Modern Wisdom - #204 - Ashley 'Dotty' Charles - Why Everyone Is Outraged

Episode Date: August 1, 2020

Ashley 'Dotty' Charles is a rapper and BBC Radio 1Xtra presenter. 2020 is the year of outrage. Loud, brash, unsubtle conversations where whoever can become offended first wins. Expect to learn whether H&M are racist, how we can regain control of moderate discourse, the dangers of spending your outrage poorly and much more... Sponsor: Shop Tailored Athlete’s full range at https://link.tailoredathlete.co.uk/modernwisdom (FREE shipping automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Buy Outraged - https://amzn.to/3gb4YWF  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/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 yes, hello my friends, welcome back. If one thing has defined the discussion and discourse in 2020, it has been outrage. From 0 to 100 real quick with every single conversation. No subtlety or nuance in what's being said, no good will or faith in the other person's side, in having any truth or justification at all, it's just cancel them, delete them from the world, call them a bigot as fast as you can, and that gets you the most virtue points from other people on the internet that you've never met. Ashley Dotty-Charles is a BBC Radio 1 extra presenter and her

most recent book, Outra, Discusses Why Everyone Is Shouting and No One Is Talking. Given the way that 2020's gone and the things that you will have seen on the internet, I think this is a topic which we're revisiting an awful lot. And rightly so, right? The only two ways that we can communicate are either by speaking to each other or fighting. That's it. That's all you've got. You can use words, or you can use fists. And I would much sooner try and get us to go back to using the art of words a little bit more effectively.

But for now, it's time to work out why everyone's getting outraged with Ashley Dolly Charles. Could you have realised before writing a book on outrage just how timely mid 2020 would be for it to be published? You know what's crazy? For the past nine months I've been like we've got to drop the book now. We've got to drop the book now. Oh I wish it was coming out now. Oh we need to come. Outrage is a constant carousel. Anytime I would have released this book, people would have said what are the odds you've dropped it in it. This is the world we live in.

So I think people are hyper aware now, but I think because I've written the book, every couple of weeks, there's been something that has felt really timely. And I've been like, oh, they're canceling David Williams. We need to release the book. Oh, no, no, no, it's JK Rowling. The book needs to come out.

It's just constant. And that I think that's why the book was needed because any time would have been timely. The stock price of outrage is constantly on the up, isn't it? Is that Tesla or something at the moment? So why did you write a book about outrage a while ago? Let's forget this year.

Why did you write a book on outrage already? Yeah, so I started this book two years ago, well, two and a half years ago, it took me two years to write it. And I'm somebody who has been one of those voices online. I've had arguments with strangers. I've tried to convince people that I've never met that their thinking is wrong and that their belief system is flawed. I've written an open letter system is flawed. I've written an open letter to Pierce Morgan. I've been that person that I now can't stand, right? I've had pointless arguments. I've been outraged about trivial things. And I kind of reached

breaking point, I'd say. And I sort of had an epiphany. and I think when people read this book they'll each have their epiphany moment. For me it was January 2018 and there was outrage about H&M hoodie which had been placed on a black boy and it said coolest monkey in the jungle. Now of course you can look at that through critical lens and say what, that this is completely tone death, it's racist. For me though, it warranted a conversation about who the hell works at H&M and why did nobody flag that this could offend people. I don't think the intention was to offend people. I think it was more symptomatic of their employment structure and how flawed it must be. If there's nobody from the stage of idea conception to it making it onto the H&M website, if nobody in that conveyor belt of decision making

says, oh, maybe we don't put the monkey hoodie on the black kid. If there's nobody in that in that system that notices that there's a problem in the system, but that doesn't want to need jerk outrage because this is clear. It's not intentional racism by H&M. A multi million revenue company is not going to one day wake wake up and say should be a bit racist today Yeah, it's probably all away. It arcs of negligence or just EASY right rather than maliciousness exactly and That was my light bulb moment as I kind of watch the world up in arms Outraged H&M or racist boycott H&M, they've done this deliberately. In that moment,

I was like, outrage has gone too far because it's stifling conversation and we're not going to get anywhere by having this knee-jerk reaction. Being quick to anger doesn't work in every situation and I felt as though we'd overinflated the outrage bubble and it adbursed for me in that moment. And so I wrote an article about it for the Guardian and from that article, the book was born. I absolutely love. I'm going to read the the passage that you put in from that Guardian article because it is so good. So this is the currency of outrage, publishing the the Guardian 25th January 2018. Everyone is offended by everything. It's exhausting, keeping up with all the non-inclusive,

misogynistic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, agist, culturally-appropriating body-shaming propaganda that seems to lit the social meat at the social media age. Apparently in 2018, almost anything is subject to the scrutiny of one marginalized eye or another. Being outraged allows you to take the moral high ground. It reaffirms your moral righteousness. It lets you say, I am offended and therefore I am principled. It lets you jump on the bandwagon and pledge allegiance to the latest campaign on your timeline. It gives you a vehicle to add your name to the narrative. It proves that you are following current affairs, albeit from the comfortable vantage point of your Instagram feed.

It allows you to place yourself on the virtuous side of the conversation. It says, I am woke. And for that reason, outrage has become currency. So what's that's making? You should have done the bloody audio book, mate. Give it to me. Give it to me. I tell you right. Anyone out there that needs to do, head up to Newcastle. But yeah, that identifies it to me. You write and currency is the right word for it.

It is a sort of tradable commodity. How many virtue points did you get today? How many virtue points did you get today? I washed a black person's feet in the middle of my street. What did you do? What I painted some white lines and tried to take over the middle of a city. And not even just in a sort of a figurative sense, although love your analogy there.

It genuinely is currency, right? You can trade off outrage for progress in a very real sense. So if you look back at the Civil Rights Movement, there was so much currency in that outrage. It prompted change, you know. The suffragette used the currency in their outrage to get the female vote. You know, outrage can give you a return on your investment. It's not sort of merely ornamental.

It's not just a figment of my imagination, this idea of currency. It really has value. And I think what we're doing wrong is why aimlessly investing it because outrage is an investment on an emotional level as well, to apply yourself to something with genuine outrage. It requires impetus. It requires some real effort on your part. So it is an investment of your time, your emotion, your energy. I think our issue is that we don't really look for a return on our investment. We're just kind of throwing our currency out there, you

know? And that is where you devalue outrage, where you no longer see the value in it. You know, I think every outrage exchange should have an end goal. You should be seeking a return on your investment. Otherwise, you're just barking at strangers, you know, with no ambition. So that overuse of outrage is diluting down the usefulness of outrage. Exactly. So if you imagine, just a few trivial things that people have been outraged, why? Because make no mistake, there are times when we do need have been outraged. Why? Because make no mistake, there are times when we do need to be outraged. But if you look at things we've reacted to, like

Scarlett Johansson being cast to play a trans woman, Jamie Oliver's jerk rice, these things are tone deaf, they are poor decisions, but do they warrant outrage on the same scale as white supremacy of proven moments of misogyny? If we just react in the same way to everything, how do you move the needle when it generally needs to be, when it genuinely needs to be moved? If we're loud, if the volume is always up, how can you cut through the noise when you really need to be heard? And I think that's the issue. Outrage is just our default setting. So it's lost in the outlaw.

We need to restore factory settings. I mean, go back a bit so the outrage actually means something when we get there. I understand. So what's the architecture of outrage in 2020? Is there like a common narrative or a common structure that it always seems to follow? Now outrage is so multifaceted and I think that's part of the problem with it. We don't recognise that nuance, you know, we lump things all underneath this umbrella of cancel culture, which in itself is a myth. But we will put a JK Rowling next to slave owners, next to some mistake that Phillips Gohfield made, and it all gets lumped underneath this umbrella of canceled and actually there's no metric system for outrage. There's no, there's no threshold that you pass and it's like okay you're a you get your badge. You are

the outrage badge yeah. You get the outrage badge and it's official you are indeed canceled. Every situation is unique and it's different and the issue is our knee jerk reaction is the same, no matter what the transgression. And I think that's the issue, you know, you could be trending number one if you're a mass murderer or if you use somebody's pronoun wrong, you're're gonna be trending in the same way and you're going to be the topic of discussion, which you never want. Rule number one of social media,

you never wanna be the topic of discussion, right? That I think that is something we should all avoid is being the main character on Twitter, on any given day. But it's the fact that we kind of, we respond to all of these transgressions in the same way. And what my book aims to do is to point out that it's not just two opposite ends of the spectrum. It's not just, Warren's outrage doesn't

Warren outrage. If it was that simple out of it in a pamphlet and not a book, right? It's about recognizing that there are shades in between the black and the white and we need to recognize and identify all of those different shades and respond accordingly rather than just having outrage as I'll go to reaction. Something happens, I'm outraged. Something else happened, I'm outraged. It completely, as I said, the values it. Why are people going to the extreme then? Why are they not deciding to use a more

measured response? So, first of all, there's something that I refer to as the fear of the fence, right? We are so scared of sitting on the fence, because we think, oh, the fence is for people who are unaffected or uninformed, or it's a place of apathy. I can't sit on the fence, I've got a bee over on this side or on that side. And therefore, we find ourselves just often out of sheer force picking aside in the moment and having to sustain our allegiance to that side, although it's

not particularly informed by any real process of creating a judgement. It's often ush just saying, I've got to pick a side, I've got to go the moral majority here, I think, that is bad, that is wrong, cancel them, because we fear that allowing ourselves to exist in that middle ground makes us look as though we're disconnected or we we don't have an opinion and sometimes it's all right to say I don't know or I think I've got a good idea but I'm willing to listen to other people before I make my mind up people hate that people are so scared of that that corridor of indecision that they quickly in a room. They're like, can't part me in the fucking corridor, do you know what I mean?

Better get in a room. And so we find ourselves just picking a side. And we allow the tide of that decision to take us, you know, you find yourself tethered to this idea that you made just as a knee jerk reaction. You find yourself now picketedly defending that idea because again, you can't look wishy-washy. Even if it was something you maybe didn't necessarily agree with or understand in the first place and then. Yeah, you're like, I'll just retweet in Charlotte and now I've got a backup my idea. Why the hell do I feel this way? And that is often why we get these heated debates

because people are just defending a point of view that an arbitrary point of view, that they feel they need to remain shackled to. And of course, the internet is so noisy. It's so loud that in order to cut through we feel we need to be as loud and You know being mildly disgruntled is not loud enough On the internet you've got you've got to be outraged. There. I can't hear you, you know Some ambient displeasure low-tech did some tepid unhappiness isn't going to make it on to the

Channel page not gonna cut it if you want some retweet to it. Yeah, I think that's definitely part of it. I wonder how much of it's virtue signaling, how much of it. I care more than you because I can use more cap and letters or clap hand emojis. Like, you know, it does feel a little bit of quality. Of course. So somehow, somehow,

somehow it has this thing in these most recent podcast, which I thought was phenomenally cause it, performative communication. And I think that absolutely is what a whole bunch of this is, is occurring because a lot of the time, if you see one person's point of view on one topic, you can probably extrapolate out to their point of view on a whole bunch of other topics as well, both real and imagined. If it's the case, you're not a real human. You shouldn't have cookie cutter beliefs at all.

Absolutely, absolutely, but our social media feeds are, they're kind of a pure release. Everything you post and everything you say, every image you share is you saying, this is who I am, it's my latest PR release, this is what I stand for. So we find ourselves constantly trying to project this image of our best bits, you know, this is how I feel, this is what I do on the weekends. This is how I bake. It's your highlight reel, right? And people find that being outraged is a great moral highlight reel. It's like, look what I stand for, man. I'm for the refugees. I'm for the women. I'm for the Muslims. I'm for it all, look how good I am. And people become

more concerned with seeming progressive than being progressive. It's more important that I'm seen to be like this as opposed to actually being like this. And in the book, I explore the neuroscience behind it as well. So there's there's like loads of science Hit us. We want to know tell behind behind why we act like this, right? There's there's an endorphin anybody who has ever posted a view That they thought was kind of specific to them This is how I feel on a matter and then they've started to see the likes and the retweets rack up That is a rush that is a biological rush. It's endorphin-fueled to be agreed with, right? If I go out in the street and I say, hey man,

pick up your litter, that is bad. There's no rush there because nobody saw me do it. If I record a video of the petrol company pumping their petrol into this picturesque lake and I shame this company and everybody rallies behind me and says, oh my gosh, this is an abomination. That's going to give me an endorphin rush. And therefore, we like to perform our goodness in front of a crowd. It becomes more important, as I said, to be seen to be doing the thing, as opposed to just doing it. And that is our innate need to be celebrated. And that's been weaponized by having always on communication, social

media, which is accessible anywhere in the world. Yeah, absolutely. What are some of your favourite examples of outrage that you looked at from the book? There's quite a few different ones that you go through. Have you got any of your favourite hits? So obviously the book explores the word and the wonderful and the warranted at times, right? Let's not mistake this for a book that says, everybody calm down. This book isn't saying, you know, life should be a free for all without consequences, you know? It's it's more me saying people and circumstances are intricate and they deserve that level of care when we, you know, unpack and dissect them. But with that comes the absolutely ridiculous stuff.

Like austerity day, which fascinated me when I wrote the book because you do, you get your usual suspects that kind of flow around anything contentious like flies on shit, right? And you get your gemillager meals and then your Jackman rows and your David Lambies and people that are like, oh, there's something here but I think I need to be a bit angry about and those those moments are the ones that fascinate me when they're ridiculous. So austerity day was a private school decided that to teach their well-to-do students that not everybody has a ladder and a pantry at home and a garage that can fit three cars.

They decided to have austerity day to teach them about the other side of life. So they scrapped their Dachal Orange on the lunch menu and gave them like jacket potatoes, just root veg and a real what they thought was a bog standard lunch. You know to teach these private school kids that there's a life out there unlike your own. You're going to learn about austerity via a cheap lunch and there was opera. There was genuine opera saying that this was it fetishized, working the working class, that it was an insult to people who genuinely live this way. And for me, that is one of those absurd moments, right? Because yes, there are children that survive on food banks. There are children whose only hot meal is the meal

they go to school and get. That's their only hot meal of the day. Osterity is a real major issue. You're not going to dismantle that by slacking off a private school in southwest London. Do you know what I mean? And I think our issue with matters like this and why it's so important to highlight in the book, the ridiculous is because we need to take down power structures, right? There are power structures that need to be dismantled. There are entire systems that are flawed and you don't take down the tree while jumping up at

leaves. And that's what so much of our outrage is. It's us like, oh, I've got a leaf, I slammed off H&M, you know what I mean? And those are what I call leaves, the ridiculous moments. Because they are symptomatic of bigger issues, but they themselves are not the big issue. Yeah, I really do wonder how many people that involve themselves in this performative communication and decide to go for it full chat on Twitter. I wonder how many of them actually believe the things that they're saying,

because it's quite effortful. Like for me to go and take time out of my day to get into big, big Twitter was, I need to be really compelled to do it. I don't want to just do it because I'm bored, but I wonder how this spread of these people are that do create this outrage online? Truth be told, as much as I joke about it,

and I do, in the book, I joke about this issue quite a lot, if I'm being honest, but I joke as a vehicle to make quite an important point, which I think is, it's not a laughing matter outrage, right? And it's not just them over there. It's not those crazy people over there, virtue signaling, or those crazy people over there that are just quick to anger. It's not those crazy people over there, virtue signaling, or those crazy people over there that are just quick to anger. It's all of us. And at times we don't realize we're doing it because we're not doing this consciously. We're not saying today I think I'm going to pretend to be really pissed off about anti-semitism. It's not an intentional act, right? We go on social media or on blogs or even in our everyday conversations and we tackle

the problems we feel are within our reach, right? So much out there is completely insurmountable or at least it seems insurmountable, right? So you may have some real concerns about government policy and it just feels it's insurmountable. How do I begin to topple that? It feels as though something that's out of your reach. But what's within reach is Judith underscore 87 talking shit. So we tackle that not because we're bad people that are pretending to be angry, but because we feel as though that is some sort of progress. It's progress within my reach.

It's something I can do that is within my means, you know, and it's important with this book to realize that it's not finger pointing, actually. It's actually about saying we need to analyse and assess ourselves and figure out how to be more effective in our communications because as I say it's not just us going out there with this intent to be foe-raged. We're quite convinced that we're doing something. We're actually convinced in ourselves that mob justice is social justice. Quite often we can flake the two. We're like, oh brilliant, we're all piling on this thing. Look at us go, you know, we are part of a movement and it's like, let's mob justice, it's

not actually social justice, but cool, get your rocks off, you probably feel quite good in that moment. And it's about channeling, it's about channeling that same sentiment, but into things that matter. So how do we decipher between true outrage and full rage? Because I'm a fairly, I like to think I'm a fairly sensitive, reasonable person. I don't want people to feel uncomfortable with the things that are on TV. The David Walliams from 10 years ago, the both selected, but I also don't want them to feel uncomfortable about gender pay gap, all of these different things, but as you've said,

before there's a line, somewhere there has to be a line that's drawn, so how do we decipher between the two? There's so much in what you just said, but I'd love to unpack. Part of it is in our needs to be heroes, right? And we feel as though, and, and I know who, who, who quite often feel that way, it's kind of why allies who almost go to the extreme, where they're like, I'm going to be offended by everything on your behalf, because I don't, I don't, I don't want to don't I don't want to be I Don't want to be the image of privilege. I don't want to be the image of supremacy So I'm gonna go the other way and I'm gonna bend over backwards and actually that's offensive and that's offensive

And that's offensive and then you get this sort of Performative I'm on my gap here Helping out all the orphanages and it's actually self-serving. It's to kind of, it's to negate a privilege that you feel you have. And that's a big part of the issue of outrage, where we're doing it not for the progress of a cause, but for the position in of ourselves to appease ourselves and make ourselves feel better. And feel like I'm contributing in some way you know and if it's if it's not rooted in a genuine desire for change it's it's not sustainable and that's where you get

these people that they seem really progressive and they seem like great people but what they care about this week isn't what they cared about three weeks ago and then there was something totally different they cared about a few weeks before that, because you're trying to care about everything. And I say in the book, and I say to people all the time, if you stand for everything, you're going to knack yourself,

you'll never sit down, and you'll not really make any contribution to everything. You'll be giving a little bit of yourself. So so many causes. And, as you say, you'll sign a petition here and you'll retweet something over here and then you'll forward something else to eight friends. But, are you committed to changing everything?

I think that's part of the issue in that we feel obliged to care about everything. There are enough people for us to each play our position we feel obliged to care about everything. There are enough people for us to each play opposition and create progress in so many avenues, right? The Civil Rights Movement, again, I use it as an example. Okay, there are incredible creatives, for example, James Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, who have to kind of pop their creativity

and be like, OK, I've got to figure out the civil rights movement first. It's like, you can't just be a poet. You can't just be a writer. We've got to tackle this issue first. And you see that progress when people kind of bore themselves into a fist, right? We're kind of busy off being fingers these days.

Well, I'm overheard doing that. I'm overheard doing this and we don't pack the punch of a fist because we're not concerted in sustained efforts. And I think that's a real big issue, that we need to care about things, what we need to be unwavering, we need to be sustained and dedicated in those things, which the internet doesn't always give you room to do. You know, if you look at what's trending, if you refresh it in 30 seconds, it's going to be a jumble of new things in a different order. And we feel like, no shit, we're talking about this now, and we feel an obligation to

move with the conversation. The conversation moves so fast online. We're not caring about anything long enough to actually create change. Because we see what happens when when we do you get moments like Black Lives Matter which wasn't a trending for a day wasn't trending for a week it forced people to have self-wracking in it it created conversations it felt like a bit of a social shift because it wasn't something that just you refreshed and it disappeared and that's where there's so much power in outrage. It's it's not in in what you say

there where you're like I want people to be happy here and I want people to be happy here and I want it's about saying okay I can't be all things to all people right right now. Where can I affect change? Where can I be a strong ally? Where can I be committed to a cause as opposed to trying to stand for everything? Which is bloody exhausting. Who's job is it to police people being full-raged? Is it? Nobody's job.

Right, okay, so. It is nobody's job. And this is an important point I make in the book. This book isn't me saying, you know, this is a manual. This is a manual that you must follow to be correctly outraged. It's a road map, right? It's like an old school A to Z,

where it takes you is up to you, all right? If you want it to take you east or take you east. If you want to take you west, it will take you west. It's me taking a deep dive and kind of serving up everything that I found and one thing that I found is look outrageous subjective, you know. It's like this again, this idea of cancel culture. There's no universal way to establish if something deserves to be canceled. Something that offends you may not offend me. There may be something that truly offends me, but it doesn't reflect your lived experience.

So you can have empathy, but you can't be outraged on the scale that I am. Right? So you can't police what I'm outraged by, just as I can't police what you're outraged by, all right? And often you get these people that are like, oh, I don't get it. Why is everyone overreacting to this thing that's allegedly transphobic? You're not trans, so you cannot measure the offense, right?

It's again, with anti-semitism, it's been on the agenda recently because of Nick Cannon. And people are like, there's people like, oh gosh, but did he mean to be anti-semitic? If you are not the target of a topic, or if you're not the person that is directly affected, it is not your place to determine whether or not the outrage is warranted.

What I urge people to do in this book is to ensure that when they are outraged, they have gone through that process of checking with themselves whether there's a purpose, whether there's meaning, whether there's reasoning behind this avenue. And I think that's the most important thing, not us dictating how other people respond, but it has been responsible for how we respond. You know? That's hard, though. It's much easier for me to just be outraged and do a retweet and say,

fuck JK Rowling. I never liked Harry Potter anyway. Hermione is a bitch. Are you Ron Weasley? Never liked him. Look, we don't give ourselves enough credit man for how much we can still and curate our own experience. So we often go onto the internet. And as I said, we just respond to what's already there. So, OK, everybody's angry about this thing. Quite often, the people that are responding to it didn't consume it firsthand.

You know, quite often we react to things we didn't watch live or to things written in newspapers that we don't read, you know, or something that was said on a TV network in a country that we don't live in. But we've consumed this transgression online and now we feel obliged to respond to it. Again, absolutely exhausting. There is enough in your realm, first hand, that you can respond to. We have this thing where we seek out events which really frustrates me. We kind of, we look for the hot topic of the day. We say, okay, what's everybody talking about?

Okay, this is trending. There are a lot of tweets about that. I better put my two pens in. And as I describe it in the book as the outrage conger line, right? We don't know where it's going. We don't know where it's where it's where it's starting. Fuck it. Let's all go in. We're doing a fucking conger mate. Fine. And that's that's what these mass moments of outrage often are. People were with the David Williams book, with the kids books, right, which was kind of topic of discussion recently

on social media. I read it and I was like, I sort of read the threads, started by Jack Monroe. I read the threads and I was like, fuck, this book sounds absolutely awful. Like his book's sound horrendous. This is, but then I was like, I've got enough shit in my day today. I don't need to join the David Williams pile on if I'm being completely

honest. We don't give ourselves the credit that we, we should be giving ourselves. We don't give ourselves the credit that we should be given ourselves. We don't harness that power to create, to curate, sorry, what we consume. You can say, not having that, zoning out, locking that, muting that, unfollowing you, not joining this conversation. Oh, I've got a view on that. But is my perspective adding anything unique that hasn't been said? Probably not. Well, just said it 10 minutes ago. I'd just be saying it in a different way. And if we if we do that more more effectively more more consciously, well, not only a sort of rediscover the power in our outrage, but we'll have a better

experience online. So many people kind of tap out of Twitter and Facebook because they're like, I can't take it. I hate it. It's negative. It's like, you can actually, you actually have the power to curate who you follow and to control what you consume. Absolutely.

That's why I only follow, I think, 98 people now and taking that down. Oh, good number. Taking that down from, like, 2000 or something is just cleaned it up. I just see the things that are interesting, not necessarily stuff that I agree with. I wonder how much of this, especially to do with social media, is to do with the frictionlessness and the lack of consequence from thought to projection of the things that appear in our consciousness. So a hundred years ago, in order for me to go and tell a large number of people anything, we'd have actually been quite effortful. I've got to have got my boots on, told the wife that I was leaving, you know, jumped on my horse on my cow or

whatever, do you ride cows? Anyway, I can tell that I'm such a fine one. If you're riding a cow in this story, mate, commit. Thank you. Thank you. That's not, not prejudice against cows, not prejudice against horses. Yes, I am. And I'm just like shouting it, you know, like, oh, it is, there is a huge problem over here. And I'm like, alerting people. It's so effortful. That time in between me having a thought arising consciousness and then going right, I'm off to get the cow, like all of that different process would have given me chance to reflect. I actually, is this worth me getting the cow out? Is this worth me going and shouting at all of my neighbors? And then, because there's no anonymity,

because people actually have to see you, you see their reactions, you're not detached from the act of the saying or the receiving of the words either. And I wonder how much this, always on communication, constant dopamine hits, were not built to consume, human brain is not built to consume the entire globe's news

in real time, by definition, obviously were not. And then again, you have this frictionless sort of brain to mouth or a keypad system that we've got going on at the moment. I think that might lend people to say a lot of things that they maybe don't agree with, and obviously that pushes them out into these extremes. Absolutely, like you've hit the nail on the head,

that is a huge part of the issue. It's the speed of the internet, right? And people often find themselves wanting to be fast rather than factual, right? It's like, I better sum up how I feel about this very quickly as opposed to, okay, let me read this and let me take this in and let me, you know, have a beat. We don't give ourselves that beat. And again, as you said, a great point. We're not built to consume the world's news, right? In real time, which is why you find clickbait

is the source of so much outrage. We haven't got time to consume the whole article. So I'm going to base my judgment on that headline, right? So if that headline says, Chrissy Teigen aboard Jeffrey Epstein's private jet. Fox, Chrissy Teigen's a beautiful, do you know what I mean? That's how I have to consume the news. So now, Chrissy Teigen's a baddie in my eyes.

I've not time to read the article, and that's how so much of our news is consumed. And that's why we often get ourselves in a pickle with our outrage because we haven't done the due diligence. We haven't actually researched what it is we're angry about or we've got angry about a 25 second clip of an interview. Oh, I've come and got time to on read the whole thing or I haven't got time to go and watch the whole interview. I'm gonna base my judgment on this bit

that was taken entirely out of context and that is how I'm gonna form my judgment. It's this issue of speed, which seems to have rid us of all our critical thinking and it's another reason why our outrage is in a state of disrepair. The thinly spread outrage, which we're giving back, might actually be a reflection of this thinly consumed information coming in. It seems like that, that would

make quite a bit of sense that no one has the time to genuinely connect with a social cause that they thoroughly care about because there's three a day that they need to try and keep up with. Exactly, exactly. We are the sort of the cure and the cause of this thing. We are putting out what we're consuming and then we're consuming what was being put out and we're just in this sort of

Horrible dystopian echo chamber And it is this it's a carousel that I want to get off mate So I've had this this is one of the proofs which actually really cool Oh, I know this is early. Did you ever get one of those? I did that's a that is that's true. I've had this for one day I've had the exactly I'm gonna have to get you to sign this for me. But this has been, this has been with me since February. We're getting, we're getting of the year, yeah. Yeah, so what would you, if you were to do an appendix to this

based on from when you finished writing it until now, would there have been anything else that you would have thrown in? Was there some stuff that appeared and obviously you will have we need to get the book out now, but also stuff that was like fuck like I wish I could have put that situation in or that situation in. Is there anything that appeared in 2020 that you you would have liked to have had? I think the the great thing about this book is that, as I said, it could have come out at any time because it's just, it's symptomatic of the world we're living in. And if I had written it next year or the year after, there would have just been a different

set of case studies, right? Making the same points, but a different set of case studies. JK Rowling, for example, is, as much as I've tried to disconnect from these instances of cancel culture, which as I'll always give the caveat that cancel culture is a myth, but JK Rowling, it fascinates me because everyone is like,

JK Rowling has been cancelled. This is the problem with this idea of cancel culture. Right? It doesn't exist. Okay? JK Rowling has not been cancelled. All right? People are not burning their Hogwarts merch. Right? People are not, they're not shutting down Harry Potter land. They're not, her books are still performing well. The issue with, with JK Rowling speaking out against cancel culture is what fascinates me more than this idea of cancel culture itself, because we've created a climate where people can evade accountability by hiding behind this idea of cancel culture.

So rather than saying, maybe I've messed up here and I need to have conversations and I need to go for a bit of self-reconing, you can say, the world's gone mad, look, they're bullying me. And you can hide behind this veil, which almost inverts the entire thing and makes you evict him. And I write about this in the book, just with a different reference. In the book, it's Danny Baker, who has said, you know, he put that picture out of sort of newborn royal baby, a monkey.

I don't know, monkey's as a motif returns in this book. But yes, he put a picture out of a monkey in reference to the royal baby, got fired from his BBC radio job. And rather than saying, shit, that was tone death and I completely get why it appears offensive for me to post a picture of a monkey in reference to a biracial baby.

The first glimpse of melanin in the royal family, there's some unconscious bias, maybe, on my part, that my mind's even posting a monkey picture. His reaction was, the cancel culture man, these snowflakes man, the world's gone crazy, and that's part of the issue with cancel culture, is that it's created a curtain behind which you can actually hide from your transgressions and divert the conversation

and make it about free speech and make it about censorship rather than actually accepting that you may have made a bad decision, you may have had a poor choice of words, you may have expressed yourself wrongly. Rather than accepting that, there's now something to hide behind. That has to be a time when that's not the case though. For instance, I don't know whether you looked at, you know, remember Mario Lopez from saved by the bell. Yeah.

Did you see AC Slater? AC Slater. Yeah, it just hasn't aged at all. At all. No. At all. Did you see what he said about children undergoing gender reassignment under the age of three. What did he say? Bloody hell. This is like, maybe you're in a bit to go now.

I spoke to Andrew Doyle on the show about this. And basically, it was the most measured pedestrian statement I've ever seen from someone. No one reasonable would have taken offense at this. And he essentially said this long-winded, load a hyperbole, load a caveat, and then he eventually says, I don't know if children under the age of three should be being told that they're perhaps the wrong gender. Like, you know, my business partners cared is like a five-and-one minute, then a postman, the next, then an astronaut,

the next, and blah, blah, blah. I don't think that any of those, and he said this real gentle sentence, put it out there, and just got annihilated. There were people calling for his head at MTV. Three days later, he gives the most groveling. I have educated myself. I'm always being an ardent supporter of the LGBTQ plus community. I believe in this, I have further blah, blah, blah. And I just think that there was nothing wrong with what you said. You're talking about people who are too young to have sex, but are young enough to have their gender reassigned. Like, I don't know. That to me seems like one of the times where cancel culture does come for someone.

The cancel culture in situations like this, which is one of many, it's difficult when people are clumsy in their messaging. And often we mean, well, we're trying to say something we've inadvertently offended somebody, right? We see this happening a lot. The weight of public opinion is such that we are now just stifling conversation. We're even like, I was about to call him AC Slater, Mario Lopez may have had a conversation with a parent of a trans boy later on down the line and actually been watching that bloody hell. I actually never been in that situation. I've now had some conversations. As much as I think my idea was rooted in sense,

I can kind of see why there may be exceptions to that, right? What we've done though, we've stifled it and you've forced someone into a corner, you've forced them to renounce their feeling and you've just kind of hustled an apology out of somebody, which again, I write about in the book, these kind of hustled apologies, which actually mean nothing at all. And my fear around that is that we're just kind of creating this sort of dystopian future, man, where everyone is scared to speak,

everyone's scared to drive a SUV, because they're gonna look like they don't care about the environment, you know, and everybody just wears gray because anything else might be. Just in case you culturally appropriate something. Exactly. So can't wear anything that might be a material that is in some way indigenous to some other place. Everybody's just their heads, but just good have to just not have our hair in any style. I feel that we're kind of just listening to elevator music and driving our hybrid cars

to just be as inoffensive as possible. And as black mirror as it sounds, I feel as if there's not an outrage intervention that that is actually where we're headed. There'll be no more mario and opuses because nobody's speaking. Exactly. I mean, I feel that as well on the show.

Like, I try and just have as little filter as possible from brain to mouth so that the audience has faith that what they hear is what I think. Thankfully, I have quite, usually have quite reasonable views as opposed to if I was someone who is having a self-sensor all the time, I just immediately be in bother. But I feel that, I'm like, oh God, is this wrong? Because last year it maybe wasn't so wrong, but this year I'm seeing people getting in

real bother for talking about things around these. So when the rules are always changing, it can be really, really worrying. And if that's someone like myself and you who talk a lot, but professionally, what about the person on the street? They're not supposed to be a professional. They're not supposed to spend that time really finding the new ones of where their position sits. Exactly. And that is, I start one of the chapters in the book saying, I have written this book out of sheer terror, right? I'm writing this book because I think if somebody doesn't write it, it's just who's gonna be left?

Just the Pope, you know, and then the Pope will fuck up. He's too white. Yeah. Then there'll be some skeletons in the closet there. It's like as if we're creating a framework of perfection creating a framework of perfection and sort of moral high ground We're raising the bar to levels that we ourselves will at some point for sure of right? So we're we're kind of placing this parameter around acceptable behavior Which is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until until none of us are in it and it's that that's what terrifies me. And that's part of why I I wrote the book as you say in a vocation where you're a broadcaster or your podcaster where you're literally your documenting your views right now we're? And on social media, you're documenting your views in

Landscape that is ever changing and you are putting something there in perpetuity that we can now dig up in Six seven years and say oh God You you said you think that you don't say woman anymore How how are cake? I know you know how long Should someone be held accountable for a thing that happened in the past Because we're seeing a lot of sort of past experiences get dreaded up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, where's the where's the line for that? again Yeah, yeah, where's the where's the line for that again?

These things are our subjective right so there are For example, there are people who have just been on Twitter for 12 years and look it was the wild wild west back then all right, so you've got somebody who joined Twitter when they were 14 and said some absolutely ridiculous shit but now they're they're 26 and shit, their potential employer has found out that they were body shaming some TV presenter when they were 14, right? There needs to be a certain level of common sense, right? If you were saying something 12 years ago, but you're a 60 year old man, and you were still in your fouries,

and your opinions were well formed, I think these things need to be handled on a case by case basis. But it's like with cultural moments like like little Britain and 40 towers where it's so difficult because again tones change, attitudes, change, that is the nature of the world we're living in, right? And what frustrates me with the mob is this idea that you have to be tethered to your attitudes, right? If you felt that way then or you made that show, then that must be reflective of how you feel now, right? If everything we are doing is for the purposes of progress.

So if we are getting outraged because we want gender pay gaps to disappear, if we're being outraged because we want policies to change or we want attitudes to change and we are out there, we're protesting in the streets because we want things to change. Then we see that there's a capacity for change. You can't have both. You can't say, look at who you used to be. You'll never change while saying, but I'm going to go out here and protest in a hope for change. You cannot have it both ways. If you're going to contribute to the fight for change, you have to also accept that people have the capacity to change. And I feel like there's a real lack of compassion on the internet at

the moment, especially when it comes to sort of retrospective rage, things that you said then, things that you felt then. And I said, there's going to be nuance in these different cases, but for the most part, if somebody has been held accountable and they've said, I said that eight years ago, and I'm ashamed, and I'm embarrassed, and I do not stand by that person I was eight years ago, there needs to be the space to allow for that. You can't say no, not having that.

You are cancelled for who you were in 2012 because you genuinely, you cannot have it both ways. It's dangerous to judge the actions of today by the, judge the actions of yesterday by the rules of today. the, judge the actions of yesterday by the rules of today. Like really, really dangerous. And it's the John Clees thing, the Faulty Towers thing, such a good example. You're talking decade, like 1970s, something like that.

Like, I'm not sure of the date, but look, there is blackface, 40 towers, slavery. Blackface, 40 towers, slavery, that there is so much which in its time was accepted, right? And yet we cannot turn a blind eye to the world we want to live in. And that's where sometimes I'm like, should these things be coming down? Should you just delete 40 hours? Should you just delete little Britain or do these things need to come with a disclaimer up front that says, this is the world we used to live in? You know?

Or are we going to completely erase the history? And the history that is littered with bigotry, it is, it's littered with prejudice. I think it's actually a cop out for the people that perpetuated those views. I think it's easy for you to just pretend you didn't have those views. I think it's easy to yank little Briton down and allow Matt Lucas and David Williams to escape that. That's too much of a cop out. That should exit, continue to exist as a representation of the tone of the day. And that's my honest opinion.

I actually don't think we should be pulling things off streaming services and pretending they didn't happen because that allows you to escape what was the tone of the day, you know. That's that's how we make lessons, right? The lessons are created by us being able to reflect on history, you know, one of the the greatest ever losses was the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Like if all of that compiled wisdom hadn't been lost, like, genuinely, I think we believe with sort of these technocratic gods that are always just going to be omnipotent and all of our future generations are going to remember shit. It's like, no, there is no cultural canon that will remember little Britain in a hundred years' time

if you decide to, or if you decide to delete anything, if you get rid of all of the memories of all of this stuff, and it's only available on fucking VHS, like to be put into a machine that no one has anymore. That very, very much will disappear from the artifacts, the architecture of cultural history. And then, then what happens? Do you just have to relearn that lesson again? Is it like, oh, okay, well, we don't have that, we don't have the proof that that lesson went wrong. So like, might just stumble upon it again. Yeah, and look, it's all, it's a,

bloody, it's a tapestry, isn't it? Like, our experience, humanity's experience, existence is a tapestry of everything that has happened. You can't just be like, don't like how that patch looks anymore. It's part of it, I'm afraid. Like, part of this quilt is going to be fucking ugly and it's what we've built. And as we progress, we will like the look of it more. You can't just start unstitching all the other

shit. And I was having this conversation the other day about Gwen Stefani. What she done now? She hasn't done anything now. If you look at old Gwen Stefani videos where she had a bindi, she had dreadlocks and she had three Japanese girls on leashes. This was her look. When Stefani would never get away with that. You just couldn't. It is that you're ascending everybody. It's almost like Gwen's gone out of her way

to find how many different cultures she can appropriate. How many birds can I kill with white stone, right? And you'd never get away with it now, but I was a Gwen Stefani fan. Gwen Stefani was out and I didn't recognize how actually under the lens of woke 2020, how awful this is going to look. I can't just erase my experience as a teen that quite enjoyed a bit of, hey, baby, but when it's the funny, right? And it's about, as you say, just taking these

as lessons, as things to learn from, and accepting that look, we will like the look of our tapestry, the more we progress. It's good to reflect on the fact that you were present when that sort of stuff came up as well, right? Because it reminds us that we were also either ignorant or willfully blind or a part of whatever society and structure allowed anything in the past. Like Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark was put on varieties, ten films which should come with a warning label because it showed stereotypical depictions

of Hindu people as the people that will try and take your heart out as the evil villains. And once upon a time in Hollywood is also a part of that list, a whole bunch of other movies. When those movies came out, I haven't been seeing this huge campaign for Raiders of Lost Ark to come down over the last 30 years, like people outside of Harrison Ford's house with pickets, which means that you were there then, but your opinions have changed to now. And it harps back to what you said about growth. Like if you're the different. I would give that the caveat though, that quite often, people who are the butt of the joke, right? and quite often you have movies and you have TV programs that punch down right. Let's take the piss out of Indian people. Let's take the piss

out of black people. Let's take the piss out of women right. The nature of so much dated media punched down and you don't get that as much now but the people who were the target or the butt of the joke went necessarily empowered or in a position to say not really enjoying this, right? So it does always need to come with a caveat, because there's no blanket rule that says that was the past, and we can't dwell on the past. This is kind of what my book is about. Every situation is nuanced, right? There's no paint by numbers response that is gonna fit every single instance of outrage. And there will be people that watch Little Britain

and were offended, right? That were offended by its depiction of chav culture and felt that it was classist. What there was no outlet, or they didn't feel like, what am I gonna say? Everyone's enjoying the show, or there'll be people that were uncomfortable with the blackface, that now feel as though

the tide has changed. And actually, I can say that I felt this way. So there is always gonna be that side. And it's important, which is why I say it's you can't be scared of that gray area, man. Like so much of our online arguments are because we refuse to accept that there's a gray area and there almost always is. Any non-typical view that someone holds,

if you say, I am a this person, conservative, a person of Jewish heritage, Chinese, whatever it might be, if you have, let's say you're conservative, but you're also pro-life, that is seen as a chink in your armor, as like a weakness in your viewpoint. And I think that that is one of the reasons why people seem to be taking their views wholesale

rather than piecemeal, that it's like, I am a this person. Love that, I love that, yeah. Therefore, I'm gonna go through the rest of it. That's not an original thought. That is me taking it from someone else, but I don't know who it is. So we're gonna, I'm the closest person

that we're gonna refer to. But yeah, that during a debate, if you have a nuanced view, the other side see that as a weakness. Ah, you see? You see, I knew he wasn't really pro Trump Democrat, whatever it might be, because he doesn't agree on this.

And he's like, yeah, yeah, obviously, I don't, because I don't happen to be Donald Trump. I don't happen to be Joe Biden. I don't have to be like that this particular person. And with that in mind, I'm going to have these little nuances and these gray areas. And I write in the book about tribalism, which is something that really, we just career down these cul-de-sacs of opinion because we feel railroaded by our tribes, right? So you might feel as though, shit, I'm a vegan from the three counties and I've got a stand for everything that is in a front to my community and my veganism. And I can't fall outside

of the parameters of what it means to be in that tribe. So often we find people speaking up because it's in a front to their tribe. Not necessarily because they personally are offended, but because they feel they're supposed to be offended, right? Shit, this person has said something about women. Fuck, I'm not that offended, but I have got a feminism podcast, I better say something. Do you know what I mean?

And you get so much of that, people feeling as though because of the groups to which they subscribe that they have to respond to everything or they're letting their tribe down and that is when you get people shouting about a H&M hoodie because I'm black and I've got to be angry about the monkey hoodie right you know and it's that which doesn't allow for new once quite often. It's like vicinity offense. It's like this isn't something I'm offended by, but it's kind of, it's kind of someone near me that might have done.

So, it's in my realm. Yeah, it is. It's in vicinity. And so, what can people do? How can the listeners move forward and that sort of act a little bit better if you were to leave people with some tips of how to be better outrages? How can we make outrage great again? Oh, again, there are so many, it isn't like a free step guide, right?

It's about you figuring out for yourself what you care about. Again, the worst thing, the biggest disservice I could have done in this book is tell people what to care about. I don't, I just, it doesn't work to try and, as I say, fit a framework around somebody else's ideas and belief systems. That's the beauty of humanity. There are going to be little differences in all of us. What I will always say is you owe it to yourself to only be outraged by that which truly outrages you. And that seems like a really sensible concept. Like, yeah, of course, I'm only outraged by things that outrage me that, no, you may think you

are genuinely outraged. But if you are genuinely outraged, then you want to get something out of it. The purpose of outrage is progress. It's the only reason outrage should exist is because you feel something needs to change. I am outraged by this because these policies are archaic. I am against this because I feel as though it is racist, it's offensive, it's sexist, and that needs to change. I want this to happen, right?

Which is why I continue to use the analogy of outrage as currency. Treat your outrage as you would a real investment, right? You wouldn't blindly be like, oh, put 5K in that, oh, put 10K in that, these are your life savings, right? Your outrage is your emotional life savings, right? It is yours to invest as you see fit. Every single time you are outrade, you are spending your currency, you are investing it, stop doing it blindly, stop doing it where you are not seeking a return on your investment because you are pouring your outrage down the drain, right? It did because you want to see a return on your investment and you owe that to yourself. I really, really hope that the internet

takes heed of this. It sounds like a much nicer place to live. Whatever's inside outraged seems like a much more wonderful place to be than we are right now. Yeah, I just I just think we need an intervention, which is what this book was. It's for all the outrage junkies or friends of junkies, you know, sometimes your crack head friend is not gonna read the book and you've gotta read it for them, right?

So this is for anybody in need of an intervention or who knows somebody that might. I love it. It will be linked in the show notes below. Of course, if you want to go and check this out, it will be available on Amazon. You said that you've done an audio version as well, so you've done the kit, the audio book. There's an audio book.

I mean, if you're not sick of my voice an hour into this podcast, there's some more in the audio book. If you don't like this tone, go for the hardback. Yes, something else. It's a fairly easy read as well, right? You know, you can probably crack this out in a few days, but it's really dense and there's some great laughs in. So yeah, linked in the show notes below.

Anything else you want to plug? Do I do you anywhere other places that people should go? Not read the book, share it, spread the word. I think this is one of those books. I'm not so much faster people going out and buying it. I would love you to read this book and just give it to somebody else and then tell them to give it to somebody else. It's not about shifting the units on this one.

I think it's about continuing the conversation. So please, yeah, recycle your outraged book call your outrage book once you've read it.