The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - Milo Yiannopoulos: Past, present and future

Episode Date: May 19, 2019

Today we present Dr. Peterson's conversation with journalist, performance artist, and comedian, Milo Yiannopoulos. Recorded April 11, 2019. https://www.jordanbpeterson.com

Welcome to season 2, Episode 9 of the Jordan B Peterson Podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson, Dad's daughter and collaborator. Today we're presenting his conversation with Milo Yunopolis recorded April 11, 2019. This podcast will give you a bit of a background on Milo, which many of you might not be aware of. Hopefully it's enjoyed. Dad is still out for the count for the meantime. Probably the foreseeable future to be honest. We're still dealing with a health crisis, although Mum's recovering from surgery like a champ. She's the least wonny person I know. We'll keep you guys posted next

week. Hope everyone's Victoria Day is good. That's just a Canadian holiday. But that's good for us. The American suckers out there don't get Monday off. Sorry about that. When we return, dad's conversation with Milo Yunopoulos. I'm speaking today with Milo Yunopoulos. Milo is a hard man to categorize. Part journalist, part performance artist, part agent provocateur, part comedian at WIT. Unopolis is a man of immense and complex self-contradiction.

He's half Greek and half Irish, but is known as an Englishman to the Americans with whom he is communicated extensively. He's gay and Jewish by descent. He married his long-term boyfriend and of African-American man in Hawaii in 2017, but faces frequent accusations of racism. He is, or was, strangely attractive to young American Republicans and completed a successful and controversial written tour of US universities in 2016 and 2017. For at least two years he was one of the most well-known internet celebrities

let's say on the political front, caused more uproar than any other single person that I can think of. He collected his fair share of enemies along the way. He's often accused, for example, of being an alt-right supporter. An accusation justified in the view of those who oppose him by his association with Breitbart for whom he was an editor. In my view, for what it's worth, Milo was such a figure of inter-contradiction and outer controversy that I believed from the beginning that his time was numbered. Nonetheless, the circumstances of his demise were unpredictable, I would say, not in keeping with his apparent destiny. After revealing details of his early sexual experiences at the hands of a 29-year-old priest who he refused to name,

he stated that he was an active participant in the events, and that such occurrences were far more common and far more consensual than people were willing to admit. I don't think he ever recovered from the controversy that those comments generated. I should finish by saying that Milo is definitely now on the list of those who no one acceptably socially should ever speak to, which I suppose is one of the reasons why I'm talking to him. I want to know what happened to him in his own words, and I don't really give a damn if that's politically incorrect. Thanks Milo for agreeing to be on my channel and podcast. Thank you very much for having me. I take a slightly less fatalistic view of my prospects

than your introduction would suggest, but certainly I went through an extraordinary tumble and I'm happy to share my thoughts about it with you. Yeah, well let's start by reviewing some of your history if you wouldn't mind. Tell me, tell me, let's start with a bit of your history in the UK before you came to the US. It's been long enough so that I think some biographical information would be useful for people. So tell me, tell me about your your life in the UK before you came to the US. And then let's start talking about what happened to you as soon as you came over to North America. Sure. I had a very unhappy life, particularly a very unhappy 20s in London.

I started off with a journalist and some quite prestigious publications. I was in a relationship that was, I don't think, healthy or happy for either person involved. I was searching, I think, I was looking. I couldn't work out yet what I was, what I was for, what my purpose was. And it wasn't until I got to America, I discovered what it was, but I started to explore at least what would eventually become my, I suppose my civic function, as bomb thrower and promoter. Right at the beginning of my career in journalism,

I mean, I obviously fairly predictably come from and broken home, not much loved for four or from my the parent. And I started, I got lucky, combination, I guess, of luck and talent, writing for the telegraph, which is the most prestigious newspaper in Britain. And I began to notice the gap between the world that I was being asked to describe

and the world that I could see existed. At the time I was writing about technology. It was being asked to say that women were having a dreadful time of it in the emerging startup ecosystem in London, which as far as I could tell was the exact opposite of the truth. And eventually these sort of fishes got wider and wider to the point where I sort of had this moment where I realized that my profession was a crock of, you know what?

And then if I wanted to do something worthwhile with my life, I should either blow it up from the inside by being one or pick something else to do. And that was around the time that I attracted the attention of Breitbartless site in the US. And I started from London writing from Breitbart in the US and at that time I didn't know what it was. I never met Andrew Breitbart, and I didn't know who he was either.

I don't think anybody knew what it was, or who, what it was, to begin with. And it's a funny thing when you look at things in retrospect, you get involved with people and organizations that develop a particular way over time. And then it looks from a historical perspective, like that was self-evident from the beginning, but certainly not when you're dealing with a new organization.

Yeah, I mean, it was new-ish. I don't think that the values of Breitbart changed a lot, but I think perhaps it's murder-sopurando, I think perhaps the way that it conducted itself as an organization shifted into high gear when Steve Bannon and I were there, and I was doing the cultural wall stuff, and Steve was using the rest of the site as the sort of battering ramp, politically. So, I mean, I bear a lot, a large part of the responsibility for Brightbot becoming what it eventually became, although I don't think they've held onto that legacy very well. I think it's a little sad that when I was there, we used to make the news and now they're sort of chasing off the turning point with stories that could have been written in 2015-16. I don't think they've managed to maintain the culturally defining excitement that was there when I was there, which I think is a function of

being Steve working together. I suppose my central gravity just started shifting to the US. I started getting invitation to speak at colleges. And one day, I just sort of thought there were six of them in a row. So I thought, was there a point flying home between them? And there was a mistake. And just do sort of college after college. And then certainly, I found myself booking more of them

and wondering why I should bother going home. And my central gravity editorially and in other ways was shifting to the US too. So I, over the course of six or nine months, began writing more about the states, thinking more about the states, being in it, talking about it. And then I suppose, fast forward a year perhaps, and I was one of the two or three people driving a bright bar as this extraordinary, momentous, fascinating, dysfunctional editorial force through the last election. So what was it that attracted you? Do you think to the United States and the political concerns there

why away from the UK? I don't think Britain handles iconoclasts very well. And it particularly doesn't handle bombastic ones. And I think a lot of people with outsized personalities find themselves investigating America as an alternative birth, because I think America has a much higher tolerance for outsized personalities.

Yeah, well, you mean, it's pretty clear that you had some of the characteristics that made people, that made people stars, that made people personalities. It was stars, that make people personalities. That was obvious pretty much from the step. For instance, why I'm not worried in the long term about my career prospects. I had a stratospheric rise over a couple of years

and a painful tumble, but talent is talent and talent always wins. And I've got 40 years ahead of me, of whatever I choose to do with it. So I've got 40 years ahead of me, you know, of whatever I choose to do with it. So I'm not worried in the long time about my career prospects. Good. Well, we can talk about your dissent and the sort of catastrophe that accompanied it, and maybe about how you see being pulled out of that. I'd like to hear about that as well. So what in the world do you think made you so attractive

to American Republicans? I mean, this is one of the things that struck me about you right from the beginning, because it's not exactly like you're a poster boy for what you would assume a conservative American Republicans would be attracted to. So, I think they quite liked the fact that I was reflecting their views in a package

that you would more often think would be a liberal. And of course, I, you know, made that part of the act and part of the brand. It's kind of like, you know, all these things and yet still Republican. But the real answer is joy. There's a joylessness about a lot of conservative activists, authors, and speakers. And there's a joylessness in intellectual.web too. It's a very fun-less place. I look out at the public intellectuals and commentators and speakers who are currently enjoying and speakers who are currently enjoying a moment in the sun. And each of them is in their own way quite joyless,

quite devoid of mirth. And I think that people like my sense of mischief and they like the fact that I'm always smiling. And I think it's unusual to see somebody talking about really serious things, who is the subject of the most extraordinary and relentless abuse, who nonetheless is always smiling. And I have always been that person.

I've never stopped, not in 2017, 18 or today. And I think people find that very mesmerizing and very attractive because... And very... The plexig, and difficult to understand, given the circumstances and the apparent seriousness of the topics. I mean, there is something to think. I think it's to do with, I mean, joy is Christianity's great gift to Western civilization. Laughter, the medieval church is this place of song and of dance.

I think Christianity has become quite joyless. The only places where there's a really impassioned, happy spirit of worship is in black churches, but white evangelical Protestantism in the US has become, I think, quite suffocating and joyless. I think the public square as a whole in general is a miserable place. Yeah, which is a miserable place. If you turn the television on, people are miserable.

I think there's something about me, there's something maybe missing in my brain that doesn't get ground down by it. And I'm watching, you know, I had my, you know, moment in the sun, so other people are having a moment in the sun now. That will, that too will pass. And I'm watching them, and I'm watching them all getting ground down. Well, how do you, well, that's a good, that's a real question. It's of interest to me from a psychological perspective. I mean, my suspicions, it's obviously that you're extremely extroverted.

I'm not claiming any particular brilliance for noting that. And also that you're extremely open, and that's the creativity dimension. But I'm wondering about your scores on neuroticism. It's like you were subject to a tremendous amount of controversy. subject to a tremendous amount of controversy and and then a quite a precipitous fall under strange and complicated circumstances and you seem to be able to survive that and you just described yourself as a relatively joyful person. I'm a very happy person. I think that listen, I mean, you know, conservatives are only out and off the playing field when they choose to be, because there's such a, there's so few of us

in such a wide open market. The reason I'm not worried about my prospects in the long term is I still wake up every day with joy in my heart, brimming with energy and ideas. Most, I don't know anybody in public life, not one person in public life who could have gone through what I went through and not been broken by it, but I'm not. It hasn't beaten me. And I think that that's a down to a combination of personal characteristics that I don't think many other people possess. And that's part of that is, you know, not being, not, it's impossible to intimidate me, for instance.

I don't get scared of things. I'm not scared of things. It's, I don't feel, perhaps at the same degree that other people do embarrassment and shame. So I don't mind playing full staff, clowning. You know, I don't mind subverting myself, laughing at myself because through that, I'm able to point to truths that are real and big and beautiful and important. I'm not an egotist, so I don't,

and I think that's part of the same thing. I don't mind humbling myself because I play at having a big ego, but I don't really. And I'm not ground down or broken or upset by things that don't matter that much. I mean, I have love in my life. I have achieved more than 99.8% of journalists, political activists, you know, public figures.

You and I are the only people who have achieved remotely close to our level of success in our, you know, in the last 10 years with a libertarian conservative IDW, youW, whatever this grand nexus ecosystem is that we both belong to. Even I have the only two people who have achieved the greatest success at it. And I've had terrible things happen to me. You're fortunate and nothing bad has really happened to you yet.

I can't think of anything really awful that's happened to you, so I've been the Cambridge thing which I think that I like to do. I can't think of anything really awful that's happened to you, so I think the Cambridge thing which I think that I would call those. I think you brought that on yourself and I don't think it was too much of a big deal anyway. But nothing really bad has happened to you yet. The worst thing imaginable has happened to me. I had to stand up in front of the world and tell them that I had been sexual abuse as a child, and that this was why I'd spoken loosely and incautiously and used a formulation that I regretted about something that had happened to me.

At the same time, try to try to also say, well, I'm not going to stop making jokes about that or anything else. For other people, I think that level of public ritual humiliation would simply have snapped them. And it didn't me. And I don't know, I mean, you're the psychology expert, perhaps you have some insight of you on this. The only person I know, my personal life, a friend who has similar qualities as Angcolta,

to whom criticism is, it's a game. And she's able to very, and the interesting thing is, you know, it's not enough to say that we're, let's say sociopathic, because quite clearly we're both not, we wouldn't be able to have some of the insights we do, and we wouldn't have the love in our lives that we do if we were sociopathic. So it's not that, but we do both have an ability to just pick things up, put them over there, and not allow them to borrow in and have and train.

That seems to me to be that relatively rare combination of extreme extroversion and very low neuroticism. That's not the same as sociopathie. I think you're right about that. I think maybe that's what I've got. Some people are just not that affected emotionally by negative events. Some people are devastated by the smallest of obstacles. And some people can roll with punches that would take a normal person out and continue to

get back up. I think it's very sensitive. It seems to bother me in my personal life. But there are things that are actually significant, whether it's to do with my family or my loved one or whatever it is, but there are things that I, that in my brain are emotionally significant, serious things, worthy of unfettered access to my emotions, if you like, and they have that. And they produce very strong reactions in both directions, and they're very passionate person. I can even be hotheaded, you know, when I'm defending somebody I love, for instance. But there's another world, which is the professional world, which is to me, just a big game. It's a big fun game. And this, the reason I just... I've always thought of you as a kind of a trickster, you know.

I mean, I think that's a part of it. In a sense that you do, there is a game-like element to what you're doing. And... I very much see what I'm doing in life and we'll be doing for the next 40 years as playing a very complex and very enjoyable game of, and very, you know, a game of snakes and ladders.

And just because I hit a ladder on one of my first turns, and then immediately the snake took me back to the front row. It doesn't mean the game is over. In fact, it just means you've learned the rules. So that's, I suppose, why I find it difficult to take too seriously, you know, harrowing introspection about, you know, whatever, because it's not how I apprehend the situation. I can look dispassionately at what happened and why, and we can talk about that, and I have some ideas about that. But I don't have a sort of emotional, I don't have anything to offload about it. Really. Okay.

Well, so, you know, when that conversation about your early childhood sexual experiences first came out, I listened to it and I thought that there was tremendous trouble brewing there, you know, for a variety of reasons. And if you remember, I phoned you at that point and suggested that we had a conversation and we made some efforts to manage that that never came to fruition. And I always felt that that was unfortunate. And so I'd like to, if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you about that situation. Because know I had a lot of mixed feelings about what you said like many people and they weren't particularly judgmental by the way. I mean so you

correct me if I'm wrong here because I want to get this story straight. You related some experiences you had with a priest who was twice your age, right? I feel like that. Yeah, approximating, approximately that. You were about 14. I think it was a little older than that, actually. Okay. Okay. It was a little older. It's difficult to judge ages when you are 14. I think I thought, I think I thought that he was younger than he was at the time. And subsequently found out he was perhaps 10 years older than I thought he was. It's completely okay, sorry. But there was a significant age gap.

Yeah, yeah. And so arguably he was someone who was in the position of authority. And that what he did with you was something that he shouldn't have done. And also, it's highly probable given the nature of such things that you were by no means his only, let's say, target. Now when I heard you talk about that, the first thing that struck me about the way that you formulated it was your refusal to play victim. Now actually, I don't see myself as one.

I know, I know, I know that, I know that. And that actually struck me as rather admirable because you came forward and said, this is an uncomfortable truth, but I was of sufficient age to have a mind of my own and this was something I was pursuing of my own volition. And then it's how I felt at the time. And when you talk about the abusive authority or whatever,

I've never met an authority I recognize or respect. You know, people have to earn my respect. I have never encountered a person in a position of responsibility or authority who I have respected and deferred to merely by virtue of their office or their position. Right. So I sort of constitutionally don't recognize authority. So that element of it did not strike me until someone told me.

Okay. Okay. Well, that's the thing. Okay. So well, I can imagine that because I don't imagine that you were much different in some sense when you were 14 than you are now, you know, apart from obvious imagination. You're a sort of and provocative person and you're an iconic class and I can certainly see that intrinsic respect for authority, which so oddly often characterizes conservatives, by the way, is quite absent in you. And so, I know I thought-

Because we have that's the tabloid, gadfly constantly taking pot shots at the institutions that you also secretly love and are grateful for, but you are dedicated to keeping them on the ground and not- You know, it's the difference between, you know, the British tabloids which love to torment our Prime Minister and the White House correspondents dinner where journalists are seeking to participate in that prestige, rather than bring these people down to earth and make sure they never go a full day taking themselves too seriously. So I think that's a, perhaps a British, a bit of a British psyche. Right, that seems given my interactions with British journalists,

that seems like a perfectly appropriate statement. Now, despite the fact that when I heard you speak about what happened to you and my admiration for your refusal to play innocent victim. I also had contradictory ideas that I think were more a function of my clinical training. And the retool of them that I'd like to discuss with you. I mean, the first is, you know, when you think about yourself as a 14-year-old, you think about that 14-year-old as yourself. You don't necessarily think about that 14-year-old as a 14-year-old. And, you know, when you remember your 14-year-old self and then you go out and you see some 14-year olds, it's actually quite a shock or it can be quite a shock because 14-year-olds are often a lot younger and a lot more clueless than you remember yourself being.

I think I know where you're going with this. Well, and so because the second part of what I thought was that, like, it, and this is the incredibly tricky part of this conversation as far as I'm concerned. I mean, one of the other things that got you in real trouble, apart from the fact that you wouldn't name the person that you interacted with, your abusers, so to speak, was that you made the unforgivable case, I think, publicly, that this sort of thing happened far more commonly than people were willing to admit. And I just, as soon as you said that, I thought, man, you're dead in the water because it was interesting to me. You're good. Well, true that may be, it's not something that can be publicly discussed. It's not

You know, I Went to be a further though than just that. I took a do I took it a step further even and said that not only Is this something that happens far more often than people are willing to admit? It is a function of gay life and gay Adolescent splotting whatever and It is a function of gay life and gay, right, right, adolescent splicing, whatever. And it is a proper subject for humor. And I insist on it being a proper subject. Yeah, well, I wasn't even going to bring those two things up because I thought that just, you know, that that merely bringing up the first part of that because enough trouble. But I'm glad that you did bring the second part of that up.

Well, because there's a serious conversation that has to be had about this and the damn conversation hasn't happened. And I don't mean specifically about, even specifically about your particular experience, although I think it's a way into the conversation. It's like the first question is, well, it'd be interesting to take apart some of your claims. And I'd like to do that with your permission. And I don't expect this to be an easy conversation. No, that's I wasn't expecting to be so go ahead. Okay. Okay. So the first thing I would say is that

it isn't obvious to me that even if you were a willing participant in what happened to you when you were 14, that that justifies what happened to you on the part of the person with whom you were participating. Well, of course it doesn't, but the way I apprehended it was that it was me. Right. Right. And when I said a moment ago, I think I know where you're going with this. I can interject with a very small data point that I think explains how I think about this after some time and reflection, which is I have something now that I didn't have in 2017, which is a relationship with my stepson. And he is 16. And when I think, let's not, let's not finish that thought, but when I consider

how old he is and put myself at that age, suddenly the horror that I see in everybody else's faces that I have never felt myself about, what happens to me and therefore has never been Never been communicated for me sort of acknowledgement and awareness that this is not normal and that that this is a Horrifying and terrible things that happens to a small person I never apprehended it like that because I just thought of that 14-year-old as me today. Right, right? Okay, and that's exactly what I picked and that's exactly what I picked up from your interest until the last two years. Okay. And now I'm experiencing getting to know a child as a co-parent, as a stepmom, and now I get it. Okay, now, okay. All right, so you know, I've seen this

with my clinical clients, you know, who failed to notice in some important way that the person they were sometimes decades ago is not the person they are now and the memories they have from those times, which are appropriate to those times, are not the same memories that are appropriate to those times now given their relative maturation. So I understand, and I think it took that change in my life circumstances to jolt me into realizing

exactly what you're saying. Okay, so let me ask you some questions about that. So, what's changed in the way that you view what happened to you? And if you were interviewed, well, and I guess you are being interviewed about this right now, if you were being interviewed about what happened to you at age 14, I have two questions or three questions about that. What do you think of the propriety of that? How do you now view your role? What do you think about the culpability of the person that that I would say in common parlance prayed upon you.

How has that shifted? In the same way that there is, although it has been ruined by the progressives, we both hate so much, a proper place for outrage. It is a necessary and right human instinct and emotion that has a place. There is also perhaps, much as it has been ruined by the progressives, a proper place for victimhood when you are in fact actually a victim.

And I think that now I perhaps realize that I was one when I didn't know that I was one in 2017. Yeah, that's a hell of a thing for someone in your position to admit. Right. Yeah, yeah, it's rough, man. And I think that that's as concise and as true an answer as I can give you. Okay, so let's go into the answer. Because now I look at somebody I care about who is two years older even.

And the thought of me at that age and someone taking advantage, suddenly I get it. I get it. I'm like, I would kill the guy. I would walk over there. I would shoot him in the head. Like, I get it now. You know, I didn't get it when I was. I didn't get it when all I had to go on was my memories of being me at the time. Yeah. But one of the things that struck me is so absolutely absurd about what happened to you in the aftermath of that interview was that I thought, okay, this is really. And it's exactly what I would have expected to happen to someone like you, because you're so contradictory, is that you actually had a claim to victim status, which you then refused to capitalize on, and then which people refused to bloody well recognize in the midst of the interview. Like, the proper response to that interview should have been something like,

well, here's someone who's talking about a case of child sexual abuse, but it hasn't realized or recognized that they were at in fact victimized in that situation and hasn't come to terms with whatever that might mean and So then to comment among people who have been through these experiences, because I have since writing about this, I wrote a little bit about this in a short book I wrote about a copy recently. And in other things, the brief mentions I've made of it since 2017, a lot of people have written to me with their own accounts and it's not uncommon. I have no, I'm sure it's not. I've experienced this sort of thing and I guess there's some point in middle age where the

penny drops. But yeah, I guess that, you know, there is a right and proper place to acknowledge and understand that you're a victim of something. Again, I have to... another thing that upset people, I think. Another thing that didn't do many favors, but look, I am someone who will always just speak it as I see it, and that will have terrible consequences, and it will have great consequences. And that calculus will change over the course of the next few decades. But I just, it wasn't the worst thing that ever happened to me. And people find that a terrible thing to come out of your mouth.

But it just wasn't. It's not the worst thing that's ever happened to me. And to ask the worst thing, OK,, I got a couple of comments on that. I mean, about 20 years ago, the American Psychological Association published a famous paper showing that most people who were sexually abused as children recovered with very little psychological damage. And that caused absolute outrage. The US Congress, in fact, forced the APA, if I remember correctly, the American Psychological

Association. This is one of those unsavable truths, isn't it? Well, they had to retract, they had to retract the article, even though it was... If you imagine the sort of trauma that we're expected to recognize that someone says they experienced because of mean words on the internet. And we have this economy based on what we all know is not true, but that these trivial, frivolous things can cause some kind of actual trauma.

For an organization like that, or for someone in public life, to come out and say this, huge thing. Actually didn't cause me that much trauma. It sorted in perils the whole victimhood economy, doesn't it? Because if it's the case that many, or even most people who experience this, simply don't have their lives ruined and defined by it, that rather in perils, the people who have made a career out of squawking victimhood for far, far less serious experiences.

And I think that's probably where the threat to the system kicked in, where I ask. I think that's true. I think it's also the case that the politicians are also looking for a, you know, a cheap victory, moral victory in some sense. We're also concerned that this was a potential step towards justifying pedophilia on the basis of undermining the claims of its absolutely catastrophic consequences over decades. Whereas what I saw was more as a testament to the fundamental resilience of human beings.

Right. Isn't that a positive thing? Isn't that wonderful news that there are these extraordinarily evil people who do depraved things, but that chances are you'll be all right. You know, that something like this could happen to you or could happen to somebody you love or somebody you know, but that you know what? Chances are things will be okay. Now every once in a while, somebody is just blown apart by it

and you can never put them back together, but that's not most people. That's fabulous news, but good news is the sort of thing that our current political climate, the public-square in America especially hates. It's not so much whether it is a particular kind of reaction to, for instance, people being grateful and happy that capitalism is lifting millions of people out of poverty all over the world.

People don't like that good news. Because much of what goes on in public life, basically the whole journalism industry, much of the entertainment industry, the whole of whole of political, politically correct society, depends upon everything being terrible, imperil, getting worse all the time. The sort of shrieking urgent hysteria of the press is made to look ridiculous when you point out actually the world's pretty great. Not that many people go hungry. Not that much bad stuff happens. The bad stuff that does happen, we're discovering all the time that human beings bounce back in ways that, you know,

we never even imagine. The world ain't that bloody bad. Nobody wants to hear that, who has invested into it. Or if it leased, it wasn't. At least it's nowhere near as bad as it once was, which is something. Or as bad as it profits the media to suggest that it is. As bad profits the academy to suggest that it is.

These people having were linked with the primary fund, whether it is speaking truth to power and printing all the news, you know, relaying the news as such a print or exploring the human condition, human nature, and, you know, building the, you know, expanding the, you know, the horizons and the, and the some total of human knowledge, the media in the academy have given up on those missions, instead replace them with an activism that depends on hysteria but also on urgency on a sort of, there's a sort of constant drum beat.

This is why it's always something new, always something new, as soon as something might look like it's resolved, something ever more hysterical and new must be produced. This is the natural life cycle, isn't it, of rights movements. You've got the gay rights movement which which basically achieves everything it could possibly ever want. Yet, it somehow becomes more hysterical, not less, and starts focusing on ever more minor and insignificant things like transgender pronouns, rather than AIDS. And now, all of the gay charities are run by lesbians, and are preoccupied with transgender

pronouns. You don't hear anybody talking about the fact that Thanks, you know, you see these these posters on New York Trams on the subway or whatever they're called and they're saying There's a guy there and he's called Hernandez or Hernandez or whatever and his and the poster is saying his Levels of HIV thanks to his medication are just undetectable, they're not transmittable either. It basically encouraging gay men to have sex with HIV positive other men. I mean, it's kind of like sick, but this is because conservatives have completely stepped out of that sphere entirely.

Every time a conservative tries to say something in the gay world, even if it's with good intentions to help, they get killed. So Republicans and even, it's all sensible people have simply stepped out of LGBT stuff and they just don't get involved in it at all. So you get this sick, crazy life, mental, so with this situation where they're encouraging these reckless, unsafe horrendous behaviors and who suffers the most marginalized communities of all,

because it's a gay, black Americans. They have like a one in two chance of getting HIV. Right. Like that's crazy. And this is what gay charities are not talking about while they are insisting that on Zezza, Zem, whatever. Now, this is the life cycle of rights movements when they went out of things to complain about, isn't it?

Let me ask you another personal question. Before I turn to something that will probably get me even more in trouble, in more trouble, we'll see how that goes. We've subjected me to a therapy session. I think you can get yourself into trouble as compensation. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, there should be plenty of trouble emerged from this. So, well, look, now,

one of the questions I had, again, as a consequence of watching that interview was because, you portrayed yourself as an equivalent partner in some sense, and I thought, look, that means that Milo hasn't updated his memories. There's still the memories of a 14-year-old. And that's a problem. And so, and you said that that's something that you've actually rectified over the last

couple of years. And so that's a very interesting thing to hear about. But then I was also convinced that because you were still viewing what had happened to you through the lens of your 14-year-old, your iconoclastic and rebellious 14-year-old self, that it was possible, likely even, although not necessarily the case, that you underestimated the consequence of this interaction on your subsequent life. And so now you just told me that you know, the worst things have happened to you. Yes, and in 2017, yeah, you might be right about that because in 2017, that's what I thought.

And then in the course of writing, the short poke book I just did, I asked the question, could this have affected the trajectory of my sexuality? Yeah, well, I wonder if that was exactly what in retrospect now now, what do you think, what do you think it did to you? I don't think it made the difference between me being gay or not. Okay, and why not? Because I think that that was already happening and I think that I was aware of that and that that was very much, you know, some gay people talk about, you know,

being a little bit over into gay or a lot or whatever. You know, some gay men can countenance or imagine having sex with women. And for others, it's just like, you know, in a way that's straight men will talk about homosexual encounters. Now, I have had a few encounters with women, but they were very unsatisfying and miserable for both parties. And I think I'm quite...

I don't... My hunch is, and I can't provide any evidence with my hunches that this did not make the difference. Okay. I think that, like everybody, the mixture of nature and nurture in my case was probably swung over in that direction, but I like a good male role models in my relationship with my mother. I distinctly remember picking ethnic minority male sexual partners and making sure that my mother saw me bring them home or saw me out with them to antagonize her. I

distinctly remember picking sexual partners to annoy my mom and that has demented as that sounds. And God, that's that's that's a gris like a three hour conversation. No, I'm look, I take trolling very seriously. I just I'm not saying I went to eat my mom, although I have made that joke before, but I remember an element of sort of mischief and def went my mom, although I have made that joke, made it for myself. But I remember an element of sort of mischief and defiance in there, which has always been at the core of my personality, just this this reflexive and unshakable refusal

to bow to any kind of authority. Right. And so what were you more than that also? It's not, but not just a thumb I know is it it, but to rub that authority's face in whatever it is that authority finds the most repugnant. Okay, well, so that's interesting. So first question there would be perhaps,

what in the world were you so irritated or angry at your mother about that that might have been one of your potential reactions. I have said this in public before so I don't mind sharing it with you again. My mother remarried and her new husband was occasionally physically and constantly psychologically abusive, I guess with the words the word that we would use now. Deeply unpleasant home life. It thinks like, so it was a very private kid. And I had all of these papers where I had written out poems and constructed these systems. And I just had a very hard to develop in a world, you know, and I've just lived in the realm of imagination and fantasy.

And private space and privacy was very important to me. And my mother's new husband, when I was at school, would go into my room and shuffle things around just so that I knew he'd been in there. So I knew that there was no space that was only mine. And I knew by extension that I wasn't welcome there and that I shouldn't be there and that so long as I was under his roof, I would never be my own human being and I would never have my own privacy and therefore autonomy as a human being. And I blamed my mother for this. I also blamed my mother for not leaving him when he hit me and I blamed my father for not taking me away although I asked him to and that

sort of began a chain reaction of resentment for both of them. Right, so, okay, so most of the major authority figures in your life as parental figures had, your experience at that point was of betrayal, of various magnitudes, right? Yes, they didn't have my back. Right.

From proper betrayal, all the way down to just not having my best interest at all, and not having my back. And all manner of experiences on that spectrum. But I didn't think I ever felt like my mother would go to the wall for me. Right, right. That's rough, man, because one of the things you really want from at least one parent or

at least one person in your life is the notion that fundamentally, man, you've got to have someone who's got your back. I did get it later. I did get it later in my mid to late teens with my grandmother. As so many oddballs do, they end up skipping a generation and forming a close bond with a grandparent. I did get it from my grandmother and I got sort of unconditional love and support that I recognized again in the man that I'm not with. So I have had that sense in my life and I'm not wanting for it, I don't lack it. I'm very happy with the amount of it that I now have.

But I didn't have it. So that's made up for it in some sense. Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. But I didn't have it at the time. Mm-hmm. And I do remember really wanting to hurt. I remember it is, I think one of my, in addition to my ability to sort of

see round corners and culturally and sort of tell what's coming next, which I'm very good at, I'm also very good, I'm very good at sort of intuitively figuring out what makes people take and what drives them. And I quickly identified that social justice warriors were sort of her thing and wanting everyone else to hurt like they were When I when I very very first started doing my speeches Because it was something I had felt myself, but only as a child. I had grown out of it and clearly they had not grown out of it Right, but I saw in them that same sort of petty vengeful vindictive desire to make the world burn Because they were hurting.

That I had felt myself as a 13, 14, 15 year old, and so I understood them. And that's why I was able and still am able, like nobody else, to get under their skin, because I get what makes them tick in a way that not many other people do, because none of the other conservatives who are sort of, you know, withering, you know, or contemptualists of them actually understand where they're coming from, like I do, which is why they hate me like they hate nobody else. Right, well, because part of the thing

that's so strange about you is that by all rates, you should be on their side. I should be one of them really. I want to be. Right, right, that's right. That logically speaking, that would be your natural resting place. And so it is one of the things that, well, I also thought, thought right from the beginning, that that was one of the things that put you in terrible long-term danger of, you know, encountering a scandal that would do you in. I mean, it just seems so improbable to me that you could weather that degree

of, and that's what I mean by the paradoxical combination that you bring to the situation. It's just, it's too many contradictory things to maintain themselves regardless of your psychological integration or lack thereof. I mean, I think I'm pretty well adjusted now, but I think perhaps another reason that this career stuff just doesn't bother me is that I don't I don't work in the same economy that a lot of other people do in the prestige economy. You wanted prestige when you asked Cambridge for that fellowship and you sort of invited that little embarrassment on yourself because you asked for it because although you declared they said I asked for it but that wasn't exactly if you didn't he didn't but you declared war on a class of institution um you know a higher education to then uh

ask for or expect or be pleased to receive baubles from institutions that you have declared war on struck me as very odd and obviously destined for a mess. It's an interesting point. And it's because moment of false optimism. I don't think it's false optimism. I think it's because you still live in the prestige economy because I think that stuff matters to you. And I think that you'd probably prefer to see these institutions fixed and to have a

Prestigious place within one of them rather than to see them burn to the ground as so many conservatives and Progressives seem to want they just want to tear up higher education. I don't think you want that I think you want to fix it and I think you want to be a I think generally speaking, you know, or that fixing things is better than burning them to the ground. If they can... Well, I think you want to fix them, and I think you want to be one of the crown jewels.

And I think you operate in the prestige economy in a way that I simply don't. And that gives me power because I don't care. I don't, you know, that's sort of like a scandal from which you will not recover. Is there somebody in polite society who will invite me to a dinner party? Who won't invite me to a dinner party now? Who would have in January 2017? No.

Is there a TV show that won't have me on now? That would have in January, in January, if you're going to say no. I mean, I had a blit on Bill Ma, because of the college tour, but there was no hope in hell, no way in hell I was ever going to get a TV show or anything like that, because unlike you, I can't bite my tongue. And, you know, you, I think, are, I see you maneuvering in a way that suggests that you want to do a lot of good and you're prepared to make some compromises in order to have a platform which is a lot of good and a lot of places.

I'm a purest and we differ in that because I can't buy my tongue. And if I'm across the table from somebody who is an odious piece of you know what, I'm going to tell them. It's always nice. It's my greatest asset and my greatest weakness. But it's because I'm a purest in a way that you're not. And I just, I don't live in that prestige economy that the rest of you all live in. And you all live in it. The whole conservative libertarian media ecosystem, you all crave pressure.

What do you mean by the prestige economy exactly? Like position, a recognition, titles, being a part of a sort of alternative polite society. You don't want to be excised from the church because if you did you wouldn't assigned up with CIA. You want to be part of the church and I don't. It's going to be very difficult for people who are part of the prestige economy, but people who want the TV show, want the fancy agent, want this, want that one. They want to fix and rule these institutions. It can be very difficult for those people to truly understand someone like me who genuinely can't imagine anything worse. I cannot imagine anything more awful

than having to make the sorts of constant compromises in what I say and do in order to maintain a position because I know it's doomed anyway. Look at Roger Scruton. Did nothing wrong, he is beyond reproach, he is the foremost conservative intellectual of his generation. And they just got him for saying something utterly innocuous in an interview. They're going to get you anyway. Nothing bad has happened to you yet, but it's going to. I don't say that with any pleasure whatsoever, I sincerely do not, because I think that's why I've been expecting that for a very long period of time.

I've been saying many, many bad things have happened to me. They just haven't told me. Well, not really. Not really. I mean, in compared to what some of us have gone through, whether it's Laura or Mia or Alex Jones or whatever, nothing really bad has happened. Well, fair enough. Yes. You know, that bad. It's fair enough. Yes.

You know, that... It depends on your comparison group. Well, they are allowing you to grow. I'll tell you what, they're doing with you, what they did with me, which is you will allow this phenomenon to blossom up to the point you cannot bear it any longer. And then you crush it. And that is a horrifying warning

to others not to overstep. So they did it with me, they let me get as far as Bill Maher and the tour and all the rest of it and then they came for it. They're letting you climb higher. So your fall was going to be just like mine was and they'll get you on something else. They'll get you on a complete nothing burger because mine. Let's face it was a nothing burger It was you know that the the supposed scandal was predicated on an edited video Which did not show that I said that I thought the education sent was about right And it was based on it was based on a lie If it had been the case that everybody had seen what I originally said, they might have

said, please explain this, but it would not have had the same effect that it did, had the effect it did because it was a deceptive dishonest, misleadingly edited video. Because I had created enemies on both left and right, the establishment right and the whole left teamed up to take me out. You are walking into the same position. And so Ed, so why do you see that it was the establishment right? Do you think that that was the last time you did it? That was the last time you did it.

It was the Reagan battalion, the National Review crowd, who put that video together and shared it. They were the ones who manufactured this because they were upset that I didn't give a stuff about CPAC because it means nothing to me. I didn't even know what it was at the time. But they were upset that I was speaking at CPAC because it was like their precious pure conservatism thing had been taken over by Trump world, right? Right, right. And they had to get it. So they didn't care so much about the Bill Ma, but the sort of the national review Reagan-Betanian crowd who created and propagated and shared and and

whatever with this deceptively edited video did so because they couldn't bear the thought of me being the star-turned-seat back. Okay, and so, and you think that that's why they pushed so hard on the pedophilia front? Yes, because they knew it's the one thing that the conservative base would go. Yeah. And the left didn't take me out, the right did. I wasn't aware of that. No, well, that is the left took you out at too, as well.

So what power does the left have over me? What are they doing to me now that they weren't doing in January 2017? Nothing. Well, I think what my impression, I'm not suggesting that I'm correct, but my impression was that it had something to do with the second of the two or three topics we were going to discuss, which was your claim that the experiences that you had are actually very characteristic of the gay community.

No, that, you see interestingly what actually happened about that specific thing is the entire gay liberal establishment went silent. Because what I said was, and I wouldn't phrase this way again, because it was not quite what I meant and it was let's say, in cautiously phrased to put it mildly. What I said was that relationships between older men and young, I should have said younger

men are a common function of gay life. And I think I said, I'm afraid I think I said after a lot of drinks on a late night live stream, they can be hugely positive experiences. I shouldn't have put it like that. I should have said they are a function of gay life. And in many cases, they're sitting in like a 35 year old man with a 20 year old or whatever. Very often a 35 year old will sort of induct the 20 year old into the gay way of things, show them where the clubs are, show them the ropes. In lieu of parents, because the boys' parents don't understand him, maybe don't even know,

or have rejected it or whatever. So very often there's a sort of father that there's either an evangula or a paternal dimension to these relationships. On that point, and indeed, throughout the whole controversy, the gay left went silent. On February 21, 2nd and 3rd, 2017, gay journalists were nowhere to be found in America because they did not want to have that discussion because they know it's true. Okay, well, so was that the consequence of abandoning you by inaction then? No, no, no, what I'm saying is that that's not what was so unforgivable.

That wasn't the problem. Okay, so then, well, in that case, then, I guess it's a matter of not so much the difference in age, but the difference in win that age difference starts. So we'll say, well, clearly. So we've had a conversation so far, which is presumed that the contents of what I said was important and that we should dissect it. This is a mistake, because it doesn't matter what I said. It doesn't matter whether I was right to say it or what the nuances or vagaries are of a particular statement that I say is deceptively edited here or whatever.

It doesn't matter. Now if you were established and it was repeated by right and left and the person was ejected from, you know, from public life and from whatever, right. This is what's going to happen to you. This is what's going to happen to Ben. This is what's going to happen to Dave Rubin. Because nobody stood up for me, the playbook became established. And now that is your fate, all of you. That's how you're all going to go out. And it doesn't matter what you say. It doesn't matter what the subject was, doesn't matter what the in-courses phrase was. I mean, Candace Owensy, could have happened to her recently with her stupid, she tripped over herself saying something about Hitler and there was a sentence that I'm sure she would phrase differently a second time. Everyone knew what she meant.

But it could, if the stars had aligned, have done to her what happened to me in February 2017. The content doesn't matter. It was the fact that the left and right decided to take this person out and any pretext would have done fine. So we've had a discussion sort of talking about what was it you said that was so unacceptable,

nothing. It was me. It was the fact that I had... Yeah, but there's also the mystery. Look, fair enough, you know, and I'm not disputing that. There were any number of reasons to make you a target. But I am curious about why it was that particular interview that did it because it was very sudden.

It was very sudden. Because I was scheduled to be the star speaker at CPAC. And the National Review crowd could not handle it. So they went through the hours and hours and hours and hours of all the live streams and they found something that would, they found something that would get to the Republican base, something they could sell to alienate me from Republicans rather than just the left. And then they decided this person's gonna go. This is a power they still have.

And it's a power they will leverage against the rest of you too. My question is, we can talk a little about where I'm gonna go next and what I'm gonna do next, professionally because I think it might help the rest of you when this inevitably happens to you. But it's... This is a power they still have. It is a power that they can and will leverage against other people. And unfortunately, the brightest star and the greatest standard bearer, the, you know, the court jester of the movement was allowed to be decapitated. And because that

happened, the playbook is now established for it to happen to everybody else. And it will happen to everybody else. It's already happened to other people. You've seen it happen since, to others, right? It happened to Sargon of a cow. Exactly. In a lesser, in a lesser. This is now how it's going to be. And it didn't have to be like that.

The only way that this boycott and defenestration could have been successful would be if Republicans refused to, for Republicans said, okay, we won't invite them to anything, we won't have them on our radio shows. It's too hot to handle, too much drama, too much hassle, right? What the left does is immediately start putting that person on conference stages and panels to get over that period of like, ooh, is this person gonna become untouchable?

They railroad, they drive a truck through that by immediately getting that person on TV and on conference stages a lot to sort of, to drive through that and to make sure that person doesn't get removed from circulation. Right? That's what the left does. When Linda saw a story as discovered to have said something awful, suddenly she's on conference stages every two days it seems like, you know, she's speaking, she's doing this. This is not an accident, this is on purpose. This is the left, leaping into action to ensure that she survives, right?

Conservatives did the opposite with me. They allowed the left and the establishment of Republicans who hate them to dictate who would and would not be a proper subject for discussion and who should and should not have a column and all the rest of it. And that was absolutely suicidal. And the reason that so many other media figures were secretly happy to see it happen to me is that they're idiots who believe that this is a zero-sum game. They think that by removing me, they create space for themselves. This is not true. There is nobody in the conservative or libertarian ecosystem who offers what I do.

There's not a single fucking one of you. You can crack a good joke. You know? You're going to get the art you're good enough on stage. Not as much on YouTube. You have your gifts, that's not one of them. Not a single one of you is funny. Not a single one of you could have a late night chat show.

You know, that's cabaret comedy like Johnny Carson, you know? None of you. Nobody has filled the void left by me because I'm a once in a generation talent. And sorry to be a logistical, but it's just, it is what it is. Nobody has filled that void, which is why I'm not worried about coming back to it and coming out of retirement, you know,

and refilling it myself. But something did happen to me, and that's that I sort of gave up on conservatives a little bit. And so when I do return, it's going to be very much more in the mold of a more conventional comedian. And that's what I am currently closing funding to do as we speak down here in Oklahoma. Much more in the vein of an entertainment figure and much, much less of the politics.

So the effect might be a relief for you. Well, not really, because I quite enjoyed it, but the effect if this hasn't been to kill me, the effect of the cowardice of other conservative media figures and the conservative base, they're failure to stick up for me in February 2017. The effect wasn't to kill me. The effect was to lose one of their greatest and most effective champions. Because I'm fine. I'm doing good. Okay, so let's talk about that being fine. So I want to go back to, I still have a question about the older man, younger man, relationship issue. I can't be talking about something else. Well, humor me for two more minutes

because there's actually something I want to go with this. Okay. So the first issue is, where is the line property drawn in those relationships as far as you're concerned with regards to age? And where is it usually drawn? Because those are the things you're trying to get me in trouble. I'm not, I'm really not.

I don't want to get you in trouble. And I don't think there is a line to properly be drawn because you're basically just talking about, talking degrees of degeneracy at that point, aren't you? You know, the fact that you get saddled with this aberrant sexuality, and you then have to go out and make the best of it. The fact that you find this paternal or avancular dimension in a relationship with an old man that may also have a sexual component. I mean, this is layer upon layer upon layer

of dysfunction. So you're not going to get me to say 10 years as the right gap because none of it's the right gap. It's all fucked up. What's the alternative? I mean partly, partly, hypothetically, the... I wish conversion therapy worked. I wish conversion therapy worked. At least... You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said that before. You said we know that we can push women back with men, and most of them will be happier as a result. With men on the other hand, some of us are just gay. And I'm not going to be drawn

on what the correct kind of fucked up dysfunctional. Okay, well, okay, well, that's an experience. I wasn't trying to corner you, you know. And while I don't want to corner you, this is something I'm trying to corner you, you know. And while I don't want to corner you, this is something I'm really curious about because you made the case, and you made a strong case that relationships between younger men and older men

were very common in the gay community. And that, see. What's not me making the case, that's an established fact. I mean, every gay person knows that. That's got nothing to do with me. That's just me pointing out something that every gay person knows,

which is that when people first become sexually active or aware of their sexual orientation or they first start to go out on the scene or whatever, they very often form an attachment with an older man. It may just be somebody five years older. In some cases, it's somebody a little bit older than that. So fair enough. How often do you think that that's happening at the age that it happened to you? I'm going to happen to all time. I think happens everywhere. And I think it's I think it's an inevitable result of having a an aberrant sexuality where you have to seek out kind of alternative

alternative parental figures because yours aren't fit for purpose for this particular part of adolescence, you know. Right, but then you just said too that this isn't an objection, that you don't see a clear ethical pathway forward out of that. Well, none of it's ethical. I mean, it's all debased and degenerate, but it's... Oh, how? What, what, okay, so, so, what do you mean by that exact? Because I think there's an element of predatoryness in almost every gay interaction and relationship. And this is just one example where it is more obvious and more visible. But I think that there is a predatory component

in, even in gay friendships. And you think about the way that... Well, that might have something to do with the more, arguably with the more predatory element of male sexuality. Right, right. And you're gonna talk about undiscussable things. Right, well, you take the controlling, calming,

mediating influence of women out of the equation and men just pipe each other up, which is why gay men end up pretty promiscuous, right? Because you're taking out that restraint. Right, exactly restraints the word I was looking for. You're taking out the restraint that's typically provided by the woman and instead you can just, you know, whatever. So hypothetically, that was supposed to be solved at least in part by the introduction of

like socially sanctioned monogamous relationships, right? Because I've had friends, I knew about heightened male promiscuity among the homosexual community. And it's heightened by a substantial margin. And the liberal types who I thought were reasonable and I certainly don't think all of them are Made the claim to me that the reason for that enhanced promiscuity was that all the male homosexual sexual activity had to occur behind the scenes and that it was impossible for for men's that's a ridiculous argument

That's a ridiculous argument male male homosexual promiscuity is obviously simply a function of what happens when you put two men together attracted to one another and you don't have the restraint of a woman who you know. Wow. It's obvious. And also you cannot successfully box a transgressive sexual identity into,

when we say heteropatriarchal institutions like marriage, and expect gay people to just suddenly become, you know, normal monogamous, whatever. Doesn't work like that. Well, it seemed to, okay, that's fine. So, but it seemed to me that in some sense, that, well, here's to something else that is no doubt going to cause trouble.

It seemed to me that that was kind of part of the bargain. Like, wasn't that the bargain that the... Well, I always saw that was part of the deal, is that, you know, in exchange for having this millstone around your neck, in exchange for the, in exchange for the terrible agony of giving up fatherhood, which, you know, you can adopt and blah, blah, blah, blah. But ultimately, you know, basically, it's like joining a priesthood.

You give up fatherhood. In exchange, you get to participate in a sort of taboo breaking transgressive experimental life that performs perhaps some kind of societal function, might even perform an evolutionary function. And which... You're actually the excitement of the marginal. Exactly. And that's why, I mean, I am the world's greatest hypocrite on one subject and one subject

only in that game marriage. And that's because I don't have the foggiest idea what I think, still, even though I've got one. I'm under no illusions that it is a union under the Lord, but I remain politically against gay marriage, despite the fact that I got one because I've met somebody who completed me and I couldn't think of anything else to do, but of course I would marry him. So I'm very, I'm a mess or mess subject. Yeah, that's definitely a mess or mess subject. Yeah, that's definitely, that's definitely a mess. This is for the whole thing. I make no claim to coherent logical positions on that one subject,

that one subject, I'm a mess. But the reason I always was so skeptical of gay marriage is that it was, it was robbing us of the one thing that we had, the one good cool thing about being gay, that you had in exchange for the awful horror of not being able to produce a child with the person you love in the ordinary course of sexual Congress. When you realize that, and I don't think a lot of gay people will realize that ever, but I realized it quite early, when you realize that the bottom of your world drops out and you have to do something else. You have to

find a purpose. And if your purpose isn't going to be fatherhood, this is why so many gay men join the priesthood because they want to be a different kind of father. They want it to be a shepherd. You have to find some other kind of purpose and very often for gay men, that's creativity, experimentation. It's the license that we're given by the rest of society because we don't have this other thing. Trying to cram again, I'm a complete hypocrite on the subject because I live in total married bliss.

I live in beautiful monogamous domestic harmony. So I'm a 100% hypocrite on this subject, but it just, or it still feels to me a shame to sort of condemn, you know, our experimenters, you know, the people who are so overrepresented in artists and musicians and even politicians and warlords, you know, It's a sort of condemning to the same, the same monotonous drudgery that you breeders have to submit to. Yes, well, I can imagine that it's sort of, it's sort of greats against your, what would you call it, your anti-authoritarian?

My rebellious spirit and all the rest of it. Yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm, So you're gun poetic justice in of it. Yeah, yeah. So you're going poetic justice in some sense? Yeah, yeah. This is one of the many things that convinces me that God is real, because there's a humor in that which could only have come from someone doing it on purpose. You know what?

You know what? I'm going to give you something that's just going to remind you that you don't know it all. And it's going to confound you for the rest of your life and remind you that you two are messy and complicated and on this one subject you are never going to be coherent or logical. Good luck with that. Okay, so no doubt. I have another terrible question for you. So I read Martell's book on the Catholic Church about homosexuality in Nevada. And it's a very contentious book, let's say, written by a gay man who claims that homosexuality

is extraordinarily common in Nevada. It is. And so, and that the kinds of relationships that you describe between older men and younger men are common in that culture as they're common in the rest of the culture. Yes, they are. So I've written a book on the subject too, and I can tell you for a fact that both of those things are true. There's, it's called the Lavender Mafia in the Vatican. It is the, for those viewers who don't know,

it is a cabal of not just gay bishops, but specifically progressive left-wing gay bishops. Yes. And my book was a little bit more politically focused than his. My book was drawing attention to the fact that the same people who want to water down the liturgy, who want, for, you liturgy, who want

divorcees to be able to receive communion and want gay people to be whatever, they're the same people who have been covering up child abuse in the church. It seems that the same people who have been doing the child abuse and covering it up are also the people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive reform of the Catholic liturgy and of Catholic practice. And this of course resonates with what we know from other industries, doesn't it? Just like Hollywood, just like the press, just like the academy, the people who are most aggressively pushing for progressive, free-for-all sexual liberation, other people with the ugliest and most depraved skeletons in the closet. The rest of us are quite normal.

So my book was more about that, but I can tell you that it's absolutely true. The mistake that the Catholic Church has made and I remain a Catholic, despite the terrible state of the Catholic Church. Yes, and all the other contradictions in your life? You know of the Catholic Church. Yes, and all the other contradictions in your life? You know, they've never bothered me. They've never scared me. I'm not afraid of that. I'm quite excited by that because I look forward to a day when I might go either get closer to a resolution or be happy with, you know,

with not finding one. Doesn't, I mean, you know, I can imagine, I can imagine Ben Shapiro would be kept awake at night by this, but I'm not. Because I don't need everything in my world to form into a perfect, into some sort of like, canty and or vacancinean superstructure, where everything has its right place and that, you know, and everything is perfectly organized and all the dependent things are in the right.

That's not what human beings are like, that's not what we are. We're much, much more complex and messy than that. And I'm very much looking forward to 40, 50 years of exploring my own ludicrous internal nonsense. But I remain a Catholic, but the issue that the church has had, the mistake that the church has made is turning a blind eye as the church would put it to sin. Turning a blind eye to rampant gay sex in a vocation that is supposed to be celibate, supposed to be chased.

And without you to associate that hypothetically, well, the way that you are, partels claim with the proclivity to cover up the child's sexual abuse because of it, which is his most radical claim, I would say. I don't know if he's wrong about that. What I would say is, the way that the way that church would put it is,

if you make room for once in, others will follow, right? So what that means in practical terms for the Catholic churches, because the priesthood is somewhere where lots of gay men go and a blind eye is routinely turned to their sexual pettidillos, even if it's just with each other and there's nothing non-consensual or abusive going on, because it's a sexual free for all, because it's the kind of place where supposedly transgressive or forbidden things happen routinely with no consequence, it becomes an institution that attracts other kinds of people who have other things to hide, like pedophiles.

Where are you going to go if you have some kind of psychiatric dysfunction or whatever it is like that you're going to go somewhere that routinely overlooks or ignores sexual wrongdoing Course you are. That's what the church. That's what that's what Christians mean when they say you know You let one sin and others will follow they don't just mean it in the sense of personal behavior Like if you let yourself do one thing or let yourself do others But it also works in institutions too and of course lefties will say the reason that all of these problems happen in the Catholic Church is that priests are required to be celibate. The opposite is true. They haven't

been celibate for a very long time, and that's what's created the problem, because there's now an entrenched left-wing gay mafia that effectively runs the Catholic Church that has engaged in the systematic cover-up of child abuse child abuse so as to protect its own power. And that's about as bad as it gets, you know, in terms of, you know, a global institution that has lost their way. That is as bad as it gets. I want black hope because I want there to be a doctrinally conservative because all of the Catholics in Africa are pre-Vaticant to their serious Catholics. And it will make life very difficult for progressives accusing a black pope from Africa

of being a racist and a sexist because he actually wants Catholic doctrine to remain Catholic doctrine. But the present pope is basically at the head, he is not himself, I have a sexual, as far as we know, but he does sit at the head of this lavender mafia and he is propped up by people like Cornac Mephya O'Connor from England and Wales, Vincent Nichols and all these other aging 60, 70-year-old liberal

cardinals who are products of the 60s, who are soft on communism. What my book was trying to show is that the soft on communism thing is entwined with the abuse, with the wrongdoing, with everything, that the same people doing everything. So a Theodore McCarrick, who has the the distinction of being the world's only ex-Cardinal, because Francis had to remove his cardinalcy from him, had to degrade him as the technical term. He was Francis's envoy to China, and he was the one who put the deal together with Francis to allow the Chinese state to participate in the choice in choosing Catholic bishops. This hasn't happened since like Gregory VII, the Catholic Church has been ferocious about choosing its own bishops, but they handed selection of the bishops over to the Communist Party in China,

knowing the Catholics over routinely persecuted and killed in China, because they never met a socialist they didn't like. And it's that particular 60, 70-year-old child of the 60s aging hippie liberal that lives in another planet from the rest of us and is still thinking, you know, if only they, sorry, that's some lawnmower, Oklahoma. If only, if only socialism would try one more time, perhaps it would be okay this time, that that's the world these people live in. And they also... That's in your book, Pope? It's, yeah, it's called Diabolical. How Pope Francis betrayed terrible abuse victims like me and why he has to go? It's called diabolical so yeah, but anyway, I talk about that in books

I'm not hit a book but no, it's it's very interesting how the same people who are far leftists who are pushing for church Dr. Intervie water down which has the effect of emptying the pubes because when people go to church They want the fire on room stone. They go to be told what to do. They want the Bible. They want Jesus They don't want to bishop, talking to them and I'm not making this up. There are seminaries now where the seminarians are starting to issue, they're starting to give sermons on toxic masculinity. This is a church that has no manly men left in it. Every man in that church is a homeowner, church that has no manly men left in it. Every man in that church is a hallmark.

There are no men left in the congregations. There are no heterosexual men left in the clergy. And this is a church that thinks it has too many men in problem. This is a church that, and the reason that this subject interested me in addition to my faith, is that this is another arena in which the loss of manliness and masculinity and the loss of the proper appreciation of the heroic masculine virtues has led to chaos and disaster because no true father by which I mean the sorts of fatherhood, the priests are supposed to give up having children in order to embark upon. No spiritual leader with integrity would stand by and watch children being

abused and cover it up. This is something that gay people do because they think what they do is wrong, so they're happy to cover for somebody else who's doing something wrong too. A father, a real father, doesn't sit idly by while children are being abused. He takes steps to stop it and he punishes the people who have done wrong. Okay, so that's the righteous indignation and outrage of a true father.

And that appreciation of, it's right and proper to hate the hateful and we should be outraged about. Right. Well, you said that's part of what you've learned over the last couple of years. Right. And, but that heroic manly virtue is something that has been sort of systematically wiped out of the Catholic Church, just like it's been wiped out of other places in public

life. Yeah. It's gone from journalism, like it's gone from academy. And it's had results that everybody knows about in all those different arenas. So it was interesting to me watching the book, finding that most of the problems, most of the things that are happening in the Catholic church, most of the problems the church has got itself into,

basically boil down to there being no men. It's all women and gays. And the vast majority of the child abuse scandal and all the other things that are wrong with the Catholic church are a product of the child abuse scandal and all of the other things that are wrong with the Catholic Church are a product of the Church losing its connection to masculinity and simply having no men left in it. Oh good, well good, there's nothing controversial about any of that, so that's quite a relief. So we don't have to be in parallel.

See, that was a joke. You know that I could actually pull them off. Okay, so I want to return to something if you don't mind. I want you to tell me what you think the consequences of what happened to you when you were 14 might have been. Okay, I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I look, if you're not like, if I'm not, I'm not unwilling to discuss it with you. I'm not having a problem being forthcoming. Yeah. I just don't know. I know the only thing that I've really thought about is whether or not it might have affected the trajectory of my sexuality. And I think that it may well have done, but I don't think

it on its own was enough to make difference. And I think I'm probably right about that. I've also talked about just in this conversation about the transgressive nature of the transgressive nature of that sexuality. And now you participated in that, even it's, let's say, as an active participant. And the question is, what did that do to you? What did that, what did the knowledge of that do to you? Because you had to live with it. I don't know if it's a fair question. I don't know if I'm freezing. No, no, you're phrasing it fine. I just don't know the answers to it. In the same way that I don't think anybody can know what quote unquote made them gay, you know, it's that everybody has is born with, I think everybody is born with a more or less of a predilection whether or not you believe

in epigenetics or whatever. Some people do, some people don't, but I think everybody probably has a sort of predisposition and coupled with early experiences, you end up by the most the having sex with men or not, right? I don't think that we're ever conscious of the process as acting on us at the time. And therefore, it's very difficult. It's pure speculation based on whatever we happen

to remember trying to work out what it was that made the difference. And I don't think it's something that could ever satisfactorily be answered because simply because we're just not aware of the process is acting on us. I don't know if my dad not saving me from that household made me sort of to make some kind of misfire, a rewire like, you know, I said something haywire in my brain. I don't know whether I resented and just like my mother so much that I went off all women. I don't know. And I don't think there's I've ever any way to know. And for the same reason, I don't think there's any way that I could possibly answer. And I don't think there's any way that I could possibly answer. And I don't think anybody could be on blind speculation. And I think that most people who are...

Most people who try to explain, I'm so sorry, there's no way we're going. Most people who try to explain what abuse might have done to somebody. In almost every case, I see their political prejudices and their biases at work out there in search of justification. The truth is, I have no goddamn idea at neither does anybody else. No one can possibly have a clue because these things are acting below the conscious level on us in a way that we cannot dissect and analyze. Okay.

All right, so let me ask you then, let me switch topics. level on us in a way that we cannot dissect and analyze. Okay. Okay. All right. So let me ask you, then let me switch topics. So, you know, you've been less in the public eye since this scandal. I'm retired. I've been retired. You've been retired. Okay.

I've been retired. You've been retired. But you thought you should talk. Look, I thought a quarter million books. I mean, millions of dollars. I have more nice stuff than I know what to do with. I have a husband of million books. I mean, millions of dollars. I have more nice stuff than an ought to do with, I have a husband I am deeply in love with. I could die happy tomorrow.

I helped to get a present office. I'm one of the seven people that put Trump in office and that's not egotism, that's the facts, right? I'm one of the seven people that put Donald Trump in office, I can die happy. Now, is it... You might be doing purgatory for you as a conspiration. Yeah, no, I mean, maybe, yeah, what happens after I die for that particular crime who knows,

but the fact is, like, I have accomplished more than the vast majority of people walking this earth. I have, you know, and if I were to do nothing else professionally now, I would be infinitely more successful than all of my critics combined. Okay, so I'm good. There's, there's rumors of your current state. There's rumors that you're terribly indebted. There's there's rumors. Okay, so I sometimes you know One of the problems with trying to find out what's true about me is I like to troll journalists and I Confirm or deny according to my whimsy so when somebody writes to me saying it's a true or two million and I'll say no darling

It's four million what want, what I want, go to the trouble of explaining, is that, of my many companies, the one that was funded by the mercers, who withdrew their political investments from Steve Bannon and for me at the same time, that particular vehicle is somewhat in debt. But I'm not in debt. I don't have any personal liability whatsoever. There's some total of the money I owe. It's about $977 to capital one,

because I can't get any better credit cards in there, because I haven't been in this country for long enough. So my top problem, rather than... I might not have as much money as I had two years ago. I don't, but I'm not two million in debt. One of my companies is, and we'll probably have to either try to fight, it will have to fight its way out of that,

or it will have to go through some kind of insolvency process or whatever, but I'm not in debt. I just never bothered to correct the record. And frankly, if a journalist wrote to me, it's so so worth a noise, if a journalist wrote to me and said, are you two million debt? And I made the very important critical distinction between me and the business. Yes. They wouldn't write that up anyway. That's it. They would take my confirmation of the

figure as confirmation that I'm in debt and just write what they wanted to anyway. So I feel no, I mean, it's not a crime to lie to journalists and I feel no obligation to act as their fact-checking. I think it's actually a crime to tell the truth to journalists. Amen. No, if somebody comes to me to like a crime often. If somebody comes to me to ask for a comment, I think it's a moral obligation to fuck with them, which is why I got myself into trouble that time before, you know, when someone shut up the newsroom wherever it was, because I made some flippant comment about vigilante desecords and journalists or something, and I didn't post it publicly. I wasn't like inciting people to hurt journalists. I wrote it strongly to somebody who then published it and wrote a story about it, and then they

used that as evidence that I was gining up like people, whatever. These are some of the consequences of being the kind of person who can't buy that. They're like, oh, God, hold their tongue. Right, right, right. My job, so my job is to create a career in which that doesn't matter,

because I'm not, because my success, my income, my fan base, my profile, whatever, isn't reliant on the prestige economy, but it's also not reliant on the sort of rules of journalistic propriety or whatever. So this is why I'm in the reason I'm in Oklahoma is I'm closing the last branch of money to do a late night chat show like Johnny Carly. This is the thing I alluded to earlier in the conversation. I see, I see.

So that's part of your future plans. And who are you doing that with if you don't mind me asking? Are you still in the process of waiting to announce that? I haven't announced anything yet. So I'm going to the money in the bank first and then I'll do all my hires and then I'll announce partners and all the rest of it. But the basic, the idea of it is what I should always have been doing, which is somewhere between Bill Maher and Johnny Carson, I can do my characters, I can do my Ilhanomar and

my Dr. Christine kind of characters as cold opens like SNL except they'll actually be funny. I can do monologues, I can do interviews all the rest of it. And I'm a live act. I'm not one of these people that can just babble for three hours a day. Like, you know, some of the podcasters can do, some of the YouTubers can do. I just find it so boring, you know. I don't want to just babble for three hours. I know what musta' here, the same opinions from the same four conservatives on the news every day Just mind numbingly dull. That's not me. I'm a writer in a live act, right? That's where I live. That's my happy place. So it'll just be once a week And so how are you going to how are you going to protect yourself just out of curiosity about being From being censored and taken out. Like, because I'm going to make it absolutely,

I'm going to make it absolutely anti-cratchable. We're not going to be on social media. We are going to encourage viewers not to share clips. We're going to beg people not to put us on social media. We're going to host the video on our own player, on our own website. I see. If you want to watch it, put your email address in.

And we can sell into the email list, right? So we can, you know, do newsletters without there's no the rest of it, but one of my stuff. So it's something approximating a private subscription service. Yes. It isn't completely dissimilar from Alex Jones' model, just without the homegrown products. Right, well that's what we're hoping to allow people

to do with this platform that we've been building as an alternative to Patreon. On a broader scale. Well, maybe I'll be on that because if you'll have me, because the only thing I'm not banned from, perhaps, I think these have medically sealed little universes of the future for us. Look, social media isn't for us. The people who run these companies hate us. They are dedicated to our annihilation. They want to see us wiped off the face of the planet. There is no point handing distribution over to people who run these companies hate us. They are dedicated to our annihilation. They want to see us wiped off the face of the planet. There is no point handing distribution over the people who hate. And why would you drive up a market value of these companies by providing them free content?

Just leave. And I'm always the person who has to do it two years before everybody else. So this is what I'm going to do. Just just leave social media. I'm going to spend a bunch of money converting my Facebook fans into a big, powerful email list. And I'm just gonna leave. There will be life after social media, trust me. Once upon a time, people didn't imagine that my space wouldn't still be here. There was AOL, GeoCities, where the world moves on.

And in five years, no one will have a Twitter account anymore. And you'll be wondering, you'll be wondering, what on earth you were panicking about. And the people who didn't look ahead will be lost. I will have a three million strong email list that I write to every day with a hilarious daily column. And they'll tune in on Friday nights to watch my show. And I'll be perfectly happy.

And nobody can take that away from me. If we email providers. I'm lying for that? When are you expecting to roll that out of Proximum? I've kind of pretty much sort of semi-tolled people already, so the cat's kind of sort of out of the bag, so I haven't really broken the news now. But once the money's in the bank, then it'll be six to eight weeks before we have a set built, so two months before we drop. I'm going to have a very open gestation process. I'm going to'm gonna show pictures of the set what's being built on the rest of it We're not gonna do like grand announcements because I've done enough loads of my career

so we'll just have a very iterative period of Putting every assembling everything and then in about two months I will drop episode one and it will be the funniest Most hilarious unmissable hour of television that's somehow not on TV. Produced by anybody in the country, and it will be unmissable and hysterical.

It will teach you something, because we'll have a serious component, too, whether it's a mini-documentary or an interview or a review of something. And it'll be bookended by just the funniest, political satire and characters and nonsense that nobody can do but me. It's sort of what I always should have done. It's what I've always wanted to do. Now I have the breathing space, if you like, well no one's looking, well no one's expecting daily this, that, the other for me. In my first retirement period, well like share, well, no one's looking, no one's expecting daily this, that, the other for me. I mean, my, you know, in my first retirement period, well, like share, I will come out for time at many times in my life. This is, I've had this nice space when no one's

been kind of down my neck to deliver. Have you enjoyed that? Like, has there been anything about advantages to you about the fact that you've been sort of pulled away from the public spotlight? It's been wonderful. I've been able to dedicate two years of my life to getting to know the man I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. And now we can go about, now I'll throw myself back into the fight. He's got his own career and all the rest of it, but we've had something that most married couples don't get, which is two years just together, but the beginning of our life together. Most people don't have that luxury,

or anything even close to it. They immediately get bogged down in the everyday hell of who's taken the kids to school, did you pay the gas bill crap, right? We didn't have any of that. We just had two years of bliss together. And now we have an unshakable foundation. And if I'm away for six months, I'm away for six months. And they won't make a difference to us because we don't have the same

sort of vulnerabilities that a lot of nearly woke couples do, because we have that time together. So from to my mind, it was time well spent. I've also been reading a lot. And we didn't get to talk about anything really substantive in this conversation except my obscure psychiatric history, but you will see that I've been reading a lot and sharpening my claws and refilling my toolkit. And so when I do start re-entering the arena and popping up on live streams and doing interviews and things like that, you'll see that I've spent two years reading everything I can get my hands on. And I'm considerably more formidable than I was two years ago,

when I was already quite formidable. Anything you'd particularly recommend? Not at the moment, I'm gonna keep my power to dry because I have a lot of fun things that I want to do with it all. But no, I've been regrouping and plotting and shopping. Oh, I can't imagine that you're just... And you're just...

And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just...

And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... And you're just... People keep expecting me to be sad or to have had some kind of terrible experience and the truth is I just happened. I've had the best two years of my life. I've been in perfect bliss with the best man I've ever met. And now I'm ready to go back to work. All right, well look, that sounds like a good place to end from as far as I'm concerned.

That was a nice natural solution, wasn't it? That was natural, conclusive. Perhaps we could do this again and talk about something substantive instead of my dreadful history. Yeah, well, you know, you're an interesting character. And so it was substantive as far as I was concerned. And I think people will find it that too. So what happened to you was very singular. But it's too. So what happened to you was very singular and unexpected. It's important that people realize that the specifics of what was said or neither

here nor there. It was the fact that the powers that be linked up and decided to defenestrate this person. And because conservatives allowed it to happen, they lost one of their greatest champions. And I'm going to be very successful with very profitable enterprises and perfectly happy just being funny for a living. Because I sort of think to myself, why would I keep killing myself for people who... Why would I keep killing myself for people who don't deserve me?

So some degree, the politics stuff, it's never going to be gone, but it is going to be dialed down considerably. And I'm going to be talking about love, sex, death, and money instead of, you know, Trump or whatever. And what maybe you spend, you know, maybe you spend enough time talking about politics. It's not very interesting after a while, and the people who are in politics are awful. I mean, if those of us who are kind of moving

into that political sphere and who have aspirations toward being elected officials or rest of it, they'll be then becoming awful people. I mean, everyone in politics is dreadful, ghastly. I don't think I want to spend 30 years talking about or thinking about those people. I think I want to spend 30 years talking about or thinking about those people. I think I want to do something more fun. So yeah, I'm going to, I mean, not to say that there won't be characters from the political world popping up in my sketches, but or indeed that I

want to, of course, I'm going to do journalism. It just won't necessarily be political journalism per se. So perhaps I'll do a 20-minute mini documentary in the show where I'll go out into the country somewhere or I'll go to Sweden or I'll go to London or whatever. But as far as the sort of, you know, the conservative movement stuff goes, the conservative base are cowards and they are ungrateful and they are indolent.

And I gave a lot and paid my dues and helped get a present office. And now it's time to do what I want to do, which is make people laugh. Because that's the power that I have that nobody else in our world does. So I'm going to focus on that. Yeah, it's a hell of a power.

Really, you can just make people laugh, you know? I think he makes heterosexual men, a certain kind of heterosexual man laugh. Well, that's something, you know, there are certain kinds of heterosexual men. I like the guy, but I don't personally find him, you know, rib ticklingly funny. But then that's because I like people like Joan Rivers and you know, and you know, that kind of universe. So, Bill Burr or whatever. So he's maybe not my kind of comedian. It could be, it could be.

But anyway, this has been fun, so thanks. Hey, look, I'd been looking forward to talking to you for a long time. Oh, I'd say hi to Vox for me. I will, I will, he's very much looking forward to me speaking to you too. This is, that's what I want to talk about. I want to talk about things like the forward, because there's interesting substantive things to do that you've managed. We'll have a good time. I know this was your strategy. What are your other conversations?

Well, we will. This is your strategy through this conversation, which is not lost on me, was to make sure that we don't spend too much time talking about you. And you have been successful in that strategy, because I've allowed you to. But the next conversation we will talk about you. Because I do want to talk about the forward. And I do want to talk about some of the things that the thing I asked you about on Australian TV and whatever, because I think that, um,

well, turn about as fair play as they say. Right. And I knew, no, I did apologize to you on us. And I'm, and I'm, and I did make a mistake at the asking and I, and I, and I, and I, and I, and thank you for that. No, I, I, I, I, I think there's important substance to be spoken about, you know, as regards, well, important things, garden, as well else. So let's talk about, let's talk about real things next time. Well, I think, well, I think when. So let's talk about real things next time.

Well, I think when I'm feeling particularly up to a battle, I'll think about. I'm sure a lot of people will watch this. So this is officially the last time I will ever speak about Bloody February 2017. So if anybody wants to know anything, you can watch this video and that's it. All right. Good. Well, best of luck with your new endeavor. know anything you can watch this video and that's it. All right good. All right good. Well, best of luck with your new endeavor. Cheers, best of luck to you.

All right, bye bye. If you found this conversation meaningful, you might think about picking up dad's books, maps of meaning, the architecture of belief, or his newer bestselling book, 12 rules for life, and antidote to chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. See JordanB Peterson.com for audio, e-book, and text links or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at Jordan.b.p. Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, JordanBPederson.com. My online writing programs designed to help people straighten out their pasts, understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future can be found at selfauthoring.com. That's selfauthoring.com.

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