Modern Wisdom - #706 - Douglas Murray - We Need To Stop Listening To These People

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

Douglas Murray is a journalist, author and associate editor of The Spectator. As the turmoil of global events dominates the media, it can feel as though the world is spiralling into chaos. If we can't agree on what's happening, how can we make sense of the world? What's the solution in a post-truth world? Expect to learn how Victoria’s Secret betrayed the body positivity movement, why people are struggling to agree on what's true anymore, how the “Gays for Gaza” movement will get on, whether we are past peak wokeness, why there is such a huge increase in conspiratorial thinking, what the most recent South Park episode has to say about our culture and much more... Sponsors: Get a 20% discount on your first order from Maui Nui Venison by going to https://www.mauinuivenison.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Douglas Murray, he's a journalist, author and associate editor of the spectator. As the turmoil of global events dominates the media, it can feel as though the world is spiraling into chaos. If we can't agree on what's happening, how can we make sense of the world and what's the solution in a post-truth existence? Expect to learn how Victoria's secret betrayed the body positivity movement,

why people are struggling to agree on what's true anymore, how the gays for Gaza movement will get on, whether we're past peak-wokeness, why there is such a huge increase in conspiratorial thinking, what the most recent South Park episode has to say about our culture, and much more. This episode is brought to you by Maui Ni Venison, bringing the healthiest red meat on the planet directly to your door. Not only is it the most nutrient-dense meat on the planet, they're the only 100% stress-free, wild-harvested venison that you can get. Here's my super secret hack.

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Head to drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with any purchase that's drinklmnt.com slash modern wisdom. But now ladies and gentlemen please welcome Douglas Murray. You've spent a lot of time studying history and writing about current events at the moment. How would you rate your predictive ability given the current state of the world, were the things that you foresaw coming or things that you've been particularly surprised by? Well, nobody gets to predict with 100% accuracy anything, because of my other things, all the time things happen that you could never have seen coming. I could never have seen COVID coming. I just didn't. So whenever anyone sort of boasts about their predictive capabilities, I always

think you have to do it with certain amount of humility because I mean things happen all the time you couldn't see. You're going to see round the bend of the road you're coming to. You can't see round the corner. Yeah, I mean, some things I've written about for years, particularly in my book, The Strange Death of Europe, that came out in 2017, which I think are sadly coming to fruition. I say sadly because people think that if you predicted something and got it right, you would feel any pleasure.

And that would only be if the thing you were predicting was something you looked forward to. And what I was predicting was something I was dreading. And that was the transformation of our country of birth and many other countries in the West due to demographic change. And I mean, every day now, pretty much somebody says to me, God, I used to think what you were saying and the strange stuff of Europe has been, I used to think what you were saying, and the strange stuff of Europe was a bit out there, and now I realize you were right.

But it gives me no pleasure for them to say that. Because I always sort of think, well, if you'd have agreed back then, some things might not have happened. But, so, no, but, you know, as Mark Stein said, demographics is destiny. So, it's one of the things you can predict with the most ease, you know, demographics is destiny. So it's one of the things you can predict with the most ease.

Did you have Victoria Secrets planned to bring sexy back on your 2023 Bingo card? Why Victoria Secrets bringing sexy back? After experimenting with 300 pound mannequins, plus size models, disabled models, trans models, a male model, and a 38-year-old football player, Victoria's secrets have made the controversial decision to switch strategy and start using hot women to model their underwear again. Makes a commercial sense to my mind. Yeah, it is quite, I'm always amazed

advertising executives find it complex this stuff. I mean, all you need to do is stick sexy guys on stuff, and stick sexy girls on stuff, and you can sell all the merchandise, which pretty much writes itself. Yeah, I'm not particularly surprised that if you stick Lizzo in a bikini, it's not as appealing as a bit of sales merchandise, but you know, live and learn, I suppose? Liz and learn. One of my friends owns a very big clothing company. And for a while, they tried plus sized models. Yeah. Mostly for women. There's not much of a body positivity movement for men.

No, it's not like a beer gut movement. The skinny fat revolution. And he said, we've split tested this into oblivion, big ghost on cell clothes. So when you see that, when you see a company, you know, and summers are making double plus size dildos or whatever, the company is actively hurting the top line and bottom line to be able to send the right message. And that's all well and good. Up until some shareholder meeting,

where some 70s year old guy looks at the far right column of an Excel sheet and goes, what the fuck's this? Yes. And they go, no, you don't understand. It's this really cool new movement. It's very progressive. And he goes, I don't care.

Right. I want more money than we had last year. And this is less money than we had last year. Yeah. Yeah, they, I mean, I suppose it all starts off from a good place, like some or many things. But look, if you, you might agree that, you know, it's not a good thing to sell anorexic looking models to young women.

And that's, yeah, okay, let's all agree on that. But you can, you can stop somewhere before morbidly obese. You know, that's where the whole thing goes wrong with body positivity thing. Plus, there's a place where the body positivity shouldn't occur. It should be, I mean, if somebody is so morbidly obese, they're at a significant risk of heart failure. You shouldn't celebrate them. You should say, hang on a minute, steady on the doughnuts. But they don't say that.

They just, they run all the way. I wish you could just have sort of healthy-looking women on the ads and just draw the line there. But as ever, they sort of don't know where the line is. Until you just say something wrenches and back, I think wrenches and back is normally, as you say, the bottom line. Yeah, I have been thinking about this sort of

performative empathy point for a while. Got this idea, I need to meme it better, but I think something like short term empathy or the shallow pond of empathy, I've been thinking about what is most popular in culture at the moment is something that optimizes for its immediacy to signal that you are a good guy or good girl, even if that's at the expense of the ultimate outcome for the person. So let's say you're able to do something, giving the child ice cream, it may be what it

wants right now, it may be bad for it long term, but if you're the ice cream promoter for the young children, you will be seen as a good person. And if you're the person who's saying, hang on a second, that's not what you want long term, maybe responsibility in Peterson language, maybe not casual sex in Louise Perry language, maybe not as much food as you want in body positivity language. You're seen as bigoted or judgmental or whatever, because there's no countervailing force in the culture. The unlimited empathy, people have run a long way very fast because, as you say, there's

a short-term gain to be seen to be being empathetic, let's celebrate yourself. But ordinary, you would have some other counterforce in the society in different forces have provided that in history, including a church. But if there is no counterforce to say, for instance, long-term gratification, battle and short-term, or whatever, then yeah, and that's a sort of unappealing position in our society now.

There's plenty of room for people to be in that space, but you're still on the defensive. You're still living in a society where effectively own an ice cream truck, in the language of a child, would seem to be a great thing, just as a short term thing. Not many people want that role, it's sort of uncool in some way. It might become cool at some point in the future when more people realize that the short term gratification thing was leading to diabetes or whatever. It's the same as one of the justifications, I think, for why people aren't having children, that up front one children, you just see a very, very large cost on all of the joy and stuff. Well, the economist put it as the child tax.

The amount of money you have less if you have a child. We're weird way round to look at the future of the species, isn't it? If only I died with more money in my bank account. Life of regret. Death of regret. I hate. Death of regret, but yeah. Yeah, well, you know, it's kind of the, as well, the Mexican fishermen story. Are you familiar with that?

The parable of the Mexican fishermen? No, I don't think I am. This is cool. You'll like this. So an American businessman goes on holiday to Mexico. And while he's there, he's a true story. It's a parable. Okay, right.

Got it. Fucking hell. He goes on holiday. He gets taken out fishing by a local Mexican. And he asks the Mexican how he spends his time. The Mexican says, I fish a little on the morning. I catch enough for my family. We go back.

We cook. We laugh around the fire. And I spend time with my children. And the American businessman goes, that's stupid. Here's a better idea. What you should do is actually spend most of your day fishing and then with the surplus fish you could sell them at the market. The Mexican fisherman says, why would I do that?

So, once you've got the additional money, you could start to employ some of your friends and they could come out fishing with you too and you could catch more fish, which you could sell at the market for more money. So, why would I do that? So, once you've done that, you would be able to incorporate in America and you would maybe be able to start a canning factory so that you could own the entire production process

and you could then sell the company for a lot of money. He said, why would I do that? He said, because once you've done that, you'd be able to fish a little on a morning and then go back and spend time with your children around the fire. Very good. And I often think about that as a much more direct route on a morning and then go back and spend time with your children around the fire. Very good.

And I often think about that as a much more direct route to happiness. You know? Yeah. Well, that's the classic thing that you have in the place you end up, is the place you started from. Yes. There are lots of ways about people on having children and a lot of them are simple economic things.

I mean, all of the Western countries that have terrible replacement birth rate figures are because of very easy things to solve, like cost of housing and things like that. And it's not hard to build affordable housing which is proved to be incapable of doing so. So young people wanting to, one of the, both get on the property ladder and have a, and start a family, think they have to do either or and they're not entirely wrong, but that's something that governments could have sorted out and none of them do. They're so hopeless at it and they have been for years under consecutive governments. They never build enough housing so young people don't see a future, don't feel hopeless

and then don't have kids and they know everyone wonders why there's a demographic crisis. and then everyone wonders why there's a demographic crisis. Intergenerational competition theory is something I learned about a couple of weeks ago. You're familiar with this? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know about it before, but it makes complete sense. You know, there was always this talk of millennials of the first generation to have done worse than their parents. And it seems like you're not the first. First little while.

Yes, first and two generations. Yeah. And it seems like millennials actually probably just about managed to get over on average. But Gen Z, materially. Yeah. And it seems like millennials actually probably just about managed to get over on average. But Gen Z, materially, yeah, difficulty in getting in the property ladder, the most common living arrangement for men under 35 is still at home with their parents. And yeah, you know, it, it bakes in this sort of intergenerational competitiveness and a dissatisfaction when you look at where your parents were and this felt sense that your parents got advantages that you never did, which is usually not true. I mean, they didn't suffer inflation at the same rates, they suffered

very high taxation in the post-war period. We haven't had taxation at the levels it was at in the 1960s and 70s, for instance, in the UK. The time when people were top-rate taxpayers were paying 99% tax, a friend who once in that period paid over 100% tax for reasons he can't afford. How's that possible? It will be back tax and that sort of thing. There's a tendency, particularly among millennials and after, to think that their parents had it very easier. My experience of people from that generation, the boomer generation, it didn't feel easier the time.

And yeah, there were certain things getting on the property, housing ladder was a little bit easier than it is, or significant easier. Once you have, what is it, five times average earnings being inadequate to get to the average property price you see the split go on. But you always have to factor, if you say the millennial of the first ones in the first one, whoever to have a better standard of living. You have to bake in things like, oh yeah, well, they had a world war, you know. So that's quite a big PS. Well, there's a big footnote. So yeah, everyone has their challenges. I just don't see why I once you've identified them know the way out of them. You don't do them.

But I was talking to mutual friend Eric Weinstein about this. I also spoke to Sam about this. I've spoken to a bunch of people. Why in your opinion do you think everybody struggles to agree on the truth now? Oh, that's quite straightforward. We can't agree on what has happened. So broadly speaking, an event happens now and some people believe it has happened, and

other people think it hasn't. I mean, we've been through a number of deranging years since we first spoke in which, for instance, you know, they say there's been a global pandemic, which some people believe was something which killed millions and millions of people in their own country and think they were just about saved from dying themselves. And other people think it was a fake and other people think we just massively have reacted and other people think it was all planned and nobody agrees what happened. That's just to take one example. In America you have obviously the fact that nobody agrees

who won an election, that's a problem. And so you just have basic things. Nobody can agree on it, just happened. I always say in America, you know, I mean, I think if we could just agree that one thing that's just happened happened, but then nobody wants to. As you must be a WF shill, if you believe that. So I think it is the problem, and obviously underneath that is just the problem, the fact that the treadmill of social media has totally changed the way in which we communicate, the way in which we learn things, absorb things. And we don't know what the consequences of that are. We're so early into it.

And it seems to me that, among other things, it's allowed people to have their own version of recent events, recent history, past few days. And so when you sit down to talk to somebody, you can fairly swiftly work out whether they're somebody who's open to the idea of things that happened, having happened, or whether or not they will fight you all the way. And that just makes everything much harder than it used to be. And that isn't to sort of particularly pine for the ear of a mononarrative, if that era ever particularly existed and you read history, not clear that it did. But it's just massively worse. And

news is coming at us at such a pace these days. And it's just like, you know, every day feels like, you know, a month's worth of news in the past. Things just fly by you so fast that you don't even have time to absorb it before it's happened. So I think that's part of the reason. And in any case, the whole concept of truth as being a desirable thing in the society seems to have eroded from both the right and the left. And so, well, truth, for instance, used to be the basis for university education and the basis of university inquiry that you sought the truth wherever it led you. That was a point of academia, for instance.

Politics was different. Politics was always about having to find a way around truth and deal with it and address it with inconvenience. Yeah, address it where you could, but get rounded if it was too awkward. But inquiry used to be about seeking truth. And there'd been like that for a couple thousand years or more since Greeks, certainly. And then it changed at some point relatively recently. And truth is now not a desirable thing because truth hurts people and it can be mean. So it's not only

that people have different opinions on things. They don't agree that the thing we used to agree on is worth. They have different facts as well. They have different facts, but they don't agree that the, I mean, they don't agree that you should just follow truth wherever it takes you. I mean, they don't agree that you should just follow truth wherever it takes you. Because other things are prioritized over truth. I still prioritize truth over all things I can and try to. I think that's the interesting thing about the world is finding out what and it is true and what is not. But other people don't seem to have that same appetite anymore.

And would rather live in lies, which I think is very dangerous for an individual, a very dangerous for society. In fact, it's dangerous for an individual and lethal in a society, I'd say. It's interesting to think about the motivations that people have for not believing something which is already on an unshaky foundation of we can't agree on the thing that we're not believing about. And a Gwinda one of my friends has this idea that if no amount of evidence would dissuade someone of what they believe, then they don't have a rational belief.

They have a religious ideology. Yeah, that's a Jonathan Swift beautifully put it as a reason somebody out for a position they weren't reasoned into. Of course. I'm your dealing with dogma, with many people today. It's just they don't know which faith they belong to, but it with dogma with many people today. They don't know which faith they belong to, but it's dogma for sure. I just, they're not very interested in their views, because I think they can't defend them. If you can't defend your views, I'm not very interested in them, because I don't find

them persuasive. I asked Sam this about whether or not, Obviously, whatever, 10, 15 years ago, who's a big part of the New Atheist movement, and I guess he was tangentially on the... I was a little bit of a whipper snap of that. And Ciliara. I was a whipper snap of New Atheist. You were an orbiter.

It's referred to... I was a short trousers. New Atheist. Okay. But, you know, your book, The Madness of Crowds, talks about the collapse of grand narratives. One of the biggest collapses of grand narratives was religion. So I asked Sam whether or not looking back, he believed that his deconstruction of religion

was on balance and net good or net negative. What did he say? He managed to evade being too committed, either way, I think. But what do you think? Well, I think it's like a lot of things that you deconstruct. You only know afterwards whether or not it's something you could have put back together. It's like children with bicycles, very fine at taking them apart, very bad at putting them back together. Not comparing Sandra Child, but I mean, I just, I think that is,

it is something you notice only once you've taken apart once You can't reconstruct it you'd rise what function it might have performed I Said to Sam on stage a few years ago that I I thought that it would all be fine if Most atheists were as rational and level headed as Sam But it's not Sam Harris all the way down. It's like Sam Harris followed by total mentalist and who just will not reason or rationalize anything

and are just screaming harpies of insanity. So that's a shame. But yes, I mean, I think of that whole thing works for some people, but obviously it doesn't work for others. I mean, religion, you know, shopper hair among others saw it, was, religion was philosophy for the masses. Absent religion completely, several lots of options of what will happen. One is that the general public lose the overarching framework of their lives and have nothing to replace it with. Another one is that they do replace it with other things, you know, to new religions which

crop up all the time. We have the religion of the body negativity movement. You know, we have the religion of trans, we have the religion of gender, we have the religion of race and you know, and all these things, they just stepped into this void and they're all dogmatic things with their founding texts. They've all got their own catacisms of a kind, priests, they have excommunication rights, and my only observation really would be on that is that I preferred the old gods. I preferred the old priests, which was funnily enough, partly because we knew its flaws. The sweet point where you see the flaws of religious belief, but can still live through it is one, even I can, especially Phil

Nostalgic for, because I don't like the new priesthood. I find them as corrupt as any priesthood in history with the negative attribute that not everyone's woken up to them yet. I mean, do we have, do we have an arch culture and equivalent, for instance, of the mean of the pedophile priest? I don't think we do. For instance, I would love it if the adults who push gendered this more fear stuff on children were regarded as the equivalent of pedophile priests. I think I'd be fine.

But I probably, it doesn't come with that yet. It's like the Catholic church in Boston circa 1950. The priests are still fiddling with the kids, but no one wants to talk about it. So it makes me think, as we were talking earlier on, about some of the ways in which lots of decisions need to be made. And you don't know how the outcomes are going to occur that there are no solutions on the trade-offs. I keep coming back to that in my personal life as well, but thinking about what people want to optimize for in their existence. There are no solutions ultimately. Like, and you have to give up certain things. I don't have to go up everything. Well, no, there's certainly better solutions.

Yeah. Right? But the world is trying to maximize everything. It's, there is, and it goes back to the shallow pond of empathy, that accepting that trade-offer and inevitability doesn't fit into that paradigm. Right? We will always optimize for what feels most pleasurable or empathetic in the short term. I don't know, I don't feel that. Well, that's how it plays out, I think, for a lot of people, yes, if they have

no character. If they have no character in them. Well, what do you optimize for? I try to optimize for peace. That seems to be the thing that for me, in my optimize for? I try to optimize for peace. That seems to be the thing that, for me, in my personal life, I try to do. If the price is my sanity, the cost is too high, no matter what it is. And I continually throw that rule out of the window all the time. That's what I try and aim for, right? My own rubric is... I love it, the peace in your private life.

I try... My native, lady Bracknell's line about the general at the end of the importance of being honest. She says, the general was essentially a man of peace except in his domestic life. Ha, ha, ha. You have the other way around. Yeah, a man of peace in your domestic life. Except for my mother.

Maybe while the general is. No, I don't think I am. You're a highly agreeable person. I'm fucking not. Really? I try as best I can. You're a highly agreeable person. I'm fucking not. Really? I try as best I can to keep a lid on it. But yeah, this lack of meaning and people's desire, they're absolutely fervent desire to try and fill that hole

with as many things as they can. Like Lizzo. Like Lizzo indeed. Did you see the stories that came out about Lizzo? Oh, wonderful. About her Amsterdam. My favorite story of the year. Yeah, well, what long way? For the people that don't know, Lizzo was on tour. In Amsterdam, took her backup dances to the red light district and made the backup dancers, some of the backup dancers eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam.

Yes, Strympers. My view was what happened here was at Lizzo thought you could outsource the eating of your five-food and veggie day. To the vagina? To the vagina of the Stryper or to the mountain? She's so reluctant to eat healthfully. She even outsources the five food and veggie day.

That's my view. Well, it seems to me that it seems to me that both Lizzo, Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Kimmel, all of these people who upfront, Oh, isn't it wonderful? It's so great. It's always a nice, it's awesome. It's nice and nice, it's squeaky.

Not the Lizzo of look nice, but like the squeaky clean, the Ellen de generis thing, you know, just dance and you know, and of course they're horrible in real life. It's a sort of rule that, by the way, actually, with public figures is that the ones who are most, you know, sort of sweety, sweety in public tend to be the nastiest in private. Sometimes the opposite can be true. Some people who have thought to have a very hard edge in public can to be the nastiest in private. Sometimes the opposite can be true. Some people who have thought to have a very hard edge in public can actually be lovely, lovely people in private. Margaret Fetcher was a good example. Very, very nice to people around her,

but could make tough decisions. To me, it's a counter signal. If I see someone doing the Lizzo thing of, I am so body positivity, it becomes their identity of how they're a flaming sword, card carrying, paragon of whatever this thing is. Well, it's also a bit like the Jimmy Savile, the hospital, what was it called, it still goes, but there was a hospital for children that he raised money for all the time.

And whenever anyone would try to do an investigation, the salary goes, it's going to hurt the hospital for kids. You know, you're sure you want to run that story? That's going to hurt the hospital. So there are lots of people in our own age who have a thing like that. They build the equivalent of the Jimmy Savile Children's Hospital for Sardar in order to protect themselves. Right. You're saying that Lizzo's work with the body positivity movement is in a case to

try and effectively put a wall as large as a wall? Body people in front of a very difficult wall to get over. I think it's probably easy to get over. Getting around it might be more difficult. I think I'm not going to go, I'm going to go, come on, it ran out of gas. So I had this idea about why certain women are very pro body positivity movement. And I was listening to Bill Burr, do a live show. And he said, ladies, if you could only support the WNBA, the way that you support a fat chick who is gaining weight and no longer a threat to you, that it would be doing more numbers than the NBA is.

And I realized that some non-zero number of women may deep down in their darker moments realize that they don't discourage some of their friends from gaining weight because they can eat themselves out of their intracexual competition for potential particles. Always, well, come on, men are like that as well. How do we play that game? I mean, this is going to show a low side of my character, but you can't say always that you're sad if somebody you're not very close to, but you knew, you see them after some years and they've had. I mean, you can't after some years and they've had. I mean, you can't say there isn't a slight sort of...

You'll never guess, you'll become fat. There's different versions of that with men, I think. And I think men can be complicit in that as well. Yeah. The thrill with a friend bald's early, you know. I think that's very common. That's a thrill. There'll be a German word for that. Of course, like, Shadley, but specifically for the scalp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scalp and fro. I think, I think it lost people to do that. But it's a pretty bad thing to encourage among people. But yeah, I think it is part of the competition, taking out of the competition, for sure. I was thinking as well about how material conditions you were saying before people's parents maybe had it better in some ways but also would have had it way worse.

Material conditions often don't impact people's demeanors in the way that they might have predicted. Rich people can be bitter idiots and poor people can be grateful heroes. All those George Orwell said by the age of 50, every man gets the face he deserves. What do you mean by that? I think that's actually true. I think there's a certain age. It might not be 50 now, but it's a certain age where you do show your life on your face.

Oh yeah. I mean, for instance, somebody who's very profoundly depressed for long time, it writes itself across the face. It writes itself in their eyes, I think, particularly unhappiness, writes itself on somebody's face. Joy does as well. I mean, if somebody smiles a lot, they have laugh lines, you know. And yes, there's a great truth in it. I mean, we know that because we judge people by their faces, by the way they interact with us, by the way they look at us, it's perfectly sensible. I've found a quote the other day that said, people with a low self-esteem will always find

a way to be miserable. And it made me think that material conditions a lot of the time are what? Young people, but many people lay at the feet of their despondency or the nihilism or the critical nature or whatever it might be. And I've seen enough of my friends vacillate through varying levels of affluence or relationship or singletonness or whatever. and one of the things, it's sometimes

it impacts the way that they show up, but many times they are the common denominator between all of those situations. Material conditions don't actually impact the way that they show up all that much. Well, there's a problem of analyzing this, which is that anyone who's successful inevitably looks at their own path to success as being to some extent preordained. I mean, almost. I mean, if you just get there with something with wild luck, but most people, oh, a lot of people, I mean, say who are successful look back and they think, well, I don't understand this person who hasn't made it to the same run of the ladders I have. Why didn't they work hard? There's a sort of callousness actually that can creep in there.

But equally, people are, to a great extent, masters of their own fate. And it's a very hard one to analyze that. As I say, because the Outriders skew the whole statistics, I mean, the Outrider who does very well, not everyone can do what he or she has done, but he or she is likely to think they could have done. Well, you retroactively, lots of people that achieve success look back at the root that was particularly designed by them for them to achieve the very specific type of success that they managed to get, and then retrofit that as a universal law that anybody else could follow. But one of the things I've realized is I've spent more time digging into personal growth

and self development and all of that stuff. So much of it is post-hoc rationalization about one person's very idiosyncratic solution for this thing. And they say, these are the universal principles of X, Y, and Z, and you go, no, they're not. It's highly personal. It's your personality just spun up and tuned up to 11. Yeah, I mean, most successful people I've ever met have some story of their own growth, which is both inspiring and not replicable. What are you sure people? Well, what's the alternative, as you said before, like you have to lay the agency at your

own feet, because if you were to perhaps admit the truth, which is I was in the right place at the right time, was well, that can be the case, not many people say that, but yeah, some do. Yeah, yeah, if you're in Britain in the 80s, for instance, it's a good time to make money. Easier, better than today. So then some people will say, yeah, that's a great place at the right time. But most people do sort of vaguely think they've made it, they, it was a great place at the right time. But most people do vaguely think they've made it sort of preordained. I mean, we all do that to some extent. I often describe myself as being lucky and then need somebody to remind me of how hard I've worked.

Yeah. I had a friend who joined Goldman Sachs in 1998. And he said he had an absolute golden period for about 10 years. Yeah, it did a little bit less. He said it was already starting to wind down before Lehman, brother. Yeah. Some of that was to do with DI, a very early instantiation of DI. That's right. Yes, there's several books that make that clear and some text. Yeah, several books that make it clear about some of the hiring processes going on. Yeah, 2006, he was already seeing it.

But he told me he made a trade on 9-11. He made a very particular trade and bypassed all of the security, the limits on everything and the pit boss or whatever. He's just some young dude. He's been there for two years, right? Out of whatever university or something. What did his boss think of the trade? Came over and said, like, what the fuck are you doing? And he said, look at this. If this then that, if this then that, ran it all the way down. He said, this is the outcome. This is what's going to happen. And he was like, we would, I don't know what, so first off, he was concerned that it was gonna go wrong.

And then he made the most ungodly amount of money in the space of three hours. And then all the market shut for 10 days. From, well, yes, from September 12th. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the only organization that had spec capital was Goldman because of this particular trade. And he was basically told, we may need to cut this,

I'll check with him. He was basically told, go home, don't tell anybody. Yeah, of course. You made this. He shorted the market. Yeah, I mean, it was widely thought of 9.11 that because the stock market tanked, of course, immediately. And we didn't know if there's going to be a world war or if this was a world war.

And it was regarded very swiftly as actually being the duty of Wall Street to not do that. But Bush came back and you remember you did that ground zero announcement, and that was as much for the stock market as it was for the fucking popular. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yes, because I mean, stock market collapses, I mean, many, many more Americans, I can't have the percentage, but are invested in the stock market than in Britain. I mean, like three times more or something. Right. Americans with 401K. Yeah, more than 50% of the population in America has some investment in the in the stock market. So it's different from in the UK where when the stock went when the pound was shorted in the 1990s by Sauras and

others, they a lot of British people are not that sympathetic because they don't see themselves as being involved in the stock market, which of course they are. They just don't know it. You mentioned George Orwell the telegraph recently spoke about his wife's biography or autobiography. Oh, there's a new biography of Sonny Orwell, yeah. George Orwell was sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic and sometimes violent. Biographer of the legendary writer's wife says darkness that runs through 1984 is a reflection of his soul.

Yeah. Should we unperson George? Well, it would be the obvious end point to the full circle, full circle. Yeah, I, this is just a way for the author to get publicity is to repeat things everyone knew. I mean, George all well held the views of his time about gay men for instance. We know he was a little bit homophobic, but it was the 1940s, you know. Nancy Boyes and so on, as he would have called him, were not, you know, people weren't in like a 1990s taxi drivers insult that they've thrown at him. No, it was a sort of word that all well and people with generation would use, you know, fairies

or something. And he does in some of the letters and some of his articles. But I mean, so fucking what? I don't care. I mean, was he sadistic probably in some ways, sometimes, was could he be cruel and nasty, probably being a human being? I just think that the absurdity of our age of judging people in the past, you know, just wait till people do that to you. Wait till somebody weighs up your own life in the balance and finds you wanting. I mean, I think it's preposterous. Human beings are what we are. Being amazed at us in the past. There's always just an expression of our own vanity and thinking we've got past all that.

So like the way, if a friend of mine was saying to me the other day when I was at Oxford, if you wanted to get a grant to study these days and say in English, and you were to choose Shakespeare as your subject of study, which is sort of unusual these days, you would, you would, for instance, have to find Shakespeare guilty of, you know, racism, colonialist thinking and so on. And it doesn't seem to strike these people that actually their job is not to judge Shakespeare. Shakespeare judges us. And he might find us wanting.

How so? Well, he gives us visions of the universe and our place in it, which it would do us well to listen to. And that might include exposing human follies, human weakness, human pride, human sin, human lust, the tendency to do evil in the name of doing good or think you're doing good and do great harm. So much more. All of this is in Shakespeare's work and his characters and the things he created

in his mind and his work. I think that if you look at a panoply of a vision like that, you should think, I wonder what he's telling us, rather than I wonder how I can judge him. What's the point of the latter? So boring. Human being from the past in human being in the past shocker. Well, has it always been this way? Has it always been people of the present judging people of yesterday by the standards of today?

Well, most people didn't have time in the past to engage in that, to busy trying to put food on the table or surviving past the age of 25, you know. But what it is in our current society is there's a very strange lack of respect for wisdom. Henry Kissinger said this in the early years of the internet. He said, all the knowledge is there, but where's the wisdom? People might not like me quoting Dr Kissinger in that regard, but again, he knows a lot more than most of his critics. I do think that's an oddity of the age. I think the oddity, the vanity of trying to judge everyone from the past by our current standards is just absurd. You think you know more than Shakespeare. Do you know more than all well? These are minors, snapping giants. I don't care for them. One potentially unfortunate situation is that women's mental health is in part down to misogynistic songs when BTS lead singer Jung Kook changed to a more misogynistic music

a disturbing trend followed. A psychiatrist's point of view on BTS's Jung Kook and the messages of pop music. Early in their teen career, BTS took a deliberate stance to refrain from objectifying a sexualizing woman. Despite going against a music industry norm, they achieved huge success. Now, as part of his solo launch, different imagery has surfaced in young cook songs. They include a woman telling her her man that she will be your fantasy and swallow your pride to make him never think about cheating. Lyrics that I don't identify.

So what was the story? He was that I saw your pride in a particularly suggestive way. What was the statistics there? I've got more to go here. Lyrics that identify women as those hos over there and a male rapper telling his female partner, I wanked before you came so that I can fuck you longer. Of course, in reality, young cook songs are par for the course, or even tame.

Does that work, by the way, what you just described? You've never increased your stamina by having a warm up. I thought the lyric more likely, I did that before you came, and I just thought you'd get a better. Oh my. LAUGHTER I'd kind of like a lie down. I did that before you came in there. just let it get a better.

I'd kind of like a lie down. I did that before you came in there. That's why I texted saying I'm not so first. That's right. Yeah, I didn't. I don't have a quick dinner now. I get a bit. One of my friends had a rubric for this that was masturbate before you evaluate. Oh, well, that's true.

Yeah, that's that can be sensible advice. I'm not sure if I liked your, I was just horny. Horny, yeah. Yeah. But no, girls, mentally, you were reading out these times, you were, that's it. No, those holes over there, I went before you came so that I can fuck you longer.

Well, where to start? Downstream from K-pop is a litany of female mental health problems. That's what I'm saying. There's a problem here, isn't there? Because on the one hand, popular culture does have a massive impact on the way we see the world. I was at a gym recently where I actually

asked the gym staff to turn off the music because it was a load of rap, a very unpleasant rap, with a repeated use of the N-word in it. Obviously, it was a black rapper or so I was assuming. Right. You didn't find yourself mouthing along to the lyrics or worried about it. No, I did. But actually, I know.

That's fine. What problem could possibly emerge from singing along? Just to interject there, someone got cancelled on TikTok for mouthing the N word along to a song. Right. So it's as long as possible. It's no longer the sound of the word. It's the mouth shape that that word engenders. Well, we know that it's a magical word in our time, which even the speaking

of suddenly summons up the demons of the past. Lord Voldemort via a very, very strange. But, no, I just said to the gym, so I said, I just don't want to hear it because I don't want, I just don't want it in the background of my life, you know. Is that gym that we trained at? We can discuss this in another time, but anyway. No, I just don't like, I said things I don't want to, I'm like ears and that's one actually, I have no interest in hearing the word because it's a banned word, so why would I want it in my mental background? But anyway, the point

is, of course, popular culture has a huge impact on people. It has a huge impact on the way which people see themselves. It does. At the same time, you can overstate it. You know, somebody is not generally unhappy just because of the popular culture. Apart from thinking else because you can easily step out of it as I try to do. And, you know, be a part of your time, but not be its creature as Shilla says. And so, no, I think it's a sort of weak excuse for unhappiness. The popular culture happens not to be to your taste or avoid it. Get out. Look up from the screen. When is cancel culture going to come for rap lyrics? Because it seems to me that, you know, it's worth fighting against the misogyny of air conditioning

temperatures in offices that are conditioned to the male body temperature as opposed to the female body temperature. Or, I mean, the, the, the levity of the era is just astonishing to me, you know. Lots of people attribute to me this quote that I was not quite right. It's quite for me, but that we'll be talking about gender pronouns when the barbarians break in. But I've said something like it quite a few times, but gender norms and air conditioning, it's the sort of thing that you would be discussing just before you will get, you know, macheteed. I'm totally serious about this. It's

sometimes it's like one of the things that actually genuinely shocked me in recent weeks, taking off the Hamas massacre in Israel, was you know, and something which I do think at some point when it's all the current Israel was, you know, and something which I do think at some point when it's all died down a bit might, it might be a moment of, of, of, of, what you've got to say this carefully, but a moment of, um, seriousness, which is, you know, take the music first of all within a few miles of the Gaza board that Hamas attacked. All the young people there were this sort of peace rave and this isn't in any way to victim blame. These were people just wanting to dance and dance into the early morning and I think it was called the peace rave, the peace and love rave, something like that. And then this hideous other world broke into them, into their lives, and ended the lives of hundreds of them. There's something

haunting about this I find because it's especially haunting because it sort of demonstrates that your slogans and your attitudes only go so far, and they can't keep out some of the things that are lurking at the edges. And I think that when I hear people whining about minor things, if you have any idea of the world out there, if you had any idea of the things that was lurking, you couldn't possibly be complaining about this. Well, how do you think Gates for Gaza will get on long term? Well, the joke at the moment is that there aren't enough

tall buildings in Gaza to throw Gates for Gaza off. But these, I mean, these people, you know, I've said Ray off from there, they're part of the same phenomenon as turkeys for Christmas and chickens for KFC. I mean, I just, I'm fed up these infringed idiot cases. I mean, they're so mentally defective for these people. And incredibly narcissistic, you know, I can be queer and also celebrate penalty.

No, you fucking can't fuck off. I can be queer and also celebrate penalty. No, you fucking can't fuck off. Just, you know, I can both argue for a two-state solution and also celebrate queerness and also not let myself down. No, you can't. No, you can't. You can't do all those things. At some point, you got to choose.

I've got a video to show you. Let me show you this video. Some of these explains what does we forget the justice in free Palestine? What does not even mean? Like, what is it mean? I'm pretty sure, I'm not pretty sure, abortions are illegal in Palestine unless it's like, you know, a super metaphor for emergency in the mother of thyme.

From what I understand, actually a lot of Palestinians have to go to Israel to get the abortions they want. So what does this mean? Yeah. It's what's going to start. There's five people holding this thing. It's massive. That's very good.

That's Danny, the other half of Ryan, who was the other day that you came. You were a voice cast. Reproductive justice means free Palestine. What do you think? This is just incredibly ignorant young people in America who have been taught this weird version of the world where all oppressions interlink and interlock. You are either the majority of the minority for minority rights and issues or for majority rights and issues and all minority rights and issues intersect and overlap so that if you're

queer somehow you know no it's not even that. These ignoramuses who couldn't point to the river Jordan if you showed it to them on a map, walk along the streets of America, so it's a shout you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Because I think the Palestinians are underdogs in this weird version where they've mapped American racial, or they've mapped a very specific version

of American racial politics onto everything else in the world. So same thing people talk about colonizers. I mean, there's this language of colonizers, apartheid, all this stuff, and they've just tried to map it everywhere. Well, I say everywhere. Actually, it's highly selectively, highly selectively. I mean, the people who are talking about Israelis being colonizers, when I saw that the other day on the streets of London, I thought, yes, if only there was a name for large numbers of people who came from outside to a country, and if only we could identify

what they might be called in Britain. Oh, it would be immigrants, wouldn't it? Do you wanna call immigrants colonizers in Britain? You sure you want to follow this? The logical conclusion? The talk about indigenous peoples. Oh, okay, great. Anyway, you don't want to apply that.

Might there be a country or a continent say, oh, Europe, where you don't want to start talking about the indigenous peoples? I notice that people don't. But if you do want to, welcome to hell. So, no, all of to have things a very selective mapping of a particular interpretation of the world that very dumb people in America have tried to put on certain selective other cases.

And it doesn't work, it just doesn't work, but may they never find out how much it doesn't work. May they never find out how much it doesn't work? May they never find out? I wish some bliss in the ignorance because if their ignorance ever gets popped, it will be as brutal a day as can be imagined. I've been thinking for a good while about how hypocrisy is a purpose-built tool for the internet to use. It's like catnet for the internet. It's the thing because the reason it's so purpose-built,

it's like one of those, can you spot the difference competitions on a touchscreen iPad? This is what's on the left, this is what's on the right. And what you have is here's something that someone once said or a position that they're used to hold. And here is what they hold now, or here is what they do in their real life. Here is whatever.

And it's kind of what you're identifying here that you have a worldview which is self-contradictory. You're just using different words for one thing that is almost exactly the same for another thing. And then complaining about this one saying don't look over here at this one. Well, everyone is inconsistent to some extent. And I don't think by the way, I mean, everyone is inconsistent to some extent. And I don't think, by the way, I mean, on hypocrisy, you know, for instance, I can see a scenario where somebody might say, oh Douglas, you're hypocritical on this particular question, I might say, well, you know, there are some things I think are even more important than not being a hypocrite,

such as I don't know, surviving. I, the worst thing about him is hypocrisy. And it's a weird... Hypocrisy is the easiest one to catch people on. It's the truth of that. Correct. It's the easiest one to spot. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. And they do it, as you say, on this is what this person said 20 years ago, this is what they say now. I go, get human being in growing up, shocker. Yes. Yeah.

People are allowed to evolve, they change their minds, they grow up. They'd be rather boring to say the same thing, I think the same thing only for 70 years. But yeah, people find epoxy very, very easy to see. And it's about the only vice you can really catch somebody on, I think. Which is if you say one thing publicly and do another privately. It's about the only one that people are really confident on. Most other moral judgments are better or worse, have sort of ebbed away, but people

are still able to judge hypocrisy. But I think there are worse things. I think not standing up for your loved one is not standing up for your country not standing up for yourselves in the face of horrible opposition from within without probably worse in hypocrisy. I heard you say recently you don't have to agree with everyone's principle to respect the principle they're sticking to. Did I say that?

Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, sounds good. I didn't know I said that, but you did. But the reason that I like that is I think it shows why the bravery conversation or standing up for something that you believe in is something that is a pride, at least then if someone is prepared to stand up for whatever their beliefs are, that you can assume they're telling the truth, especially if they pay a high price for it. So one of the reasons why I have a good amount of faith that Sam believes the things that he says, because he pays an unbelievably high price to continue

to flip flop from one tribe to another tribe to another tribe, I don't think he's an unbelievably high price, but a price, let's say, relatively high price. Yeah. I mean, very early in some people's careers, I want people first to make it to public notice, people say things like, you know, do you really believe what you say? The answer to which for most people is or ought to be, well, why would I say it if I didn't believe it? There are people who obviously do say stuff for lulls or clicks or monetary purpose, but at a certain point, I mean, you've got to accept that the person thinks what they think and respect them for it or at least do them the decency of

believing that they mean it. And I think that even on people I disagree with wildly. I mean, it's such a boring argument that one, some people use it, particularly on left, is like, you know, I wonder if they actually even believe it. I think they don't, I think they're just doing it for money. Well, that's an easier way to try to ignore them than actually trying to contend with the possibility of what they're saying is something they mean, I believe, and trying to work out if there's anything in it. Much easier to say the person's only doing it except paid or something. Yeah, that's the shell, grifter, accusation, very boring accusation. Yeah. No, don't

doubt there are some people who that is the case with, but way fewer than way fewer than people think. Michael Males has a hierarchy of different, I think it's like the hierarchy of grifters. Don't know why, we've only seen Michael Males, my face immediately sort of starts to smile. Yeah, it's terrible. One of the, it's like industry plant paid opposition, controlled side of it goes all the way up and he said that he descended recently. He's not quite at paid opposition, but I think he's industry plant now.

I think like Friedman is paid opposition. Is paid is different from controlled opposition. Maybe it's controlled opposition. No, I'm fucking from controlled opposition. Maybe it's controlled opposition. No, fucking no. Control opposition is, these are such weird terms that have cropped up in our area, I love it. Again, I think there's sort of low resolution explanations with really, really low resolution explanations for things.

Whenever I hear somebody describe things as that, I always sort of know you're not dealing with somebody who actually understands the world. Do you find there's a definitely a trend of conspiratorial thinking, conspirators are much stronger in adopted homeland than it is in the UK? I think yes, that's true. What do you think, how conspiracy pilled are you? Do you see... I mean, it's...

This is the moment when people say, ah, I controlled that position. You responded. Like, this is me allowing you to graduate from... I think I talked about this on the boys' cast. That's right. And briefly, and various people wrote to me saying, ah, there you go. That's proof that you're paid. You're glowing, as it's called.

But it's, you heard you're glowing? No, what's that? So tell me if I'm wrong with this mark, you're the resident glow expert, but you're glowing means you're like a planted person who's saying something that is outing their, like... Oh, it's an intelligence operation that's breached the surface and people can see it.

They comment on TikTok saying, like, you're glowing. Oh, there's like, the people that led to the FBI who are at certain protests, yeah. Or wearing chinos and T-shirts, yeah. So your conspiratorial... Yeah, so the conspiracy theory is very difficult in our era because some of the conspiracies are true, of course, have come true. We're known to be true.

Lab leak conspiracy theory, probably true. They shouldn't have ever called nobody should ever have called it a conspiracy theory, because it wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was one of a set of hypotheticals to explain what happened with COVID. So a lot of things get called conspiracy which are not. They're just hypotheses that should be allowed to remain on the table. And that makes a certain type of person increasingly prone to believe that everything that's called conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory. And before you know it, you get say-nish individuals thinking that the moon landings were a conspiracy,

that we didn't land on the moon, the American didn't land on the moon. I don't know whether the people who now claim that believe that the Russians also faked it. It's an interesting question to ask them. Do you think that the Soviets were capable of getting to the moon But the Americans were not the Americans set up like a blue fan and a flag on a dodgy papi ameshe set But the Soviets did make it or did the Soviets and Americans both agree to pretend to have gone to the moon But not really have gone

None of it makes sense to my mind, but there's a but but but it's I have noticed and I'm well It's actually all the literature demonstrates this, that there's certain types of mental problems that people have that make them disproportionately likely to believe conspiracy theories on mass, and one of them is paranoia. The more paranoid person is, the more likely to believe that sort of thing. And that's the observation in my own life. I've known a number of people who've gone into the world of conspiracy and not come out. And they are all people who have suffered paranoid episodes in their lives. So which ads are?

Sophia engenders, yeah, and as I say, it's a sort of low resolution explanation for complex phenomena. sort of low resolution explanation for complex phenomena. And I think it's also that, so you can suppose your theories come about and are used by people who, and this isn't an original point, many people have made it, they're made, the claims about them are made by and large by people who don't understand

how unbelievably chaotic the world actually is, or can't face it. So they can't face the fact that yeah somebody who followed in the newspapers every day of all of your life did actually just die in a free car crash because the driver was drunk. They can't bear the idea. The world can't be that cruel, it can't be that random. You want a bed? It's got to be coordination. It can't be coincident. Exactly. So people who can't cope with the wild fivality of the roulette table of our lives always go to the, there must be somebody behind it. There must be somebody who's controlling all this. You can use joking, nobody's controlling

this. If anyone's controlling a damn thing, I'd want to know by now. But of course, they're not. So it's a very unsatisfactory place to arrive at in your life. And by the way, my own observation is not very good for people personally because they start to lose agency themselves. Locusts of control get externalized. I'm at the mercy of the world. Yeah. And the real answer is, well, it doesn't care. No. It doesn't even know that you exist. It is deaf to you. The ability for people to hold two conflicting thoughts in their mind at the same time is supposed to be the mark of sophisticated thinking. But it does show up here, which is the government is both so

useless that they can't get anything right and so sophisticated that they're able to call to make use of it. Oh, that's massive. The Arab world is filled with that. The Muslim world is filled with that. Things like, I've noticed this repeatedly on my travel, things like 9-11 was an inside job of the Americans to allow the Jews out of the World Trade Center. And also, yay 9-11. Good for some of bin Laden, they can do both. There was somebody I knew interviewed the father of the main 9-11 hijacker, his name's gone out of my mind, I don't care, he should be forgotten, but interviewed the father in Jordan.

And he was simultaneously capable of holding in his head that his son was a great shaheed a martyr for his alarm and that 911 was an inside job with Americans. What the fuck? Like, choose. I mean, do you think your son was an agent of the FBI and also a martyr? Like, hey, people do this. The Muslim world is particularly prone to the conspiratorial thinking because it's a source of flattery to excel, to explain why they have created so few successful societies. And Bernard Lewis made this point many years ago that

the problem in the Muslim world is that they have to find explanations because if you're given the revelations of Muhammad and you're told it's the last revelation ever from God and that you are the people who have received this revelation and everything's going to go great for you because you've got the revelation and then like the Jews, you have one country and it does much better than any of your countries

and you can't get the economy of most of your country going at all and you can't provide for most of your citizens and nobody's coming up the ladder and the economies and the dust and all this. You've got to find an exploration thread because like what? We were given the revelation and they're doing much better. I mean, there's massive things like that that sit underneath the movements of our time which maybe billions of people on the planet believe, and they believe them because it flatters themselves. It flatters the governments who aspire to run these countries,

or claim to run these countries. Yeah, billions of people believe this shit. I was thinking about the extremist worldview beliefs, largely in the West, but I guess everywhere. And I was wondering whether we have finally moved beyond peak woke. And a study came up recently that was kind of interesting. Research is from change research, pulled over a thousand registered U.S. voters from 18 to 34. A majority of both women and men consider far-rightism and far-leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. 76% of women and 59% of men consider identifying as a mega-republicant to be a large turn-off. 64% of men and 55% of women say they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist.

What was it for how was the love of a communist? 64% of men, 55% of women swipe left on a communist that to know. 55% of men said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. 41% of men said the same for a woman being into astrology. Oh, that's there. I'm with that one. If somebody says, what's your star sign date over? What does a really famous meme where it's on iMessage and the text

says, Mum, what time was I born at? And the reply from Mum says, stay the fuck away from that girl. It is, it is the heart sinks when it comes up as a question. The shame. 41, 33% of men said for Black Lives Matter, it was a red flag. If they say Black Lives Matter, 14% of women, 53% of women said it was a red flag if they refused to see the Barbie movie. 31% of men, 58% of women red flag, if they say there are only two genders, 34% of men, 54% of women, they identify as a conservative, 33% of men for they identify as a liberal. So next time you're vibing with someone, maybe save the podcast recommendations and daily horoscopes for the second date.

Wow. 55% of women say that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. I wonder if the species has any future. Because they can't listen to Joe Rogan. Well, that means you're just like, all these people are wiping out. No, very significant numbers of future partners. No, no. Um, how weird.

And Joe turning up in that. 55%. So, that's amazing. I thought, what happened to all the good old people who used to say, I don't really have an opinion on that? Well, I got. I happened to those guys. I got pulled in a good bit recently on the internet for not commenting on the recent

sociopolitical furore that's happening in the Middle East. And I quoted you, pseudonymously, and said, I'm trying to make a habit of something which is very rare on the internet to not comment on something which I know nothing about. It's a very good rule. And yet, it's the rarest thing of all. Why shouldn't I? People care about my insights into health and fitness or my learnings about social psychology. Why shouldn't my fiscal advice be important?

Why shouldn't my views on immigration or it's much to be avoided that? I mean, in the end, you make much less of a dick of yourself if you don't start talking about everything. I mean, it's somebody recently sent me an article that a relatively well-known person sent me an article recently they wanted to publish about them at least. And near the opening said, I don't really know much about the Middle East, but this is about about. And I was just like, in that case, don't speak. Don't speak and say, but here, I think,

if you don't know, just a greener to do it. That's one reason why there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of television these days in the UK where you can be invited on to debate the total ignorance who's only there for balance, you know, for off-con related balance. And I just can't do that stuff anymore. It's too demeaning, you know, that if there's a subject you know about a war that you've covered, covered many times, as in my case, from the Israel, Hamaz Wars and Israel has Polar Wars.

I just can't be sitting there with somebody. I hate to say this, it's not meant in a misogynistic way, but there's a lot of women who are currently invited on things for balance, firstly, because they're women, secondly, because they provide usually a left-wing perspective, and that's needed, if it's me, that's on as well. And I just is so depressing to give your informed opinion about something you've seen

and reported on firsthand. And then they go to the other person and they go, well, like, I think it's, I'm just like, why I don't know? Why wouldn't I just at home? Why I could be doing anything else? And I've got to listen to somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, whisk up an opinion, live on air. I'm so depressing.

But masses of people are like that. And it's just, yeah, if you don't know about it, don't talk about it. It's a very good worth. I'm, or try it out in private with friends and mates and like, try to learn something. We'd a book. Are we morally obliged to have a take on everything? No. No. Most people's opinion doesn't matter. I mean, it just doesn't. And I also think that people who spend their time online, broadly speaking, trying to broadcast out their opinions on things,

should be told more often. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what you think. I mean, one of my rules on any war is, you should never as a writer try to give advice to a government, you know. This is what the Israelis must do. This is what the Ukrainians must do, you know.

I need to listen to you. I mean, first of all, you don't live in the country, unless you live in a country, the pretty damn short, shortish, you should be a bit humble about telling other people about their lives, you know? And also like, who made you the tactician de jour on everything? Right, it's the same as COVID.

Everyone became a verology or epidemiology expert. Yes. And then they became withdrawal from Afghanistan expert and then they became a Ukraine expert and now they're all Middle East experts. And I just think it should be regarded as a massive red flag that the person in question is, normally what's happened is they've downloaded the set of opinions they believe that their tribe should have.

And that's why the morons marching in London and other cities, you know, the exception of the Muslims who just whipped up all the time by the fact that the Jews do anything. I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Arabs don't care about other Arabs. Nobody cares about the Palestinians. Nobody cares about them. Can't tell you how little they care about other Arabs. Nobody cares about the Palestinians. Nobody cares about them.

I can't tell you how little they care about them. Jordanians loath them. The Egyptians loath them. The Lebanese loath them. They've done nothing for the Palestinians for 70 years. And yet, whenever the Israelis do anything, the Muslims across the West come out on the streets because they hate the Jews. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen, not a peep on the streets of Britain, other places. Certainly not big protests. Bashar al-Assad has killed more Muslims in the last 10 years than help. Then everybody on every side killed in every war involving Israel since 1948, including the war of independence. Nobody cares. The Muslims don't come out on the streets.

They don't care. The only thing they care about is their hatred of the Jews. And it motivates them like nothing else because it hits the core of their self-esteem. They can't bear it. And so that one is very interesting to me. But there are these fellow travelers who go along with them, who have downloaded, as I say, a sort of pathetic American interpretation of colonization, decolonization, racial justice, reproductive rights, and try to map everything on.

My friends got a theory called Gwinder's Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it. At which point, they cobbled together a viewpoint from women half-remembered here say, before deciding that this two minute old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on. It's very good.

My friend Freddie Gray at the spectator, attempts to run very popular pieces each time a new big thing emerges. It's just the bluff as guide to whatever. And it's great. Usually involves, in foreign parts, usually involves saying things like, well, they better get this done before the brutal Afghan winter kicks in. Who made you an expert on like meteorology in Afghanistan? Like what? Oh no, the Ukrainians have got to make his advance before they dreaded the Ukrainian May.

And I just think of what. I mean, I tried to have- The fluffers guys. It's very useful rule. I try, for instance, never to write about any foreign policy issue. If it's about a country I've not visited, preferably visited multiple times. I just, I can't bring myself to do it. I find it too embarrassing.

It's so interesting when you talk about knowing one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion, being able to accurately predict everything else that they believe. That mono thinking just proves that you're not a serious thinker. Well, I just think it's fairly obvious, for instance, you say, you know, what's the problem with the big bearded guy winning the women's weightlifting?

I go, okay, I know all of your other opinions as well. And to be fair, that probably works the other way around as well, to a great extent. The interesting thing with most people is where they're slightly out of sorts with their own political side. Well, that's exactly the point that you, if it's been a long time since you were surprised by the opinion of your favorite thinker or right or a commentator or whatever it is, that's probably a reliable signal that they're not really thinking for themselves. Yeah. If you're just permanently, oh, yeah, it's like an older leather pair of shoes. Here we go again, the COVID things happened and I can already predict such and such as

opinion on it. You know, every single time, all of the time, every single time, you know the idiosyncrasies of this person's very, very particular worldview. Well, that's because it's not theirs. Yeah, of course. It's everybody else's. It's outsourced thinking. And that was really sad about that,

is that it means that you're not really living your life. I mean, you're living a pastiche of a prescribed set of opinions. So sad. I mean, so sad. The wasted energies and wasted lives of people who've just downloaded a set of opinions and they're just running them.

You know, that's not your life. It's just someone else's life that you're just replaying. What was that quote you taught me about being shunted to the side of the road of your own? It's a Philip Larkin quote from a poem, his yes, is a description of a couple and he says that it's something he's pushing them to the side of their own lives. It's a beautiful line, terrifying line, horrifying line. You should make everyone judge for themselves.

What does it mean to you? Well, it means that there's a life that you hoped to live. You saw your life living, and you've got pushed to the side of it and ended up not living that life. I think a large number of people have that. Almost all unhappy people I've met have that feeling to some extent. And then you've got a choice of poisons, one of which is to choose the poison of other people held me back. Another is to face up to the fact that you are in somewhere coward or a victim of circumstance or something else. But I think a lot, I mean, you know, is you know one thing that young people, you know, can be encouraged to do is to set out the sort

of life they would like to live, imagine the sort of life they would like to live and the name for it, and working it out is sometimes difficult, sometimes not. But if you do have that image of your life, as you think it should be lived, and you end up not living it, that is, particularly if you can feel yourself slowly being pushed away from it, I think that's a terrible, terrible feeling. It's like watching your own demise occur second by second, yeah., unfortunately I've never felt it, but I definitely fear it. Where do you go to find or to avoid cowardice or to find resilience or bravery? Because a lot of the time the easier path is easier and it's the one that's got the least resistance.

Surround yourself with courageous people. Surround yourself with brave people. And that can be bravery of all sorts of different kinds. When I turned 40, I had a dinner, which I think you weren't invited to, but it's only because you weren't in town, if I remember right, day by. I had to get a lot of my favourite people in the room at least. And it was interesting that a friend made a speech, which he said is striking. I went and said the names of the people around the table, but some of whom will be familiar to listeners. But a friend of mine gave a very touching speech. I was very moved by it, which he said, how noticeable it was that Douglas was surrounded himself with courageous people.

And it was from a very wide array of bits of the world and different disciplines and so on. And I was really touched by that because I hadn't particularly noticed that I'd done it. But then I rise I sort of had that actually yes, I had a massive sub-consciously, but maybe now consciously wanted to be around courageous people because I think that courage is something that rubs off on other people. I think it's enormously to be desired, to be around courageous people. And there might be different types of courage, some of it physical, some of it mental. So that's one thing, yeah, surround yourself with courageous people,

or at least not cowards, not crettians, not sort of people who just say the same things that everyone's meant to say and so on. There's many ways people can get out of this non-life that they are being shunted into. One of my friends, it wasn't a friend at the time, I just met him for the first time, but someone that had been interested in for a good while, I met in Austin a while ago. He'd had an interesting story and he'd faced a cancellation over the last few years.

he'd faced a cancellation over the last few years. And he'd sort of told me the story and he said, uh, he was saddened some rooftop, later night talking about this thing and he was regaling me with the story. He said, throughout my entire life, I thought I was a hard man. I like to do man things and surround myself with masculine people and I was into, you know, like guns

and shooting and fitness and friends with Navy SEALS and all the rest of it. He said, my entire life, I was scared that I was into guns and shooting and fitness and friends with Navy Seals and all the rest of it. You said, my entire life, I was scared that I was a coward. It's terrified that I was a coward. He said, in my darker moments, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. Beautiful. And then this cancellation thing came along.

And he said, you know, even even the people that do really hard things, hard intellectual work, hard training, work, hard physical work, all the rest of it, there's a difference in the kind of difficulty that they do because it's elected, right? You've chosen to do the hard workout. But when the entire world comes to bear on you in a way that feels like chaos and catastrophe, he was whipped up into a whirlwind and he said, yeah, that was a genuine test. And he was very grateful. He said, my better self stopped his coughing and kicked the door in and came to help. But just, yeah, I could always hear my better self clearing his coughing and kicked the door in and came to help. Good.

But just, yeah, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. Well, the thing with that is the difference between situations you find yourself in that are dangerous through choice and ones that you've been thrust into and probably know that the consequence of being thrust into danger situation is much more likely to lead to PTSD and things like that. Then if you choose to and I've been fortunate in my life, the most dangerous situations I've been in have been ones I've been fortunate in my life, the most dangerous situations I've been in, I've been one of the chosen to be in. And that's very different. But yes, I'm glad he found out that he was more courageous than he feared. But think about that. What a beautiful line. To be more courageous than you feared you were. Right? Almost this war against, this, almost this war against yourself. Yes.

That's right. This fear of your own nature. Well, that, but that, I mean, it's perfectly sensible. I mean, there's a, as a horrible example I sometimes use, but I mean, if you're ever mugged for your wallet, let alone you're mugged with somebody else, let alone you feel mugged with a girl that you were with or looking after and you just handed it over. There's like, there's, There's several reasons that it's worth handing over the wallet for. One of which is, why do I need to risk getting shot for like, stabbed or stabbed for a hundred bucks and a few phone calls in the bank? Yeah. So that's like the reason to hand over the wallet, what I can. The reason not to hand over the wallet

What I can. The reason not to hand over the wallet is, are you sure that you're not going to spend the succeeding weeks dreaming dreams of pornographic violence against your attacker? And thinking of how you're going to be able to talk to him if you could get your hands on him and the brutal way in which you would have revenge if you ever find him. It might be easier to just get your head kicked in a bit. Yes. Are you sure you can live with a version of yourself that is you handing over to Wallet? I said this recently in a piece in your post about the people on the New York subway, where there's this awful thing you've probably seen where people, like a woman will be being

abused by some maniac fentanyl addled, you know, drug addict. And, you know, people like either look into their phones, including men, or they will get their phones up and like record. And I mean, somebody said, Douglass is trying to get people killed, and I wasn't obviously, but what I was saying was, where are the men? Just like stand up and like confront the guy if he's got a woman by her hair and is parading around the carriage and Yeah, that the back lash was like What do you know these people might get killed if they step in but might say Yeah, but also

Maybe we'll have a more civil society if people don't think they can go around and do this stuff without consequence. I'd like to see far more standing up like that. I think is a pathetic position for particularly for men to be in to sit there like getting out their mobile phones. But you know, it's everyone's choice. I don't exactly know what I would do in some of the situations I've seen, you know, read about on the New York subway. Didn't that guy do a thing? Is he in jail? Did he get jailed for it? He's charged. He's coming up for trial. This is a thing he said, Daniel needy, I think. Former Marine, there was a guy on the subway who was clearly off his head on various drugs was very, very violent

towards people in the carriage. Some point tore off his top and I'm going to kill you or something like this. And this Marine at that point stepped in, got him into a chokehold, was clearly not meaning to do it, but the chokehold was too hard and he suffocated the guy and he died at the scene. And that man, then the ex-Marine is charged with a think murder, if not man, I think man slaughter. And he could face a very significant prison sentence. There's a lot of discussion in New York as to whether or not a New York jury would actually convict him. Where's he being convicted in New York, right? Because you could say that the guy, because there's a racial element, like everything in America,

and because the former Marine was white and the guy off his head was black, there was an attempt of course to put the racial lens on it. And we'll see if in New York jury, which will be comprised half or so of women who have been on the subway and have probably had unpleasant interactions, will convict this man for stepping in and genuinely think that he meant to kill the guy or just, this was like a good Samaritan act gone wrong. But it's very salutary that that sort of stuff. There was a guy in London about 15 years ago, very much haunted me because the fiance, the girlfriend, did a victim impact statement that was particularly harrowing, that they were on the top of a bus in London and a guy on the bus started throwing chips, like people's heads and have, if you want to say, got up to say, look, mate, lay off.

And the guy stabbed him. He died. And that's in a, and in the wake of a story like that, a lot more people in the society will be craven on the bus because they'll have that example in their head. My fear about this case in the New York Marine case is that he, the Marine, by doing what he did and it going wrong and the publicity it got will stop other people doing good snatch. Right. 100 percent will have done while it's pending.

Whilst it's pending. Yeah. So a lot rides off the verdict. That's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And in America with a jury when you're on one of these cases where the society could break out in rioting, I'm not sure it will for this guy because the victim wasn't enormously upstanding as a member of the community and had quite a bit of a video. I don't think it was video.

I don't think they didn't see that quite a lot of it was video, but he'd also had previous things where he had like done. Is that a whole litany, like a laundry list of times that he'd been arrested for every time. Violent conduct, yeah, exactly. So he won't be that sympathetic or character, but then there are quite a lot of unsimperted characters who get dragged through the laundry of racial justice stuff in America and become saints. I won't name any names.

Going back to the sort of way you go when you need more resilience thing and the bravery piece, what was that CS Lewis quote about the times not being optimal? Oh yeah. What's that? That's one of my favorite, one of my favorite sermons overgiven was by CS Lewis University Church in Oxford in October 1939. Yes, I love that. Lewis was a master of prose as well as theological writing and he gave this beautiful, beautiful sermon in which he said, yes, he said, the conditions are not optimal at the moment.

The search for truth and beauty that our species goes through, it's sort of going through such a trial. But the point is the conditions never were optimal, they never are. He says, even those periods of history, which seem to be tranquil, like the 19th century, turn out on closer inspection, to be filled with crises, alarms, panics, and all the rest of it. He says, if human kind had put off the search for truth and beauty until the conditions were optimal, the search would never have begun.

And the main point he makes is that there is something wonderful and unusual about human beings. He says that the ants, for instance, have chosen their own route. They've chosen safety and the security of the hive, and presumably they have their rewards. But as he says, he says, men are different. And he gives us beautiful lists. I think I can remember it. He says, they propound mathematical theorems

in beleagued cells. They quote the latest poem whilst advancing on the walls of Quebec. Make jokes on scaffolds and comb their hair at the gates of Femopole. This is not Pannache, he says. It is our nature. Fuck, that's cool. It's true as well in my observation. Absolutely true. Also, well, because I've seen people in beleaguered cities many times, cities under fire,

cities under bombardment, cities that are being raised to the ground, and human life goes on. It's an extraordinary thing. People continue their studies if they can. People continue their family life if they can. They've realized that the conditions will never be optimal. When they can be better and they can be worse, but they're never perfect. And I think that the real lesson of what Lewis is saying is, and I think it's an important lesson for young people in our time, don't put off whatever it is you're meant to do until the situation is optimal. Don't fail to pursue what it is you think you're meant to pursue in your life until you have total tranquility, for instance, you know, that you have

the house or the apartment you would like until you have the relationship you would like until you have the relationship you would like, until you have the... Don't put it off until then. Or until the world is peaceful. Where shall never happen. Never happen. Never has happened, never will happen. Don't put it off until then, because if you put it off until then, it means you'll put it off forever. So do whatever you're meant to be doing now.

Start now if you haven't started already and if you started already don't go any slower for God's sake. And this is part of the you know the cost of our times I've said this before but part of the cost of our times is the enormous expense of energy on idiotic things that you can do nothing about. I think we should say to more people, don't howl at the moon. Don't shake your fists to the skies. Get home with what you're meant to be doing. And that will be different for everybody.

But I just, I'm very, well, I'm too irritable to put up with going at the slow speed that a lot of people want to make us all go out these days. So I want them out of my way. Yeah, I think a lot about the arise of a victimhood culture. No, it's got no time for. Yeah, it seems to me that like an existential crisis is actually a luxurious position to be in, because the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted.

And victimhood culture is so rampant at the moment because the human systems demand for challenge is outstripping reality's ability to deliver it to it. All of the problems, most of the problems that previously would have captured the front of our attention have been moved out of the way. Absolutely. So I mean, sensitivity to challenge has now been tuned up. Yeah, hunger and so on. Yeah.

I think that's true. I'm just amazed by that. I mean, I feel sometimes we're increasingly like I'm just in a different world than the one we're now in. It's only a different society. I'm sure it was the same with you and you were growing up, but the Britain I grew up in was a place which liked resilience. I mean, we admired resilience. We didn't admire people who wind and mule.

In fact, those are the people you avoided. At all costs. Gosh, she's a whiner. God, he's a whiner, I mean. You know, and people said things like, you know, mustn't grumble. That's one of my favourites. How are you, mustn't grumble? Now, I'd say, well, actually, I've got stage four cancer.

I'm not sure that's grumbling. I know, but we talked about it like that. People from that generation still say things. I've offended that generation who's got cancer at the moment. And she's like, oh, so boring. LAUGHTER So boring. Everyone I grew up with was like that. Now, you might say there's something unhealthy about that, but there's actually something

healthy about it too. And there's something healthy about assuming that everyone has their troubles and so they don't need you to add yours to their list of things to worry about that day. And you know, and share people up and encourage them where you can. And so I want to say, don't bring them down. It's a weird sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of pedestalizing victimhood that there is a limitless sky on how much victimhood you can claim. whereas if your status and your prestige is downstream from your accomplishments, there is a limit on how much you can accomplish because you need to go out and fucking do it.

Reality is going to constrain how much impressive stuff you can go and do, but there is an ineffable Inevitable universe of athletes' foot and my gluten intolerance and my chronic flatulence and my, you know, whatever else, those are things that you can just continue to accumulate like trinkets. Yes. I just find those people boring. I just don't care for victimhood. I think it's undesirable emotion. It's a sign of a rather undesirable person.

But I don't know why we've given into this. I've genuinely, particularly in Britain, I'm just baffled by it, because it wasn't the country we had. Well, maybe it's, you know, how you said your solution for courage was to surround yourself with courageous people if you kind of get this memetic wave, almost moving through where fewer courageous people are around, which creates fewer courageous role models,

which means to, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have the thing of men being persuaded to become cringing unocks. Not a good thing. Well, that's another reason why, you know, this conversation around the guy in the subway is so interesting. Because is he, is he really supposed to stand up for the women or is that?

Is he mansplaining? What if he mansplains while he stops a woman to have the answer? Yeah, the answer around by her hair. Well, of course, the answer to that is the other hair, so say, you know what, there's no touch thing as mansplaining or at least it's not very important, get onto something more important, like women not being assaulted on the subway. Choose your priorities.

With a denial of sex differences, would leads to the conclusion that that woman can, like why shouldn't the women stand up? Why shouldn't they use up a body weight? Yes, to push this fentanyl fuel maniac off this lady. Well, let's say that's a luxury belief for that one. And it doesn't meet reality very well. I'm not sure anyone would be very happy if the men in the carriage said to the woman,

women in the carriage go on, go on, go on. You're done. Yeah. We've had our centuries of patriarchy. Or higher. Yeah. What is it? There's one that got my goat recently with them. Yeah, we've had our centuries of patriots higher What is it there's one that got my goat recently with them? Somebody was in the US or you always happens now and everything comes up about conflict Hillary Clinton was one the worst culprits are doing this but they say they always say this thing

I've no one the reasons you've got to stop any war once it starts is they say you know the first victims of a war or women What a fucking knot. The men, they're men who do most of the fighting and the dying. Hillary Clinton's point is well then the widows and then ah yeah the poor widows of the men that are dead. Yeah there's a actually the British MOD has a thing of a special section now dedicated I think thanks to the impressive insight of that military expert, Angelina Jolie, they have a special bit of the MOD dedicated to women in conflict, suffering of women in conflict. Why not have a, the suffering of men in conflict as well? Such weird priorities are age, it's totally unserious,

this age is so unserious. So why you can't help thinking that at some point, the maniacs, the barbarians were just breaking because we've made ourselves so weak. But it's so captivating, right? This is what I meant when I said, have we progressed beyond peak woke? Because it seems to me like both the hyperwoke and hyper anti-woke thing is capturing so much of the attention. Oh, they're just, I'm so bored of these people, they're so ridiculous. Can't spend any more of my life listening to them. I don't want to listen to the slowest kid in the class. I don't want to go at his or her speed. I don't want to talk to somebody so mentally impaired that they think that we are

a weirdly hemafroiditic species, or that the clownfish is a useful species to interpret to behaviour of human beings. We can't go at this speed. No. No. 20 years ago at the dawn of the internet age, we had hoped that we would get so much father in the 21st century. And here we are with this stupid society slowed down by maniacs, debating the first thing we knew, boy or girl. Like no, not going at that speed. Emma Raddakanu did an advert for HSBC recently, which you may have missed. HSBC rewrote three classic fairy tales, their book is called Fairer Tales, and it shows that women don't need men at all. With financial attitudes shaped as early as five years old, the new book challenges traditional gender stereotypes. The new book called Fairer Tales,

Princess is doing it for themselves. Reimagines Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel as successful business women, Prince Charming. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Emma Raddokanu read to them. So in the end, the princesses didn't need a prince to save them. They set up their own businesses, saved their money, and then spent it very wisely. Maybe one day you'll buy a tower, or set up your own shoe business. That's a quote. Said the tennis player. That's the worst. I mean, I read Meghan Markle's book, The Bench. And that's worse. That's worse. Wow. Yeah. What a inspiring tale. Fairer tales. Princesses doing it for themselves.

Have you seen the South Park episode of where Cartman wakes up? He hasn't, a nightmare. You told me about this other one. There's a whole bunch of things. Except for the people that haven't seen it. What is Cartman, Cartman has a nightmare, it turns out. He is a diverse black woman. His character is really cast.

And all of his friends, Kenny and everyone else, are diverse female or trans-racial characters. And then Cartman wakes up from the night, and his mother comes in, what is it? Are you having another dream? I want to get all my favorite characters in the cartoons have been replaced by ethnically diverse women. And it's okay, Carman. It's okay. The CEO of Disney isn't hiding under your bed. That's right. Would you check, would you check? Would you check, Mom? Okay, I checked, she's not there.

I'm worried that she's gonna come out again. I'm flashing on my favorite characters with their think we like the first women. I love those guys, God, they keep doing it. Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing with the, there was that rather unappealing young woman who was meant to be playing Snow White and the new Disney Snow White.

Rachel Zygler. No, no, no, somebody else. And she is. Is it? Yeah. Rachel Zygler. So she said, Prince Charming wasn't a prince, he was a stalker.

Yeah, and she didn't need Prince Charming to discover that she could be the woman she could be. I mean, this is like sub-barra-cabama circa 2007. Like the Prince says, is the person she's been waiting for or something? You're sister's keeper. I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I- That's what I can never understand with that. Why don't they just invent new tales instead of screwing up every existing tale that's loved? Well, make your boring movie about an inspirational tale of a woman who wants to start a business and then does and has some success. I mean, okay, make that intro film.

Why do you have to go and ransack and rape all of, pillage all of the storehouse of stories that people like? Brett Cooper's playing Snow White for Daily Wire. Did you see that announcement? What? You don't see this. Let me tell you, Jeremy Boring and Ben Shapiro are doing their own live-action remake of Snow White with Brett Cooper as Snow White, because she's like West End trained, right?

So she's a very well trained, I'm supposedly a very well trained actor, who can sing apparently, like the triple threat, podcast, act, sing. Right. And they announced it the other week, and it's gonna be coming out next year. God, I hope they'd slay, Disney.

There's a rumor that Disney has had to reshoot a ton of scenes, including all of the dwarf scenes, because originally the dwarves weren't dwarves. They were like a multi-racial just group of different people. They were diverse, ethnic women. It was the same thing again. But apparently, this is just a rumor, but apparently they've reshot it all of the scenes with the dwarfs to CGI actual dwarfs in. Oh. So they've gone full.

Yeah, because I know that there was a revolt of the dwarves, which is something you don't hear every day. No. There was a revolt of the dwarves because, of course, dwarf actors who have their equity cards annoyed because there's not many dead-served jobs. Yeah, if you'd presumed it. There should have at least been seven. Yeah, plus a stunt actor. Stunt-warf.

One to do all seven stunts. Well, you could have 14, I guess. It depends how demanding the act of intelligence largest you want to spread around the dwarf actor community. But yeah, the point is, it's, it's, it actually was a panic rebellion about this because like these are some of the few like dead-s surf roles we've got. What is this not the same, the people who didn't cast that, is that not the same group of people that would say we can only have a gay actor playing a gay man

and we can only have a black actor playing a black man and we can only have other people as such. I won't use a word. Yeah, I mean, again, we haven't got time to go to the pace of these people. Acting is pretending to be other people. People will be shocked that most people who play Hamlet are not themselves members of the Danish Royal family. Welcome to the world of Make Believe. A charity shop in Swansea asked people not to donate sex toys. Barnardo's customers have been asked to refrain from donating used and unused marital aids

as they aren't quite the sort of toys we're looking for. When they say we want like your old book to old toys, they didn't mean sex toys. Sex toys. I think that's a perfectly good policy for a secondhand shop. Customers will remind you of rifling through the second hand dildo event. You don't. What are they got in here? It's a redressing room.

Yeah. Hi. Customers were also reminded that the branch had CCTV so that these items can be traced back to the original owners. Yeah, hi. At Customers, we're also reminded that the branch had CCTV so that these items can be traced back to the original owners. Oh, oh, according to the data. That means that that means that you, there's like a, what's he called that thing in Australia, the boom rank. That's a boom rank effect. You can give your dildo away and it keeps coming back to you. Then it's back on your doorstep the next morning. God damn it. Where can I get rid of this thing? Put it over the head. But it keeps landing in binados.

You know, and then it brings that. It's a dildo that will never die. Yeah. Yeah. Thinking about it. Well, thank you for that story. That was beautiful. Well, I've got another one.

Is there a lesson we can take from this? Oh, I think just be careful where you put your dildos really is the matter. That is a moral of the story. Yeah, never leave your dildo in Banados. Yeah, definitely not in the bargain bin. School in Lafayette has refused to celebrate Halloween because it isn't inclusive while going all out for LGBT plus history month. Is there much history with LGBT plus gay history? I mean, there lots of gay people in history and there

is that, but it's also what we used to call history. There isn't much T history. There's B history. I mean, there are sort of, I'm a bit skeptical about bisexuality, but there's a bit of bisexuality in history, of course. But, I mean, again, these people are such eagerness as they never know anything. I can't tell you, Chris. I mean, I have to deal with some of this shit and they just don't know anything and they keep record, it's like the all-well thing. They keep reporting their so-called discoveries as if people didn't know them before and everybody knew most of the stuff that they are trying to bring out, and it's just very tedious.

And again, what's happened to the mainstream thing of it? Why aren't we concentrating on big subjects, big authors, big historical issues? Instead of this boring, slow pace. We're here at ARC, and we're going to be attending at some point this week. I can't remember what the tagline is something about a better vision for the future, a more positive vision for the future. Yeah, a better story. Better story for the future, sorry, John. And what is your, how would, how do you think that we can begin to tell a more positive story for the future? Because it seems to me that much of the proposals are quite easily criticised and often rightly

so. But does this sort of zero sum view of happiness and growth? Somebody else is happiness somehow detracts from mine. Well that's a particularly British view, of course. Very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That guy's got something because I've not got it. It's taken it from me.

It's taken it from me. Yeah, but what's a more positive vision of the future? Well, one would be that we're not facing imminent apocalypse and catastrophe all the time from every possible direction. And particularly not ones that people have whipped up a new generation into a further over. I mean, I think of a green apocalypse thing as a particularly damaging to young people.

I think it's very, very bad for their mental health. Very had, very, very detrimental to their sense of how they build a future. And I think a lot of young people have been lied to about the proximity of global climate catastrophe. I mean, every time there isn't an actual catastrophe going on in the world, our leaders go straight back to the climate catastrophe. I mean, every time there isn't an actual catastrophe going on the world, our leaders go straight back to the climate catastrophe and they're going to a climate crisis, they now call it. What is happening is not a crisis. Maybe a problem to be managed,

but there's a luxury in calling such things a crisis. A crisis is like, minute, my shoes are on fire. That's a crisis. Not like it's possible that in 40 years, we'll need more AC. I don't see that as a crisis. But so yes, but I think that in general, there are several things that are big stories, big narratives of people being spun, which are incredibly innovating. That is they sap energy out of the society. You could feel it.

The hopelessness, if you tell young people they're not going to live into adulthood, because they're all going to burn to death. The hopelessness of saying, you know, you can't change anything, or that this is the trajectory we're on. I think that one of the other ones in the green stuff is that the hopelessness of saying people effectively, you shouldn't leave any footprint on the planet, including children. Including children. And just to put one thing out there about the hopelessness of that.

I mean, there's just new thing that many cities have signed up to, including London, which is a future in which, among other things, we will not be allowed to move around very much, and we will be allowed a flight, perhaps every six years, I think it is. What's this? It's a city's, what's it called? I'm blanking on the name. It's this new proposal for cities in 2030 or something. It's a decal and has signed up London to it. Is it one of these carbon neutral fantasies? No fun 2030. Yeah. And one of them is that you won't be allowed to fly more than once every X number of years. And of course, none of it makes any sense because among other things,

all that means is, apart from the fact that the airline industry has destroyed, is what it means is the cost of an airline ticket will be like 40 times higher. But so they always assume you can do all of these things and nothing will change. You know, amazingly, you'll be able to put a rule like that in and you won't destroy the airline industry or whatever.

But all of it is just so anti-human. I mean, it is so anti-human. The aspiration of human beings should not be to be born, fight against the patriarchy, leave no carbon footprint and die in the most ethically fine manner, preferably taken out of a Swiss clinic, you know, and then I burned in a cardboard box. It's not a very heroic narrative, you know? And I think that actually we do orient our lives around stories and around narratives, and we should not have the unit narrative that I've just laid out. We should have heroic narratives. I mean, for instance, you know, the narrative of the adventure, of

life being an adventure, that you set out on a path and hope that you set out yourself out on a heroic path, or at least an exciting path. You know, I mean, the counterpoint of the one I laid out earlier, of the one, you know, you don't know, you know, sorry, the counterpart of the one I laid out earlier, which is the, you know, everything's going to happen if you go along this path of things other people have persuaded you to say, is, well, you know where you're going, you know everything to say, and you know kind of what trajectory you're life will be on. Well, you know, I're going, you know everything to say, and you know kind of what trajectory you're life will be on. Well, you know, I say, well, yeah, there's another trajectory as well. And it's the one that I and I suspect you orient ourselves in our life, which is, I don't know exactly.

I don't know with that certainty. I don't know what will happen, but if I put one foot fairly sure, footedly in front of the next and tread well and orient myself by things like truth, sure I don't have the certainty, but it's an adventure and it's my adventure, your adventure. You actually own it. And then fancy that. You'll actually have your life. I mean, you can feel proud of what you got to, right? Because you weren't being ventriloquized by somebody else's.

You didn't spend your life saying things you don't know or mean or believe or just repeating like a parrot in order to keep in with a group of people you shouldn't seek the affirmation from. You will live your life. Remember that the outcomes that most people get are ones that you don't want in any case. The average American is obese, divorced, and with less than one K in the bank. So doing what everybody else does sounds like a very surefire strategy, but the outcomes are ones that you don't want. Yeah, well, I mean, and that can be the case

with financially successful people. I mean, it can be the case with people, I often say that people are going to professions which they don't like. And again, it's interesting. I mean, some of them are, there are ones that people apologize for as you talk to them. You notice that? There's certain, normally these days, one of the biggest self-deprecating professions is lawyers. You say to somebody, what are you doing? I'm a lawyer. I think, why that? You spent five years in full-time education, three years

in developing too. And normally, it's like, they think, oh, five years in full-time education, three years in developing too. And normally it's like they think, oh, well, it's not very interesting or something, but I think, why wouldn't you do something where you went, I am a lawyer, it's fantastic. I love doing this. That's British lawyers again for you. I've got that.

Well, no, I've seen Americans do that as well. My point is, and they're financially well rewarded. Yeah. And there's rules you can follow on that like, like, there are ones I don't understand. If you are doing a job that pays you well and allows you to provide you for your loved ones, that's worth doing. If you're not your optimal role, doing a role that you don't much care for and you're not providing for other people. And you don't see any particular purposes.

That's probably not a good idea. Or you could go, you know that there are other options and other routes open to you that will allow you to also provide for the family you're providing for. The bravery narrative is definitely one that I think is lacking. And this risk aversion that we have, this young people getting their driver's license is later than ever, most commonly living arrangement for men and the age of 35 is still living at home with their parents. Yeah, that's such an awful staff. People going into full-time employment later than ever, you know, I think about, you know, when we were, actually, no, you are the worst person to talk about this.

You told me you didn't get your driver's license until some of the... I know, I should have been a bit lazy. I'm not lazy. But I'm not risk of losing weight. I'm just lazy on that. They manifest similarly. Most people cut you 17 years old in the UK,

driver's license. I want to be free, I want to be liberated. I don't want to have to be asking them and dad for lifts and etc, etc. to be liberated, I don't want to have to be asking them and dad for the left and etc. etc. And yeah, there's not a there's not a narrative of adventure. No. I think that is important because I think that you if you don't have a narrative of adventure and success and an idea of what that looks like, you know, you are disproportionately

likely to to live a more miserable life. I think probably both of us, to some extent, have worked our way out as we've done it. And, you know, trodden the path that's not completely clear. And if you said to me, what are you going to do in 10 years time, doctors, I can particularly tell you, tell you roughly what are you going to do in 10 years time, Douglas? I can particularly tell you, I'll tell you roughly what I'd like to do, but it's not entirely clear. It might be if I was in a corporate law firm and hoping to make partner or something like that. But, yeah, I mean, the lack of clarity on it should be energizing. I'd have thought.

Well, that's what's exciting about it. But also for the desire for certainty, which is also exactly where the conspiracism comes from, right, because it removes random chance from the world and makes everything coordinated rather than coincidental. That desire for certainty really dissuades people from going and doing something which has potentially outsized outcomes. Well, look at what happens, the narrative of leaving home, or leaving the village, or leaving the town. There's every reason not to go, because if you go, you risk a lot of things. One of them is failing. And if you go and you fail, then you have to go back to where you were from, a fail, with your tail between

your legs, and then you can can sell yourself that you tried it, but it didn't work. A lot of people will not even make the try, because they think it won't work. So they never leave. And other people go and they finally make it to the city. And I mean, that's just a story of old-south beaches. They finally make it to the city, or large gathering place, and they make it there. You know. And one of the reasons why New York is a thrilling city is it's filled with people making it. I mean plenty of people who will fail and it's very harsh in a way

because the two are so close together. The billionaires blocks will have a veteran with a sign lying on the street outside. So you always, and then you get that simultaneous thing of success and the mirror of it of desperate failure, or I mean, I don't mean that, a judgemental way in the case of the vet, but desperate your life. Yep. Very close to each other. And I suspect that both of these things fire up New Yorkers all the time. Yeah. Well, you're getting to see how far you could go and how far you could fall, shown.

Yes. In front of you all the time. Yes. Yeah. There's an interesting study by Candice Blake in Australia that looked at wealth inequality in local ecologies positively predicting self-sexualization of women in online dating profiles. So, I think I followed that. If there is high wealth inequality, Women both see the sort of partner they could get in their wildest dreams and in their worst nightmares. And it positively predicts more sexualized images

in online dating profiles and social media. And her argument was that it amps up a woman's competitive edge in terms of finding a partner that they think would be able to ensure they don't end up down at the bottom end of the inequality distribution. And instead they end up in the clouds where they've seen people's outcomes occurring. Well, of course, there are also people who fake it. Well, that's the effective way to play the game. I was once in India and I had a guide I got talking to and I said, we were talking about how easy or otherwise dating was in the outskirts of Delhi, which means the slums.

He said the trick is, he did scribe there's a trick, is if you meet a girl you like, you go for date with her, but you borrow your friend's shoes, for instance. There'll be a friend who has a pair of trainers, sneakers, that are nice, good, and you borrow his shoes for the date. And then another time you might borrow a friend's motorbike. So the pool of men helps like swap right. Right. Okay. And the idea is they have one good dating outfit and vehicle between 10 people. And he said the idea was that you get the woman to say she loves you and she'll marry you.

Then you do the reveal it was somebody else's shoes. Your shit shoes. Yeah. Which I thought was both horrific, admirable. He told it to me like that, and horribly recognizable. Think of all the people who spashed our money in restaurants and things who don't really have it at all. Pretend to live above their means or do live above their means. It's all to try to intrap a mate, I think. People do a lot for sacks. Yeah, I know. I've seen. Doug this morning, ladies and gentlemen, Douglass, I really appreciate you. What's coming up next? What can people expect over the next few months?

I don't know, I don't know what I expect over the next few months. I'm going to a couple of war zones and we'll report back. I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thank you.