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

27:59How do we play that game? I mean, this is going to show a low side of my character, but you can't say always that you're sad if somebody you're not very close to it, but you knew and you see them after some years and they've had. I mean, you can't say there isn't a slight sort of... You'll never guess, you'll become fat. There's different versions of that with men, I think. And I think men can be complicit in that as well. Yeah. You know, the thrill with a friend bald early, you know. I think that's very complex. The thrill, there needs to, there'll be a German word for that. Yeah, of course, like, Shardin Freud, but specifically for the scalp.

28:39Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think lots of people do that. But it's a pretty bad thing to encourage among people. But yeah, I think it is part of the competition, taking out of the competition, for sure. I was thinking as well about how material conditions you were saying before people's parents maybe had it better in some ways, but also would have had it way worse. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Material conditions often don't impact people's demeanors in the way that they might have predicted. Rich people can be bitter idiots, and poor people can be grateful heroes. All those George Orwell said by the age of 50, every man gets the face he deserves.

29:18What do you mean by that? I think that's actually true. I think there's a certain age. It might not be 50 now, but it's a certain age where you do show your life on your face. Oh yeah, I mean, for instance, somebody who's very profoundly depressed for long time, it writes itself across the face, it writes itself in their eyes, I think, particularly unhappiness, writes itself on somebody's face. A joy does as well. I mean, if somebody smiles a lot, they have laugh lines, you know. And yes, there's a great truth in it. I mean, we know that because we judge people by their faces, by the way, they interact with us, by the way, they look at us.

29:59I've been perfectly sensible. I've found a quote the other day that said, a people with a low self -esteem will always find a way to be miserable. And it made me think that material conditions a lot at the time are what? Young people, but many people lay at the feet of their despondency or their nihilism or the critical nature or whatever it might be. And I've seen enough of my friends vacillate through varying levels of affluence or relationship or singletonness or whatever and one of the things. It's sometimes it impacts the way that they show up, but many times they are the common denominator between all of those situations and the material conditions don't actually impact the way that they show up all that much.

30:46Well, there's a problem of analyzing this which is that anyone who's successful inevitably looks at their own path to success as being to some extent preordained. I mean, almost. I mean, if you just get there with something with wild luck, but most people, a lot of people, I mean, say who are successful look back and they think, well, I don't understand this person who hasn't made it to the same run of the ladder as I have. Why didn't they work hard? And there's a sort of callousness actually that can creep in there. But equally, people are to a great extent master their own fate and it's a very hard one to analyze that.

31:22I say because the Outriders skew the whole statistics. I mean, the Outrider who does very well, not everyone can do what he or she has done, but he or she is likely to think they could have done. Well, you retroactively, a lot of people that achieve success look back at the route that was particularly designed by them for them to achieve the very specific type of success that they managed to get and then retrofit that as a universal law that anybody else could follow. But one of the things I've realized is I've spent more time digging into personal growth and self development and all of that stuff.

31:55So much of it is post -hoc rationalization about one person's very, very idiosyncratic solution for this thing. And they say, these are the universal principles of X, Y, and Z. And you go, no, they're not. It's highly personal. It's your personality just spun up and tuned up to 11. Yeah, I mean most successful people I've ever met have some story of their own growth, which is both inspiring and not replicable. What are the usual people? Well, what's the alternative, as you said before, like you have to lay the agency at your own feet, because if you were to perhaps admit the truth, which is I was in the right place at the right time, well, that can be the case, not many people say that, but yeah, some do.

32:41Yeah, yeah, if you're in Britain in the 80s, friends, it's a good time to make money. Easier, better than today. So there's some people who say, yeah, it's a great place at the right time. But most people do sort of vaguely think if they've made it, it was sort of preordained. I mean, we all do that to some extent. I often describe myself as being lucky and then need somebody to remind me of how hard I've worked. Yeah. had a friend who joined Goldman Sachs in 1998 and he said he had an absolute golden period for about 10 years. Yeah, it did a little bit less. He said he was already starting to wind down before Lehman brother.

33:23Yeah. Some of that was to do DI, a very early instantiation of DI. That's right. Yes, there's several books that make that clear and stuff text. Yeah. Yeah, several books that make it clear about some of the hiring processes going on. Yeah, in 2006 he was already seeing it, but he told me he made a trade on 9 -11. He made a very particular trade and bypassed all of the security, the limits on everything and the pit boss or whatever. He's just some young dude. He's been there for two years, right, out of whatever university or something. What did his boss think of the trade? came over and said, like, what the fuck are you doing?

34:06And he said, look at this. If this then that, if this then that, ran it all the way down. He said, this is the outcome. This is what's going to happen. And he's like, we would like, I don't know what, so first off, he was concerned that it was going to go wrong. And then he made the most ungodly amount of money in the space of three hours. And then all the market shut for 10 days from, well, yes, from September 12th. And the only organization that had spec capital was Goldman because of this particular trade. And he was basically told, we may need to cut this, I'll check with him. He was basically told, go home, don't tell anybody.

34:46Yeah, of course. You made this. He shorted the market. Yeah, I mean, it was it was widely thought of 9 .11 because the stock market tanked, of course, immediately. And we didn't know if there's World War, if this was World War. And it was regarded very swiftly as actually being the duty of Wall Street to not do that. Well, Bush came back and you remember you did that ground zero announcement? Yes. And that was as much for the stock market as it was for the fucking popular. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yes, because I mean, stock market collapses, I mean, many, many more Americans, I can't even percentage, are invested in the stock market than in Britain, I mean, like three times more or something.

35:26Right. Americans with 401K. Yeah. More than 50 % of the population in America has some investment in the stock market. So it's different from in the UK where when the stock went when the pound was shorted in the 1990s by Soros and others, they a lot of British people are not that sympathetic because they don't see themselves as being involved in the stock market. We've got they are. They just don't know it. You mentioned George Orwell the telegraph recently spoke about his wife's biography or autobiography. Oh, there's a new biography of Sonia Orwell, yeah. George Orwell was sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic and sometimes violent.

36:05Biographer of the legendary writer's wife says darkness that runs through 1984 is a reflection of his soul. Yeah. Should we unperson George? Well, it would be the obvious end point. So the full circle. Full circle.

36:22Yeah, this is just a way for the author to get publicity is to repeat things everyone knew. I mean George Orwell held the views of his time about gay men, for instance. We know he was a little bit homophobic, but there was the 1940s, you know. Nancy Boyes and so on as you would have called him. We're not, you know, people weren't in like a 1990s taxi drivers in the salt that He was a sort of word that all well and people with generation would use, you know fairies or something and he does in some of the letters and some of his articles, but I mean so fucking what? I don't care. I mean, was he sadistic probably in some ways sometimes?

37:08Was could he be cruel and nasty probably being a human being? I just think that the absurdity of our age of judging people in the past, you know, just wait till people do that to you. Wait till somebody weighs up your own life in the balance and finds you wanting. I mean, I think it's preposterous. Human beings are what we are. Being amazed at us in the past. There's always just an expression of our own vanity and thinking we've got past all that. So like the way if a friend of mine was saying to me the other day when I was at Oxford, if you wanted to get a grant to study these days and say in English, and you were to choose Shakespeare as your subject of study, which is sort of unusual these days, you would, for instance, have to find Shakespeare guilty of racism, colonialist thinking, and so on.

38:02And it doesn't seem to strike these people that actually their job is not to judge Shakespeare, Shakespeare judges us and he might find us wanting. How so? Well, he gives us visions of the universe and our place in it, which it would do us well to listen to. And that might include exposing human follies, human weakness, human pride, human sin, human lust, the tendency to do evil in the name of doing good or think you're doing good and do great harm so much more. All of this is in Shakespeare's work and his characters and things he created and his mind and his work. I think that if you look at a panoply of a vision like that, you should think I wonder what he's telling us, rather than I wonder how I can judge him.

38:56What's the point of the latter? So boring. Human being from the past in human being and the past shocker. Wow. Has it always been this way? Has it always been people of the present judging people of yesterday by the standards of today? Well, most people didn't have time in the past to engage in that, to busy trying to put food on the table or surviving past the age of 25, you know. But what it is in our current society is there's a very strange lack of respect for wisdom. Henry Kissinger said this in the early years of the internet. He said all the knowledge is there, but where's the wisdom? People might not like me quoting Dr Kissinger in that regard, but again, he knows a lot more than most of his critics.

39:51I do think that's an oddity of the age. I think the oddity, the vanity of trying to judge everyone from the past by our current standards is just absurd. You think you know more than Shakespeare. Do you know more than all while? These are minnow's snapping giants. I don't care for them.

40:13One potentially unfortunate situation is that women's mental health is in part down to misogynistic songs. When BTS leads singer Jung Kook changed to a more misogynistic music, a disturbing trend followed. A psychiatrist's point of view on BTS's Jung Kook and the messages of pop music. Early in their teen career, BTS took a deliberate stance to refrain from objectifying a sexualizing woman. Despite going against a music industry norm, they achieved huge success. Now, as part of his solo launch, different imagery has surfaced in Jung Kook's They include a woman telling her her man that she will be your fantasy and swallow your pride to make him never think about cheating.

40:58Lyrics that I identify... It was just why he did soil your pride in a particularly suggestive way. I did not at all. I've got more to go here. Lyrics that identify women as those hos over there and a male rapper telling his female partner, I wanked before you came so that I can fuck you longer. Of course in reality, young cook songs are Part of the course or even tame. Does that work by the way what you just described? You've never increased your stamina by having a warm up. I thought the lyric more likely I did that before you came in. I just like to get a better Kind of like a lie down. I did that before you came in and that's why I texted saying I'm not so first I don't have a quick dinner now, I get a minute.

41:41One of my friends had a rubric for this that was masturbate before you evaluate. Oh, well that's true. Yeah, that's that can be sensible advice. I'm not sure if I liked you or I was just horny. Horny, yeah. Yeah. But no, girls, mentally how you were reading out these times, you were. That's it. You know, those holes over there, I went before you came so that I can fuck you longer.

42:04Well, where to start? downstream from K -pop is a litany of female mental health problems. That's what I'm saying. There's a problem here, isn't there? Because on the one hand, pop -up culture does have a massive impact on the way we see the world. I was at a gym recently where I actually asked the gym staff to turn off the music because it was a load of rap, a very unpleasant rap, with the repeated use of the N -word in it. Obviously it was a black rapper or so I was assuming. Right. Didn't find yourself mouthing along to the lyrics I'm not going to make some more worry about it. But actually, I know.

42:39That's fine. What problem could possibly emerge from singing along? Just to interject there, someone got cancelled on TikTok for Mouthing the N word along to a song. Right. So it's as possible. It's no longer the sound of the word. It's the mouth shape that that word engenders. Well, we know that it's a magical word in our time, which even the speaking of suddenly summons up the demons of the past. Lord Voldemort, very, very strange. But no, I just said to the gym, so I said, I just don't want to hear it, because I don't want, I just don't want it in the background of my life, you know. That gym that we trained at, we can discuss it another time.

43:21But anyway, no, I just don't like, I said things I don't want to, I'm like, ears and that's one actually. I have no interest in hearing the word because it's a banned word. So why would I want it in my mental background? But anyway, the point is, of course, popular culture has a huge impact on people. It has a huge impact on the way which people see themselves. It does. At the same time, you can overstate it. You know, somebody is not generally unhappy just because of the popular culture. Apart from anything else, because you can easily step out of it as I try to do. And be a part of your time, but not be its creature as Shilla says.

44:01And so no, I think it's a sort of weak excuse for unhappiness. The popular culture happens not to be to your taste or avoid it. Get out. Look up from the screen. When is cancel culture going to come for rap lyrics? Because it seems to me that, you know, it's worth fighting against the misogyny of air -conditioning temperatures in offices that are conditioned to the male body temperature as opposed to the female body temperature. or the levity of the era is just astonishing to me. Lots of people attribute to me this quote that I was not quite right, and it's quite for me that we'll be talking about gender pronouns when the barbarians break in.

44:44But I've said something like it quite a few times, but I mean, gender norms and air conditioning, it's the sort of thing that you would be discussing just before you will get, you know, macheteed. I'm totally serious about this. It's sometimes it's like one of the things that actually genuinely shocked me in recent weeks, particularly after Hamas massacre in Israel, was you know, and something which I do think at some point when it's all died down a bit, might, there might be a moment of, of, of, what do you've got, I've seriousness, which is, you know, take the music first for within a few miles of the guards aboard that Hamas attacked.

45:32All the young people there were this sort of peace rave and this isn't in any way to victim blame. These were people just wanting to dance and dance into the early morning and I think it was called the peace rave, the peace and love rave, something like that. And then this hideous other world broke into them, into their lives and ended the lives of hundreds of them. There's something haunting about this I find because it's especially haunting because it sort of demonstrates that your slogans and your attitudes only go so far and they can't keep out some of the things that lurking at the edges.

46:20And I think that when I hear people whining about minor things, if you have any idea of the world out there, if you had any idea of the things that was lurking, you couldn't possibly be complaining about this. Well, how do you think gaze for Gaza will get on long -term? Well, the joke at the moment is that there aren't enough tall buildings in Gaza to throw gaze for Gaza off. But these, I mean, these people, you know, I've said, gray off from there, they're part of the same phenomenon as turkeys for Christmas and chickens for KFC. I mean, I just, I'm fed up these infringed idiot cases. I mean, they're so mentally defective for these people.

47:05And incredibly narcissistic, you know, I can be queer and also celebrate it, Pannasine, no you fucking can't fuck off. You know, I can both argue for two state solution and also celebrate queerness and also not let myself down. No, you can't. No, you can't. You can't do all those things at some point you got to choose. I've got a video to show you. Let me show you this video. Can someone please explain to me what this means? means what does reproductive justice mean? Oh. Free Palestine. What does that even mean? Like what is it mean? I'm not pretty sure. Abortiones are illegal in Palestine, unless it's like a super medical emergency in the mother of thy.

47:55From what I understand, actually a lot of Palestinians have to go to Israel to get the abortions they want. So what does this mean? Yeah. What? It's such a huge sign. There's five people holding this thing. It's massive. That's very good. That's Danny, the other half of Ryan, who wasn't there the day that you came. You're a voice cast. Reproductive justice means free Palestine. What do you think? This is just incredibly ignorant young people in America who have been taught this weird version of the world where all oppressions interlink and interlock and you either the majority or minority for minority rights and issues or for majority rights and issues and all minority rights and issues intersect and overlap so that if you're queer somehow you no one knows not even that these ignoramuses who couldn't point to the river Jordan if you showed it to them on a map.

48:56Walk along the streets from where I just say shout you know from the river to the sea Palestine will be free because I think the Palestinians are underdogs in this weird version where they've mapped a very specific version of American racial politics onto everything else in the world. So same thing people talk about colonizers. I mean, there's this language of colonizers, apartheid, all this stuff, and they've just tried to map it everywhere. Well I say everywhere, actually it's highly selectively, highly selectively. I mean, the people who are talking about Israelis being colonizers, when I saw that the other day on the streets of London, I thought, yes, if only there was a name for large numbers of people who came from outside to a country, and if only we could identify what they might be called in Britain, oh, it would be immigrants, wouldn't it?

49:50Do you want to call immigrants colonizers in Britain? You sure you want to follow this? Logical conclusion? that talk about indigenous peoples. Oh, okay, great. Anyway, you don't want to apply that. Might there be a country or a continent say, oh, Europe, where you don't want to start talking about the indigenous peoples? I notice that people don't. But if you do want to, welcome to hell. So, no, all it is happening is a very selective mapping of a particular interpretation of the world that very dumb people in America have tried to put on certain selective other cases. And it doesn't work, it just doesn't work.

50:29But may they never find out how much it doesn't work? May they never find out? I wish some bliss in the ignorance because if their ignorance ever gets popped, it will be as brutal a day as can be imagined. I've been thinking for a good while about how hypocrisy is a purpose -built tool for the internet to use. It's like catnet for the internet. It's the thing because the reason it's so purpose -built, it's like one of those, can you spot the difference competitions on a touchscreen iPad? This is what's on the left, this is what's on the right. And what you have is here's something that someone once said or a position that they're used to hold.

51:10And here is what they hold now or here is what they do in their real life or here is whatever. And it's kind of what you're identifying here that you have a worldview which is self -contradictory, you're just using different words for one thing that is almost exactly the same for another thing. And then complaining about this one saying, don't look over here at this one. Yeah. Well, I mean, everyone is inconsistent to some extent. And I don't think, by the way, I mean, on hip -hocros, you know, for instance, I can see a scenario where somebody might say, oh, Douglas, you're hypocritical on this particular question.

51:43I might say, well, you know, there are some things I think are even more important than not being a hypocrite, such as, I don't know, surviving. The worst thing about him is hypocrisy. And it's a weird hypocrisy is it's easiest one to catch people on is the truth of that. Correct. Yes. It's easiest one to spot. Yes.

52:04And they do it as you say on this is what this person said 20 years ago, this is what they say now. I get human being in growing up shocker. Yes. Yeah. People are allowed to evolve, they change their minds, they grow up. We'd rather boring to say the same thing, I think the same thing only for 70 years. But yeah, people find epoxy very easy to see, and it's about the only advice you can really catch somebody on, I think. Which is if you say one thing publicly and do another privately. It's about the only one that people are really confident on. or most other moral judgments, the better or worse, have sort of ebbed away, but people are able to judge hypocrisy.

52:50But I think there are worse things, and I think not standing up for your loved ones, not standing up for your country, not standing up for yourselves in the face of horrible opposition from within without, probably worse than hypocrisy. I heard you say recently, you don't have to agree with everyone's principle to respect the principle they're sticking to. Did I say that? Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, sounds good. I didn't know I said that, but yeah. You did. But the reason that I like that is I think it shows why the bravery conversation or standing up for something that you believe in is something that is a...

53:31At least then, if someone is prepared to stand up for whatever their beliefs are, that that you can assume they're telling the truth, especially if they pay a high price for it. So one of the reasons why I have a good amount of faith that Sam believes the things that he says, but why would he not? He pays an unbelievably high price to continue to flip flop from one tribe to another tribe to another tribe, I don't think he's an unbelievably high price, but a price, let's say. Relatively high price, yeah. Yeah, I mean, very early in some people's careers, or when people first make it to public notice, people say things like, you know, do you really believe what you say?

54:06The answer to which for most people is, or ought to be, well, why would I say it if I didn't believe it? There are people who obviously do say stuff for lulls or clicks or monetary purpose, but at a certain point, I mean, you've got to accept that the person thinks what they think and respect them for it or at least do them the decency of believing that they mean it. And I think that even on people I disagree with wildly, I mean, it's such a boring argument that one, some people use it, particularly on the left, is like, you know, I wonder if it actually even believe it. I think they don't, I think they're just doing it for money.

54:37You go, well, that's an easier way to try to ignore them than actually trying to contend with the possibility of what they're saying is something they mean, I believe, and try to work out if there's anything in it. Much easier to say the person's only doing it except paid or something. Yeah, that's the shell grifter accusation, very boring accusation. I don't doubt there are some people who that is the case with but way fewer than way fewer than people think. Michael Males has a hierarchy of different, I think it's like the hierarchy of grifters. Don't know why, with the moment you say Michael Males, my face immediately starts to smile.

55:11Yeah, it's terrible. One of the, it's like industry plant paid opposition controlled side off. Yes, yes, yes. It goes all the way up and he said that he descended recently. He's not quite at paid opposition, but I think he's industry plant now. I think like Friedman is paid opposition It is paid is different from controlled opposition. Maybe it's controlled opposition. No fucking no controlled opposition is These are such weird terms that have cropped up in our area. I love it again. I think they're sort of low Resolution explanations with it really really low resolution explanations for things whenever I hear somebody describe things as that I always sort of know you're not dealing with somebody who actually understands the world.

55:53Do you find there's definitely a trend of conspiratorial thinking, conspiracies, much stronger in adopted homeland than it is in the UK, I think. Yes, that's true. What do you think? How conspiracy -pilled are you? Do you see... I mean, it's... This is the moment when people say, ah, controlled opposition. You was offended. Like, this is me allowing you to graduate from... I think I talked about this on the boys' cast. That's right. And briefly, and various people wrote to me saying, ah, there you go. That's proof that you're paid. You're glowing, as it's called. But it's... You heard your glowing?

56:38No, what's that? So, tell me if I'm wrong with this mark. You're the resident glow expert. but your glowing means you're like a planted person who's saying something that is outing there like.

56:58It's an intelligence operation that's breached the surface and people can see it. They comment on TikTok saying like you're glowing. Oh, so there's like the people that led to the FBI who are at certain protests, or wearing chinos and t -shirts, yeah. So your conspiratorial... So the conspiracy theory is very difficult in our era because some of the conspiracies are true, of course, of come true. We're known to be true. Lab leak conspiracy theory, probably true. They shouldn't have ever called nobody, should ever have called it a conspiracy theory. It wasn't a conspiracy theory. It was one of a set of hypotheticals to explain what happened with COVID.

57:40So a lot of things get called conspiracy, which are not, they're just type offices that should be allowed to remain on the table. And that makes a certain type of person increasingly prone to believe that everything that's called conspiracy theory is not conspiracy theory. And before you know it, you get say -nish individuals thinking that the moon landings were a conspiracy. We didn't land on the moon. The American didn't land on the moon. I don't know whether the people who now claim that believe that the Russians also faked it. It's an interesting question to ask them. Do you think that the Soviets were capable of getting to the moon, but the Americans were not?

58:16The Americans set up like a blow fan and a flag on a dodgy, papiameshi set, but the Soviets did make it. Or did the Soviets and Americans both agree to pretend to have gone to the moon, but not really have gone? None of it makes sense to my mind. But I have noticed, and actually all the literature demonstrates that there's certain types of mental problems that people have that make them disproportionately likely to believe conspiracy theories on mass. And one of them is paranoia. The more paranoid a person is, the more likely to believe that sort of thing. And that's the observation in my own life.

58:54I've known a number of people who've gone into the world of conspiracy and not come out, and they are all people who have suffered paranoid episodes in their lives. It's a rich ads app. So fear, engenders, yeah, and as I say, it's a sort of low resolution explanation for complex phenomena. And I think it's also that, so you can see the theories come about and are used by people who, and this isn't an original point many people have made it. They're made, the claims about them are made by a large, by people who don't understand how unbelievably chaotic the world actually is or can't face it. So they can't face the fact that, yeah, somebody who followed in the newspapers every day, all of your life did actually just die in a freak car crash because the driver was drunk.

59:48the can't bear the idea. The world can't be that cruel, it can't be that random. You want a bed? It's got to be coordination. It can't be coincident. Exactly. So people who can't cope with the wild fivality of the roulette table of our lives always go to the, there must be somebody behind it. There must be somebody who's controlling all this. You're going, you joking, nobody's controlling this. If anyone's controlling a damn thing, I'd want to know by now, but of course they're not. It's a very unsatisfactory place to arrive at in your life. And by the way, my own observation is not very good for people personally because they start to lose agency themselves.

1:00:28Locals of control get externalized. I'm at the mercy of the world. Yeah. And real answer is, if a world doesn't care. No. Doesn't even know that you exist. It is deaf to you. The ability for people to hold two conflicting thoughts in their mind at the same time is supposed to be the mark of Sophisticated thinking but it does show up here which is the government is both so useless that they can't get anything right and So sophisticated that they're able to call that massive versions the Arab world is filled with that the Muslim world is filled with that things like Of notice for Peter D. Oh my travel things like like 9 -11 was an inside job of the Americans to allow the Jews out of the World Trade Centre and also, yay 9 -11, good for some of Inladen.

1:01:14They can do both. Somebody I knew interviewed the father of the main 9 -11 hijacker, his name's gone out of my mind, I don't care, he should be forgotten, but interviewed the father in Jordan. And he was simultaneously capable of holding in his head that his son was a great Shaheed Amater for his alarm and that 911 was an inside job with Americans. Well, what the fuck? Like, choose. Do you think your son was an agent of the FBI and also a martyr? Like, hey, people do this. The Muslim world is particularly prone to conspiratorial thinking because it's a source of flattery to excel to explain why they have created so few successful societies.

1:02:06And Bernard Lewis made this point many years ago that the problem in the Muslim world is that there's a they have to find explanations because if you're given the revelations of Muhammad and you're told it's the last revelation ever from God and that you are the people who have received this revelation and everything's going to go great for you because you've got the revelation and then like the Jews you have one country and it does much better than any of your countries And you know, you can't get the economy of most of your countries going at all and you can't provide for most your citizenry and nobody's coming up the ladder and the economies and the dust and all this.

1:02:39You've got to find an exploration thread because like, what? We were given the revelation and they're doing much better. There's massive things like that that sit underneath the movements of our time, which maybe billions of people on the planet believe, and they believe them because it flatters themselves. It flatters the governments who aspire to run these countries or claim to run these countries. Yeah, billions of people believe this shit. I was thinking about the extremist worldview beliefs largely in the West, but I guess everywhere. And I was wondering whether we have finally moved beyond peak woke and a study came up recently that was kind of interesting.

1:03:26Research is from change research, pulled over a thousand registered U .S. voters from 18 to 34. A majority of both women and men consider far -rightism and far -leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. 76 % of women and 59 % of men consider identifying as a mega -republicant to be a large turn -off. 64 % of men and 55 % of women say they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist. Fifty -five percent of women... 64 % of men, 55 % of women swipe left on a communist that to know. 55 % of men said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. 41 % of men said the same for a woman being into astrology.

1:04:06Oh, that's not how you're going with that one. So if somebody says, what's your star sign date over? What there's a really famous meme where it's on iMessage and the text says, mum, what time was I born at? And the reply from mum says, stay the fuck away from that girl. It is the heart sinks when it comes up as a question. I don't know. The shame. 43 % of men said for Black Lives Matter, it was a red flag. If they say Black Lives Matter, 14 % of women. 53 % of women said it was a red flag if they refused to see the Barbie movie. 31 % of men. 58 % of women red flag if they say there are only two genders, 34 % of men, 54 % of women for they identify as a conservative, 33 % of men for they identify as a liberal.

1:05:05So next time you're vibing with someone, maybe save the podcast recommendations and daily horoscopes for the second date. Wow. 55 % of women say that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. I wonder if the species has any future because they can't listen to Joe Rogan.

1:05:35Well, that's amazing. I thought, what happened to all the good old people who used to say, I don't really have an opinion on that? Well, I got... I got pulled in a good bit recently on the internet for not commenting on the internet, on the recent sociopolitical furore that's happening in the Middle East. And I quoted you, pseudonymously, and said, I'm trying to make a habit of something which is very rare on the internet to not comment on something which I know nothing about. It's a very good rule. And yet, it's the rarest thing of all. Why shouldn't I? People care about my insights into health and fitness or my learnings about social psychology, why shouldn't my fiscal advice be important?

1:06:27Why shouldn't my views on immigration or it's much to be avoided that? And I mean in the end you make much less of a dick of yourself if you don't start talking about everything.

1:06:42Somebody recently sent me an article that were relatively well known person. I mean, article recently they wanted to publish about them at least. And near the opening said, I don't really know much about the Middle East, but this is about about. And I was just like, in that case, don't speak. Don't speak and say, but here, I think, if you don't know, just just agree not to do it. That's one reason why there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of television these days in the UK where you can be invited on to debate, the total ignorance who's only there for balance, you know, for off -con related balance.

1:07:21And I just can't do that stuff anymore. It's too demeaning, you know, that if there's a subject you know about a war that you've covered, covered many times, as in my case, from the Israel, Hamaz Wars and Israel Haspelar Wars, I just can't be sitting there with somebody. I hate to say this, and it's not not mentioned in misogynistic way, but there's lot of women who are currently invited on things for balance, firstly because they're women secondly because they provide usually a left -wing perspective and that's needed if it's me that's on as well. And you know, I just is so depressing to give your informed opinion about something you've seen and reported on firsthand and then they go to the other person and they go, So, well, like I think it's, I'm just like, oh, why, I don't know.

1:08:11Why wouldn't I just at home? Why could I be doing anything else? And I've got to listen to somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, whisk up an opinion, live on air. I'm so depressing. But masses of people are like that. And it's just, yeah, if you don't know about it, don't talk about it. It's a very good worth. I'm, or try it out in private with friends and mates and I try to learn something, we'd a book. Are we morally obliged to have a take on everything? No. No. And most people's opinion doesn't matter. I mean, it just doesn't. And I also think that the people who spend their time online, broadly speaking, trying to broadcast out their opinions on things, should be told more often, doesn't matter.

1:08:59It doesn't matter what you think. I mean, one of my rules on any war is you should never as a writer try to give advice to a government, you know. This is what the Israelis must do. This is what the Ukrainians must do. I need to listen to you. I mean, first of all, you don't live in the country, unless you live in a country, the pretty damn short of short, you should be a bit humble about telling other people about their lives, you know. And also like who made you the tactician de jour on everything? Right, it was the same as COVID. Everyone became a verology or epidemiology expert. Yeah, and then they became and withdrawal from Afghanistan expert.

1:09:44And then they became a Ukraine expert. And now they're all Middle East experts. And I just think it should be regarded as a massive red flag that the person in question is normally what's happened is they've downloaded the set of opinions they believe that their tribe should have. Correct. And that's why the morons marching in London and other cities, you know, with the exception of the Muslims who just whipped up all the time by the fact that the Jews do anything. I mean, I wasn't just saying, I don't care about other Muslims, Arabs don't care about other Arabs. Nobody cares about the Palestinians.

1:10:13Nobody cares about them. Can't tell you how little they care about them. Jordanians, loatham, the Egyptians, loatham, the Lebanese loatham. They've done nothing for the Palestinians for 70 years. And yet, whenever the Israelis do anything, the Muslims across the West come out on the streets because they hate the Jews. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen, not a peep on the streets of Britain, other places, certainly not big protests. Bashar al -Assad has killed more Muslims in the last 10 years than everybody on every side killed in every war involving Israel since 1948 including the war of independence.

1:10:55Nobody cares. The Muslims don't come out on the streets. They don't care. The only thing they care about is the hatred of the Jews. And it motivates them like nothing else because it hits the core of their self -esteem. They can't bear it. And so that one is very interesting to me. But there are these fellow travellers who go along with them who have downloaded, as I say, a sort of pathetic American interpretation of colonization, decolonization, racial justice, reproductive rights, and try to map everything on. My friends got a theory called Gwynner's Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it.

1:11:40At which point, they cobbled together a viewpoint from women half remembered here say before deciding that this two minute old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on. It's very good. My friend Freddie Gray at the spectator attempts to run very popular pieces each time a new big thing emerges. It's just the bluff as guide to whatever. Usually involves, in foreign parts, usually involves saying things like, well, they better get this done before the brutal Afghan winter kicks in. Who made you an expert on like meteorology an Afghanistan. Like what? Oh no, the Ukrainians have got to make his advance before they dread it in Ukrainian may.

1:12:24I mean, I tried to get the fluffers guy. It's very useful rule. I try, for instance, never to write about any foreign policy issue. It's about a country I've not visited. Preferably visited multiple times. I just, I can't bring myself to do it. I find it too embarrassing. It's so interesting when you talk about knowing one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion being able to accurately predict everything else that they believe. That mono thinking just proves that you're not a serious thinker. Well, I just, it's fairly obvious, for instance, you say, yeah, what's the problem with the big bearded guy winning the women's weightlifting?

1:13:03I go, okay, I know all of you other opinions as well. And to be fair, that probably works the other way around as well, to a great extent. The interesting thing with most people is where they're slightly out of sorts with their own political side. Well, that's exactly the point that you, if it's been a long time since you were surprised by the opinion of your favorite thinker or writer or commentator or whatever it is, that's probably a reliable signal that they're not really thinking for themselves. Yeah, if you're just permanently, oh yeah, it's like an older leather pair of shoes. Here we go again the COVID things happened and I can already predict such and such as opinion on it.

1:13:44You go every single time, all of the time, every single time. You know the idiosyncrasies of this person's very very particular worldview. Well, that's because it's not theirs. Yeah, of course. It's everybody else's. It's outsourced thinking. And that was really sad about that is that That means that you're not really living your life. I mean, you're living a pastiche of a prescribed set of opinions. That's so sad. I mean, it's so sad. The wasted energies and wasted lives of people who've just downloaded a set of opinions and they're just running them. Well, that's not your life. It's just someone else's life that you're just replaying.

1:14:23What was that quote you taught me about about being shunted to the side of the road of your own? It's a Philip Larkin quote from a poem for his, yes, is a description of a couple and he says that something is pushing them to the side of their own lives. It's a beautiful line. Terrifying line, horrifying line. You should make everyone judge for themselves. What does it mean to you? Oh, well, it means that there's a life that you hoped to live. You life you saw yourself living and you got pushed to the side of it and ended up not living that life. I think a large number of people have that. Almost all unhappy people I've met have that feeling to some extent.

1:15:05And then you've got a choice of poisons, one of which is to choose the poison of other people held me back. Another is to face up to the fact that you are in somewhere coward or a victim of circumstance or something else. But I think a lot, I mean, you know, one thing that young people can be encouraged to do is to set out the sort of life they would like to live, imagine the sort of life they would like to live, and the name for it. And working it out is sometimes difficult, sometimes not. But if you do have that image of your life, as you think it should be lived, and you end up not living it, that is, particularly if you can feel yourself slowly being pushed away from it, I think that's a terrible, terrible feeling.

1:15:48It's like watching your own demise occur second by second, yeah. Fortunately, I've never felt it, but I definitely fear it. Where do you go to find or to avoid cowardice or to find resilience or bravery? Because a lot of the time the easier path is easier and it's the one that's got the least resistance. Surround yourself with courageous people. Surround yourself with brave people. And that can be bravery of all sorts of different kinds. When I turned 40, I had a dinner, which I think you weren't invited to, but it's only because you weren't in town, if I remember right there, but I had to get a lot of my favorite people in the room, at least, and it was interesting that a friend made a speech in which he said it's striking.

1:16:35I went and said the names of the people around the table, but some of whom will be familiar to listeners. But a friend of mine gave a rather very touching speech, I was very moved by, which he said, you know how noticeable it was that Douglas was surrounded himself with courageous people. And it was a very wide array of bits of the world and different disciplines and so on. And I was really touched by that because I hadn't particularly noticed that I'd done it. But then I rise I sort of had that actually yes, I had a massive subconsciously, but maybe now consciously wanted to be around courageous people because I think that courage is something that rubs off on other people.

1:17:08I think it's enormously to be desired to be around courageous people. And that might be different types of courage, some physical, some mental.

1:17:21So that's one thing. It's about yourself with courageous people, or at least not cowards, not credons, not sort of people who just say the same things that everyone's meant to say and so on. There's many ways people can get out of this non -life that they are being shunted into. One of my friends, it wasn't a friend at the time, I just met him for the first time, but someone that had been interested in for a good while, I met in Austin a while ago. And he'd had an interesting story and he'd faced a cancellation over the last few years. And he'd sort of told me the story and he said, he was sad on some rooftop later night talking about this thing and he was regaling me with the story.

1:18:02He said throughout my entire life, I thought I was a hard man. I like to do man things and surround myself with masculine people. And I was into guns and shooting and fitness and friends with Navy SEALs and all the rest of it. He said, my entire life, I was scared that I was a coward. It's terrified that I was a coward. And he said, in my darker moments, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. Beautiful. And then this consolation thing came along and he said, you know, even even the people that do really hard things, hard intellectual work, hard training, hard physical work, all the rest of it, there's a difference in the kind of difficulty that they do because it's elected, right?

1:18:48You've chosen to do the hard workout. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But when the entire world comes to bear on you in a way that feels like chaos and catastrophe he was whipped up into a whirlwind and he said, yeah, that was a genuine test. And he was very grateful. He said, my better self stopped his coughing and kicked the door in and came to help. But just, yeah, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door. Well, the thing with that is the difference between situations you find yourself in that it dangers us through choice and ones that you've been thrust into. Yeah, been thrust into and probably know that the consequence of being thrust into danger situation is much more likely to lead to PTSD and things like that.

1:19:44Then if you choose to, and I've been fortunate in my life, the most dangerous situations since I've been in it, I've been one I've chosen to be in. And that's very different. But yes, I'm glad he found out that he was more courageous than he feared. But think about that. What a beautiful line. To be more courageous than you feared you were. Right? This almost this war against yourself. Yes, this fear of your own nature. Well, that, but that's, I mean, it's both a sense, but I mean, there's a horrible example I sometimes use, but I mean, if you're ever mugged for your wallet, let alone you're mugged with somebody.

1:20:28I certainly feel mugged with a girl that you were with or looking after and you just hand it over. There's like, there's several reasons that it's worth handing over the wallet for. One of which is, why do I need to risk getting shot for like, or stabbed for a hundred bucks and a few phone calls in the bank? Yeah. So that's like the reason to hand over the wallet. What I can. The reason not to hand over the wallet is, are you sure that you're not going to spend the succeeding weeks dreaming dreams of pornographic violence against your attacker and thinking of how you're going to, you would torture him if you could get your hands on him and the brutal way in which you would have revenge if you ever find him.

1:21:12It might be easier to just get your head kicked in a bit. Yes. And are you sure you can live with the version of yourself that is you handing over the wallet? I said this recently in a piece in New York post about the people on the New York subway where there's this awful thing you probably seen where people, you know, like a woman will be being abused by some maniac fentanyl adult, you know, drug addict and, and you know, people like either look into their phones, including men, or they will get their phones up and like record. And I mean, somebody said, Douglass is trying to get people killed and I wasn't obviously, but what I was saying was, where are the men?

1:21:50Just like stand up and like confront the guy if he's got a woman by her hair and is parading around the carriage. And yeah, the backlash was, what do you know? These people might get killed if they step in. But might I say, yeah, but also maybe we'll have a more civil society if people don't think they can go around and do this stuff without consequence. I'd like to see far more standing up like that. I think it's a pathetic position for particularly for men to be in to sit there like getting out their mobile phones. But it's everyone's choice. I don't exactly know what I would do in some of the situations I've seen, you know, read about on the New York subway.

1:22:36Didn't that guy do a thing? And now, is he in Did he get jailed for it? He's charged, he's coming up for trial. This is a, I think it's Daniel Nide, I think. Former Marine, there was a guy on the subway who was clearly off his head on various drugs, was very, very violent towards people in the carriage. Some point tore off his top and I was like, I'm going to kill you or something like this. And this Marine at that point stepped in, got him into a chokehold. was clearly not meaning to do it, but the chokehold was too hard and he suffocated the guy and he died at the scene. And that man, the ex -marine is charged with a think murder, if not man, I think manslaughter.

1:23:25And he could face a very significant prison sentence. There's a lot of discussion in New York as to whether or not a New York jury would actually be convicted. Where's he being convicted in New York? Right. Because you could say that the guy, because there's a racial element, like everything in America, and because the former Marine was white and the guy off his head was black, there was an attempt of course to put the racial lens on it. And we'll see if in New York jury, which will be comprised half or so of women who have been on the subway and have probably had unpleasant interactions will convict this man for stepping in and genuinely think that he meant to kill the guy or just this was like a good Samaritan act gone wrong.

1:24:16But it's very salutary that that sort of stuff. There was a guy in London about 15 years ago, I mean he very much haunted me because the fiance the girl and did a victim impact statement that was particularly harrowing, that they were on the top of a bus in London and a guy on the bus started throwing chips like people's heads and have fiancee got up to say look mate lay off and the guy stabbed him. He died and that's an okay and in the wake of a story like that a lot more people in the society will be craven on the bus because they'll have that example in their head. My fear about this case in the New York Marine cases that he, the Marine, by doing what he did and it going wrong and the publicity it got will stop other people doing good stuff and it, you know, 100 percent will have done while it's pending.

1:25:07Whilst it's pending. Yeah. So a lot rides off the verdict. That's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. And in America with a jury when you're on one of these cases where the society could break out in rioting, I'm not sure it will for this guy because the victim wasn't enormously upstanding as a member of the community and had quite quite a bit of a video. I don't think it was videos or at least they didn't see that. Quite a lot of it was videoed, but he'd also had previous things where he had done. It was a whole litany, like a laundry list of times that he'd been arrested for every violent conduct, yeah, exactly.

1:25:40So he won't be that sympathetic, a character, but then there are quite a lot of unsympathetic characters who get dragged through the laundry of racial justice stuff in America and become saints. I won't name any names. But going back to that sort of way you go when you need more resilience thing and the bravery piece, what was that CS Lewis quote about the times not being optimal? Oh yeah, what's that? That's one of my favorite, one of my favorite sermons over given was by CS Lewis University Church in Oxford in October 1939. Yes, I love that. Lewis was a master of prose as well as theological writing and he gave this beautiful, beautiful sermon in which he said, yes, he said, the conditions are not optimal at the moment, the search for truth and beauty that our species goes through, he's going through such a trial, but the point is the conditions never were optimal, they never are.

1:26:38He says even those periods of history which seemed to be tranquil, like the 19th century, turn out on closer inspection, to be filled with crises, alarms, panics and all the rest of it. He says if human kind had put off the search for truth and beauty until the conditions were optimal, the search would never have begun. And the main point he makes is that there is something wonderful and unusual about human beings. He says that the ants, for instance, have chosen their own route. They've chosen safety in the security of the hive and presumably they have their rewards. But as he says, he says, men are different.

1:27:21And he gives us beautiful lists. I think I can remember it. He says, they propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cells. They quote the latest poem whilst advancing on the walls of Quebec. Make jokes on scaffolds and comb their hair at the gates of the Montpellet. This is not panache, he says. It is our nature.

1:27:50Fuck, that's cool. It's true as well in my observation. Absolutely true. Also. Well, because I've seen people in beleaguered cities many times, cities under fire, cities under bombardment, cities that are being raised to the ground and human life goes on. It's an extraordinary thing. People continue their studies if they can. People continue their family life if they can. They've realized that the conditions will never be optimal. They can be better and they can be worse, but they never perfect. I think that the real lesson of what Lewis is saying is,

1:28:32and I think it's off whatever it is you're meant to do until the situation is optimal. Don't fail to pursue what it is you think you're meant to pursue in your life until you have total tranquility, for instance, that you have the house or the apartment you would like until you have the relationship you would like until you have the... Don't put it off until then. Or until the world is peaceful. which will never happen, never happen, never has happened, never will happen. Don't put it off till then because if you put it off till then it means you'll put it off forever. So do whatever you're meant to be doing now.

1:29:13Start now if you haven't started already and if you started already don't go any slower for God's sake. And this is part of the cost of our times, I've said this before, but part of the cost of our times is the enormous expense of energy on idiotic things that you can do nothing about. I think we should say to more people, don't hell at the moon. Don't shake your fists at the skies. Get home with what you're meant to be doing. And that will be different for everybody. But I just, I'm very, well, I'm too irritable to put up with going at the slow speed that a lot of people want to make us all go out these days.

1:30:02So I want them out of my way. Yeah, I think a lot about the a rise of a victimhood culture. No, it's got no time for. Yeah, it seems to me that like an existential crisis is actually a luxurious position to be in because the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted. And victimhood culture is so rampant at the moment because the human systems demand for challenge is outstripping reality's ability to deliver it to it. All of the problems, most of the problems that previously would have captured the front of our attention have been moved out of the way. Absolutely. A sensitivity to challenges now being tuned up.

1:30:49Yeah, hunger and so on. I think that's true, by the way, I'm just amazed by that I mean, I feel sometimes when increasingly like I'm just in a different world than the one we're now in, it's only a different society. I'm sure it was the same with you and you're going up. But the Britain I grew up in was a place which liked resilience. I mean, we admired resilience. We didn't admire people who wind and mule. In fact, those are the people for you avoided at all costs. Gosh, she's a whiner. God, he's a whiner, I mean. You know, and people said things like, you know, mustn't grumble. That's one of my favourites.

1:31:36How are you mustn't grumble? Now, I'd say, well, actually, I've got stage four cancer. I'm not sure that's grumbling. I know, but we talked about it like that. People from that generation still say things. I've offended that generation who's got cancer at the moment. and he's like, oh, so boring. So boring. Everyone I grew up with was like that. Now you might say there's something unhealthy about that, but there's actually something healthy about it too.

1:32:05And there's something healthy about assuming that everyone has their troubles and so they don't need you to add yours to their list of things to worry about that day and you know and share people up and encourage them where you can and so on. I said he don't bring them down. Well, it's a weird sort of self -fulfilling prophecy of pedestalizing victimhood that there is a limitless sky on how much victimhood you can claim. Yes. Whereas if your status and your prestige is downstream from your accomplishments, there is a limit on how much you can accomplish because you need to go out and fucking do it.

1:32:42Yes. Reality is going to constrain how much impressive stuff you can go and do. But there is an inethical universe of I athletes foot and my gluten intolerance and my chronic flatulence and my you know whatever else. Those are things that you can just continue to accumulate like trinkets. Yes. I just find those people boring. I just don't care for victimhood. I think it's undesirable emotion. It's a sign of a rather undesirable person. But I don't know why we've given into this. I genuinely, particularly in Britain, I'm just baffled by it because it wasn't the country we had. Well, maybe it's, you know, how you said your solution for courage was to surround yourself with courageous people.

1:33:31If you kind of get this mimetic wave, almost moving through where fewer courageous people are around, which creates fewer courageous role models, which means to, you know, yeah, yeah, and you have the thing of men being persuaded to become cringing unocks. Not a good thing. Well, that's another reason why, you know, this conversation around the guy in the subway is so interesting, because is he, is he really supposed to stand up for the women or is that? Is he mansplaining? What if he mansplains while he stops a woman to have the answer around by her hair. Well, of course the answer to that is the ear of her has to say, you know what, there's no touch thing as man is blaming, or at least it's not very important, get onto something more important, like women not being assaulted on the subway.

1:34:21Choose your priorities. With a denial of sex differences, would leads to the conclusion that that woman can... Why shouldn't the women stand up? Why shouldn't they use up a body weight? Yes. to push this fentanyl fuel maniac off this lady. Well, let's say that's a luxury belief for that one, and it doesn't meet reality very well. I'm not sure anyone would be very happy if the men in the carriage said to the woman in the carriage, go on. Go on. You're turn. Yeah. We've had our centuries of patriarchy. All for higher, I'd say. What is it? There's one that got my goat recently with them. Somebody was in the US, or you...

1:35:00It always happens now when everything comes up out conflict. Hillary Clinton was one of the worst culprits at doing this. They always say this thing of, you know, one of the reasons you've got to stop any war once it starts is, they say, you know, the first victims of war are women. What the fucking knot? The men, they're men. Who do most of the fighting and the dying? Hillary Clinton's point is, well, then they're widows and then... Ah, yeah, the poor widows of the men that are dead. Yeah, there's actually the British MOD has a thing of a special section now dedicated. I think thanks to the impressive insight of that military expert, Angelina Jolie, they have a special bit of the MOD dedicated to women in conflict, suffering of women in conflict.

1:35:44Why not have a suffering of men in conflict as well? Such weird priorities are age. It's totally unserious. This age is so unserious. So why you can't help thinking that at some point the maniacs, the barbarians were just breaking because we've made ourselves so weak. But it's so captivating, right? This is what I meant when I said, you know, have we progressed beyond peak woke? Because it seems to me like both the hyperwoken, hyper anti -woke thing is capturing so much of the attention. Oh, they're just, I'm so bored of these people. They're so ridiculous. can't spend any more of my life listening to them.

1:36:25I don't want to listen to the slowest kid in the class. I don't want to go at his or her speed. I don't want to talk to somebody so mentally impaired that they think that we are a weirdly hemafroiditic species, or that the clownfish is a useful species to interpret behavior of human beings. things. We can't go at this speed. No. No. Twenty years ago at the dawn of the internet age, we had hoped that we would get so much farther in the 21st century. And here we are with this stupid society slowed down by maniacs, debating the first thing we knew, boy or girl. No, not going at that speed. Emma Radakanu did an advert for HSBC recently, which you may have missed.

1:37:22HSBC rewrote three classic fairy tales, their book is called Fairer Tales, and it shows that women don't need men at all. With financial attitudes shaped as early as five years old, the new book challenges traditional gender stereotypes. The new book called fairer tales, Princess is doing it for themselves. Reimagines Cinderella, sleeping beauty and Rapunzel as successful businesswoman, Prince Charming... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA This is an exceptional businesswoman, really. Charming is a raced -as -the -man character. Emma Raddokanu, read to them, so in the end, the Princesses didn't need a Prince to save them.

1:37:58They set up their own businesses, saved their money, and then spent it very wisely. Maybe one day, you'll buy a tower or set up your own shoe business. That's a quote. Said the tennis player. That's the worst. I mean, I read Meghan Markle's book The Bench. And that's worse. That's worse. Wow. Yeah. What an inspiring tale. Fairer tales. Princess is doing it for themselves. Have you seen the South Park episode of where Cartman wakes up. He has a nightmare. You told me about this. For the people that haven't seen it. What is Cartman? Cartman has a nightmare. It turns out he is a diverse black woman.

1:38:46His character is recast. And all of his friends, Kenny and everyone else, are diverse female or trans -racial characters. And then Cartman wakes up from the nightmare. No! And his mother comes in. What is it? Are you having another dream? I mean, once again, all my favourite characters in the cartoons have been replaced by ethnically diverse women. And it's okay, come. It's okay. The CEO of Disney isn't hiding under your bed. Would you check? Would you check? Would you check, Mom? Okay, I checked. She's not there. I'm worried that she's going to come out again and place all my favourite characters with ethnically diverse women.

1:39:26I love those guys. God, they keep doing it. Yeah, I mean, it's the same thing with, there was that rather unappealing young woman who was meant to be playing snow white and the new Disney snow white. Rachel Zygler. No, no, no, somebody else. And she's, is it? Yeah, Rachel Zygler, Zygler. So as she said, Prince Charming was an apprentice, he was a stalker. Yeah, and she didn't need Prince Charming to discover that she could be the woman she could be. I mean, this is like sub barracabama circa 2007. Like the princess is the person she's been waiting for or something, you're sister's keeper. I, I, I, why don't they invent new tail?

1:40:09That's what I can never understand without. Why don't they just invent new tails instead of screwing up every existing tail that's loved? Well, make your boring movie about an inspirational tail of a woman who wants to start a business and then does and has some success. I mean, okay, make that into a film. Why do you have to go and ram second, rape all of, pillage all of the storehouse of stories that people like? Brett Cooper's playing Snow White for Daily White. Did you see that announcement? What? You don't see this? No, no. Let me tell you, Jeremy Boring and Ben Shapiro are doing their own live action remake of Snow White with Brett Cooper as Snow White.

1:40:50right? Because she's like West End trained, right? So she's very well trained, up supposedly a very well trained actor who can sing apparently, like the triple threat, podcast, act saying, right? And they announced it the other week and it's going to be coming out next year. God, I hope they'd slay, Disney. There's a rumor that Disney has had to reshoot a ton of scenes, including all of the dwarf off scenes because originally the dwarves weren't dwarves. They were like a multi -racial just group of different people. They were diverse ethnic women. It was the Southern thing again. But apparently this is just a rumor, but apparently they've reshotted all of the scenes with the dwarves to CGI actual dwarves.

1:41:36So they've gone full. Yeah, because I know that there was a revolt of the dwarves, which is something you don't hear every day. No. There was a revolt of the dwarves because, of course, dwarf actors who have their equity cards annoyed because there's not many dead -set jobs. Yeah, you'd have presumed it. They should have at least been seven. Yeah, of course. A plus a stunt actor. Stunt dwarf. One to do all seven stunts. Well, you could have 14, I guess. It depends how demanding the act, how much larger you want to spread around the dwarf actor community. But yeah, the point is it's actually was a panic or a about this because like these are some of the few like dead roles we've got.

1:42:15What is this not the same, the people who didn't cast that, is that not the same group of people that would say we can only have a gay actor playing a gay man and we can only have a black actor playing a black man and we can only have other people as such. I won't use the word. Yeah, I mean, again, you haven't got time to go to the pace of these people. Acting is pretending to be other people. People will be shocked that most people who play hamlet are not themselves members of the Danish royal family. Welcome to the world of Make Believe. A charity shop in Swansea asked people not to donate sex toys.

1:42:54Barnardo's customers have been asked to refrain from donating used and unused marital aids as they aren't quite the sort of toys we're looking for. When they say we want like your old book to your old toys, they didn't mean sex toys. Sex toys. I think that's a perfectly good policy for a secondhand shop. Customers will remind you of the secondhand dildo event. You don't. What have they got in here? No.

1:43:28It's a redressing room. Customers were also reminded that the branch had CCTV so that these items can be traced back to the original owners. Oh, oh, according to the, that means that that means that you, there's like a, what's he called that thing in Australia? The boom rank. That's a boom rank effect. You try to give your dildo away and it keeps coming back to you. Then it's back on your doorstep the next morning. God damn it. I don't know why can I get rid of this thing. It's right over the head. But he keeps landing in binados. And then he's bringing that. It's a dildo that will never die. Yeah.

1:44:04Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for that story. That was beautiful. Well, I've got another one. Is there a lesson we can take from this? Oh, I think just be careful where you put your dildos really is the matter. There's a moral of the story. Yeah, never leave your dildo in Banados. That is. Yeah, definitely not in the bargain bin. School in Lafayette has refused to celebrate Halloween because it isn't inclusive while going all out for LGBT plus history month. Is there much history with LGBT plus? There's gay history. I mean, there's lots of gay people in history and there is that, but it's also what we used to call history.

1:44:42There isn't much tea history. There's... B history? I mean, there are sort of, I'm a bit skeptical about bisexuality, but there's a bit of bisexuality in history, of course. But I mean again these people are such eagerness as they never know anything I can't tell you Chris I mean I have to deal with some of this shit and They just don't know anything and they keep record this like the all -world thing they keep reporting their so -called discoveries as if people didn't know them before and Everybody new most of stuff that they are trying to bring out and it's just very tedious and again And what's happened to the mainstream thing of it?

1:45:22Why aren't we concentrating on big subjects, big authors, big historical issues? Instead of this boring, slow pace. We're here at ARC, and we're going to be attending at some point this week. I can't remember what. The tagline is something about a better vision for the future, a more positive vision for the future. Yeah, better story. Better story for the future, sorry, John. And what is your, how do you think that we can begin to tell a more positive story for the future? Because it seems to me that much of the proposals are quite easily criticised and often rightly so. But does this sort of zero sum view of happiness and growth?

1:46:06Somebody else is happiness somehow detracts from mine. Well that's a particularly British view, of course. Very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that guy's got something is because I've not got taken it from me. It's taken it from me. Yeah, but what's a more positive vision of the future? Well, one would be that we're not facing imminent apocalypse and catastrophe all the time from every possible direction, and particularly not ones that people have whipped up a new generation into a further over. I mean, I think of a green apocalyptic thing as a particularly damaging to young people. I think it's very, very bad for their mental health.

1:46:38very had, very, very detrimental to their sense of how they build a future. And I think a lot of young people have been lied to about the proximity of global climate catastrophe. I mean, every time there isn't an actual catastrophe going on in the world, our leaders go straight back to the climate catastrophe. And they're like, well, the climate crisis, they now call it. What is happening is not a crisis. maybe a problem to be managed, but there's a luxury in calling such things a crisis. A crisis is like, minute, my shoes are on fire. That's a crisis. Not like, is possible that in 40 years we'll need more AC.

1:47:26I don't see that as a crisis. But so yes, but I think that in general there are several things that are big stories, big narratives of people are being spun, which are incredibly innovating. That is, they sap energy out of the society. You could feel it. The hopelessness, if you tell young people they're not going to live into adulthood, they're going to burn to death. The hopelessness of saying, you know, you can't change anything, or that this is the trajectory we're on. I think that one of the other ones in the green stuff is that the hopelessness of saying to people effectively, you You shouldn't leave any footprint on the planet, including children, including children.

1:48:09And just to put one thing out there about the hopelessness of that, I mean there's just new thing that many cities have signed up to, including London, which is a future in which, among other things, we will not be allowed to move around very much and we will be allowed a flight perhaps every six years I think it is. What's this? It's a city's, what's it called? I'm blanking on the name. It's this new proposal for cities in 2030 or something. It's a decarn as signed up London to it. Is there one of these carbon neutral fantasies? No fun 2030. Yeah. And one of them is that you won't be allowed to fly more than once every X number of years.

1:48:51And of course none of it makes any sense because among other things, Because all that means is, part of the fact the airline industry is destroyed, is what it means is the cost of an airline ticket will be like 40 times higher. So they always assume you can do all of these things and nothing will change. You know, amazingly you'll be able to put a rule like that in and you won't destroy the airline industry or whatever. But all of it is just so anti -human. I mean, it is so anti -human, like, that the aspiration of human beings should not be to be born, fight against the patriarchy, leave no carbon footprint and die in the most ethically fine manner, preferably taken out of the Swiss clinic, you know, and then burnt in a cardboard box.

1:49:40It's not a very heroic narrative, you know? And I think that actually we do orient our lives around stories and around narratives, and we should not have the unique narrative that I've just laid out. We should have heroic narratives. I mean, for instance, you know, the narrative of the adventure, of life being an adventure, that you set out on a path and hope that you know, hope that you set out yourself out on a heroic path, or at least an exciting path. You know, I mean, the counterpoint of the one I laid out earlier of the one, you know, you don't know, you know, sorry, the counterpart of the one I laid out earlier, which is the, you know, everything that's going to happen if you go along this path of things other people have persuaded you to say is, well, you know where you're going, you know everything to say, and you know kind of what trajectory your life will be on.

1:50:37Oh, you know, I say, well, yeah, there's another trajectory as well. And it's the one that I and I suspect you orient ourselves in our life, which is I don't know exactly. I don't know with that certainty. I don't know what'll happen, but if I put one foot fairly sure, footedly in front of the next and tread well and orient myself by things like truth, Sure, I don't have the certainty, but it's an adventure, and it's my adventure, your adventure. You actually own it, and then fancy that. You'll actually have your life. I mean, you can feel proud of what you got to, right? Because you want being ventriloquized by somebody else's.

1:51:27You didn't spend your life saying things you don't know or mean or believe or just repeating like a parrot in order to keep in with a group of people you shouldn't seek the affirmation from. You will live your life. Remember that the outcomes that most people get are ones that you don't want in any case. The average American is obese, divorced and with less than one K in the bank. So doing sobering, isn't it? Doing what everybody else does sounds like a very sure -fire strategy, but the outcomes are ones that you don't want. Yeah, well, I mean, and that can be the case with financially successful people.

1:52:09I mean, it can be the case with people. I mean, I often say that people go into professions which they don't like. And again, it's interesting. I mean, some of them are, there are ones that people apologize for as you talk to them. You notice that? There's certain, normally these days, one of the biggest self -deprecating professions is lawyers. You say to somebody, you know, what are you doing? I'm a lawyer. I think why that? Yeah, you spent five years in full -time education three years in developing to and normally it's like they think oh Well, it's not very interesting or something, but I think why wouldn't you do something where you went?

1:52:40I am a lawyer It's fantastic. I love Doing this that's British lawyers again for you I've seen Americans do that as well my point is is that is and they're financially well rewarded You know and there's there's rules you can follow on that like um like There are ones I don't understand. If you are doing a job that pays you well and allows you to provide it for your loved ones, that's worth doing. Even if you're not your optimal role. Doing a role that you don't much care for and you're not providing for other people and you don't see any particular purposes, that's probably not a good idea. Or you could go, you know that there are other options and other routes open to you that would allow you to also provide for the fact that you're providing for.

1:53:29The bravery narrative is definitely one that I think is lacking. And this risk aversion that we have, this young people getting their drivers licenses later than ever, most commonly living arrangement for men and the age of 35 is still living at home with their parents. Yeah, that's such an awful stat. People going into full -time employment later than ever. And I think about, you know, when we were actually, no, you are the worst person to talk about this. You told me you didn't get your driver's license until somewhere, I know, I've been a bit lazy. But I'm not risk of hurting weightless. They manifest similarly.

1:54:07Most people cut you 17 years old in the UK, drive's license. I want to be free. I want to be liberated. I don't want to have to be asking mom and dad for left and etc. Yeah, there's not a, there's not a narrative of adventure. No. I think that is important because I think that you, if you don't have an narrative of adventure and success and an idea of what that looks like, you know, you are disproportionately likely to live a more miserable life. I think probably both of us, to some extent, have worked our way out as we've done it and, you know, trodden the path that's not completely clear. and if you said to me, what are you going to do in 10 years time, Douglas?

1:54:52I can particularly tell you, I'll tell you roughly what I'd like to do, but it's not entirely clear. It might be if I was in a corporate law firm and hoping to make partner or something like that, but yeah, I mean the lack of clarity on it should be energizing. I'd have thought. Well, that's what's exciting about it. But also for the desire for certainty, which is also exactly where the conspiracism comes from, right, because it removes random chance from the world and makes everything coordinated, rather than coincidental, that desire for certainty really dissuades people from going and doing something which has potentially outsized outcomes.

1:55:37Well, look at look at what happens that the narrative of leaving home or leaving the village or leaving the town There's every reason not to go because if you go You risk a lot of things one of them is failing and if you go and You fail then you have to go back to where you were from, a family or a tale between your legs, and then you can console yourself that you tried it, but it didn't work. A lot of people will not even make the try because they think it won't work. So they never leave. And other people go and they finally make it to the city, and I mean, that's this is a story of old -south beaches, if I only make it to the city or large gathering place and they may make it there.

1:56:33One of the reasons why New York is a thrilling city is it's filled with people making it. I mean, plenty of people who will fail and it's very harsh in a way because the two are so coast together, you know, a millionaires blocks will have a veteran with a sign lying on the street outside. So you always, and then you get that simultaneous thing of success and the mirror of it of desperate failure. Or I mean, I don't mean that, a judgmental way in the case of the vet, but desperate your life. Yep. Very close to each other. And I suspect that both of these things fire up New Yorkers all the time.

1:57:21Yeah, well, you're getting to see how far you could go and how far you could fall, shown yes, in front of you all the time. Yeah, there's an interesting study by Candace Blake in Australia that looked at wealth inequality and local ecology's positively predicting

1:57:43self -sexualization of women in online dating profiles. So I think I followed that. If there is high wealth inequality, women both see the sort of partner they could get in their wildest dreams and in their worst nightmares, and it positively predicts more sexualized images in online dating profiles and social media. and her argument was that it amps up a woman's competitive edge in terms of finding a partner that they think would be able to ensure they don't end up down at the bottom end of the inequality distribution. And instead they end up in the clouds where they've seen people's outcomes occurring.

1:58:29Well, of course there are also people who fake it. So I mean, well, that's the effective way to play the game. I was once in India and I had a guide, I got talking to and I said, I said, we were talking about how easy or otherwise dating was in the outskirts of Delhi, which means the slums and he said the trick is, he did scribe as a trick, is if you meet a girl you like, you go for date with her, but you borrow your friends shoes, for instance. There will be a friend who has a pair of trainers, sneakers that are nice, good. And you borrow his shoes for the date. And then another time you might borrow a friend's motorbike.

1:59:10So the pool of men helps like swap right things. And the idea is they have one good dating outfit and vehicle between 10 people. And he said the idea was that you get the woman to say she loves you and she'll marry you. And then you do the reveal it or somebody else is shoes. Your shit shoes. Yeah. which I thought was both horrific, admirable, he told it to me like that, and horribly recognizable. I'm thinking all the people who spashed our money in restaurants and things, you don't really have it at all. Pretend to live above their means or do live above their means. It's all to try to intrap a mate, I think.

1:59:51People do a lot for sex. Yeah, I know. I've seen. I mean, Douglas Murray, ladies and gentlemen, Douglas, I really appreciate you. What's coming up next? What can people expect over the next few months? I don't know. I don't know what I expect over the next few months. I'm going to a couple of war zones and we'll report back. I appreciate you. Thank you, mate. Thank you.