Modern Wisdom - #097 - Andrew Doyle - Who Is Titania McGrath?

Episode Date: August 26, 2019

Andrew Doyle is a writer and comedian. Titania McGrath is now fully established as the Queen of the internet Woke Movement and today we get to meet the man behind one of Twitter's most hilarious and controversial accounts, Andrew Doyle. Expect to learn what it's like running Titania's Twitter account, what Andrew thinks of Little Mix's opinions on Syria, why Donald Trump is potentially the funniest president in history, why we should be worried about Britain's hate speech laws, whether cats are feminists, whether dogs are prejudiced and which is the most oppressive vegetable. Extra Stuff: Follow Titania on Twitter - https://twitter.com/TitaniaMcGrath Follow Andrew on Twitter - https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com Buy Titania's Book Woke - https://amzn.to/2L4GXCc Bridget Phetasy's Article - https://spectator.us/battle-cry-politically-homeless/ Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh, hello friends. Welcome back to Modern Wisdom. My guest today is none other than Titania McGrath creator and current King of Twitter, Andrew Doyle. In between him, flitting down London to go on Sky News to talk about serious political stuff and going up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to do not only his own show, but the Titania McGrath live show. I managed to grab him and put him on the couch in my house and ask him loads of questions. So get ready for loads of questions to the man behind probably one of the most infamous satirical accounts on the Hall of Twitter. If you don't know what I'm talking about then it's totally fine because we're going to explain it to you today. Also expect to learn

what Andrew thinks about Little mix commenting on the incidents in Syria. Why Donald Trump might be one of the greatest comedians on the planet? How Britain's hate speech laws are something that we all should be really concerned about? And what is the most oppressive vegetable and our cats feminists? And our dogs prejudice. We're really, really hitting the hard topics today. Honestly, I was in stitches for almost all of this episode. Andrew's fantastic comedian, incredibly insightful and just a lovely guy. He also took me out for a drink after his show. When I went to Edinburgh on Tuesday, so thank you for the drink, thank you for your time Andrew, you are an absolute legend. Ladies and gentlemen, the creator of Tatanya McGrath, Mr Andrew Doyle.

Twitter, cracks and crumbles at our feet as the man behind Titanium McGrath Andrew Doyle joins me on Modern Wisdom, Andrew, welcome to the show. It's such a dramatic opening. I know. It's almost apocalyptic, I like it. It's kind of appropriate though, right? Well, I don't know. Like a Deus Ex Machina, I've sort of descended from the heaven. That's exactly why you're here. Yeah, I've just got the train

Yeah, like a Phoenix from the ashes. Yeah, so how have you been the last few weeks? I'm all right I'm just a bit naked because I was out with a friend late last night really late. Yeah, but yeah Functioning I'm all right. He was ever from Sweden. So did you have a choice now to think? But yeah, I'm good, but I've been all over the place, I've been back and forth for the first place, I'm not a good traveler, I get really tired. So, I'm a bit frazzled, that's why. Totally fine.

And that's good because that means anything I say that's inappropriate, I can blame on my condition. Yeah, 100%. 100%. So you're fringing plus Londoning and musing and tweeting and doing all this sort of stuff at the moment. Yeah, so I've got the titanium a graph show is on During the fringe at the moment, but I'm not there most of the time

But I've got my own stand-up show which starts on Monday Right, and you've got to look after yourself and look after her and then somehow look after your Online personas as well. Yeah, I was sort of juggling a few things Yeah, you know, we're all busy everyone's's busy. Not everyone's quite as busy as you, but you're... Well, no, that's never that. So can you explain why you were sat here talking about a fictional female character and you juggling Twitter accounts? Because you invited me, which is very nice.

But also because, in other words, how am I doing this as a job? I do ask myself that question. I started the character last year, last April, so sort of about 15 months ago or something, and more just for my own entertainment, and I wanted to sort of annoy some people on Twitter, basically, and it without it being you. Without it being me, yeah. I was interested. I love the idea of inhabiting a persona. I always like being behind someone else. I don't like, I don't like even with the stand up I do. It's a character really. It's not really me. So I like the idea of that distance that you get. But I also thought I was a big fan of like

the satirical accounts on Twitter that the personas, the Godfrey Alpha account and things like that. I was really into the idea, so I thought I'd do it myself. I spoke to Lisa Graves who co-wrote the Godfrey Alpha account. She's based quite near here. She's based in Holland, actually. I spoke to her about her work with the Godfrey Alpha thing and I said, I've always wanted to do this. She said, you should know, I've always wanted to do this.

And she said, you should just do it and encourage me to do it. She even created the picture for me. The two, yeah. And then so I just went with it. When did you start the account? April. Yeah, April this year.

Last year, 2018. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, it's, yeah. And then she got banned so often early on. Like, my whole point of it was that I was just getting, like, first I decided she was going to be a slam power. She was going to be intersectional feminist, all of that stuff. She was going to be massively contradictory, but just completely offended by absolutely

everything. Really privileged, really obviously privileged, but not recognizing her own privilege, because you wanted to be a victim. So all the kind of stuff that we recognize. And then I also made that decision early on. I wasn't going to self-sensor at all. I think one of the real problems with comedy at the moment is people are hedging their bets, they're worried about what they're saying, because they want to be successful, the makes complete sense. I thought, well, I'm not, no one knows this is me, I can say anything. Some of the early tweets were really viral actually. And we're really just sometimes just provocative for it,

so I say yeah. And you won't see them anymore because I had to delete them all. Oh, no. But what would happen is I get, I got a couple of one day bands, then I got a seven day band, then I got another seven day band. And I thought, well, you know, and then at one point, it must have been around September, something like, I don't know, you got a permanent ban. So Twitter said the email saying, well, permanently suspended, you can't come back. And then there was a

big uproar on Twitter, all these sort of prominent people complaining to Twitter. And then Twitter brought her back again. Because there's a provision on Twitter for satirical accounts, like a protection kind of thing, as long as it's apparent that it is, you can kind of get away with more. Right, so their rule is if you've got a parody account, which is a specific mocking of another person, you have to put parody in your bio.

Okay. This isn't a parody account, it's a satire account. I'm not parodying a particular person. Okay, yeah, that's interesting. So, people often don't understand it's a satire account. I'm not I'm not parodying a particular person. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's interesting. So, um, I'm, and people often don't understand that difference between satire and parody. So it's a different thing. I'm, but there is provision that is twitted ostensibly in their rules, say, that's okay, you should be allowed to do that. But they found some of the language and some of the imagery I suppose a bit unpleasant.

And then completely banned, uh, uh, all they took it literally, I don't know. Can you remember what the tweet was that was the full ban? The full ban was, I'd been, she was saying that she was going to a UKIP march to punch people in the name of tolerance. And that was all it was. And I imagine that was probably just inciting to violence. Maybe.

I guess so, yeah. Didn't you incite violence against yourself last night? Yeah, I did. Are you following me on Twitter then? Wow, yeah I did because I... I can't remember what I did now, I was drunk. What was it? So I'll tell you. Okay. The Tatanya account retweeted your show flyer. That's it.

And said this imposter is doing a show in the same places me immediately after me at Edinburgh. Go see it, bring milk shakes. Ah yeah, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, I called it it. And then you tweeted that saying, can I incite violence against myself? Yeah, and then she replied to that. I didn't see that one. Oh yeah, I was asleep. I think you probably should have been asleep.

I started having a conversation with myself. You all do that, Andrews, fine. I know. I did that at the time started having a conversation with myself. You all do that Andrews, fine. I know. I did that at the time before people knew it was me. I had like... Would you call her out about... No, she called me out on something. So I was on Sky News and I put out a clip of it and she'd quote tweeted it saying,

look at this disgusting stray white male doing this thing and then I argued back and I pretended that I didn't realize it was satire. Okay, so I argued back saying, look, it is really out of order. And then loads of people started going to me saying, this is satire mate, I can't believe you fell for it. You've had to have dick it. It was really funny and I kept saying, well, it wasn't obviously a joke and so I argued back at them. I was just having a lot of many layers. I was just fine with it.

Being built in here. So when it was very, very first new, you find it quite cathartic. Yeah, exactly. You could just, I just said whatever I want. I still do, but this is the problem is that I, I haven't learned my lesson really. I just say whatever I want now.

The difference is now, if I offend people, they come at me. Deal with the consequence. Yeah, so they all come at me and I get the sort of dog piling on Twitter, which I didn't have before because people didn't know who it was. Lovely anonymity, previously. Yeah. So I would have preferred to still be anonymous, to be honest. So how did we get from you being this, well, social justice warrior, alter ego person

to you now being both Bruce Wayne and Batman and everyone knowing the truth. That was okay, so it's a bit of a complicated one. The book came out in March. What link will be in the show, not below? Yeah, please buy that. That's the end of the reason I'm here. And the book came out in March and then Rosamond Irwin from the Sunday Times, wrote an article in the Sunday Times, and it was actually a really impressive piece of investigative journalism. What she'd done is she'd read my book, she'd read my articles for Spikes Online,

she'd worked out that there were some quotations that were similar and some thematic similarities, and then she decided, she said, I'm 50% certain it's Andrew Doyle, or it be Lisa Graves you run the Goffrey Alpha Work account and there was a pitre me and there was a pitre release so she pretty much some narrowed it down to two Lisa had also painted the portrait of Titania that appears on the book inside cover but she's credited so Rosemond Erwin was saying this seems a bit obvious if she's named so it was really good a piece of journalism she'd phone friends of mine.

Yeah, I found out about this afterwards. She'd get you. Oh, that fucking... I know, I know. There's proper Germanism, isn't it? That's like forensic literary assessment. Of a Twitter character. It's quite funny. And then a... Good for her, honestly. And then... But the smoking gun came because Chautau, in fact, Steve Bennett at Chautau, I don't know how he did it. There was a catalog of a book fair in Frankfurt, which had been issued by the publishers. And someone in the publishing house hadn't realized that I was to remain anonymous and put my name next to the book.

But this was dating months before the book was released. So I don't know. I don't know to this day how he got it. But I must ask him I should, I must ask him on day. I think it's really interesting. It's really impressive. It's impressive. What was it, so there must have been a day or a moment when you woke up and went, fuck, the game's up. Well, yeah, well when I read the Sunday Times thing, I thought it'd be quite funny. I interviewed Lisa Graves, accusing her of being too tiny and proud as myself. So them are dummy. So then I published that interview.

But I never denied it was me. I was very careful with my wording. I've never denied it. I didn't even deny it to Rosminder. I went from the times. There was something about the phrasing when she emailed me and I emailed back. I just, I made sure that I wasn't lying. Yeah And then but then when the shorter thinking about that well because I'd already turned down I'd been offered interviews and things

They've gone to the PR person at the publisher saying could we interview whoever is behind to tarnia as Him or her yeah, and I refuse those and then so when this came out I thought I mayes would do all these interviews now. And that's when I did the Peers Morgan stuff and other interviews and things, because actually it happened the week the book was out, it really boosted it. It was hugely helpful to the extent that it looks like I calculate the whole thing, but I'm not that mucky of alien. I did like things just happen like that. Yeah, they did. And it certainly worked weirdly like that. Yeah. So let's say that someone hasn't seen the Titania account. How would you describe it? I would describe it as the kind of social justice activist who is very humorous,

desperate to be offended, desperate to promote her own victimhood, and is not necessarily stupid, but is swallow this ideology wholesale to the extent that they're stopping them to think for themselves. And it's like any ideology isn't it? If you just follow our, an ideology without questioning any of its tenants, you end up basically mindless. You end up just like it was on, but you like a kind of religious zealot. And that's what I wanted to, so I'm not saying a lot of the people, a lot of the smartest people I know have bought into this cult of identity politics and they end up saying really, really stupid things. I saw it the other day, I was reading the New Yorker review of the New Quentin Tarantino film, once upon a time in Hollywood and it's a guy in the New Yorker who is obviously extremely bright,

obviously, but the review, in the review, he says genuinely stupid things because he's seeing it through the prism of identity politics. He actually says at one point, it's a ridiculously white film, which is not a serious criticism you can level at a film. It's really dumb. They did it with Dunkirk when Dunkirk came with the Christopher Nolan film,

and more than one critic, three or four made the point that, oh, the representation of people of colour, there's not sufficient representation. It's like, if that's all you can do, if you watch that film and that's all you come out with, how many boxes is it ticking? You know, if that's all you can come up with, then to be honest, you're not really a critic at all. You're just an ideologue. You know, artists don't make choices on the basis of representation and what they feel they're feeding out to society in that one real

Artist don't yeah, they care about the work and the interpretive the work And the and also this latest film by Tarantino so much of the coverage has been his treatment of women You know the fact that it's Sharon Tate in the film doesn't speak very often This is the man who produced death proof which is an overtly feminist film as far as I can see Kill Bill Kill Bill both parts Jackie Brown which is an overtly feminist film, as far as I can see. Kill Bill. Kill Bill, both parts, Jackie Brown, which is his best film, which is an incredible characterization of this, you know, older, middle-aged, black woman, in America, Pam Grier is fantastic in that film,

and he sort of brought her back to the public consciousness. The idea that he's not great at the representation of women is absurd, actually. I think part of it is it's time with the hateful ate in it because there was the treatment of the Daisy Donogue character was so violent that she'd be continually punched. But he hates all his characters, Mark Mowd point this out, his complete contempt for all of his characters, he doesn't care about. No one cares, no one else cares. No, you're told you're right. So, like, why are we seeing artworks through?

It just means you can't, you're not judging things on their own merits anymore. Mm-hmm. And it's a real shame actually. Yeah, I agree. One of the things that's interesting, so for me, I'm not massively political. I'm a red-blooded capitalist and have worked for myself

as a sovereign individual since I was 18. Okay. So, my exposure to the world of politics is very, very focused on myself. Yeah. My vote, if I was to vote, which I haven't in any, I've never voted once. Really? No, never once. As an educated guy.

I've always been a way and hard day busy with work or doing whatever it is. But if I was to vote, one of the first things that would come up would be, how does this affect my interest? Okay. Okay. And there was an absolute fine. See you up at the school. Okay, for enough. You tweeted an article which I read earlier on, which is really broken down a lot of the things I wish that I could understand. Bridget F Fettisi, and it's called the Battle Cry of the Politically Homeless. And what she says is that people who don't have extremist views on either sides of the spectrum, or people who just aren't bothered about politics, kind of get lambasted as being these wasteful, what is it, a cook-servative, a waste of

a vote, and then on top of that anyone who is but is moderate, anyone who has a slightly nuanced view just gets sort of thrown to the wayside. And I think that with Titania, what you're identifying is that the people who are the absolute extremes, that's what I'm saying. That it is funny for that reason that people can identify, most people, the vast majority people, can't identify with them at all. Yeah, exactly. I only read that article this morning. I think it's a great article. Amazing. She's an American comic who has had a lot of flak for just being honest

about her opinions. And her opinions, as far as I can say, are not particularly controversial. Nevertheless, she's talking about that idea that there's an expectation now that you should be politicised. Taylor Swift got, do you remember she got so much flack for not condemning Trump? You know, and it's like Taylor Swift's silence is deafening. So I don't need to know Taylor Swift's opinion on politics, right? I'm sorry. Just to tell you the Swift for political advice. It's like when Little Mix tweeted about the bombing of Syria. They sent an apology saying to Arb with so sorry to the people of Syria. I bet the people of Syria were thinking great, thank God, at least little mix have got our back. Well, I didn't give... look, I'm not saying these people should have it or the right to have an opinion.

Of course they do, but I don't give a shit. What little mix think about Syria? Yeah. That's not their... that's not their expertise, is it? No, not at all. So anyway, yeah, so this is an expectation, but also what Bridget's talking about in that article is the way in which actually, because if you express an honest opinion and then you get this kind of barrage of hatred off the back of it, it means that people are becoming nervous about just being honest.

So the discourse is dominated by the extremes. So you have the woke left who are really myopic and just cannot see beyond their own very narrow sort of parameters and if you step outside that particularly if you come from the left like I do and you step outside it just a little bit you are the most you're the persona known grata you're the one they are pushed straight down yeah yeah and and and and so people who have moderate views people who just want to have a discussion about some of these difficult issues, they want to address the nuance of, say, the trans debate.

They will just be lambasted as bigots. It's the big irony of this, is these people don't know what the word bigot means. I mean, the definition of bigot is someone who is incapable or completely intolerant of anyone else's opinion, someone who has a different opinion. But the people, so the nine times at 10, anyone who calls you a bigger is normally the bigger. Because what they're saying is your opinion shouldn't be allowed. Yeah.

It shouldn't, you know, we shouldn't have to, it shouldn't be tolerated. So yeah, it's a real problem. Bridget's been on the receiving end of it. A lot of us have now. And of course, what happens as well is if you express an opinion that isn't within that over to Window of Acceptable Thor, people just just say, well you're being dishonest, you're being a provocateur, you're being a shock-jock, because it's a kind of narcissistic world view that I can't believe that someone else would have a different view than me, therefore this must

be a lie. So I suppose my guiding principle is just to tell the truth, say what I think, and see what happens. Right. And I, if everyone did that, can you imagine? Would be a, would be in a much better position, wouldn't it? Yeah. Well, do, you know, John Peterson, who is a fan favorite of the show, he, his first rule, tell the truth, or at least do not lie. He makes the point in his book, actually, that it's actually very self-destructive to be dishonest. And when I read that, I really chimed with me. I think that's absolutely right.

You're hurting yourself if you're dishonest. And he also makes the point that there are times when lying is actually the compassionate thing to do. Right? Fine. But actually, there's a way to do just evading the truth. As in, you don't have to. Life is of omission, not lives of commission.

Yeah, yeah. If it's for a compassionate reason, that makes sense to me. But I think when it comes to just expressing your opinions and views, it's all about respecting people enough to tell them the truth. As in, I can respect you. I can say something that I think you might disagree with, I respect you enough as a human being not to that I assume you're not gonna start throwing things and call me a Nazi right you're gonna have a debate and a discussion yeah it's actually really disrespectful to say what you think the popular viewpoint is just for the sake of other people's sensibilities that's actually very disrespectful to them because you're patronizing them, you're infanalyzing them, you're saying that you wouldn't be

able to cope with dissent. You know, it's a bit like being at school, you know, when you're at school, like it's a particular thing with boys at school is that you won't say an opinion unless you're sure everyone else agrees, right? Right? And sometimes you're, this happens to me all the time. You must have actually like, when you were a kid and someone said something and everyone was like, oh no, we don't think that, do we? Yeah, and then it's like, oh, no, I didn't mean that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I actually sort of stand up doing a bit about this this year where he's talking about

when a situation arises in the news and he offers an opinion a bit too early when it's not formed and then he's like, oh no, can I take that back? Yeah. And which is what teenagers do. This is in the teenage act, by the way, but that's what teenagers do. And it's that thing of, well, actually, we'd all be better off being honest. We know who we were voting for, we'd know what people think, and we'd know where we stand, we'd have our views challenged. There's all sorts of reasons why honesty is a good thing. But no matter how many times I say

that, it doesn't matter, people just say, yeah, you're lying, you're just lying because you want to cause trouble or whatever. And that's really sad. I know. Anyone who wants to read a very good short book online, Sam Harris's line, one hour. One hour read. And it is a one hour justification for why you should never lie. Yeah. And it's absolutely great.

Highly highly recommended will be linked in the show notes below. But I get it. I keep getting messages from people saying, I really like what you're doing. I can't tweet about it. Honestly, I had one the other day from quite a prominent actor, say, I really, really like, I saw the show actually, is that I really like the detainee show, I can't tweet about it, because I can't be bothered with the backlash, I shouldn't have faced the backlash. So I sympathise with that. Why should they be, you know, why should they be a backlash for expressing an opinion?

Well, she, Bridget mentions in the article, which is the best way I've seen to put it, that, um, people aren't voting out of habit or for their own interests. It's now a comment on your personal identity and worth. Quite so. Let's take the Brexit vote, where the media reduced it to leave equals bad, uh, remain equals good. not just the media, but sort of the people in the sort of very middle class circle, that's how they reduced it. Leave equals racist, remain equals compassionate, yeah, and non-racist, okay? It's a lie that everyone bore into, it's pathetic, and it's the, is that right? Well, we haven't ever. Well, it's that, it's that, it's that

reductive thing of reducing actually a very complicated, new and spiritual question to an easy, uh, short cut. You know, why do you think that people are doing that at the moment? Why are people reducing down difficult discussions to these real tweet lengths? There's a good psychological reason. There's a think of the cognitive, myzomodel, which means that you, which means that you instinctively try and find the easiest to train of thought. Your mind, that you'll always go for the easiest. It actually takes a bit of effort to think about things. If you've got the situation, for instance, with the Brexit vote, and you

can just say, well, that's how it's good and that's how it's evil. Well, it's easy. It's an easy choice to make. Otherwise, you have to start understanding the issues. There's a whole lot harder. I get that. And yeah, it started to happen it's an easy choice to make. Otherwise, you have to start understanding the issues. There's a whole lot harder. I get that. And yeah, it started to happen a lot. Happened with Trump. It's happening now with Boris Johnson. So it's the same thing again.

Are you a good person? And this is why the polls never work anymore. This is why no one predicted Trump, no one predicted Brexit. It never works because people have their opinions. They have two sets of opinions. They've got their opinions that they actually feel and they've got the opinions that they know

they can express in public. Right, and those two are no longer the same. It used to be the case that they were the same. I remember talking to an old trade unionist about this, it was saying that, we used to be able to talk to like some of the miners and everything about, and they would be really homophobic. They'd say like, they hate fags and all this sort of, they wouldn't use fags that sequirs back then when they were

faggards. But they were right on all these other issues. And rather than bulk at that and say, oh, whether you're obviously a fascist, I won't talk to you about anything. This guy was saying, well, what I'd say to them is, well, okay, you're right about these social issues and these economic issues. So can we now talk about your issues about sexuality and then it became a discussion and then people changed their minds. And that was a great thing to happen, right? But now, if, say, for instance, you've got one opinion that is not acceptable, say you are anti-abortion, right?

So that, for many leftists, is like one of the sins. Cardinals, right? So if you're in that, then suddenly we write off you, we write you off completely. Yeah. So even if we agree on other things, it doesn't matter anymore, you're now the bad person, you're now an evil person. It's really unsophisticated. Yeah, it is. And it's, and it's perfectly, this is why I end up agreeing with people who, on the whole, I can't, I don't agree on, without anything.

Mm-hmm. And, for instance, let's take the free speech question, you know? So I am not a nationalist, I would never vote you Kip on the basis that it's a nationalist party and I'm not nationalist. So fundamentally, I don't have anything in common with them. But they're right about free speech. Right, so they recognize that there's a problem with free speech, the Labour Party and the Tory Party are both against free speech. Both of them are for hate speech laws, for instance,

the Labour Party want to push more press regulation if at all possible. Theresa May is one of the worst when it comes to free speech. I mean, she denied Tyler the creator and entrance to the UK on the base of a rap he'd done, right? Which was great, because then he did an anti-terrecer maw rap, which sounds really surreal, people forget about that, but that did actually happen, I didn't dream that.

So when you've got the two major parties who are anti-free speech, you've got to be able to say, this other party that I have nothing in common with, that actually I can't really stand, I am, they are right about that. But you say that, and then all of a sudden, oh, you're a UKIP supporter. No, I'm not.

I haven't voted like this. This tiny little sliver. They're correct about that. That's what they're saying. No one gets to own principles. Right, so a principle is either right or it's wrong. Okay, so you should be able to say, I don't approve of anything that person says or does,

but on that they're right, Because they don't own the principle. There's no more room for nuance or solitude in discussions now. So the thing that keeps coming back to me, and again, I'm probably a good abatar for the layperson when it comes to seeing these things, right? Because I'm not embroiled in them and it's not. Good for you. I know, it must feel like it would be heaven for you, right? But looking from the outside in, people who

are getting upset at the fact that you're making comedy at these situations to me, that is potentially the most shocking thing of all, because Armando E. Nuchi must be itching it is script to have a go at Brexit and Boris Johnson with another season of the thick of it, and there must be, you know, there must be, it is the, I think he said you could never do the thick of it again. There was an article a couple of years ago, because he says things have got through to real. Well, yeah, there we go. But you know, I mean, like to me,

it looks like the perfect breeding ground, the current political climate is the perfect breeding ground for some comedy and some satirizing. Yeah, of course. Yeah. It's, it's ideal. People often say that to me, it's like, isn't it hard to satirize, people like Trump who is self-saturizing the funniest thing said about Trump

I'll buy himself right there on his Twitter feed, you know, I mean Two days ago with the to leave you know the thing about Rashida to leave who'd who'd rights sorry talking politics again, but she'd ask To go to Israel to visit her 90-year-old grandmother on humanitarian grounds and Israel had denied her entry because she was likely to criticize the Israeli government. And she said, in a letter, I won't criticize you, I just want to see my grandmother. They came back saying, okay, and then she was like, oh, this is disgusting, I'm not going there because they're denomending that, I say certain things. It was a total political move. then Trump tweeted about it saying well the only winner in this situation is a grandmother who won't have to see it Let's be honest. That's a funny tweet

Now look I don't support Trump and I'm also kind of I'm all fashioned about policy I don't want my politician to be funny. Yeah, I want them to be serious because it's a serious job Yeah, but I can look at that and say that's funny. I can look at that and say it's a serious job. But I can look at that and say, that's funny. I can look at that and say, that's a funny tweet. He has a point even though I don't like most of what he stands for. Wish I'd written it. Yeah, there we go. That's not accurate. Yeah, but it's funny because it's the president. Yeah. There is something funny about the idea of the president of the United States calling Kim Jong Un fat. That's funny because it should never happen. It's also scary because they're both nuclear powers. You know, it's like, the legs are pretty high. Yeah, the legs are pretty high there.

So again, I should reiterate, I'm not supportive of it, I wish you didn't do it. But I also look at it in love. What are you going to do? Laughter is an involuntary response, isn't it? I don't calculate like the woke sets seem to be able to do. I mean, the woke idea is that you hear a joke, you think about it, you assess who are the marginalized groups. Is it punching up? Is it punching down? Can I laugh at that?

Yes, good. Inmit laughter. They see it as this kind of transaction, right? That's not how it works. Sometimes I laugh at the most horrible inappropriate things because they are horrible and inappropriate. Because that sort of reminds us why we don't talk about those things

You can see a Jerry Sadowitz show, you know, and good luck watching a Jerry Sadowitz show and not being offended at some point Yeah, everyone's gonna get a phone He's gonna offend you at some point. There's gonna be a moment where you think that's too much Yeah, shouldn't do that And that's part of this something quite exhilarating about that Yeah You can be offended and laugh at it Happens to me all the time.

I'm quite sensitive, I get offended really easily. But it's my problem. It's basically. Yeah, that's funny. One of the things that I've been thinking about when seeing the way that we recently had Zubi on the show. Yeah. Because of this weird game playing,

yeah, the left's done with language and social constructs and things like that. To me, what it appears to have allowed are very clever people to game that system. Right. And Zoobie's tweet about breaking the woman's deadlift record, PSI identified as a woman, don't be a bigot. That is a perfect example of regaming this, the little gaps that have been created. It's by the left in that. Is that one of the things that you think is helping us to identify where there's inconsistencies within their views and stuff like that? I think ridicule is what does it best of all. And part of the way you do that is you take on board their language. The problem with that is you find yourself tempted to play them by their rules. So when they talk

about privilege, I've seen this happen a lot, and there's an argument about privilege, and they often throw out this idea of white privilege, this blanket idea that if you're white you are inherently privileged, which is causing not true, some white people are privileged, some aren't, in more sorts of ways. There's all kinds of ways you can be privileged, right? It's not just to do with race, ethnicity and sexuality. But yeah, so you end up with a situation where people buy into the victimhood thing and they'll say, okay, I've been accused of being privileged to have them come back and say, actually, you know, I went to a rough school, I went to group on a stay, I did it right away, and then you're getting into this competition, you're playing their rules back at them, and that's probably not healthy.

You know, you can do it, like you can, and when they fall foul of their own rules, which they often do, right, did you see the Democrat conference in America where someone made a point of personal privilege, yeah, and the point of personal privilege was, guys, can you just keep the voice and noise down because I'm very sensitive, I get sensory overload and I get triggered. Then someone said, point a personal privilege about that point a personal privilege. Don't say, guys, that's gendered language, I'm really offended by that, don't do that. So you have people calling out each other's calling out. It's like this endless inception of

wokeness. Right. So we could do that too. So we could we could point out where they are being triggering. I mean, let's take an example. Most of the workload who are really anti-Brexit tend to be incredibly agist. They're basically saying, we can't wait for the old people to die, old people to fuck over the country. They're basically evil. It's like, are you kidding? You're the person who goes on all the time about being sensitive and surely what ageism is part of that, isn't

it? Or is that just your blind spot? So then if we call them out for ageism, we become part of that game. So I sort of refuse to play the game. So that's something that I've got written down here as something that I totally can't work out, but you're going to help me do it. Okay. You may have been in a relationship, but a lot of listeners will have been where your partner brings up a particular issue. You don't care about this issue. You spoke to that girl or you didn't reply in time or you were late or something like that. That's not an issue that you usually would do,

but they set a precedent by doing that. And then what you find yourself doing, next time that something happens that you find them culpable for that same thing for, is you go, hang on a second, are you talking to that guy? I didn't care. And I still don't care, but I'm going to use the opportunity to identify your inconsistency. That's fine. Straight off the bat. And that push and pull that happens in relationships, I think is very similar to what's happening here. I almost think that looking at the way that the left has kind of adopted this, the way that Andy know was assaulted in the street, they're taking bike lots around and throwing milkshakes at people, you know, that would have been a characteristic of the right previously,

absolutely, a very aggressive approach. Right. And it's almost like they're absorbing, taking on that persona, that push and pull thing. And then you think, well, hang on a second, if you keep on doing that as the left and throwing bike locks around, there are some people on the right

who have got very, very large guns. Right, exactly. Well, there's two sort of points there. I think one of them is, is, well, actually not just the left that do it, because the right do it as well. We saw that with the Joe Brand case. You know, when Joe Brand made the joke about throwing battery acid at Nigel Farage, which was obviously a joke, whether you found it funny or not, that's irrelevant. But it was most of people on the right saying she should be arrested, or she should be investigated

by the police, all the same people who complain about the very authoritarian treatment of comedy on the whole, right? And people who complain, you say that free speech is under threat. And then all of a sudden, they're the people saying, actually, no, but Joe Brown should be investigated because that's the inciting violence. No, you've got to be consistent in your principles either left or right. That's really, really important because it means your own principles will get undermined. But the other point about anti-fab, which the group, the anti-fascist group, now I for one mistrust anyone who identifies as anti-fascist, let me just say that, because for a star I assume everyone is, right? My assumption of you will be that you're not a fascist, yeah? It's a fair assumption, right? I will assume that of everyone until I hear

extraordinary evidence to the contrary, if I find the evidence fine Yeah, but we have to because there's hardly any fascist houses It's like being an anti-dog shagger. Yeah, exactly exactly. You don't declare that do you? Yeah, you don't declare that you don't have a predilection to penetrate livestock do you? Do you I don't know and I wouldn't assume that you would have? You know, although now we're talking about my suspicions, I'm like, you see, but look, and I see it on Twitter all the time,

anti-fat, proud, anti-fascist. Like, you don't need to tell me that. And it makes me suspicious, right? What you projecting about it. Yeah, exactly. It's the same as the people who, there's a statistic somewhere that you sip on the co-host to the show's part out.

Yeah. People that are very, very sort of vitriolic about being against gays are the ones that are most aroused when they see, like, like, they can study it into that. Yeah, very sort of vitriolic about being against gays, the ones that are most aroused when they see. Yeah, they can study it into that. They literally measured the extent of people's arousal, how hard they got basically. And it tended to be when the most overtly homophobic people watched gay porn. But it's such a no-brainer, of course, is, because why would you care? Yeah. Why would you care if people ask the same thing

lurking in the back of... Yeah, it's pretty, it's, it's, you know, I mean, the data's in on that one. Yeah. And it's not surprising. But the point about antifar, yeah, antifar effectively end up behaving like fascists, don't they?

They end up behaving like... That's the thing that's so funny about it. Yeah. Like anyone who seeks to silence someone through violence is the very least employing a tactic that the fascists also employed. So, you know, I'd probably stop short of calling them actual fascists. I think fascists are the very specific historical meaning, but they're certainly fascistic tendencies or strategies. I mean, I read Mark Bray, I think Mark Bray's book about Antifa. And what's very interesting, it's very well written, actually.

What's interesting about it is he does a very good job of sort of outlining all the history of the anti-fascist movements, things like cable street, whether the people confronted the Oswald Mosley's brown shirts. So all of that, and that's very good, there's a lot of that stuff I didn't know about. It's all very interesting. But of course, those are genuine anti-fascist movements. You know, these are, you know, not the kiddie's version. Right. Exactly. So what the book fails to do quite spectacularly actually is connect to those movements to what is happening now and makes the assumption that the people we're dealing with are in fact fascists. That assumption

is wrong. Okay. So some of them are fascists. Some of them are white supremacists, sure, right? Most of them are. You see Trump supporters getting pepper sprayed. People, anyone wearing a MAGA hat, getting kicked to the ground. There was someone who had a make Bitcoin great again hat that got-

Really just because they didn't read it properly. Yeah, they couldn't read the right Bitcoin instead of- Now if you can't distinguish between an actual white supremacist and someone who votes Trump, and that isn't to say that white supremacists couldn't vote Trump, they could, and they might do, but just because you vote Trump, it doesn't follow that you're a white supremacist, that will still be a massive minority of the people who voted for Trump. So if you can't make that distinction, then you are politically and historically illiterate, and what's worse is if you can't make that distinction and you have that level of illiteracy

and you've got a baseball bat and a mask, that's a dangerous combination, right? You know, I mean, we saw with Andy No, a bunch of white middle class students in masks beating up a gay Vietnamese immigrant in order to name a tolerance and to, you know, to stand up against white supremacy. It's a time you tweet. So it's really funny and also horrible. It's horrible because, sorry, I'm a bit... Well, yeah, it was hurt, he was injured, it was unjust. What they should have done, obviously all this stems from an article he wrote, or a

couple of articles he wrote for Krolet. What you do in that case, if you disagree with the journalist, is you go up to them and say, oh, I disagree with this, can we have a discussion about it? That's it. As soon as you hit someone on the basis of they are normalizing, supremacist, language or discourse, you over theorize to justify your own violent acts and it can't be justified. And it's really, really sad that we've got to this point where this is happening. Is all of this just reaction, is it still this big hangover from Trump being elected?

Partly, I mean I'm sure there's a frustration about it. Trump I suppose was the start of it wasn't it? And because people just decided that he was a fascist because they didn't really know what fascist meant, you know, he said a lot of stuff that I find contemptible and a lot of stuff that I think you would be hard pushed. I think when he talked about in a Omar and the squad, you know, and said, send them or they can get, they should just go home. I mean, three of the four were born in America, they were born in America. And the fourth is a US citizen anyway, right? It's difficult for me to see how that can be interpreted as anything other than a racist trope actually

So but this does not necessarily mean he's a white supremacist. That's a massive leap to make Again, I'd need the evidence on it, but yeah, I think I think that's the problem is that there's a sense of frustration people were angry Understandably so, you know, it's not nice to lose is it? And it's easier if you can then paint everyone who made that thing happen as evil. If you say that everyone evoked for Trump's is deplorable as Hillary Clinton, so memorably did, and that worked out really well for it, didn't then of course, you go on the offensive and you end up guaranteeing Trump's victory in 2020, that's what you do, that's what they've done. What would you predict? Well, he's definitely going

to win. You're okay. Yeah, I mean, he's playing a very smart game because he's putting the squad, the four Democrat politicians who play identity politics all the time. So in a no-mart, Alexandra Ocasio-Cutez, Ayanna Presley and Rashida Tilee, who are never going to play well with the electorate because they're always going on about grievance and intersectionality and white privilege and all that sort of stuff. That doesn't win votes, never has never will. And what Trump is doing is he constantly talks about them to make them the face of the Democrat party.

So people are like Nancy Pelosi. Giving them enough rope. Yeah, people like Pelosi are hating this. Like she wants the distances set from these four. But when you think Democrat, now you think Uber woke crazy identitarians, right? And that's largely because of Trump. And because the way he puts them at the center, the center, there's a smart tactical move. The Democrats need to distance themselves from this kind of politics. Identity politics never works. And

what's so funny about why? Why doesn't it work? Because it divides everyone up. It says, you know, you you stay in your lane over here, you stay in your lane, we're going to we're going to to really help you, we'll help the Hispanics, we'll help the gaze, we'll help the women, you know, and everyone is like, what about us? What about us, you know, and then it becomes competing, competing interests. You can only win an election by unity, by saying that we are doing what's best for absolutely everyone. And because the work movement is essentially a movement that rehabilitates racial thinking, it makes us think about race more, it makes us think about sexuality, and it makes us aware to the point of discrimination, and it separates

us all out, and it wants to undo the work of the civil rights movements. It wants to undo the work of Martin Luther King. It wants us no longer to think about content of character, but to think about color of skin. So it's a regressive, backward movement. It isn't helpful for human rights. It feeds the far right. It helps the far right. The far right is on the rise. They're still thankfully very fringe group, but they are on the rise because of the woke movement, because of the woke left, giving them all the ammunition they need. Because if you constantly say that all these working class white people, you're just privileged, all you boys, you're just rapists in waiting, you know, you've got toxic masculinity, you should be ashamed of yourself, all of this sort of stuff.

And then you've got the alt right, white nationalist group saying, well, come to us then, we're not going to treat you like that. It becomes an almost moderate and attractive, exact place to be. Exactly. And that's a really terrifying prospect for me. The main reason I attack the woke left is because I'm scared of the rise of the far right. That genuinely frightens me.

Because whereas the woke left are well intentioned, on the whole, I think they're well intentioned, they want the world to get a place, they're just in a cult, so they can't see the reality of it, right? You know, it's like anyone in a cult, they're believing, they believe it, right? It's not evil. They see the world as a full of fascists. They see the world as full of injustice, and they want to do something about it. That's a laudable aim. The problem is,

the world isn't full of fascists, and they're just end up hitting people with bite-locks because they vote the wrong way, right? So that's the problem. And all of that does is generate all of this resentment and it's a gift, it's a boon to the genuine like really vile white supremacist alt-right, just just repugnant people who can thrive on this stuff. Well, you know, that's as far as I can see, the only way to get beyond that is to is to is to take down the work left, to make it okay to mock them again, to restore reasonable political conversation, that's what we need to do, it's so important. There must be, so there's a really interesting podcast, Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan. I've seen Joe Rogan's podcast a lot, but I haven't seen that.

So Eric is the managing director of Tiel Capital, Peter Tiel, one of the PayPal Matthews companies and he is fairly widely regarded as one of the smartest people like public intellectuals on planet. And he has this really interesting point he makes about how the moderates on both the left and the right are allowing the extremists of that side to do all of the work for them. Yeah. And then by not shouting up as someone who's moderate left and saying hang on a second, that's wrong. Or by being moderate right and saying hang on a second, that's also wrong. Like Charlotteville's, Charlotteville's wrong.

Yeah. Whatever it might be, you are, he says it with much more nuanced than this, but he says essentially you're supporting it. But not by saying, oh well, you can go out, is the vanguard of your particular political leaning? Yeah, push them forward a little bit. Yeah, I think you, you can't shout louder than the lunatics, can you? They do dominate. They really do. Yeah, I mean, that's a very good, I think, for instance, the case of Charlottesville, it is quite important for people on that side of the debate to say this is wrong. It's not right for Trump to suggest a moral equivalence between people who are opposed to

fascism and people who murder in the name of white supremacy, that's not right. I mean, the the the the anti-fascist, peaceful protesters, I'm behind 100% what I'm not behind is the ones who don't the masks commit acts of violence That's a very different dragon old man out of his car when they're redirecting in traffic, right? That's a very different It's important because I think peaceful protesters the way all the time peaceful protest and ridicule But yes, certainly so so sorry to go back to the point, sorry, I've missed it. I've gone on a different extreme, extreme, pulling in for the for the moderate people. Yeah. Well, I think that goes back to what Bridget was saying, doesn't it? Is that when a movement gets characterized by its worst elements, that's a problem. In the way that Islam, for instance, has been mischaracterized by its most

reactionary elements. 100%. You get the same thing here where suddenly you think of the left. I mean, if I say the left, what do you think of? You think of these screeching offence seekers, don't you? You think of the evil her? Yeah, you think of the worst. Well, actually, that's not being on the left means, you know? It's it's and and that's a real shame. So I think, yeah, I think we need to restore moderation. I think we need to stop having fealty to ideology so that we can say, yeah, broadly speaking, my principles are left wing.

But that, that you've just said, this right wing has said this interesting thing, which I might take on board and that, which I'm adopt as well. And then, and restore the nature of the individual. The individual is sovereign, as John Stuart Mill said. Like it matters what you think. You have to be a free thinker, not let other people

do your thinking for you. And that's where we've got to, where people don't. They don't do that anymore. Like if you if you were on the left side, you told me one of your principles, I could pretty much guess what all your other views are. And that should never be the case. You should surprise me now and then with what you think.

Did you see Jordan Peterson on GQ? No. This interview is fantastic. I'll send you it for you. Oh, wait, with Helen Lewis. Maybe. It was a one to one interview, two hours long. Yes, they tried to take me down.

There was lots of opportunity to take me down. It was a really weird title. I totally did. Yeah, in that she says, she starts asking me these questions and he just starts laughing at her. And he says, because your questions are ridiculous, from the first question that you asked me, I could have predicted every subsequent question. Okay, you were going to give me that. That's it playing out in front of us. Yeah, in that side. And no one wants to be predictable anyway. You know? No, but I think that's what I think that's what the left are trying to do here.

We're trying to go like how, with how much fidelity can I become offended? Yeah. Like, with how higher resolution can I look at discrimination? Like, and continue to one up, it's the personal privilege, this, oh, personal privilege, you've years worth worked guys, like it's the one upmanship. I mean, I'm always a bit wary of that, just because I don't like to guess what people are thinking. I don't like to guess people's intentions. You know, so like,

when we talk about virtues signaling, right, which is I think what you're referring to, it definitely goes on. You know, I mean, everyone knows this, particularly politicians do this a lot, you know, they talk about, they want people to know how upset they are about a certain thing or whatever. But by the same token, I don't want to assume that they're doing that for the worst motives.

I don't want to assume that about them, you know. But I don't know. It's a problem of you having faith in people. It's a problem of you. It's literally a problem of you hoping for the best in people. Well, it's partly that, but it's also that I can't, it's a, it's that goes back to the thing about not playing by their rules. The one, the thing that I get all the time is people telling me what I secretly think. That's the one common factor I get at all the time. So people say, what did I say you think?

Well, so actually virtually all the major criticisms of me on Twitter, the people who really go for me, have decided that I have these secret racist thoughts that I have internalized homophobia, that I had one the other day about how I made, what am I, I can't do that. Like who knows, right? All this stuff is like, you're a right wing, you're a Tory, I get that a lot of Tory,

I've never voted Tory. It doesn't matter. They know that secretly I have, they know my secret thoughts, right? And that's a problem. And if I turn around and say, yeah, but you secretly think this, then I'm just reducing myself to their level.

So what I will always do is take an argument of face value. I'm never gonna assume someone's lying about their argument for whatever reason. Because the argument will be demolished irrespective of the truth behind it. You can defeat a bad argument whether the person is sincere about it or not. So that I think is a much better strategy. And I'm sure there are people who are paid for extreme opinions, you know, I think we all know who we're talking about. People will put extreme opinions

out there because they get some clickbait, you know, but the argument either stands or falls on its own merit, it doesn't really matter whether they mean it or not. And also, you can't demolish the argument by assuming they don't mean it because you've got no evidence for that. That's just your spec. You've got to defeat you on its own terms. Yeah, all right, it's merit. I'm going to bring up what I've spoke to Zubi about the other day on the podcast, which is Mario Lopez, the guy who played AC Slater on Safe by the podcast, which is Mario Lopez, the guy who played AC Slater on Safe by the Belt, which you never watched. I never watched it.

To shame, man, honestly, it's good TV shows. So Mario Lopez says this very, very over pedestrian caveat after caveat, very, very mild. I'm not sure if three-year-old should be allowed to change their gender. That's essentially what he says. And then is annihilated. And a couple of days later, it comes back with the most groveling apology. The comments I made were ignorant and insensitive, and I now have a deeper understanding of how hurtful they were. I have been and always will be an ardent supporter of the LGBTQ plus community and I'm going to use this opportunity to better educate myself moving forward. I will be more informed and thoughtful. Right, well every time someone does that, it gives more power to the woke movement

and it gives that sort of Twitter mob the upper hand because it means they know it works. It's like capitulating to terrorists. You know, once you because it means they know it works. It's like capitulate to terrorists. You know, once you do it, they know it works, and they'll do it again and again and again, and we've seen it all the time. People are forced to apologize for things they said years ago, things that probably weren't even that offensive.

That's not offensive. That's an opinion. So, and if you really, I believe it, who he didn't, right? If you believed it, stand by it. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's short, you can change your mind about stuff. It's really days. Unlike me.

To that degree. What you were actually having is a lot of pressure from, you know, I mean, people can say to him, but maybe someone sat down and said, oh, think about this thing about this, and he did change the line, that's possible. Right. Even in that case, I would advise not apologizing.

Because it just feeds the beast. You know, we saw this with Kevin Hart and the Oscars for jokes he tweeted eight years ago. Ten years ago, something like that. And there were jokes. Doesn't matter if they're offensive, there were jokes. I don't care. So, again, a public, but good for him, he did in the public. He said, I apologise at the time, I'm not going to keep apologising for this. Yeah.

You know, uh, did you see the um Liam Neeson thing about in February time? Yeah, where he said that his uh close family member had been sexually assaulted by a black guy. So he walked around his hometown with a cush. Yeah. Just going into black neighborhoods hoping to find someone that was associated with them. And you're like, well, how in a second, what's this guy supposed to say? Because I found, although it's obviously quite a dark story, I found it very, very interesting. I was like, oh my gosh, this is, how would I feel? What would I do in that situation?

How would I act in that situation? You're thinking about Liam Neeson, guy with his gravely voice walking around the dark streets of Ireland with this caution in his hand. I'm like, what an amazing story. I can't believe he said it, actually. I can't believe he said that to a journalist. And didn't think about the contentants of saying it. But there is something to be said for his honesty. It's but it's a horrible it's a horrible idea that someone can be so traumatized by something they behave in such a vial way. And by his own admission, it was a vial. And yeah, the shop, his own shock at himself.

But does that not, like that sort of a thing educates everybody. Yeah, yeah, that's sort of a story because I'm like, I've never heard anything like that before. Yeah. Even in fiction, I've never heard anything like that before. And I think, wow, what was really interesting? What was weird about that is, I don't know why the woke movement got so angry about that because actually what he was making was a really woke point because they believe that the that the white people are essentially racist anyway. And so this was just sort of bolstering their views. I don't know why they weren't happy about this,

to be honest, but yeah, they went for him. It's an unforgiving. I mean, this is the thing about the whole the whole woke thing is you can never, if you make a mistake once, you were tired for life, you can never be forgiven because it is a religion and they don't think redemption is possible. So that's why the Mario Loper you've got this window of whatever like maybe seven days or something like that within which you can recant right and as long as you do your self-flagulation over whatever particular TV station or press release it is that you do then maybe you get right but that I mean and the point he was raising is in a discussion we need to have.

The question about gender is a discussion we absolutely need to have. So anyone who knows anything about gender has read theories of gender. Gender is not as the work movement claim a social construct. It is a very complicated combination of social and biological factors, right? And the problem is that their faith-based position about gender has been adopted, particularly in Canada, for instance, by governments. And actually, we need to have a much bigger discussion, but before these sort of policies are adopted, we need to actually talk about and decide whether they're right or not. It's not correct that gender is solely something to do with culture. And largely, I mean certainly the obvious

example is that you dress boys in blue and girls in pink whereas in fact you know go back 100, 200 years it was the reverse. So those things are arbitrary. Feminism, second way of feminism spent years trying to break down the idea of gender norms and gender stereotyping, right? What's wrong with a boy being a feminer? Why do you start questioning and say, well, maybe he's a girl. Now maybe he's an a feminer boy and that's okay. What's wrong with a girl being a tomboy, being butch? Do you remember tomboys?

Yeah, because tomboys haven't been around as far as I can remember for about 10 years. When, in fact, the recent play of the, what's it, an in-it blind play? Was it Manorita? Or is it even, and they cast a non-binary actor to play the tomboy character. OK. It was a name of rice production. Now, this says a lot.

That it's almost like the concept of a butch girl is now something we don't understand anymore. No, no, no, it's a boy in a girl's body. This is deeply conservative, right? It's hugely conservative. I saw a documentary about trans kids, where the parents were talking about there, they said that we've got this little girl now

and we're so happy because we don't have to watch our little boy mincing about, like a place, like a little gay, right? So we fixed him, we fixed the problem, you know? And it was so... No, it said, and without any sense of self-awareness or... But actually that points to a very interesting thing about the trans debate, which we're not really addressing, is to what extent is this actually just a reheavallated homophobia?

To what extent is this just us fixing people into rigid ideas of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman? I remember seeing a debate between a performance artist called David Hoyle and Lauren Harris, who is a transgender woman, was formerly a man, was formerly male. And Lauren said, during the interview, she said, I always knew I was a woman because I used to buy lots of shoes. Right? Which actually just is endorsing the most base growth stereotype about women and commercialism that you can imagine. Women aren't all ML Demarcos, you know, they don't have. That's not what it can war drugs. Yeah, it doesn't mean you're a woman just because you like to, I used to play with dolls as a kid, I'm not a woman, you know, it doesn't matter.

So that's my big concern, that's what I would like to have, I'm not saying that I know all the answers or that I have a full understanding of the situation. What I am saying is I've read a lot about it and I would like to have a serious, proper, public discussion about these issues without being shouted at and called a transfer and have someone hit me with a bike lock and have a milkshake on my face.

Well, being able to, being under the age of 16 and not being allowed to have sex but being allowed to change your sex. Right. It's obviously a problem. Because having sex will last for probably first time, maybe about three minutes. But like, changing your sex is the rest of your life. Right. It's a really serious, you know, but I have composed. There's no one identifying this. I have total sympathy with someone who genuinely feels that they are in the wrong body. Of course I do. Yes.

So to suggest that to have misgivings about any kind of chemical intervention or puberty inhibitor of a child is not the same thing as being anti-trans rights. It should be actually the two are completely compatible. We need to have a serious discussion about that, right? But we're not having that discussion. We're just throwing insults. It's really sad. So I wanted to finish with some questions for Titania as if how would she answer? Right. So I've got it. That's pretty hard. I know you're going to have to channel you. You know, it's hard though because normally when I think of an idea for a tweet,

I go off and walk for like 15, 20 minutes and refine it. I do, yeah. That's interesting. Except for last night, when I just did drunken money. Byron away. Let's see how we get on. All right. Number one.

I'm not an improviser. That's fine. Number one. Are all cats feminists? Oh, cats feminists. She would suggest that feminism is the natural state and therefore all animals are essentially feminists. She also believes that all animals are essentially vegan but that they are socialized into believing that they should eat meat by our example. That's what she thinks. But there's a line in the book where she talks about her

That's what she thinks. But there's a line in the book where she talks about her vegan cat and she says, yeah, I mean, she does chase birds around the garden, but I think she must assume there's some kind of flying vegetable or something. And is that thing about, she just projects her own ideas onto everyone else? But yeah, yeah, because feminism is an actual state. Cool. Yeah. Speaking of vegetables, which is the most oppressive vegetable?

I would say butter nuts squash. Why? I don't know. I think courgette. Really? Yeah, because of that sort of French sounding G, which is how it smells in bourgeois. Actually, thinking about it as theobagine, because of the emoji. Absolutely, there we go.

Which is used to represent the phallus. We've answered it. Yeah. Male dogs, sniff the butts of males and females equally. Right, but only have sex with females. Does this make dogs prejudice? Good question. That's not all together, true, though, is it?

Does he talk sex with other boys? Yeah, yeah, there are gay dogs. What about the ones that don't? They should be killed. Fine. Yeah. Fine. Well... Actually, most dogs are polyamorous thinking about it. They have multiple partners.

They're quite woke. They're pretty damn woke, yeah. I don't know. So do I kind of provide? It's, we've got it, we nailed it. We've worked out the vegetable, we've got cats and dogs. That's really, that's the big three. All right. That is the big three.

So moving forward now, we are in the midst of Edinburgh fringe. You've got the time your live show, how's that been going? I love it, I love it. It's so much fun. We are dividing audiences, which is exactly what it should be doing. How many, as have you had many people walk out?

Yeah. We're getting it on camera. I mean, I haven't been here for a lot of the shows, but Alice tells me every now and then, there's a moment where people walk out. Yeah. We're getting it. I mean, I haven't been here for a lot of the shows, but Alice tells me every now and then, there's a moment where people walk out. And what's been interesting though is, people walk out of any of the shows all the time, remember, right? Because they've got to get to other shows and things. So you can never be sure. And you can't assume they're offended. It's always after the same jokes though. Well, after that. Alice has had a couple of examples where people have been explicit about why they're

leaving. Now, that really happens. Okay, yeah. And there was one the other night, she said, the person on the front row just said, I'm sorry, I just can't, I can't do this and walked out. And I think like, look, I'm sympathetic with anyone who is offended by it or upset, and I would also support their right to leave. I can be offended by stuff and my views are just leave. I'm not going to start winging about snowflakes and all this sort of stuff.

We all get offended by stuff and we all know what upsets us and sometimes it's best not to expose yourself to that. Everyone has different tolerances. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know, the purpose of satire is to annoy people as well as to entertain some other, you know, you can't, it can't be, it's

not being done right. If everyone loves what you're doing, or indeed if everyone hates what you're doing, or you want to be splitting people, that's exactly what was that an aim when you were writing the 100% yeah, yeah, I mean, I knew full well that it would annoy people. I wanted it to therefore tickets though. Well, yeah, a lot of people in Edinburgh don't know what they're seeing. Yeah, that's the problem. Like, you've got two good street PRs. Like, the street PRs are so effective. Like, you've got these guys out and they're unbelievable at their job.

On the other hand, I sort of want people to know what it is because I want people to enjoy. I don't want people not to, I don't want people to go to a show they're not going to enjoy. I think the tweets are more designed to annoy the general public. People who happen upon them and don't know who she is, that's funny to me. But yeah, I think if you've invested money in a show, I'd like you to enjoy it. For sure. So, I have said to the flies, can you just be honest about what this is? Because dogs on them are like...

If people are thinking they're going to see like a stand-up show for instance, it's not a stand-up show, it's more like a play. If people think that they're going to see like a stand-up show for instance, it's not a stand-up show It's more like a play. If people think that they're going to see, you know, some feminist thing I mean, it's obviously mocking contemporary feminism You know, I'd rather people just knew and didn't yeah, you know got the money's worth. Yeah, I think so But we're challenged for it. So you know, you've made a Twitter account. You've done all of this stuff And now there is a living breathing one hour manifestation of a Twitter account. Yes. On stage, in front of you, at the Edinburgh Fringe, for like, what, 20 nights, 30 nights?

Yeah, 25 shows, yeah. What does that... how does that feel? I just feel like this is the most 21st century thing that's ever happened. Yeah, it's an old one, isn't it? And I certainly didn't expect it to happen. I certainly didn't. I didn't even know I was going to write a book when I started this. It wasn't that at all. Yeah, it's an old feeling. And also because I know her so well. And then you see this sort of version of it in the flesh. My friend, has it changed the way that you think about her? Having seen it manifest

sort of in front of you? No, I don't think it has because during the rehearsal process, what we were doing is trying to get Alice's characterization as close as possible to what is in my head. Of course it's not entirely possible and of course an actor will always bring their own interpretation to the role. So but there's still this creature in my head who is a living breathing thing who isn't quite what's on stage, isn't quite, because that's a combination of my writing analysis interpretation, it's something,

I mean, my friends are a bit worried about me, so sometimes I do talk about her in the third person, I do... The issues in the room. I sort of do, like... You do your imaginary friend. It's not quite like that, because I'm very self aware about it,

but what I mean is, I have a separate phone for her, for a star, largely because Twitter will ban you if you don't want the same phone for both your accounts because if she gets banned I would get banned as well. Twitter made you behave like a drug dealer basically. And so someone said to me that I can you tweet this from to time or can you re-tweet this from to time. I was like I haven't got a phone with me. You know it's at home. And I just said it and she's saying this is worrying. You're not talking about as a, as a real thing. But it's not a psycho, I know, it's not a psycho. I'm fully 100% self aware. Okay. But it helps to think of her as, because I start to think about the way she would respond

to things, which is obviously the way that I would respond. Because it got easier over time. Yeah, I mean, I think when I first started it, so because I had to delete, I think the tweets are only there from, I went through a period of deleting everything beyond seven days, because people kept mass reporting the tweets, and that's how they do it to get you banned. And now I don't allow enough time for them to accumulate. Exactly. I don't do that anymore, just because I sort of don't care if I get banned at this point. I think to the stage now as well, where you've been mentioned on the Joe Rogan

show, like the absolute pinnacles of, I'm fine with the ban. I'm, you know, I think you can come to the stage now as well where you've been mentioned on the Joe Rogan show, like the absolute pinnacles of I'm fine with the band. I can do more, the character's out there now. I can write articles, I can write shows, I can do whatever with it. I don't need the Twitter account really, but I enjoy it just, I still, I'm still going to do it, I still enjoy it. I've got you to do it. But the early tweets were not as, I think they were just quite direct and You know because there's two types of tweets that she does. There's the joke tweets where she she tries to

Expose the inherent contradiction of the work way of thinking and then there's the bait tweets where she says something so outrageous She wants people to risk to take it seriously and those are normally the right wing as the the Trump voters and people who take it seriously and get angry. So there's the two types of tweets. And then I often get accused of, well, that's not even a joke. That's just, and I was like, yeah, I'm baiting someone there. You know, and when she says that, you know, heterosexuality should be eliminated

and stuff like that, you know. And she says future generations will thank us if we do that. You know that a lot of the people do get angry and it exposes something about their anger as well. Yeah, you know, so I like I'm gonna go at both sides, do you know what I'm saying? That's the point. It must be a fun playground to be able to have that. So what do you think? Well, if you've got any idea what you think's next for to time, don't know. Get the fringe out of the way.

Don't forget your lines and your jokes and stuff for your show. Yeah. Don't need to, that would be bad. That would be bad. Yeah, I mean, it's actually the standup champion doing next week is like a version of the show I told at the start of the year. And so it should be all right.

Cool. I've got two days just to rehearse. That'd be fine. I hope. What next? I don't know, I don't like doing the same thing for a long time. So I tend to try and move on. I'm considering writing a book about politics at the moment, which I've been speaking to my agent about. So I might do that. It would be a serious book. I mean, I like the idea of I've approached this sort of woke movement from the satirical side. Now I quite like to try it from the polemical side. Has it enhanced your understanding of politics, like on a serious level,

playing around and swimming in these sort of waters? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, for a start, I've come from that background. I've always written about politics and I've always, and I've come from a kind of woke background. I know a lot of woke people, so I've sort of come from that tradition and that, you know. back I know a lot of woke people so I've sort of come from that tradition and that you know. But yeah, it always informs me to talk to people who disagree with me. It always, you know, I, that's what's so frustrating about so many of these people, they won't

talk, they won't debate, they'll just walk away, they won't have the conversation, where it's actually, I've got, you know, we've all got a lot to learn from each other. And even people who say things that I just hugely disagree with, it's great to hear what they've got to say. It's also been really useful to see the way that people perceive me. So, you know, I'm often told things that they, I think, which I don't think, but that tells me that maybe I'm not being quite clear enough in how I express myself, you know. One of the big things I get all the time is, oh, you always go on about how you can't say anything anymore, right? I've never said that. I don't think it, and I've never said it.

I can say whatever I down well, please, and I do. The point I'm making is that in the current climate that we live in, if I was still a teacher, for instance, I wouldn't be tweeting the way I am now, because I'd be fired, right? So I think what I said, I am in a privileged position because I'm a comedian and I can say whatever I want and I can get away with it. But I know that if I were to go back to teaching now, I could never get a teaching job anymore. So they just do it a cursory Google search and I'm over, right? I mean, when I was a teacher, I had parents complaining because they'd Googled me and read some of my jokes online

and they complained to the head. So it was already getting a bit. Touch it. Yeah. So we'd, isn't that I'm saying that we can't say anything anymore. What I'm saying is most people who are in normal jobs, not fake jobs like what I do, right? Normal jobs, they feel under pressure to not joke with their workmates. They feel like they have to restrict their jokes to encrypted WhatsApp conversations

because if they are heard and misunderstood or taken up face value, which is a common thing people do with comedy now, then they're going to lose their jobs. That is a dangerous climate to be in. We had it with Bridget's article, people are afraid to express opinions online, people who email me saying, I like your stuff, but I'm not going to say it publicly. So we are living indisputably in a culture where people are self-sensoring routinely now. Out of fear of either what your peers will say, what the people on social media are going to do to you, because remember, their tactics often to try and stop your livelihood. You know, go have to go to your employer, complain to your employer,

and really pass it up the chain until they find a weak link. Or people are afraid of the state. You know, in the UK, we have a horrible situation where we have, we have hate speech laws that have led to people being imprisoned for jokes, they've written on Facebook, actual jail time, right? Constantin Kisses says that in all of Russia, every person that was jailed honestly last year, because of joke that made on social media, 400, the UK, 3000. He's talking about arrests. No, no, no, no, no, not no no no jail for jokes is very rare but it has happened or it should never happen but the way that it has happened yeah um but yeah arrests investigations it's over 3000 in this country and 400 in Russia that tells you an awful lot

hate speech laws should be abolished absolutely clearly people should be entitled to express hateful views if they want to that's not to say i support those hateful views i absolutely don't't. But what, you've got to think on balance, what is better here, right? I'd love to live in a society where everyone was nice to each other and no one said these horrible ghastly things, right? I'd love that. That's not the real world. There are some awful people out there who say some horrible things, but is the solution to that to give the state power to lock people away if they don't agree with what they say? Because that's where we are. You've got to think about it in balance. What's the bigger picture? I'd rather live in a free society where I'm going to hear some idiot on a street corner shouting

about how I should go to hell because I'm gay. I'd rather hear that, right? Then have a situation where the government can say, well, this is no longer acceptable, so now we're going to investigate and arrest you for that, which is what's happening. You know, the guy got investigated in Humberside for retweeting a poem about trans issues. Right. He got investigated. The police finally up and said, we've got to check your thinking. Right. And that should never happen. But it's happening as a matter of routine. And we know this because when people complain to the police about it, they said, but this is just common across the country. If you go on the government's hate crime legislation website, it will talk about non-crime hate incidents

that are logged as part of the hate crime statistics. So when you hear about these hate crime statistics, you've got to remember that a lot of them are people finding the police saying someone called me gay and I'm upset about it. And that gets logged. No investigation needed, it's logged. Because if that person perceives that it was hemophobic, that's it. It's really worrying. And it is, it's not authoritarian in the way that the fascist is

and he was authoritarian. But it is a kind of creeping authoritarianism and it has an authoritarian aspect to it that needs to be resisted and we shouldn't be complacent about this stuff. But the problem is no one wants to address it. You're very right. You are very right indeed. Moving forwards, last thing, what are the two most likely routes that you can see us going down in the over the next couple of years in terms of how the discourse is going to mature. Okay, so I've been asked this question before. The truth is I don't know obviously because

I'm not clever enough, but I do think we are reaching a kind of tipping point, right? Well, you've got, so the woke activists are the minority and that's the consolations you all take. They just are very loud one. It's not just loud, they have power. And that's what's dangerous about them. I mean, they're mostly bourgeois, they're mostly privately educated, so they tend to occupy those roles in society where they are opinion forming, you know, they overly dominate the law, journalism, the media, the arts, all of these sorts of areas, university certainly. So you end up in a situation where they are dictating the sort of common discourse, right?

But the problem is there are minority, for them, this is their problem. There are minority and people aren't buying it. And the more they push it, the more people push back. So, you know, I mean, I hate the idea of dismissing millennials or the millennial generation. Most millennials think this is bullshit, right? It is the minority, particularly student activists. The type of kids who end up in student politics, they tend to be, you know, quite narcissistic, they're not representative of the student body. But everyone else is, they just want to get drunk get drunk and have fun and they'll go along with it. They'll be like, okay, we won't applaud, we'll do jazz hands instead. If that makes you happy, we'll just do it for an

easy life, of course. But it's not the norm and then, you know, and people grow up, of course, and they go beyond that. What worries me? I mean, personally, I blame my generation. I think it's generation X that fostered this stuff and caused this stuff by indulging it. But so what will happen, I think, is, and particularly generation Z, I mean, the millennials are getting old now, right? They're, they're, they're past it now. I mean, this is a night, so you've got to be born after 96. I'm only just not a millennial. Like, people, people forget this. Like, the millennial generation is, is, it's had its day. I mean, all the statistics seem to suggest that generation Z are pushing way back against this stuff. They've got no time for it.

You don't even get that, that, that, you know, I think that's what's gonna happen. So, and maybe they're sensing their power of slipping and that's why they're getting more and more aggressive. That's what people do when they're threatened, when their power base is threatened, they start getting, they're shrieking even louder. And so they won't go down easy.

But they'll never win because they just don't have the numbers. And this stuff is totally unpersuasive. So is the main... Well, the fear, longer term, that this causes the backlash from the right. Well, that is a fear. Yeah, and that's why we have to take this work movement down as quickly as possible, because that's a genuine fear that could happen. Yeah, I think I think, I don't know. The truth is I don't know, maybe they will dominate

and who knows, I mean that would be terrible to go to the level. But I like to think that most people are sick of it, most people are going to fight back against it and things will change for the better. But that's me because I'm an optimist. That's what I think will happen. I do. And thank you so much for coming up. I've really enjoyed it.

The Edinburgh Fringe show by the time this goes up, will have seen whether or not you've had any catastrophes on stage, but I'm not feeling well. No, no. Yeah, we were worried. We thought, oh, some idiots are going to come along and throw milkshakes or anything, nothing like that. Actually great. Well, I'm going to bring a milkshake, but I I'm gonna bring it to drink to your show and choose.

Yeah, actually do. Well, throw it, because actually that would be good publicity. That would be great publicity. But I also don't want to be ousted on Twitter by Titanie McGrath and a 400,000 followers or whatever it is. Links to everything that we've spoken about today, including the articles, Andrew's Twitter, Titanie's Twitter, everything else will be in the show, not to below.

If you've enjoyed the episode, please give us a like, give us a share, definitely give Tetonie and Andrew a follow. They're absolutely fantastic. I really appreciate you coming to see me. No thanks a lot, really enjoyed it. It'll be great. Thank you. you