0:00

Hello everybody, welcome back to

0:02

the show. My guest today is Douglas

0:04

Murray. He's a journalist, author, and associate

0:06

editor of The Spectator. As the turmoil

0:09

of global events dominates the media, it can

0:11

feel as though the world is spiraling into chaos.

0:13

If we can't agree on what's happening,

0:16

how can we make sense of the world? And what's

0:18

the solution in a post-truth existence?

0:21

Expect to learn how Victoria's Secret

0:23

betrayed the body positivity movement, why

0:26

people are struggling to agree on what's true

0:28

anymore, how the Gaze for Gaza

0:30

movement will get on, whether we're past peak

0:32

wokeness, why there is such a huge increase

0:35

in conspiratorial thinking, what the most

0:37

recent South Park episode has to say

0:39

about our culture,

0:41

and much more.

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welcome.

3:59

God bless you all.

4:18

And

4:30

what are some things that you foresaw

4:32

coming or things that you've been particularly surprised

4:34

by? Well,

4:36

nobody gets to predict with 100% accuracy

4:39

anything, because among other things all the time

4:41

things happen that you could never have seen coming.

4:44

I could never have seen COVID coming. I just didn't. So

4:48

whenever anyone sort of boasts about their predictive capabilities

4:50

I always think you have to do with a certain amount of humility

4:52

because... I mean... Things

4:56

happen all the time you couldn't see. You

4:58

can only see around

4:59

the bend of the road you're coming to. You

5:02

can't see around the corner.

5:03

Yeah, I mean

5:06

some things I've written about for

5:08

years, particularly in my book, A Strange

5:10

Death of Europe that came out in 2017, which

5:12

I think are sadly

5:15

coming to fruition. I say sadly because people

5:18

think that if you've predicted something and got

5:20

it right you would feel any pleasure. And that

5:22

would only be if the thing you were predicting was something

5:24

you looked forward to. And what I was predicting

5:27

was something I was dreading. And

5:31

that was the transformation of our

5:34

country of birth and

5:37

many other countries in the West due to demographic

5:39

change. And I mean

5:42

every day now pretty much

5:44

somebody says to me, Gosh, I used to think what you

5:46

were saying in the strange death of Europe was a bit out there

5:48

and now I've realized you were right. But it gives me no pleasure

5:50

for them to say that. I

5:52

always think well if you'd have agreed back then some

5:55

things might not have happened.

6:01

Mark Stein said, demographics is destiny.

6:03

So it's one of the things

6:05

you can predict with the most ease.

6:08

Yeah. Did you have Victoria's

6:11

Secrets plan to bring sexy back

6:13

on your 2023 bingo card? Why

6:16

are Victoria's Secrets bringing sexy back?

6:19

After experimenting with 300-pound mannequins,

6:21

foot-sized models, disabled models,

6:23

trans models, a male model, and a 38-year-old

6:25

football player, Victoria's Secrets have

6:27

made the controversial decision to switch

6:30

strategy and start using hot women to

6:32

model their underwear again. That makes commercial

6:34

sense, to my mind. Yeah,

6:38

it's quite easy. I always am amazed that

6:40

advertising executives find it complex, this stuff.

6:43

All you need to do is stick sexy guys on stuff

6:45

and stick sexy girls on stuff. If they

6:47

sell all the merchandises, it pretty much writes itself.

6:51

Yeah, I'm not particularly surprised

6:54

that if you stick a lizzo in

6:56

a bikini, it's not as

6:58

appealing as a bit of sales

7:01

merchandise. But live

7:03

and learn, I suppose. Live and learn.

7:07

One of my friends owns a very big

7:10

clothing company, and for

7:12

a while they tried plus-sized

7:15

models, mostly for women.

7:18

There's not much of a body positivity movement for men. No,

7:20

not like a bare gut movement. No,

7:23

I got it. Skinny fat revolution. He

7:27

said we've split-tested this into oblivion.

7:30

Big girls don't sell clothes. When you

7:32

see that, when you see a company, and

7:35

some are making double-plus-sized dildos

7:38

or whatever, the

7:41

company is actively hurting

7:43

the top line and bottom line to

7:45

be able to send the right message.

7:48

That's all well and good. Up until

7:51

some shareholder meeting where some

7:55

70s-year-old guy looks at the

7:57

far right column of an Excel sheet and goes, What

8:01

the fuck is this? Yes. And they go,

8:03

no, you don't understand. It's this really

8:05

cool new movement. It's

8:08

very progressive. And he goes, I don't

8:11

care. I want more

8:14

money than we had last year and this is less money

8:16

than we had last year. Yeah. Yeah.

8:19

They, I mean, I suppose it all starts off from a good place,

8:21

like some or many things. But

8:24

look, if you, you

8:26

might agree that, you know, it's not a good thing to

8:28

sell anorexic looking models to

8:30

young women. And that's, yeah, okay. Let's all agree

8:33

on that. But you can, you can stop

8:35

somewhere before morbidly obese. You

8:37

know, that's where the whole thing goes wrong with body

8:40

positivity thing. Plus there's a place where the body

8:42

positivity shouldn't occur. It should be, I

8:45

mean, if somebody is so morbidly obese, they're at significant

8:47

risk of heart failure, you shouldn't celebrate them.

8:49

You should say, hang on a minute, steady on the

8:51

doughnuts. But they don't say that. They

8:54

just did that. They, they, they, they run all the way.

8:57

I wish that you could just have sort of healthy looking

8:59

women on the ads

9:01

and just draw the line there. But as

9:03

ever, they sort of don't know where the line is until

9:06

you say something wrenches them back. I think

9:08

wrenches them back is normally, as you say, the bottom

9:10

line. Yeah. I,

9:13

I've been thinking about this sort of performative empathy

9:15

point for a while. Got this idea.

9:17

I need to meme it better. But I think something

9:19

like short

9:21

term empathy or the shallow pond of empathy,

9:24

I've been thinking about what

9:26

is most popular in culture at the moment

9:29

is something that optimizes for

9:32

it's immediately to signal that you

9:34

are a good guy or good girl. Even

9:37

if that's at the expense of

9:40

the ultimate outcome for the person. Oh

9:42

yeah. Yeah. You're able to do

9:44

something giving the child ice cream. It

9:47

may be what it wants right now. It may be

9:49

bad for it long term, but if you're the ice

9:51

cream promoter for the young children, you

9:53

will be seen as a good person. And

9:56

if you're the person who's saying, hang on a second, that's

9:59

not what you want. long-term, maybe responsibility

10:01

in Peterson language, maybe not casual

10:04

sex in Louise Perry language, maybe not

10:07

as much food as you want in body positivity language,

10:10

you're seen as bigoted

10:12

or judgmental or whatever. Because there's

10:14

no countervailing force in the culture. The

10:18

unlimited empathy, people have run along way

10:20

very fast because, as you say, there's

10:23

a short-term gain to be seen to be being empathetic,

10:25

let's celebrate yourself. But ordinarily,

10:28

you would have some other counterforce

10:30

in the society and different forces

10:32

have provided that in history, including the church.

10:35

But if there is no counterforce to say,

10:37

for instance, long-term gratification,

10:40

better than short-term, then

10:42

yeah, and then that's

10:45

a sort of unappealing position in our society now.

10:47

There's plenty of room for people to be in that

10:49

space, but you're still on the defensive.

10:53

We still live in a society where effectively

10:55

to own an ice cream truck

10:58

in the language of a child would seem to be

11:00

a great thing, to become the short-term thing.

11:04

Yeah, and not many people want that role. It's sort

11:06

of uncool in some way. It

11:08

might become cool at some point in the future when more

11:11

people realize that the short-term gratification

11:13

thing was leading to diabetes or whatever.

11:16

It's the same as one of the justifications, I think,

11:19

for why people aren't having children, that upfront,

11:21

while children, you just see a very, very

11:23

large cost on all of the joy and

11:26

stuff. The economist put it as the child tax,

11:28

the amount of

11:31

money you have less if you have a child.

11:33

It's a weird way around

11:35

to look at the future of the species, isn't

11:37

it? If only I died with more money

11:40

in my bank account. Life

11:42

of regret. Death

11:46

of regret. Yeah. As

11:51

well as the Mexican fisherman

11:53

story. Are you familiar with that? The parable of the Mexican fisherman?

11:55

No, I don't think I am. This is cool. You like this. goes

12:00

on holiday to Mexico and

12:02

while he's there, it's a parable. Fucking

12:07

hell. He goes

12:09

on holiday, he gets taken out fishing

12:12

by a local Mexican and he asks

12:14

the Mexican how he spends his time. The Mexican says,

12:17

I fish a little on the morning, I catch enough for

12:19

my family, we go back, we cook,

12:21

we laugh around the fire and I spend time with my children.

12:24

And the American businessman goes, that's stupid. Here's a

12:26

better idea. What you should do is actually spend

12:28

most of your day fishing and then with the surplus fish

12:31

you could sell them at the market. The Mexican

12:33

fisherman says, why would I do that? So

12:35

once you've got the additional money, you

12:38

could start to employ some of your friends and they

12:40

could come out fishing with you too and you could

12:42

catch more fish which you could sell at the market

12:44

for more money. He says, why would I do that? He

12:46

says, well, once you've done that, you would be able to incorporate

12:48

in America and you would maybe be able to start a canning

12:51

factory so that you could own the entire

12:53

production process and you could then sell

12:55

the company for a lot of money. He says, why would I do

12:57

that? He says, because once

13:00

you've done that, you would be able to fish a little on the morning

13:02

and then go back and spend time with your children

13:04

around the fire. And

13:07

I often think about that as a much more direct

13:09

route to happiness. Well,

13:14

that's the classic thing that the place you

13:17

end up is the place you started from. Yes.

13:20

There are lots of reasons why people aren't having children and

13:23

a lot of them are simple economic things.

13:25

I mean, all of the Western countries

13:27

that have terrible replacement birth rate figures

13:31

are because of very

13:33

easy things to solve like cost of housing

13:35

and things like that. It's not hard to build affordable housing.

13:38

We just proved to be incapable of doing so. So

13:40

young people wanting to both get on the property

13:42

ladder and start a family think

13:45

they have to do either or. And they're not entirely

13:47

wrong, but that's something that governments could

13:49

have sorted out and none of them do. They're so

13:51

hopeless at it and they have been for years

13:54

under consecutive government. They never build

13:56

enough housing. So young people don't see a future,

13:59

don't feel hopeless. plus and then

14:01

don't have kids and then everyone wonders whether there's a demographic

14:03

crisis. Intergenerational

14:07

competition theory is something I learned about a couple

14:09

of weeks ago. You familiar with this? Yeah.

14:12

Yeah. I didn't know about it before, but it makes complete sense. You know, there was always

14:14

this talk of millennials are the first generation

14:17

to have done worse than their parents and it seems if you

14:19

go... Well, they're not the first. First in a while. Yes.

14:22

First in two generations. Yeah. Yeah.

14:25

And it seems like millennials actually probably just about

14:27

managed to get over on average. Okay. So,

14:29

there's the materially... Yeah. ...difficultly

14:32

in getting in the property ladder. The most common living arrangement

14:35

for men under 35 is still at home with their

14:37

parents. Yeah. Awful. And

14:40

yeah, you know, it bakes in this

14:42

sort of intergenerational

14:47

competitiveness and

14:49

a dissatisfaction when you look at where your parents

14:51

were in this. Sure. You know, felt sense that

14:53

your parents got advantages that you never did. Which

14:56

is usually not true. I mean, they

14:58

didn't suffer inflation at the same rate. They

15:00

suffered very high taxation in the post-war period.

15:04

We haven't had taxation as the levels it was at

15:06

in the 1960s and 70s, for instance, in the

15:09

UK. That

15:11

was a time when people were top rates for taxpayers

15:13

were paying 99% tax. A friend

15:15

who once in that period paid over 100% tax

15:17

for one year for reasons he couldn't... How

15:20

is that possible? It will be back tax and that sort of thing. So, I mean,

15:23

there's a tendency, particularly among millennials

15:26

and after, to think that their parents had it very

15:28

easier. My experience of people

15:30

from that generation, the boomer generation, it

15:32

didn't feel easy at the time.

15:36

And yeah, there were certain things getting on the

15:38

property housing ladder was a little bit easier

15:40

than it is or significantly easier. Once

15:43

you have, what is it, five times

15:45

average earnings being inadequate

15:48

to get to the average

15:51

property price, you see the split

15:53

go on. But

15:55

you always have to factor. I mean, if you say

15:57

the millennial, the first one's in the... one's

16:00

gonna say whoever to have a

16:02

better standard of living you have to bake

16:04

in things like oh yeah well they had a world war

16:06

you know

16:08

so that's quite a big PS

16:11

well that's a big footnote so

16:13

yeah everyone has their

16:15

challenges I just don't see why once you've

16:17

identified them know the way out of them you don't do them

16:20

but I was

16:22

talking to mutual friend Eric

16:24

Weinstein about this I also spoke to Sam

16:26

about this I've spoken to a bunch of people why

16:29

in your opinion do you think everybody

16:33

struggles to agree on the truth

16:35

now

16:36

oh that's quite straightforward

16:39

we can't agree on what's happened so

16:43

broadly speaking an event happens now

16:45

and some people believe it has happened and other

16:48

people think it hasn't I mean

16:50

we've been through a number of deranging years

16:52

since we first spoke in

16:55

which for instance you know they said it's been a global

16:57

pandemic which some people believe

17:00

was something which killed millions and millions of people

17:02

in their own country and think they were just about

17:04

saved from dying themselves and other people

17:07

think it was a fake and other

17:09

people think we just massively overreacted and other

17:11

people think it was all planned

17:13

and nobody agrees

17:16

what happened that's

17:18

just to take one example in America you have obviously

17:20

the fact that nobody agrees who won

17:23

an election that's a problem and so

17:25

you just have basic things nobody can agree on it just

17:28

happened I always say in America you

17:30

know it'd be nice if we could just agree that one

17:32

thing that's just happened happened but

17:34

then nobody wants to and so you must be a WF

17:37

shill if you if you if you believe

17:39

that so I think it is the problem and

17:41

then obviously underneath that is just the problem fact that the

17:44

treadmill of social media has totally changed

17:47

the way in which we communicate the way in which we learn

17:49

things absorb things and we don't know

17:51

what the consequences that are with so early

17:53

into it and

17:57

it seems to me the mother things it's allowed people

17:59

to have their own version of recent events, recent

18:01

history, the past few days. And

18:05

so when you sit down to talk to somebody, you can

18:08

fairly swiftly work out whether they're somebody who's

18:10

open to the idea of things that

18:12

happened, having happened, or whether or not they will

18:15

fight you all the way. And

18:17

that just makes everything much harder than

18:19

it used to be. And that isn't

18:21

to sort of particularly pine for the era of

18:24

a mono-narrative, if that era ever

18:26

particularly existed. And you read

18:28

history not clear that it did, but

18:31

it's just massively worse. And news

18:34

is coming at us at such a pace these days.

18:36

It's just like every day

18:39

feels like a month's worth of news in the

18:41

past. Things

18:44

just fly by you so fast

18:46

that you don't even have time to absorb it before

18:49

it's happened. So

18:51

I think that's part of the reason. And

18:54

in any case, the whole concept of truth as

18:56

being a desirable thing in the society seems

18:59

sort of eroded from both the right and the left. Well,

19:05

truth, for instance, used to be the basis for

19:07

university education

19:10

and the basis of university inquiry,

19:13

that you sought the truth wherever

19:15

it led you. That was the point of academia, for

19:17

instance. Politics was

19:19

different. Politics was always about having to

19:22

find a way around truth and

19:24

deal with it and address it

19:27

where you could, but get around it if it was too

19:29

awkward. But inquiry used

19:31

to be about seeking truth. And

19:34

they've been like that for a couple thousand

19:36

years or more, since the Greeks, certainly.

19:38

And then it changed at some point relatively recently.

19:41

And truth is now not a

19:45

desirable thing because truth hurts people.

19:49

And it can be mean. So

19:51

it's not only that

19:54

people have different opinions on things. They

19:56

don't agree that the thing we used to agree on is worth going

19:58

for. They have different factors as well. Well, they have different

20:00

facts, but they don't agree that you should just follow truth

20:05

wherever it takes you because

20:08

other things are prioritized over truth. I

20:10

still prioritize truth over all things if I

20:13

can and try to.

20:16

I think that's the interesting thing about the world, finding

20:18

out what is true and what is not. But

20:21

other people don't seem to have that same

20:24

appetite anymore and would

20:26

rather live in their

20:29

lies, which I think is very dangerous for individuals

20:31

and very dangerous for society. In

20:34

fact, it's dangerous for

20:36

an individual and lethal in a society, I'd

20:38

say. It's

20:42

interesting to think about the

20:44

motivations that people have for

20:47

not believing something

20:49

which is already on an unshaky

20:52

foundation of we can't agree

20:54

on the thing that we're not believing about.

20:57

And Gwyndo, one of my friends, has this idea

20:59

that if

21:02

no amount of evidence would dissuade

21:05

someone of what they believe,

21:07

then they don't have a rational belief. They have a

21:10

religious ideology. Yeah, yeah. That

21:12

was Jonathan Smith beautifully

21:15

put it, that you can't reason somebody out of

21:17

a position they weren't reasoned into.

21:21

Of course. I

21:23

mean, you're dealing with dogma with many

21:26

people today. It's just they don't know which faith they belong

21:28

to. But

21:28

it's dogma, for sure.

21:30

I just am not very interested in

21:32

their views because

21:35

I think they can't defend them. And if you can't defend your views,

21:38

I'm not very interested in them because I don't find them persuasive.

21:42

I asked Sam this about whether or not,

21:47

obviously, whatever, 10, 15 years ago, who's a big

21:49

part of the new atheist movement? And I guess he was tangentially

21:52

on the... I was a whippersnapper. And silly, right?

21:54

I was a whippersnapper and you made... You were an orbiter, I'd

21:56

refer to you. I was a short cousers, new

21:58

atheist. Okay, but

22:02

you know your book The

22:05

madness of crowds talks about the collapse of grand narrative

22:07

One of the biggest collapses of grand narratives was religion

22:10

I asked some whether or not looking back he believed

22:12

that his deconstruction of religion was on

22:14

balance and that good or a net Net

22:18

negative what did he say? He? Managed

22:21

to evade being too committal either way.

22:23

I think But

22:26

what do you think? Sure, but I think

22:28

it's like a lot of things that you deconstruct You

22:33

only know afterwards whether or not it's something you could have

22:35

put back together It's like children with bicycles.

22:38

We're very fine to take them apart very bad

22:40

at putting them back together Not

22:42

comparing Sam to a child But

22:44

I mean I just I think that is it is something

22:46

you notice only once you've taken apart once you can't reconstruct

22:49

it You'd rather what what function it might have performed

22:53

I said to Sam on stage a few years ago

22:56

that I Thought

22:58

that it would all be fine if Most

23:01

atheists were as rational and level-headed

23:03

as Sam But it's not

23:05

Sam Harris all the way down. It's like Sam

23:07

Harris followed my total mentalist and

23:13

Who just will not reason or

23:15

rationalize anything and are just

23:18

screaming harpies of insanity So

23:21

that's a shame But Yes,

23:25

I mean I think that that whole thing works for

23:27

some people but obviously doesn't work for others I

23:30

mean religion is you know Sharpen

23:33

her among others Saw it

23:35

was religion was philosophy for the

23:37

masses Absent

23:41

religion completely there's several lots

23:43

of options of what will happen one is that the The

23:47

general public lose the

23:50

overarching framework of their lives And

23:53

have nothing to replace it with another one is that

23:55

they do replace it with other things in

23:57

which a new religions Which crop up all the time you have

23:59

the the religion of the body

24:01

negativity movement. You know, we have the religion

24:04

of trans, we have the religion of

24:06

gender, we have the religion of race,

24:09

and you know, and all these things have just stepped into

24:11

this void. And they're all dogmatic

24:14

things with their founding texts. They've

24:18

all got their own catechisms of

24:20

a kind. Priests. They're priests.

24:23

They have excommunication rights. My

24:27

only observation really would be on that is

24:29

that I preferred the old gods, you

24:31

know. I preferred the old priesthood, funnily enough,

24:35

partly because we knew its flaws. And

24:39

the sweet point where you see the flaws of religious

24:42

belief but can still live through it

24:46

is one even I can, or I can especially

24:49

feel nostalgic for. Because I

24:51

don't like the new priesthood. I find

24:53

them as

24:56

corrupt as any priesthood in history with

24:59

the negative attribute

25:02

that not everyone's woken up to them yet. I

25:05

mean, do we have in our culture

25:07

an equivalent, for instance, of the meme

25:09

of the pedophile priest? I

25:12

don't think we do. I mean, for

25:14

instance, I would love it if the sort

25:16

of adults who

25:18

push, you know, gender dysmorphia

25:21

stuff on children were regarded

25:23

as the equivalent of a pedophile priest. I think that'd be

25:25

fine. But it

25:28

doesn't come with that yet. It's

25:30

like the Catholic Church in Boston circa 1950.

25:34

The priests are still fiddling with the kids but no one wants

25:36

to talk about it.

25:39

It makes me think, as we were talking earlier on,

25:42

about some

25:44

of the ways in which lots of decisions

25:47

need to be made and you don't know how the outcomes

25:49

are going to occur. There are no solutions, only

25:51

trade-offs. I

25:53

keep coming back to that in my personal life as

25:55

well, but thinking about what people want to optimize

25:58

for in their existence. There

26:01

are no solutions, ultimately. You

26:03

have to give up certain things. You don't

26:05

have to give up everything. Well, no, there's certainly

26:08

better solutions. But the

26:10

world is trying to maximize

26:13

everything. It goes

26:16

back to the shallow pond of empathy.

26:21

Accepting that trade-offs are an inevitability doesn't

26:24

fit into that paradigm. We

26:26

will always optimize for what feels

26:28

most pleasurable or empathetic

26:31

in the short term. I don't know.

26:33

I don't feel that. That's

26:36

how it plays out, I think. For

26:38

a lot of people. Yes. If they

26:40

have no character. If they have no character. Well, what do you optimize

26:43

for? I try

26:45

to optimize for peace. That seems to

26:47

be the thing that, for me, in my personal life,

26:49

I try to do. If the price is my sanity,

26:51

the cost is too high, no matter what it is. And

26:54

I continually throw that rule out of the

26:56

window all the time. That's what I try

26:58

and aim for. My own rubric is... I love

27:00

that there's peace in your private life.

27:03

I try. It reminds me of Lady Bracknell's line

27:05

about the general at the end of The Importance of Being Earliest.

27:08

She says, the general was essentially a man of peace,

27:10

except in his domestic life. I

27:16

think you're the other way around. You're

27:19

a man of peace in your domestic life. Except

27:21

for my public life. Maybe you are generally in the public life. No,

27:23

I don't think I am. You're a highly agreeable

27:25

person. Fucking not. Really? I

27:28

try as best I can to keep a lid on it. But

27:31

yeah, this lack of

27:33

meaning and people's desire, their

27:37

absolutely fervent desire to try and fill that

27:39

hole with as many

27:41

things as they can. Like

27:44

Lizzo. Like Lizzo, indeed. Did

27:47

you see the stories that came

27:49

out about Lizzo? Oh, it was wonderful. My

27:51

favorite story of the year. What

27:53

a long way. For the people that don't

27:55

know, Lizzo was on tour

27:59

in Amsterdam. I took her backup

28:01

dances to the red light district and

28:04

made the backup dances some

28:06

of the backup dances eat bananas out of the

28:08

vaginas of Amsterdam

28:10

yes my view is that what happened

28:12

here was that lizzo thought you could outsource

28:15

the eating of your five fruit and veggie day. To

28:19

the vagina to the vagina of the stripper

28:22

or to the reluctant to eat healthfully she

28:24

even outsources the five fruit and veggie day. I

28:27

love you. Well

28:31

it seems to me that it

28:33

seems to me that both lizzo. Ellen

28:36

to generous jimmy kimmel all

28:38

of these people who up front oh isn't

28:40

it wonderful it's so great

28:43

it's a nice and nice and nice

28:45

is not the lizzo of look nice to the

28:47

squeaky clean Ellen to generous thing

28:49

you know just dance and. And

28:52

of course they're horrible in

28:54

real life or behind this course it's a

28:56

sort of rule that by the way actually with public

28:58

figures is that the ones who are most you know sort

29:00

of sweetie sweetie in public

29:02

tend to be the nastiest in private sometimes

29:05

the opposite can be true some people who have thought to have

29:07

a very hard edge in public can

29:09

actually be lovely lovely people in private. Margaret

29:11

Thatcher was a good example very

29:14

very nice to people around her you know

29:16

but could make tough decisions. Yes to

29:18

me it's a counter signal if i see someone

29:21

doing the lizzo thing of i am so body positivity

29:23

i it becomes their identity

29:25

of how they're. Flaming

29:28

sword card carrying paragon

29:30

of whatever this thing is what is also it's

29:33

also a bit like the. The

29:36

jimmy salvo the hospital

29:39

what was it called it still goes but. There

29:42

was a hospital for children that he raised

29:45

money for time and whenever anyone tries

29:47

to do an investigation savory go you know it's gonna

29:49

gonna hurt the hospital for kids. You

29:51

know you want to run that story that

29:54

the hospital so there are lots of you

29:56

have a thing like that they build like the equivalent

29:59

of the jimmy salvo. Children's Hospital facade

30:01

up in order to protect themselves.

30:04

Right, are you saying that Lizzo's work

30:06

with the body positivity movement is in a case

30:08

to try and effectively put a wall

30:10

of large- Yes, a crate of wall. A large-bodied

30:13

people in front of us. A very difficult wall to get

30:15

over. Well, I think it's probably easy to

30:17

get over. Getting around it might be more difficult. But

30:21

if the only one don't go, I go into a car and it

30:23

ran out of gas. I

30:26

had this idea about why

30:29

certain women are very pro-body

30:32

positivity movement. I

30:34

was listening to Bill Burr do a live show

30:36

and he said, Ladies,

30:40

if you could only support the WNBA

30:43

the way that you support a fat chick who

30:45

is gaining weight and no longer

30:47

a threat to you, that it would

30:49

be doing more numbers than the NBA is. I realized

30:52

that

30:54

some non-zero number of women may

30:57

deep down in their darker moments realize that

30:59

they don't discourage some of their

31:01

friends from gaining

31:04

weight because they can eat themselves

31:06

out of their intrasexual competition. So, it's

31:08

a lot of people. Oh, come on, men

31:10

are like that as well. How do we play that game?

31:15

I mean, this is going to show a low side of my character.

31:18

But you can't say always that you're sad

31:20

if somebody are not very close

31:22

to you, but you knew you and you see them after

31:24

some years and they've had. I

31:28

mean, you can't say they're in the slight sort of... You'll

31:31

never guess. You'll become fat. There's

31:34

different versions of that with men, I think. And

31:36

I think men can be complicit in that as well.

31:39

Yeah. The thrill

31:42

would offend balls early. I

31:44

think that's very common. Thrill. There'll

31:46

be a German word for that. Of course. Like,

31:49

Schadenfreude, specifically for the scalp. Yeah,

31:52

yeah, yeah, yeah. I think lots

31:54

of people do that. But it's a pretty bad thing

31:56

to encourage among people. But yeah,

31:58

I think it is part of the competition. and taking out of

32:00

the competition, for sure. I

32:02

was thinking as well about how material

32:05

conditions, you were saying before, people's

32:09

parents maybe had it better in some

32:11

ways, but also would have had it way worse. Yeah, of course.

32:14

Material conditions often

32:17

don't impact people's demeanors in the

32:19

way that they might have predicted. Rich

32:22

people can be bitter idiots, and

32:24

poor people can be grateful heroes. Although,

32:26

as George Orwell said, by the age of 50, every man

32:28

gets the face he deserves. What

32:30

do you mean by that? I think that's

32:32

actually true. I think as a certain age, it might

32:35

not be 50 now, but it's a certain age where you

32:37

do show your life on your face.

32:40

Oh yeah, I mean, for instance, somebody who's very profoundly

32:43

depressed for a long time,

32:45

that writes itself across the face, who writes

32:48

itself in their eyes, I think, people

32:51

who particularly unhappiness write itself on somebody's

32:54

face. Joy does as well. I mean,

32:56

if somebody smiles a lot, they have laugh lines. Yeah.

32:59

You know, and yes,

33:03

there's a great truth in it. I mean,

33:05

we know that because we judge people by their

33:08

faces, by the way they interact with us, by

33:10

the way they look at us. Perfectly

33:13

sensible. I

33:16

found a quote the other day that said, people

33:18

with low self-esteem will always find a way to

33:20

be miserable. And it

33:22

made me think that material conditions,

33:25

I think, are a lot at the time of what? Young people, but many

33:27

people lay at the feet of their despondency

33:31

or their nihilism or their critical

33:33

nature or whatever it might be. And

33:36

I've seen enough of my friends vacillate

33:40

through varying levels of affluence

33:44

or relationship or singletonness

33:46

or whatever. And one of the things, sometimes

33:49

it impacts the way that they show up, but

33:52

many times they are the common denominator between all

33:54

of those situations. And the material conditions

33:56

don't actually impact the way that they show up all that much.

33:58

Well, there's a problem.

35:59

I'm going to say that

36:02

some people say it was a great place at the right time but

36:04

most people do sort of vaguely

36:07

think they've made it that they were sort of preordained

36:09

and I will do that to some extent.

36:11

I haven't described myself as being

36:13

lucky and then need somebody to remind

36:16

me of how hard I've worked. I

36:19

had a friend who joined Goldman

36:22

Sachs in 1998 and he

36:25

said he had an absolute golden

36:27

period for about 10 years. Yeah,

36:30

a little bit less. He said

36:32

he was already starting to wind

36:34

down before Lehman Brothers. Yeah,

36:37

some of that was to do with DEI, a very early

36:40

instantiation of DEI. Right, yes,

36:42

there's several books that make that clear. Is that

36:44

right? Yeah, several books that make it clear about some

36:46

of the hiring processes going on. Yeah,

36:48

like 2006 he was already seeing it but he told me he

36:52

made a trade on 9-11.

36:56

He made a very particular trade

36:59

and bypassed

37:01

all of the security limits

37:06

on everything and the

37:08

pit boss or whatever. He's just some young dude, he's been there

37:10

for two years, right, out of whatever university

37:12

or something. What does his boss think of the trade? He came over

37:15

and said, like, what the fuck

37:17

are you doing? He said, look

37:20

at this, if this, then that, if this, then that,

37:22

ran it all the way down. He said, this is the outcome,

37:24

this is what's going to happen. He was like,

37:28

I don't know what – so first off he was concerned that it was

37:30

going to go wrong. Then he made

37:32

the most ungodly

37:34

amount of money in the space of three hours

37:36

and then all the market shut for 10 days from

37:39

September 12th. The

37:43

only organization that had

37:45

spare capital was Goldman because of

37:47

this particular trade. He

37:51

was basically told – we may need to cut this, I'll check with

37:53

him – he was basically told,

37:56

go home, don't tell anybody that

37:58

you made this. the market.

38:01

Yeah, I mean it was widely thought after 9-11 that

38:03

because the stock market tanked of course immediately

38:05

and we didn't know if that was going to be a world war, if this

38:08

was a world war. And

38:11

it was regarded very specifically as actually being

38:13

the duty of Wall Street to

38:16

not do that. Well,

38:18

Bush came back, you remember he did that ground zero

38:21

announcement, we will do that and that was as

38:23

much for the stock

38:25

market as it was for the fucking popular. Yeah,

38:28

absolutely. Well, yes, because I mean stock market

38:30

collapses, I mean many, many more Americans,

38:32

I can't remember the percentage, but are

38:34

invested in the stock market than in Britain, I mean it's like

38:36

three times more or something. Americans

38:39

are more than 50% of

38:41

the population. America has some investment

38:44

in the stock market, so it's different from

38:46

the UK. When the stock went, when the pound

38:49

was shorted in the 1990s by Soros

38:52

and others, a

38:56

lot of British people are not that sympathetic, they

38:58

don't see themselves as being involved in the stock market,

39:01

because they are, they just don't know it. You

39:03

mentioned George Orwell, the Telegraph

39:06

recently spoke about his wife's

39:09

biography or autobiography. Oh, there's a new biography

39:11

of Sonia Orwell, yeah. George Orwell was

39:13

sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic

39:15

and sometimes violent. Biographer of the

39:18

legendary writer's wife says, darkness

39:20

that runs through 1984 is a reflection of his

39:23

soul. Should we unperson

39:26

George? Well, it would be the obvious

39:28

end point to the full

39:30

circle. Yeah,

39:35

this is just a way for the author to get publicity,

39:37

to repeat things everyone knew. I mean

39:40

George Orwell held the views of his

39:42

time about gay men, for instance. We

39:44

know he was a little bit homophobic,

39:46

but it was the 1940s, you know, Nancy

39:50

Boyes and so on, as he would have called it.

39:53

We're not, you know, people

39:55

weren't. That sounds like a 1990s taxi drivers in

39:57

the store. that

40:00

they've thrown out. No, it was a sort of word that Orwell

40:02

and people of his generation would use, you know, fairies

40:04

or something. And he does in some of his letters

40:07

and some of his articles. But I mean, so fucking

40:09

what?

40:11

I don't care.

40:13

I mean, was he sadistic

40:15

probably in some

40:17

ways, sometimes? Could

40:20

he be cruel and nasty probably being

40:22

a human being? I

40:25

just think that the absurdity of our age

40:27

of judging people in the past, you know, just

40:29

wait till people do that to you. Yeah,

40:33

wait till somebody weighs up your own life

40:36

in the balance and finds you wanting.

40:40

I mean, I think it's preposterous. Human beings

40:42

are what we are. Being

40:45

amazed at us in

40:47

the past is always just an expression of our

40:49

own vanity and thinking we've got past all

40:51

that. So like the way if

40:54

a friend of mine was saying to me the other day when I was at Oxford,

40:56

if you want to get a grant

40:58

to study these days, say in English, and

41:01

you were to choose Shakespeare as

41:03

your subject of study, which

41:05

is sort of unusual these days, you would,

41:08

for instance, have to find

41:10

Shakespeare guilty of, you know, racism, colonialist

41:13

thinking and so on. And it doesn't

41:15

seem to strike these people that actually their job

41:17

is not to judge Shakespeare. Shakespeare

41:20

judges us and he might find

41:22

us wanting. How so? Well

41:26

he gives us visions of the

41:28

universe and our place in it, which it would

41:31

do us well to listen to. And

41:35

that might include exposing

41:38

human follies, human weakness, human pride,

41:40

human sin, human lust, the tendency

41:43

to do evil in the name

41:45

of doing good or think you're doing good and do great

41:47

harm. So

41:49

much more.

41:51

All of this

41:52

is in Shakespeare's work and his characters

41:54

and the things he created in

41:56

his mind and his work. I think

41:59

that if you look

41:59

could

42:01

panoply of a vision like that, you

42:03

should think, I wonder what he's telling us, rather

42:06

than I wonder how I can judge him.

42:09

What's the point of the latter? It's so boring.

42:12

Human being from the past, inhuman being in

42:14

the past, shocker. Has

42:18

it always been this way? Has it always been people

42:22

of the present judging people of yesterday by the

42:24

standards of today? Well,

42:27

most people didn't have time in the past to engage

42:29

in that. Too busy trying to put

42:32

food on the table or

42:34

surviving past the age of 25. But

42:41

what it is in our current society is there's a very

42:43

strange lack

42:46

of respect for wisdom. Henry

42:49

Kissinger said this in the early years on the internet. All

42:51

the knowledge is there, but where's the wisdom? People

42:54

might not like me quoting Dr. Kissinger in that regard.

42:58

But again, he knows a lot more than

43:00

most of his critics. I

43:03

do think that's a straight oddity

43:05

of the age. I think the oddity, the vanity of trying

43:08

to judge everyone from the past by our current standards

43:10

is just absurd. You think you

43:12

know more than Shakespeare? Do you know more

43:14

than Orwell? These

43:17

are minnows. Snapping. Giants.

43:21

I don't care for them. One

43:26

potentially unfortunate situation

43:28

is that women's mental health is

43:30

in part down to misogynistic songs.

43:33

When BTS lead singer Jung Kook

43:36

changed to a more misogynistic music,

43:38

a disturbing trend followed. A psychiatrist's

43:41

point of view on BTS' Jung Kook and the

43:43

messages of pop music. Early

43:46

in their teen career, BTS took a

43:48

deliberate stance to refrain from objectifying or

43:50

sexualizing women. Despite going

43:52

against the music industry, Norn, they achieved huge

43:55

success. Now as part of his solo launch,

43:57

different imagery has surfaced in

46:00

for mouthing the N-word along to

46:02

a song. So it's no

46:04

longer the sound of the word. It's

46:07

the mouth shape that that word

46:10

engenders. Well,

46:12

we know that it's a magical word in our time,

46:14

which even the speaking of suddenly summons

46:17

up the demons of the past. Lord Voldemort was

46:19

very, very strange. But, no,

46:21

I just said to the gym, I said, I just

46:23

don't wanna hear it, because I don't want, I

46:26

just don't want it in the background of my life. Was

46:30

it that gym that we trained at? We

46:32

can discuss this another time. But anyway, no,

46:36

I just don't like, there are certain things I don't want in my ears,

46:38

and that's one, actually. I have no interest

46:40

in hearing the word, because it's a banned word,

46:43

so why would I want it in my mental background?

46:45

Yeah. But

46:48

anyway, the point is, of course, popular culture has

46:50

a huge impact on people. It has a huge impact on the

46:52

way in which people see themselves. It does, it does. At

46:56

the same time, you can overstate it. Somebody

46:59

is not generally unhappy just because of the popular

47:01

culture, apart from anything else, because you can easily step out

47:03

of it, as I try to do, and

47:06

be a part of your time, but

47:08

not be its creature, as Schiller says. So

47:14

no, I think it's a sort of weak excuse

47:16

for unhappiness, that the popular culture happens not

47:18

to beat your taste, or avoid

47:21

it, get out, look up from the screen.

47:23

When is cancel culture going to come for

47:25

rap lyrics? Because it seems to me

47:27

that it's worth fighting against the misogyny

47:30

of air conditioning temperatures

47:33

in offices that are conditioned

47:36

to the male body temperature, as opposed to the female

47:38

body temperature, or I mean, the

47:42

levity of the era is just astonishing

47:45

to me. Lots of

47:47

people attribute to me this quote that I was not

47:49

quite right, and it's quite for me, but that

47:52

we'll be talking about gender pronouns when the barbarians

47:55

break in. But I've said

47:57

something like it quite a few times, but I

47:59

mean. You know, gender

48:02

norms and air conditioning. It's the sort of thing

48:05

that you would be discussing just before

48:07

you will get, you know, machetes. I'm

48:10

totally serious about this. It's

48:13

sometimes it's like,

48:16

one of the things that actually genuinely shocked

48:19

me in recent weeks, particularly after the

48:21

Hamas massacre in Israel, was,

48:23

you know, and then something which I do think at some point

48:25

when it's all died down a

48:27

bit, might, there might be a

48:30

moment of, what

48:34

do you've got? I've got to say this carefully, but a

48:36

moment of seriousness, which

48:39

is, you know, take the music

48:41

festival within a few miles of the Gaza border

48:43

that Hamas attacked. All the young people

48:45

there were at this sort of peace rave.

48:49

And this isn't in any way

48:51

to victim blame. These are people

48:54

just wanting to dance and

48:58

dance into the early morning. And I

49:00

think it was called the peace rave, the peace

49:02

and love rave, something like that. And

49:06

then this hideous other

49:08

world broke into them, into

49:11

their lives and ended the lives of hundreds of them.

49:14

There's something, there's something

49:16

haunting about this, I find, because it's especially

49:19

haunting, because it sort

49:21

of demonstrates that your slogans and

49:23

your attitudes only

49:25

go so far. And

49:27

they can't keep out some of the things that

49:30

are lurking at the edges. And

49:33

I think that when I hear people whining

49:35

about minor things, if

49:38

you have any idea of the world

49:40

out there, if you had any idea

49:42

of the things that was lurking, you

49:45

couldn't possibly be complaining about this.

49:48

How do you think gays for Gaza will get

49:50

on long term? Well, the joke

49:52

at the moment is that there aren't enough tall buildings

49:54

in Gaza to throw gays for Gaza off.

50:00

These i mean these people are you know i've

50:02

said very often and they're part of the

50:04

same phenomenon of turkey for christmas

50:06

and chicken for kfc i mean. I

50:09

just i'm fed up these in fringe idiot

50:12

cases i mean that's so mentally

50:15

defective these people and

50:18

and incredibly narcissistic

50:20

you know i can be queer

50:22

and also celebrate policy no fucking

50:25

calm fuck off. You

50:29

know i can both argue for two state

50:31

solution and also celebrate queerness and also not

50:33

let myself down no you can't no

50:36

you can't you can't do all those things at some

50:38

point you got to choose i've got a video to show

50:40

you show you this video.

50:44

And someone please explain

50:46

to me

50:47

what this

50:47

means what does reproductive

50:50

justice free

50:52

palestine what does that even mean

50:55

like what is it need

50:57

i'm pretty sure i'm not pretty sure.

51:00

Abortions are legal

51:03

in palestine and i'm like it's like you know

51:05

a super medical emergency in the mother of life

51:08

from what i understand actually a lot of palatine's

51:10

have to go to israel to get

51:13

abortions they want so what is this. Yeah.

51:22

Fine people holding. That's

51:25

very good that's

51:28

danny the other half of ryan who wasn't there

51:30

the day that you that you came voice

51:33

cast reproductive justice means

51:35

free palestine what do you think you can you

51:37

this is just this is just an incredibly

51:39

ignorant young people in america who

51:41

have been taught this weird.

51:44

Version of the world where all

51:46

the questions interlink and interlock

51:49

and you are the majority

51:51

of minority for minority rights and issues

51:53

or majority rights and issues and all minority

51:56

rights and issues intersect overlap

51:59

so that if you. queer somehow, you

52:02

know, it's not even known. These ignoramuses

52:05

who couldn't point to the River Jordan if you showed

52:07

it to them on a map. Walk

52:09

along the streets from the river to

52:11

the sea, Palestine will be free. Because I think the Palestinian is

52:13

the underdogs in this weird

52:16

version where they've mapped

52:19

a very specific version of American racial

52:21

politics onto everything else in the world.

52:23

It's the same thing with people who talk

52:26

about colonizers. I mean, there's

52:28

this language of colonizers,

52:31

apartheid, all this stuff. And

52:35

they've just tried to map it everywhere. Well, I say everywhere,

52:37

actually, it's highly selectively, highly selectively.

52:40

I mean, the people who are talking about Israelis

52:43

being colonizers. When

52:46

I saw that the other day on the streets

52:48

of London, I thought, yes, if only

52:50

there was a name for large numbers of people who came from

52:53

outside for a country. And

52:56

if only we could identify what they might be called in

52:58

Britain. Oh, it would

53:00

be immigrants when dead. Do you want to call immigrants

53:03

colonizers in Britain? You

53:05

sure you want to follow this logical conclusion that talk

53:07

about indigenous peoples? Oh, okay, great.

53:10

Anywhere you don't want to apply that. Might

53:12

there be a country or continent

53:14

say, oh, Europe, where you

53:16

don't want to start talking about the indigenous peoples? I

53:19

noticed that people don't. But if you do

53:21

want to, welcome

53:24

to hell.

53:26

So

53:27

no, all that is happening is a very selective

53:29

mapping of a particular interpretation of the world

53:31

that very dumb

53:34

people in America have tried to put

53:36

on certain selective other cases. And

53:39

it doesn't work. It just doesn't work. But

53:42

may they never find out

53:44

how much it doesn't work? May

53:46

they never find out? I

53:50

wish some bliss in

53:52

the ignorance because if their ignorance

53:54

ever gets popped, it will be as brutal

53:57

a day as can be imagined. thinking

54:00

for a good while about how hypocrisy

54:03

is a purpose-built tool for the internet

54:05

to use. It's like catnip

54:08

for the internet. It's the thing because the

54:10

reason it's so purpose-built, it's like a one

54:13

of those, can you spot the difference

54:15

competitions on a touchscreen iPad? This is what's

54:17

on the left, this is what's on the right. And what you have

54:19

is, here's something that someone once said or a

54:21

position that they used to hold, and here is what they hold

54:23

now, or here is what they do in their real life, or here

54:25

is whatever. And it's kind of what you're

54:28

identifying here, that you have a worldview

54:30

which is self-contradictory, you're just using

54:33

different words for one thing that is almost exactly

54:35

the same for another thing. And then complaining

54:38

about this one, saying don't look over here. Everyone

54:43

is inconsistent to some extent. And

54:45

I don't think by the way, on

54:47

hypocrisy, for instance,

54:50

I can see a scenario where somebody might say, oh

54:52

Douglas, you're hypocritical on this

54:54

particular question. I might say, well, there

54:56

are some things I think are even more important than not being

54:58

a hypocrite, such as, I don't know, surviving.

55:01

The worst thing

55:03

about him is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is

55:05

the easiest one to catch people on, is the truth

55:11

of that. Correct. It's the easiest one to spot.

55:17

And they do it, as you say, on this is

55:19

what this person said 20 years ago, this is what they say now.

55:21

Again, human being in growing

55:24

up shocker. People

55:28

are allowed to evolve, they change their minds,

55:31

they grow up. It'd be rather boring to say the

55:33

same thing and think the same thing only for 70 years.

55:38

But yeah, people find hypocrisy very easy

55:40

to see. And it's about the only advice

55:43

you can really catch somebody on.

55:46

Because if you say one thing publicly and do nothing privately,

55:49

it's about the only one that people are really confident

55:51

on. Or most other

55:54

moral judgments, for better or worse, have sort

55:56

of ebbed away, but people still are able to

55:58

judge hypocrisy.

56:01

But I

56:03

think, I mean, I think there are worse things.

56:05

And I think not standing up for your loved

56:08

ones, not standing up for your country, not standing up for

56:11

yourselves in the face of horrible

56:13

opposition from within without, probably

56:16

worse than hypocrisy. I heard you say recently,

56:18

you don't have to agree with everyone's principle

56:20

to respect the principle they're sticking to. Did

56:24

I say that? Yeah, it sounds good. Yeah, that's nice.

56:26

I didn't know I said that, but yeah. You

56:29

did. The reason that I

56:32

like that is I think it shows

56:34

why the

56:38

bravery conversation or standing up for

56:40

something that you believe in is something

56:42

that is appropriate. At least then if someone is prepared

56:45

to stand up for whatever their beliefs

56:47

are, that you can assume they're

56:49

telling the truth, especially if they pay a high

56:51

price for it. It's one of the reasons why I have a

56:54

good amount of faith that Sam believes the things

56:56

that he says. Yeah. Why

56:58

would he not? It's an unbelievably high price

57:01

to continue to flip-flop from one

57:03

tribe to another tribe to another tribe. I

57:05

don't think it's an unbelievably high price, but a price, let's

57:07

say. Relatively high price, yeah. Yeah,

57:11

I mean very early in some people's careers, when

57:13

people first make it to public notice, people

57:15

say things like, do you really believe what you say?

57:18

The answer to which for most people is, or

57:20

ought to be, well, why would I say it if I didn't

57:23

believe it? There are people who obviously

57:25

do say stuff for

57:27

lols or clicks or monetary

57:30

purpose, but at a certain point, you've

57:32

got to accept that the person thinks what they think and

57:35

respect them for it, or at least do them this decency

57:38

of believing that they mean it. I

57:40

think that even on people who disagree with wildly. It's

57:43

such a boring argument that some people use

57:45

it, particularly on the left. I wonder if they actually

57:47

even believe it. I think they don't. I think they're just

57:49

doing it for money. Well, that's an easier way to try

57:51

to ignore them than actually trying to contend

57:53

with the possibilities of what they're saying is something they

57:55

mean and believe, and trying to work out if there's

57:58

anything in it. Much easier to say the best. person's

58:00

only doing it because they're paid or something. Yeah,

58:03

that's the Shill-Grifter accusation.

58:06

Very boring accusation. Yeah. I don't

58:08

doubt there are some people who that is the case with,

58:10

but way fewer than way fewer

58:12

than people think. Michael Malice has a hierarchy

58:16

of different, I think it's like the hierarchy

58:18

of grifters. I don't know why, but I only say Michael Malice,

58:20

my face immediately sort of starts

58:23

to smile. Yeah, it's terrible.

58:25

It's like industry

58:28

plant, paid opposition,

58:31

controlled sigh-off. Oh, yes. It goes all

58:33

the way up and he said that he descended recently.

58:35

He's not quite at paid opposition, but I think he's industry

58:38

plant now. I think like Friedman is paid

58:40

opposition. Paid is

58:42

different from controlled opposition.

58:45

Maybe it's controlled opposition. No, fucking no. Controlled

58:47

opposition is, these are such

58:49

weird terms that have cropped up in our era.

58:52

I love it. Again, I think they're sort of low

58:55

resolution explanations. They're really,

58:57

really low resolution explanations for things.

59:00

Whenever I hear somebody describe things as that, I always

59:02

sort of know you're not dealing with somebody who actually understands

59:04

the world. Do you find there's definitely

59:06

a trend of conspiratorial

59:09

thinking, conspiracies are much

59:12

stronger in our adopted homeland

59:14

than it is in the UK, I think. Yes,

59:16

that's true.

59:19

What do you think?

59:22

How conspiracy pill do you? Do you see? I

59:24

mean,

59:28

this is the moment when people say, ah, controlled

59:30

opposition. This

59:35

is me allowing you to graduate from- I think I talked

59:37

about this on the boys cast. Briefly,

59:41

and various people wrote to me saying,

59:43

ah, there you go. That's proof that you're

59:45

paid. You're glowing. That's

59:48

it? You heard you're glowing? No, it wasn't. So

59:52

tell me if I'm wrong with this, Mark. You're

59:54

the resident glow expert, but

59:56

you're glowing means you're

59:59

like a-

59:59

a

1:00:01

planted person

1:00:03

who's saying something that is outing their

1:00:06

like.

1:00:10

It's an intelligence operation that's

1:00:12

breached the surface and people can see it. They comment

1:00:15

on TikTok saying like you're glowing. Oh,

1:00:17

it's like the people that led to the FBI

1:00:21

who are at certain protests. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All

1:00:23

wearing T-nose and T-shirts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So

1:00:26

your conspiratorial. Yeah. The

1:00:29

thing with conspiracy theories is it's very difficult in our area because

1:00:31

some of the conspiracies are true, of course, have come

1:00:33

true. Well, known to be

1:00:35

true. Lab leak conspiracy

1:00:38

theory probably true. They shouldn't

1:00:40

have ever called. Nobody should ever have called it

1:00:42

a conspiracy theory because it wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was one

1:00:44

of a set of hypotheticals

1:00:48

to explain what happened with COVID. So

1:00:53

a lot of things get called conspiracy which

1:00:55

are not. They're just hypotheses that

1:00:58

should be allowed to remain on the table. And that makes a certain

1:01:00

type of person increasingly prone to

1:01:03

believe that everything that's called conspiracy

1:01:06

theory is not a conspiracy theory. And

1:01:08

before you know it, you get a sanish

1:01:10

individual thinking that the moon landings were a conspiracy.

1:01:13

That we didn't land on the moon. The American

1:01:15

didn't land on the moon. I don't

1:01:17

know whether the people who now claim that believe

1:01:19

that the Russians also faked it. It's an interesting

1:01:22

question to ask them. Do you think

1:01:24

that the Soviets were capable

1:01:26

of getting to the moon but the Americans were not? The

1:01:29

Americans set up like a blow

1:01:31

fan and a flag on a dodgy

1:01:33

papier-mâché set but the Soviets did make

1:01:35

it. Or did the Soviets and Americans both agree

1:01:38

to pretend to have gone to the moon but not really have

1:01:40

gone? None of it makes sense to my mind.

1:01:43

But I have noticed,

1:01:45

and it's actually all the literature that demonstrates

1:01:47

this, that there's certain types of mental

1:01:50

problems that people have. That

1:01:53

make them disproportionately likely to believe

1:01:55

conspiracy theories on mass. one

1:02:00

of them is paranoia. The more

1:02:02

paranoid a person is, the more likely they are

1:02:04

to believe that sort of thing. And that's the observation in my own

1:02:06

life. I've known a number of people who've

1:02:09

gone into the world of conspiracy

1:02:11

and not come out, and they are all people

1:02:13

who have suffered paranoid episodes in

1:02:15

their lives. So which adds up.

1:02:18

So fear and genders. Yeah,

1:02:20

and as I say, it's a sort of low resolution

1:02:23

explanation for complex phenomena.

1:02:27

And you know, and I think it's also that conspiracy

1:02:29

theories come about and are used by

1:02:32

people who, and this isn't an

1:02:34

original point many people have made,

1:02:36

the claims about them are made by

1:02:38

and large by people who don't

1:02:41

understand how unbelievably

1:02:44

chaotic the world actually is, or

1:02:46

can't face it. So

1:02:50

they can't face the fact

1:02:52

that, yeah, somebody you followed in the newspapers

1:02:55

every day all of your life did actually just

1:02:57

die in a freak car press because

1:02:59

the driver was drunk. They can't

1:03:01

bear the idea. The world can't

1:03:04

be that cruel. It can't be that random. You

1:03:07

want to bear it? It's got to be coordination.

1:03:09

It can't be coincident. Exactly. So

1:03:12

people who can't cope with the wild

1:03:15

frivolity of the roulette table

1:03:17

of our lives always

1:03:20

go to the there must be somebody behind it. There must

1:03:22

be somebody who's controlling all this. Are you joking?

1:03:25

Nobody's controlling you. So anyone's controlling the damn

1:03:27

thing I'd want to know by now. But of

1:03:29

course they're not. It's

1:03:32

a very unsatisfactory place to arrive

1:03:34

at in your life. And by the way,

1:03:36

my own observation is not very good for people personally,

1:03:38

because they start to lose agency themselves.

1:03:41

The locus of control gets externalized. I'm at the

1:03:43

mercy of the world. Yeah. And

1:03:45

the real answer is the world doesn't care. No,

1:03:48

doesn't even know that you exist. It is death

1:03:51

to you. The

1:03:53

ability for people to hold two conflicting

1:03:56

thoughts in their mind at the same time is supposed to be the mark

1:03:58

of sophisticated thinking. But

1:04:00

it does show up here, which is the

1:04:03

government is both so useless that they can't

1:04:05

get anything right and so sophisticated that

1:04:07

they're able to coordinate. Oh, that's massive. The Arab

1:04:09

world is filled with that. The Muslim

1:04:11

world is filled with that. Things like, I've

1:04:13

noticed this repeatedly on my travels, things like 9-11 was

1:04:15

an inside job

1:04:19

of the Americans to allow the Jews out of the World Trade

1:04:21

Center and also, yay, 9-11! Good

1:04:25

for the realm of Inlardon. They can

1:04:27

do both. So

1:04:29

somebody I knew interviewed the father

1:04:32

of the

1:04:35

main 9-11 hijacker. His name's gone out of

1:04:37

my mind. I don't care. He should be forgotten.

1:04:40

But he interviewed the father in Jordan. And

1:04:42

he was simultaneously capable of holding in his

1:04:44

head that his son was a great shahid, a martyr

1:04:47

for Islam and

1:04:49

that 9-11 was an inside job of the Americans. What?

1:04:53

What the fuck? Like, Jews.

1:04:54

I mean,

1:04:57

do you think your son was an agent

1:04:59

of the FBI and also a martyr?

1:05:02

Like,

1:05:03

hey, people do this. The Muslim

1:05:05

world is particularly prone to the Turkish territorial

1:05:08

thinking because it's a source

1:05:10

of flattery to explain

1:05:13

why they have created so few successful

1:05:15

societies.

1:05:17

And Bernard Lewis

1:05:19

made this point many years ago that the

1:05:21

problem in the Muslim world is that

1:05:23

they have to find explanations. Because

1:05:26

if you're given the revelations of Muhammad and you're told

1:05:28

it's the last revelation ever from God and

1:05:30

that you are the people who have received this revelation

1:05:33

and everything's going to go great for you because

1:05:35

you've got the revelation and then like the Jews,

1:05:37

you have one country and it does much better than

1:05:39

any of your countries. And you

1:05:41

know, you can't get the economy of most

1:05:44

of your countries going at all and you can't provide

1:05:46

for most of your citizenry and nobody's coming

1:05:48

up on Adam and the economy is in the dust

1:05:50

and all this. You've got to find an explanation

1:05:53

for it because like, what?

1:05:54

We were given the revelation and

1:05:56

they're doing much better. massive

1:06:00

things like that that sit underneath the movements

1:06:02

of our time, which maybe

1:06:05

billions of people on the planet believe. And

1:06:08

they believe them because it flatters themselves. It

1:06:11

flatters the governments who aspire to

1:06:13

run these countries or claim to run these countries.

1:06:17

Yeah, billions of

1:06:19

people believe this shit. I

1:06:21

was thinking about the

1:06:24

extremist worldview beliefs, largely

1:06:27

in the West, but I guess everywhere, and

1:06:29

I was wondering whether we

1:06:32

have finally moved beyond peak woke. And

1:06:35

a study came up recently that was kind of interesting.

1:06:39

Researchers from Change Research polled over 1,000 registered

1:06:41

US voters from 18 to 34. A

1:06:44

majority of both women and men consider

1:06:46

far-rightism and far-leftism to be red flags

1:06:48

in a potential partner. 76% of

1:06:50

women and 59% of men consider identifying

1:06:53

as a MAGA Republican to be a large turn-off. 64% of

1:06:56

men and 55% of women said they'd also

1:06:58

swipe left on someone identifying as a communist.

1:07:01

What was it for? 64% of

1:07:04

men and 55% of women swipe left on a communist. I

1:07:07

don't know. 55% of men

1:07:09

said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag.

1:07:14

41% of men said the same for a woman

1:07:16

being into astrology. Oh, that's,

1:07:18

yeah, I'm going with that one. If

1:07:20

somebody says, what's your star sign? Date over. What

1:07:24

is a really famous meme where

1:07:28

it's on iMessage and the text

1:07:30

says, mum,

1:07:34

what time was I born at? And the reply

1:07:36

from mum says, stay the fuck away

1:07:38

from that girl. Yeah, it is. The

1:07:43

heart sinks when it comes up as a question.

1:07:45

I don't know. For

1:07:48

shame. 41, 33% of

1:07:50

men said for Black Lives

1:07:52

Matter, it was a red flag. If they say

1:07:54

Black Lives Matter, 14% of women. 53% of

1:07:57

women said it was a red flag if they received.

1:08:00

to see the Barbie movie, 31% of

1:08:03

men, 58% of women, red flag, if they

1:08:05

say there are only

1:08:08

two genders, 34% of

1:08:10

men, 54% of women thought they identify as a conservative, 33%

1:08:15

of men thought they identify as a liberal,

1:08:17

so next time you're vibing with someone, maybe save

1:08:20

the podcast recommendations and daily horoscopes

1:08:22

for the second date. Wow. 55%

1:08:26

of women say that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag, I

1:08:28

wonder if the species has any future,

1:08:31

because they can't listen to Joe Rogan. Well,

1:08:34

that really means all these people are wiping

1:08:37

out like very significant

1:08:40

numbers of future partners. How

1:08:45

weird. And Joe, turning up in

1:08:47

there. 55%. So that's

1:08:49

amazing. I thought what happened

1:08:51

to all the good old people who used to say, I don't have an

1:08:53

opinion on that. Well, what

1:08:56

happened to those guys? I got pulled in

1:08:58

a good bit recently

1:09:00

on the internet for not commenting

1:09:02

on the recent sociopolitical

1:09:06

furor that's happening in the Middle East. And

1:09:09

I quoted you, pseudonymously,

1:09:12

and said, I'm trying to make

1:09:14

a habit of something which is very rare on the internet to

1:09:16

not comment on something which I know nothing about. Very

1:09:18

good rule. And

1:09:21

yet, it's the

1:09:23

rarest thing of all. Why shouldn't

1:09:25

I? People care about

1:09:27

my insights into health

1:09:30

and fitness or my

1:09:33

learnings about social psychology.

1:09:36

Why shouldn't my fiscal advice be

1:09:39

important? Why shouldn't my views on immigration

1:09:41

all? It's much to be avoided that. And

1:09:44

I mean, in the end, you make much less of a dick of yourself

1:09:47

if you don't start talking about everything. I mean,

1:09:49

there's somebody

1:09:55

recently sent me an article, a

1:09:57

relatively well-known person, sent me an article recently they wanted

1:09:59

to... published about the Middle East

1:10:02

and near the opening said, I

1:10:05

don't really know much about the Middle

1:10:08

East. And I was just like, in

1:10:10

that case, don't speak. Don't

1:10:13

speak and say, but, if

1:10:15

you don't know, just agree not to do it.

1:10:19

That's one reason why there's a lot of, I mean, there's

1:10:21

a lot of television these days in the UK

1:10:25

where you can be invited on to debate

1:10:28

the total ignoramus who's only there for balance,

1:10:31

for off-com related balance. And

1:10:33

I just can't do that stuff anymore. It's too

1:10:37

demeaning that

1:10:39

if there's a subject you know about, a war

1:10:41

that you've covered, covered

1:10:43

many times, as in my case, the

1:10:46

Israel-Hamas Wars and Israel-Hasplar

1:10:48

Wars, I just

1:10:51

can't be sitting there with somebody.

1:10:53

I hate to say this, and it's not meant in a

1:10:55

misogynistic way, but there's a lot of women

1:10:59

who are currently invited on things for balance, precisely

1:11:02

because they're women's, actually, because they provide usually a left-wing

1:11:04

perspective, and that's needed if

1:11:06

it's me that's on as well. And,

1:11:09

you know, I just, it's so depressing to give

1:11:12

your informed opinion about something you've seen

1:11:14

and reported on firsthand. And then

1:11:17

they go to the other person and they go, well,

1:11:19

like, I think it's, I

1:11:22

say, oh, why don't I just at home?

1:11:25

Why, I could be doing anything else. And

1:11:28

I've got to listen to somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about,

1:11:31

whisk up an opinion live on air.

1:11:33

That's so depressing. But

1:11:36

masses of people are like that. And it's just, yeah,

1:11:40

if you don't know about it, don't talk about it. It's a very

1:11:42

good war. Or try it out in private with friends

1:11:45

and mates and like, try to learn something.

1:11:47

We're both. Are

1:11:49

we morally obliged to have a take on

1:11:52

everything? No. No.

1:11:55

Most people's opinion doesn't matter. I mean,

1:11:57

it just doesn't. And... I

1:12:01

also think the people who spend their time online, broadly

1:12:03

speaking, trying

1:12:05

to broadcast out their opinions on things should be

1:12:07

told more often. It

1:12:09

doesn't matter.

1:12:11

It doesn't matter what

1:12:13

you think. One of my rules

1:12:16

on any war is

1:12:18

you should never as a writer

1:12:20

try to give advice to a government. This

1:12:24

is what the Israelis must do. This is what the Ukrainians

1:12:26

must do.

1:12:28

They need to listen to you.

1:12:31

First

1:12:31

of all, you don't live in the country. Unless

1:12:33

you live in a country, pretty

1:12:36

damn sure you should be a bit humble

1:12:38

about telling other people about

1:12:40

their lives.

1:12:43

And also, who made you the

1:12:46

tactician

1:12:47

du jour on everything? It's the same

1:12:50

as COVID. Everyone became a virology or epidemiology

1:12:52

expert. And then they became a withdrawal

1:12:54

from Afghanistan expert. And then they became

1:12:57

a Ukraine expert. And now they're all Middle

1:12:59

East experts.

1:13:01

I just think it should be regarded as

1:13:03

a massive red flag that the person in question

1:13:06

is. Normally what's happened is they've downloaded

1:13:08

the set of opinions they believe that

1:13:10

their tribe should have. And that's why

1:13:12

the morons marching in London and other cities,

1:13:15

with the exception of the Muslims, who just whipped up all the time

1:13:18

by the fact that the Jews do anything. Muslims

1:13:20

don't care about other Muslims. Arabs don't

1:13:23

care about other Arabs. Nobody cares about

1:13:25

the Palestinians. Nobody cares about

1:13:27

them. They can't tell you how little they care about

1:13:29

them. Jordanians loathe them.

1:13:31

The Egyptians loathe them. The Lebanese

1:13:34

loathe them. They've done nothing for the Palestinians

1:13:36

for 70 years. And

1:13:40

yet, whenever the Israelis do anything,

1:13:44

the Muslims across the West come out on the streets because

1:13:46

they hate the Jews. And

1:13:49

hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen,

1:13:52

not a peep on the streets of Britain and

1:13:54

other places. Certainly not big protests. Bashar

1:13:58

al-Assad has killed more Muslims in the West. last 10 years.

1:14:02

Then everybody on every side killed

1:14:04

in every war involving Israel since 1948, including

1:14:06

the War of Independence, nobody cares.

1:14:09

The Muslims don't come out on the streets. They don't

1:14:11

care. The only thing they care

1:14:14

about is the hatred of the Jews. And

1:14:16

it motivates them like nothing else because it hits with

1:14:18

the core of their self-esteem. They

1:14:20

can't bear it.

1:14:23

So that one is very interesting

1:14:26

to me.

1:14:27

But

1:14:28

there are these fellow

1:14:31

travelers who go along with them who have

1:14:33

downloaded, as I say, a sort of pathetic

1:14:36

American interpretation of colonization,

1:14:38

decolonization, racial justice,

1:14:41

reproductive rights, and

1:14:43

tried to map everything on. My

1:14:45

friend's got a theory called Gwinder's

1:14:48

Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. Many

1:14:50

don't have an opinion until they're asked for it, at

1:14:53

which point they cobble together a viewpoint from

1:14:55

women's half-remembered hearsay before deciding

1:14:57

that this two-minute old makeshift opinion

1:15:00

will be their new hill to die on. That's

1:15:03

very good. My friend Freddie Gray at the Spectator

1:15:06

Tims tends to run very popular pieces

1:15:08

each time a new big thing emerges. It is the

1:15:10

bluffer's guide to whatever.

1:15:13

And it usually involves,

1:15:15

in foreign policy, it usually involves saying things like,

1:15:17

well, they better get this done before the brutal Afghan

1:15:20

winter kicks in. Who made you an expert on

1:15:25

meteorology in Afghanistan? What?

1:15:29

The Ukrainians have got to make this advance before the dreaded

1:15:32

Ukrainian May.

1:15:35

The bluffer's guide. It's

1:15:39

a very useful rule. I try, for instance,

1:15:41

never to write about any foreign policy

1:15:43

issue. If it's about a country I've not visited, preferably

1:15:46

visited multiple times. I just

1:15:49

can't bring myself to do it.

1:15:51

I find it too embarrassing. It's

1:15:53

so interesting when you talk about knowing

1:15:57

one opinion that a person holds. from

1:16:00

that one opinion being able to accurately predict

1:16:02

everything else that they believe. That

1:16:05

mono thinking just proves

1:16:07

that you're not a serious thinker. Well, I just

1:16:09

think it's fairly obvious if, for instance, you say, yeah,

1:16:12

what's the problem with a big bearded guy winning

1:16:14

the weight of women's weightlifting? I go, okay,

1:16:16

I know all of your other opinions as well. And

1:16:19

to be fair, that probably works the other way around as

1:16:21

well to a great extent. The

1:16:23

interesting thing with most people is where they're

1:16:25

slightly out of sorts with their own political side. Well,

1:16:27

that's exactly the point.

1:16:33

If it's been a long time since you were surprised

1:16:35

by the opinion of your favorite

1:16:38

thinker or writer or commentator or whatever it is, that's

1:16:41

probably a reliable signal that they're not

1:16:43

really thinking for themselves. If

1:16:46

you're just permanently, oh, yeah, it's

1:16:48

like an old leather pair of shoes. Here

1:16:50

we go again. The COVID

1:16:52

things happened and I can already predict such and

1:16:54

such's opinion on it. We

1:16:57

go every single time, all

1:16:59

of the time, every single time, you know the idiosyncrasies

1:17:01

of this person's very, very particular

1:17:03

worldview. Well, that's

1:17:06

because it's not theirs. Yeah,

1:17:08

of course. It's everybody else's. It's outsource

1:17:11

thinking. And what's really sad about that is that

1:17:13

it means that you're not really living your life.

1:17:16

I mean, you're living a pastiche

1:17:18

of a prescribed set of opinions.

1:17:21

That's so sad. I mean, it's so sad. The wasted

1:17:24

energies and wasted lives of

1:17:26

people who've just downloaded a set of opinions

1:17:29

and they're just running them. Well,

1:17:31

that's not your life. It's just someone else's

1:17:33

life. You're just replaying. What

1:17:36

was that quote you told me about being shunted

1:17:38

to the side of the road of your own? It's

1:17:41

a Philip Larkin quote from a pompous, yes,

1:17:43

a description of a couple. And he says that

1:17:45

something is pushing them to the side of their own lives.

1:17:48

It's a beautiful line, terrifying

1:17:50

line, horrifying line. It should make everyone judge

1:17:54

for themselves. What's it mean to you? Oh,

1:17:57

well, it means that there's a life that you... hoped

1:18:00

to live, your life you saw

1:18:02

yourself living and you

1:18:05

got pushed to the side of it and ended up not living that

1:18:07

life. I

1:18:09

think a large number of people have that.

1:18:12

Almost all unhappy people I've met have

1:18:15

that feeling to some extent. And

1:18:17

then you've got a choice of poisons, one of

1:18:19

which is to choose the poison of other people

1:18:22

held me back. Another

1:18:25

is to face up to the fact that you are in some way

1:18:27

a coward or

1:18:30

a victim of circumstance or something

1:18:32

else. But I think a lot, I mean, you

1:18:34

know, one thing that young people can

1:18:36

be encouraged to do is to set out the sort of life

1:18:38

they would like to live. Imagine the sort of life

1:18:40

they would like to live and then aim for it. And

1:18:44

working it out is sometimes difficult, sometimes not.

1:18:47

But if you do have that image of your life

1:18:49

as you think it should be lived and

1:18:51

you end up not living it, that is particularly

1:18:54

if you can feel yourself slowly being pushed away

1:18:56

from it. I think that's a terrible,

1:18:58

terrible feeling. It's like watching

1:19:01

your own demise occur second by

1:19:03

second. Yeah. Fortunately, I've never felt

1:19:05

it, but I definitely fear it. Where

1:19:07

do you go to

1:19:10

avoid cowardice or to find resilience

1:19:13

or bravery? Because a lot of the time

1:19:15

the easier path is easier

1:19:17

and it's the one that's got the least resistance

1:19:19

and strength. Surround yourself with courageous people.

1:19:23

Surround yourself with brave

1:19:25

people. And that

1:19:27

can be bravery of all sorts of different kinds. And

1:19:30

when I turned 40, I had a dinner,

1:19:33

which I think you weren't invited

1:19:35

to, but it's only because you weren't in

1:19:37

town, if I remember rightly. But I

1:19:40

did get a lot of my favorite people in the room at least.

1:19:42

And it was interesting that a

1:19:45

friend made a speech in which he said, it's striking. I won't

1:19:47

say the names of the people around the table, but some

1:19:50

of whom will be familiar to listeners. But a friend

1:19:52

of mine gave a rather very touching speech. I was

1:19:54

very moved by it, which he said, how noticeable

1:19:56

it was that Douglas has surrounded himself with courageous

1:19:58

people. And it was a very

1:20:01

wide array of bits

1:20:03

of the world and different disciplines and so on. And I was really touched

1:20:05

by that because I hadn't particularly noticed that I'd

1:20:07

done it. But

1:20:09

then I realized I sort of had, that actually,

1:20:12

yes, I must have subconsciously,

1:20:14

but maybe now consciously, wanted to be around

1:20:16

courageous people. Because I think that courage is something that rubs

1:20:19

off on other people. I think it's enormously

1:20:23

to be desired to be

1:20:25

around courageous people. And that might be different

1:20:27

types of courage, some physical, some that

1:20:30

mental.

1:20:33

So that's one thing, you know,

1:20:35

surround yourself with courageous people, or at least not cowards,

1:20:38

not crescends, not the sort of people who just say

1:20:40

the same things that everyone's meant to say and so on. There's

1:20:43

as many ways people can get out of this

1:20:45

non-life that they are being shunted

1:20:47

into. One of my friends,

1:20:51

he wasn't a friend at the time, I just met him for the first time,

1:20:53

but someone that I'd been interested in for a good while, I

1:20:56

met in Austin a while ago. And he'd

1:21:00

had an interesting story and he'd faced a cancellation

1:21:02

over the last few years. And he'd

1:21:05

sort of told me the story and he said,

1:21:09

he sat on some rooftop late

1:21:12

at night talking about this thing. And he was regaling me

1:21:14

with the story. He said, throughout my entire

1:21:16

life, I thought I was a hard man. I like

1:21:19

to do man things and surround myself

1:21:21

with masculine people. And I was into, you know,

1:21:23

like guns and shooting and fitness

1:21:25

and friends with Navy SEALs and all the

1:21:27

rest of it. He said, my entire life, I was scared that I was a

1:21:30

coward. Terrified

1:21:33

that I was a coward. And he said, in

1:21:37

my darker moments, I could always hear

1:21:39

my better self clearing his throat in

1:21:41

the room next door. Beautiful. And

1:21:44

then this cancellation thing came along. And

1:21:46

he said, you know, even the people

1:21:49

that do really hard things, hard intellectual

1:21:51

work, hard training work, hard physical work,

1:21:54

all the rest of it. There's a

1:21:56

difference in the kind of difficulty that

1:21:58

they do because it's elected. You

1:22:01

chose to do the hard workout,

1:22:03

but when the entire world comes

1:22:05

to bear on you in

1:22:08

a way that feels like chaos and catastrophe,

1:22:10

you whipped up into a whirlwind and he

1:22:12

said, yeah, I that

1:22:16

was a genuine test and

1:22:19

he was he was very grateful. He said my my

1:22:21

my better self stopped his coughing and kicked

1:22:24

the door in and came to help good. But

1:22:27

just yeah, I could always hear my better self

1:22:29

clearing his throat in the room next door. Well,

1:22:32

the thing with that is the

1:22:35

difference between situations

1:22:38

you find yourself in that dangerous through choice

1:22:41

and ones that you've been

1:22:45

thrust into and probably

1:22:47

know that the consequence

1:22:49

of being thrust into dangerous situation is much

1:22:51

more likely to lead to PTSD

1:22:54

and things like that. Then

1:22:57

if you choose to and I've

1:23:02

been fortunate in my life to most dangerous situations

1:23:04

I've been in and be ones I've chosen to be in

1:23:08

and that's that's very different. But

1:23:12

yes, I'm glad he found out that he was

1:23:15

more courageous than he feared. Think

1:23:18

about that. What a beautiful line to be to

1:23:20

be more courageous than you feared you were

1:23:23

right. You know this this almost this

1:23:25

war against yourself. Yes,

1:23:28

the fear of your own nature. Well, that

1:23:30

but that's perfectly sense. I mean, there's a horrible

1:23:33

example I sometimes use, but I mean, if

1:23:36

you're ever mugged for your wallet, let

1:23:39

alone you're mugged with somebody else. Certainly, if you're mugged

1:23:41

with a girl that you were with or looking after and

1:23:43

you just handed it over. There's like this. There's

1:23:45

several reasons that it's worth handing over the wallet

1:23:47

for one of which is why

1:23:49

do I need to risk getting shot for like stabbed

1:23:52

or stabbed for 100%. 100 bucks and

1:23:55

a few phone calls in the bank. Yeah.

1:23:58

So that's like the reason. to

1:24:00

hand over the wallet.

1:24:04

The reason not to hand over the wallet

1:24:08

is, are you sure that you're not going

1:24:10

to spend the succeeding weeks dreaming

1:24:12

dreams of pornographic violence against

1:24:15

your attacker and

1:24:17

thinking of how you're going to

1:24:19

torture him if you could get your hands on him and the

1:24:21

brutal way in which you would have revenge if you

1:24:24

ever find him? It might be easy to

1:24:26

just get your head kicked in a bit. Yes. And

1:24:28

are you sure you can live with the version of yourself that is

1:24:31

you handing over the wallet? I said this recently in a piece

1:24:33

in New York Post about the people on the New York subway

1:24:36

where there's this awful thing you've probably seen

1:24:38

where people, you know, like a woman will

1:24:40

be being abused by some maniac

1:24:42

fentanyl adult, you know, drug

1:24:46

addict and, and, you know, people

1:24:48

like either look into their phones, including men, or

1:24:51

they will get their phones up and like record. And

1:24:54

I mean, somebody said Douglas

1:24:56

is trying to get people killed. And I wasn't obviously,

1:24:58

but what I was saying was, where are the

1:25:01

men?

1:25:02

Just like stand up and like confront

1:25:04

the guy if he's got a woman

1:25:06

by her hair and is parading her around

1:25:08

the carriage. And

1:25:11

yeah, the backlash was like, what

1:25:14

do you know, these people might get

1:25:16

killed if they step in, but why say, yeah,

1:25:19

but also maybe

1:25:22

we'll have a more civil society if

1:25:25

people don't think they can go around and do this stuff

1:25:27

without consequence.

1:25:29

I'd like

1:25:32

to see far more standing up like that.

1:25:34

I think it's a pathetic position

1:25:36

for taking for men to be in to sit there like getting

1:25:38

out their mobile phones. But

1:25:41

you know, it's everyone's choice. I don't exactly

1:25:43

know what I would do in some of the situations I've

1:25:45

seen, you know, read about on the New York subway.

1:25:48

Didn't that guy do

1:25:50

a thing? And now is he in jail? Did he get jailed for

1:25:52

it? He's charged. He's coming up for trial.

1:25:56

This is the things that Daniel

1:25:58

need. former Marine,

1:26:01

there was a guy on the subway who

1:26:03

was clearly off his head

1:26:05

on various drugs, was

1:26:09

very, very violent towards people in

1:26:11

the carriage, some point tore off his top

1:26:13

and was like, I'm going to kill you or something like

1:26:15

this. And this Marine at that point stepped

1:26:18

in, got him into a choke hold. It

1:26:20

was clearly not meaning to do it, but the choke

1:26:23

hold was too hard and he suffocated

1:26:26

the guy and he died at the scene. And

1:26:28

that man, the ex-Marine, is charged

1:26:31

with, I think, murder, I think

1:26:33

manslaughter. And

1:26:38

he could face a very significant prison sentence. There's a lot of

1:26:40

discussion in New York as to whether or not a New York

1:26:42

jury would actually convict him. Where

1:26:45

is he being convicted? In New York, right. Because

1:26:50

you could say that the

1:26:53

guy, because there's a racial element,

1:26:55

like everything in America, and

1:26:57

because the former Marine was white and

1:27:00

the guy off his head was black,

1:27:03

there was an attempt, of course, to put the

1:27:06

racial lens on it. And

1:27:08

we'll see if a New York jury, which

1:27:10

will be comprised half or so of women

1:27:13

who have been

1:27:15

on the subway and have probably had unpleasant

1:27:17

interactions, will

1:27:20

convict this man for stepping in and genuinely

1:27:22

think that he meant to kill the guy or just,

1:27:25

this is like a good Samaritan act gone wrong.

1:27:29

But it's very salutary, that

1:27:31

sort of stuff. There was a guy in London about 15 years

1:27:34

ago, I remember, he very much haunted me

1:27:36

because the fiancé, the girlfriend, did

1:27:38

a victim impact statement that was particularly

1:27:41

harrowing, that they were on the top of a bus in

1:27:43

London and a guy on the bus

1:27:45

started throwing chips at people's

1:27:47

heads and her fiancé

1:27:50

got up to say, look,

1:27:52

lay off. And the guy stabbed him. He

1:27:55

died. And

1:27:58

in the wake of a story like that, a lot more. people

1:28:00

in the society will be craven on the bus

1:28:03

because they'll have that example in their head.

1:28:06

My fear about this case in the New York Marine case

1:28:08

is that the Marine, by

1:28:11

doing what he did and it going wrong and

1:28:14

the publicity it got, will stop other people

1:28:16

doing good stuff again. Right, 100% will

1:28:18

have done while it's pending. While it's pending. Yes.

1:28:21

So a lot rides off the verdict. That's a lot of pressure. That's

1:28:23

a lot of pressure. And in America

1:28:26

with the jury, when you're on one of these cases

1:28:28

where society could break out

1:28:30

in rioting, I'm not sure it will for this guy because the

1:28:33

victim wasn't enormously upstanding

1:28:36

as a member of the community and had quite a lot of it. Quite

1:28:40

a lot of it was videoed, but he'd also had previous

1:28:42

things where he had done a whole litany,

1:28:45

like a laundry list of times that he'd

1:28:47

been arrested for

1:28:50

every violent conduct. So

1:28:53

he won't be that sympathetic a character, but then there are quite

1:28:55

a lot of unsympathetic characters who get dragged

1:28:57

through the laundry of racial

1:29:00

justice stuff in America and become saints.

1:29:03

I won't name any names. Going

1:29:06

back to that sort of where you go when you need more resilience

1:29:08

thing and the bravery piece, what

1:29:11

was that C.S. Lewis quote about

1:29:14

the times not being optimal? Oh, yeah. What's

1:29:17

that? That's one of my favorite, one of

1:29:19

my favorite sermons ever given was by C.S. Lewis

1:29:21

at the Church in Oxford in October 1939.

1:29:27

Yes, I love that. Lewis was

1:29:29

a master of prose as well as theological

1:29:31

writing. He gave this beautiful,

1:29:34

beautiful sermon in which he said, yes,

1:29:36

he said, the conditions are not

1:29:38

optimal at the moment. The search

1:29:41

for truth and beauty that asked me, she's going

1:29:43

through such a trial. But

1:29:46

he says the point is the conditions never

1:29:48

were optimal. They never are. So

1:29:50

even those periods of history which

1:29:53

seem to be. Crank,

1:29:55

well, like the 19th century, turn

1:29:58

out on closer inspection to be filled with. crises,

1:30:00

alarms, panics and all the rest of it. If

1:30:03

humankind had put off the search for

1:30:07

truth and beauty until the conditions were optimal, the

1:30:09

search would never have begun. The

1:30:13

main point he makes is that

1:30:17

there is something wonderful and unusual

1:30:19

about human beings. He says

1:30:21

that the ants, for instance, have chosen

1:30:23

their own route. They've chosen safety and

1:30:25

the security of the hive, and presumably

1:30:28

they have their rewards. But

1:30:30

as he says, men are different. And

1:30:34

he gives this beautiful list. I think I can

1:30:36

remember it. He says, they

1:30:38

propound mathematical theorems

1:30:40

in the legged cells. They

1:30:43

quote the latest poem whilst advancing

1:30:45

on the walls of Quebec, make

1:30:48

jokes on scaffolds and comb

1:30:51

their hair at the gates of Thermopylae.

1:30:54

This is not panache, he

1:30:56

says. It is our nature.

1:31:02

Fuck, that's cool. It's true as well

1:31:05

in my observation. Absolutely true. How

1:31:07

so? Well, because I've seen

1:31:09

people in beleaguered cities many times,

1:31:11

cities under fire, cities under bombardment,

1:31:14

cities that are being razed to the ground, and

1:31:18

human life goes on. It's an

1:31:21

extraordinary thing. People

1:31:24

continue their studies if they can. People

1:31:27

continue their family life if they can.

1:31:31

They've

1:31:32

realised that conditions will never be optimal.

1:31:34

They can

1:31:37

be better and they can be worse, but they're never perfect.

1:31:39

And I think that the real lesson of what Lewis is

1:31:41

saying is, and I think it's an important lesson for young people

1:31:43

in our time, don't put off whatever

1:31:45

it is you're meant to do until the situation is

1:31:48

optimal. Don't

1:31:52

fail to pursue what it is you think you're meant

1:31:54

to pursue in your life until you

1:31:57

have total tranquility, for instance.

1:32:00

have the house or the apartment you would like until

1:32:02

you have the relationship you would like until you

1:32:04

have the... Don't put it off until then. Or

1:32:08

until the world is peaceful, which

1:32:11

will never happen. Never

1:32:14

happen. Never has happened. Never

1:32:16

will happen. Don't put

1:32:18

it off till then because if you put it off till

1:32:20

then, it means you'll put it off forever. So

1:32:24

do whatever you're meant to be doing now. Start

1:32:26

now if you haven't started already. And if you started already,

1:32:28

don't go any slower.

1:32:31

For God's sake.

1:32:33

And this is part of the

1:32:35

cost of our times. I've said this before,

1:32:38

but part of the cost of our times is

1:32:40

the enormous expense of energy on

1:32:42

idiotic things that you can do nothing about. I

1:32:45

think we should say to more people, don't howl at the moon.

1:32:49

Don't shake your fist at the skies. Get

1:32:52

on with what you're meant to be doing. And

1:32:55

that'll be different for everybody. But

1:33:00

I'm very... Well,

1:33:05

I'm too irritable to put

1:33:09

up with going at the slow

1:33:11

speed that a lot of people want to make us all go

1:33:13

at these days. So

1:33:15

I

1:33:18

want them out of my way. Yeah, I think

1:33:20

a lot about the

1:33:23

arrival of victimhood culture. No,

1:33:25

that's what I've got no time for. Yeah,

1:33:28

it seems to me that an existential

1:33:30

crisis is actually a luxurious position to be in

1:33:32

because the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy

1:33:34

of needs have been sorted. And

1:33:38

victimhood culture is so rampant at the

1:33:40

moment because the human system's

1:33:43

demand for our challenge is

1:33:45

outstripping reality's ability to deliver

1:33:48

it to it. All

1:33:50

of the problems, most of the problems that previously

1:33:52

would have captured the front of our attention

1:33:55

have been moved out of the way. Absolutely. So

1:33:57

I mean, with all this. Our sensitivity to challenge

1:33:59

is... been tuned up, hunger and

1:34:01

so on. I

1:34:06

think that's true. I'm just amazed by

1:34:08

that. I feel sometimes we're

1:34:10

increasingly like I'm just from a different world

1:34:12

than the one we're now in, certainly

1:34:14

a different society. I'm

1:34:17

sure it was the same with you when you were growing up, but the

1:34:19

Britain I grew up in was a place

1:34:21

which liked resilience. I

1:34:25

mean, we admired resilience.

1:34:28

We didn't admire people who whined

1:34:30

and muled. In fact,

1:34:33

those are the people you avoided at all

1:34:36

costs. Ah,

1:34:38

she's a whiner. God, he's

1:34:40

a whiner. I mean, you know, and

1:34:42

people said things like, you know, mustn't

1:34:45

grumble. It's one of my favorites. How

1:34:49

are you mustn't grumble? Now I'd say, well, actually

1:34:51

I've got stage four cancer. I'm not

1:34:54

sure that's grumbling. I know, but we

1:34:56

talked about it like that. People

1:34:58

from that generation still say things. I've offended

1:35:00

that generation who's got cancer at the moment. She's like, oh,

1:35:02

so boring. Everyone I grew

1:35:05

up with was like that.

1:35:07

Now you might

1:35:10

say there's something unhealthy about that, but there's actually

1:35:12

something healthy about it too. And

1:35:17

there's something healthy about assuming

1:35:20

that everyone has their troubles. And so they don't need

1:35:22

you to add yours to their list of things to worry

1:35:24

about that day and, you know, cheer

1:35:27

people up and encourage them where you can and so

1:35:29

on. And so they don't bring them down. It's

1:35:32

a weird sort of self-fulfilling

1:35:34

prophecy of pedestalizing victimhood.

1:35:38

There is a limitless sky

1:35:40

on how much victimhood you can claim.

1:35:44

Whereas if your status

1:35:46

and your prestige is downstream

1:35:49

from your accomplishments, there

1:35:51

is a limit on how much you can accomplish because you

1:35:53

need to go out and fucking do it. Reality

1:35:56

is going to constrain how much impressive

1:35:58

stuff you can go and do. but there

1:36:00

is an ineffable

1:36:03

universe of my athlete's

1:36:06

foot and my gluten intolerance and

1:36:08

my chronic flatulence and my you know

1:36:10

whatever else. Those

1:36:13

are things that you can just continue to accumulate like trinkets.

1:36:15

Yes, I just find

1:36:17

those people boring. I just

1:36:20

don't care for victimhood. I think

1:36:22

it's an undesirable emotion.

1:36:26

It's a sign of a rather undesirable person.

1:36:31

But I don't know why we've given

1:36:33

into this. I just genuinely particularly in Britain

1:36:35

I'm just baffled by it because it wasn't the country

1:36:38

we had. Well maybe it's you know how you

1:36:40

said your solution for courage was to surround yourself

1:36:42

with courageous people if you

1:36:44

kind of get this mimetic wave.

1:36:46

Yes. Almost moving through where

1:36:49

fewer courageous people are around. Right. Creates

1:36:51

fewer courageous role models which means to you

1:36:53

know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have the thing

1:36:55

of men being persuaded to become cringing

1:36:58

eunuchs. Not a good thing. Well that's

1:37:01

another reason why you know this

1:37:05

conversation around the guy in the subway is so interesting

1:37:08

because is he

1:37:12

really supposed to stand up for the women

1:37:14

or is that, is he mansplaining?

1:37:16

What if he mansplains while

1:37:18

he stops a woman being dragged around

1:37:21

by her hair? Well of course the answer to that is the

1:37:23

area has to say you know what there's no such thing as mansplaining

1:37:25

or at least it's not very important. Get

1:37:28

on to something more important like women

1:37:30

not being assaulted on the subway. You

1:37:32

know choose your priorities. But

1:37:35

the denial of sex differences would lead to

1:37:37

the conclusion that that woman can... why

1:37:40

shouldn't the women stand

1:37:42

up? Why shouldn't they use their upper body weight? Yes,

1:37:44

yeah, to push this fentanyl-fueled maniac

1:37:47

off this lady. Well as I say

1:37:50

that's a luxury belief that one and

1:37:52

doesn't meet reality very well.

1:37:56

I'm not sure anyone would be very happy if the men in

1:37:58

the carriage said to the woman, the women in the carriage. carriage.

1:38:00

Come on, go on. Your turn. Yeah.

1:38:03

We've had our centuries of patriarch

1:38:05

or higher art in warfare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What

1:38:08

is it? There's one that got my goat recently with

1:38:11

somebody, was in the US? It always happens

1:38:13

now when everything comes up about conflict. Hillary

1:38:16

Clinton was one of the worst culprits of doing

1:38:18

this, but they always say this thing of

1:38:20

one of the reasons you've got to stop any war once it

1:38:22

starts is they say, you know, the

1:38:24

first victims of war are women. They're

1:38:27

fucking not.

1:38:28

They're men

1:38:30

who do most of the fighting and the dying. Hillary

1:38:32

Clinton's point is, well,

1:38:34

then their widows and then, ah,

1:38:37

yeah, the poor widows of the men

1:38:39

that are dead. Yeah, actually, the British

1:38:42

MOD has a thing of, there's a special

1:38:45

section now dedicated, I think, thanks to the

1:38:47

impressive insight of that military expert

1:38:50

Angelina Jolie. They have

1:38:52

a special bit of the MOD dedicated

1:38:54

to women in conflict, the suffering of women in conflict. Why

1:38:57

not have the suffering of men in conflict

1:38:59

as well? Such

1:39:01

weird priorities our age is totally

1:39:03

unserious. This age is so unserious. So

1:39:06

why you can't help thinking that at some point

1:39:09

the maniacs, the barbarians

1:39:11

will just break in because we've made ourselves so

1:39:13

weak. But

1:39:16

it's so captivating, right? This is what I meant when I said,

1:39:18

you know, have we progressed beyond peak woke?

1:39:21

Because it seems to me like both

1:39:23

the hyperwoke and hyper anti-woke

1:39:26

thing is capturing so much of

1:39:28

the attention. I'm so bored of these

1:39:30

people. They're so ridiculous. Can't

1:39:33

spend any more of my life listening

1:39:36

to them. I don't want to

1:39:38

listen to the slowest kid in the class. I

1:39:40

don't want to go at his or her speed.

1:39:43

I don't want to talk to somebody so

1:39:45

mentally impaired that they think that

1:39:48

we are a weirdly

1:39:51

hermaphroditic species, or

1:39:53

that you can, that the clownfish

1:39:56

is a useful species to

1:39:59

interpret behavior of human beings.

1:40:02

Like, we can't go at this speed. No.

1:40:05

No. 20 years

1:40:08

ago at the dawn of the internet age, we had hoped

1:40:10

that we would get so much farther in

1:40:12

the 21st century. Here

1:40:15

we are with this stupid society

1:40:17

slowed down by maniacs

1:40:20

debating the first thing we knew,

1:40:22

boy or girl. Like,

1:40:25

no, not going at that speed. Emma

1:40:28

Radocanu did an

1:40:31

advert for HSBC recently, which

1:40:33

you may have missed. HSBC

1:40:35

rewrote three classic fairy

1:40:37

tales. Their book is called

1:40:39

Fairer Tales, and it shows that

1:40:41

women don't need men at all. With

1:40:44

financial attitudes shaped as early as five years

1:40:46

old, the new book challenges traditional gender

1:40:48

stereotypes. The new book called Fairer Tales,

1:40:50

Princesses Doing It for Themselves, reimagines

1:40:53

Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel

1:40:56

as successful businesswomen. Prince

1:41:02

Charming is a raised as the main character.

1:41:05

Emma Radocanu read to them, so

1:41:07

in the end, the princesses didn't need

1:41:09

a prince to save them. They set up their

1:41:11

own businesses, saved their money, and then spent

1:41:14

it very wisely. Maybe one day you'll

1:41:16

buy a tower or set up your own shoe business.

1:41:19

That's a quote, said the tennis player.

1:41:21

That's the worst. I mean, I

1:41:24

read Meghan Markle's book, The Bench, and

1:41:28

that's worse. That's

1:41:31

worse. Wow.

1:41:36

What an inspiring tale. Fairer

1:41:38

Tales. Princesses Doing

1:41:40

It for Themselves. Have you seen the South

1:41:44

Park episode where Cartman

1:41:47

wakes up? He has a nightmare. You

1:41:49

told me about this other lunch yesterday. For the people that haven't

1:41:51

seen it, what is it? Cartman has

1:41:54

a nightmare, it turns out. He is

1:41:56

a diverse black woman. His

1:41:59

character is Reid Cartman.

1:41:59

and all of his friends, Kenny and everyone

1:42:02

else, are diverse female or trans-racial

1:42:05

characters. And then, Karthon wakes up from

1:42:07

the night, and his mother comes in, what

1:42:09

is it, are you having another dream? Once

1:42:12

again, all my favourite characters in the

1:42:15

cartoons have been replaced by ethnically diverse

1:42:17

women. And

1:42:20

she goes, it's okay, Karthon, it's okay. The

1:42:23

CEO of Disney isn't hiding under your bed. Would

1:42:27

you check? Would you check? Would you check,

1:42:29

mum? Okay, I checked. She's

1:42:31

not there.

1:42:32

I'm worried that she's going to come out again and play

1:42:34

one of my favourite characters in the comics, we love diverse women.

1:42:38

I love those guys. God, they keep doing it. Yeah,

1:42:41

I mean, it's the same thing with the, there was that rather unappealing

1:42:44

young woman who was meant

1:42:46

to be playing Snow White in

1:42:48

the new Disney Snow White. Rachel Ziegler.

1:42:51

No, no, no, somebody else. And she...

1:42:53

It is, is it? Yeah, and Rachel

1:42:55

Ziegler, Ziegler. So, as you said, Prince

1:42:58

Charming wasn't a prince, he was a stalker. Yeah,

1:43:00

and she didn't need Prince Charming

1:43:03

to discover that she could be the woman

1:43:05

she could be. I mean, this is

1:43:07

like Sub-Barack Obama

1:43:10

circa 2007. Like, the prince says, is

1:43:13

the person she's been waiting for

1:43:16

or something. You think your sister's keeper?

1:43:20

Why don't they invent new tales? That's what I can

1:43:22

never understand with that. Why don't they just invent new tales instead

1:43:24

of screwing up every existing tale

1:43:27

that's loved? Make your boring

1:43:29

movie about an inspirational

1:43:31

tale of a woman who wants to start

1:43:33

a business and then does and has some success.

1:43:35

I mean, okay,

1:43:38

make that into a film. Why do you have to go

1:43:40

and ransack and rape all of, pillage

1:43:42

all of the storehouse of stories

1:43:45

that people like? Brett Cooper's playing

1:43:47

Snow White for Daily Wire. Did you see that announcement? What?

1:43:50

You don't see it? I know. Let me tell you, Jeremy

1:43:54

Boring and Ben Shapiro are doing their

1:43:56

own live-action remake of Snow White.

1:44:00

Cooper as Snow

1:44:02

White because she's like West

1:44:04

End trained, right? So she's a very well

1:44:06

trained, supposedly a very well trained actor who

1:44:08

can sing apparently, like the triple threat podcast

1:44:11

acting, and they

1:44:13

announced it the other week, it's going to be coming out next

1:44:15

year. I hope they'd slay

1:44:18

Disney. There's a rumor

1:44:20

that Disney has had to reshoot a

1:44:23

ton of scenes, including

1:44:25

all of the dwarf scenes, because originally the dwarves

1:44:27

weren't dwarves. They were like

1:44:30

a multiracial just

1:44:32

group of different people. They were diverse

1:44:34

ethnic women. It was the same thing

1:44:38

again. But apparently, this

1:44:41

is just a rumor, but apparently they've reshot it

1:44:44

all of the scenes with the dwarves to CGI

1:44:47

actual dwarfs. So

1:44:49

they've gone full. Yeah, because I know that there

1:44:51

was a revolt of the dwarves, which

1:44:53

is something you don't hear every day. No.

1:44:56

There was a revolt of the dwarves because of course, dwarf

1:44:58

actors who have their equity cards

1:45:01

are annoyed because there's not many dead

1:45:04

jobs. Yeah. Well, you did presume that there should

1:45:06

have at least been seven. Yeah, absolutely.

1:45:08

It was a stunt actor, stunt

1:45:11

dwarf. One to do

1:45:13

all seven stunts. Well, you could have 14,

1:45:15

I guess. It depends how

1:45:17

demanding the acting. How much larger you want to spread

1:45:19

around the dwarf actor community. But yeah,

1:45:21

the point is that I actually was kind of

1:45:24

rebelling about this because these are some of the few

1:45:26

dead set roles we've got. Well, is this not the same,

1:45:29

the people who didn't cast that,

1:45:31

is that not the same group of people that would say we can only have a

1:45:33

gay actor playing a gay man and we can only

1:45:35

have a black actor playing a black man and we can only

1:45:37

have other people as such? I

1:45:39

won't use the word. Yeah.

1:45:41

I mean, that again, we haven't got time

1:45:43

to go to the pace of these people. Acting

1:45:46

is pretending to be other people. People

1:45:50

will be shocked that most people who

1:45:53

play Hamlet are not themselves. They're members

1:45:55

of the Danish royal family. Welcome

1:45:58

to the world of make.

1:46:01

A charity shop in Swansea

1:46:03

asked people not to donate sex toys.

1:46:06

Barnardo's customers have been asked to refrain

1:46:08

from donating used and unused marital

1:46:11

aids as they aren't quite

1:46:13

the sort of toys we're looking for. Hahaha.

1:46:17

When they say we want your old books,

1:46:19

your old toys, they didn't mean sex toys. Sex

1:46:21

toys. Right. I think that's a

1:46:23

perfectly good policy for a secondhand shop. Customers were

1:46:26

reminded... I fling through the secondhand dildo

1:46:28

then. Hahaha.

1:46:30

You

1:46:31

don't. What

1:46:33

have they got in here? Hahaha. Hahaha.

1:46:36

Is there a dressing room? Yeah.

1:46:42

Hi.

1:46:43

Customers were also reminded that the branch had CCTV

1:46:46

so that these items can be traced back to the

1:46:48

original owners. Oh.

1:46:51

Oh. According to... That means that you...

1:46:53

there's like a... what's

1:46:57

it called? That thing in Australia. The boomerang.

1:47:00

That's a boomerang effect. You can give your dildo away and it keeps

1:47:02

coming back to you. Then it's back on your

1:47:04

doorstep the next morning. God damn it.

1:47:07

Where can I get rid of this thing? Get over the hedge. But

1:47:10

it keeps landing in Barnardo's... and then they

1:47:12

bring it back. Hahaha. It's

1:47:14

a dildo that will never die. Yeah.

1:47:17

Yeah. Well thank you for that story. That was beautiful. Well

1:47:20

I've got another one. Is there a lesson we can take

1:47:22

from this?

1:47:23

Oh. I think just be careful where you put your

1:47:25

dildos really is the matter. It's the moral of the

1:47:27

story. Yeah. Never leave your dildo

1:47:29

in Barnardo's. Barnardo's. Yeah. Definitely

1:47:32

not in the bargain bin. School in Lafayette has refused

1:47:34

to celebrate Halloween because it isn't

1:47:36

inclusive while going all out for LGBT

1:47:39

plus history month. Is there

1:47:41

much history with LGBT...

1:47:45

Well there's gay history. I mean there are

1:47:47

lots of gay people in history and there is

1:47:49

that but it's also what we used to call history.

1:47:54

There isn't much tea history. There's...

1:47:59

the history? I mean, they're

1:48:02

sort of, I'm a bit skeptical about

1:48:04

bisexuality, but there's a

1:48:06

bit of bisexuality in history, of course. But

1:48:10

I mean, again, these people are such ignorant people, they

1:48:12

never know anything. I can't tell you, Chris, I mean, I have

1:48:15

to deal with some of this shit. And

1:48:17

they just don't know anything. And they keep recording, it's

1:48:19

like the Orwell thing, they keep reporting

1:48:22

their so called discoveries as if people didn't know them

1:48:24

before. And everybody

1:48:26

knew most of the stuff that they are trying to bring out and

1:48:28

it's just very tedious. And

1:48:31

again, what's

1:48:33

happened to the mainstream thing of it? Why aren't we concentrating

1:48:35

on big subjects, big authors, big historical

1:48:38

issues, instead of this

1:48:40

boring, slow pace?

1:48:44

We're here at ARC, and we're going to be attending

1:48:46

at some point this week. I

1:48:49

can't remember what the tagline is something about a better

1:48:51

vision for the future, a more positive vision for the future.

1:48:54

Yeah, a better story. A better story

1:48:56

for the

1:48:59

future. Sorry, Jordan.

1:49:02

How do you think that we can begin to tell a more

1:49:04

positive story for the future? Because

1:49:06

it seems to me that much

1:49:09

of the proposals are

1:49:11

quite easily criticized and often rightly

1:49:14

so. But

1:49:16

this is sort of zero sum view of happiness

1:49:18

and growth that somebody else's happiness somehow

1:49:20

detracts from mine. Well, that's

1:49:23

a particularly British view, of course. Very

1:49:25

much. Yeah, that guy's got something is

1:49:27

because I've not got it. He's taken it from me. Yeah,

1:49:30

but what's a more positive vision of the future?

1:49:33

Well, one would be that we're not facing imminent

1:49:35

apocalypse and catastrophe all

1:49:38

the time from every possible direction. And

1:49:40

particularly not ones that people have whipped up a new generation

1:49:42

into a fervor of. I mean, I think

1:49:44

that the green apocalyptic thing is particularly

1:49:47

damaging to young people. I think it's very, very bad

1:49:49

for their mental health. Very,

1:49:52

very, very detrimental to their sense

1:49:55

of how they build a future. And

1:49:57

I think a lot of young people have been lied to about the

1:49:59

proxy.

1:49:59

of global

1:50:03

climate catastrophe. I mean every time

1:50:05

there isn't an actual catastrophe going on in the world,

1:50:08

our leaders go straight back to the climate catastrophe.

1:50:10

It was a climate crisis, they now call

1:50:12

it. What

1:50:15

is happening is not a crisis.

1:50:19

It may be a problem to be managed,

1:50:21

but

1:50:22

there's a luxury in calling

1:50:24

such things a crisis. A crisis is like, my

1:50:27

shoes are on fire. That's

1:50:31

a crisis. It's

1:50:33

possible that in 40 years

1:50:36

we'll need more AC. I don't

1:50:38

see that as a crisis.

1:50:43

I think that in general there are several things that are

1:50:46

big stories, big narratives

1:50:48

that people are being spun, which are incredibly

1:50:51

innovating. That is, they sap energy

1:50:53

out of the society. You can feel it. The

1:50:56

hopelessness, if you tell young people they're not

1:50:58

going to live into adulthood because they're all going to burn to

1:51:00

death. The hopelessness

1:51:02

of saying, you can't

1:51:04

change anything or that this is the trajectory

1:51:07

we're on. I think that one of the other

1:51:09

ones in the green stuff is the hopelessness

1:51:11

of saying people effectively, you shouldn't

1:51:14

leave any footprint on the planet. Including

1:51:17

children. Including children.

1:51:22

Just to put one thing

1:51:24

out there about the hopelessness of that,

1:51:27

there's this new thing that many cities

1:51:30

have signed up to, including London, which

1:51:33

is a future in which, among

1:51:36

other things, we will not be allowed to move

1:51:38

around very much. We will be allowed a flight

1:51:40

perhaps every six years, I think it is. This

1:51:43

is a cities, what's it called?

1:51:46

I'm blanking on the name. It's this new proposal

1:51:48

for cities in 2030 or something. The

1:51:51

City of Carnes has signed up London to it. Is there

1:51:53

any carbon neutral fantasy?

1:51:55

No fun 2030. Yeah. And

1:51:58

one of them is that you won't be allowed... To

1:52:00

fly more than once every x number

1:52:02

of years and of course none of it

1:52:04

makes any sense because among other things. All

1:52:07

that means is part of the fact the airline industry is

1:52:09

destroyed is the

1:52:11

cost of an airline ticket will be like 40 times

1:52:15

higher. But

1:52:18

they always assume you can do all these things and nothing

1:52:20

will change. I know me

1:52:22

you'll be able to put a rule like that in the new won't destroy

1:52:24

the airline industry order but all