TRIGGERnometry - "Activism is Often About Revenge" - Mike Nayna

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

Mike Nayna is an Australian filmmaker. Check out his 2016 film Digilante https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjUakQYKdPw Support TRIGGERnometry: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/trigger... https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@failinghuman) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisham. And this is the show for you. If you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our guest today is an Australian filmmaker, Mike Naina. Welcome to Trigonometry. Hey, how you doing? It's good to have you on the show, man. Thanks for coming on. We met you about a year ago now. I think it was exactly a year ago. Wow, that long. Okay, cool. Yeah. And we've been very keen to talk to you since. And really one of the reasons we were particularly keen to talk to is

Sir James Lindsay, our mutual friend, sent us your film. Did you know? Okay. And it was like, you must watch this. And we both did and felt that it was really, really incredible. So it kind of made it extra special for us to chat with you. But for anyone who hasn't seen the film, who doesn't know who you are, just give us a little bit of a background as who are you,

how are you where you are, what has been your journey through? life. Okay. I'm an Australian filmmaker and I'm interested in the internet and what's that doing, what's that doing to us as humans and activism, I guess, this digital part of activism that we're seeing a lot of. And yeah, I've made several films now in that area. I guess how we came to meet at some point was I started looking into activism, a strange kind of activism, kind of destructive in my opinion activism. It wasn't doing what it said on the box. I started looking at that here in Australia.

And I started hanging out with in activist circles and monitoring activists on social media. And I followed a lot of their concepts and language to the academy. It seemed like there was an intellectual engine underneath a lot of the things that were talking about. And from there, I guess that meant I spoke to a lot of academics and I stumbled into what could be considered an academic underground, I guess, with a lot of people who were concerned about certain fields in cultural studies.

And they weren't, I mean, they would open up to me behind the scenes, but they were very concerned about speaking publicly about this kind of stuff. So I had a lot of experiences where I'd meet academics and we'd be in their office and they would lock the door and we'd speak in hush tones or we'd start email threads that would start on their, this happened twice actually, it started on their official academic inbox, professor so-and-so at deacon.edu.a.u. And then they would take it halfway when we got into the nitty-gritty, they would take it to their personal accounts.

And this started happening and I thought that was, It was very strange that academics wouldn't feel open about talking about something like that, particularly because they were so passionate about it. And that eventually led me to cross paths with Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, and Peter Bogosian, who were just about to take part in this academic hoax scandal that later became known as the Breivance Studies scandal. And I guess I've been making films in this area. It's like a rabbit hole that keeps on opening up further and further into new and interesting. interesting things and interesting people, I guess, we met in London last year as a result of

this. And I seem to be heading into some strange kind of reluctant, pundit role. I find myself on stages and being invited on things like this. It's not exactly what I want to be doing, but it's where I am right now. Well, that's the first time a guest has said they don't want to be on the show while on the show. That's fantastic. Usually we get the rejections by email. You've decided to come on and tell us. You don't want to be on fantastic stuff. It reminds me of many a date that I've been on, Mike. Persons opposite me.

I like what you guys are doing. I respect it. It's just, it's a, I just kind of want to hide a way and make films, you know? Like, do it in my own time and then show you something and maybe do a Q&A.

It's quite strange to be caught up in this political mess and be talking about these things. And why were these academics scared, Mike? Well, there's many reasons. I mean, why are a lot of people scared to say things that they're concerned about right now? I think that these particular fields in cultural studies, they have connections to diversity boards and things like that. And it's got quite a, what would you call it, like a hushing, an intimidating, an intimidating kind of. of kind of entities within the university that make people feel weird about saying things openly.

And it's, I mean, it's the same in arts and entertainment. You guys would experience that over there. There's certain things that you just don't talk about. And if you talk about them publicly, then it's not like anyone will tell you face-to-face, but you do get a sense that there are whispers around and things like that. So that's very much taking place within academia. in a big way. And the more I'm looking into this,

the more and more that seems like that's what's going on. Mike, and just so people understand, like, what is it that these academics are scared to talk about? Are they people who want to measure black people's dimples, skulls, or like what is it that people are terrified to discuss?

Well, there's forbidden knowledge, I guess. There are areas of inquiry that people want to go into, race IQ being one of them, even just talking about biological sex, you can get into trouble. There's a guy named Bruce Gilley over in, he's a colleague of Peter Bogosians who wrote something about a case for colonialism.

So let's look at some positives that took place as a result of colonialism. He never said it was a good thing. He just said some, there were certain parts of it. And this guy's an academic. And he got driven out of his profession. He got shamed. And there's a lot of these kinds of stories, Breton Heather. from Brett Weinstein and Heather Hine from Evergreen State College.

I made a series about that. I spoke to them about it, where Brett stood up to this orthodoxy, I guess, his moral orthodoxy that was emerging within his school and an equity plan that they were trying to put in place, which overstep the bounds, I think, into his STEM field. So he started speaking up about that. and then you've just got to see the series to see what happened now. I can't actually do it justice here, having a conversational form.

But if you go to my channel and check it out, you'll see some strange things took place. And what we're seeing in academia is people being forced out. Now, these people would argue that what they're doing is good and right and it's the morally correct thing to do. After all, racism is bad, isn't it? Sexism is bad. The more diversity, the better. What are your opinions on it, Mike?

Well, it depends. There are reasonable edges of this. And then it's difficult to draw lines around. There's some pretty hardcore postmodern sections of the academy that are studying quite strange things. It's almost like it's a fundamentalist sect of the new left. So it is, it's not that simple. It's actually hard to speak about in simple terms because you have to, you go down layers of this stuff. There are surface level arguments that people are having.

And it's like, oh yeah, that seems perfectly reasonable. But then if you go back in the scholarship, maybe one decade or two decades or three decades, you're getting into some very strange philosophies. They've got a different conception of how humans are put together. They have this kind of blank slate philosophy of, human beings, that humans can be reshaped, I guess, through the discourses and the way that we speak about things and the way the knowledge is produced. And so right now we're dealing with, we're probably three decades into some very, very strange conceptions of reality in humans.

And we're talking about surface level things like cultural appropriation and many of these what is the basis for biological sex it's all rooted in this 30 year old philosophy that's been I guess built built over the past few decades

I might just so you know what we're going to do is we're going to clip that and Francis is going to say well racism is bad isn't it and then you're going to go it depends and we'll just leave it. Well, think about this. It depends on what your definition of racism is, right?

Like if you've got the traditional definition of racism where it's discrimination based on immutable characteristics, then that is horrific and let's work against that. But if you're talking about systems of power and privilege where waking up in the morning and buying a coffee and putting on some kind of hat is racism, then we're going to have to have a bigger conversation. And this is what these fields are doing.

They're broadening the concept of racism, and it's getting to the point where it's just capturing people just going about their everyday business. And Mike, there'll be lots of people who would say, look, this is a problem on campuses, but it doesn't affect broader society. You know, it's just students being students. Let's be fair, students and knobs.

I was a knob when I was our age. I think we all were. What is your argument to that, that it has no real effect on sort of wider culture? I guess it just always seemed obvious to me that the culture is downstream from the academy. Our elite classes, our cultural producers, they all go through the academy and they learn these things

and then they come out and they produce art, they produce journalism. They produce the templates for how we think. And so it's never really struck me as something that's kind of off in the corner of our culture, producing strange things. All our best and brightest minds go through it and they come out and then they create culture. And so we live downstream from the academy. So whatever happens there, it will eventually happen within the culture.

It will manifest in some sense. I mean, you know, it'll be pushed back upon from people who don't, who haven't gone through that way of thinking, but it's there. It's definitely there. I don't exactly know how to articulate that, but it just seems so obvious to me. I know, man. It's interesting because probably a year and a half ago now, I got this offer to do a comedy show at University. And they sent me like a massive contract with the list of 50 things that you aren't supposed to joke about. And when I turned it down, and it became quite a big story over here, people were having to go

at me and saying, well, why, why, you know, why do you feel so strongly about it? These are just some silly students. And I was like, well, they're not just some silly students. They're going to grow up and become, you know, MPs, lawyers, journalists, and they're going to be shaping the world of tomorrow. And I don't want to live. And so what year was that? When did that take place?

That was literally the last few days of 2018. 2018, right, right. Yeah. So not that long ago at all, man. Yeah. And it's, and, you know, and I was saying at the time that, yes, slippery slope arguments don't always necessarily accurately reflect reality. But if we allow people to censor, comedy, you know, whatever, we're going to start to find that, you know, we start to go back through history and erase things that were done

and cancel shows that have been on TV for a long time and question everything. and it's been 18 months and look where we are now, man. Yeah, yeah. And it's one way, right? It's when pushing back is seen, or even just hold up, let's talk about this, is seen as a moral, then you're on a freight train to something very strange. And I mean, anyone's picked up a history book. This kind of behavior happens and then famines and death and genocide happens.

So it's not clear to me why so many people are like, hey, bring it on, man, bring it on let's get on this freight train do you think it's just cowardice mike in the sense that i think a lot of most people are busy and they've got busy lives and they don't have time to delve into this stuff and the way yeah yeah yeah and francis do but what they do know as you said in academia and i think it's true everywhere else as well is if you speak out against this stuff you will be punished and so if you don't really know what's going on and you're scared and you're scared and you have a reason to be scared. Why would you get involved?

Why don't you just go, yeah, look, all right. Well, they keep saying this word cultural appropriated, these two words cultural appropriation. They keep saying white privilege. They keep saying like all these things. I don't really know. I'm not an expert. But if I question the stuff, I'm going to get fired.

You know, my reputation is going to be ruined. I'm going to be wrong. I mean, there's even a different population that are in the middle of that. They hear it and it speaks to their moral sensibility. it's it's it still speaks to my moral sensibilities there's this kind of care harm moral access that it's speaking to and so you if you haven't done your homework you would hear a lot of this stuff and go hey this is just some kind of extension of the civil rights movement um but if you do your homework and see what's underneath it it's it's it's not at all and so i find that a lot of people who whose moral

instincts are being spoken to poke it poked and prod they're playing apologetics for it they're They're going, no, well, they can't mean that. They must mean, and then they say what they must mean. And in that sense, there is this cover for this strange, radical thing that's moving up. And it's like, hey, just look at what they're actually saying. Abolish police. Let's get rid of, they're actually saying that. They're not, it's not reform.

I'm down for reform. I'm progressive. But it's not actually what they're saying. If you go, if you just do a little homework, just get into. So true. That is so true, man, because this is the point I've been trying to make to a lot of people and on radio and whatever. Like, the lives of black people matter and everybody supports that. But if you look at the organization of Black Lives Matter and their own stated goals and what they're demanding and what they're suggesting and their agenda and who founded and who runs it, that's a whole different ballgame. And no one wants to believe it.

No one will go on their website. Can I just say it's quite offensive? As someone who comes from Venezuela, I've got to say abolishing the police did wonders for my country. We're having a great time. And if your regular viewer, Francis has just said that his mother is from Venezuela, so make sure you have a drink. This is your opportunity now. I'll mention I'm from Russia in the second.

That's a drink number two. Is there a drinking game here? Is there when we cash in on our ethnicity people drink, do that? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it's your turn, mate. But, Mike, like Constantine said, we touched on, you know, Black Lives Matter. Yesterday was the first day back for Premier League football and literally every footballer took a knee.

Imagine if a footballer, particularly like a white footballer, just didn't. I mean, that's career over, isn't it? He's done. Yeah, right, right, right, yeah. I mean, how have we got to this point where even saying something like saying you don't agree with all aspects, of a political organization means cancellation? Well, I suspect it's been sold quite well. Like, people don't look at what's underneath it.

They're not looking at the individual arguments. They're not looking at the constellation of what's going on. Like, if you take a few steps back and you realize it's not just this, it's this and this and this and this, you start to notice, hang on a second, there is some kind of revolution of foot. you know on the individual case in the individual case it's often very reasonable but if you're if you're losing moving ground on 10,000 different fronts then all of a sudden you're heading towards some kind of revolutionary entering a revolutionary enterprise so it is it is strange because

I'm all my friends and family are experiencing this from the surface level and they're all yeah black lives, they do matter. I was like, yeah, yeah, that's true. I can see where you're coming from, but let's go to their website and look what they're actually about. This is quite kind of scary. But people don't want to do that, do they? That's the thing that terrifies me is people, and again, I keep saying this in our interviews in the last few weeks. This sends me back to echoes of what we went through in the Soviet Union where people knew what they were supposed to not look at. and what information they did in forbidden knowledge right right and not even so much forbidden knowledge more like I don't want to expose myself to this information because then I would have

to have the wrong opinion right right right and then I will be punished you know and that's I see so much of that flying around at the moment you know what I mean yeah yeah and Mike moving swiftly on to your film Digilante which we both watch we loved I mean that was very very interesting as well in that it was, you know, talking about digital activism, which you were involved with. For people who haven't seen the film, could you just give a brief synopsis about what it's about and then we'll delve into it? So you like a little gesture I did there. It was quite nice, wouldn't you?

Anyway. All right, so the film is, I guess it's about an experience that I had where a racist incident took place, racist and sexist incident took place on a bus, and I filmed it. And I was, it was, 2012, so it was the time when viral videos were just started to enter the kind of public consciousness. And so I'd had success with a couple of viral videos. I kind of knew how you could poke and prod them in a certain way, you know, seed them on the back end and get these things going. And so I applied that to this video to get revenge on the guys that were being horribly racist and sexism. They were, they were dicks.

They were doing the wrong thing. And so, um, and they weren't just being racist and sexist. They were also being threatening. That's, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Inexcusable behavior, right? Like, it's in. Way out of line.

These people were way out of line. Yeah, yeah. It's horrific. So what then happened was the video did go viral and it turned into this kind of international press incident. I think part of it was the zeit, geist about the racism, sexism, that really put an engine underneath it, but also because viral videos were only just starting to come out. And so it turned into this really, really big

international incident. And my experience of it was being on the inside of this press incident and then seeing how it was communicated and how it was talked about was very different to how I experienced it. And so I would meet someone in the street and talk to them about it. And their impressions of the incident and everything that was going on around, it was very different. different. And so it's a very strange experience to be in the middle of a press explosion because you get a firsthand experience of how disconnected a media incident can become from the actual reality of the event itself. And so it's the story is it's a short documentary and it's just, it's just about that experience. And I caught up with some of the racist, he wasn't racist. He was just

being violent. One of the perpetrators. That sounds like such a great excuse. He wasn't racist. He was just violent. Only violent. Or otherwise known as embracing Australian culture.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's a big sunny day and we're all drinking. And so, yeah, that's where it leads to usually. Yeah, so I guess that's what the film is about, short documentary. I showed it a long time ago. It was like 2015.

And it only just recently got picked up by Atlantic because I think it just becomes more and more relevant as time goes on and the internet keeps delivering these incidents. Well, I mean, I think you've described it factually in terms of the storyline, but I actually think that to me, that wasn't what it was really about in the sense that for me it was much more about your journey of going from here's a racist incident. I filmed it. How do I make this go viral to, oh shit, this is now viral.

and I'm not happy with what I've done here. Yes, yes. And it's about also having control over something. You don't have control over that. Something that goes viral and something you put out on the internet, you have control of the preconditions, and that's it. So once you let it go, then it will turn into something. And it did turn into something quite ugly, I felt.

And the conversations that were happening around racism, that it sparked, they didn't seem to make any sense to me. It wasn't constructive either. I don't think it was doing any good. It was just causing more harm and making people pissed off. And so I was looking at that, and it kind of made me rethink the dynamics of these kind of viral incidents and how all this stuff worked.

And I guess that's why I'm looking at what I'm looking at now, because it's very much, it was an insight into how strong, the public discourse is, how strange and unproductive the public discourse is around race. And that was, and how the media plays into that and how social media plays into that. And so that has launched me into this new, new thing I'm working on now. And one of the things that I found very interesting about it was this desire, and I don't know whether it's innate in us of the desire for revenge, where you saw what happened to these men who did, let's be fair,

they were awful, awful, reprehensible behavior. There's not what you can condemn it. But then the reaction, I would say, was even worse and a desire to destroy these men's lives. There was this bus incident that took place in real life, and then there's this digital incident that looked a hell of a lot like what took place on the bus. And so it's such a strange thing that are kind of echoed

into this giant mythological event where, where people, the anger that was on the bus and the thing that people were angry about, they were just replicating. So it was just creating more destruction and more anger and more threats and violence and saying horrible things about people. And so yeah, that's, I think something that I noticed from that was, from that experience is that revenge isn't constructive.

There's nothing constructive about revenge. No one wins in the end. And so I guess that's the position I have now. now with this new kind of activism that I'm looking at, it looks a lot like, it looks more like revenge to me than anything constructive. And so I think that a lot of modern day activism has revenge deep inside it. And the internet has a way of looking after that. You know, it's kind of, the internet selects for emotion and revenge is a deep, deep, deep, deep emotion.

And so I think that is echoing through our current situation more and more. I guess that's why the Atlantic was picked it up because it's, it's become more relevant, not less relevant over the years. Yeah, it has. And you mentioned that one of the things you realize is the way we talk about race and racism and all of the discrimination, all of these things, particularly in the age of social media, isn't actually constructive. We're not trying to get to a better place.

Would that be fair to say? I think we're trying, but it's not a good method. So what I see from these disciplines, these kind of fundamentalist sect of the new left I've been talking about it. I think as polite society, we all agree that racism, sexism, homophobia, they're bad things, but we don't agree on how to remedy them. And I think that in the past, liberal ethics or treating everyone the same was something that was delivering gains on those fronts, on those civil rights, like culturally and socially. I think a lot of people became a lot more accepting because of liberal ethics, universal liberal ethics. And so this new postmodern ethics that these people have is a completely different remedy for the problem. And I don't think it's going to work.

I think it will make things much worse. And so the way I look at it is that if racism and sexism, homophobia is a flu, and we're looking at a patient and we're both like, well, there's something wrong here, right? we don't we want to fix this this is this is a pathology let's get in there um these postmodernists are saying chemotherapy let's just give it chemotherapy that'll that'll sort it and then the rest of us are like bed rest maybe some antibiotics let's just calm down but they're like let's just throw everything at this thing and i don't think it's constructive or it's going to we'll kill the patient and secretly when you actually look at what they're on about they want some kind of total revolution

so they secretly do want to kill the patient because the afterlife is the left-wing utopia that they want to take us to. Mike, but you say that, as you say, most people won't be familiar with that. So what's your evidence for that? What's your evidence for them wanting to, you know, overthrow society or whatever? It's there. The thing is they're very explicit. And so you can just go to, I think James Lindsay has a great resource on these, new discourses. So he's, he, he, James, Helen, Peter Bogosian were the subjects of my new film. But I didn't want to take what they were saying on face value. I didn't want to be like a glorified cameraman

that was just like recording what they were saying and delivering that to the people. I wanted to figure out what the hell was going on myself, just out of interest. And so over the course of the last few years, we've kind of morphed into this weird startup think tank where we're mapping the landscape and trying to figure out what the hell is going on here,

mapping out these disciplines. from the outside and where they come from, what's the intellectual history behind it. And James is starting to run out creating a platform, new discourses. And he's aggregating all the proof that you were talking about. What proof do you have? So it's in the literature. It's all through the literature. I've spent a lot of time reading this stuff and I can, I mean, I can email your stuff.

We can sort it out. But it's there and they're quite explicit about this. So what is it that they won, exactly? A revolution. They want to change everything. But it's strange because you've got, it's almost like they're a woke foot soldiers that don't know who the generals are.

So if you go back further in time, they're talking about totally, they're disaffected Marxists, I guess, and they want a new way to jimmy up the population into creating the new Marxist utopia. And so they changed the way, the new left changed the way that that would take place. Yeah.

And so then you've got generations upon generations that are kind of moving along with this way of thinking and expanding upon it and then moving it into further, further details and smaller papers, smaller arguments. and all of a sudden you've got this whole entity that's actually it starts in this strange revolutionary enterprise but if you're reading the today's paper in your hands it's about cornbread being racist or something like that it's it's hard to figure out what the enterprise is when you look at the the surface level arguments that we're swimming in now we're swimming in these surface level arguments we're swimming in the meme level of this thing where if you look underneath it and you go further and further down there is a revolution philosophy underneath it.

And why do you think it's resonated so, so much, especially with this current generation? Because, look, there must be a reason. Is it a dissatisfaction? Is it the fact that capitalism isn't working for young people? Why do you think it's resonating so strongly, Mike? Ugh. There's a lot to go into. Like, we can look at it from a philosophical angle.

We can look at it from an economic angle. things are harder to, it's harder to advance now. We can look at it from an overproduction of elites that are trying to find new ways to advance within our centers of cultural production. You can look at it from a moral perspective that God is dead and we're all dealing with the existential weight of not having a plausible external source for morality. And so any external doctrine for morality will, the market value of that will go right up in a time like that.

Like you meet people who are just staunched vegans. It's like I'm I'm grabbing onto this one moral thing and that will define me. That's like my, the one thing that I can grab onto. And so you see all these doctrines popping up, which are moral communities saying, hey, look, you don't need that existential weight of creating your own moral system. We have a moral system over here. And I think it's something to do with, I mean, I sound like a madman, I know, but if you, the more of the philosophy you dig into, the more you realize that there's some strange, big tectonic shifts

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that you'd be able to explain to our audience who might not be aware of it? That's why I want to make films. I can go and make films and be a weird guy and then just drop it and people can understand because it's got it explains it in a different. different way. I don't know how to articulate some of these things. But it's, I mean, it's just moral communities, moral communities that are evangelizing and people want to become part of a moral community. It's a dearth of religion. It's a spiritual problem that we've got. And so people are trying to solve it. And they're trying to solve it, these certain people are

trying to solve it politically. And do you think as well, it taps into our latent knowledge. narcissism as well, especially the virtue signaling, especially the online activism. And it's a narcissism that we all have. Like when you created your video, part of it was like you talked about that when in the film you saw the guy walking away and that made you feel angry that in a sense you got away of his crime. But also part of it, and let's be fair, I share this as well. It's like, I want to make my video go viral. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, the thing is, is that there's a level of, if you have moral standing, you have like a divinity role in your moral community.

And so that's a status. And so I'm also part of building, if you look at letter.wiki, I'm building social media networks. And if you look behind the scenes of what social media actually is, it's status as a service. So people are using social media to mature to a point where people are kind of using social media

in order to ratchet up. their status. And so when you've got this kind of moral system that's got its own language and it's ready to go and it's zeitgeist friendly, then that's a resource for for ratcheting up your divinity factor within your moral community. And so there's a lot of people who, I mean, you look at the Instagram models kind of going, black lines, nada, and they're like taking all these photos of themselves at rallies and things like that. There's part of that that is, it is about creating some kind of moral standing within within the community. So this, I mean, there's cynical ways to look at it. There's, there's, there's, there's, there's, there's kind of people searching for

answers, ways to look at it. There's economic ways to look at it. We're just in this kind of maelstrom of change. And it's, I mean, it's fascinating, but also scary. It is. And by the way, Francis has never had a video go viral. So here's, here's what we're going to do, Mike. Next time he is being racist, I'm going to record it. I'm going to send you the footage and we're going to make a little film and we'll make you go back. You want to do it? All right. We'll take him out. Red-faced gammon being racist to get somebody.

It would be terrific. I've got the face. I've got the wardrobe and most importantly, I've got the voice. So it's... Come at me, bro. It's absolutely perfect. But this is a question that we always ask people. but I would really be interested to get your opinion on it.

All political movements inevitably burn themselves out. They have their peaks and then they sort of fizzle out. Do you think we're close to it fizzling out? Or do you think it's just continuing to, it's going to continue to get stronger? Well, from what I've been looking at, there's a billion dollar industry. There's bricks and mortar.

There's a doctrine that's been sitting there for 30 years. It's been built upon. And so it's not, I can't see it going anywhere. It's these people have careers and jobs built around this stuff. There is a lot of these kind of non-profit organizations popping up with this doctrine underneath it. And so it doesn't go away. We have to develop tools to live with it and to understand it, I think. Well, that's interesting.

I haven't thought of that before because up to this point, I think our position has been very much this stuff is nonsense. we've got to fight it and defeat it, but you think it's... Well, no, it's new. I'd be very surprised if it disappears. It'll continue on in some sense. I think it's part of the enterprise that Jim and I are getting into is we can potentially draw lines around part of it. Like, I don't...

We're talking about this huge phenomenon, but we're looking at this kind of fundamentalist new left sect, which I think is the dangerous part of it, right? There's all sorts of culturally woke people, but then there's the clergy. And so if we look at that and we can draw lines around it and actually talk about it as some kind of religious entity, then maybe it will get ratcheted down and we can apply separation of church and state principles to it. But I don't imagine, I don't know.

I know it's funny. It's almost ludicrous that we're living in a time like that. Right. Strange times called for odd solutions, I guess. We've got to do something. I can't imagine it disappearing. I just say it would be very strange. Because this has been, I mean, I know it's going to sound incredibly stupid and naive

now that I'm saying it out loud, but that is how stupid and naive I am. I've been sitting there for the last few years going, look at this new thing that they're saying that's really obviously stupid. more people are going to realize that this stuff is nonsense now. And then look at this other thing. You know, they're banning sombreros from university parties. You know, now they've banned clapping at some universities because it's triggering and it's a microaggression.

Now they're doing this, now they're doing that. And I was thinking, well, like eventually all of that is going to stack up to a point where enough people are going to go, this is bullshit. it, you know, let's wake up, let's stop this. But it's not happening. No, it's not just some thing that popped out of nowhere. It's got, it's, it's got decades of academic work underneath it. It's a, it's a sophisticated worldview.

And, I mean, we can laugh at it. We can, we can poke at it and give it shit because it is kind of crazy and weird, but it's, it's also sophisticated. it. They view the world in a different way. And the more you realize what the way they view their world, you realize how different it is from the way that you view the world. It's like, hold on a sec. We're going to have, I think you realize how deep the schism actually is.

It's not political anymore. It's philosophical. We're heading into a new strange territory, I think. And Mike, this has been frequently described. as the culture war. And if it is a war, who is winning? Is it that side that's winning or is it the other side? Well, I would find it very difficult,

if this phenomenon is not as widespread as I think it is, I would find it very difficult to gauge that. Because I've been looking at it for several years now and obviously we're kind of hooked up in some kind of network. And so all my algorithms are bent, toward it. And because I've started speaking publicly about it, all my inbox is full of people with stories about how it's entering their workplaces and how they feel totally alienated by certain groups. They have knitting groups and things like that. It's coming into all these

areas of the world. And I just get a constant influx of people going, can you help me help me out? I don't know what's happening here and I'm concerned about it. So, in, My worldview is just flooded with this. So it looks huge. So if it wasn't as big as I think it is, then I'm kind of stuck in this little bubble that I can't get out of. But I will put my hat in the ring and say,

this is quite large. I think there's enough evidence to suggest that there is something afoot. So I don't see it in terms of winning and losing. I don't, it's not. exactly how I look at it. Well, Mike, I know that you feel like, you know, your primary way of expressing what you feel and you think is through making films.

But actually, I have to say, I think this interview has been really, really insightful and helpful for Russ and for a lot of our viewers and listeners as well, because you've really narrowed it down to what it is. You know, like you said, these people won a revolution. It's based on 30 years of academia. here. Longer, but yeah, but it started getting harder in 30, yeah, yeah. They started getting serious up to 30 years. Exactly. And it's not going away and we're all going to have to find some way of dealing with it. I think it's been, it's been really, really great to have you on. So before we

ask our last question, which I really, I'm keen to hear your answer to, just tell everybody, where can they find some of your work on these issues? Where can they watch, you know, your primary way of expressing yourself, which is, of course, your film? Yes. Check me out on Twitter and then YouTube. Just Mike Naina, N-A-Y-N-A. I want to spend more time on YouTube, but behind the scenes, I'm obviously researching this stuff with the guys,

and I'm working on a feature-length film that I want to release through other distribution networks, channels, so I can kind of break the bubble that we're kind of stuck in. So hopefully I can throw it out and get a Netflix or something like that. Who knows how the way things are going right now. Yeah. What's that sorry?

I said they're not work at all. Yeah, look, look, it's going to be a, I'll have to Trojan horse it or something. I'll have to do something in order to get that in. But anyway, so I'm going to put more time into the YouTube channel as soon as I can find time. And so subscribe to that and wait, there'll be some more stuff. Brilliant. Well, we'll put out all the links to the video. Digilante's absolutely fantastic, genuinely enjoyable. And the last question we always finish with is what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society, Mike, that we really should be.

Well, I was just thinking before how much my inbox is full of people who are having trouble with this stuff and who feel alienated and they're not speaking up. So I think that there is is this sense that public conversation and private conversation are two very different things. Even public persona and private persona are two very different things. And so I don't distinguish between the two. And so I get myself into a lot of trouble by bringing my private persona to the public. It's probably some kind of disability. But I think that if we can just talk more, like you talk the way you're talking at home in your workplace.

and to stop being so afraid to say what you think. I think of that. If we can have more conversations around that so people feel empowered just to be themselves, I think that's something. Fantastic. It's a really, really important point because the more we silence our thoughts,

the more we don't engage, the more we don't share ideas, the bigger this problem will be. And the more it will embolden a very, very angry minority who want to, in your words, and I believe it as well, start a revolution. And for those of you've never experienced one, they're not fun.

So thank you very much for coming on. It depends on what you like, mate. It depends what you like. If you like killing people and chaos and all of that, that's quite fun for you. There is a section of population that would like that. And a lot of people don't. A lot of naive people think that they don't exist.

But they really do. I've met a few of them. And I don't want that, I don't want that guy in charge. charge. That guy is, that's not the guy you want looking after things. Absolutely. No, absolutely not. Well, Mike, thank you so much for coming on. Make sure you head over to Twitter, follow Mike. He puts some great stuff and of course, check out his work.

And the movie we were talking about is Digilante, but he's also got a range of other things. And we look forward to the feature film. Mike Nen, thank you so much for coming on the show. Cool. Thanks for having me, man. It was good.