The Joe Rogan Experience - #1538 - Douglas Murray

Episode Date: September 17, 2020

Writer, journalist, and political commentator Douglas Murray is the author of The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, now available in a newly expanded paperback edition from Bloomsbury Publishing. Also look for The Strange Death of Europe available everywhere.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day douglas how are you great to be with you again joe how are you great to be with you as well and we were talking about you potentially being able to come to america hopefully sometime that's right i'm hoping to i'm hoping to It would be nice to be with you for the end times. Well, I've escaped to Texas, so I think I'll avoid the end times for at least a couple of months. I think we'll know. Do you think that's what it might have bought you? I think it's already happening in California. I mean, if it keeps burning the way it's burning,

what's going to be left? Some friends of ours sent photos from Mammoth, California, up in the mountains. It is a hellscape. It's a terrifying vision. It's just everything is on fire. It's so bizarre. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a combination of events, isn't it? That's the other thing that's so terrifying. It's like just seeing a civilization being hit by plague, by fires, by pestilence, by politicians, everything.

If we were in another time where we didn't have access to information, we would be sure that this is the end. I think we'd be expecting the sun not to come up tomorrow by this stage. I think we'd be expecting the sun not to come up tomorrow by this stage. We'd be expecting demons to arise out of the fires and ride horses with searing eyes. And then we'd be trying to work out which of our friends were the demons and slaying them for no reason. Right, right, like the Salem witch trials. Yeah, it's at Los Angeles, which I was telling you before we got started that I fled. at Los Angeles, which I was telling you that I, before we got started, that I fled, I really never thought too much about the government there.

I never thought too much about who the mayor is or who the governor is. But my God, does that matter? Yeah, yeah. I just saw the mayor of Portland has done another cracking one in the last 24 hours. I think he's sort of, there's some move to have even less policing or something like that. He's hilarious because he is the most progressive mayor in this country. And they're like, fuck you, not good enough, resign, no cops, no laws, no rules. Yeah, I saw, see, they came to his house, didn't they? Yes, they lit his lobby on fire.

Yeah, yeah, that didn't persuade him that it was a problem. He's like, they all, they mean the right thing. They're anti-fascists. How could they be wrong? That's one of the other plagues. That's one of the other plagues. It's just amazing that that name is still being used by people. There's some people, particularly like hardcore left-wing sites, that still call them anti-fascists.

Instead of Antifa, they're calling them anti-fascists, which is like an obvious move to distort what they've done and what they stand for and what happened in Seattle and what's happened for over 100 days in Portland. Well, it all matters, doesn't it? The language matters. And everyone's been caught on the back foot by it because a huge number of people have clearly been persuaded that they are what they pretended they were. You know, I suppose people are falling away bit by bit from believing that the anti-fascists are actually anti-fascist, but they've clearly fooled a lot of people. It's been a clever move on their part, calling themselves this. If they had just called themselves fascists, they might have, you know, everyone else might have got there a bit faster, but they were quite clever on the naming. Yes, because if you look at what they're doing,

there's nothing anti-fascist about what they're doing at all. In fact, what they're trying to do is get people to comply. They're actually using fascist tactics, getting people to use their language and comply, and they're trying to literally get rid of the current police and the current authority. They're trying to do it by force. The best example of the fact they're not even trying to disguise it is that they're trying to make everyone raise their arm. was that used that used to be a giveaway yeah the thing that they did in washington dc where my i just i'm continually astounded like every day i look at the news for a hope

like a glimmer of light like some reason has popped through and it's it's not coming every day it gets more and more bonkers. Those people outside, a bunch of white people, by the way, screaming at this lady who has marched for Black Lives Matter multiple times, telling her she must raise her fist in compliance. You know, she's my hero. She's my glimmer of light. She really is. I, you know, quite often in sort of good times or comparatively good times, people say things like, you know, where are the heroic people? And they sort of forget that heroic people come up because bad things occur and heroism, which they didn't know was there, comes out. I think that woman is a very good example of that. She probably didn't know she had the heroic instinct to make her not go along with the mob. And she just one evening in her own spare time out for dinner proves this incredibly heroic trait, which is no, I won't go along with you.

You can't tell me what you do. I won't raise my fist. I won't kneel. I won't dance. And so, yeah, there's the glimmer of light. And she was really I mean, she was in a beautiful position being that she has marched for Black Lives Matter. She does believe in the cause of stopping police brutality against people of color. She believes in all those things.

But she's like, that's not what this is. This is a bunch of thugs bullying me into compliance. And it's a bizarre, disgusting, natural human instinct to try to get people to bend to your will. And that's what all those idiots were doing when they were surrounding her with this arbitrary gesture of raise your fist, as if that helps anything. Also, didn't you feel, I mean, people are too generous to the people who go along with this. But when I saw the footage of the people in D.C. restaurants who did go along with that, you know, sitting, having a quiet dinner with their girlfriend, and then these people come in and they sort of do agree to raise their fist and you can see some of them

looking a little nervous when the chanting started to become fuck the police you know like oh i'm not sure i'm with that one um but uh but no i mean i and i feel a sort of contempt for that those people because that is also the problem the problem is these people who are willing to go along with the crowds and be told by the crowd what to do. Instead of standing up, which they should do, and saying, excuse me, I'm trying to have a dinner with my girlfriend here. Fuck you. Surely. I agree with you, but I think those people are just in fear literally of their safety and possibly their life.

We've seen so many instances of people getting beaten up and stomped and kicked. life we've seen so many instances of people getting beaten up and stomped and kicked i'm sure you saw the one guy who got pulled out of his car and a guy ran up behind him and kicked him in the head and knocked him unconscious i mean sure they're doing this for people that have done nothing wrong for no reason absolutely just my mentality but but you know you know as well as i if you if in a restaurant in washington dc and a beggar comes along and disturbs the clientele yeah you know the restaurant staff will move the beggar comes along and disturbs the clientele, you know, the restaurant staff will move the beggar along. It's an ugly side. It's an ugly, you know, division that exists. But if a mob comes into the restaurant, the restaurant staff don't do anything either. I mean, everyone is

in fear of these mobs. And at some point that has to stop. At some point people have to say individually or as groups, we're not going along with that. And you can't intimidate us. You just can't intimidate us. Well well that's what's scary about these things happening in places that have open carry for for firearms and you know you're you're seeing that obviously in kenosha when that 17 year old kid showed up with a gun and they attacked him and he shot and killed two people and this is this is a really scary moment where it could tip one way or the other. And my fear is that after the election,

it tips in the worst way possible. Because I don't see a positive resolution left or right. I think if Biden wins, people will be furious. And if Trump wins, people will be furious. Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, I've always loved your country and I've spent quite a lot of time in it. But I do have to say watching it at the moment, I mean, this is all the basis for a civil war. Yeah.

And I'm sure, you know, you know that. But I think a lot of people haven't quite realized this yet. This is all, you know, my country went through this 400 years ago. A fundamental debate over the nature of our state and our government. And it seems to me you have a fundamental disagreement like that going on there now. You know, a portion of the country doesn't believe in the founding principles, and another one holds them to be absolutely holy. I don't see how you reconcile that. I agree with you. And my friend Tim Poole was talking about this over a year ago.

He was saying, I see this country headed to civil war. I was like, that's a bit hyperbolic. I'm like, that's kind of ridiculous. I thought he was just being silly. I thought he was just taking it too far. Like, oh, we'll be fine. But this is pre-COVID. This is pre... I think COVID has ramped up everything considerably because

everyone's so nervous and there's so many people out of work and there's so many people that have the time to do these things, to show up in front of the mayor's office or the mayor's house and light it on fire in Portland because they don't have jobs. There's nowhere to go to. And there's also no hope. And as they see these traditional structures, the traditional economic structure, the traditional political structure, as they see these traditional structures, the traditional economic structure, the traditional political structure, as they see these things deteriorating, they're making their moves. And this is where it gets really spooky. Because if they continue to do things like Chaz, the six-block place in Seattle,

I mean, that seemed like almost a little bit of a test, a little bit of a test run. I mean, they did a Mad Max-style takeover of six blocks in Seattle and held it for a considerable amount of time with the compliance of the mayor, who called it the summer of love. I know. I saw a video of that, of what happened after Chaz. And there were zombie-like people lying around on the grass. Everything seemed to be covered in urine. And there weren't any statues, obviously. There were a hell of a lot of plinths. after Chaz and there were like some zombie-like people lying around on the grass. Everything seemed to be covered in urine and there weren't any statues, obviously. There were a hell of a lot of plinths and everything had graffiti over it. And I thought people should realize this is what you inherit. You'll inherit rubble. You'll inherit piss-stained rubble. And I'm not sure how many people have got that lesson yet. Well, they should read your book. The Madness of Crowds is

excellent. It really is. It's a very good book. And you wrote that book before the shit really have got that lesson yet well they should read your book the madness of crowds is excellent it really is it's a very good book and you know you wrote that book before the shit really hit the fan but uh it was uh eerily accurate in in many ways when you were you were talking about the current problems and where they could lead and there's there's so much of what you were saying in that book that could be used as a like a guide to what's happening today that's what i hoped i mean i did it a year ago i've updated it now and what did you have well basically because now um is that it's out this month is that basically i i thought something very interesting happened through the covet era which was that at the beginning of it,

I thought, we all thought, okay, this is a plague like the Justinian plague. It's going to end the empire. We're all going to lose massive numbers of our loved ones. And if that's the case, at least at these end times, the social justice warriors will pipe down. You know, it was my one consolation was I thought at least we won't have to deal with them so much, because if everyone's got real problems, if everyone's got real complaints, kind of microaggressions start to seem less important than they have done in recent years. So that was my assumption at the beginning, was if the plague was what it seemed at first, then we'd hear less from these people. And then my impression was that as COVID went on, something very interesting happened, which was that our tolerance for the social justice

activists diminished. I mean, there were little things like little bits of light, like Sam Smith, you know, from his mansion posts a photo of him sort of crying a bit and sort of sad because he's lonely. And normally that would be, oh, Sam Smith, they is feeling bad and so on. And there was just total of we don't care. We don't care. Who is Sam Smith? Sam Smith is a British. I'm so pleased you don't know of him.

It fills me with joy. He's got a horrible, horrible whiny voice. He sang one of the worst Bond theme songs against some really stiff competition, as you know. And it was one that nobody had. Anyhow, Sam Smith was a guy who came out as gay, then as genderqueer, and then as non-binary, or look at me.

Or look at me. He'sbinary, or look at me. Or look at me. It's coming out as look at me. That's what it should be called. It should be called coming out as look at me. Yeah, what the fuck is non-binary? My God. So he came out as look at me, and then a bit later, he wanted more attention. He posted

a photo of himself in his mansion saying how difficult he was finding COVID. And just there was a complete lack of empathy oh my god and and I sort of thought things like that were a good sign you know because because that that's it you know if if at best we're all going to see a massive decline in our living standards and our whole societies have got mass unemployment and so on then Then I thought, well, at least we'll hear a bit less from those guys. And then several things happened. The first was that some people started doing things along the following line. As you know, in Madness of Crowds, I do each of these in turn.

I do gay, women, that is relations between the sexes, race and trans. And I noticed that the women thing came in first, that people started saying things like women are suffering most from COVID. And I thought, well, OK, we've got to look at the stats on this. And then the stats came in and it showed that men were disproportionately likely to die. And then the same people said, well, the men might be doing the dying, but the women are doing the suffering or something. And that didn't make very much sense. something. And that didn't make very much sense.

But it showed that there were some people who needed to look at this through the prism they've looked through everything, which is women, men, disproportionate relations between sexes. And then you've got some people doing that with gay. The BBC in my own country, in Britain, started running pieces about, you know, it's difficult for a lot of LGBT people because they're living with their families who might be homophobic. And again, you know, you sort of read these stories. You thought, well, yeah, a lot of people are living with their families who are, well, their families.

I mean, they're having to live with their mom and dad and they might be heterosexual and they've just been forced into chastity by government regulations. You know, you know what I mean? It's difficult for everyone. Yeah. Why do we need to single that out? Then there was a story about somebody who I kid you not, by the way, Joe, you'll love this one. The BBC had a story which was of a trans person who said the headline was, I'm I'm I'm fearful that I'm going to be buried in the wrong gender. Oh, boy. And, of course, I just thought, well, a lot of us are just fearful of being buried, you know, period. Yeah, please call me a woman when I'm dead.

I don't give a fuck. You can misgender me all you like. I don't want to be buried. That's the first thing. It's so crazy. Not this year. Not this year. That's the first thing. It's so crazy. Not this year. Not this year. There's so much nonsense.

So that sort of thing started happening. I thought, oh, this is just, they're just. But again, I still thought they'll double down, but the majority won't listen to them. And then Minnesota happened. And the race one came back with a vengeance. Then Minnesota happened and the race one came back with a vengeance. And that had been happening through COVID, obviously, because in all of our countries, we if this was the case, and it does seem to be, then it was because like America couldn't even import a virus from China without giving it its own special racist spin. You know, that all of the things that you

could look at to explain why there might be a higher mortality rate, including higher numbers of perhaps nurses in the health service, underlying health issues, and much more. That wasn't being focused on. It kept on being portrayed as if this could only be because of racism. And that just worried me because I thought even a virus, a pandemic can't bring us together. And we still have these people doing this. But as I say, it wasn't until after Minnesota that then that really took off and we discovered something very important, which is that. But the racism and the whole issue of race is even more important than trying to avoid the pandemic. of race is even more important than trying to avoid the pandemic. And that and everything that's flowed from it is just rolling on and on. And it's very, very worrying. It's everything I feared would happen, which was everybody doubling down on these identity traits in the era when we all

hoped we could move beyond them. You know, we also got to this weird point where we're supposed to collectively ignore the fact that having 50,000 people marching through the streets arm in arm could easily be spreading the disease. There was this giant uptick of the disease in America and everyone stuffed their head in the sand and pretended they were not connected. Everyone wanted to pretend well it had nothing to do with the protest well if you even more yeah it's clear more it wasn't it wasn't just head in the sand it was actually saying that we don't mind i mean the medical medical

professionals in america who signed a joint letter defending people going out on the protests were saying that that racism kills and so does COVID, but racism is clearly a bigger underlying risk than COVID. And if you've taken that view, then everything's possible, isn't it? I mean, apart from the fact that it's clearly not true, because however you would work out the numbers of people killed by racism, uh, which does exist, but I mean, to claim that the mortality rates from racism are higher than those from COVID when, what are the figures in America now? You know, six figures of people who've died.

190,000 is the lowest. 190,000, you know, I guess it. Surely the people who claim that racism kills more people than COVID should have to answer and say, where are the 190,000 racist murders in America this year? And that doesn't happen. And that's medical professionals saying that. Well, you've got everyone terrified of being labeled as a racist that that's that's where we've gotten to this point how we've gotten to this point

yeah yeah well we live in an era where all of the all of the worst things you can be accused of are also not provable and not disprovable and that's something i say in the madness of crowds which is just very difficult for us you know know, it happens every day to someone, you know, I mean, someone gets called the whole charge sheet, the homophobe defense because you cannot actually prove you're not a racist. You can't prove you're not a misogynist. You can't prove you're not a homophobe. It happens all the time. People say, you know, I'm not a homophobe. You know, it happened with the former Australian prime minister the other day. I'm not a homophobe. My sister-in-law is a lesbian. She married her partner and I was at the wedding. But they still say he's a homophobe. You can't prove that the claim isn't true.

And the worst of that is obviously with racism. And so obviously, everybody in the era is trying desperately to avoid the claim. Because once the claim is made, our society has no way to brush it off. Yeah, I've been having conversations lately with people about the term hate speech. And it brings me back to um a conversation that i had with someone who worked for youtube this was just randomly at a party i happened to be with someone who worked for you for youtube and i was talking to them about some of the problems with youtube and suppression particularly at the time there was a a person who had taken a conversation with you and Sam Harris and they had put it on

their playlist. I believe I talked to you about this. Did I not? They put it on their playlist and they got a flag for violating the community guidelines just from putting that conversation with you and Sam Harris. I brought this up to her and she immediately dismissively said, well, that was because it's hate speech. And so then I got upset. I had a couple glasses of wine in me. And I was like, wait a minute. Why do you just say – tell me what was the content of the conversation.

And my wife is squeezing my leg under the table because she thinks I'm about to go ballistic. I'm like, how can you just flippantly say this is hate speech? You're talking about two public intellectuals who are discussing all sorts of intricate and nuanced issues, and you're just saying it's hate speech, and that you're justifying a community guidelines strike on this person's channel who just had it on their playlist. This is an interesting conversation that I enjoyed. I'm going to put this in my playlist. Whether I agree or disagree, it inspired thought. Yeah, but that's... I mean, this is one of the most sinister things

of the time. As you know, I do a chapter on tech in the book and spend some time in Silicon Valley trying to work out what the hell's going on. I mean, if there's a big underlying thing that's gone on here, Joe, I mean, I think it's that in all of our countries, the people in charge of what correct opinion is, have managed to draw their lines in a way that excludes majority opinions. And that is, I mean, it's sustainable, I suppose. It obviously is for some people as a business model, but it's a disaster for our societies. I mean, you know, if you decide that talking about certain issues is beyond the pale on each of these subjects, and, you know, you could do that if it was a wildly minority held opinion. But actually, I mean, most people, for instance, don't think men have to just never talk about women. Most people think the sexes need to get on. I'm among them. It's not my personal

area of study, but it's, you know, I reckon that men and women have to be able to thrive and have relationships without this being this unbelievable landmine territory. And yet the social media companies decide, no, even to talk around any of the necessary but difficult stuff must comprise hate speech. And what they don't seem to realize is that you're keeping majority concerns and thoughts and conversations out. And you just can't – long term, it's an unsustainable thing to do. It's also a minority perspective, minority perspective that's deciding to censor the discussion between two enormous groups of people, the people that are on the left and the people that are on the right. You're siding entirely with the people on the left and deciding that

the people on the right should be silenced in many of these cases. And I think many of the people on the left and deciding that the people on the right should be silenced in many of these cases and I think many of the people on the left don't agree with that because there's a lot of people on the left that would like to have Freedom of speech is a core tenant of this culture. It's it's enormous It's how we work things out and if you say I disagree so shut them up Well, you've fucked this whole thing up because the whole way this works is people have to state their argument, debate, discuss it, and then the people that are objective or on the outside or on the fence, they get to look at it and go, oh, this guy's making a lot of sense.

I used to be this, but now I might be leaning more towards being a centrist or more towards being libertarian or more towards being a liberal or whatever the fuck it is that's convincing to you. And whoever makes the most convincing argument, whether it's Noam Chomsky or whether it's Ben Shapiro, whoever makes the most convincing argument, for you, you're allowed to take that side. You're allowed to incorporate those opinions.

You're allowed to consider them. And you can't do that if everybody's censored. And you're also, by the way, way i mean one that really troubles me you should be magnanimous in victory i mean that is a that is so it's so striking to me in in the one i do first of the the issue of gay which is that we are currently in the tech companies are doing this are pretending first of all that our current views on, for instance, gay marriage, which I was an early supporter of. But that if you weren't for gay marriage before almost anyone else was, you're now a homophobe. Right. And apart from the fact that doesn't seem reasonable, it's an unbelievably un magnanimous thing to do in victory, you know,

to sort of stalk around. I give some examples of this really prominent figures in television and elsewhere in the States who, you know, in the 2000s weren't in favor of gay marriage. Barack Obama wasn't in favor of gay marriage at that stage. But but they're already going back like this and say you didn't hold in the past views that people hold now. Right. And this this this goes against one of the absolute central tenets, which is, you know, boot on the other foot ism, you know, gay rights, like all other rights movements, managed to advance because it said, you know, you may not want to do this, but we're not asking you to do this we're looking for the

right to live our own lives this way too and then there's this terrible moment and i i say it happens in every rights claim the terrible moment when equal doesn't seem to do it for some people and they say no now we've got the upper hand we're going to behave to you in a way that we would have hated when you did it to us yes and we're going to make you you in a way that we would have hated when you did it to us. Yes. And we're going to make you a non-person. And we're going to say you can't even gather in private places. And you can't even talk to each other online or on the internet.

This is the profoundly illiberal viewpoint. And it's being done by people in the name of liberalism. It really is. And it's people on the fringes that are the loudest. And these are the ones that are the loudest, and these are the ones that are causing people to be most upset, and ironically, making people lean towards the right. They're saying these people on the left are out of control, because the people that are

on the left that they're hearing from are the ones that are outrageous. They're not the ones that are reasonable, left of center, and you just have opinions that most of us believe about civil unions about about gay rights civil rights about you know women's rights all the different areas that people think of when they think of people on the left i support all those until you get to these far far left people that are so loud and outrageous and they want to get rid of the police and get rid of the laws and everyone should be a communist. You're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. And that's making people go right.

It's forcing people towards the right and forcing people, ironically, towards Donald Trump. The more people freak the fuck out over here, the more they go, who is going to protect us from this shit? Well, it's that guy. He's the only guy. And it's crazy. The number of friends of mine in America

who are saying exactly this privately at the moment, I don't know anyone who says, well, maybe I know a couple, but I don't know very many people who say, I just love Donald Trump and everything about him. And his character is just so good. And he's just, he's just obviously the sort of person I'd like my children to grow up to want to be. Nobody says that. No. I think they look at him the same way a lot of people on the left, at least up until recently, were looking at Antifa. A lot of people on the left were looking at Antifa like they're doing our dirty work. They're the hard, far-left people.

They are pushing it so far that it'll make room for my ideology because they'll clear the path and they'll silence and eliminate all these horrible right wing people that I don't agree with. I think they think that about Trump. They're like, he's not my guy. I don't think the way he thinks, but that guy's not going to let that shit fly. And he's going to step in and yeah, he might be a liar and he might be full of shit and he might have done terrible things in business.

And, you know, he might have lied about the destructive consequences of COVID and all these other issues that people have problems with him. But at least he's not those guys. Yeah, I mean, on almost any issue, this is the case. There was this in the John Bolton memoir, there's this rather hair raising story of President Trump talking with our then prime minister. And it becomes clear that Donald Trump doesn't know that the UK is a nuclear power. What is he saying? What is he saying? Oh, it's an unbelievable exchange. He's standing in Chequers, the country house of the British

prime minister. The Russians had just done this um novichok attack in solstice where they took out his former agent and uh his daughter with this unbelievably you know toxic that was the doorknob right they put it on the doorknob yes it was classic you know kgb tactics you use the most dangerous biological weapon in order to demonstrate that you can. Yeah. Anyhow, and that had just happened in a little little the cathedral city of Salisbury. Theresa May, the then prime minister, says to Donald Trump in Chequers, you know, Mr. President, I'd like to remind you that that we in Britain regard this as a WMD attack. And what's more, she says, looking at him meaningfully,

a WMD attack on a nuclear power. And Donald Trump turns to, uh, one of the other people with Theresa May and says, have you got nukes? It's, um, it's,

it's, it's striking. Um, anyhow, the, the point about this is that you hear this sort of story and you think well that's shocking but not that surprising and then you think but anyway look what else is being offered and this this this thought is just obviously going through everyone's minds because

the left in america has screwed up so badly they They could have. It's it's it's so striking to me as an outsider. They could have spent the last four years saying, how did this person with all of these these character traits that we sort of agreed on that we don't like and with lots of downsides and things, how did he win anyway? And they could have looked at that right and work and work so much out. And instead, you've had four wasted years of, you know, frankly, bullshit claims that have wasted everyone's time. We've had something very similar in Britain. But it's horrifying for an outsider to see this. I think they thought those claims were going to work.

I think they thought the Russia scandal was going to work. I think they thought his affairs were going to ruin him. I think they thought all these various chess pieces that they moved into position, they thought they were at checkmate multiple times. And he's like, nope, fuck you. And they're like, what? And he just keeps on keeping on. And I just don't think they correctly estimated his resilience,

think they I don't think they correctly estimated his resilience nor did they estimate the way people who support him would view him and I again I think there's a lot of people that don't agree with him don't like his tactics don't like his personality but they see him as the preferable alternative to what's going on in Portland, what's going on in Seattle, and what happens when you get lawlessness. I mean, it's not even like he's very good and effective at what he claims to want to do. The most obvious critique of him is he'll tweet something, but he won't act on it. He knows one big lever to pull, but he's got no idea of how to work out the intricacies of

all the little levers you need to know about to run an effective administration. And that's a reasonable critique, and everyone can see it. There seems to be some problem. One can't help noticing that job retention is a problem in the White House. That's a nice way of putting it. Average length of employment. It's like a month. It's like a month. But the point is, even despite that, because of what the left has done and what it's allowed to happen, what it's allowed to rush through, we now see people who know every single critique you can make of Donald J. Trump and will still vote for him.

Yes. No, I agree. It's shocking to watch it all. He tweets things sometimes that you go, what the fuck is he doing? He tweeted a video from my podcast where Mike Tyson was talking about when he hurts people it becomes orgasmic for him Donald Trump with no context with no comment tweeted that and some friends of mine were sending it to me like what the fuck is going on and I went and looked at the video I was like what did he really tweet this like what

does that mean what What is he saying? Is he saying that he finds it orgasmic when he beats on his opponents? Like, what is he saying? Does he just think it's interesting? I don't know if you can just do that. Look, I could do that. You could do that. If you saw something preposterous or ridiculous, you could just tweet it.

Like, look at this. This is nuts. You probably would say something like, oh, my, and then post that. You could do that. But when you're the goddamn president of the greatest superpower the world has ever known you're the commander-in-chief of the biggest army the planet has ever seen and you just tweet a thing about one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time talking about getting orgasmic when he beats the fuck out of people it's just like what what world are we living in what is happening yeah yeah we should we should we should try now we should talk about

something orgasmic and see if we can get him to retweet it again well i see a pattern emerging he's been retweeting a lot of my stuff lately for some strange reason he tweeted a video the other day where i said that to to me, Joe Biden is like having a flashlight with a dying battery and going on a long walk in the woods. It's not going to work out. And that's how I felt. I feel bad for Biden. I do. I really do. And I feel bad for the left that they've got to pretend that this is a good choice. But, you know, there's just one obvious thing there, Joe. I mean, again, an outsider, but you can't have a future if you hate your past. You can't have a future if you disagree on the foundational principles of the state.

disagree on the foundational principles of the state. And watching senior members of the Democratic Party being asked, for instance, if they'll condemn the bringing down of statues of George Washington, and watching them trying to dodge the question, it's just heartbreaking, because that is the terrain which America used to be able to agree on. You know, to watch a CNN presenter standing on MSNBC, standing in front of Mount Rushmore and saying, as one of them did, that the president is going to give a speech tonight in front of statues of slave owners on stolen ground.

Mount Rushmore used to be able to agree on that. He used to be able to agree on that he used to be able to agree on on roosevelt and uh um you know and and and lincoln and and he used to be proud of these people and and you had good reason to be proud of them oh you sure there were critiques as well because there always are because amazingly people in history aren't as perfect as all of us living today and thinking we're right but you know you used to be able to agree that these people were honorable men and distinguished men and people who had done an extraordinary thing in creating the United States of America. And if you don't think that's extraordinary, if you don't think that, OK, there are people

who can think that America isn't exceptional, but to think that America is only exceptional in being exceptionally evil, well then you don't have a future if that idea catches on. And it seems to have caught on, on a significant swathe of the American left. It's also, talking about Mount Rushmore, describing it as statues of former slave owners on stolen land, that's such a simplistic perspective on who those people were. Yeah, they did own slaves, and yeah, this land did used to belong to indigenous people, but that story, it's very disingenuous to tell that story in one sentence. that story, it's very disingenuous to tell that story in one sentence.

It's a very complex tale of a different era. It's of a different time and of people seeking to try to figure out and carve out a new form of democracy, an experimented self-government that never existed before. And they succeeded. Exactly. I'm just stunned by this because it's happening everywhere, but it's happening in America furthest and fastest. And it's this thing that we are looking at the past as a savannah of of grievances. We want to, you know, hack through and find and then use, you know, as if the past is just there for this purpose. And as you know, I write a bit about this in Mans of Crowd. It's about how we can get

to a more reasonable attitude towards the past. Because if we got a more reasonable attitude towards the past, we'd also have a more reasonable attitude towards our present. You know, we'd know better how we ought to be behaving now because we might among other things have a certain amount of damn humility yeah you know be a bit less assertive and dogmatic you know wouldn't it be good if we if we realized that people in the past even you know even the best people acted given the knowledge they had in the circumstances they found themselves in. You know, they weren't sort of involving themselves in some abstract experiment to see if they could pass muster in 2020. Right.

And it's almost as if our societies have taught a form of history which isn't interested in doing that. And as a result, we're not interested in doing it in our own lives and realizing that all of us are going to make mistakes. So what do you do about that? Well, you hope that people can be forgiving and you hope you can be to some degree forgiving of people in the past when they acted in ways you don't approve of now, because you also hope that people who come after us look at us with a certain amount of forgiveness because there will be things we're doing now that are insane. In fact, I can guess a few. And people after us,

we would hope, would look at us and think, well, maybe they did them not because they were evil people, but because they were acting on the knowledge they had and certain presumptions they have, which we now know to be wrong. Yeah, I mean, that's a very accurate way of assessing it. And I think that it's difficult to be reasonable and balanced and forgiving today, because it's an uphill battle. Whereas someone who's through virtue signals, who uses social media, who attacks, that's the accelerant that I see on this situation today. And so many people and so many groups are diving in. There was a thing on the UN the other day, posted something about COVID and about the coronavirus pandemic, and they used it as an

opportunity to contend the patriarchy. Did you see that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did. The American Psychological Association ought to refer itself, I think. It's one of the strange things, because this is the second time in a year, isn't it? Because it was the American Psychological Association that last year described masculinity as toxic. Yeah. And I mean mean i pity all the young men who are being uh referred to people approved of by the american psychological association who are telling them that being a man is bad you know and that masculinity is bad i really pity the people who are going to have to grow up with that kind of rubbish, evil rubbish being told to them. And it's the same with this. The American Psychological Association is saying that,

what is it, everything in America is built on white supremacy. Like, what do you do with a claim like that? And why should a body that had some respect, I mean, it had some standing, it's still as I understand it, is the body that has to approve anyone in the US who's going to practice in psychology. What do you do when that body says there's something fundamentally wrong with being a man and there's something fundamentally evil about being white. What do you do in a society where formerly serious organizations are saying that? Well, I think what's happening now is the thing that everyone was criticizing years ago about what was happening in academia,

what's happening in the schools, the silencing of conservative speakers and the blowing air horns and pulling fire alarms. People were making that out to be no big deal. Like, oh, it's much ado about nothing. There's a small amount of occurrences in universities. And then the Brett Weinstein thing happened at Evergreen. And everybody went, wow, that is extreme. But again, it's a small, strange college in the Pacific Northwest. But what we're seeing is the chickens coming home to roost.

All these warnings that all these people in academia, like Brett Weinstein and like others, Peter Boghossian and many others, James Lindsay, who had seen this coming. They're like, this is going to be a real problem because these people are going to enter the workforce. They're going to enter society. They're going to be 23, 24, 25 years old. And they're going to be telling people what to do. And they're going to enter society. They're going to be 23, 24, 25 years old. And they're going to be telling people what to do. And they're going to be dictating policy. And they're going to be forcing people to shape society in this idea.

And we're seeing it. You know, one of the things was also conservatives were underestimating this as well. I mean, you know, because conservatives, when they talked about the campus stuff there was a kind of easy easy joke on it which was the and i've made it myself you know which was basically that uh you know your daughter goes away to college you remortgage the house she goes to study lesbian dance and then she graduates and discovers there aren't very many graduates and discovers there aren't very many jobs in lesbian dance. And so, you know, she then realizes the error of her ways and becomes a conservative. That was sort of the background idea that conservatives had about this, that the market would assert itself. And of course, that turned out to be totally wrong. There were jobs for these people to go to.

They've gone, they've gone, they've filled job after job and role after role. They have, they have washed through major former newspapers in the US, like the New York Times. They have washed across the cultural institutions in all of our countries. They have, they, you know, if we'd been speaking even five years ago, you would have thought, well, corporate America is not going to fall for that. They're not going to be held hostage by the people with, you know, like crock degrees in non disciplines. But, you know, they're the corporates all are. They all encourage the growth of their H.R. departments. And they're packed with people who now can hold an entire company hostage i see this in the publishing industry i mean jk rowling you know harry potter fame

um she she's she's got this book coming out for kids called the ichabog uh and 150 or so staff her publishers at hatchet um threatened to walk out because they said they couldn't be working, they couldn't justify working for a publisher that brought out a book by J.K. Rowling because J.K. Rowling has expressed perfectly mainstream and decent and reasonable views about where trans rights appears to cross over and tread on women's rights. And, you know, unsurprisingly, most of the people who signed that letter were young. But the problem with it was that on that occasion, the CEO actually stood by J.K. Rowling because she's very, very successful, probably the world's

most successful author. And at the moment, at that very, very top level, sometimes, not all the time, the money speaks. But nobody turned around and said the only thing that needed to be said, which was, you know, you're not even at a publishing house that's publishing J.K. Rowling's big book of trans. You know, it's not chicks with dicks by J.K. Rowling. It's it's it's it's it's the Ichabod. And if you cannot work in an office that's publishing the Ichabod, you're probably not just not cut out for this profession, but probably not cut out for this life. You're going to find life really tricky if the Ichabod terrifies you. And what's more, the CEO of a company in that

position should by now have said, thank you so much for your letter. I take it to be a resignation letter. And in the next day's newspapers, there should have been 150 openings at that publisher for people who wanted to work in the business of ideas and thought. And what is so striking is that even on the ones where people hold the line, they are not saying what needs to be said, which is we cannot be as societies or as companies or as cultural entities, we cannot be held hostage by fundamentally dishonest, hostile actors. And we certainly can't be held hostage at the risk of just one person, because that's all it requires. Just one person saying the Ichabog's too mean for me.

That's what we can't operate like that. We can't exchange ideas like that. And what she's saying should be debated. If you disagree with what she's saying about trans rights entering into the realm or suppressing women's rights, this should be a conversation that people have. The idea that you're going to silence literally the most popular author alive today because she has a very reasonable position. It's madness. And this is the same attitude that's led to deplatforming people with reasonable views. This is the same attitude that is infuriating people to the point

where they're going to vote the opposite way and vote for people like Donald Trump. I mean, this is what's happening. But I'm also, you know, I'm worried about so many things. One is, by the way, the reason why i've written about this which is that i want people to know the scale of this um plot pros and lindsey and bogosian and others have done an amazing job on this you know because you really you need to you you want among other things to to save people the hassle of having to read the crap that we're talking about. I mean, you don't want the smartest minds of this generation having to wade their way through Judith Butler on feminism and performativity of gender. You know, I mean, almost anything is better to do with your life than that.

And so to an extent, what is needed is these books and these people saying, as I try to say, look, this is what it is. But for God's sake, don't get caught up in it. Don't get stuck on it. Don't waste your life looking to solve the world through these means, because all you will do is make yourself and everyone around you much, much more unhappy. But also, you know, we all in our lives definitely have something more important to do than talk endlessly about gender. You know, we almost certainly all have in our lives something more important to do than to talk endlessly about hereditary characteristics over which we have no say.

And one of the best takes on this, in my opinion, has been Helen Pluckrose, Peter Boghossian, and James Lindsay when they did these grievance studies. And some of their more preposterous ideas and papers didn't just get reviewed but got awarded, like fat bodybuilding and instances of homoerotic rape culture in dog parks. The great one was the rewriting of a section of Mein Kampf using some feminist jargon. And it was republished as Their Struggle, My Struggle.

And of course, we've got to credit the penis as a social construct has to be the greatest work of literature of recent decades to get that passed was quite something it's amazing what got passed but the reaction once it was found out

I mean Peter almost lost his job many of these people have been attacked they didn't have any I mean, Peter almost lost his job. Many of these people have been attacked. They didn't have any sense of humor on how preposterous their own position is. No, and they couldn't defend it at all. I mean, we've heard for years peer review as this sacred, sacred thing. And all these papers got peer reviewed, and they all got punked. Their papers are amazing.

They were amazing. And all they did was turn on the people who did it. But by the way, that's that's the absolutely typical thing of the time. I mean, that's why I think that those of us who do have the ability to talk about this stuff and it's weird why we do. But those of us who survive and are able to sort of not be stopped by the mob have to talk about these things because it can't be made this impossible. Yes, it just men cannot be stopped from talking about women. White people cannot fear any discussion about race because of the fear of being called a racist by dishonest people. You know, straight people can't live in fear of being called homophobes or transphobes.

And, you know, we've just made the cost of entry into the discussion too high. In fact, we made it so high that nobody really wants to go into it. Well, I think it's because they don't really want a discussion. They want compliance. And that seems to be a big part of what this is all about. It's about compliance. It's about forcing those people to raise their fists at the restaurant. It's not about real change. It's about in-the-moment compliance.

You want your ideas to win out, and it's this natural inclination people have when they're playing a game. You want to get checkmate. You want to win. This is what's happening with people today. Yeah, that's taken quite a long time for some people to work out that what we're dealing with is very often is dishonest people who want to win and are willing to just use any maneuver in the meantime. I mean I've talked about this but it might have been actually on the on the thing which your contact at youtube talked about i've talked about with sam harris before which was you

know i sent him once just a moral proposal like why don't you and i say that all the people who criticize us are pedophiles why don't we just say whenever they say like sam harris is is the worst person in the world and douglas murray is a terrible bigot why don't we just say well it's a shame you can't stop shagging kids you know and and and and and when and when they then say what how dare you then we can say oh i'm sorry i thought we were doing that i thought we were just throwing around crazy attempts to end each other's careers i thought that was the game we played. I'm sorry, I'd mistaken it.

Maybe we'd both like to step back a moment. The point is, there's a fundamental reason why we don't, which is that for a lot of us, we are holding on and tenuously in some cases, holding on to the idea that we can continue to have reasonable discussion and reasonable debates with honest actors and that therefore to lie knowingly about other people would be a bad thing to do and a wrong thing to do

i mean i actually you know i do think that's the case because i think you wouldn't know when to stop and that's what we're and that's what we're seeing that is one of the parts of far left they don't know when to stop because they've been given the most they've been given the most powerful tools of the time which is to don't know when to stop because they've been given the most powerful tools of the time, which is to accuse people of all the things that our society abhors. Our society abhors racism. It abhors homophobia.

It abhors misogyny. And so if you're given the tools to wield and you wield them dishonestly, you don't know when to stop. And that's why they've done it all these years against all these people. But the obvious thing to break through here is how can people not be vulnerable to the dishonest claims? And how do we get out of this?

How do we get out of this mess? Exactly. And, you know, I'm afraid that I, we also, we cannot put any, any faith in the idea, which some people have faith in which is that you know people will kind of learn it'll get nasty enough because well you can see in kenosha and elsewhere some people might see an exit wound of a bullet from somebody's head for the first time in their life and think i'm stepping back from this abyss but other people will see it and quite like what they see quite like the power that they wield quite like the darkness they've just trodden into so i i have no faith in this hope that you know again it's a bit of a conservative hope quite often that people will see reason

because they'll see the the pandemonium and the and the chaos that isn't the case a lot of people see the pandemonium and the chaos and they think let me in and every mugshot from portland oregon demonstrates yes every mugshot these are chaotic people who've led chaotic lives and threatening them that they are going to live more chaotic lives isn't going to work at this stage they're they're in the abyss they're working very happily there so it's everybody who's not yet gone there that needs to try to work out what to do and you know one thing one thing i honestly do stick with is don't be portrayed as things you're not and don't be cowed by allegations that are insincere. I would like to see more rage from people who are being insincerely accused of things they're not guilty of. I remember Joan Rivers, one of the sharpest comedians I've ever seen.

Joan Rivers was once in a discussion on the radio in my country with a far left sort of black power activist called Darkus Howe. And this is about 20 years ago. And it was a spellbinding moment of radio because there was a discussion. It was just, you know, she had something of the tour to sell. He had something to sell. And they were just having to be on the same program and at some point darkest house said you know jones seems to have a problem with me as a person and i think it has to do with race it was something along these lines and you should listen to it joan rivers just went for him she said how? How dare you, you son of a bitch? And she went for

him. And she ate him on air. And the visceral rage she demonstrated at what was being attempted against her in the studio is the visceral rage that everybody should use when that move is played against them. We shouldn't just brush it off and say, oh, well, it happens. We say, how dare you? How dare you demean a meaningful currency? How dare you demean a meaningful term? How dare you push our entire society to a point it will come to at some point, which would be we don't care. How dare you speed that day along in the name of anti-racism

or anything else? Or in the name of winning an argument. Winning an argument. It's so commonplace to win for the short term. You just create hell for the long. I think what you're saying about the people in Portland is so accurate. And anyone who's looked at those mugshots, it's one of the first things that they get from it. Like, look at these people. They look unhealthy. They look lost. The guy who shot the man in Portland has this black power tattoo on his neck.

And when you hear him talk, I don't know if you saw the interview with him and Vice. Vice interviewed him before the police shot him. Oh, yeah, I saw that. He's clearly a lost person who probably led a life that was filled with mistakes and fuck-ups. And then he finds himself in this situation where he has a gun in the middle of chaos.

And he's literally got his hand on his gun, running around stalking Trump supporters and finds one that's willing to engage him and he shoots the guy and kills him. But you know, we had a couple of weeks of this in the UK where it looked like it might run away with us. The police were literally chased down the street in Westminster by crowds shouting, run, piggy, run. And it was a very concerning moment. But we managed to step back from the brink. And it seems interesting to me that America couldn't around the same time. And there might be lots of reasons for that. But one which mystifies me,

time and there might be lots of reasons for that but one which mystifies me it I've not got the answer to it is why America has so many people in exactly that position you just described like very very lost people yeah I don't have the answer to that I think it's a numbers game I think there's so many of us over here there's 320 plus million people if just one percent of them were lost you've got three million plus people that are lost that's a lot of people you gather them together in large cities and you give them bullhorns and bats and have them screaming against the fascists whatever the fuck that means and they all of a sudden have a family all of a sudden they're united and that's what I saw in Chaz, the six block area of Seattle that they took over.

They felt like they had done something. They had achieved something. And I think that's what you're seeing now in Portland. When these people are walking down the street, marching and cheering together, for a lot of these people, this is the most exciting moment of their lives. They're joined together.

There's chaos. There's fire. There's screaming in the streets. Occasionally people get murdered. I mean, there's chaos, there's fire, there's screaming in the streets, occasionally people get murdered. It's pretty wild stuff. And it feels like you're in history. It feels like you're making history. This is what I... I give this analogy, I lift it from a late Australian philosopher, Ken

Minogue, but this is why I talk about St. George in retirement syndrome. And the St. George in retirement syndrome is, I think, what a lot of campaigners are stuck in at the moment, which is that basically the situation St. George would be in after he'd got the acclaim of slaying the dragon, he might be tempted to go around the land looking for other dragons to slay. he might be tempted to go around the land looking for other dragons to slay. And if there aren't dragons, he might be found attacking smaller and smaller animals until eventually one day St. George can be found swinging his sword at thin air. Now, I don't say that there's absolutely thin air, but the St. George in retirement syndrome clearly exists for a portion of young people in America in particular, because they've been told that, you know, and the problem is this is sort

of right in lots of ways. Like, who wouldn't have wanted to have been with Martin Luther King and the March on Washington, you know? Who wouldn't have wanted to have had the pleasure and the satisfaction of being the head of a movement like that. I have to say, I wouldn't particularly myself, but lots of people have been told, you should have been at the Stonewall Inn in 1968, or you should have burned your bra with the second wave feminists. They miss this stuff because all of these movements have been vindicated massively. And the people who did partake in them have got a very serious

advantage in society because they are viewed with respect for rightly for having been ahead of their time of being brave and so on. it means that in 2020 we have people who think that they are still slaying dragons which at the very least by now are just not that powerful dragons at the very least i don't know how this ends and portland to me is the most interesting petri dish because of the fact that you have the most progressive mayor and they're still like fuck you not good enough my eyes are on that place

in particular because Portland's always been a real kind of an oddball place and I always enjoy going there I actually love Portland it's one of my favorite places to perform most of the people there are very nice but there's a madness going on there you want to talk about Most of the people there are very nice, but there's a madness going on there. You want to talk about madness of crowds. That exemplifies that right now. And to me, they've

arrested people for lighting forest fires up there. They've arrested left-wing people for lighting these forest fires, air quote activists. And this is something that's also not widely being reported, you know, that people have actually been arrested for lighting fires up there. This is a, I don't know what, like, I would love to talk to the mayor and say, what is your strategy for ending this? Are you hoping this is just going to die down? Because these people want your head and they want blood and they don't seem to be willing to settle for anything less.

And the more they receive no resistance from him, the more adamant they get about his resigning. And they're all – I mean, I've been reading quite a lot about revolutions recently for obvious reasons. It's a good time to do it. I highly recommend it. What have you been reading quite a lot about revolutions recently for obvious reasons. It's a good time to do it. I highly recommend it. What have you been reading? Which books? Well, lots of books on the Russian Revolution, 1917. And, of course, everything on the French Revolution always remains pertinent, mainly because of just the unchanging nature of our species.

You know, it always happens in similar ways. I mean, you know, at the beginning of the Russian revolution in 1917, people who weren't on the side of the revolutionaries, but didn't want to get hurt would affix to their sleeves, you know, signs of the revolution so that the mob would leave them alone. And what is people doing Blackout Day on Instagram and all of that but that in the technological age? But sometimes that doesn't even work. Did you see the Kenosha business that had a giant billboard that said Black Lives Matter and yet it was in flames?

I loved that one early on. You shouldn't say you loved it but i did of those sort of three jocks who were sort of in a in an apartment and they were kind of going yeah fuck black lives matter and then and then all the windows get smashed in and they're sort of shouting we're on your side we're on your side and smash um shows you what's really going on it shows you what's really going on and i think that quite a lot of people have been in a performative stage. They've been in a performative stage with they've done their stuff of saying, well, you know, America is a racist society. And of course, we live in a slightly white supremacist society. And they did all of that. And now they've got to this other stage when when the rubber hits the road and when people start to act on it because they believe it. rubber hits the road and when people start to act on it because they believe it and this is the most dangerous stage and i mean one of the things of course is all the people pushing this now will not survive the revolution none of them will survive that's what you learned from 1789 in

france among other places all the people who push it and the way, it's also always for the same reason. In when the assembly meets after the revolution, they immediately start to talk about the rights of man and the rights that they're all going to acquire. They don't talk about laws. Why? Because it's it's easier and happier to talk about rights than they put off the laws for another day. And then you get everything, including the terror and everybody, everybody, scene by scene of the revolution is taken out. And what's amazing watching America at this stage is the revolutionaries seem to know that they're playing history again. You saw this scene where they built a guillotine outside the house of, was it Jeff Bezos? We don't need very many more clues as to what these people are trying to do and aiming to do. They actually seem to look at these cultural revolutions and think, that seemed to go well. Why don't we try that again?

Yeah, it's very confusing to me because I don't know how we get out of it. I don't see any map of the territory that seems like all we have to do is band together on these critical issues and just agree that we could speak civilly and discuss things and debate things. And I don't see any of that. I don't. I think there are answers to get out of it. I think there's a very obvious one, by the way, which is staring everyone in the face, which is in all of our countries, we have this the silent majority you know yes uh everyone's always talking about the silent

majority the number of people in recent weeks who said to me look i know this person who owns a business they make you know and it's literally things like you know they make frilly flowers or something or they make doilies or you know it's always sort of something completely harmless and somebody finds out that they didn't make a statement on black lives matter and bang the thing comes for them so that so you always hear the same story so eventually they did and eventually they posted the right thing and they said the right thing and they bowed and they took the knee and they raised the fist and they danced and so on but my suggestion is why is the majority silent why why does it only speak if it speaks at elections why once you work out what the force i mean you know this from mma but we just we haven't

worked out fast enough we should have done by now that our entire society is being knocked off kilter by a very small number of people hitting very, very hard at the margins. And that is answerable, but it is only answerable if that majority stops being silent. It's not answerable if a few people scattered around the globe are allowed to talk about the difficult issues of the day. It's only answerable if the silent majority stops being silent. And that means nothing less than a mass act of resistance of people against the dishonest actors. It is to speak up and say, I will not, for instance, go through indoctrination training at my workplace. I will not be made to sit in a workshop with somebody who knows less than me telling me to educate myself. I will not continue to be humiliated in this fashion. And there are various ways you can do that. The most threatening, by the way, and it's not. I will not attack black people as a mass.

I will not attack white people as a mass. I will not talk on these terms. And if that happened at every corporation in America, this could stop. And the only reason it doesn't stop is because the majority has been cowed. That's why I go back to that woman in the restaurant in Washington. Everybody could say, I understand legitimate grievances, but I will not

be cowed by people who are at this stage trying to bully an entire society to go along silently with a project we cannot agree to. I completely agree with you. But when I think about human nature and I think about the way people have reacted so far to this kind of outrage, I just don't see it happening. People are terrified of repercussions. And there's real repercussions for saying reasonable things. There was a broadcaster that was uh asked about black lives matter and he said all lives matter

all of them and he was fired yeah the idea you could live in a world where you say something that reasonable it's not like he said no black lives do not matter he did not say that he said all lives matter and to which most people would say you're correct so that you're also saying black lives matter. Yes, I am. Black lives matter. White lives matter. Women lives matter. Gay lives matter.

Trans lives matter. Everyone's life matters. Everyone. But you can't say that. It's a forced compliance. It's a movement that has no opposition. I mean, nobody is opposing the fundamental premise. Nobody says black lives don't matter.

Right. But the problem is if this guy gets fired, no one wants to hire him back because he was fired for not going along with Black Lives Matter. So he might go through a period of years without being employed again. It's going to follow him around. Absolutely. And that'll to follow him around. Absolutely. That'll happen one by one. It's like that Netflix guy who used the N-word as an example of a word not to use.

You know the case. Well, the case was because of a good friend of mine. That case was because of my good friend Tom Segura. Tom Segura is a very good friend of mine and he was using the term retard saying that you're not supposed to say that anymore. It was part of a bit about words that you're not supposed to say anymore.

So he says that word. So this man who was an executive at Netflix says essentially that word is like saying the N word to black people, but he actually said the word in a meeting. And they were like off with his head. You saidracadabra you said it out loud you can't even acknowledge it as a word he wasn't calling anyone it he was just saying the word out loud and that was enough and i don't believe they were really outraged as much as i believe they could go after him for that they knew that that was a target they found a window they had They had a rock. They threw it. The guys with the thumbs up, they took it right in the window. That's really what happened. Those

guys in the window weren't bad people. They were just an easy target. Throw that rock. But I go back to this point about what the majority thinks. Take sporting occasions. This is why all of us, well, certainly me, has this horrible feeling that what is happening at the moment is an end of empire moment, is because of the combination of things that is washing across us, you know. And just look through Roman history and the fall of the Republic, which takes 400 years from Nero to the fall. But there's plague after plague that comes through the land and ends out just taking out people, making people fearful, destroying the republic in another way. But if you use this analogy on now, what is so fascinating about and terrible about the combination of covid and the blm thing is

i would bet that for instance teams all taking the knee would not happen if the stadiums had people in them i i don't know about enough i don't want to speak about american football because i really would be on the least knowledgeable terrain i could possibly find myself in but if the terraces in the UK, in the soccer terraces, the football terraces were filled with fans, the fans would not still be staying silent as the teams all took the knee. There was a cricket match the other day between England and Ireland and the BBC, because there's no one in the stadium, of course, says. And now, of course, both teams are going to take the knee as if it's like an ancient tradition we've always done and i mean everyone watching you just sort of think every friend says it's just so strange the way it's all sort of everyone there now we take the knee and the ritual uh and if the cricket audiences are a bit politer, maybe than football ones.

But I don't think that the cricket stadium in August, you know, months on from George Floyd would be just saying, yeah, no, sure. We all approve of that. The terraces in the football would definitely not be by now. They just started to boo. And and so this is this thing of the combination of events that the team captains and others don't seem to be able to judge the public mood and the public mood. Can I just suggest it on that one, for instance, is this. Everyone's sorry about the death of George Floyd. Nobody defends the Minnesotan policemen and we feel no responsibility for the killing. Like nobody in the football stadium had anything to do with the killing of George Floyd. And, and the cricket audience didn't

kill George Floyd. Right. And they're willing for a bit to say, well, you know, this seems to be a particular problem that does sometimes come up in American policing. And I wish that was able to be sorted out because that's just ugly as hell. And, and, but I'm not responsible. I'm not changing all the norms of my society. I'm not, I'm not introducing new weird rituals and dance routines. We're meant to go through jumping through hoop after hoop after hoop because of something which I have no connection to and no responsibility to, because of something which I have no connection to and no responsibility to. Because this is a form of a claim of collective guilt and responsibility, which is ugly every way you tried to do it. Agreed. I agree with everything you just said.

I think it would be interesting to see how people would react in a large crowd and whether or not the crowd in America in a football stadium would go with it or whether or not they would boo. I would assume most people would go with it given today's climate because they would be scared to boo. They'd be scared to react that way. This is how I feel the climate is today in America. Most people don't really want their politics mixed in with sports but when they are and it's kind of being forced down everyone's throat they they just go along with it because the consequences of going against it saying look i support black lives matter but do we have to have it here

could can it can it just can't this just be football only football i know it's it's it's happened everywhere there are libraries that are currently having breakdowns over their collection. The British Library has just announced it's going to try to decolonize itself. I mean, God knows what that means. The British Museum has just announced it's going to have an investigation into basically everything. thing. The university system here is doing weird stuff like announcing an audit into any potential benefit that they got from slavery. There was a bell at the Cambridge College, which was recently removed. This is like the sort of magic words that are so dangerous that if they're said, even when they're said critically, they must be stopped.

There was a bell at a Cambridge college which was removed recently because it was found that it could it could have been rung on a plantation. OK, but but now we're in the realm of magic. This is like something from a C.S. Lewis Narnia thing. Is it that if you ring the bell again, the slavery comes back? What is the thinking behind it? So the problem is institution after institution is falling for it because they are not doing the thing they could do, which, as I just said, is we're very sorry about this thing that happened, but it had nothing to do with us. And if you come along and pretend that it did, then we're going to say, sorry, you're a dishonest actor. And the problem about all of this is that the most liberal and tolerant societies in human history are now unified in being portrayed as the most oppressive and bigoted societies ever. And that's, by the way, a particular problem you have

in America, particularly with American graduates. They know so little about the rest of the world, so little about history, that they honestly think the United States is the most reprehensible country on earth. And anybody who knew anything about the rest of the world, who had traveled anywhere, would know what rubbish that is. And yet not enough people say it because they're being held hostage by dishonest hostage takers. Well, you've managed to express yourself honestly, but not without consequence. And it's one of the things that I want to talk to you about, because I think you're a very reasonable person with some well-educated beliefs. Your thoughts are thought out. You've taken these ideas,

and it's not like you're flippantly expressing them. These are things that you've worked over in your mind for quite a long time and written them down and expressed them. But I've seen horrible things written about you that don't make any sense at all. And what has that been like for you to see people, because you're not willing to go along with this collective group thing, to have these people have this completely disingenuous description of you, this interpretation of what you're trying to accomplish, and the fact that you're not willing to bend the knee, you're being demonized in a very uncomfortable way.

The truth is, I don't feel it, Joe. That's amazing. I really don't feel it. I mean, I don't know why that might be the case. I can suggest some reasons. One is, I don't care what people I don't care about think. I, you know, I really, I don't mind if some bot on Twitter is mean about me. It doesn't bother me. The New York Times has never taken a love feeling towards me, but I don't mind. I don't need the New York Times to love me. I don't need any of that. And I don't care. I genuinely don't care. My own opinion is enough for me.

And I get to my opinions because I think about them. I investigate them. I travel all the time when we are still allowed to travel and speak to people and meet people all around the world all the time i'm fascinated by other cultures i'm fascinated by what we can learn from each other and i genuinely am not in front influenced at all by dishonest people who make dishonest claims about me and i have to say i i've just had the good fortune in my life as a writer to always say what I think. And sure, that means I make mistakes at times. Doubtless, everybody does. But I can't tell you, and particularly your listeners who are wondering about this,

it is so much better in your life to tell the truth, however you see it. It is so much better to just say what you see than to shut up you know if of all the regrets we could all have on our deathbeds i reckon one of the biggest is the regret that you just sidled through life kind of hoping people didn't notice you and just you just got by and you did everything you were told to do and you just were a good boy and then you sidle off i i think that's a regretful position to be in i i so i've always i've always said what i thought i've always written what i thought i'm amazed i'm still here in some ways but um it's it's you know i have the I only desire the approval of a relatively small number of people who I respect. And if they said to me, I think you're totally wrong on this, Douglas, and I'd listen.

But when it's people who don't want me to do well, for instance, then, of course, I don't listen to them. And I think that's the same as it is in all of our lives. You know this. I mean, you know, if your wife says to you, you know, you're really onto the wrong thing here, then, you know, then you listen because, you know, she wants you to do well. If some guy in the street with an I hate Joe Rogan T-shirt on tells you what you should do, obviously you're not going to listen to them. They don want you to do well and it's it's it's it's one of the tools we all have to to hone in our lives i suppose to work out who wants us to do well who wishes us well and to listen to them even if they're critical of us and they will be at times and to separate out those people from people who just of course they don't want you to do well. You know, hate you, hate everything about you and whatever.

But I'm just, you know, I don't have much sympathy for the people who bang on about being, you know, cancelled. I mean, I do when it's people who have, you know, ordinary jobs and they've just been horribly treated by the madness of this era. I have every sympathy for them. And a lot of the cases i write about in madness of crowds tries to highlight that but i don't have much sympathy with public figures who say i can't say what i think and i can't speak up and all this sort of

thing because i just think if you're not going to now when are you going to if you're not going to in this life what life are you expecting to come where you'll do it and so i know i i am i i'm i'm comfortable and as comfortable as you can be in the end times obviously uh uh as everything's burning down and there's plagues of locusts coming our way um i'm you know and i just i honestly urge other people to do the same. I am, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, I can't say it's dandy, but it's, it's, it's a pretty good life. I mean, I, you know, and I have the satisfaction of knowing that I'm not lying. And for young people watching in particular, this is just one of the most important things,

because as I say somewhere in Manus of Crowds, the problem with being told, the problem with going along with being told to bend the knee, raise the fist, jump through the hoop is that be demoralized because you'll know that you shouldn't have done that and at some level you will think badly of yourself for having done it you'll feel regretful you'll feel cowardly and it will affect your life in other ways and the opposite is also true the person who doesn't stand with the mob the person who doesn't go along with the mob, the person who refuses to walk with the crowd will feel quietly but significantly better about themselves. And I think we'll be a better person and they will achieve more in their lives, whatever that is, because they will have self-respect. And that's what these that's what totalitarian movements across history

always knew, was that you grind people down and make them agree to lies because you will then be able to make them do anything. If I say so, there's this very, very telling thing that happened in the communist era in Eastern Europe. Václav Havel, great late Czech leader, says this when he was one of the great Czech dissidents and playwrights of the period in the 60s and 70s. He wrote a piece once, which is really worth reading again today,

where he cites the example of a green grocer in Prague who has to put up in his window, like everyone else, the notice that says workers of the world unite. And it's sent by party headquarters to all green grocers and you all have to hang it. And Václav Havel says a number of things happened from this. The first thing is that, of course, that the green grocer is showing to everyone that he is a party lawyer and he wouldn't be able to operate as a business if he didn't do this thing. But it also hangs there every day as a sign of his subjugation. It's a little thing, but it hangs there as a sign of his subjugation. It's a little thing, but it hangs there as a sign of his subjugation. And it reminds him that he's not the man he could be. Now, one of the results of

that is that such a person ends up hating the people who make him hang the sign hates him because they have demoralized him. But Havel's point, among others, is you think you're doing a little thing, but you're not. You are diminishing your soul by doing this because you know that you could be something more than the person who just has to hang whatever party headquarters tells you to hang this week. Well said. Thank you. Absolutely. Outstanding. More people need to hear this. This is what you just said is an excellent guideline of how to live a meaningful life and express yourself honestly. And I think one of the things that we're dealing with with these collective groups of people subjugating themselves to the masses is a failure of our education system. Because although we teach people mathematics and history and all these different things, we don't teach them enough of the psychology of, first of all, the consequences of giving into these things.

Also the temptation of giving into these things, also the temptation of giving into these things, why they occur, what is happening with human beings when they're trying to force people to comply, and how this is a natural occurrence. And so people can't see it. They have to experience it, and then they have to go, what the fuck just happened? And then they go, how did I get canceled? And then their life falls apart, and they have to look into it. And into it it's a long lengthy process because they haven't been given a map they don't really understand how this plays out and by the way there's there's another thing from that sorry isn't it which is it's not just knowing the map of the way out but knowing what is on the other side of the map yes and and that's what that's what I wish More people could realize you know I what I've written and what James Lindsay and Bagozian and Plotkos and others Deborah so and others have been writing is

Is an attempt I think I don't I can't speak for us collectively But certainly for myself is an attempt to help people fast forward through this era of thought So you've been immersed in bad thinking all of these years. You've been taught crock theory. And you're being encouraged to wade through more of it. Your boss is sending you lists of unreadable books that tell lies and telling you to read them. And one of the things I'm trying to do is to say, I'm going to try to short circuit

that, like get you through that now for the following reason. None of this is what any of us should be spending our lives doing. None of it. And there is at some point a huge opportunity cost by the fact that in this era, so many people spent their time talking about crock ideas. talking about croc ideas. It's not a useful way to spend our lives to talk endlessly about gender performativity and look at me-ism and so on. It's just not a useful thing to do. It's not endlessly interesting to talk about whether there are a hundred genders or a million or whether you're genderqueer or pansexual. It's not interesting. It's really boring. It's really boring. And the same goes for all the rest of it. Do we really want to speak about race for the rest of our lives? No. We'd like to have the least racist society that is possible to have. But we don't

want to speak about race all our life. I don't want to speak about black writers. I want to talk about writers. I don't want to talk about black thinkers. I want to just talk about thinkers. to talk about writers yeah i don't want to talk about black thinkers i want to just talk about thinkers and and the risk is that we're going to all spend our lives enmeshed in this crock stuff and my hope is that if this works what a few of us are trying to do is short-circuiting that get through this fast fast forward through that and helping people to realize what this is forward through that and helping people to realize what this is, on the other side of it, everyone will be able to have more the life they should have been having. They will be dedicating themselves to the things they're good at. They will be thinking about the things they wanted to think about. They won't be thinking about what is exactly the composition

racially of the group I am listening to. But who's the best group out there? And and that's what we could all be doing. You know, a friend of mine spoke at a university in America when you could still speak in public and and and and said to me afterwards, every single one of the questions, a's a businessman, said every single one of the questions was about, you know, identity stuff. And he said, he just turned to them and he said, why are you doing this? He said, your generation should be working out how we live in underwater cities and get to Mars.

Now, you might, you know, a particular student might not feel they have much to give in the way of helping us live in underwater cities. I myself would be a terrible guide to that. But I know that everybody has something better they could be doing than just performing these crowd performances that we're all being told to do. We could have much better music. We could have much better art, much better sports, much better everything, much better science, everything. If we stopped doing what we're doing at the moment, fast forwarded it through it and just used the amazing potential we have and the interconnected potential we all famously have now on the planet and used it to do what's worth doing. used it to do what's worth doing yeah it's it seems like with a lot of these subjects we have these these people who have clung to these subjects because they give them power and these

these they're they're grifters essentially but they're sanctioned grifters because they're they're going after these very particular hot subjects that no one wants to disagree with so you're allowed to be a grifter So you're allowed to be a grifter, and you're allowed to pretend that everything is racist, or everything is sexist, or there's a million genders. And if you disagree with that, you are disagreeing with the current orthodoxy. You're stepping out of line, and you'll be punished for that. And it's very much like cult thinking. It's very much like fundamentalist religious thinking yeah there's a lot of a lot of parallels that we're seeing well the cult stuff in particular i mean i mean we are

this should be said more often we're dealing with a cult yeah the so-called woke thing which always sounds too jokey to me the so-called woke thing is a cult yeah i mean you have you have people telling telling young people not to speak to their grandparents if their grandparents don't have the right views. That's a cult right there, right there. And by the way, I was watching the other night this documentary on the Jonestown massacre. And I was amazed to see, I mean, the cult parallels all over the place. I was amazed to see that one of Jim Jones's things to his followers was you can't go back to the United States because it's so racist. his things to his followers was, you can't go back to the United States because it's so racist.

I thought, wow, like hucksters and fraudsters have been onto this longer than I knew they had. Yeah, because it's such a hot button subject. And if you say it to people, they get terrified that they actually are racist or that they're going to be accused of being racist. And so they'll comply just to avoid the sting, the sting of the accusation, and they'll subjugate themselves. Unless, as I say, unless we all take the Joan Rivers approach, and we say, there will be a cost to you for dishonestly saying something about me like that,

and I won't put up with it. If we took the inspiration of Joan Rivers, we'd get somewhere. Well, maybe with more people being at least definitely more people are taken out of their current occupation because of COVID. More people have lost their jobs. And there's a lot of people that are forced into being independent. If they can become independent, like truly independent and not be concerned about losing a job, they can at least express themselves more freely and then only be concerned with the people around them who are forced into compliance and have to attack them, people who do have jobs and can lose those jobs.

I mean, there's a lot of people that are... You're not just forced into behaving a certain way. You're forced into condemning other people who don't go along with it. They're asking you to jump on board, pile on to the mob. Yeah, well, I just read Deborah So's book. I know you spoke to her recently. I mean, isn't it just amazing? She had to basically step out of academia to tell the truth about sex and gender.

Yes. And that's not a good sign. That's not a good sign. But thank God she's done it. And thank God she and others, small number of people, are doing the same thing. And it's terrific. And more people could take inspiration from it. Actually, Deborah So is a very good example of that.

She could have spent her life lying and hanging around and doing peer-reviewed papers, making the same bullshit claims that all of her contemporaries were making, whilst whispering in the canteen that it was all bullshit. Right. But that would be a horrible life. And instead, she's written a really good book, and doubtless she'll do many more great things. Well, fortunately for her— Because she happens to be able to live in the truth. Yes, and fortunately for her, there are these avenues. She happens to be able to live in the truth.

Yes, and fortunately for her, there are these avenues. There's these places that she can go where she can go on podcasts. She can use social media. But she gets attacked left and right because of it. And I got attacked because of having her on. But what she's saying, there's clearly something going on when you have this gigantic uptick of young girls who have sudden onset gender dysphoria and are turning trans and then the same with abigail shearer her book as well she describes the same situation and i've had people reach out to me hey my daughter is going to school and her

friends are turning trans there's a group of 10 of them that have decided they're trans the odds of that being actually that they're actually trans is so staggering and it's more likely there's some sort of psychological phenomena going on but if you bring that up people are thinking that it discredits actual trans people no we're talking about a human beings are malleable this is something we all know there's a reason why cults exist in the first place human beings are very subject to manipulation to to to suggestion to suggestion and also the praise that these young girls are getting for stepping out and saying that they're trans people are saying that's amazing and we're so brave yes we are interesting we all lean towards love you get that and it seems like that's all. So brave. Yes. And interesting. We all lean towards love.

You get that. And it seems like that's all of a sudden giving them meaning and giving them purpose. And, oh, I found the thing. I was so awkward and lost and confused. But it was just because I was trans. I know. I know. I have the same thing, Joe. I take trans on last because it's sort of the most minority thing, but

it's obviously very, very interesting and important thing to question what's going on here. And like, you know, and I'm not, I say, you know, I think something is obviously going on with the trans thing. I think that it's wildly under-discussed and I think that our societies are doing things that we will look back on with shame in terms of experimenting on young children. I mean, we will just... Yes, that is the most disturbing. And there's a bunch of lawsuits coming everyone's way quite soon, and maybe that'll stop it. But

I have, like you, I have parents who, again, when we still had events, would come up to me afterwards. I get emails from parents. I mean, I have a sympathy, which I think everybody else has, but they don't voice enough because they worry about it. I have so much sympathy with parents who say, I've been threatened with the suicide of my child. And by the doctors, by the medical profession, you know, and when, and this is what's always said, when people say, do you want a living daughter or a dead son? And they're told that by medical experts. What are they meant to say? What are they meant to do?

And these people find no sympathy for them anywhere. Right. And I think it's a huge one. I and I think I think again, it's a total silent majority one. Everybody knows most parents know something's going on in this. It's also, by the way, to have the real discussion about it is much more interesting than the fake one, because the real discussion, as I say, about things like autogynephilia, about sexual eroticism and

trans dressing and all this stuff is really interesting yes and it's not there's not much written about it but as you know but i mean it's really really interesting much more interesting than than what the trans activists try to say about trans um but all of that's going on all of it is trying to be suppressed it can't't be suppressed. It won't be suppressed. It'll all be had out sometime. And I think we can have it out now. But by the way, isn't it worrying that it is the debate that it has become? And I just I worry it was Camille Paglia who first alerted me to this. I worry about the dominance that trans has taken precisely where we started off because it's an end of empire discussion.

You know this? Paglia says at the end of every empire, they get interested in sexual fluidity, hermaphroditism and so on. And I do think that if this is the end of American dominance in the world, and it could be, if America falls into civil war, then this is the end of American dominance. It's the end of the West as we saw it and the rise, obviously, in the overtaking by China and China, first of all. And if that happens and historians look back on this, one of the things that they will say is, wasn't it strange that in the last decades, this American society got completely hung up on the issue of trans? It will be seen to be a late empire, a bad sign, a bad sign of things falling apart, on top of the multitude of other bad signs that you

particularly in America have all around you at the moment. That is fascinating that at the end of empires they get really concerned with gender and hermaphrodites and those things. That's universal? Well it certainly happens at the end of the Greek and Roman empires. I wonder what that is? I think it must be something to do with those boundaries and all other boundaries starting to erode. I mean, the nature of society is that we have certain fixed ideas that we agree on. I mean, by the way, isn't it?

Trans is a brilliant one. The whole non-binary thing is a brilliant one if you wanted to pull apart society, because, again, get people to pretend that men and women don't exist. Get get people to pretend that one of the things that we've all known from the beginning doesn't exist. Yeah. And you can do all of the other stuff, too. It's a brilliant one. It's a brilliant one to demoralize people on. Say there's no difference between men and women. The penis is a social construct. to demoralize people on say there's no difference between men and women the penis is a social construct um uh um somebody a labor mp said recently and on television she actually had the gold set up she said children are born without sex like penises and vaginas are so 20th century and um you know if if you if you do that stuff then of course people end up, they just doubt everything, everything.

And that's why these things worry some of us, because if everybody is persuaded to doubt what they see with their eyes, then they can be persuaded to fall for absolutely anything next. Agreed, but I don't think people are doing that on purpose with a specific goal of eroding society, right? So what is the motivation? Some are, some are. Some are, you believe? Some are. In what way?

Definitely. Oh, you can predict with 100% certainty the people who will use the latest, craziest trans claim and run with it. There are definitely politicians in all of our countries who pardon the image, but use trans people as a battering ram for something else. But they use trans as a battering ram against capitalism, horrible image, but I mean, like, they lit, they're just running at the door of capitalism using the latest thing that they

think will be useful, because they think that it demonstrates our horribleness as a society and obviously communist regimes were much better with trans but it it's something like that but so yes some people are pushing it but i agree it's not knowingly done among everybody right i think those people are using it but it already exists the question is why does it exist in such prevalence and the people that are supporting it in such and it's another thing that demands compliance i remember there was a conversation that i had with someone online back when i used to talk to people online um when i used to actually engage the people on twitter this woman was saying this you brought this up in your book actually it was about this is how i got brought into the whole trans thing in the in the. I pride myself on being open-minded. I literally don't care what your gender is.

I don't care what your sexual orientation is. I don't care where your ancestors are from. I just, I like people. I like all kinds of people. And I didn't have a lot of experience with trans people, but I didn't have any problem with them. Zero. Until I found out that there was a woman who was a man for 30 years and then

started entering into mixed martial arts competition as a women without telling the women that she was a man for 30 years and I was furious and I like this is fucking crazy this isn't you just entered into my realm okay this is my world I'm a martial arts expert and And I'm telling you right now, that's fucking insane. And the blowback I got, I didn't expect. I didn't see coming. And some of it was so preposterous. One of them was this woman that I interacted with who said, she has always been a woman. And I said, even when she had sex with a woman and got her pregnant and had a baby. she said yes even then i

remember seeing that seeing the yes even then and going oh we're in a fucking not we're in narnia we're in nonsense land right we've crossed over to the other side where you could just say anything you can say a man who sticks his penis in a woman ej ejaculates inside of her, gets her pregnant, has a baby, was never a man. What the fuck is going on then? What are we doing? And then you can also say that she is not just a woman, but she's equal to women in terms of physical strength, all the different physical attributes that we know. Reaction time, one-tenth of a second faster. There's all these different things that make the shape of the hips, the shape of the shoulders, the size of the hands, the mind that has grown with testosterone for 30 years.

If you had a woman that was competing in any sport, forget about combat sports, but any sport, and it was found out that her parents were injecting her with testosterone from the time she was a baby. And just making her the perfect killing machine so that when she entered into the octagon, she would have this spectacular advantage over women. And all they were going to do is just cut off her testosterone about two years before she entered into competition. You would go, that's fucking crazy. That's cheating. Oh, my God.

How can you do that? fucking crazy. That's cheating. Oh my God, how can you do that? That's so unethical. But yet when it's a trans person, we say, oh, she was always a woman and we're supposed to step back and just let it all happen. And I found it repulsive. Yeah. Well, the same thing happened to you as happened to various scientists. It's exactly the same thing. They trod on your realm. They trod on one of the things you knew about and you said no. And it's the same with quite a lot of scientists with that. It's just they trod on their realm and they said, sorry, I can't do this. And that's exactly what everybody should do. And it treads on their realm. And by the way, that happens on

all of these issues. It, you know, there are people I know who get concerned of each of these issues because it treads on the things they know about. And that's perfectly normal. It should happen more. I mean, I'm surprised that there isn't more objection when, you know, because, again, all of this is so much more interesting to have out honestly. The trans the transporting thing is so much more interesting if you have it out honestly than if you pretend as so many people want to it's much more interesting yes the actual thing is absolutely fascinating and i'm 100 in acceptance of it i'm i'm i i don't believe they're pretending to want

to be women i don't believe they're pretending to be even the ones who don't want to be women but the men who are sexually aroused by putting on women's clothes and women's shoes. It's fascinating. I don't think they're pretending that that arouses them. That 100% is a real thing. So the question is why and what's going on? Those are the real questions. But when you wrap this up with identity politics and you wrap this up with this forced compliance, now all of a sudden we can never get to the answer. And then you can say things like, there is no such thing as biological sex. And you go, what the fuck are you talking about?

It's exactly the same with the relations between the sexes questions. It's so much more interesting to have the discussion we're not having than it is to have the nonsense one. As you know, I have this obsession with Christine Lagarde, the former head of the IMF, because she always says, she did it again recently, she said, you know, says that if Lehman Brothers have been Lehman sisters, then we might not have had the financial crisis. And I just think, I always ask, but why? Right. But why? Why? That would be really interesting to know.

Yes. And I ventriloquize her, but her answer would be because women are exactly the same as men and also magically better in certain ways. And I don't think that's a sustainable position. Not just magically better, but not allowed to achieve their incredible heights of success as they would be if not for the patriarchy. They're suppressed. Exactly. Superheroes in waiting. That's the only reason why they're not so successful.

And by the way, Lugana did it recently as well when she said that female world leaders have been more successful than male world leaders in tackling COVID and then just left it there dangling. But it's much more interesting to have the discussion that nobody then has, which is to say, if that was the case, and I don't think it is particularly, but if that was the case, why might that be? Is it the case that something in the female mind makes them better at dealing with pandemics? Instead of putting it on a chart and putting a one on the female side and a zero on the male side, let's find out what they did and apply it to everybody. If it is true, then we better get women to the top for the pandemic era fast. And we shouldn't

have that as a secret. It shouldn't be like a little tittery bit of knowledge. It should be fast track the women in the pandemic. But we're also pretending that women are all the same. That's what's ridiculous. If that is the case, and by the way, there's a small handful of women that are running countries. So you're not dealing with a lot of people. So what is about those women and why are we pretending, why would anybody pretend those women are equal and exactly the same as every woman who's ever existed?

That's nonsense. We all know that's nonsense. And this idea that you could identify with a particular gender and that would make you automatically better at handling COVID is so fucking stupid that it's just amazing that someone can just say that. Someone whose opinion is supposed to be respected can just – imagine if a man said that. Imagine if a man said, well, we're just better at it. Men are just – all men are better at this. Yeah. Well, of course – and it's no longer a hypothetical thing it's as you know in the state you just fled uh in california this bill

has just been passed that is going to force all corporations to i can't what are the things it's something like um if you have five directors you've got to have a minimum of two female directors by the end of next year and the people with who they say are underrepresented bodies, you've got to have two if you've got a board of nine, and then I think add up to three to four by 2022. So all of this stuff is gonna be enforced. Crazy. By the state on every single company operating in the state of California.

And you know, you do just, you at some point have to be able to have the discussion, you have to have the discussion anyway, whether you're allowed to or not, about whether, for instance, the underrepresented groups that are going to have to go on boards, including women, people who are trans, I think Pacific Islanders was one, LGBT, obviously, like what you've got to at some point, tell everyone, if you're going to make everyone go one, LGBT, obviously. You've got to at some point tell everyone, if you're going to make everyone go through this incredibly painful and potentially financially unhelpful process, you've got to at some point tell them exactly what the benefit is.

And again, like Christine Lagarde, California is stuck in this situation where they have to simultaneously pretend, as I say in the women chapter, that every group is simultaneously exactly equal in their competencies. And also underrepresented people bring something that's better. And I think you can hold one of those, but you can't hold both. Or at least you can't hold both without serious cognitive dissonance. Because at some point you I mean, by the way, I had a friend who's a mathematician to run the figures of this in the state of California and of the number of companies and i think i'm right in saying that if you're trans or a pacific islander in california you better clear your diary for the next few years because you are going to have to dash from board meeting to board meeting it's going to be it's going to be walled or your diary your diary for 2022 is blocked uh and and it's not going to work. And it's not going to work.

But if it's not going to work, why not work that out now and have the discussion now instead of having it after the endless, painful gear cogs have not meshed for several years? And then California, on top of everything else, has failed company after failed company because they prioritized the wrong things. Well, it's the presumption that the only reason why women aren't in these positions is because they've been suppressed.

It's not because they're not interested in those positions at all. And that's not where they link. I've always used the example of mixed martial arts fighters. There are women who fight in a cage, but there's not a lot of them. If you look at the general population, there's not a lot. There's a spectrum of female behavior and women that are interested in different things. I feel like that's across the board with everything that's dominated by men.

I don't think it's necessarily because the men are suppressing the women, although in some cases I'm sure that's the case. But I think it's more often that women do not gravitate towards those fields. And this has always been the issue with gender pay gap. And that's been weaponized by so many people disingenuously, including Obama. I remember when Obama was giving a speech, he was talking about having to deal with the gender pay gap and I was like Jesus Christ you must know you must know you went to fucking Harvard you have to know that that's not why there's a gender pay gap it's because they choose different career paths. I'm sure there is sexism I'm sure some women are suppressed from certain

positions I'm sure but I'm also sure that there's a lot of women that aren't interested in these male-dominated fields because they don't appeal to them because they can make their own decisions what they want to do with their life and if all of a sudden those those things that they are not interested in become open they just go to it because well i can get an easy job as a ceo fuck it might as well just absolutely it's great and by the way and by the way isn't it sad because there will be lots of girls who will be growing up and they'll be smart and they'll be looking to do things in their lives and they'll hear obama or anyone else in charge saying this and they will honestly think that if they go into a job and i've had this conversation with lots of people

since manners of crowds came out they will honestly think that if they go into a job and I've had this conversation with lots of people since Manners of Crowds came out, they will honestly think that if they go into a job in their 20s, they will be paid less than their male colleagues. Yes. And that's just it's just a horrible way to start your life. It's the same way. You know, if you if you tell people lies about their society and sometimes it seemed they seem at the time quite small things like gender pay gap. Why go on about the gender pay gap but because down the line you get a generation of very disgruntled people who have a false

understanding of pay in their society yes and then further down the line and i i've i mean like the transparency issue i i've had i've had a lot of contact from women since the book came out about the chapter on women saying you say something there which is very painful but is correct, which is where I highlight the issue of motherhood. And everybody knows it. That feminism skipped motherhood. It didn't really know what to deal with it. And so it went on to things it saw as being easier questions. Could you elaborate on that for people that are just listening to this that haven't read your book? onto things it saw as being easier questions. And we all know...

Could you elaborate on that for people that are just listening to this that haven't read your book? The second wave feminists knew that motherhood was a big question and that of all of the things that made women different, this was possibly the most important. But they didn't know what to do with it because it is undoubtedly if you if you're talking about career and motherhood the desire to have children and the desire to have the career that you can have these are obviously

things that at some point are going to come into contest now you can set up your society better in order to help women who have that. But it's never optimal because, as we know, small companies, how do you support a woman when you've got a staff of three, if one of the woman goes away on pregnancy leave and you've got to still support. And so these aren't impossible to solve. But they're very tricky in lots of ways. And on a personal level, the thing that's tricky is how you deal, unless you're very, very rich, with the conundrum of working every hour of the day in order to get to the top in a particular line of work and also being able to look after children and being able to mother children and indeed being pregnant. The point is it was always there as a very, very tricky issue, which it continues to be. It continues to be. But the third and fourth wave feminists knew it was a tricky issue, and so they just skipped

it and they went on to these other things. I mean, by the way, not all crazy things. I mean, a lot of it, domestic violence and much more, which they stressed as well, were very worthwhile. I don't think it was particularly worthwhile when the fourth wave feminists decided to say things like all men are trash. I don't think that massively advanced their cause. Well, that was also the hashtag that you discussed in your book, kill all men. Kill all men. They didn't get a lot of new recruits from that one.

They didn't get a lot of new recruits from that one. Well, that was also the thing that the head of Vox, Ezra Klein, was defending. That's not really what they meant. Like, what the fuck are you saying? Yeah, some words mean things they don't, and others don't mean what they say. And it depends on my personal choice, is what Ezra Klein was saying. It depends on the ideology. But the point is, is that, again, I mean, the whole issue of work, motherhood, the difficulty of it, it's not irreconcilable. There's a very big question there.

And it's painful for women as it is for men. And it's much more useful for our society to have that discussion and be better at sorting that out than it is to pretend that it's a problem which is either not there or solved. And, you know, it again, there is an opportunity cost to having these things out wrongly. the end of it is that you end up with people who have a misunderstanding of the society they're in think they think it's uniquely unhappy uniquely unpleasant uniquely bigoted against them uniquely biased against them and it'll mean that they will have less chance in their lives of fulfilling their potential because they have been told that they've been born in society where they're second class from the outset and i don't think that's. And I don't think it helps young women any more than it helps young men. But it's an example of, again, of just this problem that there are really interesting problems we could be trying to solve. And instead, you know, our era decides to settle down on unsolvable problems or non-existent ones. It is fascinating that women have been plugged into this society, this society of capitalism,

and expected to gain equal ground while actually giving birth and raising human beings that came out of their body. I had this bit that was, one of the times when I was being canceled, was taken out of context and put in print because it's an easy one to do i was talking about um how my own mother was saying i want a woman to be president because i think it would be great if a woman if a woman did the most important job in the world and i said you make all the people again that's not the most important job every person that's ever lived came out of a woman's body you you literally make life inside there's seven billion people in the world all of them came out of a woman's

body I go you make food with your tits you do the most magical thing ever you make baby food that literally affects the child's immune system. It changes the child's intelligence. You make life in your body. And you want to be president too? You fucking greedy bitch. And that was the joke. And that's where people got upset. I go, what else you want? You want a bigger dick? You want all the money?

You want everything? It was clearly a joke. But when it was taken out of context, you know, you want to be president too. Women who want to be president are fucking greedy bitches. Well, that's, okay, that's not what I said. But this is one of the things that's done but in but in all in no joking joking aside they do the most magical thing we know of yeah they're literally responsible for all the life and people that don't think that's a big deal do you do you not love people

i fucking love people i think they're. All my favorite people are people. All my favorite people in my life came out of a woman's body. Women do the most important thing we know of. And we also expect them to earn the same amount of money. We also expect them to be CEOs and presidents and all these other things. And we don't take into account that we've plugged women into this capitalist society. Just like we've plugged us into this capitalist society. But we have demeaned or diminished the biological fact, the biological impact of actually creating human beings.

Yes. That's what – so right. I quote the American writer Wendell Berry on this. He said somewhere a couple of decades ago that he was growing to resent the portrayal of motherhood as mere drudgery and as something that women spend their lives on where they could be doing something better. And, you know i i identify in

madison crowds there these cases like the economist magazine a couple of years ago ran a piece describing like the child debt what it costs you to have a child and how it's sort of therefore not worth your while because it'll it'll you won't get to this level in promotion you know it was it was being talked about as if the point of life is to get to the grave with the largest possible bank balance. Exactly. And Wendell Berry says, and I love this, he says, we all have to spend our lives on something.

We have to spend ourselves on something. And of all of the things you could spend yourself on in your life, the raising of a child would seem to be absolutely at the top, much higher than if you pretended the thing at the top was dying with the largest bank balance. And so it's not that it has to be either or, but it is incredibly sad when a society, yes, presents it as if one of the greatest things you can ever do is mere drudgery. And by comparison, you know, getting to the top of some bloody investment firm where you're going to find they're all woke idiots anyway once you're there and you're wasted your time and then you've got a retirement party and you're going to find they're all woke idiots anyway, once you're there and you're wasted your time, and then you've got a retirement party and you're out. And that wasn't all it was cracked up to be after all. You know, everybody has to, as my late friend Christopher Hitchens once said, everybody has to choose their regrets. You know?

There's a regret worth choosing or not. And if whatever you choose, knowing honestly what you're going into would be a good thing. And I would say I completely agree with that. And I'd also say there are women that don't ever want children, and that's fine too. There's women that want to travel the world and they want to do art or they want to be CEOs of companies or they want to be fighter jet pilots. Whatever the fuck they want to do, of companies or they want to be fighter jet pilots, whatever the fuck they want to do, that's fine. That's wonderful. But to diminish the idea of womanhood to the point where you're diminishing this incredible

thing that human beings are capable of doing, and only females, making human beings, they make them inside their body. It's one of the most spectacular things that we know of. If there was an invention that could do that, it would be phenomenal. If someone had a box and babies came out of it, and then those babies went on to be presidents and football players and mathematicians, you'd be like, this is the most incredible thing ever. Through this box, inventors have been born. Well, it's actual human beings. But our society,

for whatever reason, has diminished that role because it doesn't add up on a ledger. You don't see it in a bank account. It's just having a baby. Here's a suggestion, by the way, because I'm always after answers to these things. I think that a suggestion that we could try to get agreement on across all political boundaries, such as they now exist, is that I think you get an absolute majority in all of our, in all the developed countries for the following proposition, which is that nobody should be held back from achieving whatever they can achieve in their life by dint of a characteristic over which they have no say. Yes. And, and I think, I mean, maybe people aren't honest to pollsters. I think they're

pretty much, I think, I think it's a very small number of people now in America or Britain who think that a woman who's able to do the job shouldn't get the job because she's a woman. I think a very small number of people think that, you know, those of us who are gay shouldn't achieve things because we're gay if we can if we can do them. And I think a very small number of people, they exist but i think there's definitely a vast minority i think most people think that uh you shouldn't be held back from whatever you can achieve because of the color of your skin i think i think we have almost total agreement on this in our societies and i resent by the way the those people on the far left who pretend that actually everybody on the right doesn't agree to that because it's absolute

agreement on that. What there is a disagreement about is a perfectly serious issue to disagree on, which is how you go about making sure that those optimal conditions not only are attained but remain in place. Yes. And the left has an answer, which is forcing people onto boards and forcing boards to take over and and quotas and much more. And that has something to be said for it.

And the right has its own answer, which is, broadly speaking, give it time and it'll all look a bit more, you know, it'll get there. And that's got a lot to be said for it and something to be said, you know, against maybe. But broadly speaking, that's the deal by now. And it's not such a bad disagreement to have. And if we had it out honestly, and if we had it sincerely, we could again, we could we could get there. We could we could solve that. Well, we'd like everything to be a meritocracy, but in order to do that, you would really have to somehow or another even out the starting points. This is a gigantic problem in America with impoverished cultures or impoverished communities that have been there since slavery, and there's nothing, very little, been done to try to

improve upon those things. So when you're talking about issues of race, that's a primary factor in whether or not this is a meritocracy. How can it be if some people start, you know, at third base and other people are starting, you know, several miles from the beginning? Yeah, yeah, of course. Yes, this is, but this is also an issue when you force people into these positions or when you make it so difficult for people to have a workplace environment that is friendly and loose and easy. There's going to be people that don't hire women because they're worried that women are going to complain about sexism or that women are going to be difficult to work with. This is a very, very unfortunate, very unfortunate aspect of the complaining and of this sort

of framing all of these businesses as being sexist and the fact that these women aren't in these positions of power is because of some patriarchy that's holding them back. You're going to have a lot of people that are scared of hiring these women because they don't want to be accused of sexual harassment or of discrimination. And you could actually fuck up the whole process of progress. Yes. You could also, I mean, there are already stats on that of CEOs who just won't fly in the same cabin of a plane as female colleagues and will not even be on the same hotel floor as female colleagues on a

business trip and this the south is a staggering the fear that is being injected and it's weaponized it's weaponized and and the problem is and this is the problem on all of these identity traits thing and the way we've decided to weaponize them the problem is is that it relies on everybody on earth being honest all the time it relies on everybody being an honest actor on for instance if you get if you get the right character trait person in place they will always use their position accurately and they will always level accusations truthfully and it's possible and i just put it out there, human nature being what it is, that some people, when they're found to have a cudgel that they can use, might use it

in order to advance themselves, might use it to do over somebody they don't like, or to get a little bit further forward. And that happens. That happens throughout history. It happens in every society. The problem exists if other people cannot ever identify that. Yes. And that's dangerous because it means that everybody is. So that thing I'm trying to help defuse, everything's bubbling away underneath and nothing is allowed to happen above the surface. Everybody knows what we know. I say about the sexes. Everyone knew a load of things till yesterday and we've had to pretend not to know them today. And that's the case in each of these situations.

I'm a big fan of Steven Pinker's and one of the things that I enjoy about Steven Pinker's work is watching people get angry at him saying how things are better today than they've ever been before. And I think that's really inarguably true. It's pretty clear when you look at the statistics of violence, of rape, of murder, of theft, of all the variables that we would consider to be important in a polite society.

There's less of all those things today than there have been in the past. There's less homophobia. There's less racism. There's less all those things. than there have been in the past. There's less homophobia. There's less racism.

There's less all those things. My fear is that we're going through this really fucked up time, and it will get better, but it'll take so much time that I'll be an old man before I see it, and that all these years will be spent just knee-deep in nonsense and dealing with all this horse shit until the generations eventually work it out. It's possible. Look, I mean, there have been lots of people who have predicted this,

but the problem that you get when you get a society of the kind of freedom that we have, particularly in America, is that at the end of this process, people are bored and they want something to do, and they react against freedom out of something like habit. They're so used to reacting to things, against things, that they react against the best thing going and they don't realize it. There is something like that that's going on in America. There is a way back, and it has to involve, as I said before, some historical context.

It has to involve people knowing about things that happened before yesterday, has to involve people knowing about things that have happened and are happening now around the world. Because if you have it in context, you cannot possibly think that the system you've got going in America is so unfair that it deserves to have a 1789 or 1917 moment. And maybe what will happen is that people will start to see the stakes, will realize that they were interested in the performative bit of revolution, but they don't actually want to burn down the whole damn building. And you just have to hope those people are going to be in large enough numbers to see off the people who see a great big bloody pyrotechnic disaster and just want to rush towards it. Well, I'm very thankful that there's people like you that are

out there that are writing books that highlight all these issues that we're dealing with and that you are brave enough to go forward with your thoughts uncensored despite the criticism and the way you present them you're you're so articulate and you're so dead on the money with so many of these issues i i think you're you're one of the bright lights that could lead us out of this darkness and i and i think your work is very brave in that regard because i know the kind of blowback i've read the kind of blowback that you you've received i think it's very important what you're doing. That's very kind. Likewise, Joe. And it's just a great pleasure to virtually see you. I hope we can have a drink someday in the great state of Texas. Yes, I hope it's legal someday. I mean,

I'm not going to be the first person to take the vaccine, but I'm sure something's coming. Well, after we've got that, let's have a scotch. Yes, let's do it. So The Madness of Crowds, the newest, latest edition with this new edition that you added to it. Yeah, new chapter. Brings us slap up to date and is out this month. It's out this month. And I can't recommend it enough.

It's excellent. And the audio book is excellent too when you read it. Oh, I love doing that. And I particularly enjoyed it because there are strange things I get to read out, like some of the work of Nicki Minaj. And I loved doing that. And a lot of my listeners were very startled. I'm sure they were. I'm sure they were.

Well, thank you, Douglas. Hopefully next time I see you, it will be in person. Absolutely. It's been great to be with you, Joe. Great to sure they were. I'm sure they were. Well, thank you, Douglas. Hopefully next time I see you, you'll be in person. Absolutely. It's been great to be with you, Joe. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye.