The Joe Rogan Experience - #1807 - Douglas Murray

Episode Date: April 22, 2022

Douglas Murray is a political commentator, journalist, and author of numerous books, the most recent of which is "The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason."

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day oh well i guess we are going there we're up and running first of all you look fucking great you look like you've been working out what's going on i have been and i'm also not wearing suits dude you look jacked well Well, that's very kind. So do you. You do. But you look like the pandemic has been... There's two different types of people during the pandemic. The people that gained weight and the people that got fit.

And you look like a fit man. I certainly tried not to gain weight during the pandemic. Yeah, you look good. Congratulations on that. Thank you. On holding it down. What does it feel like to be wandering the world now? Yeah, I mean, I sort of was a bit during the pandemic.

Oh, you're a risk taker. Well, I don't like to say exactly what I did, but I did decide that after lockdown one in my native country, the UK, I wasn't going through that again. I mean, lockdowns are bad everywhere, but in the UK, they just kept doing them. Yeah. And they started one of them in late December one year. And it was just like that.

You don't want to spend January locked in your house. And, you know, it's bad enough in the UK anyway. How did the UK handle lockdowns in terms of the restrictions? Like what did they do? It was really strict. Really strict. I mean, just terrible. And things like you were only allowed out once a day from your house

for one bit of physical exercise. One friend of mine called me one day and she said, do you have spies in your neighborhood? I said, what do you mean? She said, in my village, we have people who inform. And I said, well, what does that look like? She said, for instance, somebody leant over the garden wall the other day and said to me, you are aware this is your second walk of the day.

Wow. I know. She said the embarrassing thing is I know him. People were doing really crazy stuff like that. I thought it was horribly revealing. And I loathed it and I got out. That's just a character issue that pops up whenever people have any kind of control. You know, that's the Stanford Prison Experiments.

They found it like almost immediately. People just started ordering people around and treating people like shit. Well, look at all these people who now love it. I mean, they were shouting at us for years. Yeah. And they want to keep doing it. Yes. I was in the theater recently in New York. And I mean, they now treat you like you're going to Rikers Island when you've paid $100 to go and see a show.

Really? I'm standing there like, everyone, show your papers. And it's like that. You think, whoa, this isn't a great start to the evening. Right. I mean, this play better be funny. And they're doing that. And those people, I don't know.

I don't know what we can do with them after this because they're going to lose their meaning because they've just had a whale of a time. Yeah. All this sort of you haven't remastered fast enough. Those people. Yeah. Yeah. It's it became a way to communicate with people. It's like a standard way to do it. Like you have to bark at someone who's not wearing their mask properly, bark at someone with,

I can see your nose. Yeah, yeah. The one good thing in the UK was that we didn't have the crazy, complete politicization we have in America of like, you know, if Donald Trump had been pro-mask, the other side would be anti and, you know, that sort of thing.

Right, right, right. So we didn't actually have that. And masking wasn't quite as strict. So if I forgot my mask and I was going into a shop, you know, I could easily, like, I had several techniques. One was to pull my hat down a bit. Another was I always felt if I walked a bit faster and frowned, that also kept COVID away. I was at the gym in the middle of the pandemic, and there was a guy in the gym with a face shield on. It was just this plastic thing.

But you could reach under there, and it's the same air. It's like it didn't make any sense. Did you reach under there? Were you tempted? No, but it's me. So these are big COVID-y hands. It was like I used to have this cat that would hide under like a table but her tail was sticking out i was like you're not hiding you're right there this is so silly like she thought that she was hiding

because her head was under there she just wasn't very body aware that's what it felt like yeah like this is not hiding yeah you're not hiding from covid your hands go right in there's this big space it's just this plastic window in front of your face. It doesn't make any sense at all. It's like symbolic. You had to have something on that showed that you're precautious. For sure. You had a good pandemic. It was a fun time.

You've been very quiet of late. We haven't heard anything of you. Really? I'm being sarcastic. Yeah, no. I mean, basically you're doing the same thing. You have been put through the ringer. Yeah. I definitely got put through the ringer. Since we last met.

They did a number on you. They did. Wow. It's interesting. Wow. But my subscriptions went up massively. That's what's crazy. During the height of it all, I gained 2 million subscribers. I'm so pleased for you. I'm pleased for everyone, actually.

When I watched what they were doing to you, I just thought, as long as you survive this, something's going to be okay in this world. Yeah, they went for it. They went for it. And because it didn't work, it felt like everyone could sigh a bit of a breath it's also it's fortunate that the people that went for it were CNN and they're just so

untrustworthy yeah people know how biased they are and they know how socially weird their fucking anchors are just these awkward non relatable people that no one feels. If there's someone on TV, pick a person like Jon Stewart is a great, relatable person who I find to be a brilliant guy who's a kind person. If Jon Stewart thinks you're a piece of shit, I'm going to listen. Right. You know? But if Brian Stelter doesn't like you, that doesn't mean anything to me.

One of my rules, I try and never be mean about people because of their appearances. But a friend of mine said to me the other day, do you know how old Brian Stelter is? And I said, I don't know, 56 or something. He said, look it up on your phone. He's like 34 or something. Yeah, something nuts. I couldn't stop laughing the rest of the evening. I just couldn't stop laughing.

I don't know what, everything about the guy is strange. Everything about him. Very strange. His pattern of communication is so strange. It's like, do you listen to other people? Yeah. They talk very differently than you. Yes, he has that, hmm.

Yeah. And also, Crystal Ball from Breaking Points was making fun of him the other day. people. They talk very differently than you. Yes, he has that, hmm. Yeah, and also Crystal Ball from Breaking Points was making fun of him the other day. She's like, why does he sit like this? Because you ever notice, he sits like this. Douglas, Douglas Murray has a book out. It's called The War on

the West and it's terrible. The War on the West, is that really what's going on? One of my favorite moments was him with Barry Weiss where Barry Weiss How has the world gone crazy? Oh, yes, and she just rattles really good one after another after another That's right. Yeah when you say silence is violence when actual violence is violence the world has gone crazy Yeah, the world's gone mad and she just rattled all these off. We're speaking on this day where CNN minus just went under. Yeah, CNN plus went under.

Oh, CNN minus. Just went under. They spent $300 million. They got 10,000 subscribers. Imagine the hubris of thinking that something that people don't want for free, that you're going to charge money for it. We're going to have a Jake Tapper book club. Jake Tapper seems like a great guy.

But, I mean, I feel like I don't have to pay for his book club. I feel like you should put that on Twitter. It's just not very good. I mean, the ideological stuff aside, it's not very good. I watched it a little while ago. Early last year, I just spent a bit of time watching it. And everything in the coverage was horrible and inflammatory. And everything in the advert breaks were for like adverts about the KKK's history in America.

So like all you saw all the time was like burning crosses. And then that was the relief from the interview stuff. It was just horrible to watch. Isn't it a function of time, right? Because if you're dealing with a show that's only an hour long and it's supposedly a new show, you kind of have to pay attention to only the bad things because you have to be aware of those bad things. Because maybe those bad things are something like Russia invading Ukraine, something you actually have to pay attention to. But it's not an accurate assessment of the world at large.

There's so much great stuff going on. It's like most of the world is wonderful. Most of the world is people getting along. Most interactions between people are fine. Sure, sure. Now, I mean, there was a British philosopher some years ago who tried to start a website which only did good news. I felt really sorry for him because it was obviously going to fail.

It was a nice idea, but it was obviously going to fail because people don't really just want to hear that things are okay. Is there a problem with just the idea of having news, just news in that way, like where you're just going to something to see what's happening in the world? So it's almost always going to be negative. Like there's no news channel of record that we're aware of ever that is focused on like really positive stories.

No. I mean some local news used to do a bit of that, didn't they? Yeah, local stories. A nice local story, a bit of heartwarming stuff. Kitting up a tree, gets rescued by the fireman. Yeah, someone opens a shop, that sort of thing. It wouldn't make the national news but it's nice yeah i tell you in my own lifetime everything seems to have gone wrong since 24-hour rolling news i'm just sure of it like i saw it i saw it

myself it just yeah because of the need of the news to develop the story i mean i used to get this uh when i started off in journalism people would phone you and and say, would you be willing to come on and call for X now that Y has happened? So say somebody's got into a scandal. Would you come on and argue that we should now call for an inquiry?

Would you be willing to come on and call for the resignation and say that it's enough and is enough? So they vet your opinions? Oh yeah, of course. Interesting. And things like Sky in the UK, the BBC, because they think their job is to move the story along. Because otherwise it's just them all day saying the same thing,

which it kind of is. Yeah. But the other thing is it's just a very bad way to absorb news. I mean, I flick down a few news websites in the morning and I can get most of them and most of the news in like a minute maybe an overview and if I was watching like nightly news I don't take half an hour yeah that's just not a good use of my time well even the way they handle debates or discussions they have too many people they'll don't have

a panel with four or five people and they're all talking over each other and they're all trying to get a soundbite. I always joke about that one that they do where they say, now here's an incredibly important issue. It's a world important issue and that's why we're going to discuss it for three minutes with five guests

all of whom get 15 seconds. It's crazy. That's not appropriate of the subject at seconds. It's crazy. That's not appropriate, the subject at hand. It's terrible. Yeah. It's a terrible way to communicate.

Yeah. There's no way you're ever going to get into depth about something. No one knows when they can talk, so everyone's trying to, like, just jump in. And that presumption of the interviewer wanting to take the guest down. Yes. I mean, that's the worst one. Yes. That's the worst one.

Well, that was a lot of people's reputation. Like that interviewer would ask the tough questions and would prod you about your personal life and then get deep and make you uncomfortable. They'd throw you off center and all that sort of thing. Yeah. They would try like trip you up my favorite used to be when people like uh when i was still allowed on npr which i was a couple of books ago um you're not allowed on anymore they reject you apparently there was well a couple of books ago i was still allowed on had a very good uh ding dong as we'd call it in britain

with the uh presenter it was good it It was like 10, 15 minutes. Which book was it? Was it Islam and the Strangest Death in Europe? The Strangest Death in Europe they interviewed me on. I remember because a friend of mine in America said I almost drove my car off the road. They said you were coming on. I said no way. And then Madness of Crowds I was told actually by somebody who knew somebody on the inside

that when I suggested that they should interview me about the madness of crowds, the person who suggested it almost lost her job. Wow. So it went that fast. And it's happened that fast in my own life, in my own career. But no, when you did used to sort of do NPR, there was always that sort of media,

there was always that sort of funny thing where the interviewer would interview you about your book having having not read it, and try to catch you out on it. Having not read it. So did they get questions that were prepared by the producers or something? Barely even that. It was usually an attempt to prove you were a liar. So a typical BBC interview would start with, so Doug, thank you so much for joining us this morning. You're clearly not that pleased, but thank you so much for

joining us this morning. And now you say in your latest book, and then you say, well, I didn't quite say that. Ah, so you're saying you didn't say that. By the second question, you're in like this horrible mire. And then about like 90 seconds later, you're chucked out. Yes. And that was a normal interview Until you and a few others came along. Well when the Kathy Newman Jordan Peterson interview went viral So what you're saying is She is she after they because I was one of the people who passed that around when that happened I watched it live and then and I realized this was a car crash for Kathy Newman.

But Channel 4 thought it was great. They actually posted out a video of them mocking Jordan Peterson afterwards. Oh, wow. They thought it was good. Their first thing was it was good. And I tweeted something like saying, I don't know, there's another way to see this. Get ready.

And she then complained that I and others doing that had led to death threats against her, which then became the news. Because within 24 hours, it became poor Kathy Newman suffers death threats as a result of interview with alt-right hero, you know, blah, blah, blah. hero you know blah blah blah and of course all that had happened was that that like it turned out that what they thought was a what they claimed to be a death threat was somebody wrote on youtube one person wrote on youtube r.i.p kathy newman's career isn't that amazing that is not a death that's amazing like as a connoisseur of the genre i'll show you a death i'll show you let's a death threat. Let me go through my Twitter feed real quick. R.I.P. Kathy Newman's career.

That's not at all. And they were like, we have to call in security now. Because, of course, that means that then you haven't done the bad thing. You're the victim. Right. She's a victim. Well, it's a great strategy. It's a great strategy for instantaneously becoming a victim.

But that's quite cute that R.I. RIP Kathy Newman is a death threat. Yeah Yeah, I know how likely is it that guy's gonna follow through on that? Yeah There was one moment in the career in that interview though Where she did show a sense of humor because he asked a question she was asking about offensive like why should you? Think was like why should you? Be allowed to offend people he's like if you're allowed to talk and think, you have to risk being offensive. That's right. And they had this conversation.

And then, I forget what it is, he caught her. And she's in the moment. He goes, I got you, right? And she goes, yes, you did. It took quite a while, but you got me. And they were kind of like joking around about it. Because she was silent. Yes.

But she went into that argument or that discussion with the goal of making it controversial. The goal of trying to catch him and trying to press him like that's the thing instead of just having a conversation with someone you don't know jordan peterson you're meeting him for the first time let's talk to him well by the way that's one of the things i mean i've you know i know jordan pretty well like you do and and i uh have such huge respect for him admiration as well just just such a great guy he's a great guy and one of the things i i think i'll never get over about his his his career even to date is that none of these people who tried to take him down ever spent any time trying to work out why he'd risen right like they never bothered right and i just i always felt like if somebody who i was

very ideologically opposed to or really had a lot of differences with was packing out arenas of young, cool, clever, smart people night after night. Yeah. I think I'd want to find out what they were on to. Yeah. Instead of just like not even bothering with that. And they never bothered with Jordan. None of those critics ever bothered to work out like they must must be onto something. Otherwise, this wouldn't be happening. Well, there's this narrative that gets bandied about in certain social circles. And the narrative

with him was alt-right, anti-trans, misogyny. And it was, this is who he is. And then you can look at his supporters, and you see how his supporters attack people who criticize him, and this is who he is. And that narrative, if you went against that narrative, you faced a lot of blowback. So most people just accepted it. And I've had these conversations with people. They go, oh, God, Jordan Peterson.

Tell me why you don't like him. What is it? What did he say? It does, even now, I mean, you can survive this like you did, but even now, these kind of hit jobs when they try them, there is a residue for quite a long time afterwards. Yes. You know, like, I still will speak to people occasionally who are not in the same line of business, the same line of work, and they will say, like, so do you think, do you think like jk rowling is a transphobe

you know you know yeah uh because there's just a slime trail after these attacks which you never completely clean up i don't know i hope it is with i hope it is in your case you clean up with people who know you the fortunate situation for me is that I've been doing a podcast for 12 years and people hear me for hours and hours and hours every day right and because of that they know me you can't hide for hours and hours every day they know who you are so misrepresentations don't work like if somebody tried to tell me my best friend was a piece of shit I'd be like what what way you know like he does this he does does that. I'm like, no, he doesn't.

I know him. I know him really well. Like, what are you saying? It doesn't work. You know, but if I didn't know him and someone tried to say something terrible about him, I'd have to take that into consideration. So it probably worked on people who didn't like me already or people who would be more inclined

to form a stereotype or something based on their appearance or, you know, I mean, I'm problematic. I host cage fights, you know, I mean, that's one of my side jobs. I commentate and explain how people are beating the fuck out of each other. Yeah. That's part of my job. It's great.

But it's a weird, it's a weird gig, you know, to also have and then to be talking to people like you and political candidates and scientists. I hope what it is is that you have enough work out there, like Jordan had enough work out there to survive. I do worry that somebody's starting off. If anyone comes from somebody who has not got a body of work behind them, that would be hard to survive. Especially if you have a job and you get fired from that job.

That's the big one. If you're self-sufficient, if you have a job and you get fired from that job. That's the big one. If you're self-sufficient, if you have a podcast or something, you might lose some advertisers, but hopefully if your show is still good, you'll still gain numbers, and after a while the residue will die down, and then you'll get advertisers again. I know people where that has happened, where they've lost advertisers due to being air quotes canceled. But if you have a job, it's frightfully easy to fire someone.

I know. So easy. All you've got to do is be called into that fateful HR meeting and be told that there's something you've done that's damaged the reputation of the company. Or you've offended a certain number of people that work there. And the thing about work is people don't like working. They don't like being stuck in a cubicle they don't like being stuck in an office and they feel a certain innate sense there's like a just

a there's a level of frustration that's undeniable and one thing that people would do when they encounter a level frustrations they lash out and if they can lash out inside the rulebook like like, what's the rule book? I was offended. Fuck him. Get him fired. Like, they're just tense, and they're just, you know, they have, like, a certain level of a lack of compassion already

just because of the fact that they have a low-level, subtle torture that's being put on them every day just by having to show up there. Vengefulness in general is one of the nastiest human instincts to try to get around. Lack of charitable takes on things. Just a lack of the ability to have a charitable view on whatever has gone on. When you look at it in the worst possible light. That's right.

That's what was clearly being done to, it was being done to you. It's what's being done to lots of our mutual friends. It's a deliberate attempt to not look at something in a charitable light. The fascinating thing about it, though, it really does make those people look even less reliable. Yeah. Yeah. I'd hope so. Although, you know, you do end up with this problem that everyone's got at the moment, which is then, you know, who people do go to to rely on. Right. I mean, you know, I know you've discussed it. Independent people. The only thing that I count on, Glenn Greenwald, I count on people like Crystal and Sagar from Breaking Points, Matt Taibbi.

Right. There's a few people that I'll count on for an honest take on world events. But there's not many. Kyle Kalinsky, there's not many. Even then, the problem is that it doesn't cover everything. I mean, I have some things I know a lot about. A few things I know a lot about.

A number of things I know a bit about. And it's just masses of stuff I don't know anything about. And so obviously, my rule, wait for this, my rule is not to masses of stuff i don't know anything about and so obviously i'm so my my rule wait wait for it my rule is not to talk about the things i don't know about that's crazy it's crazy uh now that's holding you back you should talk confidently about almost everything but just but you know the chips fall where they may you know the thing is,

enormous number of people don't follow that last. Yeah. I mean, they actually do think that they have to know about everything. So it is like, and then there's one reason

why the last couple of years have been so terrible for so many people, you know, has been this thing of like, well, what do you think about pandemics? And what do you think

about vaccines? And what do you think about ivermectin? And what do you think about BLM? And what do you think about Trump? And what do you think

about election integrity? And what do you think about vaccines and what do you think about ivermectin and what do you think about BLM and what do you think about Trump and what do you think about election integrity and what do you think about Afghanistan and then China and then Ukraine and also ivermectin. And also ivermectin. It's like, I don't know. I don't know. And very few people are willing to say,

that's not my thing. I can't form a strong view on that. It is interesting that you're expected to have deep knowledge about so many subjects. Yeah. Especially if you're publicly commenting on things. I know. I mean, various people, I didn't write anything very much about the pandemic because, as I occasionally said to critics, I just I not spent any of my life writing about pandemics or thinking about it before. And I should have done.

But definitely because it became a big thing would have been useful to have studied. But I mean, literally, it was one of those things where if I was at some conference and there was a panel on pandemics, it was one of the ones you knew you could step out from. I kind of thought, it's not what I know about. And so, yeah. And I felt like, then some people say, I can't believe you didn't speak on that.

My thing is like, look, I wish I'd known now what I, I wish I knew then what I know now. But I didn't. And I wasn't going to take a punt on it there's also this weird thing that when whenever anything is going down your silence is is thought of as a negative right if you're not commenting on something like I rarely read comments but occasionally I accidentally read one and uh I read one on my own Instagram. I was posting something,

then I had to go back and edit it. When I was editing it, I fucked up something, and I went back to make sure that it was okay. I read someone saying, why haven't you said anything about Ukraine? This was one of the first weeks of the invasion. And I was like, I don't know what's happening.

You're mad that I'm not, I know you don't care, you pretend to care. I'm like, I don't know what's happening. You're mad that I'm not, like, oh, I know, you know, you don't care. Like, you pretend to care. I'm like, I don't know what's happening. I like the people who say, like, you don't have the guts to talk about X. And they're like some anonymous account. Yeah, exactly. They're an egg.

I can't believe you're not willing to. But that's just the masses of humans, right? It's like you're focusing on one person with a logical argument. It's not logical. Like if you thought about it, like why haven't you talked about Ukraine? Maybe they're considering it. Maybe they're looking at it and researching it and trying to find out what's going on. And in the case of that, like Ukraine is a complicated issue and you have to find out like what is the conflict?

Like why is this happening? Is there natural resources that are at play play like what's going on here? It's a long process of trying to gather information if you spent like I have Zero time thinking about a crane up until then Yeah, no, I think it's gonna be very important that people are able to say look. I don't know. I'm thinking about this I'm interested in it and I'll I'll let you know if I do for many of you Yeah Look, I don't know. I'm thinking about this. I'm interested in it. And I'll let you know if I do form any view. Yeah. But but this this thing of like holding forth on everything. I'm like everyone moving from being COVID experts to Afghan experts to Ukraine experts back to something else.

You know, I can't I can't cope with that. And I it's one of my self-imposed rules of my life. I try not to ever contribute to that noise. Well, that's great, because one of the things that people appreciate about you is your honesty. And that's a great way to reinforce that. Never talk about anything that you're not really sure of. You can be completely – Because you're – in the face of controversy and in the face of like extreme criticism you're able to stand your ground

and have logical discussions about pertinent issues and some of them are these hot button topics that people just they have these takes that you're supposed to accept and you're supposed to adopt and then you're supposed to broadcast that out to let everyone know

that you're a good person and send that signal out so everybody knows that you're on the right team and you're and you have always been the guy that's like actually yeah and then i don't if my instinct kicks in and my brain kicks in and says no i know that's not true yeah i just can't not thank god God. I kind of lead quite a life. It's been very profitable. Not that profitable. No, I mean, I sort of have that feeling of like I couldn't look at myself in the morning if I knew it was not true. That said, again, I couldn't look at myself in the morning if I said something I knew not to be true.

Right. So it's not like you have a choice. Yes. If you're wired this way. There's also this thing that people do where they're a prisoner to their initial suspicions or their initial ideas that they've adopted. And then when things change and the landscape is clearly not what they thought it was, they're not willing to bend. Well, that's what I was writing about this recently, that there was a study a few years ago,

I think, I can't remember if we talked about this before, there was a study at Harvard about what happens when people with a completely incorrect opinion meet the correct opinion. And I don't mean like, as in, the era is saying this and you're saying that. No, I mean, like, literally, I know, you think the world is flat

and you're introduced to the facts that show that the world is around. This study found that very disappointingly, you'd have hoped that people immediately had changed their mind. But no, a vast number of people double down. Well, of course they do, because because we like to think that we're rational and reasonable people and we we're capable of that. But we're lots of other things as well. We don't understand ourselves. We're not transparent to ourselves.

And we are capable of reason and rationalism. But we're also capable of lack of humility, pride, jealousy, all that sort of thing. And when it comes to saying, actually, I got that wrong, or I've changed my mind on that, it requires you volunteering up a bit of your pride. And if you had a choice between those two things and you could get away with not having a hit on your pride, you kind of would for most people.

That's why they hold on to things they know are kind of indefensible still. It's very unfortunate because it ruins all your opinions after that most people that's why they hold on to things they know are kind of indefensible still it's very unfortunate because it ruins all your opinions after that if people know that you're that guy that won't admit that you were incorrect there are some very prominent examples in the you know a lot of the united states and well this pandemic really opened up that book right you got to see a lot of like initial suspicions that were proven incorrect and people are still hanging on to them i know i i was once told by a policeman in northern ireland never shut a door entirely and it's it's a quite useful piece of advice and it's one i've tried to keep in

mind in the last couple of years as i've seen people going off what I regard as a reservation. Yeah. I just try to be, you know, never close the door entirely. But it's been tricky in the last couple of years. Yes. It's been very tricky. Well, you learn about character when people encounter adversity. And this was the first time on a global scale where

we encountered a universal enemy that was scary to some people and not as scary to others so there was a debate on how to deal with it and how to react and there was certain places that were just saying we're just going to go business as usual and protect the people that are in danger. And then there's other places to go. Fuck that. We're going full authoritarian. Like we were talking about Singapore earlier today. I have a friend who's a trainer in Singapore.

He trains UFC fighters at the Performance Institute in Singapore. Totally locked down. Everyone's locked down. He caught COVID. He tested positive. He had no symptoms. He had to be like fully isolated in a quarantine facility for 12 days never had a symptom nothing uh all their athletes are they

have to work out by themselves so they're doing solo workouts to prepare for fights it's crazy so they're in rooms like they're quarant quarantined in a single room or an apartment. And they just have to do push-ups and sit-ups and shadow box, no sparring, no technique training. And then they're going to have a cage fight soon. This is a pretty good way to drive people mad. Yeah. It's about the best, if you think about it, isn't it? Lock people up and isolate them completely. Well, also in this case case because it's so illogical because you're talking about something

with this new strain that's essentially like a cold yeah yes it's a contagious cold and yes for some people who are immunocompromised it can be still still can be dangerous but it's not nearly as dangerous as like say Delta or what we thought you know the initial right now the know, the wave, the first wave. It was so confusing, the whole thing, I thought, because after that first bit when you sort of thought, okay, it's not what we thought it might first be. Right.

You know, there was that moment at the beginning of the pandemic which was almost, a friend of mine said, it's almost romantic, isn't it? And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, any of us could die at any moment. And I thought, that's true. There's like a certain kind of wow. Yeah. Like everything, the whole atmosphere changes in the world. Everything's put in a different perspective.

And then that sort of moment of realizing it wasn't that, but it was hard to tell when that turn happened. And in the meantime, we were all, as I say, isolated. We lost all our social antennae. And then a whole set of crazy things happened, which, I mean, would derange large numbers of people. You know, I mean, I think the fastest whiplash one was the movement from everybody stay in your houses

to everyone go out onto the streets and protest against racism. I mean, that was a that was a that was a whiplash, even if even if you didn't completely follow the logic of people who said the pandemic is the pandemic, and then who said, no, racism is the pandemic. Oh, it's like pandemic season, we just get to find different pandemics. And what's the next one? Even if you didn't do that, you had the moment of watching and thinking, okay, hang on, thousands of people are out on the streets and they're packed in, screaming, and they're not masked.

And if this is what we're being told it is, this is going to cause a massive spike. And then that didn't happen. And so we were all like doubly, hmm. And I think that's one of the reasons why now, I mean, we're in a situation where, I mean, I don't know about you, but I mean, among my friends, there are people who believe almost anything now.

I mean, you know, my favorite are friends who I know have put illegal drugs in their body. I don't want to shock you, Joe. I don't want to shock you. Friends who I know have put illegal substances in their body who have suddenly become all my body is a temple about the vaccines. I am not having this. This hasn't been through enough tests.

What? You do heroin? Heroin? How well tested is that? Yeah. Do you have one of those test kits they use at raves? Like, what are you doing when you get your drugs? CDC never looked through this.

Yeah. So I'm unsympathetic to some of that. I am unsympathetic to some of that. I am unsympathetic to some of that, too, but then I'm also – I know people that have had horrible adverse effects that people want to bury their head in the sand about. That's right. They want to pretend that that's not a real thing. Well, that's kind of the problem with everything, isn't it? Yeah. People don't want to admit that the vaccines aren't perfect, and they don't want to admit that they're not as bad as –

Right. It's the same thing with like – it's really hard for people to hold the line of, American elections are not as reliable as a first world country's elections ought to be. America sends election observers around the world. It should be a bit better at doing it at home. And then at the other end, there is no election integrity in the United States.

People find it very hard to say, we have problems with this, but it's probably not that. I wish it was someone, I wish that this wasn't, like it's so ideological when we deal with election integrity. It's so ideological that like if it's Trump, Trump saying that he lost, no one's even going to consider it. Trump saying that he shouldn't have lost, rather. No one's going to consider whether or not anything he's saying is true. I had a conversation with a friend of mine and he said, do you think that they stole the election from him? I go, I have no information.

I go, but I do think this, there's definitely not zero election fraud. And I think in every election, there's some percentage of election fraud. And the Democrats used to admit that. Yes. Well, the John Kerry election. It was a big one. They were all saying that John Kerry got the election stolen from him. Yeah.

I think that there are very righteous people that they're ideological zealots, and if they're working in some sort of an election poll place, and they can fuck with things, and they can hide ballots, or if they're in a very Democrat-heavy place, they might throw some of the ballots away. Sure. It can have an effect, but the question is like, how much of an effect does it have? How much? Is it enough to actually sway an election? Well, it'll be interesting to see in the midterms, because if the Republicans do win, then part of the Trump narrative does fall apart. Which is like, well, do they only fix elections every four years and not every two years? That's going to be a problem for him. It will, yeah. But no, I live in the States now, and I find it like the consequences to a society

of having election after election, which the losers don't think they lost, is just devastating. Well, it's a brilliant strategy if you're a foreign country and you want to sow the seeds of despair and and that's one of the things that they've proven that the internet research agency in russia does that's right all these troll farms in macedonia and i'm sure in china and other countries as well they're doing things to exacerbate these arguments and to make sure that people they're exacerbating them

but they don't necessarily cause them. And that's the thing. That's where some of the dispute lies. I just think that, you know, in my own country of birth, in Britain, if we had had no elections for 20 years, which the losers had agreed

they'd lost in, that'd be pandemonium. Because I always say the thing with elections is it's not just that you win and you know you've won and that's great and you get to run the country. It's that if you've lost, you try to work out why you've lost. Right. So the Democrats wasted

four years not working out why maybe they hadn't put the most lovable candidate forward in 2016 and maybe there was a reason they lost to Donald Trump. If you actually had to work out why you lost to Donald Trump, you could

do some really interesting soul searching. What is it he taps into? That would be really good for the Democrats to have done and they didn't do it. And I worry about that on the Republican side too now. It's like what was wrong with our campaign in 2020 that meant that we lost? If you don't accept you did, you can't work that out.

And so you just go round and round with the same bullshit. Yeah, it's very dangerous for the future. Yes. Because if no one thinks that the elections are real, if people think it's rigged and then less people participate in them and then more people are into QAnon or January 6th, that kind of shit. That can exacerbate, could really fuel those fires of militias and all these people that think they're patriots. Right. people that think they're patriots.

Right. There's a wild, unsophisticated group of people that are not very thoughtful about all this. They're not introspective. They don't take into consideration nuance or just the sheer volume of data you're dealing with when it comes to elections, when it comes to politics, and all the factors, special interest groups and lobbies and all that. They don't think like that. They think good guys and bad guys. There's an unsophisticated group of people in this country

that only think in terms of good and bad, and there's a lot of them. And I don't know if they're real, but there's a lot of these people that have like, when I see an American flag in someone's Twitter bio, I automatically assume they're a bot or they're one of these people right either you're one of these people that just is like all in on good versus bad and you have this like very narrow bandwidth of understanding when it comes to just human psychology and the way the world works in terms of influence and politics, those people are susceptible to a guy like Trump.

And that's one of the things that I think people found very scary is that this cult of personality thing happens and this one person gets all these rallying people and you would see the people at his rallies, at his conventions and these things where he would do. And they were that person they were that person who was like very easily manipulated yeah they have these ideals almost like a film like you know good guys wear white hats like you know it's like like they have this like very narrow view of stuff it's very sad it's very sad to see some of the people

obviously some of you on January 6 were just disgusted and deserved what they got. But some don't deserve what they got and are being treated really roughly. And it's very sad seeing them when they do speak about it because, you know, part of you is also like you were kind of willing to give your life for Donald Trump. Yeah. Like that's, if Jordan and I spoke after January the 6th and it didn't go down very well with either of our followers

or it wasn't the point. The point was partly to say this is what's gone wrong. And one of the conclusions that we helped each other come to was if you'd have gone back five years in American public life and said in 2020 there's

going to be um you're not going to be able to believe anyone in the country all the media is polluted all of the state institutions are polluted all the all the intelligence communities are polluted the vice president is is a traitor everyone is a traitor. There's only one virtuous man in the republic. Can't stop Trump. It's the you're fired guy from The Apprentice. You just said, I can't see a scenario where that happens. But it did happen. And again, the thing is it happened for all those reasons.

I still can't get over this thing of Twitter and Facebook and co. silencing the New York Post. And what I can't get over most about it is the intelligence chiefs who signed the letter saying that the story was Russian disinformation. Because in my opinion, every single one of those intelligence chiefs should lose their pension.

They should be, you know, lose their reputations, whatever can happen. They should never, you should never have members of the intelligence community becoming political actors like that. And they did. So that's why nobody trusts them. And there seems to be no repercussions. There's no repercussion.

This whatever it was, 80 people from the NSA and the CIA and so on, they all gave their view about something. They knew nothing about to help Joe Biden win the election. It's like that is totally corrupt. Do you think that the strategy is to deny it until the news cycle has passed? You know, they denied it for it was a good solid year and a half, right? Yeah. And then they started admitting it.

Yeah. So in that year and a half, so many new issues have come to the forefront that it's almost impossible to give all of your attention to this Hunter Biden laptop story. Because that laptop story was pertinent at the election time. Yes, that would have been when it would have hit. Yes, and it would have been a giant issue. But because of the fact that they did lock it down, I mean, they really did manipulate the elections by doing that. Yeah, that's the problem, is that when

people say there was manipulation, there was. At that level, even if you don't want to get into everything else, that's a big level. That's a big level. That's like all your tech platforms deciding to assist one candidate, and a massive amount of your intelligence community assisting that candidate, in order to stop getting out the story of corruption in what is now the first family.

And it's being released by one of the oldest newspapers in America, the New York Post. I know. It's incredible. That's what I just can't get over. It's like the New York Post. You think you can do it to that? Right. And they did. And they Right. And they did.

And they did. And they did. And the people that are doing it are these fucking woke 20-year-olds. That's what's crazy. It's like the people that are in charge over at Twitter, like who's running that? That was the decision?

You made that decision? To not allow the sharing of a story because you think it's going to affect the election in a way that you don't desire. Right. Yeah. That's crazy. That should be illegal. It should be illegal. There should have been a punishment for it.

There should have been serious repercussions. And there never are. Not only that, unfortunately,'s set a precedent it's set a trend right and the over if you look from whenever they first started banning people on Twitter and then instigating censorship and Twitter is still not as bad as some platforms do you think oh I thought it was the worst Instagram is pretty fucking bad Instagram is pretty bad you know they they suspend people's accounts and shadow ban people. There was a case I heard recently.

The trans swimmer. Leah Thomas. Leah Thomas. Yeah. Leah Thomas, on Twitter, if you misgendered, you got suspended. Dead name. Dead name. You don't get suspended. You get banned. What's the name? Leah Thomas was born. I you got suspended. Dead name. Dead name. You don't get suspended.

You get banned. What's the name? Leah Thomas was born William Thomas. Is that what it is? I don't even notice that that was a real thing. I just only see her as Leah forever. Of course you do. Yes. Well, I thought that I could get myself banned from Twitter quite fast if I said the

following. I was very tempted, but I just need to keep my Twitter account. I kind of wanted to say, leah thomas isn't a woman i can tell you i think she's quite hard well we were trying to find out whether or not this is true but she still prefers ladies and has a penis yes and has you know about the gender he has a penis yeah you know the in she definitely has a penis fucking hell I just did it you don't have to say that here by the way okay thank you do whatever you want he that hot dude yeah that's what I think he's a girl it's um it's a very strange standard why you can still have a functional penis and have sex with women and still be considered a woman in some people's eyes like this transgender inmate that impregnated two women inmates.

But she's a she. Did you see – I read about this the other day. Did you see my favorite one? God damn it. I wish I could pull this up. Maybe you can. We can. In the Metro newspaper in the UK

it was the same week as the female inmates impregnated in all female prison. I'd just woken up. What? They do what these days? What? God damn. When did they start getting that ability?

And you know the same week, like the day before, there was this great story in the Metro in the UK. You can probably make that on the screen. If you type in, wait for it, sex toy wheelie bin woman. Sex toy wheelie bin woman and Metro I bring you all of the like the most scholarly articles the good stuff this is a good stuff I'm really hoping we can get this got anything oh yeah yeah yeah soldier exposed her penis and used willie ben as sex toy in public oh exposed her penis i like the fact that's what you see is done i mean there's quite a lot going on her name is chloe doctor 42 was was caught rubbing herself on a public wheelie bin

before using a sex toy on herself in an alleyway in Middlesbrough, how do you say it? T-side. Fine place. Is it a shitty place? I don't want to lose my middle. On August 13th of last year, a couple shouted at her and she ran away.

How many times are they going to use female pronouns? On the same day, she exposed herself on the street where she lives and thrust her hips into a fence. Basically, I mean, if you just once inside the house, you expose her bum. This is typically female behavior, as you tell Joe. That's how girls act. I mean, look, it's unladylike. We can agree on that. She exposed her bum and thrust against her window,

which three children saw as they were in a car driving past. That's they as in the children. Yes. It's very important to stress that. Thompson was already on the sex offenders registry before she came out as trans when she was legally named Andrew McNabb. Yeah. You know, and it's like I haven't even had my coffee yet.

I'm reading about this. Oh, my God. Look at all the offenses, too. 17 convictions for 22 offenses, including sexually assaulting an underage girl. 2011. But you just, it's quite hard to read news like that on a daily basis and not feel like everything's falling apart, you know? But it's just strange that you're just allowed to change genders.

Yeah. With a penis, with a clear mental illness, history of assault, history of sexual assault. You can just say, I'm a woman, and they put you in with women. Yeah. And you have a history of sexual assault, and no one cares. It's very strange. And you read a story like this, and you're like,

I don't think that women often do this kind of stuff. I've never heard of a woman using a wheelie bin as a sex toy and waving her penis at it and trying to fuck a fence. She has to be that close to death. Like that close. Like she knows what a pistol tastes like. She's that close. And she's just.

So you've heard of these cases. It's possible that you can get a woman who's just like you know like just ready to go ready to explode but otherwise it's a dude otherwise it's a dude and if it's a dude it's fairly common like a guy doing something like that it's like not even outrageous i know it wouldn't even make the news yeah it's like oh crazy homeless guy he's out there trying to fuck a fence that's normal you know it's like a oh, crazy homeless guy. He's out there trying to fuck a fence. That's normal, you know? It's like a woman doing that. You keep saying her, she, her, she. You're saying, you're using female pronouns so often,

and it turns out he exposes a dick. There's a penis involved. Like, this is, we're talking not, you had the best take on this, and I repeat it all the time, and you have said that in the, when a civilization is in a downward spiral, when it's the end of the civilization, they become obsessed with gender.

Well, yeah, I have said that. I owe the insight to Camille Padley, who I think made it first, that yes, there's a sort of weird fluidity issue. I think it is I think it's a case there are certain basic things which if they start to fall apart you can feel how everything else can as well. And you know like sex is like the first thing

we know. Boys and girls. It's not gender assigned at birth. It's not it's not like a bigoted doctor it's just like there are boys and there are girls right and uh tiny tiny numbers of people who it's less easily determined but that's not anything to do with trans and um and yeah and and if you take that away i think it is true that there is a sort of demoralization a everything becomes murkier as i say just as like an average day's news becomes you feel i don't i feel like almost

anything can be can be shoved on you if you if you agree to that and or don't or pretend you don't notice it that's the thing i think we talked about this before in relation to the communist era in Eastern Europe. That sort of part of the point that the humiliation of going along with things you know aren't true ends up having an effect down the road because you just nod anything along. Yeah. I have a friend who grew up Mormon. And one of the things she said to me once it was really interesting she said uh because she left the church and she said i'm i'm really susceptible to bullshit it's a real problem wow and so she started like she had gotten mixed up with some

like yogi type people and guru type people right people that were running like these weird little sort of like self-help things that were very cult-like and she goes i have a real problem i'm very susceptible she goes because i i grew up agreeing to things that are nonsensical and because of that because i had just like given all of my you know what when you when you just like all of your opinions are decided by a church and the church was written by a 14-year-old boy in 1820. Yeah. Like it's kind of nuts.

Yeah. And that. He'd already had a conviction for fraud. Yeah. He was already full of shit at 14. And that was a giveaway. Yeah. That was a definite giveaway.

Well, it's, I mean, just if you read the tenets of the religion. First of all, they're wonderful people. Mormons are so nice. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I don't like beating up on Morm all, they're wonderful people. Mormons are so nice. Yeah, I agree. I don't like beating up on Mormons. They're so nice. Because they're so nice. Yeah.

Actually, if there were more Mormons, it wouldn't be so bad. If you could just take out the crazy, you got a good religion. Yeah. Wow, how much crazy. Anyway. But it's sort of the same principle sort of applies when people just accept, you know, like with wokeism. You accept these ideological givens that aren't logical. They don't make any sense.

I wonder if it's the same with societies. You know, I think that it's a thing like post-religious peoples. Just because you've lost the religion doesn't mean you've lost the religious instinct. Right. You're still looking for it. It seems like that's an inherent part of being a person. I agree. And I don't think, I don't say it's bad.

It's just, it is part of what we are. And it seems to me very clear that, for instance, you know, you take Christianity out and other things will be put in. And they don't even need to be identifiable religions. Right. will be put in. And they don't even need to be identifiable religions. I mean, our own age has decided in much of the West that there's this sort of form of watered down spillover of Christianity, which will become the sort of religion, which is the kind of diversity, inclusion, equity world where you constantly struggle for greater justice, all of which

is a sort of very watered down version of a little bit of Christianity. There's a clear genesis of that, too, in the woke world. There was a group at a certain point in time. Do you remember when the atheist movement had hit this atheist plus movement? Do you remember atheism plus what was that it was weird and it was a bunch of these weird virtue signaling male feminist types that were adding with atheism adding a group of core values oh wow about you know being anti-discrimination, anti-sexist, anti-racist. Their own Ten Commandments.

Yes. And so they called it Atheism Plus. And I remember watching this guy give this speech, this fucking boring speech on this sort of establishing this idea that because you don't have a religion So we're gonna be atheists, but with plus we can establish sort of a moral framework. Well, it's totally understandable And a disaster, of course at most even if the ideas are good It's like you're putting it in an ideology You're creating a dogma you're creating're creating a – All those new atheists who sort of started off in the 2000s, like our friend Sam Harris and others, they – in my experience, they all got a little bit nervous about what was on their shoulders.

Christopher Hitchens certainly did. He started, I think, latterly in his life to get a little bit nervous about what was happening. I remember once asking him what about it. He said people were starting to ask him to officiate at their weddings. Yeah, and that was like he didn't say anything of what he said was wrong. He still obviously believed everything he believed. But that's a slightly troubling place to be in because you start to sense people are wanting you to replace the vicar or the priest

and that's and that's not the point then you're in life of brian territory aren't you like you know i want you know you should all think for yourselves yes we all think for ourselves it's it it was always a problem of atheism was like it was an invitation to to not do one thing yeah but it didn't but nothing follows from it as to how you should live your life. It's the start of something. It's not by any means the beginning of a policy. Do you think that's just an inherent thing about being a tribal primate, that we have this desire to have someone wiser, a leader,

and then even better if you can have like a godlike figure who gives you a set of rules that you have to follow or there are horrendous consequences and it keeps everyone in line. Yeah, absolutely. I always, in the 2000s, I started to think if somebody came along and declared prophethood at the moment, they could do quite well. I mean, think of those hucksters on U.S. television who still take money from people saying that they can only build the church and have their helicopter if you send in your dollars, you know? Those people still exist. There's a guy who's still selling his like silver water that he blesses from the River

Jordan or something. It comes out some hose in his garden in Texas. Yeah, yeah. And there are people who have been busted repeatedly, and they're still selling their wares. I always thought, yeah, if somebody actually made the profit claim in our era, I think people would be surprised how many people would go along with it. The late George Steiner described,

a phrase I love, nostalgia for the absolute. I love that phrase, nostalgia for the absolute. I think a lot of people have it. I have it. We all have it to some extent. And the question is whether you can avoid it

taking you to places that would demoralize you and lead you to a bad place. Yeah, it's i think if someone came along and had a really good cult like a real solid cult like really welled out well laid out be rational think for yourself be kind examine all evidence like people would join into that and then it would yeah it always ends up with like massive orgy yeah exactly like wild wild countries I know it's all about peace and as I know you get a school of women wild wild country is amazing I love that documentary so good I love that that guy Oh show had

some really interesting you still see his books in some places. In the Netherlands a little while ago, they had his books still in the bookshops. You can buy them on Apple Bookstore. I've read a couple of his books. I do like that bit where he says in one of his speeches, The people are retarded. By the people, for the people, of the people. But the problem is the people are retarded it should be by the retarded for the retarded it's like oh my god the guru is saying that

and it's something about the fact that he's dead now and then like you said it decades ago it's like but we are we we are searching for for four things yeah it seems very obvious to me I mean I just you know what plenty of people have called them like things like the religion of anti racism and the religion of social justice all that stuff they are all something to do you know yes some very very deep level like you've had your purpose today like you had your five fruit and veg you've had your meaning yeah You've had your purpose today. You've had your five fruit and veg. You've had your meaning. Yeah, you've had your meaning. You're making a difference. And that's like a lot of the

people that complain online and they think of themselves as activists because they're on Twitter and they think they're shaping culture by just complaining about stuff online on Twitter. Yeah, and they think that if they kick really hard and nastily, that's really good because it'll cause a reaction. And yeah, I'm fairly convinced that this is one of the explanations for the really horrible behavior of a lot of people in our time. I mean, who do things in the name of goodness, which they should just be ashamed of. Unquestionably. And also the fact that they don't do it in person.

They're doing this thing. Yeah. They certainly don't do it in a one-on-one in person. They're doing this thing in the online world where all the social cues have been eliminated. You're not experiencing a person's emotions when you say something cruel to them. You don't see it on their face, this normal social reaction to correct and yeah you don't you don't see it you you you i imagine like very rarely get anyone saying a present to your face never almost never almost never most people are very friendly exactly yeah exactly but i'm very friendly like if they even if they have

a bad idea of who i am if they say hi i go hi how you doing right and then you're not an you're not mean yeah yeah i'm nice to everybody when you take your wife and daughter to the zoo i love that video when you the video of you taking your wife or daughter to the zoo for the day and um and you saw nature in the raw yeah that pleased me so much i'm sorry i couldn't stop laughing at that video was it that that one of the monkeys climbed to the top of the pole and just like grabbed a seagull from the air and started smashing its brains oh yeah that wasn't my video was that your video that was a retweet of a video i thought you were talking about a different thing that i wrote years ago but no that was just someone was at a

zoo and a monkey climbed on a pole and snatched a seagull out of the sky and beat it to death it's why that's a wild video I thought that was you know no no no no I know I know something similar happening to the English country fair a few years ago I went to visit some friends and had three young children you could tell the difference between the sexes here between the boys reactions and the girls reactions they had their local sort of country fair which in England is a very nice affair you ice cream stormed a cake stall and usually competition for best rows and that sort of thing hmm and there was also a nature display of a hawk display and this this country fair just went like horribly x-rated very

fast because the hawk right flew up from its um perch his perch on the arm of its you know guide and uh sat in a tree and then came zooming down and picked up the dog of a little old lady in the crowd like a chihuahua thing took it up into the creek into the tree holy like just sat there like ripping its intestines out, like pulling. And so everyone could just hear this dog screaming in the last moments of its life. Its owner, of course, passed out on the floor. The hawk, the hawker like desperately trying to,

and the whole country fell. All the children learned a lesson that day about nature, but it was a brutal way to learn it. Nature isn't everything you want it to be it's not as fluffy as you know not with birds man But the boy was very funny because I think the girl was like horrifying the boys like oh my god is so cool. I Don't keep an eye on that boy Boy thinks a dog getting murdered in front of its owner when the lady blacks out and the dog's screaming for its life as its intestines are getting pulled out. We're going to read about that boy in the papers.

Yeah. Birds. They don't deserve to be in those things anyway. No, of course not. All those zoos are fucking gross, man. They're animal prisons. Yeah, I don't like them. For innocent animals.

They did nothing wrong. And they've got them in this. And the idea like it's good that you can go and see them that was great before video yeah yeah yeah it's crazy you don't need it now it's horrible i went to a zoo once in denver and i'll never forget they had this small primate cage there was like a couple different primates that were in separate cages but the cage where this one monkey was in was no bigger than this room. And this monkey was screaming. Just like in agony. So horrible.

Just like mental illness. And they look so much like us. So much like us. Just fucking tortured. It's horrible. It's horrible there. Just tortured. Just trapped and tortured.

It's a weird tradition that we have and also that we take these animals and we eliminate all of the things that they like like you put big cats in a cage what a big cats like to do they like to kill shit yeah how come they don't get to kill anything yeah you're gonna feed them so you're getting to kill it and you take it that thrill away from them and you just give them meat yeah okay that's crazy yeah no let him kill shit you're gonna feed him a goat like little little goat in there talking of red meat yeah talk about the war on the West what about it

have you read it no I haven't have you not? No. God, I was going to test you on it. Oh, were you going to? I would never lie. I'm so glad you didn't lie. Oh, my God. No. Authors can always tell very easily. I'm sure.

Like, whenever anyone pretends to have read your book, and you know they haven't, you're like, it's not hard. I've read The Strange Death of Europe, and I read Madness of the Crows. I will read that, 100%. I'm very pleased to hear 100%. I love your work. I'm very excited that you're out there because, like I said earlier, I think it's so important that someone's courageous in these times

where there's certain taboo subjects or there's certain subjects that you're not allowed to objectively discuss. You have to follow these ideological patterns or you get chastised well what i started to realize in recent years was that too many people were allowing really bad people a free pass on certain things and the one that started to really worry me was this thing of the like the a man who calls himself ibram x kendi and Robin D'Angelo of white fragility frame and yeah they were they started I just noticed they started saying things that were just wicked I'm like really wicked things to say about groups of people and um it's really started to

worry me in recent years because when if you were to tell any group of people that there was something wrong with them from birth, like something evil about them, you're setting them up for a real problem in their life, like a psychological problem, social problems, relationship problems, steam problems, all sorts of things. When I started reading people like this, these people who called themselves anti-racists in the modern era, I just couldn't believe they were getting away with it. I mean, did you ever read Robin DiAngelo's work? I've read chapters of it. There's a moment in her breakthrough book, White Fragility, which sold half a million

copies immediately after the death of George Floyd. There's a moment in that book where she says, there is no good form of being white. No good form of being white. And it's inescapable. Isn't she white? She's white. Oh, yeah.

I mean, she also knows how to make... But she... When I read it, I was like, she white she's white yeah oh yeah that's i mean she also knows how to make yeah but she i am she i when i read it i was like wow um and uh and i started to get really worried about this because this started to pump itself into the system very deep particularly after floyd um like departments across the u.s departments of government across the US started to teach this stuff. Schools started to teach versions of this stuff. Universities obviously did. And it was sort of out there in the popular culture. And I started to think this is going to lead somewhere really dark if there isn't a stop put to it because you couldn't do that you couldn't

do that shouldn't do it about any group of people but it would it's a wild thing to attempt to do against majority populations i'm like you i don't think it's possible to say to a minority group in a country because of your skin color you're evil and you can never get out of your skin color and think they're going to love you but to do it to a majority that's the majority that feels guilt so you take advantage of the fact that there is this white guilt out there because it's recognition that this country was in fact founded with slavery there was a major part of this country and that in fact laws were set in place after Slavery was over that completely disenfranchised black people locked them into terrible neighborhoods red lines so that they could So there's there's all this reality to the racism of the past and in the racism the current racism

But then to try to paint it with this insane broad brush that says everybody. Well, Ibram X. Kendi says the answer to past prejudice is present prejudice. Did you see what happened with him when he was saying that a disproportionate number of white people were identifying as minorities to try to get into colleges? And then he realized, like, hey, you fucked up because you just said that it's an advantage to be a minority. Didn't he withdraw the tweet?

Oh, not only did he withdraw, but days later he had an explanation of it. He was hacked. You're a race hustler. Yeah, yeah, of course he is. You're a race hustler. Of course he is. There's a lot of those. It doesn't mean that racism isn't real.

No. But a person who only concentrates on race consistently over and over and over again and you make a living doing that. And you don't just make a living, you make a very good living doing that. Oh sure, he charges $20,000 an hour It's reasonable.

It's good to feel that guilty. Well, there's this large woman who was on Jon Stewart's show, actually, with Andrew Sullivan. Was she large tall or did she eat a lot? She eats a lot. I thought you would be too gentlemanly to ask. Well, you never know.

She might be a giant. Big bones. She was a large lady, a white lady. I couldn't understand who she was because she was on John's show with a really terrible show

talking about I used to really admire him they were talking about racism and just saying all the white people are all racist

and like shut up whitey and listen about your racism it turned out this woman who actually shut Andrew Sullivan down

like said I'm gonna shut you down she said that who the hell do you think you are I'm gonna shut you down and she She said that? Yeah. She's like, who the hell do you think you are? I'm going to shut you down.

I'm going to shut you down. And she said, excuse me, but if white men could have solved racism, you've had 400 years to do so, so we don't need to listen to you. She thought she was so damn smart. Turns out she throws these. She's the person I thought was a legendary figure that didn't exist, like a mythical figure. She's the person who does these dinner parties where she charges rich

white ladies $4,000 to come to dinner at her white woman's house and be lectured to about their racism. $4,000 a plate? Yeah, yeah. That's a good hustle. But I always thought that anyhow, this large lady

was the mythical beast in question. And there she was, like shouting down Andrew Sullivan. And anyhow, but no, I just think this, it's got really, really ugly. Because as you say, I mean, there's been racism throughout American history. And it would be idiotic to deny it. But it's not the story of America. Racism is a part of the story, but it's not the story. It's the same thing like slavery is part of the story of America, no doubt about it.

But it's not the only story of America. And one of the things I became interested in was like why this race hustle ended up going through everything. So it's now gone through all of our understanding of the past. And in America, this is just catastrophic because everybody in the American founding was living at a time where slavery was normal everywhere in the world. And so, yes, they were complicit in slavery, for sure. Everybody was complicit in slavery.

And every society was doing it um which is no excuse for it but but there's this american version of this which now is like this is the only lens through which we can look at the past um everybody on the north side and the south side in the civil war now gets the same treatment i mean abraham Abraham Lincoln, who obviously was until this generation one of the great figures of American history, literally gets pulled down from his plinths across America. And it's all for the same accusations. It's all for accusations of racism or slavery.

In Britain and Europe, it's about colonialism, obviously. And it becomes this weird thing where white people are the only people who acted badly in history. Therefore, you have to punish them now. One of the points of writing The War on the West was to warn against this because I just think it has such catastrophic consequences because there's obviously going to be a blowback. There's no way people are going to put up with that. The problem is people are terrified to push back against it because when they do, it seems as if they're minimizing racism. And that's what they're scared of. They're scared of this idea that you're making light of racism or you're denying the significance of racism, the prevalence of racism. You deny, you know, whatever it is.

Like, people don't want to do that. It's too scary. Those waters are too fraught with peril. But, I mean, for instance, one of the things I get into in the book is, like, what do you do with this idea of hereditary guilt? I wrote about that a bit in The Strange Death of Europe, because obviously, like, in Germany, that's still a massive subject. But it of Europe, because obviously in Germany that's still a massive subject.

But it's become this massive subject in our societies. What is hereditary guilt? Right. What does that mean? Now, I mean, I'm white. I'm a male. I don't have any guilt about anything that I didn't do. I have guilt for things I did do, for sure.

Have done. Sure. And people should. But I don't have any guilt for things that people did before me. Right. Or people who happen to look like me. I'm like, you know, I'm in America. I have no responsibility for anything that white people did in America in the 18th century.

Right. Or in the 19th century. You just got here. I just got here. I crashed off the boat. And I also start, I resent it and I notice how many other people are starting to resent it too. Because you also get these follow on ones like the pathologizing of whiteness. These things like white rage, you know, one of the recent inventions as if there's a specific rage which only white people can have or get And of course the general mark Milley not at not an unimportant man in America chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff

He talked about white rage when he did that. What do you think was going on there? That was strange to really strange because first of all, like why is someone in the military doing that like what is to keep his job about those positions in the military are so political i mean they are just to get to those positions you have to be such a mover and an operator and do you think that it's because the democrats were in charge and he's in this position and so and he's white and he had to yes he had he had to make sacrifice and say this is something i'm very interested in it was white rage i want to find out you know about it and um but this like pathologizing of it white tears i mean do all that stuff like white i'm like imagine if we actually started talking it was such a horrible

idea like if we actually talked in the culture about black rage as being a separate pathology, or black tears, or black women's, oh that's just black women's tears, it would be really really ugly. And then the thing of privilege, which is one of the ones which I've come to resent the most the accusation, I mean there's

all sorts of reasons we have privilege in our lives and it's pretty much impossible to break down where and how it comes to you i mean like who's privileged and who isn't and there are people you look at and you think must be privileged and actually they have a hell of a time and like you can't judge other people's lives like that but when people talk about people in the past having white privilege i was like my ancestors didn't have white privilege. They didn't benefit from slavery or colonialism. Most of my ancestors were sitting on a remote Scottish island trying to eke out a tiny bit of farmland with a couple of sheep. And a couple of times in the 20th century,

the government came and asked them to come to war and they went to war and got drowned at sea. It wasn't very privileged, you know? Well, even the privilege of white people in this country, that expression, white privilege, is – I don't think it's looking at the problem. The problem is actual racism. The problem is not people who don't experience racism. It's not. It's their fault so even if they're you do isolate look white people when they get pulled over they're less

likely to get fucked with which is that just means there's a problem with cops pulling over black people and fucking with them the problem is not the white people who don't get fucked with so you're making people guilty for nothing it's a It's a version of what I describe in The Madness of Crowds. It happened in the other arenas, right, about sex and all that stuff. You're an idiot if you deny that women weren't able to make their own choices as much as men in history. Definitely. Women had less freedoms in countries like America until quite recently. But if you think that the answer to that is to punish men for a bit, you're a fucking idiot.

Same thing with gays. Nobody denies that gay people were prejudiced against very recently. If you think the answer to that is to beat up on the straight people, you're a fucking idiot. And it's the same with this. You should be able to accept that racism happened in American history without thinking, as the new race hucksters do, that the answer is to address it now by beating up on white people for the fact that they happen to be white. I think it's I think is a moral disaster that's happening. And I think that the whole

way in which the past is being rewritten to mean that in America in particular that you don't have the right to feel pride in your past is just terrible because everybody basically wants to be able to feel pride particularly if they have reason for it. You know, if you've

got a good reason to feel pride in your country and you've not got everything right, of course, but by and large you've done some good things, you should be able to feel pride in that without being made to feel like you're some kind of bigot.

What's fascinating is that this is a rare discussion, although it's logical. The points you're laying out, pushing back against this this idea because these ideas are very much like religious ideas and people just accept them and they know they're illogical and they just accept them and then quietly in private maybe they discuss it like i'm not privileged like right right my parents were poor like and they'll say things yeah it's well they do and it is a kind of subterranean thing,

and I worry about those because subterranean conversations, if you don't do something about them, have a tendency to blow out in a really ugly way. But you can't do this crap. You can't do the white privilege stuff, the hereditary guilt and all that stuff, without thinking it's going to have an effect. And like Donald Trump is like the least of the effect you might get from that.

As I say, there seems to be no viability in telling majority populations to think horribly of themselves for the rest of time. To say, for instance, you know, you kind of kind of the best thing you can do is to is to kind of sidle through life without anyone noticing you and without causing any harm to anyone who has been oppressed or historically looks like somebody who has historically been oppressed. I mean, I go into this with the issue of reparations, but that is such a damn minefield. And all the leading Democrats in the runoff in 2020 were talking about reparations. Do you understand what that means? I mean, at this stage, reparations in America means a massive wealth transfer from people who look like people who did something in the past to people who look like people to whom the things were done. How are you going to arrange that? People don't want to do voter ID. You're going to get them to do like DNA ID to work out where they came from. And

what do you do with the people who are half descended from slavers and half from slaves? What do you do about the people? I mean, Voltaire said in the 18th century that the only thing worse than what the Europeans were doing to the Africans was what the Africans were doing to the Africans. Selling their brothers, going and kidnapping their neighbors and selling them. What do you do with the people descended from those people? Yeah, what do you do? Did you see the image where Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer got on their knees and they were wearing the African garb? But unfortunately, the pattern that they picked was from a tribe that was very much involved in the slave trade.

You touch on one of my conversational G spots. Yeah. That was one of my conversational G-spots. Yeah. That was... I loved it. That was one of my favorite things. It was such great theater. That was one of my favorite things that ever happened. Also, because did you see that, like,

after they'd done their kneeling for nine minutes, they all had to be winched up? You know, because I kind of... Pelosi's getting old. Yeah. She had to be pulled up from... Her knees had locked, you know. Schumer was like being hold

into an upright position did they stay for nine minutes on their knees yeah they stayed for the amount of time that Floyd George Floyd was killed

so then they did that and yeah then they wore the wrong tribal thing because these people they're all desperately trying to hold on to their power

they're all way past their sell by date the weird gerontocracy in America is just bizarre anyway but these people all trying to hold on to it everythingontocracy in America is just bizarre. Anyway, but these people all trying to hold on to it.

Everything they do about it is just like tone-deaf. Look at Nancy Pelosi coming out after the trial of Derek Chauvin. And you remember, she comes out in her mask and she stands on the steps

with members of the Black Caucus and she looks into the skies and she says, thank you, George Floyd. Thank you, George Floyd, for giving your life for social justice. What?

Like, you think he's headed out to the shop that morning thinking, I'm going to do something good for my country today? Like, how tone deaf do you have to be? These people don't get any of this. They're just trying to survive through it. They're just trying to hustle, stay

relevant, and keep making money in the stock market. How much? 800 million she's worth, whatever it is? She's worth a couple hundred million, and she makes a couple hundred thousand dollars a year. So damn corrupt. It's so corrupt. When every other country and every other democracy talks about corruption, they have nothing on the corruption within the top ranks of American politics. It's quite shocking.

I just don't understand how she keeps getting elected. Yeah, I just don't get it I mean is she unopposed? Is there no one who wants to challenge her? Like what is it doesn't make any sense But but but people like this use it and moments like that When they do this, that's the other one She's I think it was at that same event where they had to be winched back up off their knees where she did the thing of them Say their name like say the name of the people who've been killed by the police and it's actually happened in a show I saw recently in Broadway that somebody

did this show and I said to a friend I was with I was like the thing is there's something odd about this because everyone says it as if no one knows the names of like Breonna Taylor and people but well you know them all right I'm like everybody knows the name of Freddie Gray everyone knows like the ballistics reports I'm religious chant yeah and it's like it's not like these are hidden names I mean there may have been a time there was a time the past when they would have been like this is not now and and it's got this provable result now in the American people where you I mean it's something I writeable result now in the American people where you, I mean,

it's something I write about in the book. If you look at the stats on the year that George Floyd was killed, the opinion polls asking Americans how many people they thought, how many unarmed black Americans they thought were killed by the police

in a year. The people who described themselves as liberal, a vast number thought it was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000. People who described themselves as very liberal, a large number said they thought the figure was over 10,000 unarmed black Americans killed every year by the police, and the figure was 10. So Americans- Is it really 10? It was 10 that year. How many killed that were armed? That I couldn't tell you. I know there was 10 people who were unarmed and shot by the police. And I know that there were more policemen shot that year by armed black men. I don't know exactly what the number is on armed. But the point is that the American public's perception of this,

and I think this is a media thing, funnily enough. I think it's like the Washington Post and others rightly at the beginning of 2010 has realized this is something we may have underplayed in the past and we should do more on it. One of the things that seems to have happened is that by deciding to concentrate more on it. One of the things that seems to have happened is that by deciding to concentrate more on it, they've given the American people a significantly wrongheaded view of what's going

on in their country. So that the focus actually makes people think something else worse is happening than what is happening. And if you're off by several orders of magnitude like that in your perception of what's happening in your society, like something is wrong. And I can only think it goes back to this thing that in 2020 when the news first came about George Floyd, I remember, I mean, isolated in the UK at the time, I remember thinking, whoa, I mean, can you do that in America?

Like, do they do that? And the answer, obviously, is that day, yes. No, you can't. The policeman went to prison for the rest of his life. But there is this moment like, is that our country? Is that what we do? It's a very disorientating moment, particularly if you're in isolation and you have not got your social antennae out there. And the only way you've got to communicate and vibe ideas and facts is through social media, which, of course, is the worst possible way.

So it's actually provable that Americans have a distorted view of what's going on in their own country in relation to these matters, which is not helping matters. Because I think it's one of the things that is causing this view that as a result, we have to do like nasty stuff to white people publicly, which is like a moral catastrophe built upon a misunderstanding. but we are now in the realms of over correcting something which has a vision of what america is that is at the very least very out of date and i have a section in the book about about the moral panics that have happened consistently in the last decade on american campuses where like for instance there's one of the campuses in america minnesota goes into lockdown because students report a member of the KKK is sighted on campus walking around waving a whip. What? You'll be surprised to hear it turns out not to be the case.

But the campus goes into lockdown. There's no picture of this person? It's just a report? They find the person. The person turns out to be a Dominican monk carrying a rosary. Oh, God. Yeah. There are numerous other examples I give of similar weird incidents.

Somebody finds a shoelace hung on a hook outside their room and says it's a noose. It's been put up as an attempted lynching. It's a noose that's been put up as an attempted lynching. And on another occasion, another campus, there's a tie that's found from a rubbish sack and it's reported and everyone goes into lockdown. There's another lynching attempt on campus. My point is, is that, first of all, this always happens in the places least likely for that to happen. Like if the KKK were to gather in public, let alone be walking out on their own solo, it seems unlikely they would choose a liberal arts college campus to do it. How much?

Please go. But the point is that the places where it's least likely to happen, it's like the evergreen thing, are the places with this distorted. I mean, you know America better than I do, but it doesn't feel like a country where the KKK is any longer able to just like congregate and walk around campuses and carry out hate crimes. Certainly not on campuses. Yeah, the evergreen situation is like a perfect example of it. Like the looking for the most minute signal of racism and people's unwillingness to stay home if they're white. Right. Because they're going to, a day of, they had a day of absence of African Americans and people of color on their, it was a day of like appreciation. Like they're going to stay home for the day, they get the day off work.

And then you get to reflect on the fact that they are a minority and they're not treated as well. Look, that's not a bad idea. Like that, giving them a day off and that's not a bad idea. Like that, giving them a day off and like, not a bad idea. But they turned it around and say, no, all you white people must stay home. So instead of having the option, like if you're a person of color, you could stay home and, you know, and we'll send, we'll give you free money for the day. And just, we appreciate the fact that you deal with some bullshit that white people don't deal with.

That's reasonable. That's not even an anti-racist perspective. That's just a nice thing that you can implement and it causes discussion and people think about things. You're not saying anyone's guilty. You're saying like, let's appreciate these people and let's give them the day off. That way you appreciate the contribution that they give when they're around. But when they turned it into no, instead, that's not good enough.

We want white people to stay home, stay out. We're running things today. Well, that's when, as I've said, that's when the demand for racists is bigger than the supply. The demand for racists is bigger than the supply. That's when you have to pretend that Brett Weinstein is a racist. Yeah. Because you just not got any racists. You've got a small supply.

You've got a small supply of racists. Yeah. They're not anywhere near you. And you've got to pretend that people who aren't racist are racist. And that is just a horrible position to be in for lots of reasons but one of them is the sheer equality issue you know is is that I remember at the beginning of the the Floyd era Eric Weinstein said Brett's brother said said you know if I can't tell you that you're wrong you're not my equal hmm yeah I thought it's a very neat way of saying it but I mean I have a way of saying that which is you know like the point of equality is

Isn't that that you make up for the past by but by making one group better in the present Which is the Kendi route the Angela route It would be to say look I mean as a white person and I hate like the idea that I People I have to identify like that, but it's like being asked, how do you think of yourself? And saying, well, I'm a male. It's like, well, I don't really spend my time thinking about myself.

But if we have to think of ourselves in these terms, I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of my skin color. It's just the craziest damn idea ever. Just because of your skin color, you're better than that person? I think it's like never since I was brought up in multicultural London has that occurred to me. But here's the deal. I certainly don't believe that other people are better than me because of their skin color either. Right.

I'm not better than them. They're not better than me. That's the deal. That's controversial. That's controversial now. I mean, you know, it's and you see it in things like, oh, I can't believe you're moaning or you're whining about that. You have all this privilege. You have X, Y and Z. People demand the microphone based on their oppression. And then then you create then you create this society where people are

searching for reasons to not be part of the majority and to claim to be victims. Because you put, instead of heroism in your society, you make victimhood the prime way in which you gain status. And unfortunately, that now has led America to these really, really ugly places. And it's in every area that I thought it wouldn't reach. I didn't think it would reach. I always thought this bullshit stopped at STEM, for instance.

You're not going to... You might tell some of us nothing humanities people like this stuff. We might play around with this. There's no way you're going to get to mathematics. And they have. Boom, they have.

They have. It's not going to happen in medicine. Oh, all the main medical journals in America, I cite them, have all fallen for this racism stuff, the new racism. And now you have people actually saying, hospitals saying, they're going to prioritize people based on skin color

in order to make up for historic racism. That is going to lead America to hell. You can't do this stuff. You can't tell a group of people that they're worth less. It doesn't matter who they are. But to do this to the majority population it's just like what a nuts idea this all seems to be a thing that has left the university and then infected corporations and infected institutions and infected other things. This used to be a thing that years ago you would hear people, they would complain about this ideology that was running

amok on college campuses. And people would be like, hey, man, why are you complaining about stuff that college kids are doing? They're doing their thought experiments. They're trying out ideas. It's no big deal. But there was other folks that were sounding the alarms. They're saying, these people are going to leave. They're going these people gonna leave They're gonna graduate and they're gonna get job operations They're gonna shape the culture of these corporations and then they're gonna shape the overall culture of this country because these young people are indoctrinated into this very Very rigid ideology and and that's what we've seen the joke There was a joke on conservatives in this.

Because conservatives in the U.S. used to say very smugly in recent years, you know, they're going to go and they're going to do their degree in lesbian dance and knitting. And then they're going to, you know, find out they're going to enter the real world. As always, there's a very right-wing talking point there. Turned out to be totally untrue. Those people left and they got jobs like that. They went into HR departments. They've got lots of work.

And it's a self-reproducing organism. It also became because of the fact that it's this ideology where if you push back against it, particularly like the racism stuff, you get labeled as a racist, which is, particularly the racism stuff, you get labeled as a racist, which is one of the worst things you can be labeled. Yeah. Nobody's terrified of it. Yeah, of course.

So there was a fear attached to any sort of pushback. Yes. Well, by the way, being called a racist is still the worst thing you can be called in American society. Oh, and any Western society, actually. It is the worst thing. Other than being a child abuser. And being a child abuser,

you can... That's the worst. But if a child abuser, you can prove. This is the thing. Yeah. Something that increasingly disturbed me in recent years

was that aside from that, the biggest reputational damaging things that could be leveled against you were neither provable nor disprovable. Now that's a problem. So he's a misogynist. It's like,

it's quite hard to prove somebody's a misogynist. He's a homophobe. It's quite hard. Like he might just not be bored with gay marriage. Does that make you a homophobe? He's a racist. I was like, does that mean you're homophobe? He's a racist. I was like, you can't prove it with some exceptions. There was a very, very small minority of people who were just like, yeah, yeah.

And you can't disprove it ever completely. And that's where the same happens. And people say, well, you could sue. You're going to sue over whether this unprovable allegation that's highly damaging is true or not. And it is damaging. Of course it's damaging because it says that you're a bigot and you think of some people as being less than you. And that is your worldview and indeed the driving thing in your worldview. And it's a horrible thing to have thrown at you.

And one of the only ways I've ever found for like trying to counter it is how about if we got to a position where the people who throw those allegations around and know they're not true pay a reputational price of equivalent size so for instance when CNN attacks you the people who do it end up losing their jobs for saying something is totally untrue and if in general that could happen, that there was a reputational cost for leveling accusations that are not true, that era would be righted. But at the present moment, it's a totally cost-free exercise. It is, but do you think that ultimately people will course correct? Like they'll recognize the folly of this sort of pattern of thinking and behavior and accepting these kind of ideological narratives and they will shift back and forth because they're they're upset with it that maybe there's been this over correction and that this will lead to unfortunately a rise of

more far-right ideology and then it'll eventually like meet somewhere in the middle I hope so I mean the the pendulum swing theory is always attractive but it suggests that our our natural leveling place is a sensible median which it might not be it might not be I mean especially if you look internationally at different cultures I mean there's there's cultures that have these arcane values and archaic ideas of how women should be treated, and they haven't changed. They're not changing.

There's no debate about it. It's just they're locked in. That's who they are. That's what they do. It's like, you know, everyone who believes in progress, as if it happens, it's something we're all going towards, you know, always has to account for the fact that things like, you know, Russia sends tanks

into Ukraine and starts bombarding Ukrainian cities and its civilians. They didn't they get the memo? No, that's how the Kremlin behaves. You saw the video from Shanghai the other day of people screaming from their windows. Yeah, well, that's how the Communist Party of China behaves. Yeah. That's their median is you can do what the hell you want with the people. So we're incredibly lucky in a country like America, any Western country that we even

care about complaints of human rights. We're really lucky we live in societies like that. And it's not normal. And it's not the median historically normal and it's not the median historically and it's not the median in the world today no it is highly highly unusual and so therefore it's worth protecting and it's worth making sure that you don't over correct and provoke really ugly stuff in reply and i do have some hope on that because I do think that the hucksters I try to take apart in the war on the West,

I also say towards the end, I give examples of the people who are like obviously, if everything goes well, obviously you're going to replace these people. They're a really good, much better, much more intelligent, much more thoughtful, much better writer black Americans than Ibram X. Kendi or Ta-Nehisi Coates coming along or already there. People like Coleman Hughes and Thomas Chaston Williams and these people.

They give me enormous hope for America because these are just. They're the people you want. Yeah. And and if if all these people who are doing the overcorrection and believe the way to harmony in America is to punish white people and tell Americans they have no right to be proud of their history and so on. If if if those people could get out of the way and we could have a reasonable conversation about these things, you know, it's fine. But I do think there is this group who are white and black in America who are trying to lead America to a real precipice. And I suppose some of them are making money. Some of them really believe it. Some of them just want to see the whole damn thing burn.

them just want to see the whole damn thing burn um but you you cannot war on the foundations of an entire society and think that you're going to get away with it without any repercussions i don't think they even think about it just think about what is beneficial to them currently and if they can push whatever they're pushing, whether it's anti-racism, whatever it is, if they can profit off of pushing that and it seems like they get a lot of attention doing that, they make a lot of money doing that, then that becomes their business. That's what they're in. I mean, if either one of these people that you talked about, Robin DiAngelo, if she wanted to, like, adjust and change her perspective and write a new book, like, maybe I got it wrong. Like, this is my new take i did mushrooms one day and i had a new take on white racism and here's what the real problem is i wish we could crowdfund for that you probably could raise money for robin d'angelo to get mushrooms i wonder um where this all goes you, and I wonder what your perspective is, because I feel like the covid crisis and the pandemic was just a perfect storm of isolation, fear, anxiety, all these things. of control by these governments that decided what you could and couldn't do as far as work

and where to go and all these things. They also exaggerated this feeling of helplessness that people already had. They pumped up the anxiety of these people. There's a lot of people in 2018 and 19 that were already fucked. Yeah, exactly. What about them now? They're barely hanging on by threads fucked. Yeah, exactly. What about them now? They're barely hanging on by threads now. Yeah, yeah.

Like, I wonder what your perspective is in terms of where is this headed? Like, do you have a prediction? Do you look at it and can you separate yourself from it and observe it as a pattern and see some sort of clear direction that it's headed? I don't think there's any clear direction. I think that the atomization is going to be much worse than anyone realizes. Much, much worse. And the atomization not just of views but of information, of facts.

You know, having different views is so last century. You know, we all have different facts now. And actually, if you think of the last few years like a family tree like just i don't know people we know common you like start there of like vaguely in the same space and you go down and you go like let's say COVID and George Floyd and Afghanistan and Ukraine. And you take that, like almost nobody in that family tree of things ends up in the same place on everything. And some of them end up in such a different place that it's just,

I don't know how I can reach them apart from, as I said, never, never shutting the door entirely. But, um, and there are people now who just like, they have their thing,

and they're in a kind of unreachable place. And I think that's very likely to be what the future's going to be like for a long time. I had a late friend, Deepak Lal, a wonderful Indian-born economist, who I remember towards the end of his life, he used to say, you know, everyone says, Douglas, that the era of atheism will just sort of continue he said it won't we're entering an era of polytheism everybody

has their own gods and that I think that's true it's not just they have their own gods they have their own obsessions and they have their own versions of everything and how they got there and what they're meant to be doing. And so I think it's going to be a huge cacophony. I mean what we have at the moment is a cacophony. But it's going to get worse and worse. I mean let me give you one quick example. It's a kind of personal one. But I found in recent years even before we were kind of locked away, when I did public events, I found it increasingly hard to prepare for them. And in part that's because, I don't know if you experienced this, my experience is that the older you get, the harder things like public speaking become. And it's exactly the opposite of what people think.

They think it must get easier and easier. And I find it gets harder and harder because, first of all, you know all the things that can go wrong. It's like comedians who have heard all the hecklers and get more and more nervous about going on a stage. But the other reason is that I became aware in recent years, I was less and less confident that I knew what my common reference points were with the audience.

Like if I mention a certain person, do they know what I'm talking about? If I mentioned this person or this event, have I totally lost them? And the answer I think increasingly, yes. It's very hard today to know what your common reference points are with 100 people even in a room. You would have to work out, for instance, even just on mundane stuff like who wins elections, you'd have to work out roughly, who am I speaking with about that? Do people think this happened and that happened? Are there people who think this is the case and that's the case? And that's even before you get on to just whether they know anything about the

past. And so I feel that atomization very, very strongly to the extent that when somebody says something that I don't expect them to know about or a reference point I also have and share, you know, I'm thrilled. I think good. It's like we've drunk from the same well. And increasingly, you can't rely on that. You don't know if you've drunk from the same well, whether you have the same background of knowledge and references and whether you've got anything in common other than just the very basic starting point of being two human beings. And I think that's going to get worse and worse. There are going to be people who just won't speak to people because they didn't share their views on something.

Yeah. And they're going to drill down and down and down. And they're going to drill down and down and down. This is a French writer I'm very fond of, Michael Welbeck, predicted that at the beginning of the 2000s about the atomized society. I mean, it's just, we are living through it and it's going to get so much worse. And that's why the only way to reverse that

is to try to think of things that you can agree on. You know, that's why elections, it's like, it's useful to agree on them. Who won, who lost. Right. It's quite, it's useful to agree on them. Who won, who lost. It's quite a useful thing to have in a society. But there are other things as well. Like, you know, it's good to agree on roughly, you know, I don't agree on it, but you're a force for good or a force for bad. Do you have things to be proud of that you're all proud of? Your common reference points.

Friend of mine used to say, if you talk as a nation about we, you're talking about the widest group apart from, much wider even than the sports team and its supporters, of feeling, you know, some kind of kinship with something which you might not have actually done something for so right so it says my team what we won on Saturday and it's great and they didn't do anything but yourself but maybe you stand on the terrace and shouted at the team but you know it's we and that's that's fantastic very very human need

and it's like that with nations as well. People like to be able to say, we, you know, we did that. That was good. We stopped this. We did this good thing. And I think people should work on that, on those things. Like in America, it would be great if people could just agree on a few good things America's done. Same thing in my own country birth in Britain where it's

a little less bad at the moment but I nice to agree on a few good things we've done yeah but people want to almost on instinct find the things you disagree with concentrate on them first do you find that socially I I don't. Some people. I avoid those fucks. Yeah, of course. But they're out there. You're a million miles away from them. But they're out there.

There's some people that enjoy conflict. And I always feel like it's usually generally people that don't have a lot of agency either in their job or their relationship. Exactly. Exactly. People, like frustrated people who want to say, that's, I mean, I don't know about you, but I'm very hard to rile up in my spare time. Yeah, me too. Because I'm like, whatever. I'm not going to have a row over the dinner table.

Yeah, I'm so uncontroversial at dinner. I'm like that. I'm a real letdown. Like they're hoping you're going to get into Islam. Yeah, no, no. I'm discussing immigration. Those fries are great don't you love fries i'm very uncontroversial in my dinner with douglas murray's i was expecting

so much more exactly i thought it was a firebrand yeah lamb yeah well people will probably bring you to a dinner hoping you start some shit it happens very rarely it happened a little while ago in new york it was quite actually jordan pet wife were there. It was very funny because there was one woman who just, who said, I've got to leave by 9.30 because I go nuts after 9.30. They said this. Like a pumpkin. Yeah, like a pumpkin. And it was very weird because, as Tammy said

to me afterwards, she actually did go nuts after 9.30. She went nuts on me. Oh, really? And then I had to defend myself. Anyhow, I said to Jordan afterwards, I said, this is an unusual event. He happened to step out of the room at that point. I said, the mushroom cloud went off when you weren't there. That's unusual.

But yes, it's very, very unusual for me to be able to get a rise in my spirit. I don't want that. And generally, as long as you're dealing with good faith people, I want to hear what they have to say. Yeah. I mean, you know, you're like this. I mean, if somebody says, I believe this to be the case,

and it's like some crazy thing, I don't know, wow, tell me why that, you know? Right. But if you're, I agree, if you have a kind of like, you're very frustrated in your private life, you're very frustrated in your work, you don't feel people are paying you enough attention or respect or something, then you're kind of, yeah, those people.

We've also conned people into thinking that everyone is special and that sort of when you add that to this feeling of not having agency or not – like they're not treating you the way you deserve to be treated. There's this feeling that people have because there's this sort of – there's an enforcement in this country that everyone is unique and special. Everyone's amazing. Everyone's doing such a great job. But no, there's a lot of mediocre people. They're lazy. They have no energy. They eat bad food. They don't sleep people. They're lazy. They have no energy. They eat bad food.

They don't sleep enough. They're addicted to their phone. And the output that they have is unexceptional. The work that they do is not that good. And you have a hard time saying that to them if you're their employer. If you're their employer, it's hard to fire those people. They have to do something really wrong or they'll sue. They go to HR about issues. And then they'll just change their gender.

And then you have to deal with that or they'll become non-binary, which is my favorite. Tim Dillon loves that one because we were talking about it. He goes, it is the best way for someone who's like a white woman to claim victimhood. You just say you're non-binary. You're like everybody else. You're like trans people or people of color. Oh my God, you're so oppressed and fascinated. Just non-binary.

That's all you have to do. You know what I always say. Non-binary actually means look at me. Yeah. That's all. That's all it means. That's crazy. Otherwise, queer.

I hate that one. I hate that one because I hated the term that was used in a derogatory way about gay people. And now people are like, there's a guy that teaches at the University in the UK who recently said like oh I had a student come up to me after a supervision say it's so good to see a visibly queer member of faculty and the guy in questions married to a woman I like he probably just puts on a bit of nail varnish you're not queer

you're a normal heterosexual guy. There's nothing you need to be ashamed of. With a little bit of skin. Don't try to pretend that you've got skin. Those people, yeah, they pay attention to me, people. That's the version. But I agree. I mean, what you've just described, by the way,

is that is a result of the fact that there's a Christian ethic we can't do in a secular way. And the Christian ethic is everybody being equal in the eyes of God. And it's a really important ethic. Everyone is, and I believe this as well on the moral level, everyone is equally valuable as human beings. The Christian religion has a good way of doing that which is saying you're all equal in the eyes of God but if you drop that if you drop the

god bit out of it and you try to instill as a society the idea that everyone is equal right but that's not true exactly all right you can you can be equal in the eyes of God and unequal in your capabilities. But if you're just unequal in your capabilities and have to pretend everyone is equal. Not just unequal in capabilities, but in accomplishments. In accomplishments, I know. In provable, measurable. You could see what this person's output has been.

This is why this whole idea of equality of outcome is such a fucked way of looking at things, where they're like, well, we need equality of outcomes. We need equity. Well, you're never going to have, first of all, we should take into consideration initially, no one is coming from the same starting point. So that's not equal. And we can all agree that there's something wrong about that.

Some people are just fucked. They have a terrible childhood they have abuse and they have so many things are levied against them but then another thing that we don't have there's a cup if you want to use that the the other thing that we have is there's an inequality of effort oh for sure and what do you do about that that's a big deal because if someone doesn't work as hard, but they want the same amount of attention, that becomes a problem. And that is where this world of everyone's special and everyone's doing amazing stuff. No, it doesn't make you a better person to be a person who's more successful or a person who's more driven or ambitious or disciplined. But it makes you better at those things. It doesn't make you a better person you're no more valuable

you're not you shouldn't be treated better you shouldn't have better laws that apply to you but you're better at that and that's why there's people that you know when a basketball game is in the final quarter you hope lebron james has the fucking ball right you hope an elite athlete rises to score for the team that you're rooting for because that person is measurably better they've put in the effort they're measured are they equal in terms of like you know the way you think about your friends or a guy that work yes as a human yes in terms of the law in terms of consideration and love. Yes, yes, equal.

But not in terms of what they've accomplished or what they're capable of because of the amount of effort and focus and drive that they put towards a specific thing. Some people don't want to do that work. So those people find these cultural shortcuts for getting exorbitant amounts of attention and it could be you paint your nails and call yourself queer and meanwhile you're heterosexual. You're just doing something odd. Got a wife secretly on the side. Isn't that funny? That's a shame. How dare you? But it's this, when you have these cultural shortcuts where you're allowed to say, I'm non-binary.

And meanwhile, you look like a woman. Like you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy. You must get this a lot. People say things like, I know. I do this in a kind of self-deprecating way. I often say, well, I've been lucky in this

and you know very well a lot of life is luck for sure, some of life is luck being in the right place at the right time just being able, just being able-bodied but then a lot of it is and it's underplayed you also work hard

and I realized some time ago that I use because i'm born in britain i i have that natural tendency to like under place and think well i'm just lucky in that and somebody said to me you shouldn't do that you know you do work very hard and i thought yes but like saying what i've been lucky in that is a nice way to say to other people, oh, I haven't really had any input and you don't need to particularly. It's a sort of it's a it's a flattering thing to say to somebody else, which ignores which ignores what something I quote at the end of the book. One full phrase of Branch Rickey I came across. We said luck is the residue of design.

Hmm. Luck is the residue of design. Luck is the residue of design. A lot of what we call luck has come about through something other than chance. So I used to say, you're lucky to be born in America. And on one level, that's true, which is like you could have been born in the great pool. You could have been born in Mogadishu and it'd be a lot worse. But there's also something it covers up, which is the luck is that people before you made good choices that meant that you are in a situation which is more optimal. And it's not simply luck that you have in America the right to freedom of speech. That's not simply luck.

It's luck in that you were born here as opposed to Mogadishu. But it's not luck that America ended up with that situation. It is the residue of design. It's the consequence of men and women making good decisions, prudent decisions, like not being crazily short-termist, setting up a state well. You know, there's a great description in a novel by Hilary Mantel about the French Revolution in the first days of the meeting of the parliament after they've killed the king. And she says, you know, they wanted to talk about rights. She says, I'm paraphrasing, she says something like,

this was the day to talk about laws, but rights were more attractive to talk about. So they put off the discussion of laws for another day. And that's how you get what you got in the terror and everything else. And this is the thing is that we have to find a better way to understand what we often mean by luck. You have luck in your life sometimes because other people have made good judgments that are effectively for you before your time yeah you know your politicians your family and others it's not just it's not just some wild whirligig it's also make prudent decisions make decisions, work hard and a lot more. And you'll find that you are what we call lucky or luckier.

Don't do any of that stuff. Put everything off all the time. Be lazy. Be unmotivated. You know, blame other people all the time for things that you think you could correct yourself and you will find you are the type of person that is described as unlucky.

And it's the same with countries. There are countries we describe as unlucky like Venezuela. They weren't just unlucky. They had the people fucking unluckiest people in the world moment practically But like it became and what we would call an unlucky country because politicians made catastrophic decisions

You know, they have yet. They have the same energy sources Same energy resources as Norway same energy resources as Norway. It's better to be in Norway than in Venezuela. And there's a reason, which is that people made better decisions. And we are very unwilling to identify what those decisions are and what it is that leads to a good outcome or a bad outcome. Which is really strange because American exceptionalism was always predicated on the idea that you work hard and you can make something in this country.

There was a big part of the motto of what it meant to be an American. Yeah. That this is a place unique in that we celebrate winners. Like we were talking about Steve Hilton earlier, my friend Steve. I've known Steve for a long time. We actually met in Hawaii. Our families became friends on the beach

before he was ever a political commentator for Fox. Great guy. But one of the things that he said about moving to America from England is that he said, in England, it seems like people don't want you to succeed. He said there's like an active resistance to you succeeding, whereas in America, they're like, good for you. That's awesome. Go for it. Go after it.

You know, that's completely true. I see a friend, Chris Williamsonson later he and I had this discussion recently because he's just moved to America there are various reasons for that one of them is to do with the perception of world class in the UK in particular the perception that

it's not totally unfair that there are again fortunate and less fortunate places to be born fortunate and less fortunate that is not totally unfair, that there are, you know, again, fortunate and less fortunate places to be born, fortunate and less fortunate backgrounds to be coming from, and that you sort of shouldn't class shift too much. That is kind of there. And now this view is outdated,

but the money is held by people who've inherited it. It's not totally outdated. And we still have a monarchy and a sort of system of aristocracy that that does happen with. Whereas in America, people are self-made. I mean, there's a guy in the U.K. who I met a couple of years ago who was very early into North Sea oil. to North Sea Oil and an American friend said, you're the only person of your class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur. And he said, I'm the only person of my class I've ever met who's an entrepreneur. Because people who had money just sort of sat on it and spent

it and gambled it and had less. But whereas america and i noticed it all the time in america in the system i i i really do love it in america there there is this feeling of you know it's it's like everybody like i could it's not look at that guy in the car that bastard he's taking his money off the backs of oppressed workers it's like wow i'd love to own that car one day. And that is still an American thing. That is still an American thing. It was very funny. And I come across it all the time. And people are genuinely pleased for you when you do well. And there is definitely in Europe and in Britain less of a sense of that

and a kind of sense that if – Billy Connolly used to talk about that, that you're kind of somehow you're saying to people, I, he said, he said something very sad once. Did you ever meet him? No, I never did. Just what a great, amazing man. Did he pass? No, he's very ill. He's done his last stuff.

He's got dementia. I think so that he just amazing in his his heyday but he he once did a documentary about going home to glasgow where he was from he worked in the um in the shipyards and he said it was it was hard going back not because we weren't pleased he said he said he felt that if he went into the pub there'd be another guy like telling a great story at the bar and when he went in that guy would be let feel less than he was oh wow yeah very sad observation oh that's so strange um and felt like he was taking away from someone's joy by just existing exactly because he was the guy who'd really made it from there and he he'd left. And the other guys were there.

And so the funniest guy in the pub in Glasgow still wasn't great once Billy Connolly returned. And I had friends from Australia, like Barry Humphries and that generation of Australians. When they left Australia, which was for similar reasons, they found that back home in Australia, people hated them or very distrustful of them because well what's not right with us jim jeffrey said that really became famous in america

he he found it shocking that he would go over back to australia and he couldn't sell tickets or couldn't sell as many tickets as he thought he should be selling yeah he's like this is fucked they think they do think that you've abandoned them because you think you're better than them. They call it tall poppy syndrome. Tall poppy syndrome. And that's what it is in Britain as well. They say tall poppy syndrome is you've got above yourself. And that is a really central thing about America. America doesn't have that.

It's not like, what do you mean above myself? There's no above. We like ballers. We like it. We take pictures in front of private jets with big watches and diamonds and stuff. It's great. I love that. Some Americans love that.

I love that. They love celebrating success over here. It's such a big thing. I mean, there's a lot of haters over here, too. Sure. But there is this sense that there are paths to victory, that you can work really hard, and if you have a vision and you get to that pinnacle of success people will celebrate you like look at him he went for it absolutely and that and that respect for the

fact that if you put the work in yeah then you you deserve the rewards yeah and um and you haven't made other people feel worse you've made them feel more optimistic about what they could achieve yes that's just a great thing about America. And it is still there. Yeah, I think it's still there. They haven't killed that. They haven't killed that. But there's some people that don't like that because they're fucking lazy and they are never going to be that exceptional person.

So they will rail against exceptional people. Well, you know, that's I write a chapter in the World West on resentment, which I think is a huge, huge human driver, which has only one answer to it, as I say in the book, it's gratitude. It's to turn around resentment into gratitude. But resentment is one of the biggest drivers that human beings have.

And I was reading a lot on the nature of resentment for this book. And I found a very powerful passage in Nietzsche where he says that one of the only ways to deal with the person of resentment, as he describes it, is, he says, to turn around to the person and to say, you are correct. There is a reason why you have resentment. There is a person you need to blame. There is a reason why your life isn't what it is meant to be. The reason why you have resentment there is a person you need to blame there is a reason why your life isn't what it is meant to be the reason is you now the problem is that is the last thing anyone wants to hear but it is the most important thing that a person filled with resentment should hear you are the person you have become because that's you.

Yeah. It wasn't other people. We all in our lives have so many reasons to feel resentment. Every day. Well, especially when you reach a certain age. There's so many decisions that had to be made. Right. Made to whoever you are at 45 years old.

How many decisions did you make to be who you are now? How many times did you fuck it up? How many times did you stay in bed and hit the snooze button? How many times did you not take a risk, not take a chance when people around you did and they became wildly successful? How much anger do you have towards them instead of recognizing that you had made an error

and now it's time to use that information and apply it to the rest of my life? Absolutely. They don't do that because that's painful. It's much, much more painful, much easier to take the other route. But it is like societally as well as individually, it is the toughest pill, but it is a necessary pill sometimes to swallow. It's very similar to what you were talking about earlier in that pill of recognizing that you're incorrect. Right.

And saying, you know what, I'm not right. I thought I was right, and this is why I thought I was right, and now I realize I was wrong. Yeah. And that's very difficult for people to do. I pride myself on that. I take major steps to do that as often as possible, to say when I'm wrong, to just go out and make it a statement

i agree i think it's important but i would just say that there is there is one rider to that which is that you can do that because of the position you have yes and somebody who's say young and starting off it's not so easy i don't know they could do i don't know. Because they could do. I don't know. It just depends on what they do. What business are they in and how are they doing? If you're a young person and you have a podcast, you're a free person. Yeah, that's true. You do whatever the fuck you want. That's true.

And either people like it or don't like it. And the amount of effort that you put into it is generally proportionate to the amount of success that you put into it is genuine is generally rather um proportionate to the amount of success that you get because if you put a lot of effort into it and then people and you're doing it correctly you're doing it better all the time people tell people about it and then it spreads yeah and then but if you're in a business where you it requires you to be hired by a corporation well yeah you can't really fuck up you can't mistakes. You can't be the person that said, this is my error. Because people just fire you. And then, why did you get fired from that job?

Well, I fucked up. And this is what I did wrong. Well, why did you do that? Well, I thought I was right. And it turns out I was incorrect. Well, it also depends what you prioritize in your life. Yes. And I suspect, like me you you always prioritize having freedom yes

right it's everything yeah same for me freedom and truth freedom is though without without truth you don't have freedom because if you have you have freedom but you're living lies you still have no freedom exactly but some some people don't prioritize that yeah some people have other priorities. And again, it goes back to your thing. That's why you'll have different outcomes. Different people will want different things. Yeah. The prison of being confined to someone else's expectations or what they require of you in terms of the way they want you to behave and think and do is like that is so restrictive that it's it's so difficult to break out of that

and find your own whether it's i hate that to like find yourself or find your identity but there's something to that right yeah find what do you actually enjoy like what what what should you be doing like what if you could wave a magic wand and give yourself a perfect path of life and career what would it be do you even know or are you so locked in this system that you find yourself entrenched in where you're trying to climb this corporate ladder and it requires you dressing a certain way behaving a certain way and like all those things are the enemies of freedom because they're so restrictive i couldn't agree more i remember and again it is sort of, it is in all of our hands to some extent. I mean, sometimes the most

important decision in your life, in my experience, is deciding something you're not going to do. Right. Shortly after I left university, I had written my first book very early and I spent the advance very fast. Because I was young. And of course, if you're 19,

you think, oh, I imagine this is going to happen all the time. Then you're broke. I basically did what a lot of NBA players do, but with less money. Anyhow, and I had no money. And I didn't have any money to eat at one point, I remember. And a friend took me to the at one point, I remember. A friend took me to the supermarket and bought food for me.

Anyhow, at this point, I realized I've got to get a job. And I remember saying it to a friend, a very close friend, who said, Douglas, you say it as if this is a tragedy unique to yourself. No other human being will understand. A tragedy unique to yourself. That's such a great one because young people do feel like that. They do feel like that. Anyhow, the point was is that there was something I wanted to write, and I knew I needed time, but I also needed money and I needed the job.

And I remember applying for the job and I couldn't understand what it was I just didn't understand what the point of it was hmm and I kind of got through an interview and I was how does money move around I I thought I was going to cause one of these international disasters on the banking scene if I stayed. Anyhow, they offered it to me, like very lackluster, and I turned it down. And it's one of the things I'm most pleased in my life that I did. And it ended up I had more to suffer through, as it were,

in the short term. But it was the best thing imaginable because i didn't get stuck there's a phrase of philip larkins i'm very fond of he describes people who get shunted to the edge of their own lives and you i managed to make sure at an as early a stage as possible i didn't get pushed to the edge of my own life but if if most people, if you say to them, what is it you really want to be? They're embarrassed to tell you at a certain stage because of the dream of what, it's not even a dream. The vision of what they thought they were going to be in their lives is too different from the reality that they don't want to admit it. And often that vision is perfectly achievable. It's not like I want to be the new Marlene Dietrich.

is perfectly achievable. It's not like I want to be the new Marlene Dietrich. It's I want to work in this area of work, not that one. Yeah. But I hate it when you see people who, and that's the people who become really resentful, is I thought I could achieve it, and I never bothered to try to take the risk. And then all of a sudden you're 60.

You're 60 and you thought. And it's not going to ever happen. And you've kind of wasted your life and you're filled with resentment. And in order to not think about that, you concentrate on other people and you're just angry about other people all the time. Angry about other people and angry about how fast it all went. That's my favorite thing. Norm Macdonald's book

is the semi-memoir book, he says a beautiful phrase somewhere. He says the only thing an old man can say to a young man is it goes fast, so fast. And the tragedy is that the young man will never believe him. So true. So true. So true. It goes fast, so fast.

Yeah. So true. So true. So true. It goes fast, so fast. Yeah. So try not to be stuck in the life you don't want to live any longer than you have to. That's the thing that people say. Oh, it's easy for you to say, Douglas Murray.

You're a fucking successful author. You got lucky. Well, as I say, I have a counter to that. Firstly, screw you. No, as I say, my British answer to that would be, well, there's something in there. My answer I've learned from being in America is, yes, first of all, people have no idea how much you have to put in and how much you actually have to go through to do some of the things that make you successful. Yeah. They have no idea of the amount of early mornings

and late nights and constant, like, constant work. Yeah, constant. Only people close to you see what it looks like, the old iceberg thing of achievement and work. Only people very close to you see the amount that has gone on under the surface to get anything in this life. And secondly, no, I think that there is amount that has gone on under the surface to get anything in this life. Yes.

And secondly, no, I think that there is definitely an element of luck, good fortune and stuff like that. But most of it is peddling fucking hard all the time to make sure you're living the life you want to live. Yes. And so, no, I've now been in America long enough to say, screw you. Well, that's the unique thing about being independent, as you are too, is that the amount of effort that you put into something is all on you. Yes, that's true.

And I like that. I mean, I like that. I do too. Sometimes people say, well, you could take your foot off the pedal a bit. And I tend to think, well, yeah, but I like the feeling of my foot on the pedal. Yes. And it's fun. And it's also, it's like, no, I can't because then I'm not me.

Yes. I said to a really good friend in America recently, I said, God, I'd love to take a break. I don't have to write any articles for a couple of weeks. She said, no, you wouldn't, Douglas. You'd hate it. You'd be bored after 48 hours. After 48 hours, you'd be like the worst house guest ever. Well, I resolved that by going on vacations. Oh, yeah. Are you any good at it? Yes, I've become good at it. My wife has taught me how to do it.

I'm terrible at it. Well, I have children and that helps because i go and um we hang out we'll go to like a beach or somewhere some island or something and you manage to like put the phone away yes i'm good at it now i'm good at it now you know that's hammered you know that's what i like to do how do you get hammered just get drunk get high if I can get weed I get weed if I can't I'll just drink a lot of margaritas and I go to the gym every day and I just think and sometimes I read a book but a lot of times I just like I just I've learned how to just be at peace and then around day five I start getting itchy and then

when I come back I'm fucking rare and ready to go And I'm diving back into it and I enjoy it. Yes. But I've learned how to like, it's also like when you have children and you're talking about things going quickly. Well, you want to talk about quickly when they become adults. It's so fucking fast. It's 18 years. It's so quick. How old are yours now?

Well, the youngest ones I have are 11 and 13, and then I have a 25-year-old. Wow. You've got a 25-year-old? Yes. So watching them grow and watching them become this, you know, my 13-year-old's hilarious. She's like this little adult, and we're laughing at stuff, and she's got little saying she she says and it's like she got her own little personality i'm like man she's only going to be around a few more years and then she's going to be out in the world and then hopefully i'll be close to her in like geographically

where i can see her as often as i can and you know i want to make sure that i spend as much time with her now as i can so one of the beautiful things about vacations is it's the one time where we're together 24 hours a day for like over a week so i love that so we love being with them they love being with you clearly yeah it's fascinating little people that you've made that came out of your own dna are fucking so it's so bizarre yeah you love them so much but also you get to see like how much of my fucking personality is genetic yes you know because like this kid is not want for anything but yet is so driven like why she's such a psycho it's so strange and it's like oh you just have my fucking crazy genes that's that's one of the reasons why people are always fascinated by hereditary yeah like that's why royal

families are interesting to people why dynast fascinated by hereditary yeah like that's why royal families are interesting to people why uh dynasties of yes because it's like we're all very very interested in seeing how dna plays out there's more to it than just nature and nurture there's a lot going on there and there's some stuff that my kid has especially what one of my kids has this artistic bend that's very similar to like i used to be an illustrator and I wanted to draw comic books and stuff. And she's very talented as an artist. But the other one, the athletic one, is the one that fascinates me the most. Because she acts like, she gets obsessed with things like someone who's not loved.

Someone who's trying to show the world that she's special but Wow her personality's not like that at all like she loves everybody she's easygoing she's very confident friendly but she's like me but I felt like I was like that because my parents broke up when I was young and I right I didn't I thought maybe my drive was all like, I'm going to show you that I'm special. And I'm going to put in the amount of effort and work that a person with a good family is not capable of doing. Because you're not going to be as crazy as me. And so that was my fuel when I was younger. But now it's confronted by this 13-year-old psycho who's totally loved.

And also fueled. Fully fueled by this insane desire to achieve greatness, but also totally loved and completely confident. That's fantastic because among other things, it gives us hope that to be successful, you don't have to feel like you've been screwed up in any way. I think there's a difference in our choices though and this is the thing like my daughter does gymnastics and a lot of other athletic things and she's really good at it but i was interested in fighting like i was

trying to hurt people and i was also doing this very dangerous thing where i was trying to learn about myself she doesn't have that desire and i'm like I think that there's a thing about fighting where I don't think you excel at that well I could be wrong here too though I don't think you necessarily excel at that I should say unless you have some pain I don't I don't know I'm sure I think the ones who are willing to get up at 6 in the morning and the ones who hit the bag harder and the ones who sprint up that extra hill there's demons for sure i by the way i'm i'm no damn good at boxing uh at all i can't do it very very bored by it and very unmotivated motivated by most uh physical exercise apart from boxing um and uh a friend said why do you think that is I said I'm fairly sure it's because

whatever that is that people take out I use on my keyboard mmm writing yeah if I if I like if I if I if somebody does something it really pisses me off open word yeah well that's an outlet as well, right? I'm fascinated by demons and how those demons manifest themselves in someone's work. One of my obsessions with this is Stephen King. Oh, yeah. Stephen King is one of my favorite authors. His earlier work, Carrie and The Shining. I mean, amazing.

But it was just cocaine and alcohol. Really? And then his new stuff, I just don't sync up with. And I feel like he exercises demons. They don't show up at work anymore. That's one reason why a lot of successful people are very unwilling to go through things like rehab or therapy. Because they think, and I think mainly this is wrong. There are cases where it's true.

They think that if you look under the bonnet, the car will stop working. Yeah, I don't necessarily think that's true. I don't think it's necessarily true. But a lot of successful people have's true. I don't think it's necessarily true. But a lot of successful people have that fear. I don't think it's true, but when you're writing about monsters and demons and terror and murder and torture

and the horrible, horrible instincts of the worst kind of people, I feel like you need a little chaos in your life you need to do a little fucking bump of coke and throw down a couple of beers and stephen king was completely unconscious when he wrote kujo you know he doesn't even remember writing it what doesn't remember anything about it really yeah yeah it was all just cocaine and alcohol his book on writing is really fascinating it's a very very interesting book but one of the things that he talks about is

getting rid of all these things in his life cigarettes are one of them cocaine alcohol and his family's intervened and and saved him he's very thankful but the man he is now is this like guy who tweets about politics in this sort of obtuse way and then writes stuff that is good it's good he's a very good writer he's a great writer but it's not the shining it's possible of course also that he just took it he wrote himself out on that early it is it's also possible that he's old. And then old people have less energy and they're not angry. And there's no, there's like,

there's a hunger when you're, you know, you have a family and you're barely fucking feeding them. Yeah. And you're making your living off of your creativity. There's a,

there's some energy there. Yeah. And I do think that people write out rage. Yes. They get it out of their system. For sure. For sure. And when you're young

you're much more rageful much more angry about things and the older you get the more you can make your peace with things and the more you can see things in a clearer light including yourself most of us don't have any idea what motivates ourselves but the older you get the more you can

see yourself in some kind of reasonable light. And among other things, be kinder to yourself. Learn not to beat up on yourself. But at the beginning, you've got to work damn hard. And any writers watching, listening, by the way, should not take the Stephen King route because most of them will not write a masterpiece

if they do a pile of Coke and a load of beer. No, you have to be Stephen King. They will be like, as I said, I quoted Billy Connolly earlier. One of the favorite things he ever said was he said once, he said when he used to drink really heavily and he said, he said, I think I know these fantastic ideas. You know, I just thought, I found out I would be a millionaire.

Fantastic. And wake up in the morning, damn it, I've forgotten that idea. And I was going to be rich. And he said, so he decided to have a notebook by his bed with a pen. And he'd, like, come back from the apartment. I really smashed. And he'd go, I've got to write down that idea of how to be rich. And he'd, like, wake up in the morning.

Oh, God damn it. The idea's gone. No, it hasn't. I've got my notepad. And he'd look over and he'd be like, buy a tractor. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Most people drunk or high cannot achieve very much in the way of discipline in work.

That's a problem. I have a never more than one drink rule if I'm working. Never write after more than one drink. Never speak after more than one drink. That's a good rule. Yeah, it's a very good rule. Yeah, one drink is enough. One drink, you achieve what you want. You get a little looseness, a little social lubrication. After that, it's like

and you read it the next day and go God damn. But then Hunter Thompson, I mean, he wrote a lot of his shit, Hammer too, a lot of it on acid. Have you ever seen the list of things that he did? Like there was a guy, probably a little bit of his performative because he knew that there was a journalist that was following him around. Right.

And this journalist came to him and wanted to find out what Hunter Thompson did in a day. And it's like, you know, from waking up in the afternoon to doing cocaine, Dunhills, all the alcohol that he drank. Like, here it is. Hunter Thompson's daily routine. 3 p.m., rise. 3.05, Chivas Regal with morning papers. Dunhill cigarette.

3.45, cocaine. 3.50, another glass of Chivas. Dunhill. 4.95, first cup of coffee. What is it? 4.05, rather. I'm like, what is 4.95? What? First cup of coffee, Dunhill.

415, cocaine. 416, orange juice, Dunhill. 430, cocaine. 454, cocaine. 505, cocaine. 511, coffee, Dunhill. 530, more ice and shivvies. 545, cocaine.

6pm, grass to take the edge off. 7.05, Woody Creek Tavern for lunch, which I went to when I was in town, just out of respect. Heineken, two margaritas, two cheeseburgers, two orders of fries, a plate of tomatoes, coleslaw, taco salad, a double order of onion rings, carrot cake, ice cream, bean fritter, Dunhill's, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone, a glass of shredded ice over which he poured three or four jiggers of Chivas. 3pm. Oh, is that 8 I guess? 9? Oh, it's just scratched out.

9pm, cocaine. 10pm, drops acid. 11pm, chartreuse, cocaine, grass. 11.30, cocaine. Midnight. Hunter is ready to write. So from 12.05 to 6 a.m., chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhill's, orange juice, gin, 6 a.m. in the hot tub,

champagne, Dove bars, Fettuccine Alfredo, 8 a.m halcyon 8 20 sleep how the hell how the hell did he sleep halcyon uh sleeping pills oh is it yeah sleeping that is crazy that's that's why i mean that is one of the reasons why he wrote great things is because he was just fucking just diving into the madness of this chaotic life and absolutely not living like the standard American absolutely not living like a normie I would I would say that normal people most people could do that and then stop and write about it but not do that and write at the same time well that is really you and write about it, but not do that and write at the same time. Well, that is really...

He could only do it for a certain amount of time. That's the other thing. Towards the end of his life, his writing was not good anymore. As you were saying that, as you were reading that list, let alone like Chartreuse, the nastiest, stickiest, sweetest alcoholic drink.

Why that in the middle of like... But when you look at that list, I can even just, you reading it, my brain feels fuzzier just thinking about yeah the idea of going through the day and then many meaning to sit opposite your typewriter well I think he hated that part about it but he knew that that was his job and he would just get fucked up before he wrote you know it's really uncommon I can't stress enough how uncommon that is that everything about writing particularly works and articles is

About you could do whatever the hell you want But the discipline needed to get thoughts on the page in an orderly fashion that is on That is readable by other people. That's a crucial thing Like yeah, you may think you've got your thoughts in the best imaginable fashion, but it's a bloody mess Yes for it to be in a readable fashion that other people want to read, almost nobody can do that on that. No. And the sad thing is that the people who can end up dying young.

And then also deteriorated horrifically towards the end of his life. You know, I remember watching him on Conan O'Brien, and he was talking, and you could barely understand a word he was saying. It was just like he had just – he fired everything. If the red line was at 7,000, everything went to nine. Pistons were blowing. Everything was fucked. His hips were gone.

He couldn't walk anymore. He was crippled. He was in agony all the time. I mean, everything was wrong. There is a price paid for everything. Yes. I mean, Hitchens talked about that. He talked about that when he died.

He's like, I burned the candle at both ends, but what a lovely flame it created. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I think about him a lot. But he also said, I can't remember if he said it publicly or privately. I can't remember. I remember him saying before the end, I hoped I'd get another 10 years.

And he said, I thought I'd earned it. Which I found very upsetting because he'd worked so hard. And I used to have drinks with him. I mean, I used to go out with him a lot. Literally, all the stories are true. He would write an article when you were barely able to get off the sofa. He'd go and tap away next door. And that's an amazing skill, but it also meant we didn't have him as much as we could have done.

And he worked hard enough to have deserved to be able to take the foot off his own, you know, demon accelerator. And he had hoped that he would have had his 70s, and he't was it cigarettes and alcohol cigarettes or mainly he used to say that he's easily what get me yeah I mean you don't you could be heavily but they are the the alcohol the cigarettes with the cigarette the problem with cigarettes is it's a cognitive enhancer and that's one of the things that Stephen King talked about how difficult it was to write after he quit cigarettes. It was one of his most difficult things. The only people I know who've been through AA for drugs or drink,

they don't give up cigarettes. No. They stick with the cigarettes. Yeah, that's the thing that keeps them stable. Yeah. Yeah, I knew a lot of people. Because a lot of comedians back in Boston, they got into comedy from Alcoholics Anonymous. Because Alcoholics Anonymous, you would go up there and speak and you could tell your drunk stories to these people.

Oh, sure. Yeah. And I knew quite a few of them that that became like literally their first open mic night almost. They would go up there, hi, I'm Bob. I'm an alcoholic. literally their first open mic night almost. They would go there, hi, I'm Bob. I'm an alcoholic, and today marks my 45th day. I'm still hiding from my Coke dealer because I owe him $1,000 because we went to Atlantic City, and they'll tell these crazy stories. And they were telling these stories, and people were howling, laughing.

And they got, like my friend, he's passed. His name is Dave Fitzgerald. He was a really funny guy guy and he lived in Boston and he got he was a guy who didn't even get started in comedy until he was deep into his 30s and His life was a fucking disaster up until that point because he was just always drunk and fucked up and and then he got into Alcoholics Anonymous He got clean and sober and then started telling these stories and those stories were so funny that people demanded that he go and do comedy and then he wound and then there was like a whole like

there's this guy dick doherty who also was in the program who started you know he inspired a bunch of other sober people to try it too and they tried it from it's interesting how much the whole aa thing reflects on a load of other things in life for people who are not addicts of some kind. I discovered since this book came out that the gratitude thing, I didn't know this, that gratitude is one of the things that Alcoholics Anonymous, they urge people going through the program to write down things they're grateful for. I had no idea about that until recently when people started writing to me and i realized that's of course that of course you'd be asked to do that it's just a good way to mentally balance

yourself too like we should all be grateful for a lot of things there's many many many things you and it it'll shift the balance off of constantly looking at things in a negative manner right particularly when you're comparing yourself to others well Well, I saw, by the way, I saw a little bit of your podcast with Jordan a little while ago. You mentioned the night we spent in New York together. And when I saw that, I started talking about this.

I thought, oh, God damn, what's he going to say? But actually the thing that stood out for me most in the evening he described was that we were walking through Times Square. And I remember, I just love walking across Broadway and I stopped in the middle of it and I said to

Jordan, isn't this fucking amazing? And he grabbed me and he said, right man! And we just both of us were just overtaken with joy about like, wow! This is just like, what are the chances that anyone could create

this right and it was just such a it was a wonderful moment of mutual enthusiasm about something that if you're a new yorker you get used to every day but you shouldn't be used to it the first time i ever saw new york city i was living in boston and we drove down for something i forget exactly what it was i think it was for a martial arts tournament and we we drove down for something. I forget exactly what it was. I think it was for a martial arts tournament. And we drove on the West side highway and there's this moment where you're driving and you start to see the building and then you're inside it. And then you're up close. It's like for me as a young kid, I was probably 15 or 16 at the time, like looking up, me as a young kid, I was probably 15 or 16 at the time,

like looking up like, this is fucking crazy. That's right. This is so big. Yeah. It's so immense because Boston is so small in comparison. Right. Boston is so quaint. Provincial.

Yes. It's like there's big buildings, but there's not that many of them. It's not crazy. Like you're in, when I was, you know, when I was a teenager, whatever it was, I was in Manhattan and I was like, I can't believe there's a place like this. It was so much different than seeing it in a photograph. You could be ruined for life. Some people get ruined for life by that because you can be like this.

Yeah, and you can live like this. You can live like this. I mean, it's fantastic. Again, it goes back to your thing. The people who are spurred energized and things will will orient themselves towards places that thrill them like that and the ones who are not will fear that they'll fail well it's it's having those tools to look at things in a way that benefits you the most and look at and to not be tripped up by thoughts and ideas that are limiting. If you're upset that other person, someone, this is a very common one amongst certain people, they're upset that other people are getting successful, upset at someone else's

success. That doesn't help you at all. No. There's no benefit to that thought. Those thoughts are the opposite of the thoughts you need Yeah, you can be inspired you can shit you can you can say was that if that guy made it? I'm gonna fucking kill. Yeah, you could say you could even do it in a shitty way You don't necessarily have to be praising this. Yeah, that's why I think one of the ugliest things anyone ever said was Gore Vidal

Who's brilliant? There's lots of ways, Gore Vidal, who's brilliant in lots of ways, but Gore Vidal famously once said, whenever a friend succeeds, something within me dies. Gore said that? Yeah. Wow. And I thought

that was a pretty shitty thing to say. That's super shitty. But I mean, it wasn't like he minded coming across that way. But I always thought that was very,

I mean, I just, I literally can't, among friends, I can't familiarize myself with that sentiment. No. That's one of the reasons why you're so prolific. When a friend does something well, you're like,

that's fantastic. Yes. That's a great attitude. That's how we should all be. We should shun people who think that way. But maybe Gore was just fucking around. I think he might have been. He was no stranger to deliberately provoking.

His debates with William F. Buckley were fantastic. That documentary is amazing. That's a great documentary. There's a film. Really good. There's a play that's opening about it as well. But those are amazing debates. I watched that documentary in Ravello.

No. Yeah, because I was in Ravello for vacation you didn't visit the house no i did not but uh we were staying at this resort in ravello that overlooks the sea stunning oh my god it's like one of the most incredible views in the world it's heaven that place and the food yeah oh my god the italian food there is off the charts and i i downloaded on my laptop so I was watching it up there. And, you know, because Gore Vidal lived there for a while. He had that stunning house on the cliff with the external staircase.

I know. God damn. I was in Ravello some years ago, like 10, 15 years ago, and I remember somebody pointing out Gore Vidal's house to me. I was like, wow, fantastic. And they said a famous writer lived there. And of course, Gore Vidal. And they said it's on the market.

I was like, wow, that's fantastic. And I immediately Googled. It was $30 million. $30? $30 million. And I was like, writers used to be much better paid or it probably wasn't worth that much back then yeah i might not but not yeah anyhow it was it was a it was a disappointing moment but i had a moment of thinking wow wouldn't it be great to

move into gorvydar's old house that would be pretty fucking amazing but the thing is like how often would you be there that i i thought about it too because whenever I'm whenever I'm in a place that I really enjoy like in my family we would we went to Ravello for like five years in a row before the pandemic that was like our spot for the summer beautiful yeah so before the kids would go back to school we'd go to Ravello and I was thinking like well okay if I had a house here like how often like it takes how long does it take to get here? It takes 16 hours by plane, whatever the fuck it is.

Like how often would I do this? And I was like, this is not, I can't do this. It's a wonderful dream though. It's a great dream. But no, Vidal was amazing. I do, and those debates with Buckley were really, I mean that was like, television debates were good then. Yes, well, they figured out a way to get people engaged on serious issues and to have these two intellectuals from completely polar opposite ideologies debate on national television and essentially in podcast form.

And they both knew how to speak in paragraphs. Yes. I mean, they had a skill that almost nobody has today. Right. And they both of them are so, I mean they they're so lucid yes great writers and they were also they had they had great jabs at each other oh yeah and they would go back and forth and well that's because you know Buckley I never I never met Buckley but he had lots of friends in common he he had that great

awful weird I think yeah yeah and a friend of mutual friends said that's He had lots of friends in common. He had that great, awful, weird eye thing. Yes, yes. And a mutual friend said that's because he was an early user of contact lenses. You know, remember those hard contact lenses? So that's what I thought. And he said that's why. He was always, you know. And I said, I'm not sure that completely explains it,

because Buckley does it whenever he scores a palpable hit. So if you see his debate with Chomsky in the 70s, he says at one point, Chomsky says something about some revolutionary movement in South America or something. And he says, and they hate America, so you must love them, Mr. Chomsky. And he does the eyes thing. He always did it when he was going to win.

Young Chomsky debating Buckley was very fascinating. Wasn't it? Very fascinating because Chomsky was so measured. Very measured. Amazingly. But he became so strange. Well, he's strange now, but I feel like it's fear and age and a lot of things. He hasn't helped a younger generation think their way through.

No. But he was, you know, he was forced censoring people that had dissenting opinions about COVID, and there was, like, a lot of, you know, his thoughts on isolating people who were unvaccinated, which was, like, really weird. Really? He went into that? Yeah, there was his positions on forcing either forcing people or restricting their rights and

i don't want to paraphrase yeah yeah because i forget well we should probably now that i brought it up probably should say because i know a lot of people who are hardcore lefties that i'm friends with were upset at him like this is noam chomsky like how is this noam chomsky and i'm like man old people are fucking scared of covid like really scared in a way like a healthy fit guy like yourself is not going to be scared of it's a different kind of existential threat it's a different kind of danger but it comes back to the thing as well i said earlier i mean the likelihood of being lockstep on all of these issues now right very small right very small what about Chomsky is weird to you what the Chomsky of today well no I just thought that for me that the turn on to

having these views on every American military escapade mmm he had. It was all very idiosyncratic, very, I thought, conspiratorial a lot of the time. And he got horrible stuff about the Balkans, about Cambodia and stuff. I thought he stepped wildly out of his area of expertise and made himself an expert in something which he was unreliable on, which was American foreign policy. And weirdly, that became the thing he became most famous for and became a guru on. And I never liked it. I never liked the sort of the way in which it veered from. Is somebody trying to get in? the way in which it veered from somebody trying to get in no that's uh people working on our gym

are doing something stupid while the podcast is going off they must be banging they're saying it's time to work out or something i think they probably probably are we're done bloody hell because it's almost four o'clock yeah um you know it's like live long enough and you become a villain you know if you're a hero like uh noomsky, who to a lot of people is an intellectual hero, eventually you're going to get something wrong and then you'll be captured by it. Yeah, I saw a performer recently, I won't go into too many details, who wasn't everything he had once been. And I said to a mutual friend I said joking I said when I become like that you will tell me when this friend said when I become like that

don't say a word just say it's marvelous wouldn't it I mean I think at a certain point in time you've got to know and just step away but then you know there's people like Carlin Carlin performed till he died he died in a hotel room in Vegas you know yeah yeah it's also it's like can you still do it well why don't you right you know are we just doing this because we do it at a certain level I mean what was it Tommy Cooper died on stage oh wow funniest man of his generation you can Cooper died on stage? Oh, wow. Funniest man of his generation in the UK. And he died on stage and the audience thought it was part of the act. Did you see the video?

And they pulled the body away in front of the audience. Oh, my God. Last sight of him, the curtain came down and his feet were on the wrong side and they pulled the body. Did they know? Did people know at that point? By that point, they were starting to work out it wasn't that show. Jesus Christ. But in a way, I mean, the old kind of how do you want to go.

Yeah, exactly. How do you want to go other than having sex? There was a recent... Which is such a selfish thing to say. It's very selfish. Especially for the person you had sex with. Like, what the fuck? They have to live with this for the rest of their life?

Now they're connected to this idea the last person they had sex with fucking died yeah the person they have sex with after that that's tricky yeah and they have to like get a bunch under their belt before they start feeling normal about it again you know have a bunch of sessions like okay i think i think i'm not a jinx i think it's not me you know um there was a woman her name is heather mcdonald she's a comic and she was on stage joking around about how vaccinated she was, about she's vaccinated and boosted and you know and I even got the

shingles vaccine or whatever the fuck it was and she's in the middle of doing this and blacks out on stage and bangs her head off the ground, like watch this let's play it play it from the beginning and i still get my period being vaccinated but i want you to know double vaxxed booster flu shot and i'm going to be honest i have the shingle shot too

and i still get my period what yes And I still get my period. What? Yes. Traveled. Went to Mexico twice. Did shows. Meet and greets.

Never got COVID. Clearly, Jesus loves me the most. Seriously. No way. So nice. So nice. Boom. Somebody wants to. I wish I'd seen that.

Well, it's not funny, really. I laughed, unfortunately, because it was my friend Justin Martindale. That was the guy, the comedian that was making fun of me. Did she die? No, but she did crack her skull. She literally bounced her skull off the hard stage and cracked her skull. You see, I wrote a column recently saying, and this wildly backs up my view, I do slightly believe in the old gods.

There's something to that. There's something to it. How many of these people that are saying, we need to enforce vax mandates, and they're just like... There's something to it that you just don't tempt the fates. There's so many people. Or they'll come running at you. They'll hitch up their skirts, come running at you, and smack the living daylights out of you. I would normally say that's just nonsense and superstition.

But there's so many videos of people talking about forcing mandates, forcing vaccines, and then they black out while they're doing it. There's got to be something in the fates. So never boast like that. Never. Particularly not about your period. Because that's a crazy one and i still got my period like what you're talking about is how many women don't get their fucking period because it's a real thing yeah you know i have a friend who didn't get a period for six fucking months after

she got her shot yeah it's a weird thing it's not for everybody but it's a it's a real thing it's a weird thing. It's not for everybody, but it's a real thing. It's like she's joking around about this, and then God's like, ha-ha. That's it. Check, please. Never tempt the fates. No. Yeah. Are you doing an audio version of this?

I've done the audio version. How stressful is that? It's not stressful at all. I love it. Do you? Well, you talk well. I love it. No, no, no, it's not that.

I really love it because when you do an audio version of a book, and I did for the Madness of Crowds as well, the best thing is when you quote crazy shit other people have said, if you type it out, it's funny. Yeah. And when you read it, it can be funny. When you read it out loud, it can just be hilarious. So there are people I quote just like crazy shit that people say. And I find myself having to say to the

producer, I'm sorry, I'm corpsing, laughing so much. I'm not laughing at my own jokes. I'm laughing at how ridiculous this is when you say it out loud. There's this woman from Yale who fantasizes about killing white men.

When I'm typing up what she says, it's like, this is crazy. When you read it out loud, you go, this is a really deranged person who should be locked up very fast. But it's great fun doing it. Is she a white woman? Yeah, of course.

Of course. It's always white women. Of course. Why wouldn't you be a white woman? Why would you hate white people so much? Yeah. But it's great. I love doing it.

And actually, a lot of people, as you know, a lot of people listen to audiobooks now, and they realize quite rightly that it's the same thing as reading the book. Yes. Only a few years ago, people used to think it was like cheating somehow. It's not. You get all the same information. I still feel guilty when I say that I listen to audiobooks mostly. I do read occasionally, but's like eight eight out of ten

i'm listening well i think it's a great medium and uh i think it's great fun to do and it's great fun to listen to and and sometimes there are kind of jokes and things which come across slightly better read than oh for sure sarcasm translates so much better i had one in matters of crowds i referred to somebody who described something as being literally like Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. And I say in the book, I say, not just any old Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. And it's like,

it's definitely better read than on the page. Well, especially that it's your voice. The thing that drives me mad is when you have someone who's very good at reading, but the publisher in their infinite wisdom decides to hire an actor. And so you have someone completely disconnected from the work who's just reading it. And you're like, oh, no, don't do this.

Well, for me, it's a great pleasure. And it brings you a whole new audience, you know? And I love that. There are people who do jobs which, you know, they need to spend a lot of the day listening to stuff. And they listen to books yeah I just listen to them when I commute it's right it's like so I have an hour of that book every day right if I were here half our home and that is I mean you can get through a book pretty pretty well that way I will 100% it's out now the war on the west the war in the west all formats i don't have anything signed for me will you sign this one for me yeah all right if you want it's nice beautifully please um well thank you for being you man i

really appreciate you i i love your work i love the fact that you're out there it's uh there's not a lot of you douglas murray there's there's not a lot of people that I could point to and say, that guy's on to it. So it means a lot to me. Appreciate you're out there. It means a lot to me. And you can get this now along with all the other books, The Strange Death of Europe, Madness of Crowds,

and this, The War on the West. Do you have any other books? I've been getting busy. You make it sound like I'm a... Are those the three, though? No, no, no. I've written like seven books. Okay.

If you buy these three, you're well set. We're good. All right. Thank you. Appreciate you, man. Bye, everybody.