Modern Wisdom - #109 - Douglas Murray - The Price Of Thinking Out Loud

Episode Date: October 7, 2019

Douglas Murray is a journalist, author and an associate editor of The Spectator. What is the price of thinking out loud about the most inflammatory topics of our age? Gay, Women, Race & Trans make up the four chapters of The Madness Of Crowds and today Douglas jumps feet first into all of them. Expect to learn which chapters Douglas could have added to the book but didn’t, how the LGBTQ community are less united than you may think, why we should be skeptical about the number of gay stories in the press, why Piers Morgan seems to be in the middle of so many controversies, what Douglas thinks about Nicki Minaj shaking her butt in everyone's face and why the demands of men by women may be totally unrealistic. A massive thank you to all of you for your support over the last year as this episode marks Modern Wisdom's crossing of 1 Million Total Downloads. Hit Subscribe if you haven't already! -  Extra Stuff: Buy The Madness Of Crowds - https://amzn.to/35egrPU Follow Douglas on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - 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

Hello friends, welcome back to Modern Wisdom and welcome to over 1 million downloads. That's right, we made it into the 7 figures club, huge thank you to everybody who supported us over the last 18 months, so it only been going since January 2018 and it feels so good to hit that 1 million figure. On to today's guest, what better of a way to celebrate hitting a million downloads than with Douglas Murray. International bestselling author of the Strange Death of Europe and his new book The Madness of Crowds is absolutely sublime. A lot of sense-making around some really contentious topics. I mean, the four chapters in the book are gay women race and trans,

which kind of tells you everything that you need to know about what you're in for today. It's really fitting that this episode with Douglas marks the breaking of one million downloads because it absolutely reminded me why I love doing this podcast. You know, it's not a huge team. It's me and video guy Dean putting out two episodes every Monday and every Thursday with people like Ben Greenfield or James Altich or Aubrey Marcus or Scott Barry Kaufman. It's a big project that is unrelenting in its workload and having conversations like this with Douglas, just make it so worthwhile. A genuinely would do this podcast even if no one was listening, but increasingly it seems

like more and more people are. So thank you so much for tuning in. If you are not subscribed, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. You will get one episode every Monday and every Thursday with the most interesting humans on the planet delivered directly into your listening device of choice. But for now, it's time for I am joined by Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds and bestselling author of the Strange Death of Europe. Douglas, welcome to the show. It's been a great pleasure to join you so far. We've had a couple of technical issues,

but got through them fine. And now we get onto the real issues. First things first, Manus of Crowd, your new book, Four Chapters, Women, Gay, Race and Trans. Each one of those is a nuclear warhead race. You take it off underneath my foot. How are we going to be able to navigate this conversation and how also did you navigate this without getting

blown up? Well, I don't know, I've survived so far the books have been out of fortnight. I'm still here. Yeah. My view is that we've become in our society's really bad at having conversations and we've become very bad at thinking because we can't think out loud or at least the price of thinking out loud has become potential total career and life destruction. So when people wonder why people don't do it, it's not hard to find the reason. I think that for some reason in recent years I noticed that these four issues in particular, there are others, but these four issues in particular were the ones which people just kept on, you know, the moment they knit the trip wire, they were just detonated. And I just found that really interesting also because I think all four issues are unbelievably

interesting and actually significant, I mean, have significant effects on people's lives and on our societies. So my view is that we've got this strange position in our societies at the moment where the only people who can sort of speak or think out loud at people who don't have any hierarchy above them that's vulnerable to crowd stampedes and mobs and so on. So those of us who can think aloud whether we're right or wrong, I don't know, but sort of have a disproportionate duty to talk and think and write. And so I decided just to take each of the absolute nuclear bomb issues head on and just go jumping on in.

You certainly did. I was going to ask you this at the end, but I'm going to ask you now, were there any chapters that you could have considered adding that you didn't? That's a very good question. There were two that I could have done that I didn't. One was green, which I have been becoming more and more interested in. And I think that there's whatever people's views about the nature of climate change, and the best way to deal with it and so on, it's clear there is at this point an element of crowd mentality that's kicking in. And I suppose the other one that was, that where I could have done, I thought about doing, one that was, that where I could have done, I thought about doing, but decided to put off to another day was mental health because I think that mental health in general is a

fascinating, fascinating issue. It's come very fast into the mainstream and I think that it's sort of good in all sorts of ways, but there are lots of issues around mental health that I'm very skeptical about, not that, you know, you don't need to get into all of them, but I don't entirely share a lot of the presumptions of the age. And I think that it basically, it has some of the same absolutes of the things I'm discussing here is that you get onto the thing and you don't know where to correct or it becomes almost impossible to say stop at any point. And I tell you, I mean, with the mental health, I'm just not bang on,

but one of the ones I noticed a few years ago was that there were certain mental illnesses that people clearly wanted to have, and ones they did it. Well, okay, so are you just inviting me to jump in to a tiny view atomic bomb? But I will, here we go. Let's do it. So I noticed, friends, speaking to to doctor friends and everyone, that bipolar, this isn't to say that there aren't people who are bipolar, but that it was a good thing some people thought to have diagnosed. Similar to OCD.

Right. And what's striking to me is that there are mental health afflictions that are just definitely not the ones that people would want. And they are underdiagnosed by comparison. So schizophrenia, like nobody thinks it's cool to be schizophrenic. And like, whereas on a date somebody saying, and I, you know, have bipolar issues, it's not that everyone loves that, but there'll be some people who'll be like, you know, that's, whereas if you say, by the way, I should tell you, I'm a skips of franning. It has a different, it's the branding, right?

It's people talk about how I'm LCD, but I'm really only on your CD in the kitchen. You know, right? Right. Right. And also, the general thing of, I've got mental health, You're like, right? Right. And also, the general thing I've got mental health, as if some kind of calling card. Yeah. Anyhow, so yeah, I could have done that, but I decided to put that off for another day.

And there's just, there's an entire book just on that. But I decided that the four I'd thought about most, and the four I had been digging into most were yeah, were gay women, specifically relations between sexes, race and trans. And in a way the last one of those was the most interesting for me because it's the one that we've been thinking about for the least amount of time and therefore which I would argue we have run furthest and worst without having much questioning, actually. Removed the reality the most, would you say? Yeah, well, just things get sort of wave by in the general discourse, which I don't think I necessarily buy.

And I mean, the one that's come up in recent days, again, thanks to Sam Smith has been non-binary. And I just, I don't think there's any such thing. And on that occasion, it's not for me to prove that there isn't, it's for people who say they are non-binary, to prove to me that, tell them, or no, just to tell me what it is. And they can't. They don't. They just say, shut up, bigger. And I'm not interested in that mode of discourse. So regardless of whether you think that argument does or doesn't have credence, it shouldn't be news. I think everyone should be able to agree. Like that was so all over my Twitter

that I just logged out for the rest of the evening. Yeah. It is not a story. Yeah, well, the news website is a partly responsible for a lot of this. There's a feeling I explain as you know in the matters of crowds where I say there's sometimes when you feel the news isn't the news. It's about something else. It's some kind of reeducation program. I notice isn't because I happen to be gay.

I could probably say this where some head sexual saying it might not sound so good. But there are days when I wonder how does it feel like to read the news if you're heterosexual because there's so much about the gay thing. I mean, there was a very, very minus celebrity who married his boyfriend and it was from Pays News on the BBC website. He's a guy of such little consequence that I I mean he's not even a well-known reality TV star and it's like why are you telling us about it other than to say gay wedding gay wedding gay wedding and that sort of stuff worries me because I think well that's the stuff right there which I regard as being what I call the possible over corrections which I regard as being what I call the possible overcorrections, where to make up for something that was wrong in the past, i.e. homophobia, you overcorrect. And I think that's happening

a lot of the cases I write about in this book, a lot of the subjects I write about in this book. And I'm really interested in it because then the question is, if you've overcorrected, how would you know and how would you stop and how would you get back to equal, which is pretty much all I'm interested in. Yeah, you are right. Some of the examples that you use in the book, like in the business section of the New York Times, Japanese, Japanese is a cultural approach to gay people in the workplace. Yeah, the first two pages of the business section in York Times are about a gayman in Japan who came out and it wasn't the problem because they're not all homophobic in Japan Japanese workplace. That is the definition I know from being a journalist myself there's a definition definition of a non story something happened in another country and nothing happened as a consequence.

That's not new that's the opposite of news. Have you heard we've got a Canadian who doesn't like cats? Oh, anything happened, no. No, cats were fine about it, and now everyone's gone with the day. Yeah, it's bizarre. That, I don't really know, I don't really know sort of where to go with that.

You are right though, the fact is over correction that we're potentially moving towards a situation where gay stories are being shoe-horned into the press. One of the things that that instantly does is it down regulates the virtue or the integrity of any real achievements which are made by people that are gay. The same thing is calling everyone a Nazi. If you call everyone a Nazi it loses its power. The same thing is if a gay person in Japan being gay is worthy of being in the news, then what happens when something really newsworthy happens? Right. It's like the thing of first woman or first ex of race in a particular role. There are definitely

times when it makes sense, but there are times when, you know, it's, I say, it's with the women chapters. There are times in recent years when you wouldn't have thought that, for instance, in Britain, we lived in a country with a female head of state, a female prime minister, female heads of Supreme Court, and so on, and just, uh, female heads of Supreme Court and so on and just, you'd thought we lived in some Margaret Atwood novel, judging by the way in which it's being written about. And you sort, yeah, it's not, like, we have women inside, and we know that. Like, what are you doing other than that some level in the media, and I show how the tech companies have done this too, in some way, sort of correcting the public, yes, telling us or saying, this is another way of looking at saying, I dare you, I dare you to mind the sort of Greta Thurneberg phenomenon as well, so I dare you, go on. Go on.

Chris Slider, 16 year old autistic kid, go on. Yeah. Yeah. You're totally right. It's like in volleyball, this, whatever it's called, that one before they come in and they hit it, it's the little throw up in the air that's like, look, do you wanna have a go at that?

Right, and it's like, okay, we'll make this even less newsworthy. Do you wanna have a go at that? Do you want to have a go? And it's like, okay, we'll make this even less newsworthy. Do you want to have a go at that? Because if you do, I'm immediately going to be able to say, you fucking big it, not, I wrote a shite story. And as it happens, the only people in the world who jump up and hit that ball are all makes of mine. Yeah, they are.

They are, whatever, like the striker or whatever you're having, volleyball. There'll be some volleyball people listening to a tear in the hair out because how little we know about volleyball. I'm absolutely winging this. Totally. We've been admitted my knowledge. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So for domain of competence, I was going to wait for this as well, but I've wanted to ask this question as well since reading the book. He is Morgan, right? Get brought up a few times throughout the book.

Is it coincidental? Or does he just happen to employ themselves in these situations a lot? What the fuck is going on with Peers Morgan? That's a very interesting point. I actually saw Peers Morgan this morning, because I was doing a good morning show. Peers morning. And his wife wrote a very nice call of mentioning my book the other day and I thought,

okay, she's read it. I wonder if he has because yet the references to him are not that obliging. Unfortunately, this morning I went with a copy of the book and at the end of the show, just to finish recording, Piers said, is that one going to spur Douglas? I said, yeah, could I have it? I said, yeah, no, of course. And I thought, well, maybe I shouldn't take on that page out. But never the, I didn't really. No, but he, yeah, he, it is actually coincidence in a way, because I mean, he's obviously

whether one agrees or disagrees or likes or dislikes or whatever. I mean, he's definitely one of those characters who throws himself into things. In his case, we're just, you know, glee. But it does mean sometimes that people like that are sometimes there at interesting cultural turning point moments. And I think the two times he comes up in the book, I don't want anyone viewing this to think this is like a biography of Pierce Morgan.

No, I can assure that he isn't. But the two times he comes up, it's because, yeah, he's sort of, he's thrown himself right into the middle of a culture war and something happened as a consequence. And it is interesting, there are figures, slight lightning rods for Good and Il who you notice, crop up. But one thing I'm proud of about this book is that I try to do everything from looking at the philosophy and deep ideas that cause some things we're going through right up to, you know, what happened on the view or Good Morning Britain yesterday because it's quite easy for people who love books as I do

to think books create the world or, you know, massively influence them. They do have an influence, but so does television, so does pop music, so does rap, so does Twitter. And really the interesting challenge, which I hope I managed to rise to the occasion of, was to try to encompass all of that. So this is the era we are in, and this is the madness we are going through. And to do that on everything from the level of the deep, deep ideas all the way through to these television events, for instance, which have a massive impact on the culture. You know, if somebody has destroyed live on air, the not saying the thing that nobody said till yesterday. Everyone learns, everyone learns.

You're right, it's the BuzzFeed's 15 second clip, Piers Morgan destroys homophobic, bigger, it's live on air. There was a guy who was doing gay conversion therapies, one of the examples in the book. And one of the things that I thought was very interesting, you have this quite balanced view, you went to go and see his particular film and Piers Morgan had annihilated this guy live on air. But this particular individual wasn't working with anyone who didn't come to him,

wasn't saying that it was, he wasn't making a value judgment on gay or not gay. He was simply offering people a service for that wanted to become straight. And yeah, you told you right, this that was the little ball in the air and P. is Morgan just came in and hit the bigot button immediately. That's right. And I actually I felt sorry for the guy in question. I mean, I I I caveat this a lot and I say like in a different era if he'd have had more power, I wouldn't have liked to have necessarily had him in any kind of control this guy. But if you live in a free and liberal society, then what's the source of the goosey source of the gandro, whatever it is, you can't just change one set of demands of a society. And then just demand the new set.

And you've got to express tolerance even to very, you know, things you disagree with a lot. And I say that as long as, as long as that group, I don't like what they do. But I don't think that, I want to look at their ideas, I want to weigh it up, and I can come to my own conclusions. But yes, I'm very suspicious of this thing where people just are brought on air

to be shouted at and told their biggest and then waved off into the distance. Why do we need to be tolerant of other people's views? Well, the main reasons are, the classical reasons for it that, certainly in the tradition of English liberty is, which is sort of the one that became the idea in America as well, is that you need to hear other views. In fact, you specifically need to hear the views which are

the minority views. Because the basic, the first reason is that you might be wrong and If you are wrong you want to have access to the correction to your error um and Even if you're not completely wrong, you might be wrong in part Which I mean my only experience in life is that that's happened quite often. I've had a presumption and And quite often whether that that whole process, it's inevitable that we don't like to do it because it's more work to correct your opinion when you're wrong.

I mean, there's even fascinating studies, there was a fascinating study at Harvard that Cass Sunstein and others did a few years ago, it showed that, you know, we might think that when somebody's wrong, it literally has the wrong view. That it's a fact they are wrong about. And they meet the correction to the view. We might think, we tend to think, that you would just say, oh, I see, I didn't realize I was wrong, but as anyone who's had a boyfriend or a girlfriend for a long time will know, often it doesn't work like that.

They dig their heels in even harder. You don't immediately say darling, absolutely see your point thank you. And actually the studies show that people double down on their error. But any hand my point is that that's the first reason you might be wrong and you should correct it if you are actually wrong. It's for your own good as well as a good society that you don't go around in error. But the second reason actually the second broad second broad reason, which is really interesting, is that even if you're not in error and the other person is being reminded of it helps you keep your own knowledge of why you're you're in the right right. So it's like a sharp and like a knife sharpening,

we're not allowed to use metaphor anymore are we? But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, Stuart Mill said about it, that we avoid slipping into dogma. And the reason why it's worth not slipping into dogma is just that you end up becoming lazy and unable to defend things you really need to defend. And I think our society, as I say, is in the, I quote, G.K. Chesterton, as well as Nicki Menage in the epigraph, to say, to say that our, our era is, I mean, is filled with dogmas. And we've pretended isn't, but it really is. I mean, there's a lot of dogmas in our society. One of the things that you bring up right at the beginning is that you say that the grand narratives that we used to identify with, the root cause of this crowd derangements of the collapse of all of our grand narratives.

Why is that enabled this broader situation that we're seeing in front of us? Because this cross is all of the, it's enabled the gay, the trans, the race discussions to be so visceral. So my feeling is that we, look, something incredibly deep has happened underneath our societies,

which we're in, if not in denial about, we don't face up to, which is, we're living in a stage where we might be among the first people in human history to have absolutely no explanation for what we're doing here. And no story to tell about what we should do other than, I know there are narratives, they're pretty weak ones I know accumulated as much money as you can and enjoy yourself there's one. Getting some Twitter followers. Yeah it's not the worst idea in human history but it's a fairly shallow one. As I say I mean this this porosity of ideas and I say it say it's obviously the consequence of the collapse of religion, which is pretty much a irreversible issue now, and the collapse of organized religion,

the collapse of all major political ideologies in the 20th century, other than the present structure, which is a, you know, a poorly liberal state of the capitalist economy. And I think that in the last 10 years, basically in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, a lot of confidence, self-confidence was lost in capitalism, which is, I think, a disaster in all sorts of ways because it's, you know, as like, Churchill famous said, said, famously said about democracy, it's the worst system apart from all of the others. And, and we've, so we're in a strange position where we've really run out of things to believe in and we sort of pretend that,

well, just find your own meaning in the world. And that's one of the reasons why, as I say, I mean, I think that it's very understandable that people then get caught up in new ideologies of this. And my view is that the social justice movement intersectionality or this stuff is a way to give life meaning. And the problem with it among other things is that all of these things equal what rights for women, equal rights for sexual minorities minorities equal rights for racial minorities and so on are very good things and they are the products of liberal rights but we've tried

to instead of being the products of them it's like we've flipped the whole bar stool around and trying to sit on the products of the right and it doesn't support itself because as I as I show in each chapter each of these not only are each of these things gay relations between sexes race and trans not only are they going against each other in very interesting ways trans against women trans against gay and so on but but they each in themselves are more unstable than we're willing to admit. So for instance, we still don't know very much about being gay. We don't know quite what causes it.

And there's been this study that's just come out since my book came out, which sort of vindicates what I say, which is a bit more complex than we pretend. Relations between sexes and attitudes as a society towards women in particular are very contradictory and we pretend they're not. So we pretend that women are simultaneously exactly the same as men and magically better on occasion. And we just decided to hold that idea. And with race, we are very, very unsure for good reasons, for good reasons, because who wants to open that up really, well, a lot of people it turns out, but I explain why I think that's going to be risky. And then you have the trans one, and that's just really, really uncertain, and really,

really not something we know enough about, or say not as much as we're pretending. And so I'm just saying, let's lean on all of these things a little less. Let's not make everything about these identity issues. Let's try not to lean as much as we are on them and try to get back to what I thought was the aim which was equal, not better equal and focusing on the content of people's character. You make an analogy between Martin Luther King and his, the content of someone's character, not the color of the skin, which has that, if there was a bar stool analogy to be used, it's that now, right? That it is all about the color of someone's skin. And then on top of that, are they gay? And are they, are they, they used to be a man? And then how many more of these can we

layer on top? That's how bar stools being flipped, right? Yeah, and I, I think it's just all profoundly dangerous. Why? Well, because first of all just because somebody is of a particular group does not mean they're right. Or indeed, it doesn't always by any means, if ever, they have a particular right to be heard. It's true that you wouldn't want a conversation between a hundred people about women and none of them to be women The Catholic Church is trying that for a man, but more than a hundred you think I'm right, but but generally speaking we recognize that that that people do bring Confucianism, we're just not entirely sure what and what the

What the particular mix is it's needed, but nevertheless there isn't a particular virtue you bring by being of a characteristic. There's a very brilliant young American writer who happens to be black called Coleman Hughes, who mentioned this in an essay of the wild gun, I quote him in the introduction that he said that when he was a university quite very recent, I think maybe he still is in America. Some of his contemporaries treated him as if he had a special moral insight from being black. Well, I think some black people obviously will have special moral insights, just like people with all sorts of backgrounds and skin colors will, but just being black in itself doesn't bring that in the same way that

we all know, I mean, just because you're a man or just because you're a woman does not mean you have a magical virtue or insight, there will be things you notice and there will be things you can see. But that sort of, that all depends on the individual. It's like, if you said, I just think that women are so clever. What's that? You said, what do you mean? What do you mean? It's like saying, I think men are all clever. Like, what are we talking about? It's just there's individuals.

You point you to brilliant women. I can point you to brilliant men. But, plenty of brilliant black people as well as plenty of brilliant white people. But why would you be doing these categories? What do you think they bring? And I think in each of them, it's very strange, it's almost like we, in the course of my lifetime, actually, I've only just turned 40, but in the course of my lifetime, we've, it's almost as if on these things we've gone past, equal and over corrected slightly. As if, because men and particularly white men have had, you know, certain advantages, I think there's a lot to

dispute in that interpretation, but that for a bit, we'll be mean to them. We'll make white people feel a bit of the racism that some of them have expressed in the past two other people in order to make up for the past. It's compensatory mechanism compensate and if it's the same thing with it's not enough that women are equal we should also punish men a bit. And on each of these, I think, well, there are a set of questions, aren't there? How would you know when you've overcorrected? Who would announce it? What would the signs be? And how would you get back to equal? And are you sure you could? You absolutely sure you would know how to orient yourself. It, I mean, they're being by that point, among others,

careers and jobs and pensions of people who are very happy with the over correction. Yeah, there's a quote from your interview with Candace Owens, where one of you says that after a while, when I think she's referring to black people and she says after a while, being treated as special as black makes being treated normal feel like a being undervalued. Right. I had an Irish immigrant friend who, one of my best friends, nice and years ago, who you had a beautiful phrase on this. He used to say about integration. He used to say the moment when you're integrated really into a society is not when

you get anything special or anything extra and then when you're really integrated is when you rise, you just have to put up with the same shit the rest of us have to put up with. I like that. But it's indifference isn't it? It's the same thing as we do a relationship series and we were talking about how to get over someone. And I was saying that the ultimate, ultimate conclusion to a relationship and any residual feelings for your ex isn't hatred or resentment, it's indifference. It's seeing them in the street and feeling nothing. That, you know, that, that to me is completing it. Some people may be able to actually continue on with nice memories of their ex,

but that indifference that, again, you're seeing just judged on the basis of your character. So I want to jump onto the women thing because the Nicki Minaj quotes throughout just had me, that I absolutely loved that. But before we did that, I only realized, upon reading this book, so I haven't looked that much into LGBT recent history,

when did gay rights get like amalgamated in with LGBT? And does that, is there a, I don't know what you know, you're not exactly like tip of the spear of like the gay movement or whatever, it doesn't know that you're the representative. But I wonder how gay people feel about having to have their movement adopted amongst this broader group of people. So it used to be gay rights, and I remember,

I thought you won, I remember when it was gay rights. I don't remember when it became LGBT. Well, it's the beef history, it is what Dave Chappelle refers to as the alphabet people in his recent show is he's actually he's he has a very good summary of what I part of what I say in the gay chapter. Basically the gays and the lesbian has got together and they didn't have much in common other than the fight for lesbian and gay. Or the fact that none of them were interested in each other.

Yes, I mean, it's a really, I love the sort of presentation of the LGBT community, as if like the gays and the lesbians never meet have nothing, nothing to say to each other. And in my opinion, my experience, the lesbians all find the gays ridiculous because they think they're essentially sort of silly and obsessed with sex and lots more. And the gays think the lesbians are kind of daudy and boring. And that's the, I'm not saying this in my view. I love the inflay of not saying this is my view. I know, I just, I love the, I love the, in the play of the politics is great. So anyway, but the point is, is that no one ever talks about this, but basically the,

the elves and the Gs didn't get on at all really ever and had nothing come. And then the Bs came along and the, the, nobody quite believed the Bs existed. And I think there's still a lot of doubt about that. Okay. Yeah. Um, what if we put it another way, most men who say they're bisexual, women don't then,

women are almost never cool with that. And the gays think that's just somebody who hasn't made the mind up yet. And whether that's right or wrong, I'm now gonna be accused of biphobia around all my other many, many crimes. But anyhow, and then the, then the teas come along who have absolutely nothing in common apart from also some suspicion from wider society. And the teas morphs in the space of a few decades from

dressing up as some, like, some clothing of the opposite sex to full on sex changes. And this happens incredibly fast now to this position where people say there are people who are born transsexual, which is as I say in the trans chapter, it's all really fascinating but it's by no means as clear as that. But by the way, I also say that the T's run against the L's and the G's. That's just overwhelming. Well, now if a child is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is a really troubling whole business this, 80% of children diagnosed as having so-called gender dysphoria will grow up not to have it.

I.e. they will grow up to be straight or gay. And a lot of gay men and women look at that and they think, whoa, that could have happened to my younger self. You know, the sort of Tom Boyish lesbian might have been told, actually, you're a boy. And we're going to give you hormone therapies and block your puberty. And then you can have an experiment, you know, medically on you and a bit later and then, I mean, that is really, there's like a lot of... Totally right. There's a lot of tension there.

Pushing people towards the extremes, I brought this up with Zubi, that I don't remember the last time I heard Tom Boyz. Like, there's no such thing as a butch girl anymore, or like a girl that likes to do sports. Yeah. There's a future boy trapped inside of a girl's body. And one of the strange things, you see, one of the strange things, I mean, like LGBT, that's

a bloody minefield. I mean, as I said, that's just one great big contradiction there. But it's much worse when you see what the tea does to the women because women have spent decades fighting not to be judged according to male standards among other things. And then when trans comes along, people who are born men say they're women and quite often do a lot of things and approximate women in a way that is highly offensive to women, highly offensive to women. For instance, I give an example in the book of, well, one second way of feminist in Britain described as, you know, the assumption that a woman's natural body shape is that of a sort of Brazilian

transsexual, you know, all big breasts and sort of poorly, and, you know, and all that. And a lot of women like that's exactly the kind of sexual objectification of by men of women that we were trying to get away from. And so anyhow, all of this, the point is all of this is just a bloody great big mess. It's much messier than everyone pretends. They're like, oh, all of this into locks. And if we can tackle trans rights, we can also address women's rights. And no, they might go like that, like that, and just keep happening like that. There was an event the other day in the UK, there was a meeting of feminists,

British feminists, and they were barricaded by trans activists outside the police were protecting the trans activists, and these people who were men until quite recently are banging on the windows intimidating the women inside, and it's like, the friends write. Yeah, I was like, what? And what are the situation and the men allowed to intimidate the women? I'll believe the men say they're now women. When they wear heels, that's why.

When they wear heels. Uh, yeah. That's exactly when they're allowed. Unless they take them off and then start using them as a weapon. Yeah, it's, everything in our day says all of these things are linked and it's really straightforward. And I'm kind of pissing on that party in this book, among other things. There's a number of parties getting pissed on in the book, yeah, there is. Great.

I want to move on to Nicki Minaj just because she just first off she fascinates me. Second, she appears a number of times in the book. But you have this beautiful quote which I think is hit on something that I've seen and not known what it was. Women can be as sexual as they like, but they cannot be sexualized and haven't helped any man who responds. Yeah. Could you just take us through that little the Nicki Minaj video thing that happens before because it's it absolutely strikes at the heart of what I've felt

as a, you know, a young single man for quite a while. Yeah, I am really interested in these things in our age which are basically impossible demands. The most obvious one is that I write about is the insistence that there's this insistence that goes, you have to understand me. And simultaneously says, you will never understand me. The same person can do both of those all the time. And we have that everywhere in our side. Now, there are other things of just impossible demands. For instance, I say at one point, I cite a ridiculous person who complains on the BBC that they are often ridiculed in public. And that's not nice, but I point out, if you're ridiculous, you will be ridiculed. You can't escape it other than by not being ridiculous. And my favorite impossible demand is the one that you just hit on there,

which is the demand that is currently just very uncomfortably in the culture, in relation to the relation between the sexes, which is, yeah, women are allowed to be as sexual as they want, as sex as they want, but must not be sexualized. And this, as I point out, is not possible. Now, does this mean that men can do whatever they want? Obviously not. Obviously not. And you see, this is the one that conversations that's so hard to have, because somebody always leaps in and goes, oh, I suppose you're just a part of the brain. You know, oh, so you think women should be raped?

No, there are gradations between total chastity and rape, you know, that's how we're here. Otherwise, we wouldn't have Skype, we wouldn't have you, we wouldn't have me, we wouldn't have all the nice people watching. It's just just a two or three. But it's a sort of, it's a sort of, it's a sort of, it's a sort of, you know, we don't allow ourselves to have this conversation. And my point is, none of this means that men can do what they want but if a woman is entering the sex game by being highly sexualized, you know, and I'm talking about the reason I give

them Nicki Minaj example is because it's so overtly sexual and and I particularly I'm interested in this video of Anna Konda, I believe where the audible version of my book, I read myself and it means that I read. I have to read the lyrics. Oh, I read that in an amazing way. Somebody has already put it into a video on YouTube. And the music over the top. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whoever that is, whoever that is, I salute you. Also, to the people who are listening, obviously, the link to Manusar Crouds, the book on Amazon will be in there, but I'm going to put the link to the audible version as well so that you have to hear. Yeah, I, yeah, it's, I was going to be my party piece, I can see you. Yeah, it's nice. Go on, do Nicky, do Nicky. Do Nicky, yeah. But no, but the first thing to think about this, this, this video, and I just, I talked to it over a lot of straight

trends and I just, so what she does in Anaconda is, my other thing is, it's all completely sexual. I mean, just totally sexual. Just her wiggling her butt and her friends wiggling her their butts, and they sometimes hit each other's butts, and they sing about each other's butts and their own butts. You get the gist.

And then in case none of this is settled in, she then has a scene where she eats a banana, sprays her breasts with whipped cream and licks the cream off with one of her fingers, which is also obviously impossible to interpret. And then there's this really interesting last 90 seconds or so of the video where she crawls on all fours into a darkened room towards a very handsome, fit black guy in a chair and she just does everything in front of him. It's not justice. It's not somebody will say, it's just like it's like a...

A lusk. Yeah, it's a lusk. It's not. She's all over his body. This is a thing. She's wrapping her legs around him. She's wiggling her butt in his face. She's a total predatory thing and Towards the end of this interminable scene the guy you see he's starting to you know and he Goes eventually and touches her slightly on the side and she whips around and smacks his hand away and walks out. And obviously the message of the video

that Nicki Minaj is giving is, I can do all of this, but don't you dare think you can control the game. And this seems to me to be a demanding demand, a demanding claim, which is, apart from things I was deeply unfettered men, because the whole problem of relations like that is, when does the game become about that? When do we enter the sex business?

When are we in that proximity? And the Nicki Minaj thing is is only if I get lead you all the way there and give you permission all the time all the way, but if I'm just enjoying myself in a skimpy outfit, wiggling my butt in your face, etc., etc., don't you even think that you still control the situation? I control it all the time, either woman, and I think that is demanding and deeply unfair to men and not possible. It's not possible. And it's the sort of thing which our society is really bad at thinking about because we, as I say, we fall into these incredibly basic things. The woman always must do X or the man must always do Y.

And you see, I think that one of the things that's causing so much trouble in our society is that simultaneously we pretend that we know about things we don't, the trans one is the example I just gave, we just don't know very much. But simultaneously, we pretend not to know about things we all knew till yesterday. There is a massive amount of stored knowledge. We all have straight gay men and women, a massive amount of stored knowledge we have about what is actually going on in these situations. And it's complex, but it's not as complex as we're making it by putting these impossible layers on top. And one of the, just had one other thing, if I may,

which is that one of the problems of this, of course, is in recent years, we've been talking about etiquette of sex, particularly sex between the sexes, through the prism of Hollywood and celebrity, and it just should be clear to us by now this isn't the best prism to see these things through. It's I don't know it's like trying to work out drinking etiquette from a Jodie or a Jody or like it's or a Scotsman. Yeah, I can say that. Yeah, you're allowed to say that. I'm in Newcastle, so I'm a Ladsay Jody. So, but you know, this has become a real problem in our societies because apart from anything else, I think young men, young heterosexual men, are being told things that are not possible to do and

sustain and you know when I spoke recently to a friend whose son had just just left school I said and I hadn't seen some for one friends with older than me and I said oh how's the boy and he said good I said what do you think about girls he said there was nothing to do with them and I said I know and I said well, well, he's not gay as he's, and no, no, no, he's okay. So just they're more trouble than they're worth. So it's just he thinks they're a nightmare. And I've come across that quite a lot actually because it is, it is being made harder than it needs to be made. I think the, the relations between the sexes has definitely got a lot less exciting.

Do you remember flirting? Do you remember when flirting was a thing? It's the same as flirting, it's the same as tomboy's and e-mose. Remember e-mose? Where have they gone? I haven't seen an e-mose in like a... I don't miss them, I have to say. Yeah, for enough, but too much eyeshadow.

Anyway, you get me. All you know, all these things, like they feel like fucking nostalgia now. I know, you know, flirting is an amazing one, because there's a load of things. I mean, we just had this, by the way, in the UK today about the ridiculous claims that are prime minister once put his hand on a woman's leg 20 years ago, and this is the headline,

this is the headline on the day we're speaking. And then number one news item, not like there's much else to talk about in the world, is there? But, you know, there's this strange thing where, I mean, the point is this is so complicated, because again, we keep having this stuff out on that sort of level, the former defense minister, Michael Fallon, had to resign. And like being the defense minister is a really serious job. It's not like agriculture or transport. Yeah. No, but I was not a transport. Like I shouldn't. Oh my God.

I'm getting the farmers are going to be off. No, I know. In a bus. In a bus. No, no, they're transport people. I don't mind losing. But they're there. But it's not like transport is a defense minister. You've got part of the control over the nuclear capability. You could destroy Paris if you wanted.

You, you, you, it's a serious job. He's embroiled in touching a woman's leg or something. And, and, and, and somebody, as it happens, who I, who I know a journalist in the UK, had told the story some time before that he touched her knee at something and she'd said, again, not all women can do this or want to do this, it's not to say this is always good, but this one said, if you keep your hand on my knee, I'll sock you in the bloody face or something, and he took it as hand off pretty fast. That was it. That was it. And then 15 or 20 years later, the story came out again, yet to resign. I mean, in a way, it's a very British sex scandal, there's no sex. It's like liberal Democrat sex scandals. They're always like that. There's always a fat man asked a woman for a coffee and she said no, and that was it, and then he asked to resign,

and that actually happened. And actually happened, Lord Venna. Any other point is, these are people look at this, and they they think what exactly are the rules? And the answer is we're making them up as we go along, which is not uncommon, but we're making up rules that are completely contradictory. And I give the example in the book of like, what are you to make growing up of the fact that you are simultaneously told that women the fact that you are simultaneously told that women must always be believed and the most popular book for women in recent years are the 50 shades stories where women have rape fantasies. Growing up is hard anyway and these levels of not being able to discuss things mean that people just see these totally contradictory messages in the

culture and I don't blame them for being utterly bemused. And you know what the solution is, the solution is that of your friend's son, which is just to exit, to just be like, you know what it is, I can't do any sense-making. I either don't have the desire or the capacity or the fucking sanity to spend my time thinking, trying to work out where the rubber meets the road to this issue. So, you know, it is simpler for me to simply not engage. So, recently I got asked to do a job for a particular company as a brand ambassador. As a part of this, I went on a training course with them.

And the training course, I run nightclubs in Newcastle. The training course was about sexual discrimination and sexual predation in nightclubs. Now, as a nightclub operator, that is the calling card that you do not want. You do not want that story in your venue. And the group that we're giving the presentation throughout the whole course, there was this odd undercurrent where it was supposed to be equal between what men were doing and what women were doing. It was supposed to be that every example, for instance, would you throw this woman out of your venue if she did XYZ and one of them was like, left her top up and expose her breasts to a group of men and the equivalent

for the man was like, take his pants down and expose his penis to a group of women. And in the, um, in the bureaucratic elements of it, it was even in the rhetoric and narrative-based elements, it was exclusively women being the subject of some sort of predation by men. And I, down the road from this, I actually went through the course, then sent an email to my agent and said, I'm really sorry, I just can't, I can't get on board with this. I think that what they're doing is great,

but I'm concerned about the delivery and I think that it may make me out to be a target, which I don't think is quite right. I don't think they've quite got the course correct yet. Email them and so are you. Sorry. But one of the things that I brought up while I was having this big course, and it was run by, there was, I was the only man in the room, and I think of the five or six women,

there was only maybe one that was straight. So there was a number of different layers of narrative going on. Wow, that's a high ratio. Yes, for sure. And one of the things that got brought up there was about what women wear on nights out. Right. And about how they dress. And I was trying to say, I was trying to be as empathetic as I could. And my empathy is crippling. I was going to be as empathetic as I could. And I was saying, well my look, like if I had a daughter, I would tell her to dress carefully. That would be the terminology that I would use. Absolutely. Just dress carefully. Yeah. And immediately there was a quick sort of head snap to the where it is like, well, why? Right. If I need to explain why, then I get pushed down this hill and at the bottom of that. And then the bottom is bigger.

Yeah. Yeah, the bottom of his death, you, you, I mean, he is one way. I try to get to where we need to get to at least in having a reasonable conversation about these matters and why society is. Is there such a thing as a predatory female? So I know I learned on that course that there's no such thing as statutory rape as a woman in English common law, which I never knew. There's sexual molestation or whatever the one down from that is, which would be the

equivalent of a man putting anything which isn't his penis in a woman, but there is no no such thing. But go go have a stage from that to just normal interaction as it were non non physical interaction. Can women pray on men? Absolutely. Right. This is stored knowledge that we've pretended we don't have. Everybody knows it. Everybody. And it's unbelievably dangerous to talk about. This I give the example in the book of the Indiana Jones films, one of the Indiana Jones films,

there's a famous scene where the whole class is sort of a very attractive young, women all looking moonily, Harrison Ford, and he's teaching, and they'll say, oh, they're sexy, you know, archaeology guy, which is of course completely familiar in real life. Any anyhow, he's giving a class, and one of the women on the girls, I mean, they are girls really in the class, has written Love You on her eyelids. And she blinks at him so he can see this. And I find this fascinating because this again,

sometimes it comes up as a meme online still, but everybody knew this, so it was so familiar as a type, the woman or even the young woman, making a really overt play for the male. It's so familiar there was in family movies. And what about the spinster with the toy boy? You know, and we sort of pretend that these types don't exist.

We sort of denied ourselves access to archetypes that we pretend it don't exist. It's unlearning, really important learning. Yes. Well, because in these things, we're in the realm of, for a lot of this, you know, because within the law, as I was saying, adieu, there's earlier, we're in the realm of manners. And the manners are things that you, you're best trying to acquire as you go along from other people and learning from your elders and the elders at the moment are saying, we don't know what we know, we're not passing it on. Don't touch.

Good luck figuring it out for yourself. Yeah. And and by the way, some of them are men. And that's the no, isn't it? That's the B home, B home by one. Yeah. But it's just, as I said, it's complex, it's complex, but it's not as complex as we're making it. What do we do to move forward then? Several things. The first thing is we have to realize what's going on and like just get out of it. We have to get out of this. We have to get out of this zero-sum game, particularly the zero-sum game whereby in order for we think for women to do better, men have to do worse, or for gay people to thrive, straight people have to do worse, or for black people to thrive, white people have to do worse.

We've got to get out of this. This is just so unhealthy. It's waste of individual life, and it's a terrible opportunity cost for a society, because none of it is fixable is my view. You know, things you can do worse and there are things you can do better, but we're never going to fix it. There's never going to be the lovely interlocking Nirvana that means that we all move to some perfect state. It's just not the case. So what should we be doing? And this is the really, this is the thing. And I think that a lot of clever people,

and particularly a lot of people who have had certain advantages in their lives, are helped through this, and they know how to get through this era. I give various examples of this. There's sort of cuttlefish phenomenon among others, but my point is that there are people who've worked it out. And I'd quite like their knowledge that among other things, a lot of this is bullshit. phenomenon among others, but my point is that there are people who've worked it out, and

I'd quite like their knowledge that among other things, a lot of this is bullshit, to be more widely understood, because we need to get out the other side of this in larger numbers. Now, my view is that this is because it's partly just something for people to do. It's a lifestyle choice of its own. And a hobby and a religion and all the other things. It's worth thinking, what should we be doing then? If we're not doing this, but let me put it this way. I mean, imagine if we actually solve the identity politics thing, which I say

it's not gonna happen. And what would it look like? It would look like us saying it's great. I've worked out where I am in the hierarchy this morning. And I'm allowed to speak between 11.30 and 11.32. And you do that for some decades and you die. Now I'm not up for that. Now, I'm not up for that. And I trust you aren't either. No. Now, what could we be doing well?

I think we should be hugely ambitious, and I don't have all the answers by any means, but I know that we should be much more ambitious than that in what we're going to do. We have the 21st century ahead of us. We have better luck than anyone in human history, anyone, not just anyone alive today, but anyone alive ever. So why would we be wasting our time playing identity, quick fix, politics? I would submit that we should try to get ourselves

off this in order to dream bigger dreams, to do really meaningful things, to not work out what we shouldn't be doing, and what we're not allowing ourselves to do and what we don't think is in our lane, but to break out of that. You know, the, something Jordan Peterson and I and others have discussed a few times in the past has been this strange view of life in this era as if the ideal life is to be harmless, like harmless from cradle to grave, not cause harm. At least I didn't emit any CO2 and I never,

never upset anyone and I never spoke when I shouldn't have spoken and so on. I just think we've got to break out of that and say no, no. The aim of this generation is not just to be harmless, as our highest aspiration. It's to be extraordinary, to be great, to be inventive, to be intelligent, to be loving, to be caring, to be great in all of our personal relationships, if we can, and recognize it will fail a great deal, but do as well as we can.

And then in the rest of our lives, be extraordinary, and great, and do things that people will talk about for generations afterwards and look out with admiration. We don't look at the great buildings of the past that have stayed standing and look at them with anything but awe. And I can't see that in this generation. If our ambition is to look at our navel long enough to believe we've understood ourselves totally and then die, I see nobody standing looking at a statue of that and think if anyone could do that in marble and thinking those are the guys. 2000, 2019 really nailed it. Yeah. Yeah.

I get it. I agree. I agree. I think that when you think about how much energy goes into these issues, these non issues. And some of the first off, when you think about how much dilution of real issues is done by the non issues. And first off, when you think about how much dilution of real issues is done by the non-issues, and then secondly, when you think about how much talent and cognitive power that could be spent on real, genuine, lasting, epoch, world-changing stuff. And just another one little thing on that, which is this whole thing of hold yourself back, stay in your lane, timidity. It's exactly the opposite. It's exactly the opposite of what successful lives

look like caused by. It's not, I wonder how I can make sure I don't veer out of my lane, but how can I burst out of my lane and into the world? How can how can I do something unbelievably meaningful and important to me in my life and that will benefit other people too? There's there's an aspiration But it's entirely in contradiction to what we are told so Break out of the era, I'd say.

Douglas, today's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. The madness of crowds, everybody who is listening or watching if you're on YouTube, the link will be in the show notes below. Where can people hassle you if they need to find you online, Douglaslass? I'm on Twitter, Douglas K. Murray, and I do have Facebook and things like that. You are not Douglas Murray III on Instagram as I found out earlier on today. That is a professional footballer at Washington State. We've got

blue tick. There's an ice hockey player who shares my name in Sweden because I used to have a colleague who used to check when people were saying things about me and I used to say, I don't really like to know about that. But she used to say, what's he done now? Because it'd be like, Murray smashes a pony and then grinds him onto the ice and goes, oh, basically, they're the last bit. Go, no, no, no, that's fine. It's not fine. Well, obviously, my name's Chris Williamson.

So the number of anti-Semitic accusations I've had, but I did love Island about four years ago. So I went on love Island. And I often post, like, my, my anti-Semitic alter ego is at it again. And one of my friends, one of my friends commented on that below saying, I wonder when you get in the press, whether he says, oh, for fuck's sake, my love island alter ego has done it again. So yeah, but Douglass, thank you so much for your time. Books fantastic. It's made, It's made a lot of sense to me.

I hope it makes a lot of sense to everyone else as well. I hope they enjoy. Yeah, thank you for that time. It's been great. Thank you. Kaja. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all

social media, but for now, goodbye friends. Who I'm at?