd. | ||
| Like a chihuahua thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Took it up into the tree and ate it in front of the horse. | |
| Holy shit! | ||
| Like just sat there like ripping its intestines out. | ||
| And so everyone could just hear this dog screaming in the last moments of his life. | ||
| His owner, of course, passed out on the floor. | ||
| The hawk, the hawker, like desperately trying to, and the whole country fair. | ||
| All the children learned a lesson that day about nature, but it was a brutal way to learn it. | ||
| Nature isn't everything you want it to be. | ||
| It's not as fluffy as you. | ||
| Not with birds, man. | ||
| But it was very funny because the girl was horrified and the boy's like, oh my god, it's so cool. | ||
| I'd keep an eye on that boy. | ||
| You know? | ||
| 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. | ||
| We're going to read about that boy in the papers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Birds. | ||
| They don't deserve to be in those things anyway. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| All those zoos are fucking gross, man. | ||
| They're animal prisons. | ||
| Yeah, I don't like them. | ||
| For innocent animals. | ||
| They did nothing wrong. | ||
| And the idea that it's good that you can go and see them. | ||
| That was great before video. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's crazy. | |
| You don't need it now. | ||
| No, it's horrible. | ||
| 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! | ||
|
unidentified
|
So horrible. | |
| Just like mental illness. | ||
| And they look so much like us. | ||
| So much like us. | ||
| Just fucking tortured. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| It's horrible there. | ||
| Just tortured. | ||
| Just trapped and tortured. | ||
| It's a weird tradition that we have. | ||
| And also, that we take these animals and we eliminate all of the things that they like. | ||
| Like, you put big cats in a cage. | ||
| What do big cats like to do? | ||
| They like to kill shit. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| How come they don't get to kill anything? | ||
| Like, you're gonna feed them, so you're getting to kill it, and you take that thrill away from them, and you just give them meat? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You know, let them kill shit. | ||
| If you're gonna feed them a goat, like, let a little goat in there. | ||
| Talking of red meat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Talk about the war on the West. | ||
| What about it? | ||
| Have you read it? | ||
| No, I haven't. | ||
| Have you not? | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm going to. | ||
| I was going to test you on it. | ||
| Oh, you're going to? | ||
| I would never lie. | ||
| I'm so glad you didn't lie. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| No. | ||
| Authors can always tell very easily. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Like, whenever anyone pretends to have read your book and you know they haven't, you're like, it's not. | ||
| I've read The Strange Death of Europe and I read Manus of the Cross. | ||
| I will read that, 100%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm very pleased to hear it. | |
| I love your work. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Did you ever read Robin DiAngelo's work? | ||
| I've read chapters of it. | ||
| There's a moment in her breakthrough book, White Fragility, which sold half a million copies immediately after the death of George Floyd. | ||
| There's a moment in that book where she says, there is no good form of being white. | ||
| No good form of being white. | ||
| And it's inescapable. | ||
| Isn't she white? | ||
| She's white. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh yeah. | |
| I mean, she also knows how to make... | ||
| But she... | ||
| When I read it, I was like, wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But to do it to a majority? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That can't work. | |
| But it's a majority that feels guilt. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, Ibram X. Kendi says the answer to past prejudice is present prejudice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Didn't he withdraw the toy? | ||
| Oh, not only did he withdraw, but days later he had an explanation of it. | ||
| He was hacked. | ||
| You're a race hustler. | ||
| Yeah, of course he is. | ||
| You're a race hustler. | ||
| Of course he is. | ||
| There's a lot of those. | ||
| It doesn't mean that racism isn't real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| But a person who only concentrates on race consistently over and over and over again. | ||
| And you make a living doing that. | ||
| And you don't just make a living, you make a very good living. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| He charges like $20,000 an hour and things. | ||
| It's reasonable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's good to feel that guilty. | ||
| Well, there was this large woman who was on Jon Stewart's show, actually, with Andrew Sullivan the other week. | ||
| Is she large tall or does she eat a lot? | ||
| She eats a lot. | ||
| I thought you would be too gentlemanly to ask. | ||
| You never know. | ||
| She might be a giant. | ||
| Big bones. | ||
| She was a large lady, a white lady. | ||
| I couldn't understand who she was because she was on John's show, a really terrible show talking about, I used to really admire him. | ||
| They were talking about racism and just saying all the white people are all racist and like shut up whitey and listen about your racism. | ||
| It turned out this woman who actually shut Andrew Sullivan down I'm going to shut you down. | ||
| She said that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She's like, who the hell do you think you are? | ||
| Shut you down. | ||
| I'm going to shut you down. | ||
| 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. | ||
| $4,000 a plate? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| That's a good hustle. | ||
| It's a good hustle. | ||
| But I always thought that... | ||
| 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. | ||
| The problem is people are terrified to push back against it because when they do, it seems as if they're minimizing racism. | ||
| And that's what they're scared of. | ||
| They're scared of this idea that you're making light of racism or you're denying the significance of racism, the prevalence of racism. | ||
| You deny, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| People don't want to do that. | ||
| It's too scary. | ||
| Those waters are too fraught with peril. | ||
| But I mean, for instance, one of the things I get into in the book is, what do you do with this idea of hereditary guilt? | ||
| I wrote about that a bit in The Strange Death of Europe, because obviously in Germany that's still a massive subject. | ||
| But it's become this massive subject in our societies. | ||
| What is hereditary guilt? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I mean, I'm white. | ||
| I'm a male. | ||
| I don't have any guilt about anything that I didn't do. | ||
| I have guilt for things I did do, for sure. | ||
| I have done. | ||
| And people should. | ||
| But I don't have any guilt for things that people did before me. | ||
| Or people who happened to look like me. | ||
| I'm like, you know, I'm in America. | ||
| I have no responsibility for anything that white people did in America in the 18th century or in the 19th century. | ||
| You just got here. | ||
| I just got here. | ||
| I crashed off the boat. | ||
| And I also start... | ||
| I resent it, and I notice how many other people are starting to resent it too. | ||
| Because you also get these follow-on ones, like the pathologizing of whiteness. | ||
| These things like white rage, you know, one of the recent inventions. | ||
| As if there's a specific rage which only white people can have or get. | ||
| And, of course, General Mark Milley, not an unimportant man in America, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he talked about white rage. | ||
| When he did that, what do you think was going on there? | ||
| That was strange to me. | ||
| It's really strange. | ||
| Because, first of all, why is someone in the military doing that? | ||
| To keep his job. | ||
| Those positions in the military are so political. | ||
| To get to those positions, you have to be such a mover and an operator. | ||
| And do you think that it's because the Democrats were in charge, and he's in this position, and so... | ||
| And he's white. | ||
| And he had to... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Make the sacrifice. | ||
| He had to make the sacrifice and say, this is something I'm very interested in. | ||
| It was white rage. | ||
| I want to find out about it. | ||
| But this pathologizing of it, white tears. | ||
| I mean, do all that stuff. | ||
| I'm like, Imagine if we actually started talking. | ||
| It was such a horrible idea. | ||
| If we actually talked in the culture about black rage as being a separate pathology, or black tears, or black women's... | ||
| Oh, that's just black women's tears. | ||
| It would be really, really ugly. | ||
| And then the thing of privilege, which is one of the ones which I've come to resent the most. | ||
| The accusation... | ||
| I mean, there's all sorts of reasons we have privilege in our lives, and it's pretty much impossible to break down where and how it comes to you. | ||
| I mean, like... | ||
| Who's privileged and who isn't? | ||
| And there are people you look at and you think must be privileged and actually they have a hell of a time. | ||
| You can't judge other people's lives like that. | ||
| But when people talk about people in the past having white privilege, I was like, my ancestors didn't have white privilege. | ||
| They didn't benefit from slavery or colonialism. | ||
| Most of my ancestors were sitting on a remote Scottish island trying to eke out a tiny bit of farmland with a couple of sheep. | ||
| And a couple of times in the 20th century, the government came and asked them to come to war, and they went to war and got drowned at sea. | ||
| It wasn't very privileged, you know? | ||
| Well, even the privilege of white people in this country, that expression, white privilege, is... | ||
| I don't think it's looking at the problem. | ||
| The problem is actual racism. | ||
| The problem is not people who don't experience racism. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's their fault. | ||
| So even if you do isolate, look, white people, when they get pulled over, they're less likely to get fucked with. | ||
| Which is, that just means there's a problem with cops pulling over black people and fucking with them. | ||
| The problem is not the white people who don't get fucked with. | ||
| So you're making people guilty for nothing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| My parents were poor. | ||
| And they'll say things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is a kind of subterranean thing. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, what do you do? | ||
| 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? | ||
| You touch on one of my conversational G-spots. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I loved it. | ||
| That was one of my favorite things. | ||
| It was such a great theater. | ||
| That was one of my favorite things that ever happened. | ||
| Also, did you see that after they'd done their kneeling for nine minutes, they all had to be winched up? | ||
| Because Pelosi was getting old. | ||
| She had to be pulled up. | ||
| Her knees had locked. | ||
| Schumer was being old. | ||
| Did they stay for nine minutes? | ||
| Yeah, they stayed for the amount of time that George Floyd was killed. | ||
| So then they did that. | ||
| And yeah, they wore the wrong triangle. | ||
| Because these people, they're all desperately trying to hold on to their power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're all way past their sell-by date. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for social justice. | |
| Ah! | ||
| What? | ||
| Like, you think he's headed out to the shop that morning thinking I'm going to do something good for my country today? | ||
| Like, how tone deaf do you have to be? | ||
| These people don't get any of this. | ||
| They're just trying to survive through it. | ||
| They're just trying to survive through it. | ||
| They're just trying to hustle, stay relevant, and keep making money in the stock market. | ||
| How much? | ||
| $800 million she's worth, whatever it is? | ||
| She's worth a couple hundred million, and she makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. | ||
| So damn corrupt. | ||
| It's so corrupt. | ||
| When every other country and every other democracy talks about corruption, they have nothing on the corruption within the top ranks of American politics. | ||
| It's quite shocking. | ||
| I just don't understand how she keeps getting elected. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just don't get it. | ||
| I mean, is she unopposed? | ||
| Is there no one who wants to challenge her? | ||
| It doesn't make any sense. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Everyone knows, like, the Ballistics reports. | ||
| It's like a religious chant. | ||
| Yeah, and it's not like these are hidden names. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Is it really 10? | ||
| It was 10 that year. | ||
| How many killed that were armed? | ||
| That I couldn't tell you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What? | ||
| You'll be surprised to hear it turns out not to be the case. | ||
| But the campus goes into lockdown. | ||
| There's no picture of this person? | ||
| It's just a report? | ||
| They find the person. | ||
| The person turns out to be a Dominican monk carrying a rosary. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Certainly not on campuses. | ||
| Yeah, the Evergreen situation is a perfect example of it. | ||
| Looking for the most minute signal of racism and people's unwillingness to stay home if they're white. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They had a day of absence of African Americans and people of color. | ||
| It was a day of appreciation. | ||
| They're going to stay home for the day. | ||
| They get the day off work. | ||
| And then you get to reflect on the fact that they are a minority and they're not treated as well. | ||
| That's not a bad idea. | ||
| Giving them a day off. | ||
| Not a bad idea. | ||
| But they turned it around and said, no, all you white people must stay home. | ||
| So instead of having the option, like if you're a person of color, you could stay home. | ||
| And we'll give you free money for the day, and we appreciate the fact that you deal with some bullshit that white people don't deal with. | ||
| That's reasonable. | ||
| That's not even an anti-racist perspective. | ||
| That's just a nice thing that you can implement. | ||
| It causes discussion and people think about things. | ||
| You're not saying anyone's guilty. | ||
| You're saying, like, let's appreciate these people and let's give them the day off. | ||
| That way you appreciate the contribution that they give when they're around. | ||
| But when they turned it into, no, instead, that's not good enough. | ||
| We want white people to stay home, stay out. | ||
| We're running things today. | ||
| Well, that's when, as I've said, that's when the demand for racists is bigger than the supply. | ||
| That's when you have to pretend that Brett Weinstein is a racist. | ||
| Because you just not got... | ||
| You've not got any racists. | ||
| You've got a small supply. | ||
| You've got a small supply of racists. | ||
| They're not anywhere near you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's the craziest damn idea ever. | ||
|
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It's stupid. | |
| What, just because of your skin color, you're better than that person? | ||
| Never since I was born and brought up in multicultural London has that occurred to me. | ||
| But here's the deal. | ||
| I certainly don't believe that other people are better than me because of their skin color either. | ||
| I'm not better than them. | ||
| They're not better than me. | ||
| That's the deal. | ||
| That's controversial. | ||
| That's controversial now. | ||
| I mean, you know, it's... | ||
| And you see it in things like, oh, I can't believe you're moaning or you're whining about that. | ||
| You have all this privilege. | ||
| You have X, Y, and Z. People demand the microphone based on their oppression. | ||
| And then you create this society where people are searching for reasons to not be part of the majority and to claim to be victims. | ||
| Because you put, instead of heroism in your society, you make victimhood the prime way in which you gain status. | ||
| And unfortunately, that now has led America to these really, really ugly places. | ||
| And it's in every area that I thought it wouldn't reach. | ||
| I didn't think it would reach. | ||
| I always thought this bullshit stopped at STEM, for instance. | ||
| You know, like, you're not going to... | ||
| You might tell some of us nothing humanities people like this stuff, and we might play around with this. | ||
| There's no way you're going to get to mathematics. | ||
| And they have. | ||
| Boom, they have. | ||
| They have. | ||
| It's not going to happen in medicine. | ||
| Oh... | ||
| 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. | ||
| It doesn't matter who they are. | ||
| But I had to do this to the majority population. | ||
| It's just like, what a nuts idea. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's what we've seen. | ||
| There was a joke on conservatives in this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Never was terrified of it. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| There was a fear attached to any sort of pushback. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Does that make you a homophobe? | |
| He's a racist. | ||
| You can't prove it with some exceptions. | ||
| 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? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I mean, the pendulum swing theory is always attractive, but it suggests that our natural leveling place is a sensible median. | ||
| Which it might not be. | ||
| It might not be. | ||
| I mean, especially if you look internationally at different cultures. | ||
| I mean, there's cultures that have these arcane values and archaic ideas of how women should be treated. | ||
| And they haven't changed. | ||
| They're not changing. | ||
| There's no debate about it. | ||
| It's just they're locked in. | ||
| That's who they are. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Well, that's how the Communist Party of China behaves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's their median. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I don't think they even think about it. | ||
| 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 wish we could crowdfund for that. | ||
| We probably could. | ||
| Raise money for Robin DiAngelo to get mushrooms. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| What about them now? | ||
| They're barely hanging on by threads now. | ||
| I wonder what your perspective is in terms of where is this headed? | ||
| Do you have a prediction? | ||
| Do you look at it and can you separate yourself from it and observe it as a pattern and see some sort of clear direction that it's headed? | ||
| I don't think there's any clear direction. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Who won, who lost. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's quite a useful thing to have in a society. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but people want to almost, on instinct, find the things you disagree with, concentrate on them first. | ||
| Do you find that socially? | ||
| I don't. | ||
| Some people. | ||
| I avoid those fucks. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Keep a million miles away from them. | ||
| But they're out there. | ||
| There's some people that enjoy conflict. | ||
| And I always feel like it's usually generally people that don't have a lot of agency, either in their job or their relationship. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Frustrated people who want to... | ||
| I don't know about you, but I'm very hard to rile up in my spare time. | ||
| Yeah, me too. | ||
| Because I'm like, whatever. | ||
| I'm not going to have row over the dinner table. | ||
| Yeah, I'm so uncontroversial at dinner. | ||
| I'm like that. | ||
| I'm a real letdown. | ||
| Like they're hoping you're going to get into Islam. | ||
| Yeah, no, no. | ||
| I'm discussing like, you know, those fries are great. | ||
| Don't you love fries? | ||
| I'm very uncontroversial in my space. | ||
| We had dinner with Douglas Murray, so I was expecting so much more. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I was expecting a firebrand. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lamb. | ||
| Yeah, well, people would probably bring you to a dinner hoping you start some shit. | ||
| It happens very rarely. | ||
| It happened a little while ago in New York. | ||
| It was quite... | ||
| Actually, Jordan Peterson and his wife were there. | ||
| It was very funny because there was one woman who just... | ||
| Who said, I've got to leave by 9.30 because I go nuts after 9.30. | ||
| They said this. | ||
| Like a pumpkin? | ||
| Yeah, like a pumpkin. | ||
| And it was very weird because Tammy said to me, she actually did go nuts after 9.30. | ||
| She went nuts on me. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| And then I had to defend myself. | ||
| Anyhow, I said to Jordan afterwards, I said, it was an unusual event. | ||
| Like... | ||
| He happened to step out of the room at that point. | ||
| I said, the mushroom cloud went off when you weren't there. | ||
| You know, that's unusual. | ||
| But yeah, so it's very, very unusual for me to be able to get a rise in my spirit. | ||
| I don't want that. | ||
| And generally, I mean, as long as you're dealing with good faith people, I want to hear what they have to say. | ||
| I mean, you know, you're like this. | ||
| I mean, if somebody says, I believe this to be the case, and it's like some crazy thing, wow, tell me... | ||
| Tell me why that, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if you're – I agree. | ||
| If you have a kind of like – you're very frustrated in your private life. | ||
| You're very frustrated in your work. | ||
| You don't feel people are paying you enough attention or respect or something. | ||
| Then you're kind of – yeah, those people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You just say you're non-binary. | ||
| You're like everybody else. | ||
| You're like trans people, or people of color, or immigrants. | ||
| Oh my god, you're so oppressed. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Just non-binary. | ||
| That's all you have to do. | ||
| You know I always say non-binary actually means look at me. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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That's all. | |
| That's all it means. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Queer. | ||
| I hate that one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the guy in question is married to a woman. | ||
| He probably just puts on a bit of nail varnish. | ||
| Screw you. | ||
| You're not queer. | ||
| You're a normal heterosexual guy. | ||
| There's nothing you need to be ashamed of. | ||
| With a little bit of skin. | ||
| Don't try to pretend that you've got skin. | ||
| Those people, yeah, the pay attention to me people. | ||
| That's the version. | ||
| But I agree. | ||
| What you've just described, by the way, is that is a result of the fact that there's a Christian ethic we can't do in a secular way. | ||
| And the Christian ethic is everybody being equal in the eyes of God. | ||
| It's a really important ethic. | ||
| Everyone is, and I believe this as well on the moral level, everyone is equally valuable as human beings. | ||
| The Christian religion has a good way of doing that, which is saying you're all equal in the eyes of God. | ||
| But if you drop the God bit out of it and you try to instill as a society the idea that everyone is equal, but that's not true. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you can be equal in the eyes of God and Unequal in your capabilities. | ||
| But if you're just unequal in your capabilities and have to pretend everyone is equal... | ||
| Not just unequal in capabilities, but in accomplishments. | ||
| In accomplishments, I know. | ||
| In provable, measurable... | ||
| If you could see what this person's output has been. | ||
| This is why this whole idea of equality of outcome is such a fucked way of looking at things. | ||
| Where they're like, well, we need equality of outcomes, we need equity. | ||
| Well, you're never going to have... | ||
| First of all, we should take into consideration initially, right? | ||
| No one is coming from the same starting point. | ||
| So that's not equal. | ||
| And we can all agree that there's something wrong about that, right? | ||
| Some people are just fucked. | ||
| They have a terrible childhood, they have abuse, and they have so many things that are levied against them. | ||
| But then another thing that we don't have... | ||
| There's a cup if you want to use it. | ||
| The other thing that we have is there's an inequality of effort. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| And what do you do about that? | ||
| That's a big deal. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And, you know, and meanwhile you're heterosexual. | ||
| You're just doing something odd. | ||
| Got a wife secretly on the side. | ||
| Isn't that funny? | ||
| That's a shame. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| But it's this... | ||
| When you have these cultural shortcuts where you're allowed to say, I'm non-binary. | ||
| And meanwhile, you look like a woman. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| You must get this a lot. | ||
| People say things like, I do this in a kind of self-deprecating way. | ||
| I often say, well, I've been lucky in this, that, and the other. | ||
| And you know very well that a lot of life is luck, for sure. | ||
| Some of life is luck. | ||
|
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A lot. | |
| Being in the right place at the right time. | ||
| Just being able. | ||
| Just being able-bodied. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, your politicians, your family and others. | ||
| It's not just... | ||
| It's not just some wild whirligig. | ||
| It's also make prudent decisions, make wise decisions, work hard and a lot more and you'll find that you are what we call lucky or luckier. | ||
| Don't do any of that stuff. | ||
| Put everything off all the time. | ||
| Be lazy. | ||
| Be unmotivated. | ||
| You know, blame other people all the time for things that you think you could correct yourself. | ||
| And you will find you are the type of person that is described as unlucky. | ||
| And it's the same with countries. | ||
| There are countries we describe as unlucky, like Venezuela, where they weren't just unlucky. | ||
| They had the people, the fucking unluckiest people in the world at the moment, practically. | ||
| But it became what we would call an unlucky country because politicians made catastrophic decisions. | ||
| You know, they have the same energy sources, same energy resources as Norway. | ||
| It's better to be in Norway than in Venezuela. | ||
| And there's a reason, which is that people made better decisions. | ||
| And we are very unwilling to identify what those decisions are and what it is that leads to a good outcome or a bad outcome. | ||
| 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... | ||
| They're like, good for you. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Go for it. | ||
| Go after it. | ||
| It's completely true. | ||
| I see a friend Chris Williamson later. | ||
| He and I had this discussion recently. | ||
| Because he's just moved to American. | ||
| There are various reasons for that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's like, wow, I'd love to own that car one day. | ||
| And that is still an American thing. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That is still an American thing. | ||
| It was very funny. | ||
| And I come across it all the time. | ||
| And people are genuinely pleased for you when you do well. | ||
| And there is definitely in Europe and in Britain less of a sense of that and a kind of sense that... | ||
| Billy Connolly used to talk about that, that you're kind of somehow you're saying to people... | ||
| He said something very sad once. | ||
| Did you ever meet him? | ||
| No, I never did. | ||
| What a great, amazing man. | ||
| Did he pass? | ||
| No, he's very, very ill. | ||
| Very ill, right. | ||
| He's done his last stuff. | ||
| He's got dementia, I think. | ||
| He's just amazing in his heyday. | ||
| He wanted to do a documentary about going home to Glasgow, where he was from. | ||
| He worked in the shipyards. | ||
| And he said it was hard going back. | ||
| Not because we weren't policing. | ||
| He said he felt that if he went into the pub, there'd be another guy telling a great story at the bar. | ||
| And when he went in, that guy would feel less than he was. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Very sad observation. | ||
| Oh, that's so strange. | ||
| So he felt like he was taking away from someone's joy by just existing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Because what's not right with us? | ||
| Jim Jeffery said that when he became famous in America. | ||
| He found it shocking that he would go over back to Australia and he couldn't sell tickets. | ||
| Or couldn't sell as many tickets as he thought he should be selling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's like, this is fucked. | ||
| They do think that you've abandoned them because you think you're better than them. | ||
| They call it tall poppy syndrome. | ||
| Tall poppy syndrome. | ||
| And that's what it is in Britain as well. | ||
| They say tall poppy syndrome is you've got above yourself. | ||
| And that is a really central thing about America. | ||
| America doesn't have that industry. | ||
| It's not like, what do you mean above myself? | ||
| There's no above. | ||
| We like ballers. | ||
| We like it. | ||
| We take pictures in front of private jets. | ||
| With big watches and diamonds and stuff. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| Some of the Americans love that. | ||
|
unidentified
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I love that. | |
| They love celebrating success over here. | ||
| It's such a big thing. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of haters over here, too. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, look at him. | ||
| He went for it. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And that respect for the fact that if you put the work in, then you deserve the rewards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you haven't made other people feel worse. | ||
| You've made them feel more optimistic about what they could achieve. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's just a great thing about America. | ||
| And it is still there. | ||
| Yeah, I think it's still there too. | ||
| They haven't killed that. | ||
| They haven't killed that. | ||
| But there's some people that don't like that because they're fucking lazy. | ||
| And they are never going to be that exceptional person. | ||
| So they will rail against exceptional people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It wasn't other people. | ||
| We all in our lives have so many reasons to feel resentment. | ||
| Every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Every day. | |
| Especially when you reach a certain age. | ||
| There's so many decisions that had to be made. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Made to whoever you are at 45 years old. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They don't do that because that's painful. | ||
| It's much, much more painful. | ||
| Much easier to take the other route. | ||
| But it is, like, societally as well as individually, it is the toughest pill, but it is a necessary pill sometimes to swallow. | ||
| It's very similar to what you were talking about earlier in that pill of recognizing that you're incorrect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And saying, you know what? | ||
| I'm not right. | ||
| I thought I was right, and this is why I thought I was right, and now I realize I was wrong. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's very difficult for people to do. | ||
| I pride myself in that. | ||
| I take major steps to do that as often as possible, to say when I'm wrong, to just go out and make it a statement. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Because I think it's important. | ||
| But I would just say that there is one rider to that, which is that you can do that because of the position you have. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And somebody who's, say, young and starting off – It's not so easy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| They could do. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It just depends on what they do. | ||
| What business are they in and how are they doing? | ||
| If you're a young person and you have a podcast, you're a free person. | ||
| Yeah, that's true. | ||
| You can do whatever the fuck you want. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| And either people like it or don't like it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it also depends what you prioritize in your life. | ||
| And I suspect, like me, you always prioritize having freedom. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
| Yeah, same for me. | ||
| Freedom and truth. | ||
| Without truth, you don't have freedom. | ||
| Because if you have freedom, but you're living lies, you still have no freedom. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But some people don't prioritize that. | ||
| Some people have other priorities. | ||
| And again, it goes back to your thing. | ||
| That's why you'll have different outcomes. | ||
| Different people will want different things. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I couldn't agree more. | ||
| I remember, and again, it is in all of our hands to some extent. | ||
| Sometimes the most important decision in your life, in my experience, is deciding something you're not going to do. | ||
| Shortly after I left university, I'd written my first book very early and I spent the advance very fast. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And of course, if you're 19, you think, oh, I imagine this is going to happen all the time. | ||
| Then you're broke. | ||
| I basically did what a lot of NBA players do, but with less money. | ||
| Anyhow, and I had no money. | ||
| I didn't have any money to eat at one point, I remember. | ||
| A friend took me to the supermarket and bought food for me. | ||
| Anyhow, at this point, I realized I've got to get a job. | ||
| And I remember saying it to a friend, a very close friend, who said, Douglas, you say it as if this is a tragedy unique to yourself. | ||
|
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As if no other human being will understand. | |
| A tragedy unique to yourself. | ||
| That's such a great one, because young people do feel like that. | ||
|
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But they do feel like that. | |
| Anyhow, the point was is that there was something I wanted to write, and I knew I needed time. | ||
| But I also needed money and I needed a job. | ||
| And I remember applying for the job and I couldn't understand what it was. | ||
| I just didn't understand what the point of it was. | ||
| And I kind of got through an interview and I was still... | ||
| How does money move around? | ||
| I thought I'm going to cause one of these international disasters on the banking scene if I stay there. | ||
| Anyhow, they offered it to me like very lackluster. | ||
| And I turned it down. | ||
| And it's one of the things I'm most pleased in my life that I did. | ||
| And it ended up I had more to suffer through, as it were, in the short term. | ||
| But it was the best thing imaginable because I didn't get stuck... | ||
| There's a phrase of Philip Larkins I'm very fond of. | ||
| He describes people who get shunted to the edge of their own lives. | ||
| And I managed to make sure at an earlier stage as possible that I didn't get pushed to the edge of my own life. | ||
| But most people, if you say to them, what is it you really want to be? | ||
| They're embarrassed to tell you at a certain stage because the dream of what... | ||
| No, it's not even a dream. | ||
| The vision of what they thought they were going to be in their lives is too different from the reality. | ||
| That they don't want to admit it. | ||
| And often that vision is perfectly achievable. | ||
| It's not like I want to be the new Marlena Dietrich. | ||
| It's I want to work in this area of work, not that one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And then all of a sudden you're 60. You're 60 and you thought... | ||
| And it's not going to ever happen. | ||
| And you've kind of wasted your life and you're filled with resentment. | ||
| And in order to not think about that, you concentrate on other people and you're just angry about other people all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So true. | ||
| It goes fast, so fast. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| So, like, try not to be stuck in the life you don't want to live any longer than you have to. | ||
| The thing that people say, oh, it's easy for you to say, Douglas Murray, you're a fucking successful author. | ||
| You got lucky. | ||
| Well, as I say, I have a counter to that. | ||
| Firstly, screw you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And secondly, no, I think that there is definitely an element of luck, good fortune and stuff like that. | ||
| But most of it is peddling fucking hard all the time. | ||
| To make sure you're living the life you want to live. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so, no, I've now been in America long enough to say, screw you. | ||
| Well, that's the unique thing about being independent, as you are, too, is that the amount of effort that you put into something is all on you. | ||
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| And I like that. | ||
| I like that. | ||
| I do, too. | ||
| Sometimes people say, you could take your foot off the pedal a bit. | ||
| And I tend to think, well, yeah, but I like the feeling of my foot on the pedal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's fun. | ||
| And it's also, it's like, no, I can't, because then I'm not me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I said to a really good friend in America recently, I said, God, I'd love to take a break. | ||
| I don't have to write any articles for a couple of weeks. | ||
| She said, no, you wouldn't, Douglas. | ||
| You'd hate it. | ||
| You'd be bored after 48 hours. | ||
| After 48 hours, you'd be like the worst house guest ever. | ||
| Well, I resolved that by going on vacations. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Are you any good at it? | ||
| Yes, I've become good at it. | ||
| My wife has taught me how to do it. | ||
| I'm terrible at it. | ||
| Well, I have children and that helps because I go and we hang out. | ||
| We'll go to like a beach or somewhere, some island or something. | ||
| And you manage to like put the phone away. | ||
|
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|
Yes, yes. | |
| I'm good at it now. | ||
| I'm good at it now. | ||
| I get hammered. | ||
| That's what I like to do. | ||
| How do you get hammered? | ||
| Just get drunk. | ||
| Get high. | ||
| If I can get weed, I get weed. | ||
| If I can't, I'll just drink a lot of margaritas. | ||
| And I go to the gym every day and I just think. | ||
| And sometimes I'll read a book. | ||
| But a lot of times I've learned how to just be at peace. | ||
| And then around day five I start getting itchy. | ||
| And then when I come back, I'm fucking raring and ready to go and I'm diving back into it and I enjoy it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But I've learned how to like... | ||
| It's also like when you have children and you're talking about things going quickly. | ||
| Well, you want to talk about quickly when they become adults. | ||
| It's so fucking fast. | ||
| It's 18 years. | ||
| It's so quick. | ||
| How old are yours now? | ||
| Well, the youngest ones I have are 11 and 13, and then I have a 25-year-old. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| You've got a 25-year-old? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So watching them grow and watching them become this... | ||
| You know, my 13-year-old's hilarious. | ||
| She's like this little adult. | ||
| And we're laughing at stuff, and she's got little sayings she says. | ||
| And it's like she's got her own little personality. | ||
| I'm like, man, she's only going to be around a few more years. | ||
| And then she's going to be out in the world. | ||
| And then hopefully I'll be close to her geographically where I can see her as often as I can. | ||
| And I want to make sure that I spend as much time with her now as I can. | ||
| So... | ||
| One of the beautiful things about vacations is it's the one time where we're together 24 hours a day for over a week. | ||
| So I love that. | ||
| You love being with them. | ||
| They love being with you, clearly. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Little people that you've made that came out of your own DNA are fucking so... | ||
| It's so bizarre. | ||
| You love them so much. | ||
| But also you get to see how much of my fucking personnel is genetic. | ||
| Because this kid is not... | ||
| Want for anything, but yet is so driven. | ||
| Like, why is she such a psycho? | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| And it's like, oh, you just have my fucking crazy genes. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why people are always fascinated by hereditary. | ||
| That's why royal families are interesting to people, why dynasties of hereditary. | ||
| Because it's like, we're all very, very interested in seeing how DNA plays out. | ||
| There's more to it than just nature and nurture. | ||
| There's a lot going on there. | ||
| And there's some stuff that my kid has. | ||
| One of my kids has this artistic bend that's very similar. | ||
| I used to be an illustrator and I wanted to draw comic books and stuff. | ||
| And she's very talented as an artist. | ||
| But the other one, the athletic one, is the one that fascinates me the most. | ||
| Because she acts like... | ||
| She gets obsessed with things like someone who's not loved. | ||
| Someone who's trying to show the world that she's special. | ||
| But her personality's not like that at all. | ||
| She loves everybody. | ||
| She's easy going. | ||
| She's very confident and friendly. | ||
| But she's like me. | ||
| But I felt like I was like that because my parents broke up when I was young. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I moved around a lot. | ||
| I thought maybe my drive was all like, I'm going to show you that I'm special. | ||
| And I'm going to put in the amount of effort and work that a person with a good family is not capable of doing. | ||
| Because you're not going to be as crazy as me. | ||
| And so that was my fuel when I was younger. | ||
| But now it's confronted by this 13-year-old psycho who's Totally loved. | ||
| And also fueled. | ||
| Fully fueled by this insane desire to achieve greatness, but also totally loved and completely confident. | ||
| That's fantastic, because among other things, it gives us hope that to be successful, you don't have to feel like you've been screwed up in any way. | ||
| I think there's a difference in our choices, though. | ||
| And this is the thing. | ||
| My daughter does gymnastics and a lot of other athletic things, and she's really good at it. | ||
| But I was interested in fighting. | ||
| Like, I was trying to hurt people. | ||
| And I was also doing this very dangerous thing where I was trying to learn about myself. | ||
| She doesn't have that desire. | ||
| And I'm like, I think that there's a thing about fighting where I don't think you excel at that. | ||
| I could be wrong here, too, though. | ||
| I don't think you necessarily excel at that, I should say, unless you have some pain. | ||
| I don't... | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| By the way, I'm no damn good at boxing. | ||
| At all. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| Very, very bored by it and very unmotivated. | ||
| Motivated by most physical exercise, apart from boxing. | ||
| And a friend said, why do you think that is? | ||
| I said, I'm fairly sure it's because whatever that is that people take out, I use on my keyboard. | ||
| Writing. | ||
| If somebody does something that really pisses me off, I... Yeah, well, that's an outlet as well, right? | ||
| I'm fascinated by demons and how those demons manifest themselves in someone's work. | ||
| One of my obsessions with this is Stephen King. | ||
| Stephen King is one of my favorite authors. | ||
| His earlier work. | ||
| Carrie and The Shining. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| But it was just cocaine and alcohol. | ||
| Really? | ||
| And then his new stuff, I just don't sync up with. | ||
| And I feel like he exercises demons. | ||
| They don't show up at work anymore. | ||
| That's one reason why a lot of successful people are very unwilling to go through things like rehab or therapy. | ||
| Because they think... | ||
| And I think mainly this is wrong. | ||
| There are cases where it's true. | ||
| They think that if you look under the bonnet the car will stop working. | ||
| Yeah, I don't necessarily think that's true. | ||
| I don't think it's necessarily true, but a lot of successful people have that fear. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He doesn't even remember writing it. | ||
|
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|
What? | |
| He doesn't remember anything about it. | ||
|
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|
Really? | |
| Yeah, yeah, it was all just cocaine and alcohol. | ||
| His book on writing is really fascinating. | ||
| It's a very, very interesting book. | ||
| But one of the things that he talks about is getting rid of all these things in his life. | ||
| Cigarettes are one of them, cocaine, alcohol, and his family intervened and saved him, and he's very thankful. | ||
| But the man he is now is this, like, guy who tweets about politics in this sort of obtuse way and then writes stuff that is good. | ||
| It's good. | ||
| He's a very good writer. | ||
| He's a great writer. | ||
| But it's not The Shining. | ||
| It's possible, of course, also that he just took it—he wrote himself out on that early. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's also possible that he's old. | ||
| And then old people have less energy and they're not angry. | ||
| There's a hunger when you have a family and you're barely fucking feeding them. | ||
| And you're making your living off of your creativity. | ||
| There's some energy there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I do think that people write out rage. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| They get it out of their system, for sure. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And when you're young, you're much more rage. | ||
| I suddenly was. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| Much more angry about things. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No, you have to be Stephen King. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| I have a never more than one drink rule if I'm working. | ||
| Never write after more than one drink. | ||
| Never speak after more than one drink. | ||
| That's a good rule. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very good rule. | ||
| Yeah, one drink is enough. | ||
| One drink, you achieve what you want. | ||
| You get a little looseness, a little social lubrication. | ||
| After that, it's like... | ||
| And you read it the next day and go, God damn. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How the hell? | ||
| How the hell did he sleep? | ||
| Halcyon. | ||
| Sleeping pills. | ||
| What's Halcyon? | ||
| Oh, is it? | ||
| Yeah, sleeping pills. | ||
|
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|
That is crazy. | |
| 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. | ||
| I would say that normal people, most people, Could do that and then stop and write about it, but not do that and write at the same time. | ||
| That is really... | ||
| He could only do it for a certain amount of time. | ||
| That's the other thing. | ||
| Towards the end of his life, his writing was not good anymore. | ||
| As you were saying that, as you're reading that list, let alone chartreuse, the nastiest, stickiest, sweetest alcoholic drink. | ||
| Like, why that? | ||
| In the middle of like... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I think he hated that part about it, but he knew that that was his job and he would just get fucked up before he wrote. | ||
| It's really uncommon. | ||
| I can't stress enough how uncommon that is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then also deteriorated horrifically towards the end of his life. | ||
| You know, I remember watching him on Conan O'Brien, and he was talking, and you could barely understand what he was saying. | ||
| He fired everything. | ||
| If the red line was at 7,000, everything went to 9. Bang! | ||
| Pistons were blowing. | ||
| Everything was fucked. | ||
| His hips were gone. | ||
| He couldn't walk anymore. | ||
| He was crippled. | ||
| He was in agony all the time. | ||
| I mean, everything was wrong. | ||
| There is a price paid for everything. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, Hitchens talked about that. | ||
| He talked about that when he's died. | ||
| He's like, I burned the candle at both ends, but what a lovely flame it created. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I know. | ||
| I think about him a lot. | ||
| But he also said, I can't remember if he said it publicly or privately. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I remember him saying before the end, I thought, I hoped I'd get another 10 years. | ||
| And he said, I thought I'd earned it. | ||
| Which I found very upsetting because he'd worked so hard. | ||
| And I used to have drinks with him. | ||
| I used to go out with him a lot. | ||
| Literally, all the stories are true. | ||
| He would write an article when you were barely able to get off the sofa. | ||
| He'd go and tap away next door. | ||
| And that's an amazing skill. | ||
| But it also meant we didn't have him as much as we could have done. | ||
| And he worked hard enough to have deserved to have been able to take the foot off his own. | ||
| You know, demon accelerator. | ||
| And he had hoped that he would have had his 70s, and he didn't. | ||
| Was it cigarettes and alcohol? | ||
| The problem with cigarettes is it's a cognitive enhancer. | ||
| And that's one of the things that Stephen King talked about, how difficult it was to write after he quit cigarettes. | ||
| It was one of his most difficult things. | ||
| The only people I know who've been through AA for drugs or drink, they don't give up cigarettes. | ||
| No. | ||
| They stick with the cigarettes. | ||
| Yeah, that's the thing that keeps them stable. | ||
| I knew a lot of people, because a lot of comedians back in Boston, they got into comedy from Alcoholics Anonymous. | ||
| Because Alcoholics Anonymous, you would go up there and speak, and you could tell your drunk stories to these people. | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I knew quite a few of them. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I had no idea about that until recently, and people started writing to me. | ||
| I realized that's, of course, you'd be asked to do that. | ||
| It's just a good way to mentally balance yourself, too. | ||
| Like, we should all be grateful for a lot of things. | ||
| There's many, many, many things. | ||
| And it'll shift the balance off of constantly looking at things in a negative manner. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Particularly when you're comparing yourself to others. | ||
| Well, I saw, by the way, I saw a little bit of your podcast with Jordan a little while ago. | ||
| He mentioned the night we spent in New York together. | ||
| And when I saw that, I started talking about this. | ||
| I thought, oh, God damn, what's he going to say? | ||
| But actually, the thing that stood out for me most in the evening he described was that we were walking through Times Square. | ||
| And I remember I... I just love walking across Broadway. | ||
| And I stopped in the middle of it and I said to Jordan, isn't this fucking amazing? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And he grabbed me and he said, right man! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And we just, both of us were just like overtaken with joy about like, wow! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This is just like, what are the chances that anyone could create this? | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The first time I ever saw New York City, I was living in Boston and we drove down for something. | ||
| I forget exactly what it was. | ||
| I think it was for a martial arts tournament. | ||
| And we drove on the West Side Highway. | ||
| And there's this moment where you're driving and you start to see the buildings. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| And then you're inside it. | ||
| And then you're up close. | ||
| It's like for me as a young kid, I was probably 15 or 16 at the time, like looking up like, This is fucking crazy. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is so big. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's so immense because Boston is so small in comparison. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Boston is so quaint. | ||
| Provincial. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like it was so much different than seeing it in a photograph. | ||
| You could be ruined for life. | ||
| Some people get ruined for life by that because like, You can be like this. | ||
| Yeah, and you can live like this. | ||
| You can live like this. | ||
| I mean, it's fantastic. | ||
| Again, it goes back to your thing. | ||
| The people who are spurred and energized and things will orient themselves towards places that thrill them like that. | ||
| And the ones who are not will fear that they'll fail. | ||
| It's having those tools to look at things in a way that benefits you the most. | ||
| And to not be tripped up by thoughts and ideas that are limiting. | ||
| If you're upset that someone... | ||
| This is a very common one amongst certain people. | ||
| They're upset that other people are getting successful. | ||
| Upset at someone else's success. | ||
| That doesn't help you at all. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's no benefit to that thought. | ||
| Those thoughts are the opposite of the thoughts you need. | ||
| You can be inspired. | ||
| You can say, if that guy made it, I'm gonna fucking kill him. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You could even do it in a shitty way. | ||
| You don't necessarily have to be praising this person. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Gore said that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And I thought it was a pretty shitty thing to say. | ||
| That's super shitty. | ||
| But I mean, it wasn't like he minded coming across that way. | ||
| I always thought that was very... | ||
| I mean, I just... | ||
| I literally can't... | ||
| Among friends, I can't familiarize myself with that sentiment. | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, that's one of the reasons why you're so prolific. | ||
| Well, no, but when a friend does something well, you're like, that's fantastic. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And that's a great attitude. | ||
| And that's how we should all be. | ||
| And that should be... | ||
| We should shun people who think that way. | ||
| But maybe Gore was just fucking around. | ||
| I think he might have been. | ||
| I mean, he was no stranger to deliberately provoking. | ||
| His debates with William F. Buckley were fantastic. | ||
| That documentary is amazing. | ||
| That's a great documentary. | ||
| There's a film. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really good. | |
| There's a play that's opening about it as well. | ||
| But those are amazing debates. | ||
| I watched that documentary in Rovello. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah, because I was in Ravello for vacation. | ||
| You didn't visit the house? | ||
| No, I did not. | ||
| But we were staying at this resort in Ravello that overlooks the sea. | ||
| Oh, stunning. | ||
| Oh my god, it's like one of the most incredible views in the world. | ||
| It's heaven, that place. | ||
| And the food. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| The Italian food there is off the charts! | ||
| Positano, Ravello, it's amazing. | ||
| And I downloaded it on my laptop, so I was watching it up there. | ||
| And you know, because Gore Vidal lived there for a while. | ||
| He had that stunning house on the cliff with an external staircase. | ||
| I was in Ravello some years ago, like 10, 15 years ago, and I remember somebody pointing out Gore Vidal's house to me. | ||
| Wow, fantastic! | ||
| And they said, you know, a famous writer lived there. | ||
| Of course, it's Gore Vidal. | ||
| And they said it's on the market. | ||
| I was like, wow, that's fantastic! | ||
| And I immediately Googled, and it was 30 million dollars. | ||
|
unidentified
|
13? | |
| Wow. | ||
| 30 million euros. | ||
| And I was like, writers used to be much better paid. | ||
| Or it probably wasn't worth that much back then. | ||
| Yeah, it might not be, yeah. | ||
| Anyhow, it was a disappointing moment. | ||
| But I had a moment of thinking, wow, wouldn't it be great to move into Gore Vidal's old house? | ||
| That would be pretty fucking amazing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That was like our spot for the summer. | ||
| So beautiful. | ||
| Yeah, so before the kids would go back to school, we'd go to Rovello. | ||
| And I was thinking like, well, okay, if I had a house here, like how often, like it takes, how long does it take to get here? | ||
| It takes 16 hours by plane, whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| Like, how often would I do this? | ||
| I was like, I can't do this. | ||
| It's a wonderful dream, though. | ||
| It's a great dream. | ||
| Vidal was amazing. | ||
| And those debates with Buckley were really... | ||
| Television debates were good then. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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 they both knew how to speak in paragraphs. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, they had a skill that almost nobody has today. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Both of them are so... | ||
| I mean, they're so lucid. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Great writers. | ||
| And they were also... | ||
| They had... | ||
| They had great jabs at each other. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And they would go back and forth and, well, that's because, you know. | ||
| And Buckley, I never met Buckley, but he had lots of friends in common. | ||
| He had that great, awful, weird eye thing. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And he does the eyes thing. | ||
| He always did it when he was going to win. | ||
| Young Chomsky debating Buckley was very fascinating. | ||
| Wasn't it? | ||
| Because Chomsky was so measured. | ||
| Very measured. | ||
| Amazingly. | ||
| But he became so strange. | ||
| Well, he's strange now, but I feel like it's fear and age and a lot of things. | ||
| He hasn't helped a younger generation think their way through. | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Really? | ||
| He went into that? | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a different kind of existential threat. | ||
| It's a different kind of danger. | ||
| But it comes back to that thing as well as I said earlier. | ||
| I mean, the likelihood of being lockstep on all of these issues now is very small. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Very small. | ||
| What about Chomsky is weird to you, the Chomsky of today? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I never liked it. | ||
| I never liked the way in which it veered from... | ||
| No, that's people working on our gym are doing something stupid while the podcast is going off. | ||
| They must be banging on the wall. | ||
| They're saying it's time to work out or something. | ||
| I think they probably assumed we're done. | ||
| Bloody hell. | ||
| Because it's almost 4 o'clock. | ||
| You know, it's like... | ||
| Live long enough and you become a villain. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I saw a performer recently, I won't go into many details, who wasn't everything he had once been. | ||
| And I said to a mutual friend, jokingly, I said, when I become like that, you will tell me, won't you? | ||
| And this friend said, when I become like that, don't say a word. | ||
| Just say it's marvelous. | ||
| I mean, I think at a certain point in time, you've got to know and just step away. | ||
| But then, you know, there's people like Carlin. | ||
| Carlin performed until he died. | ||
| He died in a hotel room in Vegas. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's also like, can you still do it? | ||
| Well, why don't you? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, are we just doing this because we do it at a certain level? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, what is it? | ||
| Tommy Cooper died on stage. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Funniest man of his generation in the UK. And he died on stage, and the audience thought it was part of the act. | ||
| Did you see the video? | ||
| And they pulled the body away in front of the audience. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Last sight of him, the curtain came down. | ||
| His feet were on the wrong side, and they pulled the body. | ||
| Did they know, the people know at that point? | ||
| At that point they were starting to work out it wasn't that shit. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| But in a way, I mean, the old kind of how do you want to go. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| How do you want to go other than having sex? | ||
| There was a recent... | ||
| Which is such a selfish thing to say. | ||
| It's very selfish. | ||
| Especially for the person you had sex with. | ||
| Like, what the fuck, they have to live with this for the rest of their life? | ||
| Now they're... | ||
| They're connected to this idea the last person they had sex with fucking died. | ||
| Yeah, the person they have sex with after that. | ||
| That's tricky. | ||
| Yeah, and they have to get a bunch under their belt before they start feeling normal about it again. | ||
| You know, have a bunch of sessions. | ||
| Like, okay, I think I'm not a jinx. | ||
| I think it's not me, you know? | ||
| There was a woman, her name's Heather McDonald, she's a comic, and she was on stage joking around about how vaccinated she was. | ||
| About she's vaccinated and boosted and, you know, and I even got the shingles vaccine or whatever the fuck it was. | ||
| And she's in the middle of doing this and blacks out on stage. | ||
| And bangs her head off the ground. | ||
| Like, watch this. | ||
| Let's play it. | ||
| Let's play it from the beginning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I still get my period. | |
| I don't care, but I want you to know, double vaxxed, booster, flu shot, and I'm going to be honest, I have the shingle shot too. | ||
| And I still get my period. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Traveled. | ||
| Went to Mexico twice. | ||
| Did shows, meet and greets. | ||
| Never got COVID. Clearly, Jesus loves me the most. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| So nice. | ||
| - That is so nice. - Boom! | ||
| Somebody wants to-- - I wish I'd seen that. | ||
| Well, it's not funny, really. | ||
| I laughed, unfortunately, because it was my friend Justin Martindale. | ||
| That was the guy, the comedian. | ||
| Did she die? | ||
| No, but she did crack her skull. | ||
| She literally bounced her skull off the hard stage and cracked her skull. | ||
| You see, I read a column recently saying, and this wildly backs up my view, I do slightly believe in the old gods. | ||
| There's something to that. | ||
| There's something to it. | ||
| How many of these people that are saying, we need to enforce vax mandates, and they're just like... | ||
| There's something to it that you just don't tempt the fates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's so many people. | |
| Or they'll come running at you. | ||
| They'll hitch up their skirts, come running at you, and smack the living daylights out of you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's got to be something in the fates. | ||
| So never boast like that. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Particularly not about your period. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's a crazy one. | ||
| And I still got my period. | ||
| Like, what you're talking about is how many women don't get their fucking period. | ||
| Because it's a real thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I have a friend who didn't get a period for six fucking months after she got her shot. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird thing. | ||
| It's not for everybody, but it's a real thing. | ||
| It's like, she's joking around about this, and then God's like, ha-ha! | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Check, please. | ||
| Never tempt the fates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Are you doing an audio version of this? | ||
| I've done the audio version. | ||
| How stressful is that? | ||
| It's not stressful at all. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Well, you talk well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's not that. | ||
| I really love it because it's... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when you read it, it can be funny. | ||
| When you read it out loud, it can just be hilarious. | ||
| So there are people I quote just like crazy shit that people say. | ||
| And I find myself like having to say to the producer, I'm sorry, a corpse singer, laughing so much. | ||
| I'm not laughing at my own jokes. | ||
| I'm laughing at how ridiculous this is when you say it out loud. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There's this woman from Yale who fantasizes about killing white men. | ||
| When I'm typing up what she says, it's like, this is crazy. | ||
| When you read it out loud, you go, this is a really deranged person who should be locked up very fast. | ||
| But it's great fun doing it. | ||
| Is she a white woman? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| It's always white women! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why do women hate white people so much? | |
| Yeah, but it's great. | ||
| I love doing it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Only a few years ago people used to think it was like cheating somehow. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| You get all the same information. | ||
| I still feel guilty when I say that I listen to audiobooks mostly. | ||
| I do read occasionally, but it's like 8 out of 10 I'm listening. | ||
| I think it's a great medium. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I think it's great fun to do. | ||
| And it's great fun to listen to. | ||
| And sometimes there are kind of jokes and things which come across slightly better read than on the page. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Sarcasm translates so much better. | ||
| I had one in Madness of Crowds. | ||
| I referred to somebody who described something as being literally like Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. | ||
| And I say in the book, I say, not just any old Mein Kampf. | ||
| Adolf Hitler's in my account. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And it's definitely better read than on the page. | |
| Well, especially that it's your voice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, for me, it's a great pleasure. | ||
| And it brings you a whole new audience, you know, and I love that. | ||
| There are people who do jobs which, you know, they need to spend a lot of the day listening to stuff, and they listen to books. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, what's better than that? | ||
| I just listen to them when I commute. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's like, so I have an hour of that book every day. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Half hour here, half hour home. | ||
| And that is, I mean, you can get through a book pretty well that way. | ||
| Yeah, you can listen to this one if you'd like. | ||
| I will. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| It's out now? | ||
| The War on the West. | ||
| The War on the West. | ||
| All formats. | ||
| I don't have anything signed for me. | ||
| Will you sign this one for me? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Feels nice. | ||
| Beautifully. | ||
| Please? | ||
| Well, thank you for being you, man. | ||
| I really appreciate you. | ||
| I love your work. | ||
| I love the fact that you're out there. | ||
| There's not a lot of you, Douglas Murray. | ||
| There's not a lot of people that I could point to and say, that guy's on to it. | ||
| So it means a lot to me. | ||
| Appreciate you're out there. | ||
| It means a lot to me. | ||
| And you can get this now along with all the other books, The Strange Death of Europe, Madness of Crowds, and this, The War on the West. | ||
| Do you have any other books? | ||
| I've been keeping busy. | ||
| You make it sound like I'm a... | ||
| Are those the three, though? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I've written like seven books. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
buy these three well said we're good Thank you. | |
| Appreciate you, man. |
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