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[00:01:05.280 --> 00:01:11.040] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:18.080 --> 00:01:20.720] All right, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:20.720 --> 00:01:21.280] Guess what?
[00:01:21.280 --> 00:01:24.080] I have a special returning champion guest here.
[00:01:24.320 --> 00:01:25.440] He is Andrew Doyle.
[00:01:25.440 --> 00:01:32.080] He was on maybe two years ago, I think it was for the New Puritans, right?
[00:01:32.080 --> 00:01:34.640] Well, let me, Andrew, give you a proper introduction here.
[00:01:34.640 --> 00:01:45.280] He's a writer, satirist, and political commentator who regularly appears on television to discuss current events and affairs, and he's a panelist on the BBC's moral maze.
[00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:53.840] He's written for a number of publications, including The Telegraph, Sun, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Standpoint, Spectator, and Sunday Times.
[00:01:53.840 --> 00:02:08.840] He's the creator of the satirical character Titania McGrath, one of my favorites, under whose name he has written two books, Woke, A Guide to Social Justice, and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, both published by Little Brown.
[00:02:08.840 --> 00:02:13.160] Titania McGrath has over a half a million followers on Twitter, now ex.
[00:02:13.160 --> 00:02:22.440] Formerly, he is a visiting research fellow at Queen's University Belfast and a lecturer at Oxford, University where he earned his doctorate in Renaissance literature.
[00:02:22.440 --> 00:02:33.800] His previous books include Free Speech and Why It Matters, The New Puritans, for which he was on this show before, How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and his new book, Here It Is.
[00:02:33.880 --> 00:02:35.160] I have it in audio.
[00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:36.600] I don't have the print version, Andrew.
[00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:37.640] I have the audio version.
[00:02:37.640 --> 00:02:38.440] Here it is.
[00:02:38.440 --> 00:02:39.320] I've been listening to you.
[00:02:39.320 --> 00:02:41.880] You've been in my head for the last three days.
[00:02:42.200 --> 00:02:49.080] The end of Woke, How the Culture Wars Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter Revolution.
[00:02:49.080 --> 00:02:50.680] Here you are at 1.2 speed.
[00:02:52.440 --> 00:02:54.120] This is about Serzetson.
[00:02:54.120 --> 00:02:56.600] The stars and techniques of psychology.
[00:02:56.600 --> 00:03:03.320] I love it when authors read their own books because I like to hear your voice in my head getting your words directly.
[00:03:03.320 --> 00:03:04.360] Nice to see you.
[00:03:04.360 --> 00:03:05.240] Nice to see you too.
[00:03:05.240 --> 00:03:14.040] I think I sound better when you speed me up because for the audio books, you have to speak artificially slowly and it's very, very laborious.
[00:03:14.280 --> 00:03:19.320] And I actually only sound like myself if you play me back on 1.5 speed.
[00:03:19.320 --> 00:03:22.520] So I'm quite cool for playing it on a fast version.
[00:03:22.840 --> 00:03:26.520] So is this something of a sequel, would you say, to The New Puritans?
[00:03:26.520 --> 00:03:27.240] Like, what's that?
[00:03:27.400 --> 00:03:33.000] I'm kind of, insofar as when I wrote The New Puritans, I had anticipated that that would be my final word on the culture war.
[00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:34.920] I'll never have to talk about this again.
[00:03:35.240 --> 00:03:36.600] But then so much happened.
[00:03:36.600 --> 00:03:37.720] That was in 2022.
[00:03:37.720 --> 00:03:42.920] And by the time we get to 2025, there are all these seismic shifts taking place in the culture war.
[00:03:42.920 --> 00:03:45.000] Everything seemed to have changed.
[00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:47.040] And I knew that I had to write something else.
[00:03:47.040 --> 00:03:51.440] And my initial thought was to maybe write a republished The New Puritans with a new introduction.
[00:03:51.600 --> 00:03:57.200] And then I realized the extent of what has gone on in these three years has completely changed the landscape.
[00:03:57.200 --> 00:04:04.480] And so it would require a whole book of itself and, you know, turn out to be a longer book than The New Puritans because so much has happened.
[00:04:04.720 --> 00:04:06.480] It's such a great piece of writing.
[00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:07.920] You're such a good writer, too.
[00:04:07.920 --> 00:04:14.880] Not just a speaker, but I read, what, 100 books a year for this podcast, two a week.
[00:04:14.880 --> 00:04:18.880] And you're just really one of the best writers, like Hitch.
[00:04:18.880 --> 00:04:20.080] Better than Hitch, maybe.
[00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:23.840] Oh, yeah, no, I mean, it really makes a difference.
[00:04:23.840 --> 00:04:26.240] I think it's that classical training you've had.
[00:04:26.480 --> 00:04:32.880] And also, you write for magazines, so you have to be clear and entertaining and interesting.
[00:04:32.880 --> 00:04:45.280] Yes, I mean, I absolutely wouldn't put myself in the same bracket as Christopher Hitchens, but I would say that, you know, clarity is, I mean, we're dealing with very complicated areas that ultimately tend to fall into jargon.
[00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:49.520] And of course, the activists use the jargon as a kind of weapon.
[00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:51.360] And so I absolutely want to avoid that.
[00:04:51.680 --> 00:04:55.680] So I try to write with clarity without talking down, without dumbing down.
[00:04:56.240 --> 00:04:58.560] That's the balance I'm trying to achieve.
[00:04:58.560 --> 00:04:59.520] Well, you did it.
[00:04:59.520 --> 00:04:59.920] All right.
[00:04:59.920 --> 00:05:01.120] What is woke?
[00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:03.040] And is it really over?
[00:05:03.360 --> 00:05:04.560] Are we approaching it?
[00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:08.160] There's all this definitional quagmire of what woke is and what it isn't.
[00:05:08.160 --> 00:05:12.560] And every study into this tells us that no one seems to have an agreed definition.
[00:05:12.560 --> 00:05:32.040] In the last book, in The New Puritans, I spent a chapter going through the evolution of the word woke and sort of talking about where it's come from, how the meaning has changed, its origins in African-American vernacular, going right back to 1938 to Lead Belly's recording of Scottsburg Boys, which is a protest song where he uses the phrase stay woke.
[00:05:32.360 --> 00:05:41.640] And then, you know, you can go into the 70s, there's a play by Barry Beckham, I think it is, who wrote a play about the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, in which the character says, I'm going to stay woke.
[00:05:41.640 --> 00:05:51.560] And so, this is how the word woke, it simply at that point meant being alert to injustice, especially racism, and was specifically used by the black community.
[00:05:51.560 --> 00:05:57.000] And then it has a kind of dies away, and then it has a kind of resurgence in 2008.
[00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:01.480] Erica Badu records a song called Master Teacher, Stay Woke.
[00:06:01.480 --> 00:06:11.080] And it becomes embraced by the Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s, repopularized in terms of that initial definition of being alert to racism.
[00:06:11.080 --> 00:06:12.920] Then it gets hijacked around 2015.
[00:06:12.920 --> 00:06:19.240] And it's really interesting because the new culture war sort of kicked off in the early 2010s, 2012, 2013 is the date.
[00:06:19.240 --> 00:06:27.480] And it's a new variation on the old school political correctness of the late 1980s, early 1990s with an added authoritarian twist.
[00:06:27.480 --> 00:06:40.520] In other words, this was no longer people grappling with the social contract, seeking to have it renegotiated so that we don't generally tolerate everyday racism, sexism, homophobia, whatever it might be.
[00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:47.880] And whereas that was a kind of messy, the political correctness movement in the 80s and 90s was a kind of messy negotiation that often went too far.
[00:06:47.880 --> 00:06:49.800] Things often went wrong.
[00:06:49.800 --> 00:07:10.040] But it didn't have that extreme authoritarianism of the woke activists of the mid-2010s, who actually wanted to weaponize the law to see people arrested if they didn't speak in the way they wanted them to speak, who actually would physically assault people as well as ruin their lives through a retributive system that we call cancel culture, which they simply called accountability.
[00:07:10.040 --> 00:07:16.960] But what it was was, of course, an extreme overreaction to innocuous slights or failure to conform to their dikts.
[00:07:17.280 --> 00:07:22.560] And it would involve contacting employers, attempting to see people fired, dragging people's names through the mud.
[00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:23.600] I mean, it was bullying.
[00:07:23.600 --> 00:07:27.120] It was bullying writ large on a grand scale.
[00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:29.120] It was essentially authoritarian.
[00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:30.400] They're pro-censorship.
[00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:34.720] They were calling on big center, big tech to censor opinions that they didn't agree with.
[00:07:34.720 --> 00:07:36.320] And of course, a lot of platforms went along with it.
[00:07:36.320 --> 00:07:45.280] We saw in 2015 Jack Dorsey, who was then the CEO of the pre-Musk Twitter, on stage at the Recode conference with a t-shirt that said stay woke.
[00:07:45.280 --> 00:07:50.000] It's very interesting that when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I remember he put out a photograph.
[00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:51.280] He'd been raiding through the cupboards.
[00:07:51.280 --> 00:07:57.920] There was a cupboard full of these stay woke t-shirts so that members of staff at Twitter could advertise their political credentials.
[00:07:57.920 --> 00:08:05.520] So it was very much a term that became hijacked by authoritarians, authoritarians who were obsessed with group identity, not just race.
[00:08:05.520 --> 00:08:06.960] Then it became intersectional.
[00:08:06.960 --> 00:08:18.160] Then it became about sexual orientation, gender identity, whatever that means, sex and race, and all of that, and not class, you know, very class tended to be sort of sidelined in the intersectional dogma.
[00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:21.040] Not amongst all, but amongst the vast majority.
[00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:30.160] So this was generally speaking, an upper middle class bourgeois movement that hijacked the notion of what it means to be woke.
[00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:52.720] And so the term then became synonymous with bullying, authoritarianism, censorship, and an illiberal, regressive movement that wanted to divide us all according to group identity rather than unite us all in the tradition of Martin Luther King and the civil rights luminaries of the 1960s, while at the same time claiming the mantle of those very civil rights luminaries, even though they were effectively their antithesis.
[00:08:52.720 --> 00:08:54.960] So that's how the word evolved.
[00:08:54.960 --> 00:09:02.600] And that's really now it's become a shorthand for that kind of censorial, bullying, identity-obsessed monomania.
[00:09:02.920 --> 00:09:17.480] And the one that has seized power in all levels of government, public policy, major institutions, the arts, the media, the army, the police, hospitals, doctors, academia, schools, you name it, they've seized power.
[00:09:17.480 --> 00:09:35.640] Even though, as I point out in the book, the studies into this by the More in Common Initiative show that the woke movement was only ever supported by around 8% of the population of the USA and the UK, even at its height, even at its peak, which means it was a top-down, like I say, middle-class corporate capitalist engine.
[00:09:35.640 --> 00:09:39.720] I mean, this is the DEI industry is worth $9 billion a year.
[00:09:40.520 --> 00:09:41.640] These are money makers, right?
[00:09:41.640 --> 00:09:43.320] These are powerful people.
[00:09:43.320 --> 00:09:48.200] And they were imposing this on a population that didn't want it at any time in any generation.
[00:09:48.200 --> 00:09:49.320] Isn't that interesting?
[00:09:49.320 --> 00:09:53.000] And yet it just got pushed onto us by the elites.
[00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:59.560] And that's what woke, it came to be a shorthand because you needed a shorthand for this very complex, sprawling thing.
[00:09:59.560 --> 00:10:04.840] In my book, in the end of Woke, I try to define woke in one sentence.
[00:10:04.840 --> 00:10:14.920] And the sentence that I use is: a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means.
[00:10:15.400 --> 00:10:17.320] That, I think, just sums it up.
[00:10:17.640 --> 00:10:22.440] Similar to the definition of racism, which is prejudice plus power.
[00:10:22.440 --> 00:10:24.200] It's that power part, right?
[00:10:24.520 --> 00:10:29.880] Well, that's a redefinition of what racism actually means, which is hatred or prejudice on the basis of race.
[00:10:29.880 --> 00:10:31.640] Yeah, that's capital Hindi.
[00:10:32.200 --> 00:10:32.920] Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:44.600] They had to introduce it, making an equation, making it about power structures, because the woke were always these people who claimed to have some kind of divine capability to detect invisible power structures.
[00:10:44.800 --> 00:10:53.200] I mean, this is why Robin D'Angelo, as you all know, in White Fragility, makes the case that really racism is worse today than it was in the era of Jim Crow.
[00:10:53.200 --> 00:10:59.120] Because in Jim Crow, the systems of racism were explicit, and now they've kind of been subsumed and made invisible.
[00:10:59.120 --> 00:11:00.560] which is really convenient, isn't it?
[00:11:00.560 --> 00:11:05.280] Because it means that if there's no evidence of racism, they can take that as evidence of racism.
[00:11:05.920 --> 00:11:07.200] It kind of reminds me of that.
[00:11:07.200 --> 00:11:11.200] I saw a documentary once called The Power of Nightmares about al-Qaeda.
[00:11:11.200 --> 00:11:15.680] And there was a moment where a former employee at the CIA was interviewed.
[00:11:15.680 --> 00:11:24.560] And this individual said that they were looking for evidence of Russian submarines during the Cold War, submarines that they could not find.
[00:11:24.880 --> 00:11:26.080] They could not find in their scans.
[00:11:26.080 --> 00:11:34.080] And they said the fact that they could not detect them was proof that the Russians had developed a cloaking technology that prevented you from detecting the submarines.
[00:11:34.080 --> 00:11:37.600] In other words, the absence of evidence was taken as evidence.
[00:11:38.160 --> 00:11:39.600] I think the woke do exactly the same.
[00:11:40.160 --> 00:11:41.520] Like the witch trials.
[00:11:41.520 --> 00:11:42.320] Exactly.
[00:11:42.480 --> 00:11:45.600] Denying you're a witch, that's evidence you're a witch.
[00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:56.080] Which we saw also in the 90s with the recovered memory movement, you know, accusing parents and grandparents or whatever of sexually molesting these now adult women when they were children.
[00:11:56.080 --> 00:11:58.320] And of course, the father or grandfather denies it.
[00:11:58.320 --> 00:12:01.840] Well, denial is exactly what pedophiles do.
[00:12:01.840 --> 00:12:02.800] Isn't that so chilling?
[00:12:02.800 --> 00:12:03.920] I mean, that's a really good example.
[00:12:03.920 --> 00:12:19.360] That's a really good precursor because we saw with the satanic abuse panic of the 1980s, families ruined, you know, social workers taking kids away from their parents, psychotherapists who should have known better, really unscrupulous people, say teasing out false memories.
[00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:32.760] You know, there was that famous book, The Courage to Heal, which contained an astonishing sentence, which was, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was something along the lines of, if you think something might have happened to you, it probably did, even if you can't remember it.
[00:12:32.760 --> 00:12:39.800] And it was so, it was so tragic, you know, and all of these things were propelled, I think, because they were often kernels of truth.
[00:12:39.800 --> 00:12:49.080] So, you know, every now, a good example is: I don't know if you've seen the film Capturing the Friedmans, which is a story about a sexual abuse panic, an American family.
[00:12:49.080 --> 00:12:59.480] It is a documentary and it's absolutely fascinating because one of the brothers in the family had become one of the most famous clowns in New York amongst children's parties.
[00:12:59.480 --> 00:13:04.840] And the filmmaker wanted to make a film about him and about clowns and about what it's like to be a clown.
[00:13:04.840 --> 00:13:18.680] And he uncovered this incredibly dark, famous story of sexual abuse within the family, where the father and another brother were sent to prison for decades for mass sexual abuse, much of which probably didn't happen.
[00:13:18.680 --> 00:13:23.320] And it's really interesting because they interview some of the people who say that it happened.
[00:13:23.320 --> 00:13:29.400] And you can see when they're describing the events that took place in this basement at this computer club, it couldn't have happened.
[00:13:29.640 --> 00:13:38.760] And you even have interviews with the police officer saying, you know, we raided the house and there were pornographic magazines, child porn everywhere stacked up.
[00:13:38.760 --> 00:13:43.000] And then the filmmakers show you the photographs from the police raid and they're not there.
[00:13:43.160 --> 00:13:45.640] But the police invented it in their head.
[00:13:45.640 --> 00:13:53.640] Now, the reason that happened is because the father was, had paedophilic tendencies and had been ordering those kinds of magazines.
[00:13:53.640 --> 00:13:56.120] And then that led to a kernel of truth.
[00:13:56.120 --> 00:13:59.880] And so the police would interview these kids and say, we know this happened to you.
[00:13:59.880 --> 00:14:01.560] You may as well admit it.
[00:14:01.560 --> 00:14:05.080] And they would kind of implant these false memories into the kids.
[00:14:05.080 --> 00:14:08.600] It's a really fascinating and disturbing thing to watch.
[00:14:08.600 --> 00:14:16.560] And I think that's what's happened with the woke movement as well, insofar as there are kernels of truth, insofar as racism does exist.
[00:14:16.800 --> 00:14:20.400] There are figures who are racist within various institutions.
[00:14:20.400 --> 00:14:25.760] And once you find evidence of that, then all of a sudden you see it everywhere.
[00:14:25.760 --> 00:14:27.440] And things get exacerbated.
[00:14:27.440 --> 00:14:34.480] And I think that's largely what happened in this case, which is how a lot of hysteria begins.
[00:14:34.480 --> 00:14:39.200] I mean, in my last book, I talk about Salem and I talk about the witch hunts.
[00:14:39.200 --> 00:14:51.680] And, you know, well, I mean, Tichuba, who was the servant in the house of the Paris, the Reverend Paris, was doing faux voodoo games with the kids.
[00:14:51.680 --> 00:14:54.240] But I mean, from their perspective, it was just games.
[00:14:54.880 --> 00:14:59.120] But, you know, they took that and everything else amplified out of that, I think.
[00:14:59.120 --> 00:14:59.760] It's very interesting.
[00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:00.960] Helen Pluckrose talks about this.
[00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:10.000] You know, the number one reason why women were arrested and prosecuted as witches during the medieval period, the number one reason is because they said they were witches.
[00:15:10.240 --> 00:15:10.640] Right.
[00:15:10.640 --> 00:15:12.080] Now, it's very interesting.
[00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:15.600] They claimed to be dabbling in witchcraft.
[00:15:15.600 --> 00:15:21.120] So I just think, as with all hysteria, something happens, something small, which you can point to.
[00:15:21.120 --> 00:15:23.840] And then all of the logical fallacies follow from that.
[00:15:23.840 --> 00:15:29.760] You start off with a false premise, which might be built on something, not very substantial, maybe, but there's something.
[00:15:29.760 --> 00:15:31.280] And then it explodes.
[00:15:31.280 --> 00:15:35.600] And, you know, with Black Lives Matter, no one wants to disagree with that statement.
[00:15:35.600 --> 00:15:36.240] Everyone agrees.
[00:15:37.520 --> 00:15:39.600] So you're saying Black Lives Don't Matter?
[00:15:40.160 --> 00:15:40.560] What?
[00:15:41.040 --> 00:15:42.880] No decent person would disagree with that.
[00:15:42.880 --> 00:15:47.840] And so it was a kind of so, you know, they were onto something insofar as racism still persists.
[00:15:47.840 --> 00:15:53.200] The critical race theorists were onto something when they said, How is it that racism still persists in our society?
[00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:54.480] Yeah, fair enough.
[00:15:54.480 --> 00:16:00.840] But then you had these high priests of this new religion coming along and detecting it everywhere, seeing the demons in the shadows.
[00:16:00.840 --> 00:16:03.480] And it's, you know, I mean, I made this point in my last book.
[00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:06.280] It is obviously a pseudo-religious movement.
[00:16:06.360 --> 00:16:14.760] And but I think in the end of woke in this book, I'm trying to point to all of the signs that that is woke as we knew it is dying off.
[00:16:14.760 --> 00:16:15.960] It's fading away.
[00:16:15.960 --> 00:16:19.240] Too many, it's had too many shocks to its system.
[00:16:19.240 --> 00:16:21.160] Too many things have changed.
[00:16:21.160 --> 00:16:22.440] But it might re-emerge.
[00:16:22.440 --> 00:16:27.800] I mean, the fundamental case I make in the book, as you know, is that wokeness was never liberal.
[00:16:27.800 --> 00:16:29.880] It was always misapprehended as a liberal movement.
[00:16:29.880 --> 00:16:32.680] It is actually a failure of liberalism.
[00:16:32.680 --> 00:16:35.960] That's where woke comes from, that failure to apply liberal values.
[00:16:35.960 --> 00:16:40.040] And I know that's slightly complicated by the fact that Americans don't use the word liberal properly.
[00:16:40.040 --> 00:16:42.520] And they use it as a synonym for left wing.
[00:16:42.840 --> 00:16:43.880] And that's not what it means.
[00:16:44.280 --> 00:16:47.720] So that causes all sorts of confusion, I think.
[00:16:47.720 --> 00:16:56.200] Now, is the word woke become pejorative for somebody on the right to accuse somebody on the left of being crazy woke or something like that?
[00:16:56.200 --> 00:17:05.080] I notice when I post on X, oh, these woke people at Harvard or whatever, I'm accused of, you know, they'll use that word because that's now a slanderous word.
[00:17:05.080 --> 00:17:06.280] It's like, oh, okay.
[00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:08.680] Yeah, it's not.
[00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:15.800] Yeah, I mean, the problem is I never used it as a pejorative, which might sound surprising given that I wrote a satirical book called Woke.
[00:17:16.920 --> 00:17:18.680] But I've never used it as a pejorative.
[00:17:18.680 --> 00:17:25.720] I've always used it as a descriptive, quite mostly because, as I say, people around 2015, 2016 were self-describing as woke.
[00:17:25.720 --> 00:17:26.840] People still are, right?
[00:17:26.840 --> 00:17:31.480] So, I mean, a lot of people do embrace it as a descriptive term for themselves, a form of self-identification.
[00:17:31.480 --> 00:17:33.240] So I was using it as a kind of courtesy.
[00:17:33.960 --> 00:17:37.080] But then something weird happened around 2018.
[00:17:37.080 --> 00:17:44.800] After I'd published that book, and people accused me of using it as a pejorative, and people said, you know, this is just a snarl word invented by the right to attack the left.
[00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:46.640] Moral panic.
[00:17:44.680 --> 00:17:47.120] Yeah.
[00:17:47.360 --> 00:17:52.400] I mean, for one thing, I've never considered the culture war about left and right.
[00:17:52.400 --> 00:17:53.600] So that doesn't really work for me.
[00:17:54.160 --> 00:17:56.240] You know, this is why I think you can be woke.
[00:17:56.240 --> 00:18:01.280] You can be an authoritarian, identity-obsessed monomaniac on the left or the right, or anywhere in between.
[00:18:01.280 --> 00:18:02.720] I don't think there's anything to do with that.
[00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:07.280] But I didn't, I think that was a technique and that was a strategy in and of itself.
[00:18:07.280 --> 00:18:12.400] Saying you're using it as a pejorative to kind of just dismiss the arguments that you make.
[00:18:12.400 --> 00:18:15.920] That was another linguistic trick that they're very, very adept at.
[00:18:15.920 --> 00:18:18.480] And I think most of us got very tired of it very quickly.
[00:18:18.480 --> 00:18:21.840] And, you know, you need a way to describe, you know, this.
[00:18:22.080 --> 00:18:27.600] I mean, you might have got to the point in the book where I sort of outline everything about what the woke movement stands for.
[00:18:27.600 --> 00:18:30.480] And it's this big, sprawling single sentence.
[00:18:30.800 --> 00:18:32.560] And then I just say, oh, we can just say woke.
[00:18:32.560 --> 00:18:33.440] Let's just say woke.
[00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:34.960] I love that.
[00:18:35.280 --> 00:18:35.680] Yeah.
[00:18:35.680 --> 00:18:36.240] Yeah.
[00:18:36.560 --> 00:18:36.800] Yeah.
[00:18:36.800 --> 00:18:42.720] You know, since we mentioned the recovered memory movement, well, you know, a lot of us were publishing about that, very critical of it.
[00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:52.160] But it really wasn't until some of the recovered people, that is, these adult women who realized they had been duped, then sued these therapists.
[00:18:52.160 --> 00:18:54.000] And that brought it to a screeching halt.
[00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:54.640] Lawsuit.
[00:18:54.640 --> 00:18:58.720] So I had Chris Ruffo on the show here last year.
[00:18:58.720 --> 00:19:07.680] And, you know, people like Pinker and I and you and others are fighting the culture wars through our words and ideas.
[00:19:07.840 --> 00:19:12.160] Let's debunk bad ideas, replace them with good ideas and so on.
[00:19:12.160 --> 00:19:16.000] And Rufo's response was, we tried that and you lost.
[00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:16.800] That doesn't work.
[00:19:17.520 --> 00:19:18.960] We need the law.
[00:19:18.960 --> 00:19:25.040] We need a strong man on top to say, we're putting an end to this and we're going to outlaw it.
[00:19:25.360 --> 00:19:26.640] Yeah, I mean, you can do a bit of both.
[00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:27.840] I mean, I don't know.
[00:19:28.560 --> 00:19:31.720] I'm a great admirer of Christopher's work, and I would like to talk to him about this.
[00:19:31.720 --> 00:19:35.720] I imagine we're not entirely on the same page in the best way strategically to address it.
[00:19:35.720 --> 00:19:38.200] I think we both agree on the fundamental problems.
[00:19:38.760 --> 00:19:44.040] But I think, you know, there's a sense in which a lot of people believe that, you know, someone has to be in power.
[00:19:44.040 --> 00:19:46.200] So it may as well be the ones on the right side of this.
[00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:48.760] And I get that.
[00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:51.320] I do understand that point of view.
[00:19:51.320 --> 00:19:55.080] But I actually don't think we should give up on the marketplace of ideas quite yet.
[00:19:55.080 --> 00:20:02.360] And I think a lot of, and as I say, because the woke movement has been so unpopular, you know, we always hear about the extremes.
[00:20:02.360 --> 00:20:09.320] You know, sure, maybe on a university campus, you're going to get a disproportionate number of voices on that side because those are among the elites.
[00:20:09.320 --> 00:20:10.440] Those are among the most privileged.
[00:20:10.440 --> 00:20:16.200] Let's not forget it's mostly the posher universities which have a preponderance of these kinds of students.
[00:20:16.200 --> 00:20:17.960] So you're going to get a misrepresented idea.
[00:20:17.960 --> 00:20:22.360] Evergreen College was another example, you know, where this crazy hysteria erupted.
[00:20:22.360 --> 00:20:25.080] It's been documented by Benjamin Boyce, obviously.
[00:20:25.080 --> 00:20:31.720] And so I think we do have to keep in mind the statistics on this, which is that it's never been popular in any generation.
[00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:40.040] And that means we can still win it back without resorting to similarly authoritarian techniques to eliminate it.
[00:20:40.040 --> 00:20:41.560] I'm very wary of that.
[00:20:41.560 --> 00:20:43.800] And I don't think it's necessary.
[00:20:44.840 --> 00:20:49.800] You know, in search of deeper causes behind it, Marxism is often brought up.
[00:20:49.800 --> 00:20:56.440] But as you pointed out at the start, it's not about class and it's by these rich elites that are driving it.
[00:20:56.440 --> 00:20:57.880] And a lot of them are making a lot of money.
[00:20:57.880 --> 00:20:59.720] They're kind of capitalists.
[00:21:00.760 --> 00:21:01.640] I mean, absolutely.
[00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:08.440] This is not, the woke movement is not something that Marx would have recognized as anywhere near anything that he had posited.
[00:21:08.760 --> 00:21:22.000] The fact that you had the cultural turn, I mean, we talk about, you know, when Marxists or people who declared themselves to be Marxists substituted the economy, money, class, those concerns for identity, group identity.
[00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:24.720] Well, then it ceases to be Marxism as far as I'm concerned.
[00:21:24.960 --> 00:21:27.680] You can say it has a Marxian DNA.
[00:21:27.920 --> 00:21:29.600] I think that's fair enough.
[00:21:29.600 --> 00:21:36.000] But it's not something that Marx would have recognized in the way that their obsession with power structures is not something that Foucault would have recognized.
[00:21:36.000 --> 00:21:38.320] It's something that Foucault would have been able to problematize.
[00:21:38.320 --> 00:21:49.680] And, you know, so it's very interesting the way that elements of these philosophical trains of thought sort of become woven into this movement we now call wokeness.
[00:21:49.680 --> 00:22:01.840] Another good example I always think is the Frankfurt School and their emphasis on mistrusting popular culture, this kind of bread and circuses idea that people get distracted by popular culture and media messaging.
[00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:12.320] And that is the, the woke have completely taken that element of the thought of the Frankfurt School to the extent that they really push for censorship of popular culture in particular.
[00:22:12.320 --> 00:22:16.400] In fact, in a way, you kind of get away with it more when it's high art.
[00:22:16.400 --> 00:22:18.160] You know, you get away with more stuff.
[00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:31.120] There's fewer people trying to protest against the performance of Titus Andronicus than there are against Snow White, you know, or fiddling with Snow White to make sure that it's promoting the creed of diversity.
[00:22:31.680 --> 00:22:34.160] But they don't worry too much about high art.
[00:22:34.160 --> 00:22:36.880] Although, having said that, they're moving into that realm now.
[00:22:36.880 --> 00:22:45.280] And you're starting to get, for instance, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the UK, just a couple of weeks ago, announced that it was going to decolonize its collection.
[00:22:46.000 --> 00:22:48.040] They said that a lot of their archive materials.
[00:22:48.040 --> 00:22:53.280] Remember, this is a major body which is entrusted as custodians of Shakespeare's legacy.
[00:22:53.280 --> 00:23:00.000] And they're saying they're going to decolonize because they say that a lot of Shakespeare's work is racist, sexist, and homophobic.
[00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:10.200] It does sort of boggle the mind how a man who wrote 126 love sonnets to another man could be deemed homophobic, but nevertheless, clearly they know best.
[00:23:10.440 --> 00:23:14.600] And they're doing this and they're putting trigger warnings on the various things.
[00:23:14.600 --> 00:23:24.120] You know, there's just been announced a sort of not a non-binary production of 12th Night, where every actor will be identifying as non-binary or gender fluid.
[00:23:24.120 --> 00:23:31.080] Makes no sense at all, because, of course, 12th Night, it's about cross-dressing, it's about misdirected desire.
[00:23:31.080 --> 00:23:39.720] It needs, it requires the sex, the biological sex of each individual character to be very firmly set, actually, for the comedy to work.
[00:23:40.040 --> 00:23:41.320] So, you know, it won't work.
[00:23:41.320 --> 00:23:51.880] And it'll also be, it's that thing of whenever recent productions of Shakespeare try and reduce it to identity politics and woke politics, it's like you're focusing.
[00:23:51.880 --> 00:23:55.560] It's like going to the Sistine Chapel and just staring at the floor.
[00:23:55.960 --> 00:23:59.000] You're just narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect.
[00:23:59.000 --> 00:24:02.280] Sure, you know, you can interpret Shakespeare however you want.
[00:24:02.280 --> 00:24:06.360] And sure, he does address issues of race and sexuality and sex.
[00:24:06.360 --> 00:24:07.640] And of course he does.
[00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:09.160] But he addresses a hell of a lot more.
[00:24:09.160 --> 00:24:10.920] That's why he's the best writer who ever lived.
[00:24:10.920 --> 00:24:16.600] Because the abundance of his art, the sheer scope of what he achieves.
[00:24:16.600 --> 00:24:31.480] And so it's almost like they're writing a kind of a diorama or creating a diorama version of Shakespeare's simple two-dimensional version, a digestible thing that can just be reduced to propaganda for their creed.
[00:24:31.480 --> 00:24:32.680] And it's banal.
[00:24:32.680 --> 00:24:35.320] And it's especially banal because everyone is doing it.
[00:24:35.320 --> 00:24:37.400] Like all of the major theater companies are doing it.
[00:24:37.400 --> 00:24:38.520] And they think they're radical.
[00:24:38.520 --> 00:24:39.160] It's incredible.
[00:24:39.160 --> 00:24:42.600] It's like, just accept you're being really boring and conformist here.
[00:24:42.600 --> 00:24:46.480] You're doing episodes, you're doing everything that everyone else is doing.
[00:24:46.480 --> 00:24:48.160] And you think it makes you somehow radical.
[00:24:44.600 --> 00:24:49.600] It drives me crazy.
[00:24:49.920 --> 00:24:54.320] But that's an example of how wokeness is still persisting, and particularly in the UK.
[00:24:54.320 --> 00:24:55.920] You know, there's stuff, it's still happening.
[00:24:55.920 --> 00:25:02.400] And I really want to be clear that when I wrote a book called The End of Woke, that is a kind of aspirational concept.
[00:25:02.640 --> 00:25:03.200] It is not.
[00:25:03.520 --> 00:25:06.880] I'm not making a definitive statement in a Francis Fukuyama way.
[00:25:06.880 --> 00:25:09.040] This is the end of woke, it will never be again.
[00:25:09.360 --> 00:25:10.400] I'm making a number of points.
[00:25:10.400 --> 00:25:14.720] I'm talking about, I'm trying to envisage what the end of woke could be, what it could look like.
[00:25:14.720 --> 00:25:17.360] There's a kind of implied question mark in that title.
[00:25:17.360 --> 00:25:19.600] I'm saying that I think the death throws are there.
[00:25:19.600 --> 00:25:22.320] It might be a long, extended period of death.
[00:25:22.320 --> 00:25:27.760] It might be even years or decades, but I don't think it can go back to what it was.
[00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:37.040] And I'm also, of course, envisaging, as you know in the book, various possible sources of power that might fill that vacuum, various other.
[00:25:37.120 --> 00:25:44.640] And my key argument, I suppose, is I believe that authoritarianism is the default instinct of humankind.
[00:25:44.800 --> 00:25:50.240] I'm not qualified to say where that comes from, whether that's evolutionary or some other reason, but I do think it's the default.
[00:25:50.240 --> 00:25:51.840] I do think history teaches that.
[00:25:51.840 --> 00:25:55.040] I don't know much about evolution, but I know a thing or two about history and literature.
[00:25:55.040 --> 00:25:57.520] And it is the thing that keeps coming back.
[00:25:57.520 --> 00:25:59.680] And I think we have to continually guard against it.
[00:25:59.680 --> 00:26:02.000] And wokeness was just the latest manifestation.
[00:26:02.560 --> 00:26:03.360] Say it again, Andrew.
[00:26:03.360 --> 00:26:04.320] What's the it there?
[00:26:04.320 --> 00:26:06.160] It keeps coming back.
[00:26:06.160 --> 00:26:07.120] Authoritarianism.
[00:26:07.120 --> 00:26:08.080] Authoritarianism, yes, yes.
[00:26:08.240 --> 00:26:14.400] And authoritarian regimes and that instinct, you know, and I think wokeness was just the latest version of that.
[00:26:14.400 --> 00:26:19.120] It was an interesting one because, of course, these were tyrants who were claiming to be the underdogs, claiming to be the victims.
[00:26:19.120 --> 00:26:21.760] So it made it particularly difficult to tackle.
[00:26:21.760 --> 00:26:26.080] You know, they were in incredible positions of power and claimed to be the victims.
[00:26:26.080 --> 00:26:26.640] How is that?
[00:26:26.640 --> 00:26:27.840] You're not the victim.
[00:26:28.160 --> 00:26:38.040] If you've got the backing of the entire corporate world, you know, the royal family, the government in America, like you're not, you're the establishment, but they claim to be the victims.
[00:26:38.040 --> 00:26:46.520] So I'm making the case that we need to return to what I consider classical liberal values, which are really hard to defend and sustain.
[00:26:46.520 --> 00:26:51.560] I understand the authoritarian impulse because we all have it, and it's easy.
[00:26:51.560 --> 00:26:54.760] As in, you can make the thing you don't like go away.
[00:26:54.760 --> 00:26:59.240] You know, I mean, you'll notice that I start the book with a quotation from E.M.
[00:26:59.240 --> 00:27:07.160] Forster, where he talks about, this is obviously a brilliant, one of my favorite novelists, and he's writing at the end of the Second World War.
[00:27:07.160 --> 00:27:09.880] And he talks about there being two, there's two ways of dealing with it.
[00:27:09.880 --> 00:27:16.280] You have the Nazi solution, which is to stomp on your enemies, eliminate them, and strut up and down like you're the salt of the earth.
[00:27:16.280 --> 00:27:21.400] Or there's the liberal solution, doesn't call it the liberal solution, but there's a liberal solution, which is about tolerance.
[00:27:21.400 --> 00:27:24.200] Don't try to love everyone, you can't.
[00:27:24.200 --> 00:27:28.840] But we try and tolerate difference, and that's how we can move towards a civilized future.
[00:27:28.840 --> 00:27:32.200] And I love that quotation because it really encapsulates what I'm trying to argue.
[00:27:32.200 --> 00:27:39.080] It's from a book, by the way, called Two Cheers for Democracy, which I think is one of the best book titles that's ever.
[00:27:39.240 --> 00:27:39.800] I love E.M.
[00:27:39.800 --> 00:27:40.600] Forster for that.
[00:27:40.600 --> 00:27:42.840] And that's my argument.
[00:27:42.840 --> 00:27:57.480] We need to return to the difficult, messy liberal system, which is messy because what it says is everyone has the right to believe what they want, say what they want, act as they want, you know, right up until the point where you encroach on the rights of someone else.
[00:27:57.480 --> 00:28:00.280] But that also means that society is going to be messy.
[00:28:00.280 --> 00:28:01.240] It's going to be difficult.
[00:28:01.240 --> 00:28:03.400] It's going to be about constant negotiations.
[00:28:03.400 --> 00:28:05.480] There is no utopian endpoint.
[00:28:05.480 --> 00:28:16.000] When woke activists say that liberalism failed because racism still persists, the liberal says, of course, racism still persists because it cannot be eliminated because of the essential imperfectibility of human nature.
[00:28:16.000 --> 00:28:17.760] And that's a harder proposition.
[00:28:17.760 --> 00:28:19.600] And it's less sexy, isn't it?
[00:28:19.600 --> 00:28:24.320] It's less sexy than wiping everyone out and just getting everyone to think the way that you think.
[00:28:24.320 --> 00:28:27.760] But every ideology as a part of it, as I can see, has that authoritarian instinct.
[00:28:27.760 --> 00:28:31.760] It's a set of rules that says this is the way it must be.
[00:28:32.080 --> 00:28:35.440] And liberalism, that's why I don't believe liberalism is an ideology at all.
[00:28:35.440 --> 00:28:37.760] I know a lot of people disagree with me on this.
[00:28:37.760 --> 00:28:40.320] I think liberalism is the absence of an ideology.
[00:28:40.320 --> 00:28:52.800] Because it's really a method of finding the best way to live, given our flawed natures and the role of chance and randomness and unpredictability.
[00:28:52.800 --> 00:28:56.080] It's really not a utopian goal to get to.
[00:28:56.080 --> 00:28:57.760] There's no there.
[00:28:58.080 --> 00:29:00.160] No, and like I say, that's not sexy.
[00:29:00.640 --> 00:29:05.440] I'm so sick of people saying, oh, you centrist liberal people, you know, you're taking the easy route.
[00:29:05.440 --> 00:29:07.040] It's not, it's so much harder.
[00:29:07.040 --> 00:29:11.280] It's so much harder to defend free speech, even for people you can't stand.
[00:29:11.280 --> 00:29:17.920] When the ACLU stood up for the neo-Nazis in Skokie, Chicago, that was a really hard thing to do because it takes backbone.
[00:29:18.240 --> 00:29:21.520] You know, this is not the easy route, but it's the preferable route.
[00:29:21.520 --> 00:29:28.400] Like, nothing from everything I've read of history suggests to me that any other system works better than this.
[00:29:28.640 --> 00:29:32.000] You know, obviously, the Nazi solution looks sexy.
[00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:33.760] You get to wear Hugo Boss.
[00:29:34.640 --> 00:29:36.640] You don't have to hear from your enemies.
[00:29:36.640 --> 00:29:38.080] You wipe them out.
[00:29:38.080 --> 00:29:40.400] All of the things you hate have disappeared.
[00:29:40.400 --> 00:29:46.160] You know, you have your stupid Aryan-looking propaganda, and it's all like, it's just a nonsense.
[00:29:46.160 --> 00:29:49.520] And it's, it's, you know, that's not what human nature is.
[00:29:49.520 --> 00:29:53.920] Like, we're just, we are all different, and we're always going to see the world differently.
[00:29:53.920 --> 00:29:56.160] And you can't just crush things you don't like.
[00:29:56.160 --> 00:29:57.840] You know, there is a way through it.
[00:29:57.840 --> 00:30:00.520] But it's, but it's, but it's difficult.
[00:29:59.840 --> 00:30:02.360] I mean, that's that's really why I wrote this book.
[00:30:02.440 --> 00:30:11.880] I want to try and make the case for liberalism at a time when so many people on my side of the argument seem to be saying we should reject it.
[00:30:11.880 --> 00:30:17.560] Yeah, I really thought that the subtitle could just be the case for liberalism or classical liberalism.
[00:30:17.560 --> 00:30:22.360] I use the word classical liberalism to describe myself instead of libertarian or whatever.
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[00:30:53.000 --> 00:30:56.040] Different terms in there about modifying liberalism.
[00:30:56.040 --> 00:31:00.840] Yeah, I mean, it's tricky because, as you know, every liberal thinker throughout history has defined it differently.
[00:31:01.080 --> 00:31:08.840] You know, so you have to, I think, when you make this kind of case, you have to just be very clear about what you mean about liberalism.
[00:31:08.920 --> 00:31:14.920] I think I've been very clear in this book, and I'm sure there will be liberals who will disagree with some elements of what I say.
[00:31:14.920 --> 00:31:29.320] I think the key difference that a lot of people will have is a lot of critics of liberalism see it as a free-for-all, a kind of selfish, self-obsessed, you just do whatever the hell you want and don't worry about anyone else.
[00:31:29.320 --> 00:31:35.160] And I don't see that as liberal, because I think a key aspect of liberalism is social responsibility.
[00:31:35.160 --> 00:31:48.960] And major liberal thinkers from the sort of conservative liberals like Frederick Hayek or the sort of social liberals like John Rawls, they all agree in an essential aspect being the rule of law, equality before the law.
[00:31:48.960 --> 00:31:54.800] You know, you can go right back to Locke and to Hobbes and to Mill, and it's still always an element.
[00:31:54.800 --> 00:32:00.320] Now, that is not to say that laws can't be unjust or open to challenge.
[00:32:00.320 --> 00:32:04.240] That's part of that messy negotiation that we have.
[00:32:04.480 --> 00:32:05.280] It's difficult.
[00:32:05.280 --> 00:32:10.480] That's why, you know, I got so annoyed when during the Black Lives Matter protests, and some of them became riots.
[00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:15.040] And, you know, there was that guy, that officer guy, that Dawn, his name was Dawn, who was just shot dead.
[00:32:15.600 --> 00:32:16.880] These people looting shops.
[00:32:16.880 --> 00:32:21.440] And, you know, people like me were saying, look, this is the opposite of what Martin Luther King wanted.
[00:32:21.440 --> 00:32:25.360] Martin Luther King talks about judging people by the content of the character, not the color of their skin.
[00:32:25.360 --> 00:32:30.720] And the single criticism that comes back all the time is, that's the only thing you've ever read of Martin Luther King, that speech.
[00:32:30.720 --> 00:32:31.360] Well, no, it isn't.
[00:32:31.360 --> 00:32:32.880] I've read a lot of his work.
[00:32:32.880 --> 00:32:36.800] And they kept coming back, particularly with the letter from Birmingham Jail, saying, read that.
[00:32:36.800 --> 00:32:40.800] And they didn't understand that he would have supported these riots.
[00:32:40.800 --> 00:32:41.920] No, he wouldn't.
[00:32:41.920 --> 00:32:46.000] And if you read the letter from Birmingham Jail, he could not be more explicit about that.
[00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:52.240] He says, we need to challenge unjust laws and we need to protest against them, but we protest peacefully against them.
[00:32:52.240 --> 00:32:58.560] And more than that, we accept the consequences when we're arrested and attacked for doing so, right?
[00:32:58.560 --> 00:33:02.960] He says the opposite of what lots of the Black Lives Matter activists were saying.
[00:33:02.960 --> 00:33:04.880] He was a liberal through and through.
[00:33:05.200 --> 00:33:09.440] And even in the text that they point to to prove that he isn't, it proves the opposite.
[00:33:09.440 --> 00:33:12.640] Because I don't think a lot of them have actually read it, if I'm honest.
[00:33:12.640 --> 00:33:24.480] So I would say that's, but it's but it's hard, like as those thinkers acknowledge, as Gandhi acknowledged with his notion of Satya Graha, you know, the idea of non-violent, non-cooperation.
[00:33:24.480 --> 00:33:28.400] That's the liberal means of protest towards societal change.
[00:33:28.400 --> 00:33:31.720] And it's so much harder than just smashing up a shop and stealing some shit.
[00:33:31.960 --> 00:33:40.840] So it's not a liberal thing to take a big plastic bag and go into the CVS and fill it with as much stuff as you can, as long as it's under $1,000 in California.
[00:33:40.840 --> 00:33:42.280] What a revelation, eh?
[00:33:42.280 --> 00:33:43.800] No, of course it isn't.
[00:33:43.800 --> 00:33:48.920] And yeah, and it's so surprising to me that that's become so misunderstood.
[00:33:48.920 --> 00:33:52.760] I mean, in the book, as you know, I outline in a number of bullet points what I mean by liberalism.
[00:33:52.760 --> 00:33:53.400] I'm very, very clear.
[00:33:53.400 --> 00:33:58.280] But I mean, does it dovetail with the way that you see liberalism as a classical liberal?
[00:33:58.280 --> 00:33:59.560] Yeah, for the most part, yes.
[00:33:59.560 --> 00:34:10.760] I guess the social liberal part is getting at, you know, specifics like how much social spending should we have to help people that can't help themselves?
[00:34:10.760 --> 00:34:12.200] Okay, there's some of that.
[00:34:12.520 --> 00:34:16.920] And then, you know, the jobless and the homeless and the handicapped and so on.
[00:34:16.920 --> 00:34:19.320] That number keeps getting bigger, right?
[00:34:19.320 --> 00:34:21.320] And so conservatives are always pushing back.
[00:34:21.320 --> 00:34:23.320] Well, how about less social spending?
[00:34:23.320 --> 00:34:38.120] But if you look at like over the last, I don't know, 50 years or so and where it is now, pretty much all 20 of the top industrial democracies in the world spend like roughly 18 to 25 percent of GDP on social spending.
[00:34:38.120 --> 00:34:40.520] Even the United States is, I think, 21%.
[00:34:40.520 --> 00:34:43.160] I think France is 26%, something like that.
[00:34:43.160 --> 00:34:45.800] So it's not like anybody's proposing zero.
[00:34:45.800 --> 00:34:49.240] Like, let's go back to the 19th century and have no social spending.
[00:34:49.240 --> 00:34:54.280] You know, so I guess it's a matter of degree of what you feel morally we owe people.
[00:34:54.280 --> 00:34:58.440] And then you got to control for fraud and graft and all that stuff.
[00:34:58.440 --> 00:35:08.760] But I guess a more libertarian classical liberal might say, I'd rather teach people to be more independent and less dependent on the state.
[00:35:08.760 --> 00:35:13.640] Maybe the social liberal says, but there's a lot of people that can't do it on their own.
[00:35:13.960 --> 00:35:14.520] Absolutely.
[00:35:14.520 --> 00:35:21.760] And that's one of those difficult discussions that needs to be had, where you have to find a balance, where you have to consider all sides.
[00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:29.760] Again, not an ideology where you can just impose and say, you know, I mean, my instinct, I do have an instinctive gratitude to the welfare state.
[00:35:29.760 --> 00:35:34.320] I do think that it's a sign of civilized society that we look after our most vulnerable.
[00:35:34.320 --> 00:35:39.600] And I suppose that's the old leftist in me that still has that kind of quality.
[00:35:39.760 --> 00:35:41.360] But I understand that a lot of people don't agree.
[00:35:41.360 --> 00:35:48.000] And I also understand that there's a strong case to be made that the welfare initiatives of the mid-20th century were a disaster for the black community.
[00:35:48.320 --> 00:35:50.240] And there's a lot of evidence for that.
[00:35:50.240 --> 00:35:52.320] So I, you know, and again, it's that balance.
[00:35:52.320 --> 00:36:02.240] You know, if you, if they're, you know, and I know of people who exploit the welfare system, and, you know, I'm fully aware that it's finding that balance and you're never going to get it completely right.
[00:36:02.240 --> 00:36:06.560] But whereas like a communist might say, well, I've got the solution.
[00:36:06.560 --> 00:36:09.280] And here it is, a sledgehammer solution.
[00:36:09.280 --> 00:36:09.920] You don't.
[00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:12.080] No one's really got the solution.
[00:36:12.080 --> 00:36:20.720] And so I'm just kind of interested in that's why what attracts me to liberalism is because it recognizes that we don't have all the answers and that we never can.
[00:36:20.720 --> 00:36:25.520] And I think when it is misinterpreted, there's this idea of a selfish free-for-all.
[00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:29.040] I mean, this is why in the book I go right back to Milton.
[00:36:29.200 --> 00:36:48.640] And I spend a lot of time talking about Milton, because John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, poet, Republican, political agitator, he also wrote, of course, Aria Pagitica, which is the most elegant defense against the censorship of the press that I've ever read.
[00:36:49.520 --> 00:36:53.200] And he believed in freedom and liberty.
[00:36:53.200 --> 00:36:58.880] And he was particularly alert to this problem of confusing liberty with license.
[00:36:58.880 --> 00:37:02.680] The free-for-all, anarchic, selfish thing is license.
[00:36:59.680 --> 00:37:03.560] And that's not liberty.
[00:37:03.880 --> 00:37:09.400] For him, liberty was a kind of virtuous self-regulation born out of reason.
[00:37:09.400 --> 00:37:10.440] First and foremost, reason.
[00:37:10.440 --> 00:37:12.440] He believed that human beings were rational creatures.
[00:37:12.440 --> 00:37:14.440] That's why he was for meritocracy.
[00:37:14.680 --> 00:37:17.560] He didn't like the idea of being princess.
[00:37:17.560 --> 00:37:18.440] He was against the king.
[00:37:18.440 --> 00:37:23.560] He was against the idea of a king because it's irrational, the idea that someone could, you know, seize power by an accident of birth.
[00:37:23.560 --> 00:37:25.320] This is what drew him to Cromwell.
[00:37:25.800 --> 00:37:27.480] So he was about reason.
[00:37:27.480 --> 00:37:32.120] He thinks reason was a God-given gift for us that we can rationalize our way to the truth.
[00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:33.640] He had that faith.
[00:37:34.280 --> 00:37:36.840] But he didn't believe in this idea of license.
[00:37:36.840 --> 00:37:38.120] And I think we can learn from that.
[00:37:38.120 --> 00:37:39.320] I think we can return to it.
[00:37:39.560 --> 00:37:46.680] He wrote a tract in support of divorce, which a lot of people suspect is because he didn't like his wife, which is true.
[00:37:47.480 --> 00:37:53.400] But a lot of his peers criticized him for it, saying, oh, you just want liberty, you want free-for-all, you want liberty.
[00:37:53.400 --> 00:37:55.400] He says, you're talking about license.
[00:37:55.640 --> 00:37:56.600] I'm crying for liberty.
[00:37:56.600 --> 00:37:57.560] You're talking about license.
[00:37:58.040 --> 00:38:04.200] You have to distinguish between those two things in order to understand liberalism as Milton understood it.
[00:38:04.200 --> 00:38:06.920] And I think we could go back to that.
[00:38:06.920 --> 00:38:12.520] You know, he had this wonderful belief that human beings have to make, we have to be free to make our own mistakes.
[00:38:12.520 --> 00:38:18.520] We have to be free to read the books we want, even if they are proposing harmful ideas.
[00:38:18.520 --> 00:38:24.280] He says in Aria Pagittica, if you let truth and falsehood grapple on a battlefield, truth will out.
[00:38:24.680 --> 00:38:27.000] And I think he's got a great point.
[00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:30.680] And I think, you know, even in Paradise Lost, it is so essential.
[00:38:30.680 --> 00:38:36.680] I mean, you could interpret the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as, you know, human beings who are tricked.
[00:38:36.680 --> 00:38:38.600] Well, either, you could say they are predestined.
[00:38:38.920 --> 00:38:46.880] If you're a Calvinist, you might say they are predestined to eat the forbidden fruit and to fall so that we end up as a species in a post-lapsarian state.
[00:38:47.280 --> 00:38:48.400] That's to do with predestination.
[00:38:48.400 --> 00:38:49.200] They don't have a choice.
[00:38:44.840 --> 00:38:50.160] Milton says no.
[00:38:50.400 --> 00:38:56.960] And Milton is so clear about this because early in Paradise Lost, we have the archangel explain to them the whole thing, the whole deal.
[00:38:57.120 --> 00:38:58.240] And another appears later.
[00:38:58.240 --> 00:39:06.000] I think it's Michael who appears later to explain to Adam, you had the choice and you chose to eat the fruit and you've made the mistake and that's why you're fallen.
[00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:07.520] And it's so important.
[00:39:07.520 --> 00:39:15.440] That text is incoherent unless you understand that Milton is making it their choice, not God's predestined will.
[00:39:15.440 --> 00:39:16.800] It's them, right?
[00:39:16.800 --> 00:39:20.800] And that, I think, is so key to understanding this distinction between liberty and license.
[00:39:20.800 --> 00:39:33.120] And something we can, I think, we can reclaim that idea, you know, not that we go out there, live selfish, bullish lives where we take whatever we want, we don't care about anyone else's society.
[00:39:33.120 --> 00:39:34.880] I don't see that as liberal, right?
[00:39:34.880 --> 00:39:36.400] I see that as licentious.
[00:39:36.400 --> 00:39:38.160] Yeah, that's a great distinction.
[00:39:38.160 --> 00:39:43.520] That audacious autodidact, Eve, she wanted to know something on her own.
[00:39:43.520 --> 00:39:44.080] Yeah.
[00:39:44.800 --> 00:39:46.320] She's my hero for that.
[00:39:46.320 --> 00:39:48.080] Proto-feminist, absolutely.
[00:39:48.080 --> 00:39:48.720] Yeah.
[00:39:48.720 --> 00:39:52.640] I love that story in your book about taking your students to Milton's grave, right?
[00:39:53.200 --> 00:39:55.040] Is that the correct am I remembering that right?
[00:39:55.280 --> 00:40:00.800] Because I was teaching at the City of London School for Girls, which is a school in the Barbican estate.
[00:40:00.800 --> 00:40:06.560] And the Barbican estate, if you haven't been in London, is this brutalist, you know, the 60s brutalism.
[00:40:06.560 --> 00:40:06.720] Yeah.
[00:40:07.040 --> 00:40:12.480] A really ugly architectural monstrosity, but it's now listed because it's historically significant.
[00:40:12.480 --> 00:40:13.760] So they're not going to get rid of it.
[00:40:13.760 --> 00:40:17.840] But in the middle of this brutalist estate is this beautiful old church, St.
[00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:19.120] Giles Cripplegate.
[00:40:19.120 --> 00:40:21.280] Tiny, small little church.
[00:40:21.520 --> 00:40:23.440] But, you know, it was significant.
[00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:25.200] You know, Cromwell got married there.
[00:40:25.200 --> 00:40:27.840] Shakespeare lived just around the corner, might have been a parishioner.
[00:40:27.840 --> 00:40:30.000] We don't know much about his church-going habits.
[00:40:30.840 --> 00:40:39.640] But, you know, and of course, Milton is buried there because he couldn't be buried in Westminster Abbey because he was a Republican, right?
[00:40:39.640 --> 00:40:41.720] So it was his politics.
[00:40:41.960 --> 00:40:43.640] You know, he was lucky not to have been executed.
[00:40:43.640 --> 00:40:52.040] In fact, he only avoided execution because Andrew Marvell, another poet, intervened and said, look, the dude's blind and old and no harm to anyone.
[00:40:52.040 --> 00:40:53.080] You know, leave him alone.
[00:40:53.080 --> 00:40:54.360] He didn't use the word dude.
[00:40:54.360 --> 00:40:55.400] That was an interference.
[00:40:55.640 --> 00:40:59.000] But what do they mean by what did Republican mean then?
[00:40:59.640 --> 00:41:01.560] Oh, the idea that you didn't want a monarchy.
[00:41:01.560 --> 00:41:02.200] Right.
[00:41:02.680 --> 00:41:04.120] And, you know, its traditional meaning.
[00:41:04.120 --> 00:41:07.080] And Milton was dead against.
[00:41:07.080 --> 00:41:07.560] He took a risk.
[00:41:07.560 --> 00:41:12.120] He was on the wrong side of the civil war, as it turns out, in terms of who won.
[00:41:12.600 --> 00:41:29.080] And he, you know, he was, you know, but during the Cromwell reign, you know, during that period between the, you know, before the re-emergence of the king, he actually, weirdly, he ended up being a censor for the state.
[00:41:29.080 --> 00:41:30.520] So he was a hypocrite.
[00:41:30.520 --> 00:41:32.360] And there's all sorts of hypocrisies in what he writes.
[00:41:32.360 --> 00:41:35.080] You know, he says he does, he certainly doesn't extend free speech to Catholics.
[00:41:35.080 --> 00:41:36.200] I can tell you that.
[00:41:36.760 --> 00:41:46.680] But although, you know, even that, like, there's a reason behind it, insofar as he saw the Catholic Church as being fundamentally tyrannous, fundamentally against freedom.
[00:41:46.680 --> 00:41:49.720] So he was opposing a force that he perceived to be against freedom.
[00:41:50.120 --> 00:41:55.800] And I think that was probably informed by when he was a young, young man and he was doing the equivalent of the grand tour of Europe.
[00:41:55.800 --> 00:41:58.840] And he went to Italy and he visited Galileo.
[00:41:58.840 --> 00:42:04.760] Well, if he's telling the truth in his Area Pagetica, he says he visited Galileo, who was under house arrest at the time.
[00:42:04.760 --> 00:42:14.720] And I mention in the book, because I, and this does sound fanciful when I say it out loud, but you know, I wondered whether his interaction with Galileo was a kind of premonition of his own fate.
[00:42:14.720 --> 00:42:17.440] Because by that point, Galileo was blind.
[00:42:17.440 --> 00:42:19.280] You know, he'd almost been executed.
[00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:20.480] He was disgraced.
[00:42:20.800 --> 00:42:24.320] He was at the point where Milton would end up 40 years later.
[00:42:24.320 --> 00:42:30.320] It's just, it's just an interesting, it's a very fascinating meeting that took place.
[00:42:30.320 --> 00:42:31.840] Really interesting to envisage.
[00:42:31.840 --> 00:42:33.520] That would make a great film.
[00:42:33.520 --> 00:42:34.240] It would, wouldn't it?
[00:42:34.240 --> 00:42:35.600] Like that, no, I totally agree.
[00:42:35.680 --> 00:42:37.440] I think that would be a great film.
[00:42:37.920 --> 00:42:39.120] No one's tackled that.
[00:42:39.120 --> 00:42:41.200] And it's just, it's just, it's, you know, it's sad to me.
[00:42:41.200 --> 00:42:42.080] He ended up being buried.
[00:42:42.080 --> 00:42:45.600] Milton ended up being buried in this humble little church, St.
[00:42:45.680 --> 00:42:46.560] Charles Gripoke.
[00:42:46.640 --> 00:42:49.600] He got dug up by people during the French Revolution.
[00:42:49.600 --> 00:42:50.320] They dug him up.
[00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:52.240] They ripped off his jawbone.
[00:42:52.240 --> 00:42:56.800] They ripped off bits of hair, bits of bones, sold them as souvenirs.
[00:42:56.800 --> 00:42:59.920] So, you know, he didn't end up with a nice fate.
[00:43:00.160 --> 00:43:02.000] Ultimately, you can go to where he's buried.
[00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:03.600] I mean, they don't know exactly where he is.
[00:43:03.600 --> 00:43:07.040] There's a mark on the floor that says he's buried near here.
[00:43:07.040 --> 00:43:08.080] It's in there somewhere.
[00:43:08.080 --> 00:43:10.080] Like, they could find it if they dug it all up.
[00:43:10.240 --> 00:43:12.480] Like, they found Richard III in that car park in England.
[00:43:12.640 --> 00:43:13.360] That's right.
[00:43:15.280 --> 00:43:15.520] I know.
[00:43:15.520 --> 00:43:17.360] It wasn't a car park when he was buried.
[00:43:17.680 --> 00:43:18.560] Believe it or not.
[00:43:18.560 --> 00:43:26.320] Well, what's fascinating about that is, you know, the woman who just had an intuition that he would be there, the spot she chose, she just guessed.
[00:43:26.320 --> 00:43:28.240] And they found a skeleton.
[00:43:28.240 --> 00:43:32.400] They found the skeleton and then they suddenly realized it had curvature of the spine.
[00:43:32.400 --> 00:43:32.880] Right.
[00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:34.000] And they're like, what the hell?
[00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:35.920] Because, of course, Richard III was a hunchback.
[00:43:35.920 --> 00:43:36.400] Yeah.
[00:43:36.720 --> 00:43:40.320] And the first body they found, that was it.
[00:43:40.320 --> 00:43:42.640] And DNA checks out, dating checks out.
[00:43:42.640 --> 00:43:44.000] It's definitely him.
[00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:47.280] And anyway, I'm going off tangent, but I find that story so fascinating.
[00:43:47.920 --> 00:43:51.200] They're still looking for Jimmy Hoffa's body over here in the United States.
[00:43:52.560 --> 00:43:54.160] I don't think they're finding that.
[00:43:54.160 --> 00:43:57.920] All right, just several things come to mind here since you talk about Shakespeare.
[00:43:57.920 --> 00:44:23.480] I mean, here's, I quote this in my next book because it's just one of the great anti-bigotry statements of all time when Shylock declares, I am a Jew, hath not a Jew eyes, hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.
[00:44:23.480 --> 00:44:25.320] If you prick us, do we not bleed?
[00:44:25.320 --> 00:44:27.320] If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
[00:44:27.320 --> 00:44:29.080] If you poison us, do we not die?
[00:44:29.080 --> 00:44:31.480] And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
[00:44:31.480 --> 00:44:35.000] If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
[00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:36.760] That's one of the great statements of all time.
[00:44:36.760 --> 00:44:38.840] How can you cancel Shakespeare for that?
[00:44:38.840 --> 00:44:39.480] Astonishing.
[00:44:39.480 --> 00:44:41.080] Just, I mean, just to hear those words.
[00:44:41.080 --> 00:44:42.440] No one comes close.
[00:44:42.760 --> 00:44:43.640] Who else can do that?
[00:44:43.640 --> 00:44:44.280] Who else can do that?
[00:44:44.280 --> 00:44:45.000] No one can do that.
[00:44:45.000 --> 00:44:45.800] No one ever has.
[00:44:45.800 --> 00:44:51.400] It's so fascinating to me that Shakespeare, you know, he started his career when the public theaters were very young.
[00:44:51.400 --> 00:44:55.080] You know, a matter of at most two decades old.
[00:44:55.080 --> 00:45:01.160] You know, he comes to London sort of late, late 1587, roughly.
[00:45:01.160 --> 00:45:09.160] And, you know, he becomes this incredible force on the London stage.
[00:45:09.160 --> 00:45:12.440] And 400 years later, and no one's bettered him.
[00:45:12.440 --> 00:45:16.200] You know, at the start of this new medium, no one's actually been able to top that.
[00:45:16.200 --> 00:45:20.360] I mean, that speech, I mean, that, you know, where is some of his predecessors?
[00:45:20.440 --> 00:45:32.440] If you take Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe wrote a play called Christopher Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare, was very, but when the by the time Shakespeare gets to London, Marlowe is already established as this great, the great dramatist.
[00:45:32.440 --> 00:45:35.880] It, you know, plays like Tambourlaine, part one and two, and you know, Dr.
[00:45:35.880 --> 00:45:37.160] Faustus.
[00:45:37.160 --> 00:45:39.240] And then he writes a play called The Jew of Malta.
[00:45:39.240 --> 00:45:43.080] And the Jew of Malta is kind of a proto-uh, Shylock.
[00:45:43.080 --> 00:45:54.480] It's a figure of Barabbas who is hook-nosed, counting his gold, cackling, a cartoonish, anti-Semitic depiction of the Jew.
[00:45:54.480 --> 00:45:58.640] And remember, contextually, of course, there were technically no Jews in England at the time.
[00:45:58.640 --> 00:45:59.200] They'd been...
[00:45:59.200 --> 00:46:03.840] uh booted out in the 12th century and weren't readmitted till the late 17th century.
[00:46:04.080 --> 00:46:05.920] You could be Jewish if you had converted.
[00:46:05.920 --> 00:46:09.440] In fact, there was a house in London called the Domus Conversorum where you could live.
[00:46:09.440 --> 00:46:16.400] In fact, Queen Elizabeth's chief physician was a Jewish, well, of Jewish descent, a Portuguese man of Jewish descent called Dr.
[00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:20.080] Lopez, who was charged with attempting to kill her.
[00:46:20.080 --> 00:46:26.160] That's also the context of The Merchant of Venice, you know, so there was that was a very fame, there was a fear, but it was a different kind of thing.
[00:46:26.400 --> 00:46:28.880] It's a sort of play that, you know, couldn't be written post-Holocaust.
[00:46:28.880 --> 00:46:33.920] This is a play in a society where, you know, there aren't Jewish people about.
[00:46:33.920 --> 00:46:37.040] You know, so it's, it's, it's, it's a sort of, but it's interesting that even then, right?
[00:46:37.040 --> 00:46:39.520] So Marlowe does the caricature.
[00:46:39.520 --> 00:46:41.200] Shakespeare doesn't.
[00:46:41.520 --> 00:46:43.520] Shylock is alive in that play.
[00:46:43.520 --> 00:46:44.800] He leaps off the page.
[00:46:44.800 --> 00:46:49.680] He's, he's, he's, he thinks for himself almost independently of his creator.
[00:46:49.680 --> 00:46:53.920] He's, and that's why you can play Shylock in all sorts of ways.
[00:46:53.920 --> 00:46:58.640] You can play him as a cackling caricature, the anti-Semitic caricature, right?
[00:46:58.640 --> 00:47:06.480] There's something in the play that feels unpleasant in terms of the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of the play.
[00:47:06.960 --> 00:47:10.240] It feels grim, but maybe that's part of the impact.
[00:47:10.640 --> 00:47:22.400] Because you end up feeling for him, even though he's being incredibly cruel, you know, he's being, you know, the idea that he's demanding, even when he could have all the wealth, he's demanding the pound of flesh from Antonio.
[00:47:22.400 --> 00:47:26.080] But then, let's not forget, Antonio doesn't come across well in that play.
[00:47:26.080 --> 00:47:36.120] You know, you know, he's the you know, he it's the, you know, it's just interesting to me that Shakespeare could have represented something very two-dimensional, and he won't do it.
[00:47:36.440 --> 00:47:39.640] And that's why you can play Shylock that way, but you can also play it another way.
[00:47:39.640 --> 00:47:46.040] There's a recent production in London, um, where Shylock is played by a female actor.
[00:47:46.040 --> 00:47:49.640] Uh, I feel bad because I can't remember her name, but she's brilliant.
[00:47:49.640 --> 00:47:53.000] Um, and um, actually, do you mind if I search for that?
[00:47:53.000 --> 00:47:55.960] Because I just think it's kind of important that I get this right.
[00:47:55.960 --> 00:48:08.840] Um, it's uh it was in the London stage, and it was a Jewish production, but where Shylock is the hero, interesting, and it was a female Shylock here, here it is.
[00:48:08.840 --> 00:48:13.960] Um, and it's Tracy Ann Oberman, and my God, she's brilliant.
[00:48:13.960 --> 00:48:32.920] Oh, just a nice, and and and it's played where you she's you just feel for her, you you feel for the um the way in which the Jewish figures are treated by the Christians in the but it's there in Shakespeare's play, it's all there, they do have to modify elements of it to make it work, right?
[00:48:32.920 --> 00:48:42.760] And they do have to but my point is my point is that you can play the play that way and you can play it as effectively the other way.
[00:48:42.760 --> 00:48:48.440] And Shakespeare does that in a way that playwright playwrights can't seem to do, he doesn't ever take sides.
[00:48:48.440 --> 00:48:48.920] A.L.
[00:48:48.920 --> 00:49:01.560] Rouse, who was a or Rouse rather, who was a great Elizabethan historian, historian of the Elizabethan era, I should say, not himself Elizabethan, made the point that he said that Shakespeare sees through everyone equally.
[00:49:01.560 --> 00:49:03.320] That's the way he puts it.
[00:49:03.320 --> 00:49:25.680] So you can have a production of Coriolanus, and they had there was one in the 30s, very famous in Paris, where at the comedy at the Comédé Française, the theatre, the comedy theatre, they had the production where people from political factions would turn up pro-fascist and anti-fascist, you know, and they would be there in the crowd shouting their various political slogans.
[00:49:25.680 --> 00:49:28.960] And each faction saw the play as supporting their view.
[00:49:29.520 --> 00:49:31.840] And it ended up with riots where many, many people were killed.
[00:49:31.840 --> 00:49:35.200] It's a famous case because the play doesn't.
[00:49:35.520 --> 00:49:36.400] Who do you support in that?
[00:49:36.400 --> 00:49:37.120] Julius Caesar.
[00:49:37.120 --> 00:49:38.160] Who do you support in that?
[00:49:38.160 --> 00:49:38.480] Right?
[00:49:38.800 --> 00:49:41.200] It's Julius Caesar, great populist leader.
[00:49:41.360 --> 00:49:45.440] The crowd love him, you know, but he might become a tyrant.
[00:49:45.440 --> 00:49:46.800] That's what Brutus says.
[00:49:46.800 --> 00:49:48.560] He might become tyrannical.
[00:49:49.040 --> 00:49:52.800] So do you support the conspirators who reluctantly kill him?
[00:49:52.800 --> 00:50:00.800] Or do you support Mark Antony and the populists who say that this was just an elitist movement sabotaging the populist will?
[00:50:00.800 --> 00:50:04.480] And you can't, he won't let you settle on one side or the other.
[00:50:04.480 --> 00:50:13.920] Just when you think, right, when he gets the point, you remember the wonderful moment where Brutus gives that speech to the plebeians, and then Mark Antony comes out and gives an even better speech.
[00:50:13.920 --> 00:50:16.480] Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
[00:50:16.480 --> 00:50:24.560] And that's such an incredible speech because he's sort of revising what Brutus had said, but making it more elegant.
[00:50:24.560 --> 00:50:28.240] Like for one thing, his speech is in verse and Brutus's speech is in prose.
[00:50:28.240 --> 00:50:32.160] And it's a very subtle effect, but it's much more impactful.
[00:50:32.160 --> 00:50:36.000] And you start to believe, yes, okay, Mark Antony is right.
[00:50:36.000 --> 00:50:38.960] The conspirators are the anti-populists.
[00:50:38.960 --> 00:50:40.320] They're the elites.
[00:50:40.320 --> 00:50:41.120] They're the people.
[00:50:41.520 --> 00:50:47.840] They're the dark, shadowy, you know, the shadow government, you'd call them today, you know, the kind of the globalists, whatever.
[00:50:48.240 --> 00:50:49.280] They're the ones who come.
[00:50:49.280 --> 00:50:51.120] They want to sweep in and take power.
[00:50:51.120 --> 00:50:53.440] And then the crowd gets swept away and they start rioting.
[00:50:53.440 --> 00:50:54.960] And you think, yes, we're with the crowd.
[00:50:54.960 --> 00:50:55.760] But what happens then?
[00:50:55.760 --> 00:50:56.320] It's so key.
[00:50:56.320 --> 00:50:57.840] I quote it in the book.
[00:50:58.400 --> 00:51:00.840] They run into Sinner, the poet.
[00:50:58.880 --> 00:51:03.320] And they say, oh, there was a conspirator called Sinner.
[00:50:59.360 --> 00:51:04.200] And he says, no, I'm not.
[00:50:59.440 --> 00:51:05.720] I just have the same name.
[00:50:59.520 --> 00:51:06.040] I'm a poet.
[00:51:06.840 --> 00:51:08.440] And they say, well, just tear him anyway.
[00:51:08.440 --> 00:51:10.760] They say, tear him for his bad verses.
[00:51:11.080 --> 00:51:12.040] They say, we don't care.
[00:51:12.600 --> 00:51:13.800] We just want bloodlust.
[00:51:13.800 --> 00:51:23.720] So he seems to be at once saying that there's righteous indignation amongst the populace against the elites who have stolen their leader away.
[00:51:23.720 --> 00:51:25.160] But then he switches it.
[00:51:25.160 --> 00:51:30.280] And all of a sudden, you're like, but they're just crazed, bloodlustful maniacs.
[00:51:30.280 --> 00:51:32.760] And actually, you can't trust the people.
[00:51:33.080 --> 00:51:35.080] He never settles on one or the other.
[00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:41.080] We know nothing about Shakespeare's opinions on religion, politics, race, gender, anything.
[00:51:41.080 --> 00:51:42.200] We know nothing.
[00:51:42.200 --> 00:51:48.600] And his plays tell us precisely nothing because they can be cited to support any point of view.
[00:51:48.600 --> 00:51:54.360] And that to me makes him so far above any playwright who has ever existed ever since.
[00:51:54.360 --> 00:51:55.240] And certainly today.
[00:51:55.240 --> 00:52:07.400] I mean, most plays, most new plays that are written today, you feel like you're being hectored with a moral lesson, like it's a fairy tale or something, like we're children and we have to go away saying, yes, I will support the creed of diversity.
[00:52:07.400 --> 00:52:11.320] Yes, isn't it terrible that gay people have had such a hard time and we must be nice to gay people?
[00:52:11.320 --> 00:52:12.920] Like, that's what it feels like.
[00:52:12.920 --> 00:52:14.200] This sermonizing.
[00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:15.880] Like, Shakespeare would have had none of that.
[00:52:15.880 --> 00:52:17.480] And that's why he's better.
[00:52:17.480 --> 00:52:20.760] Is it okay if I ask you about the Shakespeare authorship question?
[00:52:20.760 --> 00:52:24.920] Because my magazine is called Skeptic, so every couple of years, you know, they hector me.
[00:52:24.920 --> 00:52:26.120] And we've looked into it.
[00:52:26.120 --> 00:52:27.240] We published a few things.
[00:52:27.240 --> 00:52:33.400] It seems to me pretty clear they don't have enough evidence for anybody else, other than Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, or was it Francis Bacon?
[00:52:33.480 --> 00:52:35.320] Was one of the other alternatives?
[00:52:35.320 --> 00:52:35.880] I don't know.
[00:52:35.880 --> 00:52:37.720] Have you looked into all that?
[00:52:37.720 --> 00:52:39

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 3 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
:51:30.280 --> 00:51:32.760] And actually, you can't trust the people.
[00:51:33.080 --> 00:51:35.080] He never settles on one or the other.
[00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:41.080] We know nothing about Shakespeare's opinions on religion, politics, race, gender, anything.
[00:51:41.080 --> 00:51:42.200] We know nothing.
[00:51:42.200 --> 00:51:48.600] And his plays tell us precisely nothing because they can be cited to support any point of view.
[00:51:48.600 --> 00:51:54.360] And that to me makes him so far above any playwright who has ever existed ever since.
[00:51:54.360 --> 00:51:55.240] And certainly today.
[00:51:55.240 --> 00:52:07.400] I mean, most plays, most new plays that are written today, you feel like you're being hectored with a moral lesson, like it's a fairy tale or something, like we're children and we have to go away saying, yes, I will support the creed of diversity.
[00:52:07.400 --> 00:52:11.320] Yes, isn't it terrible that gay people have had such a hard time and we must be nice to gay people?
[00:52:11.320 --> 00:52:12.920] Like, that's what it feels like.
[00:52:12.920 --> 00:52:14.200] This sermonizing.
[00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:15.880] Like, Shakespeare would have had none of that.
[00:52:15.880 --> 00:52:17.480] And that's why he's better.
[00:52:17.480 --> 00:52:20.760] Is it okay if I ask you about the Shakespeare authorship question?
[00:52:20.760 --> 00:52:24.920] Because my magazine is called Skeptic, so every couple of years, you know, they hector me.
[00:52:24.920 --> 00:52:26.120] And we've looked into it.
[00:52:26.120 --> 00:52:27.240] We published a few things.
[00:52:27.240 --> 00:52:33.400] It seems to me pretty clear they don't have enough evidence for anybody else, other than Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, or was it Francis Bacon?
[00:52:33.480 --> 00:52:35.320] Was one of the other alternatives?
[00:52:35.320 --> 00:52:35.880] I don't know.
[00:52:35.880 --> 00:52:37.720] Have you looked into all that?
[00:52:37.720 --> 00:52:39.320] Yeah, it's errant nonsense.
[00:52:39.320 --> 00:52:44.760] And what I really love about it is they completely defy any sense of historical accuracy.
[00:52:44.760 --> 00:52:48.240] I mean, like, Christopher Marlowe died in 1593, for God's sake.
[00:52:44.840 --> 00:52:55.120] And so, you know, there's been no Macbeth, there's been no Antony and Cleopatra, there's been no Hamlet, there's been no 12th Night.
[00:52:55.280 --> 00:53:02.400] But somehow, he just faked his own death, must have, and then carried on writing, even though Marlowe was already the preeminent dramatist of his age.
[00:53:02.400 --> 00:53:03.760] Why would he have to do that exactly?
[00:53:03.760 --> 00:53:05.840] Like, that doesn't make any sense at all.
[00:53:05.840 --> 00:53:07.840] And then you have the Oxfordians are hilarious.
[00:53:07.840 --> 00:53:19.200] You know, they say the Earl of Oxford was, he also died in the, what was he, 1602, maybe, around that, early, just after Hamlet, maybe, but before some of the great man, certainly before the Tempest and before Coriolanus and before King Lear.
[00:53:19.200 --> 00:53:26.160] And, you know, and again, you'd have to kind of suggest that it was a fake death or something of that kind.
[00:53:26.160 --> 00:53:33.280] There's this crazy theory that Amelia Lanyer wrote his plays, which has been recently proposed in a novel by Jodie Picot.
[00:53:33.280 --> 00:53:35.840] And I got into a bit of an argument with her online, friendly argument.
[00:53:35.840 --> 00:53:37.040] It wasn't Nasty or anything.
[00:53:37.680 --> 00:53:41.200] And, you know, and people are free to have their theories, but it's all nonsense.
[00:53:41.360 --> 00:53:44.080] What you'll find is Francis Bacon, another example.
[00:53:44.080 --> 00:53:50.960] All of the candidates that they suggest are upper class, are gentry, aristocrats.
[00:53:50.960 --> 00:53:51.280] Right.
[00:53:51.440 --> 00:53:55.680] Very interesting to me that it's, I think a lot of it is rooted in class snobbery.
[00:53:55.680 --> 00:53:55.920] Yes.
[00:53:55.920 --> 00:54:00.320] How could a guy with just a grammar school education possibly have done this?
[00:54:00.640 --> 00:54:04.320] Because if you know about grammar school educations of the time, you'll know how rigorous they were.
[00:54:05.200 --> 00:54:06.560] And you know, Shakespeare was middle class.
[00:54:06.560 --> 00:54:07.280] He wasn't working class.
[00:54:07.280 --> 00:54:14.320] He was, you know, he was able to go to the grammar school and when a lot of people wouldn't have been able to, you know, he wasn't, he didn't go to university.
[00:54:14.320 --> 00:54:16.880] You know, he wasn't, he had social aspirations.
[00:54:16.880 --> 00:54:18.000] He wanted to be a lord.
[00:54:18.000 --> 00:54:23.120] He was spending all of his time trying to get a coat of arms, and he eventually succeeded where his father had failed.
[00:54:23.120 --> 00:54:24.560] So he had social aspirations.
[00:54:24.560 --> 00:54:25.680] Absolutely, he did.
[00:54:25.680 --> 00:54:35.960] But he didn't have that kind of, but really, if you saw, I mean, if you see it in these terms, really, Cambridge and Oxford, which were the only two universities at the time, anyway, and he couldn't have gone anyway because he was married at that time and you couldn't go if you were married.
[00:54:36.040 --> 00:54:41.880] But they were more like finishing schools, I suppose, if you like, normally to prepare for the priesthood or something like that.
[00:54:41.880 --> 00:54:45.640] But, you know, the grammar schools, that's the rigorous rote learning.
[00:54:45.640 --> 00:54:49.720] It's your Ovid, it's your Cicero, it's your, you know, it's your Horace, etc.
[00:54:49.960 --> 00:54:57.560] It's all of those classical references, that bedrock of knowledge that recurs throughout the illusions in his plays.
[00:54:57.560 --> 00:55:00.040] They're all there in the grammar school curriculum.
[00:55:00.040 --> 00:55:02.360] A really good book on this is by Jonathan Bates.
[00:55:02.360 --> 00:55:03.560] It's called Shakespeare and Ovid.
[00:55:03.560 --> 00:55:14.280] And you can look at the way in which he was informed about these very, these key texts, which is why he had that foundation, you know, and he was a voracious reader.
[00:55:14.280 --> 00:55:15.880] You know, people forget about this.
[00:55:15.880 --> 00:55:19.080] He certainly knew where to look for the books, the right books.
[00:55:19.080 --> 00:55:26.520] He plundered Holland Shed's Chronicles, the second edition, which came out in that year, 1587, when he went to London.
[00:55:26.520 --> 00:55:29.240] And he knew, you know, he was a magpie.
[00:55:29.640 --> 00:55:32.280] And the idea that, well, here's the thing, right?
[00:55:32.280 --> 00:55:33.560] So I think that's the first thing.
[00:55:33.560 --> 00:55:34.680] It's a class snobbery.
[00:55:34.680 --> 00:55:41.640] How could a middle-class guy who didn't go to university, didn't have aristocratic connections, he was facing the same snobbery during his lifetime, by the way.
[00:55:41.640 --> 00:55:47.480] When he got to London, the key preeminent dramatists of the time were the university wits, right?
[00:55:47.480 --> 00:55:59.720] These were university-educated posh guys who were doing this really interesting thing of taking the theater, which was seen very much as low art, you know, and they were infusing with classical references.
[00:55:59.720 --> 00:56:08.360] They'd come, they'd been educated at Oxford and Cambodia, people like George Lilly and Peel, and John Lilly, sorry, and George Peel, and Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Kidd.
[00:56:08.360 --> 00:56:14.560] He didn't go to university, but he was seen within that university wits, you know, and Robert Greene, most notably.
[00:56:14.560 --> 00:56:19.120] And these people, and Shakespeare comes along, and they, what does Robert Greene call him?
[00:56:14.440 --> 00:56:21.280] Robert Greene called him an upstart crow.
[00:56:21.600 --> 00:56:25.760] It's the earliest reference to Shakespeare as a writer that we have.
[00:56:25.760 --> 00:56:34.960] And it comes from this man, Green, who had died just before the publication of this book, where he says there's an upstart crow who is beautified with our feathers.
[00:56:34.960 --> 00:56:38.000] Effectively, he's saying Shakespeare is a plagiarist.
[00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:43.360] He says he thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best of them, and he's the best shake scene in a country.
[00:56:43.360 --> 00:56:44.560] It's not subtle.
[00:56:45.280 --> 00:56:47.840] And he's annoyed because he's saying he's an actor.
[00:56:47.840 --> 00:56:49.040] He says he's an actor.
[00:56:49.040 --> 00:56:51.920] He says he's a player.
[00:56:51.920 --> 00:56:54.560] He calls him a player, wrapped in a tiger's hide.
[00:56:54.560 --> 00:56:55.360] I'm paraphrasing.
[00:56:55.360 --> 00:57:03.360] I haven't got the quotation to hand, but he paraphrases a line from one of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays to use against him.
[00:57:03.360 --> 00:57:08.640] And he says he's annoyed because he's saying, we're the university wits, we're the great dramatists, we're the great writers.
[00:57:08.640 --> 00:57:13.120] Along comes this middle-class boy who acts, he's an actor.
[00:57:13.120 --> 00:57:17.280] Shakespeare was an actor first and foremost and continued acting throughout his life.
[00:57:17.280 --> 00:57:21.680] And he starts writing plays and they're better than us and they're more successful.
[00:57:21.680 --> 00:57:24.320] He says he is beautified with our feathers.
[00:57:24.320 --> 00:57:27.840] He's stealing our feathers and wearing them as a costume.
[00:57:27.840 --> 00:57:34.720] And you get that really interesting moment in Hamlet where Polonius is reading the letter and he says, oh, beautiful, he reads out the phrase beautified.
[00:57:34.960 --> 00:57:37.120] Oh, beautified is a vile phrase.
[00:57:37.120 --> 00:57:38.720] Beautified is an awful phrase.
[00:57:38.720 --> 00:57:44.160] And I think that's Shakespeare having a go at Robert Greene for saying that he was beautified with his feathers.
[00:57:44.400 --> 00:57:46.160] But they hated him.
[00:57:46.400 --> 00:57:47.760] They were snobs.
[00:57:47.760 --> 00:57:49.520] Ben Johnson was a snob.
[00:57:49.520 --> 00:57:55.920] He didn't even go to university either, but he was a snob about Shakespeare's writing, saying he knew little Latin and less Greek.
[00:57:56.640 --> 00:57:58.800] But that snobbery has carried through.
[00:57:58.800 --> 00:58:09.960] And I just think when you get someone who is that successful, particularly at a time now where conspiracy theories are just embraced across the board, people, and I'd be fascinated by this because I wrote a piece on Shakespeare for my substack.
[00:58:09.960 --> 00:58:18.680] And the people who started insisting that it was Oxford or Marlowe, they're so vicious and vociferous and adamant, and they've got no evidence.
[00:58:18.680 --> 00:58:20.200] Here's the key question, just to sum up.
[00:58:20.200 --> 00:58:23.080] I'm sorry, I'm rambling on, but here's my key question.
[00:58:23.400 --> 00:58:33.720] If the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare, why is it that every single one of his contemporaries thought that he did?
[00:58:34.040 --> 00:58:35.480] Every single one.
[00:58:35.480 --> 00:58:39.080] Why was there no hint of anyone saying there might be a bit of a hoax here?
[00:58:39.080 --> 00:58:51.160] There might be a bit of if Ben Johnson, his rival and friend, had one slight indication that there could have been a hoax, he would have sung it from the rooftops and never shut up about it.
[00:58:51.160 --> 00:58:51.480] Right.
[00:58:51.480 --> 00:58:53.240] But they didn't because they knew it was him.
[00:58:53.240 --> 00:58:54.760] It's that simple.
[00:58:54.760 --> 00:58:56.280] Yeah, it's a little bit like the U.S.
[00:58:56.360 --> 00:58:57.400] fake the moon landing.
[00:58:57.400 --> 00:58:59.640] Well, then why didn't the Russians say anything?
[00:58:59.640 --> 00:59:02.920] Why did the thousands of people involved in it all keep their traps shut?
[00:59:04.120 --> 00:59:05.800] You can't keep a conspiracy like that.
[00:59:06.040 --> 00:59:06.680] It's not doing.
[00:59:06.760 --> 00:59:14.200] There's something about genius that's six standard deviations out from the mean or more in the case of Shakespeare or Newton.
[00:59:14.200 --> 00:59:21.080] You know, just a handful of these people, Einstein, Feynman, von Neumann, just people that are just like from another planet.
[00:59:21.560 --> 00:59:25.400] And most people just can't conceive of how that.
[00:59:25.400 --> 00:59:28.120] I can't think, you know, the argument from personal incredulity.
[00:59:28.120 --> 00:59:30.040] I can't think of how this could be done.
[00:59:30.040 --> 00:59:32.360] Therefore, there must be something else.
[00:59:32.680 --> 00:59:34.760] Well, it's that thing about genius, isn't it?
[00:59:34.760 --> 00:59:44.960] It's that, I mean, there's a really wonderful book on Shakespeare by Victor Hugo, who obviously wrote, you know, Le Miserable, Punchback and Otchdam, Toilers of the Sea, et cetera.
[00:59:44.960 --> 00:59:47.040] And Toilers of the Sea is his best book, by the way.
[00:59:47.120 --> 00:59:47.840] No one reads it.
[00:59:44.280 --> 00:59:48.960] It's a tip.
[00:59:49.680 --> 00:59:52.640] Anyway, Victor Hugo wrote a book called Shakespeare.
[00:59:52.640 --> 00:59:55.520] And actually, it's not really about Shakespeare, it's about 10% of it's about Shakespeare.
[00:59:55.520 --> 00:59:58.480] It's really about the notion of artistic genius.
[00:59:58.480 --> 01:00:08.720] And the point he makes is that true, sublime, transcendent artistic genius comes about maybe he estimates three or four per generation, right?
[01:00:08.720 --> 01:00:17.280] And he's talking about the likes of Bach or Mozart or Michelangelo or Da Vinci or whatever it might be, you know, whoever you can think of.
[01:00:17.280 --> 01:00:20.640] The real heights, the height when you think, how did they do?
[01:00:20.640 --> 01:00:24.720] You listen to some of Mozart's work and you think, I don't know how a human being does that.
[01:00:25.280 --> 01:00:27.840] And Shakespeare's up there as well.
[01:00:28.160 --> 01:00:28.960] And think about that.
[01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:32.560] So it's got three or four a generation, these incredible geniuses emerge.
[01:00:32.560 --> 01:00:34.080] I think Hugo's got a point.
[01:00:34.080 --> 01:00:36.800] None of them will emerge if the circumstances aren't right.
[01:00:36.800 --> 01:00:44.800] So, like, Shakespeare couldn't have emerged as that transcendental genius had he not appeared in London at that perfect time.
[01:00:44.800 --> 01:00:52.720] You know, when you have the theater suddenly burgeoning with the university wits dignifying it, but making it become a higher form of art.
[01:00:52.720 --> 01:00:58.000] If he hadn't been there at that time, if he hadn't been fortunate to have the grammar school education, none of it would have happened.
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[01:01:58.360 --> 01:02:01.160] We'd have just died and the genius would have died with him.
[01:02:01.160 --> 01:02:01.640] Yeah.
[01:02:01.640 --> 01:02:03.240] We were lucky in a way.
[01:02:03.480 --> 01:02:04.360] But think about that then.
[01:02:04.360 --> 01:02:09.080] So if it's three or four generations, three or four great, great geniuses every generation.
[01:02:09.080 --> 01:02:16.600] So, you know, your Aristophanes, your Pindars, whatever it might be, then the circumstances have to be right.
[01:02:16.600 --> 01:02:22.200] And the woke era cannot produce sublime artistic genius because the conditions it creates.
[01:02:22.520 --> 01:02:25.080] Well, let me ask you a slightly different question.
[01:02:25.320 --> 01:02:32.520] Because the population of Europe at the time of the people you're talking about was very low compared to today.
[01:02:32.520 --> 01:02:39.960] So the counter-argument you hear is: you know, in a world of 8 billion people, why aren't there 30 Mozarts and 30 Shakespeare's?
[01:02:40.520 --> 01:02:41.560] Where are they?
[01:02:41.880 --> 01:02:45.240] Well, we are, you know, there are a number of things going on.
[01:02:45.240 --> 01:02:48.600] There is the degradation of the educational system.
[01:02:48.920 --> 01:02:51.800] So people don't have that bedrock that Shakespeare had.
[01:02:51.800 --> 01:02:57.800] You know, it's, I mean, even if even my father, my father had a much better education than me.
[01:02:58.120 --> 01:03:00.120] You know, he had a much more rigorous education.
[01:03:00.120 --> 01:03:00.520] Really?
[01:03:01.080 --> 01:03:02.760] People of my people of my uh you have a PhD.
[01:03:02.760 --> 01:03:04.120] What are you talking about?
[01:03:04.120 --> 01:03:05.640] Yeah, but I had to catch up.
[01:03:05.640 --> 01:03:06.680] Like, this is my point.
[01:03:06.640 --> 01:03:08.840] Like, I didn't really start working.
[01:03:08.840 --> 01:03:11.160] I wasn't studious until I got to university.
[01:03:11.160 --> 01:03:13.000] I was a lazy boy.
[01:03:12.960 --> 01:03:16.720] I was, uh, I almost got thrown out of my sixth form college because I never turned up.
[01:03:17.040 --> 01:03:18.240] I didn't turn up before midday.
[01:03:18.240 --> 01:03:19.520] I was too lazy.
[01:03:14.920 --> 01:03:21.360] Like, I, you know, it was absolutely crazy.
[01:03:21.520 --> 01:03:23.440] I was almost expelled.
[01:03:23.440 --> 01:03:26.640] And I didn't do homework ever.
[01:03:26.640 --> 01:03:28.480] I didn't, I didn't read anything.
[01:03:28.480 --> 01:03:29.840] And I wasn't forced to.
[01:03:29.840 --> 01:03:34.880] You know, I mean, I went to a state comprehensive, you know, this isn't, I didn't go to a posh school.
[01:03:34.880 --> 01:03:39.360] I didn't like the private schools in the UK, they're on you all the time because I've taught at them.
[01:03:39.360 --> 01:03:44.080] And so, if one kid misses homework two or three times, there's meetings about it.
[01:03:44.080 --> 01:03:46.160] They're like, we're calling the parents, we deal with it.
[01:03:46.160 --> 01:03:47.280] None of that in my school.
[01:03:47.280 --> 01:03:48.320] You didn't have to do homework.
[01:03:48.320 --> 01:03:49.440] You didn't have to do anything.
[01:03:49.440 --> 01:03:50.560] And so I was lazy.
[01:03:50.560 --> 01:03:54.080] And so as an adult, I've always been catching up on my education.
[01:03:54.080 --> 01:03:57.200] Even now, even now, I don't have the rigorous.
[01:03:57.280 --> 01:03:58.640] I didn't have that rigorous bedrock.
[01:03:58.800 --> 01:04:02.880] The only way I can do it is by constantly reading and constantly catching up.
[01:04:02.880 --> 01:04:04.560] And, you know, I'm not blaming anyone for that.
[01:04:04.560 --> 01:04:06.560] Like, that's just a general kind of degradation.
[01:04:06.560 --> 01:04:11.760] We've had in the UK successive governments that have just made examinations easier, right?
[01:04:11.760 --> 01:04:14.160] And if you don't believe me, just read some of the old.
[01:04:14.160 --> 01:04:19.520] So we've got a thing called GCSEs, which is an exam that you take roughly around the age of 15, 16.
[01:04:20.400 --> 01:04:26.160] And if you compare those papers with the equivalents from 40 years or 30 years before, which is the O level, look at the paper.
[01:04:26.160 --> 01:04:29.680] It's like you're dealing with, it's the difference between kindergarten and a PhD.
[01:04:29.680 --> 01:04:30.960] It's incredible.
[01:04:30.960 --> 01:04:37.120] And of course, every successive government has wanted to make the to boast of their improvements to education.
[01:04:37.120 --> 01:04:39.040] So you've had grade deflation.
[01:04:39.040 --> 01:04:43.360] In other words, it is easier now to get a top grade by doing very little work.
[01:04:43.360 --> 01:04:51.760] I mean, when I was a teacher, I remember there were some totally semi-literate kids getting A's because it wasn't that hard to get A's, you know?
[01:04:51.760 --> 01:04:56.320] Whereas and I think, so I think the education thing is a problem.
[01:04:56.800 --> 01:04:59.520] Kids don't read, kids are patronized, you know.
[01:04:59.520 --> 01:05:05.800] When I was at school, when I was teaching, we were told not to teach Charles Dickens to the kids because they wouldn't get it.
[01:05:05.800 --> 01:05:09.240] Well, they would if you just trusted them to get it, you know.
[01:05:10.680 --> 01:05:16.360] I think in order to create those conditions for the gene for that genius, firstly, you need civilization.
[01:05:17.000 --> 01:05:18.920] You need to have a civilized society.
[01:05:18.920 --> 01:05:23.720] You need to build up that thing that elevates us above the animals.
[01:05:23.720 --> 01:05:27.960] And that's something that is not so easily acquired and very easily destroyed.
[01:05:27.960 --> 01:05:31.880] Would it be Western civilization with certain elements that bring that out?
[01:05:32.520 --> 01:05:35.640] There are great geniuses that emerge in other cultures too.
[01:05:37.000 --> 01:05:49.720] But certainly, if you take the Greek civilization, there's a reason why those great dramatists like Menander, like Aristophanes, you know, like Euripides, there's a reason why they emerged.
[01:05:49.960 --> 01:05:54.040] Unfortunately, part of the reason is that they all had slaves, so they had a lot of leisure time.
[01:05:55.160 --> 01:05:57.720] Although we might have that again with AI, of course.
[01:05:58.120 --> 01:06:00.760] But the one counter is that they're doing something else now.
[01:06:01.000 --> 01:06:12.920] They went into jazz rather than classical music, or a Jackson Pollock, you know, just designs a whole new genre, or it's Bill Gates programming, or it's Elon Musk designing rockets.
[01:06:12.920 --> 01:06:15.000] You know, they're just doing something else.
[01:06:15.000 --> 01:06:20.200] There's something interesting and experimental about a Jackson Pollock or a Mark Rothko, but it's not transcendental, is it?
[01:06:20.200 --> 01:06:21.160] Let's be honest about it.
[01:06:21.160 --> 01:06:21.960] It's just not.
[01:06:22.200 --> 01:06:28.440] So you don't get that sense of awe that you get from the Sistine Chapel or at the Parthenon, do you?
[01:06:28.440 --> 01:06:28.760] No.
[01:06:28.760 --> 01:06:31.000] And, you know, we have to be honest about that.
[01:06:31.000 --> 01:06:36.040] We have to be unafraid to say that there is such a thing as artistic genius and there's such a thing as lower art.
[01:06:36.040 --> 01:06:36.840] There just is.
[01:06:37.080 --> 01:06:39.240] And that, I don't care if you call me a snob.
[01:06:39.240 --> 01:06:40.280] It's just true.
[01:06:40.240 --> 01:06:40.480] Right?
[01:06:40.760 --> 01:06:43.800] You mean the banana, the banana duct tape to the wall?
[01:06:43.800 --> 01:06:44.600] Amazing.
[01:06:44.600 --> 01:06:45.120] Yeah.
[01:06:45.440 --> 01:06:50.240] You know, sell a tape a banana to a wall and you think you think you're da Vinci.
[01:06:44.760 --> 01:06:51.120] Hilarious.
[01:06:51.840 --> 01:06:54.560] You're just a bit of humility would be quite good, wouldn't it?
[01:06:55.280 --> 01:06:55.920] That would be quite good.
[01:06:55.920 --> 01:07:11.680] I mean, if you just listen to that last piece that Mozart, the last thing Mozart composed, the Lacrimosa from the Requiem, which was then completed by someone else, and you can actually weirdly tell with the knowledge that the first eight bars were the only things he composed and the other composer took over.
[01:07:11.680 --> 01:07:14.320] And you can kind of hear it at that point.
[01:07:14.320 --> 01:07:15.040] It's really interesting.
[01:07:15.040 --> 01:07:27.840] But the way it builds and this sort of sense of this mournful, like plaintive quality to this sheer beauty, he's got a kind of, he's got a, there's a gap between him and the numinous.
[01:07:27.840 --> 01:07:34.560] There's some, he was able to step through that gap and enable us to see it too.
[01:07:34.560 --> 01:07:41.920] Well, wasn't that theme in Amadeus where Salieri is cursing God for not giving him that spark of genius?
[01:07:41.920 --> 01:07:43.520] Yeah, I mean, that's an amazing way.
[01:07:43.600 --> 01:07:48.000] I mean, I know that Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play, is a lot, it's fictional, of course, it is.
[01:07:48.400 --> 01:07:54.000] And, you know, the implication that in the insinuation that Salieri was this deeply bitter, you know, all of that is very contested.
[01:07:54.000 --> 01:07:54.320] Yeah.
[01:07:54.560 --> 01:08:00.320] But Salieri was not the genius that Mozart was and never could have been.
[01:08:00.320 --> 01:08:12.960] And Mozart was, you know, had a sort of wicked sense of humor, a very dirty sense of humor, and was maybe seen as a bit more of a this kind of brat, this spoilt brat who was, you know, taken around Europe by his dad.
[01:08:12.960 --> 01:08:28.200] And, you know, ultimately, there's something in him, that is genius, that was, was wherever it comes from, God or just something that human evolution throws up every now and then, that he had something that was magical, you know.
[01:08:28.000 --> 01:08:31.880] And it's, and it's, and what's interesting, I mean, there's a piece he wrote.
[01:08:29.680 --> 01:08:34.440] I remember I was going, I was listening to Mozart on Shuffle.
[01:08:34.520 --> 01:08:41.960] I've got like the complete works on my Apple, whatever, and I was listening to it on Shuffle, and this piece came up that I hadn't heard before or I didn't recognize.
[01:08:41.960 --> 01:08:42.680] And it really struck me.
[01:08:42.680 --> 01:08:45.000] I thought, I really, really love this.
[01:08:45.000 --> 01:08:49.560] And then I looked into it, and it was the piece he wrote when he was nine years old.
[01:08:49.560 --> 01:08:53.240] And it was a piece he wrote while he was in England because the lyrics were in English.
[01:08:53.240 --> 01:08:54.440] It's God is our refuge.
[01:08:54.440 --> 01:08:58.120] It's based on the Psalm, I think Psalm 46.
[01:08:58.440 --> 01:09:00.920] And he wrote it in English and he wrote it.
[01:09:00.920 --> 01:09:06.680] And the manuscript was given to the British Museum while he was staying near Sloane Square in London.
[01:09:06.680 --> 01:09:15.000] And I was just astonished that this thing that caught my ear and I thought, because I often, the pieces that catch my ear, I save in my favorites box.
[01:09:15.000 --> 01:09:16.200] And I just didn't expect that.
[01:09:16.200 --> 01:09:18.360] I didn't expect, I mean, I know it's not his best work.
[01:09:18.360 --> 01:09:20.600] Something about it resonated with me, and I don't know why.
[01:09:20.600 --> 01:09:22.520] But it was, he was nine.
[01:09:22.520 --> 01:09:23.480] He was nine.
[01:09:23.480 --> 01:09:26.360] And you listen to that and you think, and by the way, they tested it.
[01:09:26.360 --> 01:09:29.960] I mean, again, the conspiracy theorists will say, that's not possible.
[01:09:30.600 --> 01:09:32.440] His father composed it.
[01:09:32.440 --> 01:09:33.480] Well, they're wrong.
[01:09:33.480 --> 01:09:38.200] They're factually wrong because at the time, there were musicologists in Europe who tested it.
[01:09:38.200 --> 01:09:42.280] They locked the boy Mozart in a room and they made him compose stuff by himself.
[01:09:42.280 --> 01:09:42.920] He did it.
[01:09:42.920 --> 01:09:44.040] It was him.
[01:09:44.040 --> 01:09:56.600] And of course, his later masterworks, once you get to the, you know, the magic flute and the marriage of Figura, that once you're up there, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's, it's, if you believe in God, I mean, that to me is the best evidence of God, that kind of thing.
[01:09:57.000 --> 01:09:59.400] You know, how else can you, how else can you account for it?
[01:09:59.400 --> 01:10:02.360] But, you know, of course, people think it couldn't have happened.
[01:10:03.240 --> 01:10:14.880] There was a joke among SETI scientists about sending out the Voyager records with, you know, different elements of the human condition and said, well, we should put Bach in there.
[01:10:15.600 --> 01:10:17.600] And the line was, no, that would just be bragging.
[01:10:17.840 --> 01:10:18.480] That's too much.
[01:10:14.440 --> 01:10:21.360] Yeah, exactly.
[01:10:22.000 --> 01:10:27.680] You know, there's a psychologist named Dean Keith Symington who wrote a book on genius.
[01:10:28.000 --> 01:10:35.760] And one of his points was that, of course, there's genetic flukes and all that stuff that you can't control for, but that they produce a lot of content.
[01:10:35.760 --> 01:10:46.000] And so his model was kind of a Darwinian model, that they produce a lot of content, and then either they're selecting or the public is selecting.
[01:10:46.000 --> 01:10:51.440] And the stuff we get at the end is the absolute best by their own selection or the public selecting.
[01:10:51.440 --> 01:10:56.240] But these are not just people that come out of nowhere with no background and they just can do it.
[01:10:56.240 --> 01:10:57.520] Yeah, well, that's very interesting.
[01:10:57.520 --> 01:11:04.160] I mean, they do say, you know, like with the Beatles, you know, that it was their continual gigs in Amsterdam or wherever it was.
[01:11:04.160 --> 01:11:04.640] It is constant.
[01:11:04.720 --> 01:11:05.440] Was it Amsterdam?
[01:11:05.520 --> 01:11:06.320] Hamburg.
[01:11:06.320 --> 01:11:07.200] Handbook, sorry.
[01:11:07.200 --> 01:11:10.640] And, you know, you do have to work a lot at it.
[01:11:10.640 --> 01:11:14.080] And you have to, like, like, I mean, Shakespeare wrote continually, you know.
[01:11:14.720 --> 01:11:15.680] You know, he was very prolific.
[01:11:15.920 --> 01:11:18.000] Not the most prolific, by the way, but very prolific.
[01:11:18.160 --> 01:11:18.480] Yeah.
[01:11:18.480 --> 01:11:25.760] And also the objection to, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, where he made famous the 10,000-hour rule.
[01:11:25.760 --> 01:11:26.480] 10,000 hours.
[01:11:26.800 --> 01:11:32.400] Yeah, but there's a lot of garage bands that put in 10,000 hours and they still stink.
[01:11:32.400 --> 01:11:34.000] They didn't become the Beatles.
[01:11:34.160 --> 01:11:36.080] Because you'd have to have that spark of genius as well.
[01:11:37.280 --> 01:11:42.720] And if you look at Mozart, well, it's still pretty young to be producing work of that quality.
[01:11:43.120 --> 01:11:52.800] And I know that he was borrowing from existing tropes, and I know that he was, you know, really just, he had that ear where he could listen and replicate the best features of the music he heard.
[01:11:52.800 --> 01:11:58.800] But by the time he gets later in his career and he cultivates his own voice, his own musical voice, then it is utterly incredible.
[01:11:58.800 --> 01:12:00.520] And I suppose with Shakespeare, you could say the same.
[01:11:59.920 --> 01:12:09.640] Well, Titus Andronicus, early plays, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, you could say these are dispensable, maybe.
[01:12:09.640 --> 01:12:10.520] They're not really.
[01:12:10.520 --> 01:12:11.800] They're still brilliant.
[01:12:12.040 --> 01:12:21.080] I mean, I think with Shakespeare, he was a natural comic because Comedy of Errors works as a farce in the true sort of tensor plautus with that structure.
[01:12:21.080 --> 01:12:27.720] And with, you know, it's one of the few plays he wrote that observes the Aristotelian principles of unity.
[01:12:28.120 --> 01:12:34.920] And it really works well in performance as just a really great knockabout farce.
[01:12:34.920 --> 01:12:37.080] It's not his highest work, you know.
[01:12:37.080 --> 01:12:49.400] Love's Labour's Lost, another example, early play, very mannered, very kind of about the art of language and the courtly rhetoric and the puns and the variation.
[01:12:49.400 --> 01:12:55.640] You know, when the characters write their poems, he always uses a different poet format, different verse structure.
[01:12:55.640 --> 01:12:57.080] He's playing with words.
[01:12:57.080 --> 01:13:02.200] It's the one that's aged the most because so many of the references we don't get anymore.
[01:13:02.200 --> 01:13:04.360] But it's still amazing.
[01:13:04.360 --> 01:13:07.880] And it's still something that I return to all the time.
[01:13:07.880 --> 01:13:09.400] But then, of course, you hit Hamlet.
[01:13:09.400 --> 01:13:15.720] We think about the Greg, you hit Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and no one's come close to those plays.
[01:13:15.720 --> 01:13:17.480] 12th Night as well, if you want to go into the comedies.
[01:13:17.480 --> 01:13:23.800] So I think tragedy took him a bit longer to get right because Titus Andronicus is, you know, I mean, I love it.
[01:13:23.800 --> 01:13:26.120] And I actually think it's much better than people think it is.
[01:13:26.120 --> 01:13:28.680] But it is very much playing to the crowd.
[01:13:28.680 --> 01:13:34.520] And it is, you know, violent to the point where it's comedic.
[01:13:34.520 --> 01:13:35.880] And I think that's deliberate, by the way.
[01:13:35.880 --> 01:13:38.120] I think he was writing a tragic comedy.
[01:13:38.120 --> 01:13:43.160] I think he was trying to be funny, but it lacks the nuances, it lacks the subtlety.
[01:13:43.160 --> 01:13:47.600] But even in Titus Andronicus, you get these beautiful passages, you know.
[01:13:44.760 --> 01:14:01.360] You know, even when he has a caricature like the character of Aaron, the Moore, who's sort of a prototype Yago in a way, this is this black-hearted villain who is like a kind of pantomimic, has that pantomimic quality.
[01:14:01.360 --> 01:14:07.360] But even he starts to have this tent, this human tenderness when it comes to his own baby.
[01:14:07.360 --> 01:14:13.520] So he can't even resist, even in those early stages when he's honing his crowd, he still can't resist being better than everyone else.
[01:14:13.520 --> 01:14:23.840] Like even in an early history play like Richard III, where you think, well, Richard III, quite a bit of a pantomime villain, he's the one who's very self-hu, he's very self-amused, isn't he?
[01:14:23.840 --> 01:14:28.400] Like he tells you his evil plots and he laughs about it.
[01:14:28.400 --> 01:14:30.160] And we laugh at him.
[01:14:30.160 --> 01:14:30.560] Right.
[01:14:30.560 --> 01:14:33.200] Right up until the point in that play where he kills the kids.
[01:14:33.200 --> 01:14:36.480] And you know, you notice in that play, it's like an iron curtain comes down in that play.
[01:14:36.480 --> 01:14:38.480] And it's like, we're not laughing anymore.
[01:14:38.480 --> 01:14:39.920] Something's gone wrong.
[01:14:39.920 --> 01:14:42.640] And then he has that dream about his victims.
[01:14:42.640 --> 01:14:44.640] And he's in a moment of trauma.
[01:14:44.640 --> 01:14:48.240] And even then, you are, then you start feeling for him and hating him.
[01:14:48.240 --> 01:14:49.680] And it becomes incredibly complex.
[01:14:49.680 --> 01:14:56.560] And that's where Shakespeare begins his pervention of the soliloquy and really begins developing that idea of the soliloquy, which he masters.
[01:14:56.560 --> 01:14:57.360] No one else does it.
[01:14:57.360 --> 01:14:58.080] No one else can do it.
[01:14:58.080 --> 01:14:58.880] I mean, that's the other thing, right?
[01:14:59.040 --> 01:15:08.640] So, I'm sorry, you're on my favorite subject, but when you get to the soliloquies of Macbeth, is this a dagger that I see before me, the handle before my hand?
[01:15:09.120 --> 01:15:12.320] Or Hamlet, of course, to be or not to be, that is the question, etc.
[01:15:13.600 --> 01:15:16.320] They are so perfect.
[01:15:16.800 --> 01:15:20.160] I don't think you could change a single syllable in those soliloquies.
[01:15:20.160 --> 01:15:39.560] And that innovation of a character on stage, not just doing what Richard III does, which is to tell you the plot, not just being expositional, but delving within their own mind and wrestling with their own psychology, and sometimes even revealing things to you that they don't themselves understand, which Hamlet does, which Yago does.
[01:15:39.560 --> 01:15:52.760] I mean, the brilliant thing, Yago's soliloquies in Othello is fascinating because the soliloquy is meant to be direct address to the audience, one character on stage, speaking the truth because they are revealing what they are thinking.
[01:15:52.760 --> 01:15:59.800] But Yago lies to himself, and then in the course of those soliloquies, he starts believing his own lies.
[01:15:59.800 --> 01:16:04.440] So it reveals so much more about him than he knows he's letting on.
[01:16:04.440 --> 01:16:06.840] I mean, the sheer complexity of that.
[01:16:07.320 --> 01:16:10.440] This is what makes Shakespeare the ultimate playwright.
[01:16:10.440 --> 01:16:15.400] Every character is an individual, breathing, living human.
[01:16:15.400 --> 01:16:18.120] Even the minor characters seem to think for themselves.
[01:16:18.120 --> 01:16:21.640] You even get a sense that you know what they are from just a few lines.
[01:16:21.640 --> 01:16:23.560] And they're all wildly different.
[01:16:23.560 --> 01:16:24.840] How is that possible?
[01:16:24.840 --> 01:16:31.000] Like, it's not like most writers, all of your characters end up sounding pretty much like you in one way or another, right?
[01:16:31.160 --> 01:16:36.920] I often give the example of Quentin Tarantino because I love Quentin Tarantino, but all his characters speak like Quentin Tarantino.
[01:16:36.920 --> 01:16:37.720] That's right.
[01:16:37.720 --> 01:16:42.760] Like, and even Little Girl in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood talks like him.
[01:16:42.760 --> 01:16:44.440] But Shakespeare doesn't do that.
[01:16:44.440 --> 01:16:57.320] I mean, I think we often misunderstand because we're looking back 400 years later at this very kind of stylized, poeticized Elizabethan language, heightened stage language, and we think they all sound the same.
[01:16:57.320 --> 01:17:09.880] But if you learn the language and if you embed yourself in that world, you realize how different they all are in terms of the way they speak and what they say and what they think and their reactions to things.
[01:17:10.200 --> 01:17:17.200] It is almost like he had a split personality and was able to understand every aspect of humankind.
[01:17:17.200 --> 01:17:17.760] Amazing.
[01:17:14.760 --> 01:17:19.120] I could listen to you all day about this.
[01:17:19.280 --> 01:17:28.800] Last point on genius, I like to use a Galton board, which is, you know, Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, pioneer in statistics, bell curve.
[01:17:28.800 --> 01:17:32.480] So a Galton board, you can look it up and see it in operation.
[01:17:32.480 --> 01:17:40.000] You just take a bell curve with a bunch of little columns, and then you drop the little BBs that fall through there and they split it each one.
[01:17:40.320 --> 01:17:44.480] And so you're going to get most of them in the middle of the bell curve.
[01:17:44.480 --> 01:17:54.720] But to get all the way out here and so just make it a huge one where there's like a hundred slots on each side, the chances of any of the BBs getting all the way to the end are very, very rare.
[01:17:54.720 --> 01:17:59.760] So geneticists tell us that even something like height, there's no gene for height.
[01:17:59.760 --> 01:18:01.520] It's like a thousand genes.
[01:18:01.520 --> 01:18:07.040] And so something like IQ or creativity is going to have, you know, probably tens of thousands of genes.
[01:18:07.040 --> 01:18:10.480] So most of us are just, you know, getting in the middle of the bell curve.
[01:18:10.480 --> 01:18:20.720] But, you know, every once in a while, and then you could extrapolate that to the environment and the timing in your culture, the place where you just happened to be born, which is you have no control over.
[01:18:20.720 --> 01:18:22.160] So you're going to end up way out here.
[01:18:22.160 --> 01:18:25.040] So in any generation, yeah, it's only going to be three or four.
[01:18:25.040 --> 01:18:45.920] But at Burt, even within that, even those within the middle of the curve, I mean, even the artists who aren't, you know, even the Salearis, let's say, you know, I mean, not, they're important too, because, not just because I believe in art for its own sake, but also because, and not only because an artist who isn't the height of genius can still produce beautiful, important work, that's true as well.
[01:18:45.920 --> 01:18:52.160] But they also contribute to a kind of artistic culture within which those geniuses can emerge.
[01:18:52.160 --> 01:18:55.040] There would have been no Shakespeare without Marlowe, for instance.
[01:18:55.040 --> 01:18:55.360] Right.
[01:18:55.360 --> 01:18:56.080] So many of those early.
[01:18:56.320 --> 01:18:57.200] All right, that's a good point.
[01:18:57.200 --> 01:18:57.680] You're right.
[01:18:58.160 --> 01:18:59.200] He borrows from Marlowe.
[01:18:59.640 --> 01:19:07.000] You know, there's a reason why the canon of English literature is really formed by the artists and who they mimic and who they imitate.
[01:19:07.000 --> 01:19:09.400] And it's a kind of collaborative thing.
[01:19:09.400 --> 01:19:23.560] And so for all sorts of reasons, I defend artistic freedom, even when it's a mediocre artist, because it's all part of a broader civilizational battle.
[01:19:23.560 --> 01:19:29.400] We need to have a thriving artistic culture and civilization above all things.
[01:19:29.400 --> 01:19:33.080] Are you worried about the assault on meritocracy by the woke?
[01:19:33.080 --> 01:19:34.200] Back to your book.
[01:19:34.520 --> 01:19:35.880] Sorry, yeah, let's go back to the book.
[01:19:35.880 --> 01:19:36.440] I mean, yeah.
[01:19:36.840 --> 01:19:37.880] Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
[01:19:37.880 --> 01:19:40.280] The meritocracy is part of it.
[01:19:40.280 --> 01:19:42.360] And we haven't had that in the arts for a long time.
[01:19:42.680 --> 01:19:50.120] I mean, certainly, you know, in the comedy industry in the UK, for a long time now, you're effectively booked and showcased and put on TV panel shows.
[01:19:50.120 --> 01:19:57.400] If you fulfill certain ethnic or racial or sexual criteria, it becomes a kind of diversity showcase.
[01:19:57.800 --> 01:19:59.640] I'm not saying they're all talentless.
[01:19:59.640 --> 01:20:05.960] There are some very talented people, but a lot of them are pretty bad and pretty talentless, but they get on TV anyway.
[01:20:05.960 --> 01:20:09.640] And this gives the illusion that there aren't more talented people out there.
[01:20:09.640 --> 01:20:18.040] Ultimately, the meritocracy system, but it's difficult with the arts because, of course, there's also the subjective judgment of humor and taste, etc.
[01:20:18.440 --> 01:20:25.320] But it's certainly true that I think genuine artistic genius would probably just not get commissioned, right?
[01:20:25.320 --> 01:20:37.000] I mean, I think that's a real problem because the ideological capture of the arts, you know, someone, the equivalent of Shakespeare today, would come along with a script, and the sensitivity readers would strip out all the best bits.
[01:20:37.000 --> 01:20:42.520] And then the theater commissioner would say, Can we just cast all these people as gay or black or whatever?
[01:20:42.920 --> 01:20:49.280] Oh, and by the way, the messaging here is a bit dodgy, you know, and maybe just censor that bit, please, because that might upset some people in the audience.
[01:20:44.920 --> 01:20:50.640] And it wouldn't work.
[01:20:50.960 --> 01:21:03.440] So even if we had all those thousand different variables that you mentioned in order to fulfill genius, we just, we just, in the woke era, we just don't have the culture for it to emerge.
[01:21:03.440 --> 01:21:04.320] It can't.
[01:21:04.320 --> 01:21:10.720] And I challenge anyone to tell me one major artistic genius within the woke era.
[01:21:10.720 --> 01:21:11.520] Where is it?
[01:21:11.520 --> 01:21:12.320] Not one.
[01:21:13.200 --> 01:21:13.840] Interesting.
[01:21:13.840 --> 01:21:14.960] There are brilliant writers.
[01:21:14.960 --> 01:21:22.000] There are brilliant, there are people I love and adore as writers and filmmakers and novelists, but they're not that.
[01:21:22.000 --> 01:21:27.760] They're not the heights of Bach and Shakespeare.
[01:21:27.760 --> 01:21:29.440] That was the before time.
[01:21:29.440 --> 01:21:33.120] You're the first person I've heard in a long time to use that phrase, the before time.
[01:21:33.120 --> 01:21:35.440] So here's what I wrote about.
[01:21:35.440 --> 01:21:38.480] Here's the depth of my literary scholarship.
[01:21:38.480 --> 01:21:53.280] In a 1966 episode of Star Trek called Miri, a prepubescent heroine of the story explains to the flummox Captain Kirk what happened on her planet in which all the grown-ups died leaving the only children to fend for themselves.
[01:21:53.280 --> 01:21:56.640] That was when they started to get sick in the before time.
[01:21:56.640 --> 01:21:58.640] We hid, then they were gone.
[01:21:58.640 --> 01:22:27.520] As the linguist Ben Zimmer tracks the phrase's entomology, the before time represents a pre-plague world, and the expression has a deep literary history at least as old as the King James Bible, published in 1611, in which the author of the book of Samuel writes, Before time in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake, Come and let us go to the seer, for he that is now called a prophet was before time called a seer.
[01:22:27.840 --> 01:22:34.440] The locution was resurrected in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as tracked by the Atlantic columnist Marina Corin.
[01:22:35.000 --> 01:22:46.760] The exasperated sense is that the days before the coronavirus swept across the country, the before time, as many have taken to calling it, feel like a bygone era.
[01:22:47.080 --> 01:22:48.520] That's such a great phrase.
[01:22:48.520 --> 01:22:48.840] Go ahead.
[01:22:49.080 --> 01:22:50.680] What was the before time before woke?
[01:22:50.680 --> 01:22:52.040] And what happened?
[01:22:52.360 --> 01:22:53.400] Lots of things happened.
[01:22:53.400 --> 01:22:59.960] I mean, I try and trace it in the book, and I'm talking about in the UK, it was very much Brexit was part of it, 2016.
[01:22:59.960 --> 01:23:03.720] And of course, that combines with Donald Trump's election in 2016.
[01:23:03.720 --> 01:23:14.040] I think that sowed the seeds of, I mean, already the woke era had begun insofar as the critical social justice woke activists had started to accrue power around 2012.
[01:23:14.040 --> 01:23:20.760] You start hearing their various phrases in their lexicon appearing with greater frequency in the media, and there's a sudden spike.
[01:23:20.760 --> 01:23:38.520] By the time 2016 comes around, I think Brexit and Donald Trump really consolidated this tribalistic world that we now occupy and this reduction of humanity to this kind of Manichean view of good versus evil, kind of Disney view of the world, where there are villains.
[01:23:38.520 --> 01:23:42.440] You know, if you vote one way, you're good on the right side of history.
[01:23:42.440 --> 01:23:46.120] And if you vote the other way, you're on the side of the devils and you're evil.
[01:23:46.120 --> 01:24:06.600] And it really ramped up, and nothing was ever the same after Brexit or Trump because all of a sudden, and during the Brexit debate, people who were going to vote leave were dismissed as evil, racist, stupid bigots who are not just we disagree over our membership of an international trading bloc, which is what it was.
[01:24:06.600 --> 01:24:13.720] The real absurdity of Brexit is very few people who were very exorcised about the whole thing really knew anything about it.
[01:24:13.720 --> 01:24:16.560] They didn't know what they were so fervently supporting.
[01:24:16.880 --> 01:24:27.920] A lot of people who went out there in their face paint of the EU flags, painted blue like woad in a battle, and like that's something out of Braveheart.
[01:24:28.480 --> 01:24:31.840] They are screaming, we must overturn the result.
[01:24:31.840 --> 01:24:33.440] We must stay in the EU.
[01:24:33.440 --> 01:24:37.200] A year before, if you'd have asked them what they thought of the EU, they would have said, What's that?
[01:24:37.200 --> 01:24:39.680] They don't, it wasn't, they didn't know, didn't know anything.
[01:24:39.680 --> 01:24:48.000] I remember getting a row with a friend about this and asking him to name a member of the EU Commission, and he hadn't even heard of the EU Commission, he didn't even know what it was.
[01:24:48.000 --> 01:24:50.400] So, you know, they didn't know what it was they were getting upset about.
[01:24:50.880 --> 01:24:53.680] What they cared about was that we're the good, we are good.
[01:24:54.000 --> 01:24:55.440] We good, you bad.
[01:24:55.440 --> 01:25:01.840] You know, that was it was just reduces childish, infantile way of thinking about public discussion and public debate.
[01:25:01.840 --> 01:25:02.880] And that never went away.
[01:25:02.880 --> 01:25:03.680] Same with Trump.
[01:25:03.680 --> 01:25:10.880] And that's why for a long time, you know, everyone's saying, if you vote Republican, you're an evil, you're an evil bigot, you're a fascist.
[01:25:11.120 --> 01:25:12.640] And then that word fascist came back.
[01:25:12.640 --> 01:25:18.240] You know, I quote the article by George Orwell that mentions the fact that the word fascism doesn't mean anything anymore.
[01:25:18.400 --> 01:25:19.840] It could have been written yesterday.
[01:25:19.840 --> 01:25:20.800] You know, I know.
[01:25:20.800 --> 01:25:26.160] He says about, oh, it's used for, you know, anything, shopkeepers, JB Priestley broadcasts.
[01:25:26.160 --> 01:25:28.160] Anything I don't like is fascist.
[01:25:28.160 --> 01:25:30.240] And he's writing that when the fascists were around, right?
[01:25:30.640 --> 01:25:31.680] It's so incredible.
[01:25:31.680 --> 01:25:36.320] Yeah, it's absolutely mad that that was written when it was.
[01:25:37.120 --> 01:25:46.800] So, yeah, that's my point: is that I think that 2016 moment really killed off the before times in a way and ended.
[01:25:46.800 --> 01:25:48.560] It moved us into a new era.
[01:25:48.560 --> 01:25:49.680] And we're still in it now.
[01:25:49.680 --> 01:25:54.080] And then the second thing, of course, was 2020, was the lockdowns, was that, I think.
[01:25:54.080 --> 01:26:03.880] So the sort of hysteria that emerged from everyone being locked up and you know, and the fact that the members of the elites were lying to us about various things.
[01:26:04.440 --> 01:26:14.920] You know, the fact that we can no longer trust the figures of authority because for a long time, the idea of being, let's say, well, what was the good example?
[01:26:14.920 --> 01:26:19.160] The example of the theory that the virus had leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
[01:26:19.240 --> 01:26:20.680] Yeah, the lab leak hypothesis.
[01:26:20.920 --> 01:26:24.600] That was always called a crazy conspiracy theory, but it wasn't.
[01:26:24.600 --> 01:26:25.720] It was probably true.
[01:26:25.880 --> 01:26:30.520] And of course, it was probably true because it's the world's biggest coronavirus lab in Wuhan.
[01:26:30.520 --> 01:26:31.400] And that's where it came from.
[01:26:31.800 --> 01:26:36.200] I mean, it took Jon Stewart doing a comedy bit to make it okay to say it.
[01:26:36.200 --> 01:26:36.600] I know.
[01:26:36.600 --> 01:26:38.040] It's absolutely crazy.
[01:26:38.600 --> 01:26:43.800] But no, I think that's the thing that now everyone sort of agreed.
[01:26:43.800 --> 01:26:47.240] But there were actually academic journals saying that this was just a racist conspiracy theory.
[01:26:47.240 --> 01:26:47.560] Yeah.
[01:26:48.440 --> 01:26:57.000] And I think when that happens and when there's such mistrust in people of power, and because the media have been lying to us for so many years about so many things, and they still do.
[01:26:57.000 --> 01:27:01.960] I mean, the BBC, the BBC will tell us that a rapist is a woman.
[01:27:03.000 --> 01:27:04.040] They'll say she, her.
[01:27:04.760 --> 01:27:10.680] There are even some articles they've done where they don't even mention that this is someone who identifies as a woman or they don't even use the word trans.
[01:27:11.000 --> 01:27:12.040] So that's a journalist.
[01:27:12.040 --> 01:27:13.000] That's the national broadcast.
[01:27:13.000 --> 01:27:13.400] Just lying.
[01:27:13.480 --> 01:27:14.440] I quoted J.K.
[01:27:14.440 --> 01:27:19.000] Rowling's tweet quoting Orwell's news speak.
[01:27:19.000 --> 01:27:22.520] And, you know, we're black is white, and this is that, and this is that.
[01:27:22.520 --> 01:27:27.080] And the person with a penis who raped you is a woman.
[01:27:27.320 --> 01:27:29.480] Her last, whatever the exact phrase was.
[01:27:29.480 --> 01:27:30.120] It was so funny.
[01:27:30.520 --> 01:27:31.400] That was a great quotation.
[01:27:31.400 --> 01:27:37.400] I mean, she's, yeah, she's adapting the slogan of the ruling party in 1984.
[01:27:37.400 --> 01:27:38.680] And she's exactly right.
[01:27:39.000 --> 01:27:45.840] We were expected for so long to believe things that we know are not true, to parrot falsehoods, to say that two plus two equals five.
[01:27:45.840 --> 01:27:47.920] And so you end up with this legitimation crisis.
[01:27:44.920 --> 01:27:50.000] You end up with a situation where no one believes figures of authority.
[01:27:50.080 --> 01:27:59.920] So I think off the back of the tribalization and the of 2016, the good versus evil dynamic, which the woke is all about.
[01:27:59.920 --> 01:28:02.560] You know, if you disagree with them, you're not just wrong, you're bad.
[01:28:02.560 --> 01:28:03.040] Yeah.
[01:28:03.360 --> 01:28:05.120] And you have to be quashed.
[01:28:05.440 --> 01:28:15.360] That's then combined with the hysteria of 2020, which emerges partly due to lockdown, and then that sort of spark, the cataclysm of George Floyd.
[01:28:15.760 --> 01:28:19.120] And then all of a sudden, we're in a new world, absolutely in a new world.
[01:28:19.120 --> 01:28:21.120] And so we can look back to the before times.
[01:28:21.120 --> 01:28:36.640] One of the examples I give in the book is, of course, I have a nostalgia for being at university and arguing with friends late into the night, getting roaringly drunk and disagreeing brutally, and then being friends still in the morning, and it's fine.
[01:28:36.640 --> 01:28:39.840] And actually, more than that, it was part of our friendship.
[01:28:39.840 --> 01:28:43.920] Part of our friendship was the idea that we could disagree and still be friends.
[01:28:43.920 --> 01:28:44.800] That's gone.
[01:28:45.040 --> 01:28:49.120] So now the slightest point of political disagreement is interpreted as evidence of fascism and evil.
[01:28:49.120 --> 01:28:57.280] Well, we just did a study at the Skeptic Research Center of how many people no longer speak to friends that they disagree with politically.
[01:28:57.280 --> 01:29:04.400] Or would you allow your son or daughter to marry somebody of a different political party or would you object to it?
[01:29:04.400 --> 01:29:06.480] And those numbers have gone way up.
[01:29:06.480 --> 01:29:07.120] Yeah.
[01:29:07.360 --> 01:29:10.720] I quote a poll by Frank Luntz about the very same thing in the book.
[01:29:10.720 --> 01:29:13.360] I can't remember the exact figure, but it's pretty sinister.
[01:29:13.600 --> 01:29:19.040] You know, the idea now that, yeah, there's a complete intolerance for the idea that someone might think differently than you.
[01:29:19.040 --> 01:29:21.920] That is escalating, and that is something new.
[01:29:21.920 --> 01:29:24.080] And that wasn't there in the before times.
[01:29:24.080 --> 01:29:26.720] But about, I'd love to get that back.
[01:29:26.720 --> 01:29:28.000] Don't you think that would be good?
[01:29:28.640 --> 01:29:29.960] If we could somehow get that back?
[01:29:29.960 --> 01:29:38.600] If people could, if people who disagree with what we're saying, Michael, today could watch this podcast and go away and think, Oh, well, maybe I'll read some of the books they're talking about, and maybe I'll think about it.
[01:29:38.600 --> 01:29:48.040] And you know, and maybe I'll criticize what they're saying, and maybe that a dialogue can start rather than you're evil, fascist, bigot, block, cancel, and you know, this.
[01:29:48.040 --> 01:29:52.040] I think it's, I think this is why I say the culture war is infantilism writ large.
[01:29:52.120 --> 01:29:55.320] Yes, it's how children, it's how children behave.
[01:29:55.320 --> 01:29:58.680] I quote Jefferson, let friends be wrong.
[01:29:59.000 --> 01:30:02.200] And of course, you said friends don't think they're wrong, they think you're wrong.
[01:30:02.200 --> 01:30:07.560] So, okay, we're all wrong, like we're all wrong about quite a lot, quite a lot of the time.
[01:30:07.560 --> 01:30:13.400] This is why, if I make a factual error in an article and someone contacts me and lets me know, I thank them for it.
[01:30:13.880 --> 01:30:16.840] I don't get defensive and start saying, you know, let's have a row about it.
[01:30:16.840 --> 01:30:19.720] It's just ego, ego has taken over.
[01:30:19.720 --> 01:30:20.600] And we all have an ego.
[01:30:20.600 --> 01:30:21.720] We've all got a sizable ego.
[01:30:21.720 --> 01:30:22.920] I'm not saying I'm immune to that.
[01:30:22.920 --> 01:30:23.240] Yeah.
[01:30:23.240 --> 01:30:27.240] But you kind of, you kind of train yourself, don't you, to not respond like a kid.
[01:30:27.400 --> 01:30:28.760] There have been all sorts of studies, haven't they?
[01:30:28.760 --> 01:30:30.680] And you'll probably know more about this than I will.
[01:30:30.680 --> 01:30:35.000] Where when people disagree with you, people tend to react as though they've been assaulted.
[01:30:35.000 --> 01:30:36.040] Yes, right, right.
[01:30:36.040 --> 01:30:36.600] Yes.
[01:30:36.600 --> 01:30:46.280] And that it's so I recognize that it's hard to take the bruising of being proven wrong or even being challenged.
[01:30:46.280 --> 01:30:50.280] But we have to part that's why I go back to education and the importance of that education.
[01:30:50.280 --> 01:30:56.520] I think the key thing you can teach kids is to be able to do that, to be able to disagree healthily, to not take it personally when they disagree.
[01:30:56.520 --> 01:31:02.280] To in other words, reject their instincts, because I think it is instinctive, right?
[01:31:02.280 --> 01:31:06.360] I think a lot of this plays on instinct, and that's why you need socialization.
[01:31:06.360 --> 01:31:08.680] And again, coming back to that word, civilization.
[01:31:08.680 --> 01:31:09.880] That's why you need civilization.
[01:31:09.840 --> 01:31:13.560] And I fear that what woke did is dismantled a lot of what we have.
[01:31:13.560 --> 01:31:19.280] All right, speak to the transition from the idea of equal opportunities to equal outcomes.
[01:31:20.240 --> 01:31:21.440] It's a key thing, isn't it?
[01:31:21.440 --> 01:31:24.480] Because that word equity sounds so much like equality.
[01:31:24.480 --> 01:31:25.040] Yeah.
[01:31:25.040 --> 01:31:29.120] And therefore, people were duped into supporting things they would otherwise oppose.
[01:31:29.120 --> 01:31:33.360] I mean, if you have equality of opportunity, you have meritocracy.
[01:31:33.360 --> 01:31:39.280] You say, it doesn't matter what your background is, what race you are, sexual orientation you are, it doesn't matter.
[01:31:39.280 --> 01:31:40.800] You have the same opportunities as everyone else.
[01:31:40.800 --> 01:31:42.640] And that's hard to achieve.
[01:31:42.640 --> 01:31:45.600] And it takes a degree of social tinkering, doesn't it?
[01:31:45.600 --> 01:31:50.400] Because the truth is, some people are born in circumstances where they're going to have fewer opportunities.
[01:31:50.400 --> 01:32:08.640] And that's why I do have, and we go back to that welfare state thing, I do have some sympathy for that idea of to a degree helping to level the playing field, but only leveling the playing field so that you have a true meritocracy, not artificially changing the situation so you get a job you're not qualified for just because you're gay or whatever it might be, right?
[01:32:08.640 --> 01:32:10.240] That to me is an absolute nonsense.
[01:32:10.240 --> 01:32:11.680] It's patronizing.
[01:32:12.080 --> 01:32:14.720] It's patronizing to the minority groups in question.
[01:32:15.040 --> 01:32:16.640] And it's also inefficient.
[01:32:16.640 --> 01:32:22.880] So you end up with people who cannot do the job in positions, in positions of power, which is an absolute disaster, right?
[01:32:23.040 --> 01:32:28.640] You end up with people like Claudine Gay at Harvard, who was by no means an exceptional academic.
[01:32:28.640 --> 01:32:32.160] And am I fair in saying that she was proven to be a plagiarist?
[01:32:32.160 --> 01:32:32.640] Yes.
[01:32:33.360 --> 01:32:36.880] I'm astonished that that has not been followed up on.
[01:32:36.880 --> 01:32:40.240] I mean, if she was a grad student, she would have been kicked out.
[01:32:40.240 --> 01:32:46.080] Well, I asked that question just to make sure I'm not libeling anyone, but as far as I know, that still stands.
[01:32:46.400 --> 01:32:49.440] And again, if I'm wrong, and you can present the evidence, I will happily retract that.
[01:32:49.440 --> 01:32:50.960] So let's just make that clear.
[01:32:51.480 --> 01:32:55.760] But on, but on the other hand, you know, that's not, you know, you don't want to be a diversity hire.
[01:32:55.760 --> 01:32:56.560] It's the worst thing.
[01:32:56.560 --> 01:33:02.200] You know, if someone said to me, I'm going to give you a job on this panel show because you're gay and we need more gay people on.
[01:33:02.520 --> 01:33:04.600] I mean, I would feel absolutely gutted.
[01:33:04.600 --> 01:33:05.880] I'd feel so worthless.
[01:33:05.880 --> 01:33:06.120] Right.
[01:32:59.680 --> 01:33:07.000] So undervalued.
[01:33:07.160 --> 01:33:09.960] And also, people, see, what happens now in a way that they never used to?
[01:33:09.960 --> 01:33:21.400] You know, if you see, say, a show and there's a black actor in there in a role that doesn't really sit right with the character being black, you start thinking, oh, well, maybe he just got it because he's black and probably not that good.
[01:33:21.400 --> 01:33:24.840] And even if he is good, you start seeing him through that lens and it's so terrible.
[01:33:24.840 --> 01:33:25.800] I know, it's not good.
[01:33:25.800 --> 01:33:27.240] And sometimes they're not that good.
[01:33:27.240 --> 01:33:40.680] I mean, like, I saw a play recently set in the interwar period, an old play, about, and the character was a number of characters are sort of old bigots, and they really object to the sexual behavior of one of the other characters.
[01:33:40.680 --> 01:33:45.560] But there's in the middle of this, there's a young couple, and one of, and the man is white, and the woman is black.
[01:33:45.560 --> 01:33:54.120] Now, I'm sorry, in early 1930s England, with a with a with a boarding house full of elderly bigots, they are not going to like that.
[01:33:54.120 --> 01:33:57.080] And then, and we were expected to believe they were totally fine with that.
[01:33:57.080 --> 01:33:58.760] They didn't even notice.
[01:33:58.760 --> 01:34:01.000] So the play then became incoherent.
[01:34:01.000 --> 01:34:02.760] The play no longer worked.
[01:34:02.760 --> 01:34:07.960] But on top of that, the girl who was playing the black girl who was playing the character was a very bad actor.
[01:34:07.960 --> 01:34:08.920] She couldn't act.
[01:34:08.920 --> 01:34:13.240] And she was in there, obviously, to tick a diversity box.
[01:34:13.240 --> 01:34:20.040] And it wasn't helpful to her because she was on stage with really talented people and it made her look 10 times worse.
[01:34:20.040 --> 01:34:22.280] So this isn't helpful to anyone.
[01:34:22.280 --> 01:34:27.320] And I've never had a problem with colorblind casting or whatever you want to do or however you want to present a play or anything like that.
[01:34:27.320 --> 01:34:33.760] What I resent is that when I was a kid and you saw diverse casting, and you didn't even notice or care.
[01:34:33.920 --> 01:34:35.640] Like, none of us cared.
[01:34:35.640 --> 01:34:44.600] And now we've hyper-racialized and re-racialized society and made it, frankly, more racist to such a degree that now we see race in a way that we didn't need to before.
[01:34:44.600 --> 01:34:47.200] And I do believe in that ideal of colorblindness.
[01:34:47.200 --> 01:34:52.880] Not to say that we don't see it, because obviously we see it, but that we don't care.
[01:34:52.880 --> 01:34:54.640] That we just treat everyone.
[01:34:54.640 --> 01:34:57.200] You know, Sam Harris makes the comparison with ginger hair.
[01:34:57.200 --> 01:35:03.600] You know, what if we, you know, we see it and we know it's different, but no one treats people with red hair any different than anyone else.
[01:35:03.600 --> 01:35:06.560] Can't we get to that aspirational point with race?
[01:35:06.560 --> 01:35:08.880] Wouldn't that be so beautiful?
[01:35:08.880 --> 01:35:09.840] Right, exactly.
[01:35:09.840 --> 01:35:11.840] All right, let's talk about the trans issue.
[01:35:11.840 --> 01:35:16.240] Here's how I recently summarized what I think is going on here.
[01:35:16.640 --> 01:35:24.000] Here, I'm putting myself into the mind of a good liberal who supports civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, children's rights.
[01:35:24.000 --> 01:35:26.160] And what's the next one?
[01:35:26.160 --> 01:35:31.200] Like all good liberals, we want to be allies and support everyone in their desire for the very human.
[01:35:31.200 --> 01:35:39.200] Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed?
[01:35:39.200 --> 01:35:46.880] During that perfect meditation flow, on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment.
[01:35:46.880 --> 01:35:56.720] That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.
[01:35:56.720 --> 01:36:03.920] Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts, Ad-Free, included with Prime.
[01:36:04.240 --> 01:36:10.480] Longing for rights and liberties and dignity, and this includes black women, children, workers, the poor, and LGBT.
[01:36:10.480 --> 01:36:16.000] Trans people are telling us that they're oppressed and discriminated against, so we should support them.
[01:36:16.320 --> 01:36:20.880] The next cohort in the rights revolution deserving of equal rights, liberties, and dignity.
[01:36:20.880 --> 01:36:29.120] Three, women are telling us that they don't want men in their bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons, and other women's-only spaces, and we support women's rights.
[01:36:29.120 --> 01:36:35.080] Four, we know that biological men cannot actually become biological women, and vice versa, so that presents a dilemma.
[01:36:35.320 --> 01:36:39.080] Delusion, number five, they aren't actually men, they're women.
[01:36:39.080 --> 01:36:41.720] Trans women are women, trans men are men.
[01:36:41.720 --> 01:36:54.920] Now, we know how risably ridiculous it is to point to an adult man with a penis and call him a woman and pretend he can chest feed infants, or to celebrate a six-foot, two-inch, fully intact male swimmer and crown him an NCAA champion swimmer.
[01:36:54.920 --> 01:37:01.080] So, six, we're changing the definition of biological sex to fit whatever it is that trans people want it to be.
[01:37:01.080 --> 01:37:15.240] Since it can't be gametes or genes, which inexorably leads to sexual binarity, it has to be based on other criteria, including how a person feels inside, born in the wrong body, assigned at birth incorrectly, and so on.
[01:37:15.560 --> 01:37:18.600] Anyway, so this goes on a few more steps, but you get the idea.
[01:37:18.600 --> 01:37:23.400] Is it just, do people just think, well, this is what I should support because this is the next thing?
[01:37:23.400 --> 01:37:25.000] They think it's the next civil rights movement.
[01:37:25.000 --> 01:37:32.920] They haven't really grappled with it, and they don't understand that the gender identity ideology movement or genderism, as Gareth Roberts calls it, which I think is a really neat way of phrasing it.
[01:37:33.160 --> 01:37:34.040] Genderism, yeah.
[01:37:34.040 --> 01:37:40.600] Genderism is against gay rights, and it is against women's rights, and it is moving backwards in terms of civil rights.
[01:37:40.920 --> 01:37:43.480] So, it's very complicated when you see it in those terms.
[01:37:43.480 --> 01:37:44.520] Let me explain why that is.
[01:37:44.520 --> 01:37:51.560] Firstly, biological sex and the recognition of biological sex underpins women's rights and women's rights to single-sex spaces.
[01:37:51.560 --> 01:37:53.240] It also underpins gay rights.
[01:37:53.240 --> 01:37:58.040] It is the recognition that there are a minority in any given population who are attracted to their own sex.
[01:37:58.040 --> 01:38:00.200] You obliterate that, gay rights is gone.
[01:38:00.200 --> 01:38:09.560] This is why plenty of lesbian apps, dating apps, now have men with beards and penises on the apps saying you should be ashamed if you don't want me in your dating pool.
[01:38:09.560 --> 01:38:17.360] It's why even a gay hookup app such as Grinder does not allow its gay users to filter out women anymore.
[01:38:14.840 --> 01:38:19.680] It says you can filter according to gender identity.
[01:38:20.080 --> 01:38:24.480] Can't filter out a woman who identifies as a man because that makes you a bigot.
[01:38:24.480 --> 01:38:26.880] It says that's we don't tolerate transphobia.
[01:38:26.880 --> 01:38:35.520] So if you think about that, that is a gay hookup app that has made a fortune off the sex drives of gay men, shaming gay people for being gay.
[01:38:35.520 --> 01:38:40.240] So the people who are meant to be supporting gay rights are now the homophobes, are now the anti-gay people.
[01:38:40.480 --> 01:38:44.000] It's absolutely all, it's completely backwards.
[01:38:44.000 --> 01:38:49.520] Once you recognize, you know, here's the liberal, the liberal solution is you can identify however you like.
[01:38:49.520 --> 01:38:51.120] You can call yourself whatever name you like.
[01:38:51.120 --> 01:38:52.880] You can use whatever pronouns you like.
[01:38:52.880 --> 01:38:54.480] You can dress however you like.
[01:38:54.480 --> 01:38:55.840] You can do anything you like.
[01:38:55.840 --> 01:39:00.800] And there's that key caveat, right up until the point where you encroach on the rights of other people.
[01:39:00.800 --> 01:39:04.240] The gay rights movement did not seek to encroach on anyone else's rights.
[01:39:04.240 --> 01:39:05.440] And that's why it won out.
[01:39:05.440 --> 01:39:08.240] Same with black emancipation, same with women's rights.
[01:39:08.240 --> 01:39:13.680] It didn't say we're going to, we want equal rights, but we also want to take some rights away from you.
[01:39:14.000 --> 01:39:16.320] Trans lobby does precisely that.
[01:39:16.320 --> 01:39:19.200] What it says is we want single-sex spaces to be gone.
[01:39:19.200 --> 01:39:22.320] We want men in women's prisons, even if they're rapists.
[01:39:22.320 --> 01:39:24.400] We want men in women's sports.
[01:39:24.800 --> 01:39:34.800] We want gay spaces to be obliterated so gay people can no longer gather, as in Australia, where lesbians, it's illegal for lesbians to have a gathering without men who identify as women.
[01:39:34.800 --> 01:39:39.120] So this is all going backwards on civil rights and it is taking away the rights of other people.
[01:39:39.120 --> 01:39:43.600] So the trans lobby, genderism, is simply not the next civil rights issue.
[01:39:43.600 --> 01:39:44.800] It's the opposite.
[01:39:44.800 --> 01:39:50.800] If you're supporting that, you're supporting anti-gay, misogynistic discourses.
[01:39:50.800 --> 01:39:53.760] And I think it's just down to the point that people don't understand.
[01:39:53.760 --> 01:40:07.720] You know, you say that the solution, the only solution in that logical, those logical steps that you outlined was to effectively redefine biology, was effectively to say woman and man are now identity categories rather than biological categories.
[01:40:08.040 --> 01:40:09.800] And there are all sorts of implications once you do that.
[01:40:09.800 --> 01:40:15.720] And particularly when you say people can self-declare as a woman through this circular definition, I'm a woman because I feel like one.
[01:40:15.720 --> 01:40:16.840] Well, what is a woman?
[01:40:17.000 --> 01:40:19.320] A woman is someone who says they're a woman.
[01:40:19.320 --> 01:40:20.120] What the hell is that?
[01:40:20.120 --> 01:40:20.360] Right?
[01:40:20.360 --> 01:40:21.960] So these crazy circular definitions.
[01:40:21.960 --> 01:40:31.240] No, a woman is a human adult whose body is organized around the production of larger gametes.
[01:40:31.560 --> 01:40:32.920] That's what a woman is, right?
[01:40:32.920 --> 01:40:33.640] That's it.
[01:40:33.640 --> 01:40:34.280] That's it.
[01:40:34.280 --> 01:40:36.520] And that's non-negotiable, right?
[01:40:36.520 --> 01:40:45.480] So you can't identify yourself into that category without significantly impinging on the rights of the people within that category.
[01:40:45.800 --> 01:40:50.280] So absolutely, I think this has been broadly misunderstood.
[01:40:50.280 --> 01:40:54.920] The notion, and it's been misunderstood, I think, largely through people who want to be kind and want to be compassionate.
[01:40:54.920 --> 01:41:02.600] And they're constantly told that trans people are the most marginalized, the most discriminated against.
[01:41:02.600 --> 01:41:04.600] There's no evidence for that.
[01:41:04.600 --> 01:41:13.320] Trans people, trans-identified people are three times roughly less likely to be murdered than anyone else in the population, both here and in the US.
[01:41:13.320 --> 01:41:19.560] So the stats tell us they're actually among the safest of all demographics, just going by the murder rates.
[01:41:19.720 --> 01:41:20.840] But then you get onto other points.
[01:41:20.840 --> 01:41:22.440] You know, this is a group.
[01:41:22.440 --> 01:41:27.640] This is a lobby that has the support of all major corporations, the government, the police.
[01:41:27.640 --> 01:41:32.600] They can get the police to arrest who they want by putting a complaint in about misgendering.
[01:41:33.000 --> 01:41:34.360] No one else can do this.
[01:41:34.360 --> 01:41:37.480] This is incredible power, not marginalization.
[01:41:37.480 --> 01:41:42.040] There is a trans day of remembrance for all of the trans people who've lost their lives through violence.
[01:41:42.040 --> 01:41:47.920] Now, look, if someone gets beaten to death for being trans, that is a horrific tragedy that anyone must oppose.
[01:41:47.920 --> 01:41:49.680] But it just doesn't happen very often.
[01:41:49.920 --> 01:41:50.880] It really doesn't.
[01:41:50.880 --> 01:41:52.160] The stats on this are incredible.
[01:41:52.480 --> 01:41:56.320] There's over 20 countries in Europe where that has never happened on record.
[01:41:56.560 --> 01:42:07.280] There's in the UK, I mean, they had a Trans Day of Remembrance last November, and there was a flag flying from Edinburgh City Council for all the trans people who've lost their lives through violence.
[01:42:07.280 --> 01:42:12.560] There was one Scottish person on that list, and that person hadn't lost his life through violence.
[01:42:12.560 --> 01:42:20.960] He was a criminal who had been stalking a 13-year-old girl who was considered one of the most menacing people in the Scottish state who had died due to unrelated causes.
[01:42:20.960 --> 01:42:32.400] So they were flying a flag for this criminal on the Edinburgh City Council under this delusion that violence against trans people is rife.
[01:42:32.400 --> 01:42:45.680] There was a moment where one of the politicians in the UK was tweeting about Trans Day of Remembrance and someone tweeted underneath, this was very smart, said, Could we have, would you mind reading out in Parliament the names of all the trans people who've been murdered and lost their lives?
[01:42:45.680 --> 01:42:46.880] And she said, that's a great idea.
[01:42:46.880 --> 01:42:48.000] Where do I get their list?
[01:42:48.000 --> 01:42:48.800] There weren't any.
[01:42:49.600 --> 01:43:03.040] You know, and this is the, it was a neat thing to do because, you know, this is not to denigrate anyone who attacks anyone for how they identify or how they dress, which I fundamentally find abhorrent and I oppose.
[01:43:03.040 --> 01:43:21.760] But the only way you get these statistics about trans people being uniquely marginalized or uniquely susceptible to violence is if you take global statistics and start bringing in, for example, the statistics in Brazil, where there is a high preponderance of trans-identified people in sex work, which is a particularly dangerous form of work.
[01:43:21.760 --> 01:43:24.400] That's the only way you get these elevated statistics.
[01:43:24.400 --> 01:43:25.600] They're not marginalized.
[01:43:25.600 --> 01:43:27.280] They're not uniquely vulnerable.
[01:43:27.280 --> 01:43:30.120] And if anything, they have unique power in society.
[01:43:29.920 --> 01:43:31.560] It's completely 100% backwards.
[01:43:31.880 --> 01:43:45.400] The power to take away someone else's rights, to completely deplete gay rights, so that Stonewall, the leading gay charity in this country, is now effectively an anti-gay charity because the policies that it pursues are antagonistic to gay rights.
[01:43:45.400 --> 01:43:48.200] E

Prompt 6: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 7: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 8: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 9: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 3 of 3 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
d died due to unrelated causes.
[01:42:20.960 --> 01:42:32.400] So they were flying a flag for this criminal on the Edinburgh City Council under this delusion that violence against trans people is rife.
[01:42:32.400 --> 01:42:45.680] There was a moment where one of the politicians in the UK was tweeting about Trans Day of Remembrance and someone tweeted underneath, this was very smart, said, Could we have, would you mind reading out in Parliament the names of all the trans people who've been murdered and lost their lives?
[01:42:45.680 --> 01:42:46.880] And she said, that's a great idea.
[01:42:46.880 --> 01:42:48.000] Where do I get their list?
[01:42:48.000 --> 01:42:48.800] There weren't any.
[01:42:49.600 --> 01:43:03.040] You know, and this is the, it was a neat thing to do because, you know, this is not to denigrate anyone who attacks anyone for how they identify or how they dress, which I fundamentally find abhorrent and I oppose.
[01:43:03.040 --> 01:43:21.760] But the only way you get these statistics about trans people being uniquely marginalized or uniquely susceptible to violence is if you take global statistics and start bringing in, for example, the statistics in Brazil, where there is a high preponderance of trans-identified people in sex work, which is a particularly dangerous form of work.
[01:43:21.760 --> 01:43:24.400] That's the only way you get these elevated statistics.
[01:43:24.400 --> 01:43:25.600] They're not marginalized.
[01:43:25.600 --> 01:43:27.280] They're not uniquely vulnerable.
[01:43:27.280 --> 01:43:30.120] And if anything, they have unique power in society.
[01:43:29.920 --> 01:43:31.560] It's completely 100% backwards.
[01:43:31.880 --> 01:43:45.400] The power to take away someone else's rights, to completely deplete gay rights, so that Stonewall, the leading gay charity in this country, is now effectively an anti-gay charity because the policies that it pursues are antagonistic to gay rights.
[01:43:45.400 --> 01:43:48.200] Even though it claims that's not the case, it absolutely is the case.
[01:43:48.760 --> 01:43:51.080] The power of that is absolutely immense.
[01:43:51.080 --> 01:43:56.040] So I think it comes down to this point that people just don't know what it is they're supporting.
[01:43:56.360 --> 01:43:58.600] That's what it is, I think.
[01:43:59.240 --> 01:44:01.240] Okay, so I'm with you 100% on that.
[01:44:01.240 --> 01:44:11.400] But the objections I hear is like on the sports, for example, there's, I don't know, a couple dozen trans athletes in the collegiate population of what, 50,000?
[01:44:11.400 --> 01:44:15.160] There's something like 50,000 college athletes in America.
[01:44:15.160 --> 01:44:16.840] You're making a big deal out of nothing.
[01:44:16.840 --> 01:44:18.040] This is a moral panic.
[01:44:18.040 --> 01:44:20.440] Come on, there's just a few of them that want to compete.
[01:44:20.440 --> 01:44:21.720] Why not be supportive?
[01:44:21.720 --> 01:44:26.440] Or how many prisoners are really transitioning and so on?
[01:44:26.440 --> 01:44:28.040] It's not that big a deal.
[01:44:28.040 --> 01:44:38.760] So the report by the United Nations that I quote in the book shows that 600 female athletes have lost at least 890 medals to men within their category.
[01:44:38.760 --> 01:44:41.000] That doesn't seem trivial to me.
[01:44:41.400 --> 01:44:43.880] By the way, even if it were one, it would be wrong.
[01:44:43.880 --> 01:44:45.080] Yes, right, of course it would be.
[01:44:45.240 --> 01:44:45.960] But it's hundreds.
[01:44:45.960 --> 01:44:46.200] Right.
[01:44:46.200 --> 01:44:47.000] It's hundreds.
[01:44:47.720 --> 01:44:51.960] Now, the number of men in the female estate, there are quite a few.
[01:44:51.960 --> 01:44:54.040] And there are people who absolutely should not be there.
[01:44:54.040 --> 01:44:56.760] And it's, I mean, this is the question.
[01:44:57.480 --> 01:45:01.800] Look, sexual assaults by trans-identified people in women's toilets are very rare.
[01:45:01.800 --> 01:45:03.560] And I absolutely accept that.
[01:45:03.560 --> 01:45:05.080] Very, very rare, right?
[01:45:05.400 --> 01:45:13.240] But safeguarding doesn't work on the principle that you take a subcategory of men and say, because they're very unlikely to attack, we'll just move them out.
[01:45:13.240 --> 01:45:14.680] The truth is, men are men.
[01:45:15.120 --> 01:45:24.240] Now, I can't go into a woman's toilet, or I won't, not because I don't take that as an insult that, oh, they think I'm a rapist, they think I'm a criminal.
[01:45:24.320 --> 01:45:32.560] It's because of safeguarding, because statistically, 98% of all convicted sex offenders are men, and 91% of their victims are female.
[01:45:32.560 --> 01:45:34.560] That is a major safeguarding risk.
[01:45:34.560 --> 01:45:40.320] So, what you do is on a statistical basis, you just keep all men out.
[01:45:40.320 --> 01:45:43.440] We know that women's single-sex spaces are far safer for women.
[01:45:43.440 --> 01:45:53.520] There was a report by the Times that found that 90% of all cases of sexual assault, abuse, and voyeurism in public toilets occurs in unisex facilities.
[01:45:53.520 --> 01:45:56.960] Single-sex toilet facilities are far safer for women.
[01:45:56.960 --> 01:45:59.600] And you might say, well, yeah, but predators are going to find a way in.
[01:45:59.600 --> 01:46:04.160] Actually, an awful lot, I'd say the preponderance of these attacks are opportunistic in nature.
[01:46:04.160 --> 01:46:10.880] So, when you have a situation where someone, a man in a dress, can be in a woman's toilet, it's far more likely to happen.
[01:46:10.880 --> 01:46:13.600] That isn't to say that trans people are more predatory.
[01:46:13.600 --> 01:46:17.760] No one's saying that trans-identified people have an innate predation about them.
[01:46:17.760 --> 01:46:20.240] The truth is that self-ID is being exploited.
[01:46:20.240 --> 01:46:31.280] Now, it is true, and I have to say this: trans-identified individuals are far, there's a disproportionate, are disproportionately represented in the statistics of sex offenders, right?
[01:46:31.600 --> 01:46:41.680] Now, I think the reason for that is men are exploiting self-identification to gain access to women's spaces, not that trans people are inherently more predatory.
[01:46:41.680 --> 01:46:43.280] But let's have a look at the stats.
[01:46:43.760 --> 01:46:51.360] The last census in the UK, one in every 2,750 men in the UK are convicted sex offenders.
[01:46:51.360 --> 01:46:57.920] When you talk about trans-identified men, that figure goes up to one in every 585.
[01:46:57.920 --> 01:47:00.840] Now, what explains that disparity?
[01:47:01.160 --> 01:47:11.080] Either you are saying that my suggestion, which is that men, predatory men, are exploiting gender self-ID to get what they want.
[01:47:11.080 --> 01:47:14.840] The only other explanation is that trans people are five times more predatory.
[01:47:14.840 --> 01:47:16.120] than anyone else.
[01:47:16.120 --> 01:47:24.680] So the people who are denying that self-ID is being exploited by predators are making the case that trans people are just more predatory, right?
[01:47:24.680 --> 01:47:28.600] That they don't see it that way because they haven't thought about it, but that is the truth of it.
[01:47:28.600 --> 01:47:36.840] And by the way, even if it's just a handful of cases, which it is, how many rapes are you willing to tolerate for your ideology?
[01:47:36.840 --> 01:47:37.400] Exactly.
[01:47:37.640 --> 01:47:48.840] You know, the case of the boy who wore a skirt into a girl's toilet in Ludon in Virginia, and the father was arrested after that sexual assault for complaining about it because the school tried to cover it up.
[01:47:48.840 --> 01:47:50.760] There's a massive lawsuit going on about that.
[01:47:50.760 --> 01:47:52.440] Was that tolerable for your ideology?
[01:47:52.440 --> 01:48:10.760] What about Katie Dolotowski, the six foot five bloke who wore a dress, who went into a public female toilet in the UK and sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl, went into another toilet and filmed a 13-year-old girl on the toilet, and he was sent to a female prison.
[01:48:10.760 --> 01:48:15.320] Now, I want to know from these people who say self-ID, no ifs, no buts.
[01:48:15.640 --> 01:48:21.000] I want to know how many of those sexual assaults do you think is acceptable who uphold this ideology?
[01:48:21.000 --> 01:48:25.320] Or how about we just have safeguarding, say all men stay out of women's spaces.
[01:48:25.320 --> 01:48:26.840] That's the safest way.
[01:48:26.840 --> 01:48:30.600] This is just a topic that isn't broadly thought about or understood.
[01:48:30.600 --> 01:48:31.640] I think that's the problem.
[01:48:31.640 --> 01:48:37.880] You mentioned the We Spa, I think, in LA incident where the guy went into the all-women's spa.
[01:48:37.880 --> 01:48:42.360] And then the women got in trouble for objecting to this.
[01:48:42.360 --> 01:48:51.840] That was terrible because, of course, you know, you have a guy we subsequently found out has a criminal record for indecent exposure, walking in there with a young girl, a mother with a young girl.
[01:48:52.160 --> 01:48:54.640] He's apparently allegedly semi-erect.
[01:48:54.960 --> 01:48:57.840] The woman goes to the counter to complain.
[01:48:57.840 --> 01:48:59.840] This is filmed, it becomes a viral video.
[01:48:59.840 --> 01:49:05.600] The staff effectively say, We, you know, he, this is a woman because this person says they're a woman, but it was a man.
[01:49:05.600 --> 01:49:08.080] You know, the clue was the penis.
[01:49:08.400 --> 01:49:21.760] And then you get feminists, of course, very rightly protesting outside there, but you also get far-right activist groups protesting because they hate the idea of trans for different reasons because they're not liberals and they think you shouldn't be able to identify as you.
[01:49:21.760 --> 01:49:24.240] So you get the two clash, and the media conflate the two.
[01:49:24.240 --> 01:49:26.640] And you actually have the Guardian, and I think this is unforgivable.
[01:49:26.640 --> 01:49:31.280] The Guardian, which is a major paper in the UK, I know they've got an outlet in America as well.
[01:49:31.280 --> 01:49:37.440] They claimed it was a hoax that this girl hadn't, this woman hadn't seen this man exposing himself.
[01:49:38.160 --> 01:49:43.120] And they said that, and they conflated the feminist protesters with the far-right protesters.
[01:49:43.120 --> 01:49:44.400] And they did it more than once.
[01:49:44.400 --> 01:49:50.400] And they did it even after news broke that this guy was a criminal sex offender.
[01:49:50.720 --> 01:49:51.760] Unforgivable.
[01:49:51.760 --> 01:49:57.360] And again, like it's outlets like The Guardian who prioritize their ideology over women's safety.
[01:49:57.360 --> 01:50:07.360] I don't think in the future, when we get past whatever period this is and go back to something more resembling the before times, I don't think they'll be forgiven for that.
[01:50:07.360 --> 01:50:09.440] And I probably don't think they should be.
[01:50:09.440 --> 01:50:14.400] All right, let's think about gender dysphoria versus rapid onset gender dysphoria.
[01:50:14.400 --> 01:50:19.360] The latter seems to be a new phenomenon that happens in teen years.
[01:50:19.920 --> 01:50:32.360] The former, though, tiny percentage, maybe one half of 1% at most, people that feel uncomfortable, even at a young age, that seems to be a real thing, however small it is.
[01:50:33.560 --> 01:50:35.000] What do you make of those two?
[01:50:35.080 --> 01:50:38.040] Is one a real phenomenon, the other's a social contagion phenomenon?
[01:50:38.440 --> 01:50:41.480] Well, I mean, I'm not qualified to talk about the medical aspect of this.
[01:50:41.480 --> 01:50:44.600] I would say that, you know, the phrase used to be gender identity disorder.
[01:50:44.600 --> 01:50:45.000] Yeah.
[01:50:45.000 --> 01:50:53.400] And campaigners at WPATH campaign to have it change to gender dysphoria, which sounds more like something pathological, innate.
[01:50:54.200 --> 01:50:57.400] You know, it muddies the waters somewhat.
[01:50:57.800 --> 01:51:03.640] But ultimately, do I think that I don't believe we have a gendered soul?
[01:51:03.640 --> 01:51:07.480] I don't believe we have an essence that doesn't align with our body.
[01:51:07.480 --> 01:51:08.760] I think we are our body.
[01:51:09.480 --> 01:51:25.800] And so, therefore, I think it is perfectly possible for children who are obviously socialized in a world where there are men and women and we do have conventions that are affixed to what it means to be masculine and what it means to be feminine, whether that is how you dress or how you behave.
[01:51:25.800 --> 01:51:27.240] Those things are all real.
[01:51:27.240 --> 01:51:34.360] And they are for the most part socially constructed, but there are also obviously biological differences between men and women and behavioral differences, I mean.
[01:51:34.840 --> 01:51:36.280] So there's all of that.
[01:51:36.680 --> 01:51:48.040] But I don't believe, so I can conceive that a child could feel more comfortable with the social accoutrements of what is typically associated with the other sex.
[01:51:48.200 --> 01:51:50.040] That makes complete sense to me.
[01:51:50.040 --> 01:51:55.960] But that's something that is a social problem or at least requires a psychotherapeutic solution.
[01:51:55.960 --> 01:52:07.880] The solution to that is not to medicalize the child's body, put the child on drugs, block their puberty, which always, almost always leads to cross-sex hormones and in some cases, irreversible surgery.
[01:52:07.880 --> 01:52:14.280] What's the statistics I quote in the book about the number of double mastectomies of under 18 girls in the thousands?
[01:52:14.280 --> 01:52:16.080] It's up to like 6,000.
[01:52:16.320 --> 01:52:19.120] And 50 of those were sort of under 13, I think.
[01:52:20.080 --> 01:52:21.760] I mean, shocking stuff.
[01:52:21.760 --> 01:52:28.880] Mutilating children because of a supernatural, pseudo-scientific belief in a gender essence.
[01:52:28.880 --> 01:52:29.760] What the hell is going on?
[01:52:30.160 --> 01:52:34.400] This is one of these things that I think future historians will not be able to grapple with.
[01:52:34.400 --> 01:52:37.200] How the hell did we ever allow that to happen?
[01:52:37.200 --> 01:52:38.080] It's absolutely insane.
[01:52:38.080 --> 01:52:56.000] And it happened, of course, because of the likes of WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, whose files, which were leaked to Michael Schellenberger and then published in the report by Mia Hughes, revealed that they knew that so many of the experts within WPATH knew that a lot of these patients could not give informed consent.
[01:52:56.000 --> 01:53:09.520] You know, they were transitioning, giving transitional surgery to people with dissociative disorders and schizophrenia and homeless people, people on drugs, and children who had no understanding of what it meant to lose your sexual function.
[01:53:09.920 --> 01:53:10.880] They couldn't understand it.
[01:53:10.880 --> 01:53:12.400] How could you if you were pre-prebested?
[01:53:12.400 --> 01:53:14.720] I mean, that should have been the end of WPATH.
[01:53:14.720 --> 01:53:18.400] You know, those files should have been the end.
[01:53:18.400 --> 01:53:25.680] You know, when it was revealed that the WPATH standards of care, I mean, they had explicitly a section on eunuch identity.
[01:53:25.680 --> 01:53:28.160] And they said that it is a doctor's responsibility.
[01:53:28.160 --> 01:53:38.880] If a patient comes along and says, I do, I was born a eunuch, I'm innately, I have a eunuch soul, and therefore I want my testes removed, that a doctor should go along with that.
[01:53:38.880 --> 01:53:39.600] What?
[01:53:39.600 --> 01:53:43.360] Like that eunuch isn't an innate identity.
[01:53:43.360 --> 01:53:44.480] This is absolute nonsense.
[01:53:44.480 --> 01:53:52.320] I mean, if I went to a doctor and said, I want my arms removed because I feel like I should have been born without arms, it would be dead against the Hippocratic oath for any doctor to go.
[01:53:52.400 --> 01:53:55.040] It would be completely unethical for that doctor to do it.
[01:53:55.040 --> 01:53:57.760] I don't buy this idea that once you're an adult, you do what you want with your body.
[01:53:57.760 --> 01:53:59.480] Because what about the doctor's ethics?
[01:53:59.800 --> 01:54:00.040] Right?
[01:54:00.680 --> 01:54:08.680] So, look, and that is where I probably depart with some libertarians on that, but I just think you know, the ethical standards of the doctor have to be taken into account.
[01:54:08.680 --> 01:54:17.000] But I think WPATH should have been totally discredited right when they published that ridiculous version 8 standards of care with the eunuch identity in there.
[01:54:17.000 --> 01:54:30.280] And in their draft version, by the way, that document linked to a pornographic website, the Eunuch Archives, which had thousands of stories about older men getting sexual kicks out of castrating children.
[01:54:30.520 --> 01:54:34.680] That's that's that was exposed by Genevieve Gluck at Redux magazine.
[01:54:34.680 --> 01:54:37.160] I urge people to read what she wrote about that.
[01:54:37.160 --> 01:54:39.160] She's waded through all those horrible stories.
[01:54:39.160 --> 01:54:40.680] I don't know how she did it.
[01:54:40.680 --> 01:54:50.520] And I just think that should have been the end of that document, by the way, with that link to the Unich Archives, was uploaded on the official NHS Scotland website.
[01:54:50.760 --> 01:54:51.160] Right?
[01:54:51.160 --> 01:54:51.480] Wow.
[01:54:51.480 --> 01:54:53.400] That's child castration porn.
[01:54:53.400 --> 01:54:53.960] Yeah.
[01:54:53.960 --> 01:54:54.840] On the NHS.
[01:54:55.240 --> 01:54:55.960] Are you joking?
[01:54:56.280 --> 01:54:57.080] How does that not?
[01:54:57.240 --> 01:55:00.920] I mean, now you see, after that, the NHS has been backtracking.
[01:55:00.920 --> 01:55:03.080] You know, they're moving away from WPATH.
[01:55:03.080 --> 01:55:05.560] They don't want anything to do with it.
[01:55:05.560 --> 01:55:07.720] Why has that not happened in America yet?
[01:55:08.840 --> 01:55:11.000] Why are other countries not now?
[01:55:11.000 --> 01:55:14.280] But it's mostly a state by state issue.
[01:55:14.760 --> 01:55:18.360] It's not clear that Trump can come in with the federal government and change it.
[01:55:18.440 --> 01:55:19.400] He might be able to.
[01:55:19.400 --> 01:55:20.680] You're ruining kids' lives.
[01:55:20.680 --> 01:55:21.080] No, I know.
[01:55:22.120 --> 01:55:22.440] I know.
[01:55:22.440 --> 01:55:22.920] I know.
[01:55:22.920 --> 01:55:23.800] There's no excuse for it.
[01:55:24.280 --> 01:55:25.720] There's no justification for it.
[01:55:25.720 --> 01:55:33.720] Even if the people perpetrating this, and I'm sure some of them do, genuinely believe it is possible for a child to be born in the wrong body, which it isn't.
[01:55:33.720 --> 01:55:35.600] Even if they genuinely have this belief.
[01:55:35.400 --> 01:55:38.120] Oh, it's a form of allowed to do it.
[01:55:38.120 --> 01:55:40.280] It's an old form of dualism.
[01:55:40.280 --> 01:55:44.560] You know, that there's a gendered soul floating around in there and it landed in the wrong body.
[01:55:45.360 --> 01:55:48.480] What about the idea that there's actually no such thing as trans?
[01:55:44.120 --> 01:55:50.240] These are gay kids.
[01:55:50.880 --> 01:55:59.040] Well, we know that between 80 and 90% of the adolescents referred to the Tavistock Pediatric Gender Clinic in London, which has since shut down since the CAS review.
[01:55:59.040 --> 01:56:03.120] Between 80 and 90% of those kids were same-sex attracted.
[01:56:03.440 --> 01:56:13.600] So there is a high preponderance of kids because we also know that every study into this shows that most gender non-conforming young people grow up gay.
[01:56:13.600 --> 01:56:14.160] Okay?
[01:56:14.480 --> 01:56:17.760] Just that's just verifiable and indisputable.
[01:56:17.760 --> 01:56:20.480] So, yeah, the majority of these kids are just gay kids.
[01:56:20.480 --> 01:56:26.240] You know, they're just camp boys, effeminate boys, and tomboys, you know, girls who behave in traditionally masculine ways.
[01:56:26.240 --> 01:56:29.520] And, you know, a lot of them are just lesbians, a lot of them just gay.
[01:56:29.520 --> 01:56:37.120] And they're being, you know, they're being told that this is, that they effectively need to be heterosexualized.
[01:56:37.120 --> 01:56:38.880] You know, they need to be straightened out.
[01:56:38.880 --> 01:56:48.960] And I made the point of the book about what the NHS were doing with the Tavistock is no different from what the Iranian government does, which is because they, you know, homosexuality is illegal, can get the death penalty.
[01:56:49.440 --> 01:56:58.880] The government there, with the endorsement of the Mullahs and the Ayatollah, by the way, will fund your sex change to straighten you out, to fix you, to heterosexualize you.
[01:56:59.200 --> 01:57:08.640] If you want to say that the trans movement is just another civil rights movement like gay rights, you have to explain to me why it is trying to eliminate homosexuality.
[01:57:09.840 --> 01:57:19.360] The movement is, I mean, I don't use the word homophobia lightly because I think it's used against people who just have, say, reservations about gay marriage, or they just personally don't like it, or whatever.
[01:57:19.320 --> 01:57:22.640] Like, I just think it's a word I don't trust.
[01:57:22.640 --> 01:57:30.120] But if castrating and sterilizing and medicalizing children for being gay isn't homophobic, I don't know what is, right?
[01:57:29.520 --> 01:57:35.320] That I mean, it's just the ultimate form of there was even a joke at the Tavistock Clinic amongst the staff.
[01:57:35.640 --> 01:57:38.440] They used to joke, soon there aren't going to be any gay people.
[01:57:38.440 --> 01:57:38.840] Right.
[01:57:39.080 --> 01:57:39.560] Right.
[01:57:40.040 --> 01:57:41.000] Or they knew what they were doing.
[01:57:41.000 --> 01:57:42.600] Where did all the lesbians go?
[01:57:42.920 --> 01:57:45.080] They knew what, yeah, it's unbelievable.
[01:57:45.080 --> 01:57:49.000] And every whistleblower has pointed to this endemic anti-gay sentiment.
[01:57:49.000 --> 01:57:53.400] Sometimes, even parents who just don't want a gay kid, they straighten the kid out.
[01:57:53.400 --> 01:58:04.840] What about this idea of autogonophilia where these young men are attracted or sexually aroused by either dressing as women or thinking of themselves as women?
[01:58:04.840 --> 01:58:08.680] But they're still, it's just a sexual arousal thing.
[01:58:08.680 --> 01:58:11.240] Yeah, high preponderance of that.
[01:58:12.040 --> 01:58:18.600] It's something that's never talked about because trans, the umbrella of trans has now expanded to include what we call old-fashioned transsexuals.
[01:58:18.600 --> 01:58:23.080] It incorporates cross-dressers, fetishists, AGP, autogarnifiers.
[01:58:23.080 --> 01:58:26.120] So actually, or non-binary, anything can go under that umbrella now.
[01:58:26.120 --> 01:58:33.480] So, you know, it's no longer as simple because I think a lot of people in the before times might have known one or two transsexuals.
[01:58:33.800 --> 01:58:37.080] An individual who, you know, for whatever reason has to go through that.
[01:58:37.080 --> 01:58:38.360] Very painful and expensive.
[01:58:38.600 --> 01:58:41.000] So when I ask, what is Odoo?
[01:58:41.000 --> 01:58:42.520] What comes to mind?
[01:58:42.520 --> 01:58:45.160] Well, Odo is a bit of everything.
[01:58:45.160 --> 01:58:52.280] Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth.
[01:58:52.280 --> 01:59:00.680] But you know, some people also say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable.
[01:59:00.680 --> 01:59:07.480] But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks.
[01:59:07.480 --> 01:59:12.920] I mean, whatever your business needs: manufacturing, accounting, HR programs.
[01:59:12.920 --> 01:59:17.280] You can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company.
[01:59:17.280 --> 01:59:19.040] So, what is Odoo?
[01:59:14.840 --> 01:59:21.760] Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything.
[01:59:22.080 --> 01:59:27.680] Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstock building blocks for business.
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[01:59:38.640 --> 01:59:42.320] Surgery and not a thing taken lightly by any means.
[01:59:42.320 --> 01:59:49.360] You know, this is something that for psychologically, for whatever reason, probably those social reasons we discussed earlier, this is the only way they can be happy.
[01:59:49.360 --> 01:59:51.440] And I have sympathy for those people.
[01:59:51.440 --> 01:59:55.920] I don't want them in women's spaces, and I'm not going to pretend they've changed sex.
[01:59:55.920 --> 01:59:58.640] But I have that, they have my sympathy, right?
[01:59:58.640 --> 02:00:07.920] But that's not the same as an autogynophilic fetishist who gets an erection whenever he puts a dress on and wants to go into women's toilets because he is sexually aroused.
[02:00:07.920 --> 02:00:13.840] And by the way, in women's rape crisis centers, and is sexually aroused by the idea of breaking those boundaries.
[02:00:13.840 --> 02:00:16.000] It's more prevalent than you think.
[02:00:16.320 --> 02:00:19.840] I've interviewed an autogynophile on my show, Debbie Hayton.
[02:00:20.000 --> 02:00:29.120] So, this is a man who went through all the transitional surgery to become Debbie Hayton and has written very well about this subject.
[02:00:30.240 --> 02:00:35.200] Now, I was interviewing Debbie about a book called Transsexual Apostate.
[02:00:35.200 --> 02:00:36.560] Transsexual Apostate.
[02:00:36.560 --> 02:00:46.480] It's worth reading because, I mean, Debbie's one of the few AGPs who admits that this is a that AGP is the reason for the transition.
[02:00:46.800 --> 02:00:47.600] Isn't that interesting?
[02:00:47.600 --> 02:00:48.720] Very few people do that.
[02:00:48.720 --> 02:00:50.160] Very few people will admit that.
[02:00:50.160 --> 02:00:52.240] It's become like a kind of taboo.
[02:00:52.240 --> 02:01:05.320] So, that's a book worth reading if you want to understand how the sexual impulse, which is an incredibly powerful impulse in humankind, and particularly, I have to say, in men, can be a particularly intense drive.
[02:01:05.640 --> 02:01:12.920] People are willing to ruin their lives, upend everything for their sex, for their sex drive to satisfy their libido.
[02:01:12.920 --> 02:01:27.160] If you don't think that male predators who are turned on by the idea of breaking women's boundaries will use any opportunity to do so, including government-sanctioned gender self-ID, you are deluding yourself hugely.
[02:01:27.160 --> 02:01:28.920] So the AGP thing is an issue.
[02:01:28.920 --> 02:01:30.360] It's just something we have to be able to talk about.
[02:01:30.360 --> 02:01:33.400] Like, it is a thing, and we can see it's a thing.
[02:01:33.400 --> 02:01:36.840] You know, that guy exposing himself in a women's spa, semi-erect.
[02:01:36.840 --> 02:01:38.440] What else is that if not a fetish?
[02:01:39.000 --> 02:01:47.080] If you want to be in a women's changing room and have your penis out, you know, that's going to be part of it, probably.
[02:01:47.080 --> 02:01:51.240] In almost all, maybe not in all cases, but in a significant number.
[02:01:51.640 --> 02:01:53.320] Why do women have to bear the brunt of this?
[02:01:53.560 --> 02:01:55.240] Why is it always women who have to bear this?
[02:01:55.240 --> 02:01:59.960] Like, I hate this when there's these male celebrities saying, you know, women are just bigots if they don't.
[02:02:00.360 --> 02:02:03.080] Well, you're not the one who has to get undressed in front of these people.
[02:02:03.320 --> 02:02:04.680] You're not the one it affects.
[02:02:04.680 --> 02:02:06.840] You know, I just think it's a complete lack of empathy.
[02:02:06.840 --> 02:02:09.000] Do you know Deodra McCluskey?
[02:02:09.000 --> 02:02:10.040] I do not.
[02:02:10.040 --> 02:02:14.120] She is the, well, it used to be Donald McCluskey, then she transitioned.
[02:02:14.520 --> 02:02:21.880] And she's an economist and basically a sort of classical liberal or conservative economist, libertarian, maybe.
[02:02:21.880 --> 02:02:26.600] Anyway, she's written quite a few big works on the history of economics.
[02:02:26.600 --> 02:02:28.680] She does economic history.
[02:02:28.680 --> 02:02:32.440] But yeah, she also wrote a book about transitioning and how painful it was.
[02:02:32.440 --> 02:02:34.680] Family won't talk to her, kids disowned her.
[02:02:34.680 --> 02:02:37.080] It's a horrible, it's a heartbreaking story.
[02:02:37.080 --> 02:02:40.280] Whatever's going on in there, I just really don't know.
[02:02:40.280 --> 02:02:42.600] Like Bruce Jenner, now Caitlin Jenner.
[02:02:42.600 --> 02:02:43.080] I don't know.
[02:02:43.080 --> 02:02:44.120] It's complicated, right?
[02:02:44.120 --> 02:02:45.280] Humans are really complicated.
[02:02:44.520 --> 02:02:45.600] Yeah, really complicated.
[02:02:46.240 --> 02:02:55.920] I mean, the human sex drive thing, yeah, the evolutionary psychologist, like David Buss on the show, his latest book is on men, when men behave badly.
[02:02:55.920 --> 02:03:01.120] And it's really this sex drive is so hugely different for men than women.
[02:03:01.120 --> 02:03:03.120] And the data is just stunning.
[02:03:03.840 --> 02:03:06.320] Well, like you said, 98% of sex criminals are men.
[02:03:06.880 --> 02:03:08.240] So we have to accept this reality.
[02:03:08.800 --> 02:03:10.400] But we go back to that word civilization.
[02:03:10.400 --> 02:03:12.240] It seems to be a bit of a theme of what we're talking about today.
[02:03:12.240 --> 02:03:23.280] But, you know, I think civilization is the armor that we build up against these baser instincts, whether that be authoritarianism or a sex drive that can be damaging.
[02:03:23.280 --> 02:03:28.880] And civilization, the institution of marriage, is largely about the containment of that sexual drive.
[02:03:28.880 --> 02:03:30.480] You know, that's part of it.
[02:03:30.480 --> 02:03:36.640] Well, there's all these women coming out now saying, you know, feminists told us we can have all the sex we want just like men.
[02:03:36.640 --> 02:03:37.680] And guess what?
[02:03:37.680 --> 02:03:39.600] It doesn't really work that way.
[02:03:39.920 --> 02:03:41.040] Well, you know, I like it.
[02:03:41.120 --> 02:03:41.920] I'm liberal.
[02:03:41.920 --> 02:03:42.880] You had Perry.
[02:03:43.280 --> 02:03:46.080] You talked about Perry in your, what's her first name?
[02:03:47.200 --> 02:03:48.080] Louise Perry.
[02:03:48.080 --> 02:03:50.320] She wrote the book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
[02:03:50.320 --> 02:03:50.640] Yeah.
[02:03:50.640 --> 02:03:50.960] Yes.
[02:03:50.960 --> 02:03:51.200] Yeah.
[02:03:51.680 --> 02:03:53.520] And there's others like this.
[02:03:53.520 --> 02:03:53.840] Yeah.
[02:03:54.000 --> 02:03:55.120] I mean, I take the point.
[02:03:55.120 --> 02:03:57.600] I think, you know, she makes a very strong argument.
[02:03:57.600 --> 02:04:02.880] And I'm, you know, I think it's a debate that we need to have, but I also think I am, my instincts are liberal.
[02:04:02.880 --> 02:04:06.000] I do think consenting adults should be able to have sex with whoever they want.
[02:04:06.000 --> 02:04:07.200] You know, not my business.
[02:04:07.200 --> 02:04:07.440] Yeah.
[02:04:07.440 --> 02:04:07.680] Yeah.
[02:04:07.920 --> 02:04:11.520] You know, and I don't want to shame anyone for doing that.
[02:04:11.520 --> 02:04:15.520] My only concern, my only concern, is when it encroaches on someone else's rights.
[02:04:15.520 --> 02:04:24.720] It becomes a big debate then, insofar as if we have the OnlyFans culture, if women are as promiscuous as some of these women who are sleeping with a thousand men a day or crazy stuff like that.
[02:04:25.360 --> 02:04:26.960] What does that do to the culture?
[02:04:26.960 --> 02:04:31.640] What does that do to our perception of women, girls, upper sex?
[02:04:32.920 --> 02:04:36.600] These are all valid concerns and valid arguments.
[02:04:37.880 --> 02:04:42.200] But I still err on the side of individual adult autonomy.
[02:04:42.200 --> 02:04:42.760] Yeah.
[02:04:42.760 --> 02:04:44.760] So long as they're not hurt.
[02:04:44.760 --> 02:04:46.840] As soon as there's a non-consensual element, no way, right?
[02:04:46.840 --> 02:04:48.920] You know, that's my line.
[02:04:48.920 --> 02:04:54.760] Yeah, David's got these huge databases from the dating sites where you can get information like this.
[02:04:54.760 --> 02:04:59.800] Like, how many dates would you need to go on before you'd be intimate with somebody from the site?
[02:04:59.800 --> 02:05:01.800] And for the women, the average was seven.
[02:05:01.800 --> 02:05:05.000] For the men, it was like one, 1.2 or something.
[02:05:05.000 --> 02:05:08.840] So for every guy that said two, somebody said, why even go out on a date?
[02:05:08.840 --> 02:05:09.240] Yeah.
[02:05:09.560 --> 02:05:11.240] But of course, but we know this.
[02:05:11.240 --> 02:05:11.400] Yes.
[02:05:11.960 --> 02:05:16.440] Everyone knows that this is a reality that, which is why we have women safeguarding.
[02:05:16.760 --> 02:05:18.840] This is absolutely not rocket science.
[02:05:19.480 --> 02:05:19.960] All right.
[02:05:19.960 --> 02:05:21.160] A couple other quick things here.
[02:05:21.160 --> 02:05:23.720] We're going on two hours as I could listen to you all day.
[02:05:23.960 --> 02:05:30.360] So we used to read about the authoritarian right and the woke left, but now we have the authoritarian left and the woke right.
[02:05:30.680 --> 02:05:31.160] Yeah.
[02:05:31.160 --> 02:05:32.920] Well, I mean, look, I've talked about this in the book.
[02:05:32.920 --> 02:05:34.840] I know that the woke right is a contested term.
[02:05:35.080 --> 02:05:39.640] I know that people get very angry about it, largely because of what you were talking about earlier, about the idea that woke is a pejorative.
[02:05:39.640 --> 02:05:44.920] And particularly, if you're someone who has used the word woke as a pejorative, you're not going to like it when it's thrown back at you, right?
[02:05:46.120 --> 02:05:50.920] And I know, like Benjamin Boyce has argued that it was almost engineered in order to goad.
[02:05:50.920 --> 02:05:56.200] Whereas for me, I've always used woke as a, not as a pejorative, as I say, as a descriptive.
[02:05:56.200 --> 02:06:05.720] And according to the definition that I outlined to you before, I think that wokeness is all about group identity monomania with that added authoritarian aspect.
[02:06:05.720 --> 02:06:06.200] Okay.
[02:06:06.200 --> 02:06:09.000] So, of course, that can exist on the right and the left.
[02:06:09.000 --> 02:06:11.960] I mean, we know that there are crazed identitarians on the right.
[02:06:11.960 --> 02:06:13.640] We've seen them throughout history, right?
[02:06:13.640 --> 02:06:16.000] Not just the white nationalists and the groipers of today.
[02:06:16.000 --> 02:06:17.440] We've seen them all before.
[02:06:17.440 --> 02:06:20.000] So, and certainly authoritarian as well.
[02:06:20.000 --> 02:06:25.280] So, yeah, it's a no-brainer to me that wokeness is not tied to any one political party.
[02:06:25.280 --> 02:06:26.800] I understand that that's contentious.
[02:06:26.800 --> 02:06:33.680] But look, the example I give in the book is, I think, a good one, insofar as there was that conference in Cambridge in 2021 back at the university.
[02:06:33.680 --> 02:06:42.160] A bunch of woke left academics, Priyam Varda Gopol, Hendy Andrews, talking about how Hitler was the, sorry, Winston Churchill was the true villain of World War II.
[02:06:42.160 --> 02:06:48.400] I think Hendy Andrews said something like he was presided over a society which was worse than the Nazis.
[02:06:48.400 --> 02:06:51.040] I think he said, was that Daryl Cooper that was promoting?
[02:06:51.200 --> 02:06:52.160] Well, I'm about to say.
[02:06:52.560 --> 02:06:54.000] Compare it in the book to Daryl Cooper.
[02:06:54.480 --> 02:06:54.960] Yes, that's right.
[02:06:55.040 --> 02:07:00.960] He's the podcaster who goes on Tucker Carlson and says, you know, Churchill was the true villain of World War II.
[02:07:00.960 --> 02:07:08.160] And of course, so you have there two sides, they're politically opposed, but they're reaching the same conclusion.
[02:07:08.160 --> 02:07:11.920] There's a lot of discourse at the moment in right-wing circles, and I've seen a lot of it online.
[02:07:11.920 --> 02:07:14.640] A lot of anti-Semitism, very much on the rise.
[02:07:14.640 --> 02:07:19.200] And I'm seeing it, and of course, that's where the far left and the far right completely agree.
[02:07:20.320 --> 02:07:29.120] We're seeing a lot of that, but also this idea of revising history, revising truth, saying that maybe it would have been better if Hitler would have won the Second World War.
[02:07:29.120 --> 02:07:30.800] And some people are saying that very seriously.
[02:07:31.040 --> 02:07:35.600] You know, some of it is that sort of shit posting, let's just be as offensive as possible.
[02:07:35.600 --> 02:07:38.640] The opposite of virtue signaling now is vice signaling.
[02:07:38.640 --> 02:07:41.360] Let's say the meanest, most shocking thing possible.
[02:07:41.360 --> 02:07:49.600] So there's a lot of that, you know, epitomized when Kanye West put up that image of Hitler with the goat emoji, greatest of all time, right?
[02:07:49.600 --> 02:07:50.080] Stuff like that.
[02:07:50.080 --> 02:07:54.800] So there's all of that kind of muddy, uncertain discourse going on.
[02:07:54.800 --> 02:08:12.200] But there are people genuinely who believe that if you look back at where we are now, if you look at where we are now with wokeness, if you look at the drag queens at the Paris Olympics, that ceremony, that pastiche of the Last Supper, remember Darrell Cooper put a photo of that up alongside a photo of Hitler entering Paris.
[02:08:13.560 --> 02:08:14.920] He prefers the Hitler, right?
[02:08:14.920 --> 02:08:19.560] Now I don't know to what extent that was a satirical point or whatever, or whether he was joking.
[02:08:19.560 --> 02:08:22.040] A lot of people say he wasn't.
[02:08:22.040 --> 02:08:42.920] But the point is, there are a lot of people reaching that conclusion that the degeneracy, which is the word they use, which is also the word that the Nazis used, the degeneracy of modern society with the LGBTQIA plus fetish parades, with the drag queen story hour, with all of the kind of things that we're seeing, such as the drag queens in that church in Dallas that I mentioned.
[02:08:43.080 --> 02:08:50.440] You know, all of this kind of stuff is evidence that Western degeneracy cannot be repaired.
[02:08:50.440 --> 02:08:51.720] It's irreparable.
[02:08:51.720 --> 02:08:58.120] And that actually maybe it would have been better if the Third Reich had won because the West is irredeemable, unregenerable.
[02:08:58.120 --> 02:09:00.920] Now, and that's sort of the argument of the woke left, isn't it?
[02:09:00.920 --> 02:09:06.120] That the West is singularly evil and unregenerable and needs to be dismantled.
[02:09:06.360 --> 02:09:09.000] So the woke left, woke right thing.
[02:09:09.000 --> 02:09:12.760] I know people get very upset by this, but that's a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it?
[02:09:12.760 --> 02:09:16.040] I mean, the similarities are kind of incontestable, aren't they?
[02:09:16.840 --> 02:09:31.640] Yeah, I encountered some of this when I was writing my book on the Holocaust deniers, of people like Pat Buchanan and others on the right who thought, yeah, Hitler was bad, but you know, not all of his ideas were bad.
[02:09:31.640 --> 02:09:34.040] And, you know, he did fight against the communists.
[02:09:34.040 --> 02:09:43.720] And then I encountered the historia strike in the 1980s in Germany, where German historians were trying to parse out the good parts from the bad parts and all that.
[02:09:43.720 --> 02:09:51.520] And so you take some legitimate debates among historians, and then you, and then you just run with it, and you end up like a Darrell Cooper.
[02:09:51.520 --> 02:09:52.320] Yeah, same thing.
[02:09:52.320 --> 02:09:55.840] Is that that co-channeling David Irving, if you don't mind my interrupting there?
[02:09:55.840 --> 02:09:58.560] Because that's stuff he's been doing.
[02:09:59.520 --> 02:09:59.840] Yeah.
[02:09:59.840 --> 02:10:01.680] But the David Irving case is another, yeah, exactly.
[02:10:01.680 --> 02:10:03.680] And the best, again, well, I'll be David Irving.
[02:10:03.680 --> 02:10:05.360] I mean, they put him in prison in Austria, didn't they?
[02:10:05.360 --> 02:10:06.560] For a Holocaust.
[02:10:06.640 --> 02:10:08.960] They're just showing up at the airport.
[02:10:09.280 --> 02:10:10.240] Such a bad move.
[02:10:10.240 --> 02:10:16.240] And again, it's this thing of it's the same reason I say all these people wanting to censor Kanye West's Harl Hitler song.
[02:10:16.240 --> 02:10:18.240] You're getting this 100% wrong, right?
[02:10:18.400 --> 02:10:30.000] You know, and when you lock people up for Holocaust denial for being wrong about history, you grant them a martyrdom they don't deserve, and you imply that maybe they've got a point because people's instincts are like, well, why are you trying to silence that person?
[02:10:30.000 --> 02:10:31.360] Maybe there's something to it.
[02:10:31.360 --> 02:10:32.480] It's such a disaster.
[02:10:32.480 --> 02:10:40.400] The best response was Richard Evans, the historian, Richard Evans, taking his position apart through historical knowledge.
[02:10:40.400 --> 02:10:49.040] There's a reason, by the way, that Daryl Cooper refuses to debate Andrew Roberts, the foremost historian of Winston Churchill.
[02:10:49.040 --> 02:10:50.480] I think he's even admitted it.
[02:10:50.480 --> 02:10:54.000] But, you know, because Darrell Cooper doesn't claim to be a historian.
[02:10:54.160 --> 02:10:56.960] I know Tucker Carson introduced him as a historian.
[02:10:56.960 --> 02:11:00.240] And he knows that he knows nothing compared to what Andrew Roberts knows.
[02:11:00.560 --> 02:11:03.680] He knows that that can't be sustained in a debate.
[02:11:03.680 --> 02:11:05.680] Well, fair play for him for admitting that, right?
[02:11:05.680 --> 02:11:14.160] But, you know, but we're dealing here with false narratives about history, which is exactly what the woke have been peddling with the 1619 project and all sorts of things.
[02:11:14.480 --> 02:11:20.320] Well, I went to several of these talks by David Irving when I was tracking the Institute for Historical Review.
[02:11:20.320 --> 02:11:21.520] They're in Southern California here.
[02:11:21.520 --> 02:11:26.200] So they would bring him in to give his talks periodically at these, you know, tiny little hotel rooms.
[02:11:26.200 --> 02:11:28.960] Not that many, a couple dozen people, maybe 50 people.
[02:11:28.960 --> 02:11:30.600] But he played that up.
[02:11:30.600 --> 02:11:32.440] Like, you know, they arrested me.
[02:11:32.440 --> 02:11:33.960] And you know why they arrested me?
[02:11:33.960 --> 02:11:35.240] Because I'm onto them.
[02:11:29.840 --> 02:11:36.120] I know what's going on.
[02:11:36.440 --> 02:11:38.600] And he was well received for that.
[02:11:38.600 --> 02:11:39.320] Of course.
[02:11:39.320 --> 02:11:40.120] Proves my point.
[02:11:40.120 --> 02:11:41.480] That's exactly what I'm saying.
[02:11:42.120 --> 02:11:42.760] Such a design.
[02:11:42.840 --> 02:11:43.960] We had a similar case in this country.
[02:11:43.960 --> 02:11:47.160] There's a woman who wrote what she called were satirical songs.
[02:11:47.160 --> 02:11:51.320] A woman called Alison Chablos went to prison, I think, more than once.
[02:11:51.720 --> 02:11:53.960] And she denied the Holocaust.
[02:11:53.960 --> 02:11:57.480] She denied that the gas chambers existed, all sorts of things like this.
[02:11:57.480 --> 02:11:59.400] And such a bad idea.
[02:11:59.400 --> 02:11:59.880] Why?
[02:11:59.880 --> 02:12:01.240] Like, she is in time.
[02:12:01.240 --> 02:12:07.240] I can't stand what she was saying, but I think the principle of free speech is more important.
[02:12:07.240 --> 02:12:09.880] And I think she should never have been in prison.
[02:12:09.880 --> 02:12:13.080] But when I say that, people, of course, say, oh, well, you're supporting Holocaust.
[02:12:13.160 --> 02:12:16.680] No, I'm supporting the principle of free speech, which goes way above anything else that's right.
[02:12:17.000 --> 02:12:22.760] I actually wrote a letter to the judge in Irving's case in Austria saying, You should, I've debunked this guy.
[02:12:22.760 --> 02:12:26.040] I completely disagree with him, but you should let him out.
[02:12:26.040 --> 02:12:26.760] You know, I know.
[02:12:27.400 --> 02:12:28.600] And I hate that argument.
[02:12:29.720 --> 02:12:31.080] And these audiences he has.
[02:12:31.080 --> 02:12:32.520] There's like, you know, two dozen people.
[02:12:32.520 --> 02:12:35.640] I mean, he's not like he's filling the O arena or something.
[02:12:35.880 --> 02:12:37.720] Well, his popularity went up a hell of a lot after being.
[02:12:37.880 --> 02:12:38.600] Yes, I know.
[02:12:38.600 --> 02:12:39.240] Right.
[02:12:39.880 --> 02:12:41.160] Yeah, that's crazy.
[02:12:41.160 --> 02:12:41.480] All right.
[02:12:41.480 --> 02:12:43.640] One last thing I'm going to read here on the deep state.
[02:12:43.640 --> 02:12:48.680] I just want to get your comments because somebody was asking Trump yesterday, all right, you're in there now.
[02:12:48.680 --> 02:12:51.240] So tell us what's really going on behind the scenes.
[02:12:51.240 --> 02:12:52.280] Here's what you write.
[02:12:52.280 --> 02:12:57.400] In discussions around the demise of woke, one often hears references to the deep state.
[02:12:57.400 --> 02:13:10.840] It sounds like the most conspiratorial of phrases, evoking images of mass men in wine red cloaks, blazing torches in hand, gathered around a large pentagram chalked onto the floor of a subterranean crypt.
[02:13:10.840 --> 02:13:16.000] Perhaps they have secret handshakes or coded expressions to signify allyship.
[02:13:14.600 --> 02:13:21.280] It's probable that they sacrifice adolescent wombats to appease the spirits of the sticks.
[02:13:21.920 --> 02:13:23.200] That is such great writing.
[02:13:23.200 --> 02:13:24.640] And you go on and on about that.
[02:13:24.640 --> 02:13:27.680] Is there such a thing as a deep state or something like that?
[02:13:27.680 --> 02:13:33.360] And back to your woke stuff, could Trump actually do something about this, you know, from the top?
[02:13:33.680 --> 02:13:34.080] There is.
[02:13:34.080 --> 02:13:35.680] I mean, I'm having fun with the imagery there.
[02:13:37.120 --> 02:13:38.720] The absurdity of this.
[02:13:38.720 --> 02:13:46.160] A lot of the conspiratorial theories and thinking is going really, really nuts, you know, and really extreme.
[02:13:46.160 --> 02:13:50.080] But that phrase deep state, as I understand it, actually makes a lot of sense.
[02:13:50.080 --> 02:14:08.160] Insofar as take the UK, we have a civil service, the machinery of government, and whistleblowers have said that members of the civil service routinely try and obfuscate and obviate the instructions from the elected government because they see it as their role to promote social justice irrespective of what's coming from above.
[02:14:08.160 --> 02:14:09.920] And you can't vote those people out.
[02:14:10.480 --> 02:14:13.040] So that is a kind of deep state, right?
[02:14:13.040 --> 02:14:22.240] The example I give in the book, which was exposed by the Daily Wire, of the female workers who, the supervisor who said, if you see a Trump sign outside of a house during the hurricane, don't offer support.
[02:14:22.240 --> 02:14:24.080] Well, that's not coming from above, is it?
[02:14:24.080 --> 02:14:33.440] So that's there is a low-level middle management ideologues, activists who are going to pursue their goal irrespective of what the elected government thinks.
[02:14:33.440 --> 02:14:41.120] In our country, we've got the College of Policing, who are training police in England and Wales to investigate non-crime explicitly.
[02:14:41.120 --> 02:14:43.440] They're called non-crime hate incidents.
[02:14:43.440 --> 02:14:49.360] In our country, we have 12,000 people arrested a year, arrested a year for offensive speech.
[02:14:49.360 --> 02:14:51.200] Not just investigated, arrested.
[02:14:51.200 --> 02:14:53.600] So we are, that's 30 a day.
[02:14:53.600 --> 02:15:02.760] We are, that's all because of the College of Policing, which is now an activist body who ignores instructions from the Home Office to stop recording non-crime.
[02:14:59.760 --> 02:15:06.040] The Home Office said twice, two different Home Secretaries said it.
[02:15:06.360 --> 02:15:08.760] The High Court said to them, you can't do this.
[02:15:08.760 --> 02:15:09.720] You've got to stop doing this.
[02:15:09.720 --> 02:15:11.240] They ignored the High Court.
[02:15:11.240 --> 02:15:13.480] Activists do whatever the hell they want.
[02:15:13.480 --> 02:15:15.320] And that's deep state.
[02:15:15.320 --> 02:15:16.600] That's what I mean by deep state.
[02:15:16.840 --> 02:15:24.440] What I mean is activists embedded in quangos who will work against what the elected representatives do, right?
[02:15:24.440 --> 02:15:29.480] This is why I have nervousness about unelected judges overturning what the president says as well.
[02:15:29.480 --> 02:15:37.480] Now, there's a case, of course, that you know, when it comes to the tariffs, for instance, maybe constitutionally it is the case that Congress has to be the ones to authorize that kind of thing.
[02:15:37.480 --> 02:15:40.200] And I'm not qualified in any way to talk about that.
[02:15:40.200 --> 02:15:41.960] But what I would say is I'm nervous.
[02:15:41.960 --> 02:15:48.920] I'm nervous about judges, even in our country with the Supreme Court, overturning what the government is, because we've elected the government.
[02:15:48.920 --> 02:15:56.120] I mean, when it comes to the tariffs, you can't say that Trump didn't explicitly say what he was going to do throughout his campaign.
[02:15:56.120 --> 02:15:58.920] And he won the popular vote and the Senate and the House.
[02:15:58.920 --> 02:16:02.760] He has a huge public mandate to do the things he's doing.
[02:16:02.760 --> 02:16:06.120] So I'm very nervous about anyone trying to thwart that who isn't elected.
[02:16:06.120 --> 02:16:07.240] Let's just put it that way.
[02:16:07.240 --> 02:16:07.800] Yeah.
[02:16:08.120 --> 02:16:08.680] Wow.
[02:16:08.680 --> 02:16:10.040] Andrew, too much.
[02:16:10.040 --> 02:16:12.360] That's almost two and a half hours.
[02:16:12.360 --> 02:16:13.320] Well done.
[02:16:13.320 --> 02:16:14.680] I could listen to you all day.
[02:16:14.680 --> 02:16:18.680] We're approaching almost a Joe Rogan length.
[02:16:19.000 --> 02:16:19.560] Almost.
[02:16:19.560 --> 02:16:23.880] But you know, there's a lot of stuff because, as you know, in my book, I cover a lot of stuff.
[02:16:23.960 --> 02:16:24.360] You do.
[02:16:24.360 --> 02:16:25.560] There's a lot in there.
[02:16:25.960 --> 02:16:30.680] It's really a political tract on liberalism and all that.
[02:16:30.680 --> 02:16:32.200] It's just so important.
[02:16:32.520 --> 02:16:35.880] Well, I mean, we've lost the thread in so many areas.
[02:16:35.880 --> 02:16:38.200] I mean, you want to know why Trump got elected?
[02:16:38.200 --> 02:16:41.400] That's why, because the other side lost their minds.
[02:16:41.400 --> 02:16:42.200] Yeah, absolutely.
[02:16:42.200 --> 02:16:53.520] And, you know, and you're one of the first Americans to read it, of course, because it's not out in physical copy in America for many, many months, but it is out in Kindle and on Audible with my stupid voice reading it.
[02:16:53.520 --> 02:16:58.320] But, you know, so you're one of the few to have read it over the Atlantic so well.
[02:16:58.480 --> 02:17:08.480] I mean, if you're getting your defense of free speech from, you know, Sean Hannity on Fox News or defense of women, you know, from Ducker Carlson or from Trump, wow.
[02:17:08.480 --> 02:17:09.120] Okay.
[02:17:09.440 --> 02:17:11.280] Liberals, really?
[02:17:11.280 --> 02:17:12.320] You're going to let this go?
[02:17:12.320 --> 02:17:14.160] You're going to drop this one?
[02:17:14.480 --> 02:17:14.880] Yeah.
[02:17:15.200 --> 02:17:16.080] Well, that's it.
[02:17:16.080 --> 02:17:21.680] I mean, that's why, you know, I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you about these things because I think it's so important.
[02:17:21.680 --> 02:17:22.480] Oh, totally.
[02:17:22.480 --> 02:17:23.360] All right, Andrew.
[02:17:23.360 --> 02:17:25.440] We'll see you next time in New York or wherever.
[02:17:26.080 --> 02:17:28.160] I'll see you next week in the UK.
[02:17:28.160 --> 02:17:28.800] Fantastic.
[02:17:28.800 --> 02:17:30.160] Look forward to it.

Prompt 10: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 11: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 12: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

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[00:01:05.280 --> 00:01:11.040] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:18.080 --> 00:01:20.720] All right, everybody, it's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:20.720 --> 00:01:21.280] Guess what?
[00:01:21.280 --> 00:01:24.080] I have a special returning champion guest here.
[00:01:24.320 --> 00:01:25.440] He is Andrew Doyle.
[00:01:25.440 --> 00:01:32.080] He was on maybe two years ago, I think it was for the New Puritans, right?
[00:01:32.080 --> 00:01:34.640] Well, let me, Andrew, give you a proper introduction here.
[00:01:34.640 --> 00:01:45.280] He's a writer, satirist, and political commentator who regularly appears on television to discuss current events and affairs, and he's a panelist on the BBC's moral maze.
[00:01:45.280 --> 00:01:53.840] He's written for a number of publications, including The Telegraph, Sun, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Standpoint, Spectator, and Sunday Times.
[00:01:53.840 --> 00:02:08.840] He's the creator of the satirical character Titania McGrath, one of my favorites, under whose name he has written two books, Woke, A Guide to Social Justice, and My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism, both published by Little Brown.
[00:02:08.840 --> 00:02:13.160] Titania McGrath has over a half a million followers on Twitter, now ex.
[00:02:13.160 --> 00:02:22.440] Formerly, he is a visiting research fellow at Queen's University Belfast and a lecturer at Oxford, University where he earned his doctorate in Renaissance literature.
[00:02:22.440 --> 00:02:33.800] His previous books include Free Speech and Why It Matters, The New Puritans, for which he was on this show before, How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and his new book, Here It Is.
[00:02:33.880 --> 00:02:35.160] I have it in audio.
[00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:36.600] I don't have the print version, Andrew.
[00:02:36.600 --> 00:02:37.640] I have the audio version.
[00:02:37.640 --> 00:02:38.440] Here it is.
[00:02:38.440 --> 00:02:39.320] I've been listening to you.
[00:02:39.320 --> 00:02:41.880] You've been in my head for the last three days.
[00:02:42.200 --> 00:02:49.080] The end of Woke, How the Culture Wars Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter Revolution.
[00:02:49.080 --> 00:02:50.680] Here you are at 1.2 speed.
[00:02:52.440 --> 00:02:54.120] This is about Serzetson.
[00:02:54.120 --> 00:02:56.600] The stars and techniques of psychology.
[00:02:56.600 --> 00:03:03.320] I love it when authors read their own books because I like to hear your voice in my head getting your words directly.
[00:03:03.320 --> 00:03:04.360] Nice to see you.
[00:03:04.360 --> 00:03:05.240] Nice to see you too.
[00:03:05.240 --> 00:03:14.040] I think I sound better when you speed me up because for the audio books, you have to speak artificially slowly and it's very, very laborious.
[00:03:14.280 --> 00:03:19.320] And I actually only sound like myself if you play me back on 1.5 speed.
[00:03:19.320 --> 00:03:22.520] So I'm quite cool for playing it on a fast version.
[00:03:22.840 --> 00:03:26.520] So is this something of a sequel, would you say, to The New Puritans?
[00:03:26.520 --> 00:03:27.240] Like, what's that?
[00:03:27.400 --> 00:03:33.000] I'm kind of, insofar as when I wrote The New Puritans, I had anticipated that that would be my final word on the culture war.
[00:03:33.000 --> 00:03:34.920] I'll never have to talk about this again.
[00:03:35.240 --> 00:03:36.600] But then so much happened.
[00:03:36.600 --> 00:03:37.720] That was in 2022.
[00:03:37.720 --> 00:03:42.920] And by the time we get to 2025, there are all these seismic shifts taking place in the culture war.
[00:03:42.920 --> 00:03:45.000] Everything seemed to have changed.
[00:03:45.200 --> 00:03:47.040] And I knew that I had to write something else.
[00:03:47.040 --> 00:03:51.440] And my initial thought was to maybe write a republished The New Puritans with a new introduction.
[00:03:51.600 --> 00:03:57.200] And then I realized the extent of what has gone on in these three years has completely changed the landscape.
[00:03:57.200 --> 00:04:04.480] And so it would require a whole book of itself and, you know, turn out to be a longer book than The New Puritans because so much has happened.
[00:04:04.720 --> 00:04:06.480] It's such a great piece of writing.
[00:04:06.480 --> 00:04:07.920] You're such a good writer, too.
[00:04:07.920 --> 00:04:14.880] Not just a speaker, but I read, what, 100 books a year for this podcast, two a week.
[00:04:14.880 --> 00:04:18.880] And you're just really one of the best writers, like Hitch.
[00:04:18.880 --> 00:04:20.080] Better than Hitch, maybe.
[00:04:21.920 --> 00:04:23.840] Oh, yeah, no, I mean, it really makes a difference.
[00:04:23.840 --> 00:04:26.240] I think it's that classical training you've had.
[00:04:26.480 --> 00:04:32.880] And also, you write for magazines, so you have to be clear and entertaining and interesting.
[00:04:32.880 --> 00:04:45.280] Yes, I mean, I absolutely wouldn't put myself in the same bracket as Christopher Hitchens, but I would say that, you know, clarity is, I mean, we're dealing with very complicated areas that ultimately tend to fall into jargon.
[00:04:45.280 --> 00:04:49.520] And of course, the activists use the jargon as a kind of weapon.
[00:04:49.520 --> 00:04:51.360] And so I absolutely want to avoid that.
[00:04:51.680 --> 00:04:55.680] So I try to write with clarity without talking down, without dumbing down.
[00:04:56.240 --> 00:04:58.560] That's the balance I'm trying to achieve.
[00:04:58.560 --> 00:04:59.520] Well, you did it.
[00:04:59.520 --> 00:04:59.920] All right.
[00:04:59.920 --> 00:05:01.120] What is woke?
[00:05:01.120 --> 00:05:03.040] And is it really over?
[00:05:03.360 --> 00:05:04.560] Are we approaching it?
[00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:08.160] There's all this definitional quagmire of what woke is and what it isn't.
[00:05:08.160 --> 00:05:12.560] And every study into this tells us that no one seems to have an agreed definition.
[00:05:12.560 --> 00:05:32.040] In the last book, in The New Puritans, I spent a chapter going through the evolution of the word woke and sort of talking about where it's come from, how the meaning has changed, its origins in African-American vernacular, going right back to 1938 to Lead Belly's recording of Scottsburg Boys, which is a protest song where he uses the phrase stay woke.
[00:05:32.360 --> 00:05:41.640] And then, you know, you can go into the 70s, there's a play by Barry Beckham, I think it is, who wrote a play about the black nationalist Marcus Garvey, in which the character says, I'm going to stay woke.
[00:05:41.640 --> 00:05:51.560] And so, this is how the word woke, it simply at that point meant being alert to injustice, especially racism, and was specifically used by the black community.
[00:05:51.560 --> 00:05:57.000] And then it has a kind of dies away, and then it has a kind of resurgence in 2008.
[00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:01.480] Erica Badu records a song called Master Teacher, Stay Woke.
[00:06:01.480 --> 00:06:11.080] And it becomes embraced by the Black Lives Matter movement in the early 2010s, repopularized in terms of that initial definition of being alert to racism.
[00:06:11.080 --> 00:06:12.920] Then it gets hijacked around 2015.
[00:06:12.920 --> 00:06:19.240] And it's really interesting because the new culture war sort of kicked off in the early 2010s, 2012, 2013 is the date.
[00:06:19.240 --> 00:06:27.480] And it's a new variation on the old school political correctness of the late 1980s, early 1990s with an added authoritarian twist.
[00:06:27.480 --> 00:06:40.520] In other words, this was no longer people grappling with the social contract, seeking to have it renegotiated so that we don't generally tolerate everyday racism, sexism, homophobia, whatever it might be.
[00:06:40.760 --> 00:06:47.880] And whereas that was a kind of messy, the political correctness movement in the 80s and 90s was a kind of messy negotiation that often went too far.
[00:06:47.880 --> 00:06:49.800] Things often went wrong.
[00:06:49.800 --> 00:07:10.040] But it didn't have that extreme authoritarianism of the woke activists of the mid-2010s, who actually wanted to weaponize the law to see people arrested if they didn't speak in the way they wanted them to speak, who actually would physically assault people as well as ruin their lives through a retributive system that we call cancel culture, which they simply called accountability.
[00:07:10.040 --> 00:07:16.960] But what it was was, of course, an extreme overreaction to innocuous slights or failure to conform to their dikts.
[00:07:17.280 --> 00:07:22.560] And it would involve contacting employers, attempting to see people fired, dragging people's names through the mud.
[00:07:22.800 --> 00:07:23.600] I mean, it was bullying.
[00:07:23.600 --> 00:07:27.120] It was bullying writ large on a grand scale.
[00:07:27.360 --> 00:07:29.120] It was essentially authoritarian.
[00:07:29.120 --> 00:07:30.400] They're pro-censorship.
[00:07:30.400 --> 00:07:34.720] They were calling on big center, big tech to censor opinions that they didn't agree with.
[00:07:34.720 --> 00:07:36.320] And of course, a lot of platforms went along with it.
[00:07:36.320 --> 00:07:45.280] We saw in 2015 Jack Dorsey, who was then the CEO of the pre-Musk Twitter, on stage at the Recode conference with a t-shirt that said stay woke.
[00:07:45.280 --> 00:07:50.000] It's very interesting that when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I remember he put out a photograph.
[00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:51.280] He'd been raiding through the cupboards.
[00:07:51.280 --> 00:07:57.920] There was a cupboard full of these stay woke t-shirts so that members of staff at Twitter could advertise their political credentials.
[00:07:57.920 --> 00:08:05.520] So it was very much a term that became hijacked by authoritarians, authoritarians who were obsessed with group identity, not just race.
[00:08:05.520 --> 00:08:06.960] Then it became intersectional.
[00:08:06.960 --> 00:08:18.160] Then it became about sexual orientation, gender identity, whatever that means, sex and race, and all of that, and not class, you know, very class tended to be sort of sidelined in the intersectional dogma.
[00:08:18.160 --> 00:08:21.040] Not amongst all, but amongst the vast majority.
[00:08:21.040 --> 00:08:30.160] So this was generally speaking, an upper middle class bourgeois movement that hijacked the notion of what it means to be woke.
[00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:52.720] And so the term then became synonymous with bullying, authoritarianism, censorship, and an illiberal, regressive movement that wanted to divide us all according to group identity rather than unite us all in the tradition of Martin Luther King and the civil rights luminaries of the 1960s, while at the same time claiming the mantle of those very civil rights luminaries, even though they were effectively their antithesis.
[00:08:52.720 --> 00:08:54.960] So that's how the word evolved.
[00:08:54.960 --> 00:09:02.600] And that's really now it's become a shorthand for that kind of censorial, bullying, identity-obsessed monomania.
[00:09:02.920 --> 00:09:17.480] And the one that has seized power in all levels of government, public policy, major institutions, the arts, the media, the army, the police, hospitals, doctors, academia, schools, you name it, they've seized power.
[00:09:17.480 --> 00:09:35.640] Even though, as I point out in the book, the studies into this by the More in Common Initiative show that the woke movement was only ever supported by around 8% of the population of the USA and the UK, even at its height, even at its peak, which means it was a top-down, like I say, middle-class corporate capitalist engine.
[00:09:35.640 --> 00:09:39.720] I mean, this is the DEI industry is worth $9 billion a year.
[00:09:40.520 --> 00:09:41.640] These are money makers, right?
[00:09:41.640 --> 00:09:43.320] These are powerful people.
[00:09:43.320 --> 00:09:48.200] And they were imposing this on a population that didn't want it at any time in any generation.
[00:09:48.200 --> 00:09:49.320] Isn't that interesting?
[00:09:49.320 --> 00:09:53.000] And yet it just got pushed onto us by the elites.
[00:09:53.000 --> 00:09:59.560] And that's what woke, it came to be a shorthand because you needed a shorthand for this very complex, sprawling thing.
[00:09:59.560 --> 00:10:04.840] In my book, in the end of Woke, I try to define woke in one sentence.
[00:10:04.840 --> 00:10:14.920] And the sentence that I use is: a cultural revolution that seeks equity according to group identity by authoritarian means.
[00:10:15.400 --> 00:10:17.320] That, I think, just sums it up.
[00:10:17.640 --> 00:10:22.440] Similar to the definition of racism, which is prejudice plus power.
[00:10:22.440 --> 00:10:24.200] It's that power part, right?
[00:10:24.520 --> 00:10:29.880] Well, that's a redefinition of what racism actually means, which is hatred or prejudice on the basis of race.
[00:10:29.880 --> 00:10:31.640] Yeah, that's capital Hindi.
[00:10:32.200 --> 00:10:32.920] Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:33.000 --> 00:10:44.600] They had to introduce it, making an equation, making it about power structures, because the woke were always these people who claimed to have some kind of divine capability to detect invisible power structures.
[00:10:44.800 --> 00:10:53.200] I mean, this is why Robin D'Angelo, as you all know, in White Fragility, makes the case that really racism is worse today than it was in the era of Jim Crow.
[00:10:53.200 --> 00:10:59.120] Because in Jim Crow, the systems of racism were explicit, and now they've kind of been subsumed and made invisible.
[00:10:59.120 --> 00:11:00.560] which is really convenient, isn't it?
[00:11:00.560 --> 00:11:05.280] Because it means that if there's no evidence of racism, they can take that as evidence of racism.
[00:11:05.920 --> 00:11:07.200] It kind of reminds me of that.
[00:11:07.200 --> 00:11:11.200] I saw a documentary once called The Power of Nightmares about al-Qaeda.
[00:11:11.200 --> 00:11:15.680] And there was a moment where a former employee at the CIA was interviewed.
[00:11:15.680 --> 00:11:24.560] And this individual said that they were looking for evidence of Russian submarines during the Cold War, submarines that they could not find.
[00:11:24.880 --> 00:11:26.080] They could not find in their scans.
[00:11:26.080 --> 00:11:34.080] And they said the fact that they could not detect them was proof that the Russians had developed a cloaking technology that prevented you from detecting the submarines.
[00:11:34.080 --> 00:11:37.600] In other words, the absence of evidence was taken as evidence.
[00:11:38.160 --> 00:11:39.600] I think the woke do exactly the same.
[00:11:40.160 --> 00:11:41.520] Like the witch trials.
[00:11:41.520 --> 00:11:42.320] Exactly.
[00:11:42.480 --> 00:11:45.600] Denying you're a witch, that's evidence you're a witch.
[00:11:45.600 --> 00:11:56.080] Which we saw also in the 90s with the recovered memory movement, you know, accusing parents and grandparents or whatever of sexually molesting these now adult women when they were children.
[00:11:56.080 --> 00:11:58.320] And of course, the father or grandfather denies it.
[00:11:58.320 --> 00:12:01.840] Well, denial is exactly what pedophiles do.
[00:12:01.840 --> 00:12:02.800] Isn't that so chilling?
[00:12:02.800 --> 00:12:03.920] I mean, that's a really good example.
[00:12:03.920 --> 00:12:19.360] That's a really good precursor because we saw with the satanic abuse panic of the 1980s, families ruined, you know, social workers taking kids away from their parents, psychotherapists who should have known better, really unscrupulous people, say teasing out false memories.
[00:12:19.360 --> 00:12:32.760] You know, there was that famous book, The Courage to Heal, which contained an astonishing sentence, which was, I'm paraphrasing here, but it was something along the lines of, if you think something might have happened to you, it probably did, even if you can't remember it.
[00:12:32.760 --> 00:12:39.800] And it was so, it was so tragic, you know, and all of these things were propelled, I think, because they were often kernels of truth.
[00:12:39.800 --> 00:12:49.080] So, you know, every now, a good example is: I don't know if you've seen the film Capturing the Friedmans, which is a story about a sexual abuse panic, an American family.
[00:12:49.080 --> 00:12:59.480] It is a documentary and it's absolutely fascinating because one of the brothers in the family had become one of the most famous clowns in New York amongst children's parties.
[00:12:59.480 --> 00:13:04.840] And the filmmaker wanted to make a film about him and about clowns and about what it's like to be a clown.
[00:13:04.840 --> 00:13:18.680] And he uncovered this incredibly dark, famous story of sexual abuse within the family, where the father and another brother were sent to prison for decades for mass sexual abuse, much of which probably didn't happen.
[00:13:18.680 --> 00:13:23.320] And it's really interesting because they interview some of the people who say that it happened.
[00:13:23.320 --> 00:13:29.400] And you can see when they're describing the events that took place in this basement at this computer club, it couldn't have happened.
[00:13:29.640 --> 00:13:38.760] And you even have interviews with the police officer saying, you know, we raided the house and there were pornographic magazines, child porn everywhere stacked up.
[00:13:38.760 --> 00:13:43.000] And then the filmmakers show you the photographs from the police raid and they're not there.
[00:13:43.160 --> 00:13:45.640] But the police invented it in their head.
[00:13:45.640 --> 00:13:53.640] Now, the reason that happened is because the father was, had paedophilic tendencies and had been ordering those kinds of magazines.
[00:13:53.640 --> 00:13:56.120] And then that led to a kernel of truth.
[00:13:56.120 --> 00:13:59.880] And so the police would interview these kids and say, we know this happened to you.
[00:13:59.880 --> 00:14:01.560] You may as well admit it.
[00:14:01.560 --> 00:14:05.080] And they would kind of implant these false memories into the kids.
[00:14:05.080 --> 00:14:08.600] It's a really fascinating and disturbing thing to watch.
[00:14:08.600 --> 00:14:16.560] And I think that's what's happened with the woke movement as well, insofar as there are kernels of truth, insofar as racism does exist.
[00:14:16.800 --> 00:14:20.400] There are figures who are racist within various institutions.
[00:14:20.400 --> 00:14:25.760] And once you find evidence of that, then all of a sudden you see it everywhere.
[00:14:25.760 --> 00:14:27.440] And things get exacerbated.
[00:14:27.440 --> 00:14:34.480] And I think that's largely what happened in this case, which is how a lot of hysteria begins.
[00:14:34.480 --> 00:14:39.200] I mean, in my last book, I talk about Salem and I talk about the witch hunts.
[00:14:39.200 --> 00:14:51.680] And, you know, well, I mean, Tichuba, who was the servant in the house of the Paris, the Reverend Paris, was doing faux voodoo games with the kids.
[00:14:51.680 --> 00:14:54.240] But I mean, from their perspective, it was just games.
[00:14:54.880 --> 00:14:59.120] But, you know, they took that and everything else amplified out of that, I think.
[00:14:59.120 --> 00:14:59.760] It's very interesting.
[00:14:59.760 --> 00:15:00.960] Helen Pluckrose talks about this.
[00:15:01.120 --> 00:15:10.000] You know, the number one reason why women were arrested and prosecuted as witches during the medieval period, the number one reason is because they said they were witches.
[00:15:10.240 --> 00:15:10.640] Right.
[00:15:10.640 --> 00:15:12.080] Now, it's very interesting.
[00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:15.600] They claimed to be dabbling in witchcraft.
[00:15:15.600 --> 00:15:21.120] So I just think, as with all hysteria, something happens, something small, which you can point to.
[00:15:21.120 --> 00:15:23.840] And then all of the logical fallacies follow from that.
[00:15:23.840 --> 00:15:29.760] You start off with a false premise, which might be built on something, not very substantial, maybe, but there's something.
[00:15:29.760 --> 00:15:31.280] And then it explodes.
[00:15:31.280 --> 00:15:35.600] And, you know, with Black Lives Matter, no one wants to disagree with that statement.
[00:15:35.600 --> 00:15:36.240] Everyone agrees.
[00:15:37.520 --> 00:15:39.600] So you're saying Black Lives Don't Matter?
[00:15:40.160 --> 00:15:40.560] What?
[00:15:41.040 --> 00:15:42.880] No decent person would disagree with that.
[00:15:42.880 --> 00:15:47.840] And so it was a kind of so, you know, they were onto something insofar as racism still persists.
[00:15:47.840 --> 00:15:53.200] The critical race theorists were onto something when they said, How is it that racism still persists in our society?
[00:15:53.200 --> 00:15:54.480] Yeah, fair enough.
[00:15:54.480 --> 00:16:00.840] But then you had these high priests of this new religion coming along and detecting it everywhere, seeing the demons in the shadows.
[00:16:00.840 --> 00:16:03.480] And it's, you know, I mean, I made this point in my last book.
[00:15:59.840 --> 00:16:06.280] It is obviously a pseudo-religious movement.
[00:16:06.360 --> 00:16:14.760] And but I think in the end of woke in this book, I'm trying to point to all of the signs that that is woke as we knew it is dying off.
[00:16:14.760 --> 00:16:15.960] It's fading away.
[00:16:15.960 --> 00:16:19.240] Too many, it's had too many shocks to its system.
[00:16:19.240 --> 00:16:21.160] Too many things have changed.
[00:16:21.160 --> 00:16:22.440] But it might re-emerge.
[00:16:22.440 --> 00:16:27.800] I mean, the fundamental case I make in the book, as you know, is that wokeness was never liberal.
[00:16:27.800 --> 00:16:29.880] It was always misapprehended as a liberal movement.
[00:16:29.880 --> 00:16:32.680] It is actually a failure of liberalism.
[00:16:32.680 --> 00:16:35.960] That's where woke comes from, that failure to apply liberal values.
[00:16:35.960 --> 00:16:40.040] And I know that's slightly complicated by the fact that Americans don't use the word liberal properly.
[00:16:40.040 --> 00:16:42.520] And they use it as a synonym for left wing.
[00:16:42.840 --> 00:16:43.880] And that's not what it means.
[00:16:44.280 --> 00:16:47.720] So that causes all sorts of confusion, I think.
[00:16:47.720 --> 00:16:56.200] Now, is the word woke become pejorative for somebody on the right to accuse somebody on the left of being crazy woke or something like that?
[00:16:56.200 --> 00:17:05.080] I notice when I post on X, oh, these woke people at Harvard or whatever, I'm accused of, you know, they'll use that word because that's now a slanderous word.
[00:17:05.080 --> 00:17:06.280] It's like, oh, okay.
[00:17:06.520 --> 00:17:08.680] Yeah, it's not.
[00:17:09.000 --> 00:17:15.800] Yeah, I mean, the problem is I never used it as a pejorative, which might sound surprising given that I wrote a satirical book called Woke.
[00:17:16.920 --> 00:17:18.680] But I've never used it as a pejorative.
[00:17:18.680 --> 00:17:25.720] I've always used it as a descriptive, quite mostly because, as I say, people around 2015, 2016 were self-describing as woke.
[00:17:25.720 --> 00:17:26.840] People still are, right?
[00:17:26.840 --> 00:17:31.480] So, I mean, a lot of people do embrace it as a descriptive term for themselves, a form of self-identification.
[00:17:31.480 --> 00:17:33.240] So I was using it as a kind of courtesy.
[00:17:33.960 --> 00:17:37.080] But then something weird happened around 2018.
[00:17:37.080 --> 00:17:44.800] After I'd published that book, and people accused me of using it as a pejorative, and people said, you know, this is just a snarl word invented by the right to attack the left.
[00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:46.640] Moral panic.
[00:17:44.680 --> 00:17:47.120] Yeah.
[00:17:47.360 --> 00:17:52.400] I mean, for one thing, I've never considered the culture war about left and right.
[00:17:52.400 --> 00:17:53.600] So that doesn't really work for me.
[00:17:54.160 --> 00:17:56.240] You know, this is why I think you can be woke.
[00:17:56.240 --> 00:18:01.280] You can be an authoritarian, identity-obsessed monomaniac on the left or the right, or anywhere in between.
[00:18:01.280 --> 00:18:02.720] I don't think there's anything to do with that.
[00:18:02.720 --> 00:18:07.280] But I didn't, I think that was a technique and that was a strategy in and of itself.
[00:18:07.280 --> 00:18:12.400] Saying you're using it as a pejorative to kind of just dismiss the arguments that you make.
[00:18:12.400 --> 00:18:15.920] That was another linguistic trick that they're very, very adept at.
[00:18:15.920 --> 00:18:18.480] And I think most of us got very tired of it very quickly.
[00:18:18.480 --> 00:18:21.840] And, you know, you need a way to describe, you know, this.
[00:18:22.080 --> 00:18:27.600] I mean, you might have got to the point in the book where I sort of outline everything about what the woke movement stands for.
[00:18:27.600 --> 00:18:30.480] And it's this big, sprawling single sentence.
[00:18:30.800 --> 00:18:32.560] And then I just say, oh, we can just say woke.
[00:18:32.560 --> 00:18:33.440] Let's just say woke.
[00:18:34.000 --> 00:18:34.960] I love that.
[00:18:35.280 --> 00:18:35.680] Yeah.
[00:18:35.680 --> 00:18:36.240] Yeah.
[00:18:36.560 --> 00:18:36.800] Yeah.
[00:18:36.800 --> 00:18:42.720] You know, since we mentioned the recovered memory movement, well, you know, a lot of us were publishing about that, very critical of it.
[00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:52.160] But it really wasn't until some of the recovered people, that is, these adult women who realized they had been duped, then sued these therapists.
[00:18:52.160 --> 00:18:54.000] And that brought it to a screeching halt.
[00:18:54.000 --> 00:18:54.640] Lawsuit.
[00:18:54.640 --> 00:18:58.720] So I had Chris Ruffo on the show here last year.
[00:18:58.720 --> 00:19:07.680] And, you know, people like Pinker and I and you and others are fighting the culture wars through our words and ideas.
[00:19:07.840 --> 00:19:12.160] Let's debunk bad ideas, replace them with good ideas and so on.
[00:19:12.160 --> 00:19:16.000] And Rufo's response was, we tried that and you lost.
[00:19:16.000 --> 00:19:16.800] That doesn't work.
[00:19:17.520 --> 00:19:18.960] We need the law.
[00:19:18.960 --> 00:19:25.040] We need a strong man on top to say, we're putting an end to this and we're going to outlaw it.
[00:19:25.360 --> 00:19:26.640] Yeah, I mean, you can do a bit of both.
[00:19:26.640 --> 00:19:27.840] I mean, I don't know.
[00:19:28.560 --> 00:19:31.720] I'm a great admirer of Christopher's work, and I would like to talk to him about this.
[00:19:31.720 --> 00:19:35.720] I imagine we're not entirely on the same page in the best way strategically to address it.
[00:19:35.720 --> 00:19:38.200] I think we both agree on the fundamental problems.
[00:19:38.760 --> 00:19:44.040] But I think, you know, there's a sense in which a lot of people believe that, you know, someone has to be in power.
[00:19:44.040 --> 00:19:46.200] So it may as well be the ones on the right side of this.
[00:19:47.000 --> 00:19:48.760] And I get that.
[00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:51.320] I do understand that point of view.
[00:19:51.320 --> 00:19:55.080] But I actually don't think we should give up on the marketplace of ideas quite yet.
[00:19:55.080 --> 00:20:02.360] And I think a lot of, and as I say, because the woke movement has been so unpopular, you know, we always hear about the extremes.
[00:20:02.360 --> 00:20:09.320] You know, sure, maybe on a university campus, you're going to get a disproportionate number of voices on that side because those are among the elites.
[00:20:09.320 --> 00:20:10.440] Those are among the most privileged.
[00:20:10.440 --> 00:20:16.200] Let's not forget it's mostly the posher universities which have a preponderance of these kinds of students.
[00:20:16.200 --> 00:20:17.960] So you're going to get a misrepresented idea.
[00:20:17.960 --> 00:20:22.360] Evergreen College was another example, you know, where this crazy hysteria erupted.
[00:20:22.360 --> 00:20:25.080] It's been documented by Benjamin Boyce, obviously.
[00:20:25.080 --> 00:20:31.720] And so I think we do have to keep in mind the statistics on this, which is that it's never been popular in any generation.
[00:20:31.720 --> 00:20:40.040] And that means we can still win it back without resorting to similarly authoritarian techniques to eliminate it.
[00:20:40.040 --> 00:20:41.560] I'm very wary of that.
[00:20:41.560 --> 00:20:43.800] And I don't think it's necessary.
[00:20:44.840 --> 00:20:49.800] You know, in search of deeper causes behind it, Marxism is often brought up.
[00:20:49.800 --> 00:20:56.440] But as you pointed out at the start, it's not about class and it's by these rich elites that are driving it.
[00:20:56.440 --> 00:20:57.880] And a lot of them are making a lot of money.
[00:20:57.880 --> 00:20:59.720] They're kind of capitalists.
[00:21:00.760 --> 00:21:01.640] I mean, absolutely.
[00:21:01.640 --> 00:21:08.440] This is not, the woke movement is not something that Marx would have recognized as anywhere near anything that he had posited.
[00:21:08.760 --> 00:21:22.000] The fact that you had the cultural turn, I mean, we talk about, you know, when Marxists or people who declared themselves to be Marxists substituted the economy, money, class, those concerns for identity, group identity.
[00:21:22.000 --> 00:21:24.720] Well, then it ceases to be Marxism as far as I'm concerned.
[00:21:24.960 --> 00:21:27.680] You can say it has a Marxian DNA.
[00:21:27.920 --> 00:21:29.600] I think that's fair enough.
[00:21:29.600 --> 00:21:36.000] But it's not something that Marx would have recognized in the way that their obsession with power structures is not something that Foucault would have recognized.
[00:21:36.000 --> 00:21:38.320] It's something that Foucault would have been able to problematize.
[00:21:38.320 --> 00:21:49.680] And, you know, so it's very interesting the way that elements of these philosophical trains of thought sort of become woven into this movement we now call wokeness.
[00:21:49.680 --> 00:22:01.840] Another good example I always think is the Frankfurt School and their emphasis on mistrusting popular culture, this kind of bread and circuses idea that people get distracted by popular culture and media messaging.
[00:22:02.000 --> 00:22:12.320] And that is the, the woke have completely taken that element of the thought of the Frankfurt School to the extent that they really push for censorship of popular culture in particular.
[00:22:12.320 --> 00:22:16.400] In fact, in a way, you kind of get away with it more when it's high art.
[00:22:16.400 --> 00:22:18.160] You know, you get away with more stuff.
[00:22:18.160 --> 00:22:31.120] There's fewer people trying to protest against the performance of Titus Andronicus than there are against Snow White, you know, or fiddling with Snow White to make sure that it's promoting the creed of diversity.
[00:22:31.680 --> 00:22:34.160] But they don't worry too much about high art.
[00:22:34.160 --> 00:22:36.880] Although, having said that, they're moving into that realm now.
[00:22:36.880 --> 00:22:45.280] And you're starting to get, for instance, the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the UK, just a couple of weeks ago, announced that it was going to decolonize its collection.
[00:22:46.000 --> 00:22:48.040] They said that a lot of their archive materials.
[00:22:48.040 --> 00:22:53.280] Remember, this is a major body which is entrusted as custodians of Shakespeare's legacy.
[00:22:53.280 --> 00:23:00.000] And they're saying they're going to decolonize because they say that a lot of Shakespeare's work is racist, sexist, and homophobic.
[00:23:00.920 --> 00:23:10.200] It does sort of boggle the mind how a man who wrote 126 love sonnets to another man could be deemed homophobic, but nevertheless, clearly they know best.
[00:23:10.440 --> 00:23:14.600] And they're doing this and they're putting trigger warnings on the various things.
[00:23:14.600 --> 00:23:24.120] You know, there's just been announced a sort of not a non-binary production of 12th Night, where every actor will be identifying as non-binary or gender fluid.
[00:23:24.120 --> 00:23:31.080] Makes no sense at all, because, of course, 12th Night, it's about cross-dressing, it's about misdirected desire.
[00:23:31.080 --> 00:23:39.720] It needs, it requires the sex, the biological sex of each individual character to be very firmly set, actually, for the comedy to work.
[00:23:40.040 --> 00:23:41.320] So, you know, it won't work.
[00:23:41.320 --> 00:23:51.880] And it'll also be, it's that thing of whenever recent productions of Shakespeare try and reduce it to identity politics and woke politics, it's like you're focusing.
[00:23:51.880 --> 00:23:55.560] It's like going to the Sistine Chapel and just staring at the floor.
[00:23:55.960 --> 00:23:59.000] You're just narrowly focusing on one tiny aspect.
[00:23:59.000 --> 00:24:02.280] Sure, you know, you can interpret Shakespeare however you want.
[00:24:02.280 --> 00:24:06.360] And sure, he does address issues of race and sexuality and sex.
[00:24:06.360 --> 00:24:07.640] And of course he does.
[00:24:07.640 --> 00:24:09.160] But he addresses a hell of a lot more.
[00:24:09.160 --> 00:24:10.920] That's why he's the best writer who ever lived.
[00:24:10.920 --> 00:24:16.600] Because the abundance of his art, the sheer scope of what he achieves.
[00:24:16.600 --> 00:24:31.480] And so it's almost like they're writing a kind of a diorama or creating a diorama version of Shakespeare's simple two-dimensional version, a digestible thing that can just be reduced to propaganda for their creed.
[00:24:31.480 --> 00:24:32.680] And it's banal.
[00:24:32.680 --> 00:24:35.320] And it's especially banal because everyone is doing it.
[00:24:35.320 --> 00:24:37.400] Like all of the major theater companies are doing it.
[00:24:37.400 --> 00:24:38.520] And they think they're radical.
[00:24:38.520 --> 00:24:39.160] It's incredible.
[00:24:39.160 --> 00:24:42.600] It's like, just accept you're being really boring and conformist here.
[00:24:42.600 --> 00:24:46.480] You're doing episodes, you're doing everything that everyone else is doing.
[00:24:46.480 --> 00:24:48.160] And you think it makes you somehow radical.
[00:24:44.600 --> 00:24:49.600] It drives me crazy.
[00:24:49.920 --> 00:24:54.320] But that's an example of how wokeness is still persisting, and particularly in the UK.
[00:24:54.320 --> 00:24:55.920] You know, there's stuff, it's still happening.
[00:24:55.920 --> 00:25:02.400] And I really want to be clear that when I wrote a book called The End of Woke, that is a kind of aspirational concept.
[00:25:02.640 --> 00:25:03.200] It is not.
[00:25:03.520 --> 00:25:06.880] I'm not making a definitive statement in a Francis Fukuyama way.
[00:25:06.880 --> 00:25:09.040] This is the end of woke, it will never be again.
[00:25:09.360 --> 00:25:10.400] I'm making a number of points.
[00:25:10.400 --> 00:25:14.720] I'm talking about, I'm trying to envisage what the end of woke could be, what it could look like.
[00:25:14.720 --> 00:25:17.360] There's a kind of implied question mark in that title.
[00:25:17.360 --> 00:25:19.600] I'm saying that I think the death throws are there.
[00:25:19.600 --> 00:25:22.320] It might be a long, extended period of death.
[00:25:22.320 --> 00:25:27.760] It might be even years or decades, but I don't think it can go back to what it was.
[00:25:28.000 --> 00:25:37.040] And I'm also, of course, envisaging, as you know in the book, various possible sources of power that might fill that vacuum, various other.
[00:25:37.120 --> 00:25:44.640] And my key argument, I suppose, is I believe that authoritarianism is the default instinct of humankind.
[00:25:44.800 --> 00:25:50.240] I'm not qualified to say where that comes from, whether that's evolutionary or some other reason, but I do think it's the default.
[00:25:50.240 --> 00:25:51.840] I do think history teaches that.
[00:25:51.840 --> 00:25:55.040] I don't know much about evolution, but I know a thing or two about history and literature.
[00:25:55.040 --> 00:25:57.520] And it is the thing that keeps coming back.
[00:25:57.520 --> 00:25:59.680] And I think we have to continually guard against it.
[00:25:59.680 --> 00:26:02.000] And wokeness was just the latest manifestation.
[00:26:02.560 --> 00:26:03.360] Say it again, Andrew.
[00:26:03.360 --> 00:26:04.320] What's the it there?
[00:26:04.320 --> 00:26:06.160] It keeps coming back.
[00:26:06.160 --> 00:26:07.120] Authoritarianism.
[00:26:07.120 --> 00:26:08.080] Authoritarianism, yes, yes.
[00:26:08.240 --> 00:26:14.400] And authoritarian regimes and that instinct, you know, and I think wokeness was just the latest version of that.
[00:26:14.400 --> 00:26:19.120] It was an interesting one because, of course, these were tyrants who were claiming to be the underdogs, claiming to be the victims.
[00:26:19.120 --> 00:26:21.760] So it made it particularly difficult to tackle.
[00:26:21.760 --> 00:26:26.080] You know, they were in incredible positions of power and claimed to be the victims.
[00:26:26.080 --> 00:26:26.640] How is that?
[00:26:26.640 --> 00:26:27.840] You're not the victim.
[00:26:28.160 --> 00:26:38.040] If you've got the backing of the entire corporate world, you know, the royal family, the government in America, like you're not, you're the establishment, but they claim to be the victims.
[00:26:38.040 --> 00:26:46.520] So I'm making the case that we need to return to what I consider classical liberal values, which are really hard to defend and sustain.
[00:26:46.520 --> 00:26:51.560] I understand the authoritarian impulse because we all have it, and it's easy.
[00:26:51.560 --> 00:26:54.760] As in, you can make the thing you don't like go away.
[00:26:54.760 --> 00:26:59.240] You know, I mean, you'll notice that I start the book with a quotation from E.M.
[00:26:59.240 --> 00:27:07.160] Forster, where he talks about, this is obviously a brilliant, one of my favorite novelists, and he's writing at the end of the Second World War.
[00:27:07.160 --> 00:27:09.880] And he talks about there being two, there's two ways of dealing with it.
[00:27:09.880 --> 00:27:16.280] You have the Nazi solution, which is to stomp on your enemies, eliminate them, and strut up and down like you're the salt of the earth.
[00:27:16.280 --> 00:27:21.400] Or there's the liberal solution, doesn't call it the liberal solution, but there's a liberal solution, which is about tolerance.
[00:27:21.400 --> 00:27:24.200] Don't try to love everyone, you can't.
[00:27:24.200 --> 00:27:28.840] But we try and tolerate difference, and that's how we can move towards a civilized future.
[00:27:28.840 --> 00:27:32.200] And I love that quotation because it really encapsulates what I'm trying to argue.
[00:27:32.200 --> 00:27:39.080] It's from a book, by the way, called Two Cheers for Democracy, which I think is one of the best book titles that's ever.
[00:27:39.240 --> 00:27:39.800] I love E.M.
[00:27:39.800 --> 00:27:40.600] Forster for that.
[00:27:40.600 --> 00:27:42.840] And that's my argument.
[00:27:42.840 --> 00:27:57.480] We need to return to the difficult, messy liberal system, which is messy because what it says is everyone has the right to believe what they want, say what they want, act as they want, you know, right up until the point where you encroach on the rights of someone else.
[00:27:57.480 --> 00:28:00.280] But that also means that society is going to be messy.
[00:28:00.280 --> 00:28:01.240] It's going to be difficult.
[00:28:01.240 --> 00:28:03.400] It's going to be about constant negotiations.
[00:28:03.400 --> 00:28:05.480] There is no utopian endpoint.
[00:28:05.480 --> 00:28:16.000] When woke activists say that liberalism failed because racism still persists, the liberal says, of course, racism still persists because it cannot be eliminated because of the essential imperfectibility of human nature.
[00:28:16.000 --> 00:28:17.760] And that's a harder proposition.
[00:28:17.760 --> 00:28:19.600] And it's less sexy, isn't it?
[00:28:19.600 --> 00:28:24.320] It's less sexy than wiping everyone out and just getting everyone to think the way that you think.
[00:28:24.320 --> 00:28:27.760] But every ideology as a part of it, as I can see, has that authoritarian instinct.
[00:28:27.760 --> 00:28:31.760] It's a set of rules that says this is the way it must be.
[00:28:32.080 --> 00:28:35.440] And liberalism, that's why I don't believe liberalism is an ideology at all.
[00:28:35.440 --> 00:28:37.760] I know a lot of people disagree with me on this.
[00:28:37.760 --> 00:28:40.320] I think liberalism is the absence of an ideology.
[00:28:40.320 --> 00:28:52.800] Because it's really a method of finding the best way to live, given our flawed natures and the role of chance and randomness and unpredictability.
[00:28:52.800 --> 00:28:56.080] It's really not a utopian goal to get to.
[00:28:56.080 --> 00:28:57.760] There's no there.
[00:28:58.080 --> 00:29:00.160] No, and like I say, that's not sexy.
[00:29:00.640 --> 00:29:05.440] I'm so sick of people saying, oh, you centrist liberal people, you know, you're taking the easy route.
[00:29:05.440 --> 00:29:07.040] It's not, it's so much harder.
[00:29:07.040 --> 00:29:11.280] It's so much harder to defend free speech, even for people you can't stand.
[00:29:11.280 --> 00:29:17.920] When the ACLU stood up for the neo-Nazis in Skokie, Chicago, that was a really hard thing to do because it takes backbone.
[00:29:18.240 --> 00:29:21.520] You know, this is not the easy route, but it's the preferable route.
[00:29:21.520 --> 00:29:28.400] Like, nothing from everything I've read of history suggests to me that any other system works better than this.
[00:29:28.640 --> 00:29:32.000] You know, obviously, the Nazi solution looks sexy.
[00:29:32.000 --> 00:29:33.760] You get to wear Hugo Boss.
[00:29:34.640 --> 00:29:36.640] You don't have to hear from your enemies.
[00:29:36.640 --> 00:29:38.080] You wipe them out.
[00:29:38.080 --> 00:29:40.400] All of the things you hate have disappeared.
[00:29:40.400 --> 00:29:46.160] You know, you have your stupid Aryan-looking propaganda, and it's all like, it's just a nonsense.
[00:29:46.160 --> 00:29:49.520] And it's, it's, you know, that's not what human nature is.
[00:29:49.520 --> 00:29:53.920] Like, we're just, we are all different, and we're always going to see the world differently.
[00:29:53.920 --> 00:29:56.160] And you can't just crush things you don't like.
[00:29:56.160 --> 00:29:57.840] You know, there is a way through it.
[00:29:57.840 --> 00:30:00.520] But it's, but it's, but it's difficult.
[00:29:59.840 --> 00:30:02.360] I mean, that's that's really why I wrote this book.
[00:30:02.440 --> 00:30:11.880] I want to try and make the case for liberalism at a time when so many people on my side of the argument seem to be saying we should reject it.
[00:30:11.880 --> 00:30:17.560] Yeah, I really thought that the subtitle could just be the case for liberalism or classical liberalism.
[00:30:17.560 --> 00:30:22.360] I use the word classical liberalism to describe myself instead of libertarian or whatever.
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[00:30:53.000 --> 00:30:56.040] Different terms in there about modifying liberalism.
[00:30:56.040 --> 00:31:00.840] Yeah, I mean, it's tricky because, as you know, every liberal thinker throughout history has defined it differently.
[00:31:01.080 --> 00:31:08.840] You know, so you have to, I think, when you make this kind of case, you have to just be very clear about what you mean about liberalism.
[00:31:08.920 --> 00:31:14.920] I think I've been very clear in this book, and I'm sure there will be liberals who will disagree with some elements of what I say.
[00:31:14.920 --> 00:31:29.320] I think the key difference that a lot of people will have is a lot of critics of liberalism see it as a free-for-all, a kind of selfish, self-obsessed, you just do whatever the hell you want and don't worry about anyone else.
[00:31:29.320 --> 00:31:35.160] And I don't see that as liberal, because I think a key aspect of liberalism is social responsibility.
[00:31:35.160 --> 00:31:48.960] And major liberal thinkers from the sort of conservative liberals like Frederick Hayek or the sort of social liberals like John Rawls, they all agree in an essential aspect being the rule of law, equality before the law.
[00:31:48.960 --> 00:31:54.800] You know, you can go right back to Locke and to Hobbes and to Mill, and it's still always an element.
[00:31:54.800 --> 00:32:00.320] Now, that is not to say that laws can't be unjust or open to challenge.
[00:32:00.320 --> 00:32:04.240] That's part of that messy negotiation that we have.
[00:32:04.480 --> 00:32:05.280] It's difficult.
[00:32:05.280 --> 00:32:10.480] That's why, you know, I got so annoyed when during the Black Lives Matter protests, and some of them became riots.
[00:32:10.480 --> 00:32:15.040] And, you know, there was that guy, that officer guy, that Dawn, his name was Dawn, who was just shot dead.
[00:32:15.600 --> 00:32:16.880] These people looting shops.
[00:32:16.880 --> 00:32:21.440] And, you know, people like me were saying, look, this is the opposite of what Martin Luther King wanted.
[00:32:21.440 --> 00:32:25.360] Martin Luther King talks about judging people by the content of the character, not the color of their skin.
[00:32:25.360 --> 00:32:30.720] And the single criticism that comes back all the time is, that's the only thing you've ever read of Martin Luther King, that speech.
[00:32:30.720 --> 00:32:31.360] Well, no, it isn't.
[00:32:31.360 --> 00:32:32.880] I've read a lot of his work.
[00:32:32.880 --> 00:32:36.800] And they kept coming back, particularly with the letter from Birmingham Jail, saying, read that.
[00:32:36.800 --> 00:32:40.800] And they didn't understand that he would have supported these riots.
[00:32:40.800 --> 00:32:41.920] No, he wouldn't.
[00:32:41.920 --> 00:32:46.000] And if you read the letter from Birmingham Jail, he could not be more explicit about that.
[00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:52.240] He says, we need to challenge unjust laws and we need to protest against them, but we protest peacefully against them.
[00:32:52.240 --> 00:32:58.560] And more than that, we accept the consequences when we're arrested and attacked for doing so, right?
[00:32:58.560 --> 00:33:02.960] He says the opposite of what lots of the Black Lives Matter activists were saying.
[00:33:02.960 --> 00:33:04.880] He was a liberal through and through.
[00:33:05.200 --> 00:33:09.440] And even in the text that they point to to prove that he isn't, it proves the opposite.
[00:33:09.440 --> 00:33:12.640] Because I don't think a lot of them have actually read it, if I'm honest.
[00:33:12.640 --> 00:33:24.480] So I would say that's, but it's but it's hard, like as those thinkers acknowledge, as Gandhi acknowledged with his notion of Satya Graha, you know, the idea of non-violent, non-cooperation.
[00:33:24.480 --> 00:33:28.400] That's the liberal means of protest towards societal change.
[00:33:28.400 --> 00:33:31.720] And it's so much harder than just smashing up a shop and stealing some shit.
[00:33:31.960 --> 00:33:40.840] So it's not a liberal thing to take a big plastic bag and go into the CVS and fill it with as much stuff as you can, as long as it's under $1,000 in California.
[00:33:40.840 --> 00:33:42.280] What a revelation, eh?
[00:33:42.280 --> 00:33:43.800] No, of course it isn't.
[00:33:43.800 --> 00:33:48.920] And yeah, and it's so surprising to me that that's become so misunderstood.
[00:33:48.920 --> 00:33:52.760] I mean, in the book, as you know, I outline in a number of bullet points what I mean by liberalism.
[00:33:52.760 --> 00:33:53.400] I'm very, very clear.
[00:33:53.400 --> 00:33:58.280] But I mean, does it dovetail with the way that you see liberalism as a classical liberal?
[00:33:58.280 --> 00:33:59.560] Yeah, for the most part, yes.
[00:33:59.560 --> 00:34:10.760] I guess the social liberal part is getting at, you know, specifics like how much social spending should we have to help people that can't help themselves?
[00:34:10.760 --> 00:34:12.200] Okay, there's some of that.
[00:34:12.520 --> 00:34:16.920] And then, you know, the jobless and the homeless and the handicapped and so on.
[00:34:16.920 --> 00:34:19.320] That number keeps getting bigger, right?
[00:34:19.320 --> 00:34:21.320] And so conservatives are always pushing back.
[00:34:21.320 --> 00:34:23.320] Well, how about less social spending?
[00:34:23.320 --> 00:34:38.120] But if you look at like over the last, I don't know, 50 years or so and where it is now, pretty much all 20 of the top industrial democracies in the world spend like roughly 18 to 25 percent of GDP on social spending.
[00:34:38.120 --> 00:34:40.520] Even the United States is, I think, 21%.
[00:34:40.520 --> 00:34:43.160] I think France is 26%, something like that.
[00:34:43.160 --> 00:34:45.800] So it's not like anybody's proposing zero.
[00:34:45.800 --> 00:34:49.240] Like, let's go back to the 19th century and have no social spending.
[00:34:49.240 --> 00:34:54.280] You know, so I guess it's a matter of degree of what you feel morally we owe people.
[00:34:54.280 --> 00:34:58.440] And then you got to control for fraud and graft and all that stuff.
[00:34:58.440 --> 00:35:08.760] But I guess a more libertarian classical liberal might say, I'd rather teach people to be more independent and less dependent on the state.
[00:35:08.760 --> 00:35:13.640] Maybe the social liberal says, but there's a lot of people that can't do it on their own.
[00:35:13.960 --> 00:35:14.520] Absolutely.
[00:35:14.520 --> 00:35:21.760] And that's one of those difficult discussions that needs to be had, where you have to find a balance, where you have to consider all sides.
[00:35:21.760 --> 00:35:29.760] Again, not an ideology where you can just impose and say, you know, I mean, my instinct, I do have an instinctive gratitude to the welfare state.
[00:35:29.760 --> 00:35:34.320] I do think that it's a sign of civilized society that we look after our most vulnerable.
[00:35:34.320 --> 00:35:39.600] And I suppose that's the old leftist in me that still has that kind of quality.
[00:35:39.760 --> 00:35:41.360] But I understand that a lot of people don't agree.
[00:35:41.360 --> 00:35:48.000] And I also understand that there's a strong case to be made that the welfare initiatives of the mid-20th century were a disaster for the black community.
[00:35:48.320 --> 00:35:50.240] And there's a lot of evidence for that.
[00:35:50.240 --> 00:35:52.320] So I, you know, and again, it's that balance.
[00:35:52.320 --> 00:36:02.240] You know, if you, if they're, you know, and I know of people who exploit the welfare system, and, you know, I'm fully aware that it's finding that balance and you're never going to get it completely right.
[00:36:02.240 --> 00:36:06.560] But whereas like a communist might say, well, I've got the solution.
[00:36:06.560 --> 00:36:09.280] And here it is, a sledgehammer solution.
[00:36:09.280 --> 00:36:09.920] You don't.
[00:36:09.920 --> 00:36:12.080] No one's really got the solution.
[00:36:12.080 --> 00:36:20.720] And so I'm just kind of interested in that's why what attracts me to liberalism is because it recognizes that we don't have all the answers and that we never can.
[00:36:20.720 --> 00:36:25.520] And I think when it is misinterpreted, there's this idea of a selfish free-for-all.
[00:36:26.080 --> 00:36:29.040] I mean, this is why in the book I go right back to Milton.
[00:36:29.200 --> 00:36:48.640] And I spend a lot of time talking about Milton, because John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, poet, Republican, political agitator, he also wrote, of course, Aria Pagitica, which is the most elegant defense against the censorship of the press that I've ever read.
[00:36:49.520 --> 00:36:53.200] And he believed in freedom and liberty.
[00:36:53.200 --> 00:36:58.880] And he was particularly alert to this problem of confusing liberty with license.
[00:36:58.880 --> 00:37:02.680] The free-for-all, anarchic, selfish thing is license.
[00:36:59.680 --> 00:37:03.560] And that's not liberty.
[00:37:03.880 --> 00:37:09.400] For him, liberty was a kind of virtuous self-regulation born out of reason.
[00:37:09.400 --> 00:37:10.440] First and foremost, reason.
[00:37:10.440 --> 00:37:12.440] He believed that human beings were rational creatures.
[00:37:12.440 --> 00:37:14.440] That's why he was for meritocracy.
[00:37:14.680 --> 00:37:17.560] He didn't like the idea of being princess.
[00:37:17.560 --> 00:37:18.440] He was against the king.
[00:37:18.440 --> 00:37:23.560] He was against the idea of a king because it's irrational, the idea that someone could, you know, seize power by an accident of birth.
[00:37:23.560 --> 00:37:25.320] This is what drew him to Cromwell.
[00:37:25.800 --> 00:37:27.480] So he was about reason.
[00:37:27.480 --> 00:37:32.120] He thinks reason was a God-given gift for us that we can rationalize our way to the truth.
[00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:33.640] He had that faith.
[00:37:34.280 --> 00:37:36.840] But he didn't believe in this idea of license.
[00:37:36.840 --> 00:37:38.120] And I think we can learn from that.
[00:37:38.120 --> 00:37:39.320] I think we can return to it.
[00:37:39.560 --> 00:37:46.680] He wrote a tract in support of divorce, which a lot of people suspect is because he didn't like his wife, which is true.
[00:37:47.480 --> 00:37:53.400] But a lot of his peers criticized him for it, saying, oh, you just want liberty, you want free-for-all, you want liberty.
[00:37:53.400 --> 00:37:55.400] He says, you're talking about license.
[00:37:55.640 --> 00:37:56.600] I'm crying for liberty.
[00:37:56.600 --> 00:37:57.560] You're talking about license.
[00:37:58.040 --> 00:38:04.200] You have to distinguish between those two things in order to understand liberalism as Milton understood it.
[00:38:04.200 --> 00:38:06.920] And I think we could go back to that.
[00:38:06.920 --> 00:38:12.520] You know, he had this wonderful belief that human beings have to make, we have to be free to make our own mistakes.
[00:38:12.520 --> 00:38:18.520] We have to be free to read the books we want, even if they are proposing harmful ideas.
[00:38:18.520 --> 00:38:24.280] He says in Aria Pagittica, if you let truth and falsehood grapple on a battlefield, truth will out.
[00:38:24.680 --> 00:38:27.000] And I think he's got a great point.
[00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:30.680] And I think, you know, even in Paradise Lost, it is so essential.
[00:38:30.680 --> 00:38:36.680] I mean, you could interpret the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as, you know, human beings who are tricked.
[00:38:36.680 --> 00:38:38.600] Well, either, you could say they are predestined.
[00:38:38.920 --> 00:38:46.880] If you're a Calvinist, you might say they are predestined to eat the forbidden fruit and to fall so that we end up as a species in a post-lapsarian state.
[00:38:47.280 --> 00:38:48.400] That's to do with predestination.
[00:38:48.400 --> 00:38:49.200] They don't have a choice.
[00:38:44.840 --> 00:38:50.160] Milton says no.
[00:38:50.400 --> 00:38:56.960] And Milton is so clear about this because early in Paradise Lost, we have the archangel explain to them the whole thing, the whole deal.
[00:38:57.120 --> 00:38:58.240] And another appears later.
[00:38:58.240 --> 00:39:06.000] I think it's Michael who appears later to explain to Adam, you had the choice and you chose to eat the fruit and you've made the mistake and that's why you're fallen.
[00:39:06.000 --> 00:39:07.520] And it's so important.
[00:39:07.520 --> 00:39:15.440] That text is incoherent unless you understand that Milton is making it their choice, not God's predestined will.
[00:39:15.440 --> 00:39:16.800] It's them, right?
[00:39:16.800 --> 00:39:20.800] And that, I think, is so key to understanding this distinction between liberty and license.
[00:39:20.800 --> 00:39:33.120] And something we can, I think, we can reclaim that idea, you know, not that we go out there, live selfish, bullish lives where we take whatever we want, we don't care about anyone else's society.
[00:39:33.120 --> 00:39:34.880] I don't see that as liberal, right?
[00:39:34.880 --> 00:39:36.400] I see that as licentious.
[00:39:36.400 --> 00:39:38.160] Yeah, that's a great distinction.
[00:39:38.160 --> 00:39:43.520] That audacious autodidact, Eve, she wanted to know something on her own.
[00:39:43.520 --> 00:39:44.080] Yeah.
[00:39:44.800 --> 00:39:46.320] She's my hero for that.
[00:39:46.320 --> 00:39:48.080] Proto-feminist, absolutely.
[00:39:48.080 --> 00:39:48.720] Yeah.
[00:39:48.720 --> 00:39:52.640] I love that story in your book about taking your students to Milton's grave, right?
[00:39:53.200 --> 00:39:55.040] Is that the correct am I remembering that right?
[00:39:55.280 --> 00:40:00.800] Because I was teaching at the City of London School for Girls, which is a school in the Barbican estate.
[00:40:00.800 --> 00:40:06.560] And the Barbican estate, if you haven't been in London, is this brutalist, you know, the 60s brutalism.
[00:40:06.560 --> 00:40:06.720] Yeah.
[00:40:07.040 --> 00:40:12.480] A really ugly architectural monstrosity, but it's now listed because it's historically significant.
[00:40:12.480 --> 00:40:13.760] So they're not going to get rid of it.
[00:40:13.760 --> 00:40:17.840] But in the middle of this brutalist estate is this beautiful old church, St.
[00:40:17.840 --> 00:40:19.120] Giles Cripplegate.
[00:40:19.120 --> 00:40:21.280] Tiny, small little church.
[00:40:21.520 --> 00:40:23.440] But, you know, it was significant.
[00:40:23.440 --> 00:40:25.200] You know, Cromwell got married there.
[00:40:25.200 --> 00:40:27.840] Shakespeare lived just around the corner, might have been a parishioner.
[00:40:27.840 --> 00:40:30.000] We don't know much about his church-going habits.
[00:40:30.840 --> 00:40:39.640] But, you know, and of course, Milton is buried there because he couldn't be buried in Westminster Abbey because he was a Republican, right?
[00:40:39.640 --> 00:40:41.720] So it was his politics.
[00:40:41.960 --> 00:40:43.640] You know, he was lucky not to have been executed.
[00:40:43.640 --> 00:40:52.040] In fact, he only avoided execution because Andrew Marvell, another poet, intervened and said, look, the dude's blind and old and no harm to anyone.
[00:40:52.040 --> 00:40:53.080] You know, leave him alone.
[00:40:53.080 --> 00:40:54.360] He didn't use the word dude.
[00:40:54.360 --> 00:40:55.400] That was an interference.
[00:40:55.640 --> 00:40:59.000] But what do they mean by what did Republican mean then?
[00:40:59.640 --> 00:41:01.560] Oh, the idea that you didn't want a monarchy.
[00:41:01.560 --> 00:41:02.200] Right.
[00:41:02.680 --> 00:41:04.120] And, you know, its traditional meaning.
[00:41:04.120 --> 00:41:07.080] And Milton was dead against.
[00:41:07.080 --> 00:41:07.560] He took a risk.
[00:41:07.560 --> 00:41:12.120] He was on the wrong side of the civil war, as it turns out, in terms of who won.
[00:41:12.600 --> 00:41:29.080] And he, you know, he was, you know, but during the Cromwell reign, you know, during that period between the, you know, before the re-emergence of the king, he actually, weirdly, he ended up being a censor for the state.
[00:41:29.080 --> 00:41:30.520] So he was a hypocrite.
[00:41:30.520 --> 00:41:32.360] And there's all sorts of hypocrisies in what he writes.
[00:41:32.360 --> 00:41:35.080] You know, he says he does, he certainly doesn't extend free speech to Catholics.
[00:41:35.080 --> 00:41:36.200] I can tell you that.
[00:41:36.760 --> 00:41:46.680] But although, you know, even that, like, there's a reason behind it, insofar as he saw the Catholic Church as being fundamentally tyrannous, fundamentally against freedom.
[00:41:46.680 --> 00:41:49.720] So he was opposing a force that he perceived to be against freedom.
[00:41:50.120 --> 00:41:55.800] And I think that was probably informed by when he was a young, young man and he was doing the equivalent of the grand tour of Europe.
[00:41:55.800 --> 00:41:58.840] And he went to Italy and he visited Galileo.
[00:41:58.840 --> 00:42:04.760] Well, if he's telling the truth in his Area Pagetica, he says he visited Galileo, who was under house arrest at the time.
[00:42:04.760 --> 00:42:14.720] And I mention in the book, because I, and this does sound fanciful when I say it out loud, but you know, I wondered whether his interaction with Galileo was a kind of premonition of his own fate.
[00:42:14.720 --> 00:42:17.440] Because by that point, Galileo was blind.
[00:42:17.440 --> 00:42:19.280] You know, he'd almost been executed.
[00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:20.480] He was disgraced.
[00:42:20.800 --> 00:42:24.320] He was at the point where Milton would end up 40 years later.
[00:42:24.320 --> 00:42:30.320] It's just, it's just an interesting, it's a very fascinating meeting that took place.
[00:42:30.320 --> 00:42:31.840] Really interesting to envisage.
[00:42:31.840 --> 00:42:33.520] That would make a great film.
[00:42:33.520 --> 00:42:34.240] It would, wouldn't it?
[00:42:34.240 --> 00:42:35.600] Like that, no, I totally agree.
[00:42:35.680 --> 00:42:37.440] I think that would be a great film.
[00:42:37.920 --> 00:42:39.120] No one's tackled that.
[00:42:39.120 --> 00:42:41.200] And it's just, it's just, it's, you know, it's sad to me.
[00:42:41.200 --> 00:42:42.080] He ended up being buried.
[00:42:42.080 --> 00:42:45.600] Milton ended up being buried in this humble little church, St.
[00:42:45.680 --> 00:42:46.560] Charles Gripoke.
[00:42:46.640 --> 00:42:49.600] He got dug up by people during the French Revolution.
[00:42:49.600 --> 00:42:50.320] They dug him up.
[00:42:50.480 --> 00:42:52.240] They ripped off his jawbone.
[00:42:52.240 --> 00:42:56.800] They ripped off bits of hair, bits of bones, sold them as souvenirs.
[00:42:56.800 --> 00:42:59.920] So, you know, he didn't end up with a nice fate.
[00:43:00.160 --> 00:43:02.000] Ultimately, you can go to where he's buried.
[00:43:02.000 --> 00:43:03.600] I mean, they don't know exactly where he is.
[00:43:03.600 --> 00:43:07.040] There's a mark on the floor that says he's buried near here.
[00:43:07.040 --> 00:43:08.080] It's in there somewhere.
[00:43:08.080 --> 00:43:10.080] Like, they could find it if they dug it all up.
[00:43:10.240 --> 00:43:12.480] Like, they found Richard III in that car park in England.
[00:43:12.640 --> 00:43:13.360] That's right.
[00:43:15.280 --> 00:43:15.520] I know.
[00:43:15.520 --> 00:43:17.360] It wasn't a car park when he was buried.
[00:43:17.680 --> 00:43:18.560] Believe it or not.
[00:43:18.560 --> 00:43:26.320] Well, what's fascinating about that is, you know, the woman who just had an intuition that he would be there, the spot she chose, she just guessed.
[00:43:26.320 --> 00:43:28.240] And they found a skeleton.
[00:43:28.240 --> 00:43:32.400] They found the skeleton and then they suddenly realized it had curvature of the spine.
[00:43:32.400 --> 00:43:32.880] Right.
[00:43:32.880 --> 00:43:34.000] And they're like, what the hell?
[00:43:34.000 --> 00:43:35.920] Because, of course, Richard III was a hunchback.
[00:43:35.920 --> 00:43:36.400] Yeah.
[00:43:36.720 --> 00:43:40.320] And the first body they found, that was it.
[00:43:40.320 --> 00:43:42.640] And DNA checks out, dating checks out.
[00:43:42.640 --> 00:43:44.000] It's definitely him.
[00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:47.280] And anyway, I'm going off tangent, but I find that story so fascinating.
[00:43:47.920 --> 00:43:51.200] They're still looking for Jimmy Hoffa's body over here in the United States.
[00:43:52.560 --> 00:43:54.160] I don't think they're finding that.
[00:43:54.160 --> 00:43:57.920] All right, just several things come to mind here since you talk about Shakespeare.
[00:43:57.920 --> 00:44:23.480] I mean, here's, I quote this in my next book because it's just one of the great anti-bigotry statements of all time when Shylock declares, I am a Jew, hath not a Jew eyes, hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions, fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.
[00:44:23.480 --> 00:44:25.320] If you prick us, do we not bleed?
[00:44:25.320 --> 00:44:27.320] If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
[00:44:27.320 --> 00:44:29.080] If you poison us, do we not die?
[00:44:29.080 --> 00:44:31.480] And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
[00:44:31.480 --> 00:44:35.000] If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.
[00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:36.760] That's one of the great statements of all time.
[00:44:36.760 --> 00:44:38.840] How can you cancel Shakespeare for that?
[00:44:38.840 --> 00:44:39.480] Astonishing.
[00:44:39.480 --> 00:44:41.080] Just, I mean, just to hear those words.
[00:44:41.080 --> 00:44:42.440] No one comes close.
[00:44:42.760 --> 00:44:43.640] Who else can do that?
[00:44:43.640 --> 00:44:44.280] Who else can do that?
[00:44:44.280 --> 00:44:45.000] No one can do that.
[00:44:45.000 --> 00:44:45.800] No one ever has.
[00:44:45.800 --> 00:44:51.400] It's so fascinating to me that Shakespeare, you know, he started his career when the public theaters were very young.
[00:44:51.400 --> 00:44:55.080] You know, a matter of at most two decades old.
[00:44:55.080 --> 00:45:01.160] You know, he comes to London sort of late, late 1587, roughly.
[00:45:01.160 --> 00:45:09.160] And, you know, he becomes this incredible force on the London stage.
[00:45:09.160 --> 00:45:12.440] And 400 years later, and no one's bettered him.
[00:45:12.440 --> 00:45:16.200] You know, at the start of this new medium, no one's actually been able to top that.
[00:45:16.200 --> 00:45:20.360] I mean, that speech, I mean, that, you know, where is some of his predecessors?
[00:45:20.440 --> 00:45:32.440] If you take Christopher Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe wrote a play called Christopher Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare, was very, but when the by the time Shakespeare gets to London, Marlowe is already established as this great, the great dramatist.
[00:45:32.440 --> 00:45:35.880] It, you know, plays like Tambourlaine, part one and two, and you know, Dr.
[00:45:35.880 --> 00:45:37.160] Faustus.
[00:45:37.160 --> 00:45:39.240] And then he writes a play called The Jew of Malta.
[00:45:39.240 --> 00:45:43.080] And the Jew of Malta is kind of a proto-uh, Shylock.
[00:45:43.080 --> 00:45:54.480] It's a figure of Barabbas who is hook-nosed, counting his gold, cackling, a cartoonish, anti-Semitic depiction of the Jew.
[00:45:54.480 --> 00:45:58.640] And remember, contextually, of course, there were technically no Jews in England at the time.
[00:45:58.640 --> 00:45:59.200] They'd been...
[00:45:59.200 --> 00:46:03.840] uh booted out in the 12th century and weren't readmitted till the late 17th century.
[00:46:04.080 --> 00:46:05.920] You could be Jewish if you had converted.
[00:46:05.920 --> 00:46:09.440] In fact, there was a house in London called the Domus Conversorum where you could live.
[00:46:09.440 --> 00:46:16.400] In fact, Queen Elizabeth's chief physician was a Jewish, well, of Jewish descent, a Portuguese man of Jewish descent called Dr.
[00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:20.080] Lopez, who was charged with attempting to kill her.
[00:46:20.080 --> 00:46:26.160] That's also the context of The Merchant of Venice, you know, so there was that was a very fame, there was a fear, but it was a different kind of thing.
[00:46:26.400 --> 00:46:28.880] It's a sort of play that, you know, couldn't be written post-Holocaust.
[00:46:28.880 --> 00:46:33.920] This is a play in a society where, you know, there aren't Jewish people about.
[00:46:33.920 --> 00:46:37.040] You know, so it's, it's, it's, it's a sort of, but it's interesting that even then, right?
[00:46:37.040 --> 00:46:39.520] So Marlowe does the caricature.
[00:46:39.520 --> 00:46:41.200] Shakespeare doesn't.
[00:46:41.520 --> 00:46:43.520] Shylock is alive in that play.
[00:46:43.520 --> 00:46:44.800] He leaps off the page.
[00:46:44.800 --> 00:46:49.680] He's, he's, he's, he thinks for himself almost independently of his creator.
[00:46:49.680 --> 00:46:53.920] He's, and that's why you can play Shylock in all sorts of ways.
[00:46:53.920 --> 00:46:58.640] You can play him as a cackling caricature, the anti-Semitic caricature, right?
[00:46:58.640 --> 00:47:06.480] There's something in the play that feels unpleasant in terms of the forced conversion of Shylock at the end of the play.
[00:47:06.960 --> 00:47:10.240] It feels grim, but maybe that's part of the impact.
[00:47:10.640 --> 00:47:22.400] Because you end up feeling for him, even though he's being incredibly cruel, you know, he's being, you know, the idea that he's demanding, even when he could have all the wealth, he's demanding the pound of flesh from Antonio.
[00:47:22.400 --> 00:47:26.080] But then, let's not forget, Antonio doesn't come across well in that play.
[00:47:26.080 --> 00:47:36.120] You know, you know, he's the you know, he it's the, you know, it's just interesting to me that Shakespeare could have represented something very two-dimensional, and he won't do it.
[00:47:36.440 --> 00:47:39.640] And that's why you can play Shylock that way, but you can also play it another way.
[00:47:39.640 --> 00:47:46.040] There's a recent production in London, um, where Shylock is played by a female actor.
[00:47:46.040 --> 00:47:49.640] Uh, I feel bad because I can't remember her name, but she's brilliant.
[00:47:49.640 --> 00:47:53.000] Um, and um, actually, do you mind if I search for that?
[00:47:53.000 --> 00:47:55.960] Because I just think it's kind of important that I get this right.
[00:47:55.960 --> 00:48:08.840] Um, it's uh it was in the London stage, and it was a Jewish production, but where Shylock is the hero, interesting, and it was a female Shylock here, here it is.
[00:48:08.840 --> 00:48:13.960] Um, and it's Tracy Ann Oberman, and my God, she's brilliant.
[00:48:13.960 --> 00:48:32.920] Oh, just a nice, and and and it's played where you she's you just feel for her, you you feel for the um the way in which the Jewish figures are treated by the Christians in the but it's there in Shakespeare's play, it's all there, they do have to modify elements of it to make it work, right?
[00:48:32.920 --> 00:48:42.760] And they do have to but my point is my point is that you can play the play that way and you can play it as effectively the other way.
[00:48:42.760 --> 00:48:48.440] And Shakespeare does that in a way that playwright playwrights can't seem to do, he doesn't ever take sides.
[00:48:48.440 --> 00:48:48.920] A.L.
[00:48:48.920 --> 00:49:01.560] Rouse, who was a or Rouse rather, who was a great Elizabethan historian, historian of the Elizabethan era, I should say, not himself Elizabethan, made the point that he said that Shakespeare sees through everyone equally.
[00:49:01.560 --> 00:49:03.320] That's the way he puts it.
[00:49:03.320 --> 00:49:25.680] So you can have a production of Coriolanus, and they had there was one in the 30s, very famous in Paris, where at the comedy at the Comédé Française, the theatre, the comedy theatre, they had the production where people from political factions would turn up pro-fascist and anti-fascist, you know, and they would be there in the crowd shouting their various political slogans.
[00:49:25.680 --> 00:49:28.960] And each faction saw the play as supporting their view.
[00:49:29.520 --> 00:49:31.840] And it ended up with riots where many, many people were killed.
[00:49:31.840 --> 00:49:35.200] It's a famous case because the play doesn't.
[00:49:35.520 --> 00:49:36.400] Who do you support in that?
[00:49:36.400 --> 00:49:37.120] Julius Caesar.
[00:49:37.120 --> 00:49:38.160] Who do you support in that?
[00:49:38.160 --> 00:49:38.480] Right?
[00:49:38.800 --> 00:49:41.200] It's Julius Caesar, great populist leader.
[00:49:41.360 --> 00:49:45.440] The crowd love him, you know, but he might become a tyrant.
[00:49:45.440 --> 00:49:46.800] That's what Brutus says.
[00:49:46.800 --> 00:49:48.560] He might become tyrannical.
[00:49:49.040 --> 00:49:52.800] So do you support the conspirators who reluctantly kill him?
[00:49:52.800 --> 00:50:00.800] Or do you support Mark Antony and the populists who say that this was just an elitist movement sabotaging the populist will?
[00:50:00.800 --> 00:50:04.480] And you can't, he won't let you settle on one side or the other.
[00:50:04.480 --> 00:50:13.920] Just when you think, right, when he gets the point, you remember the wonderful moment where Brutus gives that speech to the plebeians, and then Mark Antony comes out and gives an even better speech.
[00:50:13.920 --> 00:50:16.480] Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
[00:50:16.480 --> 00:50:24.560] And that's such an incredible speech because he's sort of revising what Brutus had said, but making it more elegant.
[00:50:24.560 --> 00:50:28.240] Like for one thing, his speech is in verse and Brutus's speech is in prose.
[00:50:28.240 --> 00:50:32.160] And it's a very subtle effect, but it's much more impactful.
[00:50:32.160 --> 00:50:36.000] And you start to believe, yes, okay, Mark Antony is right.
[00:50:36.000 --> 00:50:38.960] The conspirators are the anti-populists.
[00:50:38.960 --> 00:50:40.320] They're the elites.
[00:50:40.320 --> 00:50:41.120] They're the people.
[00:50:41.520 --> 00:50:47.840] They're the dark, shadowy, you know, the shadow government, you'd call them today, you know, the kind of the globalists, whatever.
[00:50:48.240 --> 00:50:49.280] They're the ones who come.
[00:50:49.280 --> 00:50:51.120] They want to sweep in and take power.
[00:50:51.120 --> 00:50:53.440] And then the crowd gets swept away and they start rioting.
[00:50:53.440 --> 00:50:54.960] And you think, yes, we're with the crowd.
[00:50:54.960 --> 00:50:55.760] But what happens then?
[00:50:55.760 --> 00:50:56.320] It's so key.
[00:50:56.320 --> 00:50:57.840] I quote it in the book.
[00:50:58.400 --> 00:51:00.840] They run into Sinner, the poet.
[00:50:58.880 --> 00:51:03.320] And they say, oh, there was a conspirator called Sinner.
[00:50:59.360 --> 00:51:04.200] And he says, no, I'm not.
[00:50:59.440 --> 00:51:05.720] I just have the same name.
[00:50:59.520 --> 00:51:06.040] I'm a poet.
[00:51:06.840 --> 00:51:08.440] And they say, well, just tear him anyway.
[00:51:08.440 --> 00:51:10.760] They say, tear him for his bad verses.
[00:51:11.080 --> 00:51:12.040] They say, we don't care.
[00:51:12.600 --> 00:51:13.800] We just want bloodlust.
[00:51:13.800 --> 00:51:23.720] So he seems to be at once saying that there's righteous indignation amongst the populace against the elites who have stolen their leader away.
[00:51:23.720 --> 00:51:25.160] But then he switches it.
[00:51:25.160 --> 00:51:30.280] And all of a sudden, you're like, but they're just crazed, bloodlustful maniacs.
[00:51:30.280 --> 00:51:32.760] And actually, you can't trust the people.
[00:51:33.080 --> 00:51:35.080] He never settles on one or the other.
[00:51:35.960 --> 00:51:41.080] We know nothing about Shakespeare's opinions on religion, politics, race, gender, anything.
[00:51:41.080 --> 00:51:42.200] We know nothing.
[00:51:42.200 --> 00:51:48.600] And his plays tell us precisely nothing because they can be cited to support any point of view.
[00:51:48.600 --> 00:51:54.360] And that to me makes him so far above any playwright who has ever existed ever since.
[00:51:54.360 --> 00:51:55.240] And certainly today.
[00:51:55.240 --> 00:52:07.400] I mean, most plays, most new plays that are written today, you feel like you're being hectored with a moral lesson, like it's a fairy tale or something, like we're children and we have to go away saying, yes, I will support the creed of diversity.
[00:52:07.400 --> 00:52:11.320] Yes, isn't it terrible that gay people have had such a hard time and we must be nice to gay people?
[00:52:11.320 --> 00:52:12.920] Like, that's what it feels like.
[00:52:12.920 --> 00:52:14.200] This sermonizing.
[00:52:14.200 --> 00:52:15.880] Like, Shakespeare would have had none of that.
[00:52:15.880 --> 00:52:17.480] And that's why he's better.
[00:52:17.480 --> 00:52:20.760] Is it okay if I ask you about the Shakespeare authorship question?
[00:52:20.760 --> 00:52:24.920] Because my magazine is called Skeptic, so every couple of years, you know, they hector me.
[00:52:24.920 --> 00:52:26.120] And we've looked into it.
[00:52:26.120 --> 00:52:27.240] We published a few things.
[00:52:27.240 --> 00:52:33.400] It seems to me pretty clear they don't have enough evidence for anybody else, other than Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, or was it Francis Bacon?
[00:52:33.480 --> 00:52:35.320] Was one of the other alternatives?
[00:52:35.320 --> 00:52:35.880] I don't know.
[00:52:35.880 --> 00:52:37.720] Have you looked into all that?
[00:52:37.720 --> 00:52:39.320] Yeah, it's errant nonsense.
[00:52:39.320 --> 00:52:44.760] And what I really love about it is they completely defy any sense of historical accuracy.
[00:52:44.760 --> 00:52:48.240] I mean, like, Christopher Marlowe died in 1593, for God's sake.
[00:52:44.840 --> 00:52:55.120] And so, you know, there's been no Macbeth, there's been no Antony and Cleopatra, there's been no Hamlet, there's been no 12th Night.
[00:52:55.280 --> 00:53:02.400] But somehow, he just faked his own death, must have, and then carried on writing, even though Marlowe was already the preeminent dramatist of his age.
[00:53:02.400 --> 00:53:03.760] Why would he have to do that exactly?
[00:53:03.760 --> 00:53:05.840] Like, that doesn't make any sense at all.
[00:53:05.840 --> 00:53:07.840] And then you have the Oxfordians are hilarious.
[00:53:07.840 --> 00:53:19.200] You know, they say the Earl of Oxford was, he also died in the, what was he, 1602, maybe, around that, early, just after Hamlet, maybe, but before some of the great man, certainly before the Tempest and before Coriolanus and before King Lear.
[00:53:19.200 --> 00:53:26.160] And, you know, and again, you'd have to kind of suggest that it was a fake death or something of that kind.
[00:53:26.160 --> 00:53:33.280] There's this crazy theory that Amelia Lanyer wrote his plays, which has been recently proposed in a novel by Jodie Picot.
[00:53:33.280 --> 00:53:35.840] And I got into a bit of an argument with her online, friendly argument.
[00:53:35.840 --> 00:53:37.040] It wasn't Nasty or anything.
[00:53:37.680 --> 00:53:41.200] And, you know, and people are free to have their theories, but it's all nonsense.
[00:53:41.360 --> 00:53:44.080] What you'll find is Francis Bacon, another example.
[00:53:44.080 --> 00:53:50.960] All of the candidates that they suggest are upper class, are gentry, aristocrats.
[00:53:50.960 --> 00:53:51.280] Right.
[00:53:51.440 --> 00:53:55.680] Very interesting to me that it's, I think a lot of it is rooted in class snobbery.
[00:53:55.680 --> 00:53:55.920] Yes.
[00:53:55.920 --> 00:54:00.320] How could a guy with just a grammar school education possibly have done this?
[00:54:00.640 --> 00:54:04.320] Because if you know about grammar school educations of the time, you'll know how rigorous they were.
[00:54:05.200 --> 00:54:06.560] And you know, Shakespeare was middle class.
[00:54:06.560 --> 00:54:07.280] He wasn't working class.
[00:54:07.280 --> 00:54:14.320] He was, you know, he was able to go to the grammar school and when a lot of people wouldn't have been able to, you know, he wasn't, he didn't go to university.
[00:54:14.320 --> 00:54:16.880] You know, he wasn't, he had social aspirations.
[00:54:16.880 --> 00:54:18.000] He wanted to be a lord.
[00:54:18.000 --> 00:54:23.120] He was spending all of his time trying to get a coat of arms, and he eventually succeeded where his father had failed.
[00:54:23.120 --> 00:54:24.560] So he had social aspirations.
[00:54:24.560 --> 00:54:25.680] Absolutely, he did.
[00:54:25.680 --> 00:54:35.960] But he didn't have that kind of, but really, if you saw, I mean, if you see it in these terms, really, Cambridge and Oxford, which were the only two universities at the time, anyway, and he couldn't have gone anyway because he was married at that time and you couldn't go if you were married.
[00:54:36.040 --> 00:54:41.880] But they were more like finishing schools, I suppose, if you like, normally to prepare for the priesthood or something like that.
[00:54:41.880 --> 00:54:45.640] But, you know, the grammar schools, that's the rigorous rote learning.
[00:54:45.640 --> 00:54:49.720] It's your Ovid, it's your Cicero, it's your, you know, it's your Horace, etc.
[00:54:49.960 --> 00:54:57.560] It's all of those classical references, that bedrock of knowledge that recurs throughout the illusions in his plays.
[00:54:57.560 --> 00:55:00.040] They're all there in the grammar school curriculum.
[00:55:00.040 --> 00:55:02.360] A really good book on this is by Jonathan Bates.
[00:55:02.360 --> 00:55:03.560] It's called Shakespeare and Ovid.
[00:55:03.560 --> 00:55:14.280] And you can look at the way in which he was informed about these very, these key texts, which is why he had that foundation, you know, and he was a voracious reader.
[00:55:14.280 --> 00:55:15.880] You know, people forget about this.
[00:55:15.880 --> 00:55:19.080] He certainly knew where to look for the books, the right books.
[00:55:19.080 --> 00:55:26.520] He plundered Holland Shed's Chronicles, the second edition, which came out in that year, 1587, when he went to London.
[00:55:26.520 --> 00:55:29.240] And he knew, you know, he was a magpie.
[00:55:29.640 --> 00:55:32.280] And the idea that, well, here's the thing, right?
[00:55:32.280 --> 00:55:33.560] So I think that's the first thing.
[00:55:33.560 --> 00:55:34.680] It's a class snobbery.
[00:55:34.680 --> 00:55:41.640] How could a middle-class guy who didn't go to university, didn't have aristocratic connections, he was facing the same snobbery during his lifetime, by the way.
[00:55:41.640 --> 00:55:47.480] When he got to London, the key preeminent dramatists of the time were the university wits, right?
[00:55:47.480 --> 00:55:59.720] These were university-educated posh guys who were doing this really interesting thing of taking the theater, which was seen very much as low art, you know, and they were infusing with classical references.
[00:55:59.720 --> 00:56:08.360] They'd come, they'd been educated at Oxford and Cambodia, people like George Lilly and Peel, and John Lilly, sorry, and George Peel, and Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Kidd.
[00:56:08.360 --> 00:56:14.560] He didn't go to university, but he was seen within that university wits, you know, and Robert Greene, most notably.
[00:56:14.560 --> 00:56:19.120] And these people, and Shakespeare comes along, and they, what does Robert Greene call him?
[00:56:14.440 --> 00:56:21.280] Robert Greene called him an upstart crow.
[00:56:21.600 --> 00:56:25.760] It's the earliest reference to Shakespeare as a writer that we have.
[00:56:25.760 --> 00:56:34.960] And it comes from this man, Green, who had died just before the publication of this book, where he says there's an upstart crow who is beautified with our feathers.
[00:56:34.960 --> 00:56:38.000] Effectively, he's saying Shakespeare is a plagiarist.
[00:56:38.000 --> 00:56:43.360] He says he thinks he can bombast out a blank verse with the best of them, and he's the best shake scene in a country.
[00:56:43.360 --> 00:56:44.560] It's not subtle.
[00:56:45.280 --> 00:56:47.840] And he's annoyed because he's saying he's an actor.
[00:56:47.840 --> 00:56:49.040] He says he's an actor.
[00:56:49.040 --> 00:56:51.920] He says he's a player.
[00:56:51.920 --> 00:56:54.560] He calls him a player, wrapped in a tiger's hide.
[00:56:54.560 --> 00:56:55.360] I'm paraphrasing.
[00:56:55.360 --> 00:57:03.360] I haven't got the quotation to hand, but he paraphrases a line from one of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays to use against him.
[00:57:03.360 --> 00:57:08.640] And he says he's annoyed because he's saying, we're the university wits, we're the great dramatists, we're the great writers.
[00:57:08.640 --> 00:57:13.120] Along comes this middle-class boy who acts, he's an actor.
[00:57:13.120 --> 00:57:17.280] Shakespeare was an actor first and foremost and continued acting throughout his life.
[00:57:17.280 --> 00:57:21.680] And he starts writing plays and they're better than us and they're more successful.
[00:57:21.680 --> 00:57:24.320] He says he is beautified with our feathers.
[00:57:24.320 --> 00:57:27.840] He's stealing our feathers and wearing them as a costume.
[00:57:27.840 --> 00:57:34.720] And you get that really interesting moment in Hamlet where Polonius is reading the letter and he says, oh, beautiful, he reads out the phrase beautified.
[00:57:34.960 --> 00:57:37.120] Oh, beautified is a vile phrase.
[00:57:37.120 --> 00:57:38.720] Beautified is an awful phrase.
[00:57:38.720 --> 00:57:44.160] And I think that's Shakespeare having a go at Robert Greene for saying that he was beautified with his feathers.
[00:57:44.400 --> 00:57:46.160] But they hated him.
[00:57:46.400 --> 00:57:47.760] They were snobs.
[00:57:47.760 --> 00:57:49.520] Ben Johnson was a snob.
[00:57:49.520 --> 00:57:55.920] He didn't even go to university either, but he was a snob about Shakespeare's writing, saying he knew little Latin and less Greek.
[00:57:56.640 --> 00:57:58.800] But that snobbery has carried through.
[00:57:58.800 --> 00:58:09.960] And I just think when you get someone who is that successful, particularly at a time now where conspiracy theories are just embraced across the board, people, and I'd be fascinated by this because I wrote a piece on Shakespeare for my substack.
[00:58:09.960 --> 00:58:18.680] And the people who started insisting that it was Oxford or Marlowe, they're so vicious and vociferous and adamant, and they've got no evidence.
[00:58:18.680 --> 00:58:20.200] Here's the key question, just to sum up.
[00:58:20.200 --> 00:58:23.080] I'm sorry, I'm rambling on, but here's my key question.
[00:58:23.400 --> 00:58:33.720] If the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to the man from Stratford called William Shakespeare, why is it that every single one of his contemporaries thought that he did?
[00:58:34.040 --> 00:58:35.480] Every single one.
[00:58:35.480 --> 00:58:39.080] Why was there no hint of anyone saying there might be a bit of a hoax here?
[00:58:39.080 --> 00:58:51.160] There might be a bit of if Ben Johnson, his rival and friend, had one slight indication that there could have been a hoax, he would have sung it from the rooftops and never shut up about it.
[00:58:51.160 --> 00:58:51.480] Right.
[00:58:51.480 --> 00:58:53.240] But they didn't because they knew it was him.
[00:58:53.240 --> 00:58:54.760] It's that simple.
[00:58:54.760 --> 00:58:56.280] Yeah, it's a little bit like the U.S.
[00:58:56.360 --> 00:58:57.400] fake the moon landing.
[00:58:57.400 --> 00:58:59.640] Well, then why didn't the Russians say anything?
[00:58:59.640 --> 00:59:02.920] Why did the thousands of people involved in it all keep their traps shut?
[00:59:04.120 --> 00:59:05.800] You can't keep a conspiracy like that.
[00:59:06.040 --> 00:59:06.680] It's not doing.
[00:59:06.760 --> 00:59:14.200] There's something about genius that's six standard deviations out from the mean or more in the case of Shakespeare or Newton.
[00:59:14.200 --> 00:59:21.080] You know, just a handful of these people, Einstein, Feynman, von Neumann, just people that are just like from another planet.
[00:59:21.560 --> 00:59:25.400] And most people just can't conceive of how that.
[00:59:25.400 --> 00:59:28.120] I can't think, you know, the argument from personal incredulity.
[00:59:28.120 --> 00:59:30.040] I can't think of how this could be done.
[00:59:30.040 --> 00:59:32.360] Therefore, there must be something else.
[00:59:32.680 --> 00:59:34.760] Well, it's that thing about genius, isn't it?
[00:59:34.760 --> 00:59:44.960] It's that, I mean, there's a really wonderful book on Shakespeare by Victor Hugo, who obviously wrote, you know, Le Miserable, Punchback and Otchdam, Toilers of the Sea, et cetera.
[00:59:44.960 --> 00:59:47.040] And Toilers of the Sea is his best book, by the way.
[00:59:47.120 --> 00:59:47.840] No one reads it.
[00:59:44.280 --> 00:59:48.960] It's a tip.
[00:59:49.680 --> 00:59:52.640] Anyway, Victor Hugo wrote a book called Shakespeare.
[00:59:52.640 --> 00:59:55.520] And actually, it's not really about Shakespeare, it's about 10% of it's about Shakespeare.
[00:59:55.520 --> 00:59:58.480] It's really about the notion of artistic genius.
[00:59:58.480 --> 01:00:08.720] And the point he makes is that true, sublime, transcendent artistic genius comes about maybe he estimates three or four per generation, right?
[01:00:08.720 --> 01:00:17.280] And he's talking about the likes of Bach or Mozart or Michelangelo or Da Vinci or whatever it might be, you know, whoever you can think of.
[01:00:17.280 --> 01:00:20.640] The real heights, the height when you think, how did they do?
[01:00:20.640 --> 01:00:24.720] You listen to some of Mozart's work and you think, I don't know how a human being does that.
[01:00:25.280 --> 01:00:27.840] And Shakespeare's up there as well.
[01:00:28.160 --> 01:00:28.960] And think about that.
[01:00:28.960 --> 01:00:32.560] So it's got three or four a generation, these incredible geniuses emerge.
[01:00:32.560 --> 01:00:34.080] I think Hugo's got a point.
[01:00:34.080 --> 01:00:36.800] None of them will emerge if the circumstances aren't right.
[01:00:36.800 --> 01:00:44.800] So, like, Shakespeare couldn't have emerged as that transcendental genius had he not appeared in London at that perfect time.
[01:00:44.800 --> 01:00:52.720] You know, when you have the theater suddenly burgeoning with the university wits dignifying it, but making it become a higher form of art.
[01:00:52.720 --> 01:00:58.000] If he hadn't been there at that time, if he hadn't been fortunate to have the grammar school education, none of it would have happened.
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[01:01:58.360 --> 01:02:01.160] We'd have just died and the genius would have died with him.
[01:02:01.160 --> 01:02:01.640] Yeah.
[01:02:01.640 --> 01:02:03.240] We were lucky in a way.
[01:02:03.480 --> 01:02:04.360] But think about that then.
[01:02:04.360 --> 01:02:09.080] So if it's three or four generations, three or four great, great geniuses every generation.
[01:02:09.080 --> 01:02:16.600] So, you know, your Aristophanes, your Pindars, whatever it might be, then the circumstances have to be right.
[01:02:16.600 --> 01:02:22.200] And the woke era cannot produce sublime artistic genius because the conditions it creates.
[01:02:22.520 --> 01:02:25.080] Well, let me ask you a slightly different question.
[01:02:25.320 --> 01:02:32.520] Because the population of Europe at the time of the people you're talking about was very low compared to today.
[01:02:32.520 --> 01:02:39.960] So the counter-argument you hear is: you know, in a world of 8 billion people, why aren't there 30 Mozarts and 30 Shakespeare's?
[01:02:40.520 --> 01:02:41.560] Where are they?
[01:02:41.880 --> 01:02:45.240] Well, we are, you know, there are a number of things going on.
[01:02:45.240 --> 01:02:48.600] There is the degradation of the educational system.
[01:02:48.920 --> 01:02:51.800] So people don't have that bedrock that Shakespeare had.
[01:02:51.800 --> 01:02:57.800] You know, it's, I mean, even if even my father, my father had a much better education than me.
[01:02:58.120 --> 01:03:00.120] You know, he had a much more rigorous education.
[01:03:00.120 --> 01:03:00.520] Really?
[01:03:01.080 --> 01:03:02.760] People of my people of my uh you have a PhD.
[01:03:02.760 --> 01:03:04.120] What are you talking about?
[01:03:04.120 --> 01:03:05.640] Yeah, but I had to catch up.
[01:03:05.640 --> 01:03:06.680] Like, this is my point.
[01:03:06.640 --> 01:03:08.840] Like, I didn't really start working.
[01:03:08.840 --> 01:03:11.160] I wasn't studious until I got to university.
[01:03:11.160 --> 01:03:13.000] I was a lazy boy.
[01:03:12.960 --> 01:03:16.720] I was, uh, I almost got thrown out of my sixth form college because I never turned up.
[01:03:17.040 --> 01:03:18.240] I didn't turn up before midday.
[01:03:18.240 --> 01:03:19.520] I was too lazy.
[01:03:14.920 --> 01:03:21.360] Like, I, you know, it was absolutely crazy.
[01:03:21.520 --> 01:03:23.440] I was almost expelled.
[01:03:23.440 --> 01:03:26.640] And I didn't do homework ever.
[01:03:26.640 --> 01:03:28.480] I didn't, I didn't read anything.
[01:03:28.480 --> 01:03:29.840] And I wasn't forced to.
[01:03:29.840 --> 01:03:34.880] You know, I mean, I went to a state comprehensive, you know, this isn't, I didn't go to a posh school.
[01:03:34.880 --> 01:03:39.360] I didn't like the private schools in the UK, they're on you all the time because I've taught at them.
[01:03:39.360 --> 01:03:44.080] And so, if one kid misses homework two or three times, there's meetings about it.
[01:03:44.080 --> 01:03:46.160] They're like, we're calling the parents, we deal with it.
[01:03:46.160 --> 01:03:47.280] None of that in my school.
[01:03:47.280 --> 01:03:48.320] You didn't have to do homework.
[01:03:48.320 --> 01:03:49.440] You didn't have to do anything.
[01:03:49.440 --> 01:03:50.560] And so I was lazy.
[01:03:50.560 --> 01:03:54.080] And so as an adult, I've always been catching up on my education.
[01:03:54.080 --> 01:03:57.200] Even now, even now, I don't have the rigorous.
[01:03:57.280 --> 01:03:58.640] I didn't have that rigorous bedrock.
[01:03:58.800 --> 01:04:02.880] The only way I can do it is by constantly reading and constantly catching up.
[01:04:02.880 --> 01:04:04.560] And, you know, I'm not blaming anyone for that.
[01:04:04.560 --> 01:04:06.560] Like, that's just a general kind of degradation.
[01:04:06.560 --> 01:04:11.760] We've had in the UK successive governments that have just made examinations easier, right?
[01:04:11.760 --> 01:04:14.160] And if you don't believe me, just read some of the old.
[01:04:14.160 --> 01:04:19.520] So we've got a thing called GCSEs, which is an exam that you take roughly around the age of 15, 16.
[01:04:20.400 --> 01:04:26.160] And if you compare those papers with the equivalents from 40 years or 30 years before, which is the O level, look at the paper.
[01:04:26.160 --> 01:04:29.680] It's like you're dealing with, it's the difference between kindergarten and a PhD.
[01:04:29.680 --> 01:04:30.960] It's incredible.
[01:04:30.960 --> 01:04:37.120] And of course, every successive government has wanted to make the to boast of their improvements to education.
[01:04:37.120 --> 01:04:39.040] So you've had grade deflation.
[01:04:39.040 --> 01:04:43.360] In other words, it is easier now to get a top grade by doing very little work.
[01:04:43.360 --> 01:04:51.760] I mean, when I was a teacher, I remember there were some totally semi-literate kids getting A's because it wasn't that hard to get A's, you know?
[01:04:51.760 --> 01:04:56.320] Whereas and I think, so I think the education thing is a problem.
[01:04:56.800 --> 01:04:59.520] Kids don't read, kids are patronized, you know.
[01:04:59.520 --> 01:05:05.800] When I was at school, when I was teaching, we were told not to teach Charles Dickens to the kids because they wouldn't get it.
[01:05:05.800 --> 01:05:09.240] Well, they would if you just trusted them to get it, you know.
[01:05:10.680 --> 01:05:16.360] I think in order to create those conditions for the gene for that genius, firstly, you need civilization.
[01:05:17.000 --> 01:05:18.920] You need to have a civilized society.
[01:05:18.920 --> 01:05:23.720] You need to build up that thing that elevates us above the animals.
[01:05:23.720 --> 01:05:27.960] And that's something that is not so easily acquired and very easily destroyed.
[01:05:27.960 --> 01:05:31.880] Would it be Western civilization with certain elements that bring that out?
[01:05:32.520 --> 01:05:35.640] There are great geniuses that emerge in other cultures too.
[01:05:37.000 --> 01:05:49.720] But certainly, if you take the Greek civilization, there's a reason why those great dramatists like Menander, like Aristophanes, you know, like Euripides, there's a reason why they emerged.
[01:05:49.960 --> 01:05:54.040] Unfortunately, part of the reason is that they all had slaves, so they had a lot of leisure time.
[01:05:55.160 --> 01:05:57.720] Although we might have that again with AI, of course.
[01:05:58.120 --> 01:06:00.760] But the one counter is that they're doing something else now.
[01:06:01.000 --> 01:06:12.920] They went into jazz rather than classical music, or a Jackson Pollock, you know, just designs a whole new genre, or it's Bill Gates programming, or it's Elon Musk designing rockets.
[01:06:12.920 --> 01:06:15.000] You know, they're just doing something else.
[01:06:15.000 --> 01:06:20.200] There's something interesting and experimental about a Jackson Pollock or a Mark Rothko, but it's not transcendental, is it?
[01:06:20.200 --> 01:06:21.160] Let's be honest about it.
[01:06:21.160 --> 01:06:21.960] It's just not.
[01:06:22.200 --> 01:06:28.440] So you don't get that sense of awe that you get from the Sistine Chapel or at the Parthenon, do you?
[01:06:28.440 --> 01:06:28.760] No.
[01:06:28.760 --> 01:06:31.000] And, you know, we have to be honest about that.
[01:06:31.000 --> 01:06:36.040] We have to be unafraid to say that there is such a thing as artistic genius and there's such a thing as lower art.
[01:06:36.040 --> 01:06:36.840] There just is.
[01:06:37.080 --> 01:06:39.240] And that, I don't care if you call me a snob.
[01:06:39.240 --> 01:06:40.280] It's just true.
[01:06:40.240 --> 01:06:40.480] Right?
[01:06:40.760 --> 01:06:43.800] You mean the banana, the banana duct tape to the wall?
[01:06:43.800 --> 01:06:44.600] Amazing.
[01:06:44.600 --> 01:06:45.120] Yeah.
[01:06:45.440 --> 01:06:50.240] You know, sell a tape a banana to a wall and you think you think you're da Vinci.
[01:06:44.760 --> 01:06:51.120] Hilarious.
[01:06:51.840 --> 01:06:54.560] You're just a bit of humility would be quite good, wouldn't it?
[01:06:55.280 --> 01:06:55.920] That would be quite good.
[01:06:55.920 --> 01:07:11.680] I mean, if you just listen to that last piece that Mozart, the last thing Mozart composed, the Lacrimosa from the Requiem, which was then completed by someone else, and you can actually weirdly tell with the knowledge that the first eight bars were the only things he composed and the other composer took over.
[01:07:11.680 --> 01:07:14.320] And you can kind of hear it at that point.
[01:07:14.320 --> 01:07:15.040] It's really interesting.
[01:07:15.040 --> 01:07:27.840] But the way it builds and this sort of sense of this mournful, like plaintive quality to this sheer beauty, he's got a kind of, he's got a, there's a gap between him and the numinous.
[01:07:27.840 --> 01:07:34.560] There's some, he was able to step through that gap and enable us to see it too.
[01:07:34.560 --> 01:07:41.920] Well, wasn't that theme in Amadeus where Salieri is cursing God for not giving him that spark of genius?
[01:07:41.920 --> 01:07:43.520] Yeah, I mean, that's an amazing way.
[01:07:43.600 --> 01:07:48.000] I mean, I know that Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play, is a lot, it's fictional, of course, it is.
[01:07:48.400 --> 01:07:54.000] And, you know, the implication that in the insinuation that Salieri was this deeply bitter, you know, all of that is very contested.
[01:07:54.000 --> 01:07:54.320] Yeah.
[01:07:54.560 --> 01:08:00.320] But Salieri was not the genius that Mozart was and never could have been.
[01:08:00.320 --> 01:08:12.960] And Mozart was, you know, had a sort of wicked sense of humor, a very dirty sense of humor, and was maybe seen as a bit more of a this kind of brat, this spoilt brat who was, you know, taken around Europe by his dad.
[01:08:12.960 --> 01:08:28.200] And, you know, ultimately, there's something in him, that is genius, that was, was wherever it comes from, God or just something that human evolution throws up every now and then, that he had something that was magical, you know.
[01:08:28.000 --> 01:08:31.880] And it's, and it's, and what's interesting, I mean, there's a piece he wrote.
[01:08:29.680 --> 01:08:34.440] I remember I was going, I was listening to Mozart on Shuffle.
[01:08:34.520 --> 01:08:41.960] I've got like the complete works on my Apple, whatever, and I was listening to it on Shuffle, and this piece came up that I hadn't heard before or I didn't recognize.
[01:08:41.960 --> 01:08:42.680] And it really struck me.
[01:08:42.680 --> 01:08:45.000] I thought, I really, really love this.
[01:08:45.000 --> 01:08:49.560] And then I looked into it, and it was the piece he wrote when he was nine years old.
[01:08:49.560 --> 01:08:53.240] And it was a piece he wrote while he was in England because the lyrics were in English.
[01:08:53.240 --> 01:08:54.440] It's God is our refuge.
[01:08:54.440 --> 01:08:58.120] It's based on the Psalm, I think Psalm 46.
[01:08:58.440 --> 01:09:00.920] And he wrote it in English and he wrote it.
[01:09:00.920 --> 01:09:06.680] And the manuscript was given to the British Museum while he was staying near Sloane Square in London.
[01:09:06.680 --> 01:09:15.000] And I was just astonished that this thing that caught my ear and I thought, because I often, the pieces that catch my ear, I save in my favorites box.
[01:09:15.000 --> 01:09:16.200] And I just didn't expect that.
[01:09:16.200 --> 01:09:18.360] I didn't expect, I mean, I know it's not his best work.
[01:09:18.360 --> 01:09:20.600] Something about it resonated with me, and I don't know why.
[01:09:20.600 --> 01:09:22.520] But it was, he was nine.
[01:09:22.520 --> 01:09:23.480] He was nine.
[01:09:23.480 --> 01:09:26.360] And you listen to that and you think, and by the way, they tested it.
[01:09:26.360 --> 01:09:29.960] I mean, again, the conspiracy theorists will say, that's not possible.
[01:09:30.600 --> 01:09:32.440] His father composed it.
[01:09:32.440 --> 01:09:33.480] Well, they're wrong.
[01:09:33.480 --> 01:09:38.200] They're factually wrong because at the time, there were musicologists in Europe who tested it.
[01:09:38.200 --> 01:09:42.280] They locked the boy Mozart in a room and they made him compose stuff by himself.
[01:09:42.280 --> 01:09:42.920] He did it.
[01:09:42.920 --> 01:09:44.040] It was him.
[01:09:44.040 --> 01:09:56.600] And of course, his later masterworks, once you get to the, you know, the magic flute and the marriage of Figura, that once you're up there, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's, it's, if you believe in God, I mean, that to me is the best evidence of God, that kind of thing.
[01:09:57.000 --> 01:09:59.400] You know, how else can you, how else can you account for it?
[01:09:59.400 --> 01:10:02.360] But, you know, of course, people think it couldn't have happened.
[01:10:03.240 --> 01:10:14.880] There was a joke among SETI scientists about sending out the Voyager records with, you know, different elements of the human condition and said, well, we should put Bach in there.
[01:10:15.600 --> 01:10:17.600] And the line was, no, that would just be bragging.
[01:10:17.840 --> 01:10:18.480] That's too much.
[01:10:14.440 --> 01:10:21.360] Yeah, exactly.
[01:10:22.000 --> 01:10:27.680] You know, there's a psychologist named Dean Keith Symington who wrote a book on genius.
[01:10:28.000 --> 01:10:35.760] And one of his points was that, of course, there's genetic flukes and all that stuff that you can't control for, but that they produce a lot of content.
[01:10:35.760 --> 01:10:46.000] And so his model was kind of a Darwinian model, that they produce a lot of content, and then either they're selecting or the public is selecting.
[01:10:46.000 --> 01:10:51.440] And the stuff we get at the end is the absolute best by their own selection or the public selecting.
[01:10:51.440 --> 01:10:56.240] But these are not just people that come out of nowhere with no background and they just can do it.
[01:10:56.240 --> 01:10:57.520] Yeah, well, that's very interesting.
[01:10:57.520 --> 01:11:04.160] I mean, they do say, you know, like with the Beatles, you know, that it was their continual gigs in Amsterdam or wherever it was.
[01:11:04.160 --> 01:11:04.640] It is constant.
[01:11:04.720 --> 01:11:05.440] Was it Amsterdam?
[01:11:05.520 --> 01:11:06.320] Hamburg.
[01:11:06.320 --> 01:11:07.200] Handbook, sorry.
[01:11:07.200 --> 01:11:10.640] And, you know, you do have to work a lot at it.
[01:11:10.640 --> 01:11:14.080] And you have to, like, like, I mean, Shakespeare wrote continually, you know.
[01:11:14.720 --> 01:11:15.680] You know, he was very prolific.
[01:11:15.920 --> 01:11:18.000] Not the most prolific, by the way, but very prolific.
[01:11:18.160 --> 01:11:18.480] Yeah.
[01:11:18.480 --> 01:11:25.760] And also the objection to, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, where he made famous the 10,000-hour rule.
[01:11:25.760 --> 01:11:26.480] 10,000 hours.
[01:11:26.800 --> 01:11:32.400] Yeah, but there's a lot of garage bands that put in 10,000 hours and they still stink.
[01:11:32.400 --> 01:11:34.000] They didn't become the Beatles.
[01:11:34.160 --> 01:11:36.080] Because you'd have to have that spark of genius as well.
[01:11:37.280 --> 01:11:42.720] And if you look at Mozart, well, it's still pretty young to be producing work of that quality.
[01:11:43.120 --> 01:11:52.800] And I know that he was borrowing from existing tropes, and I know that he was, you know, really just, he had that ear where he could listen and replicate the best features of the music he heard.
[01:11:52.800 --> 01:11:58.800] But by the time he gets later in his career and he cultivates his own voice, his own musical voice, then it is utterly incredible.
[01:11:58.800 --> 01:12:00.520] And I suppose with Shakespeare, you could say the same.
[01:11:59.920 --> 01:12:09.640] Well, Titus Andronicus, early plays, Titus Andronicus, Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, you could say these are dispensable, maybe.
[01:12:09.640 --> 01:12:10.520] They're not really.
[01:12:10.520 --> 01:12:11.800] They're still brilliant.
[01:12:12.040 --> 01:12:21.080] I mean, I think with Shakespeare, he was a natural comic because Comedy of Errors works as a farce in the true sort of tensor plautus with that structure.
[01:12:21.080 --> 01:12:27.720] And with, you know, it's one of the few plays he wrote that observes the Aristotelian principles of unity.
[01:12:28.120 --> 01:12:34.920] And it really works well in performance as just a really great knockabout farce.
[01:12:34.920 --> 01:12:37.080] It's not his highest work, you know.
[01:12:37.080 --> 01:12:49.400] Love's Labour's Lost, another example, early play, very mannered, very kind of about the art of language and the courtly rhetoric and the puns and the variation.
[01:12:49.400 --> 01:12:55.640] You know, when the characters write their poems, he always uses a different poet format, different verse structure.
[01:12:55.640 --> 01:12:57.080] He's playing with words.
[01:12:57.080 --> 01:13:02.200] It's the one that's aged the most because so many of the references we don't get anymore.
[01:13:02.200 --> 01:13:04.360] But it's still amazing.
[01:13:04.360 --> 01:13:07.880] And it's still something that I return to all the time.
[01:13:07.880 --> 01:13:09.400] But then, of course, you hit Hamlet.
[01:13:09.400 --> 01:13:15.720] We think about the Greg, you hit Hamlet and Othello and Lear, and no one's come close to those plays.
[01:13:15.720 --> 01:13:17.480] 12th Night as well, if you want to go into the comedies.
[01:13:17.480 --> 01:13:23.800] So I think tragedy took him a bit longer to get right because Titus Andronicus is, you know, I mean, I love it.
[01:13:23.800 --> 01:13:26.120] And I actually think it's much better than people think it is.
[01:13:26.120 --> 01:13:28.680] But it is very much playing to the crowd.
[01:13:28.680 --> 01:13:34.520] And it is, you know, violent to the point where it's comedic.
[01:13:34.520 --> 01:13:35.880] And I think that's deliberate, by the way.
[01:13:35.880 --> 01:13:38.120] I think he was writing a tragic comedy.
[01:13:38.120 --> 01:13:43.160] I think he was trying to be funny, but it lacks the nuances, it lacks the subtlety.
[01:13:43.160 --> 01:13:47.600] But even in Titus Andronicus, you get these beautiful passages, you know.
[01:13:44.760 --> 01:14:01.360] You know, even when he has a caricature like the character of Aaron, the Moore, who's sort of a prototype Yago in a way, this is this black-hearted villain who is like a kind of pantomimic, has that pantomimic quality.
[01:14:01.360 --> 01:14:07.360] But even he starts to have this tent, this human tenderness when it comes to his own baby.
[01:14:07.360 --> 01:14:13.520] So he can't even resist, even in those early stages when he's honing his crowd, he still can't resist being better than everyone else.
[01:14:13.520 --> 01:14:23.840] Like even in an early history play like Richard III, where you think, well, Richard III, quite a bit of a pantomime villain, he's the one who's very self-hu, he's very self-amused, isn't he?
[01:14:23.840 --> 01:14:28.400] Like he tells you his evil plots and he laughs about it.
[01:14:28.400 --> 01:14:30.160] And we laugh at him.
[01:14:30.160 --> 01:14:30.560] Right.
[01:14:30.560 --> 01:14:33.200] Right up until the point in that play where he kills the kids.
[01:14:33.200 --> 01:14:36.480] And you know, you notice in that play, it's like an iron curtain comes down in that play.
[01:14:36.480 --> 01:14:38.480] And it's like, we're not laughing anymore.
[01:14:38.480 --> 01:14:39.920] Something's gone wrong.
[01:14:39.920 --> 01:14:42.640] And then he has that dream about his victims.
[01:14:42.640 --> 01:14:44.640] And he's in a moment of trauma.
[01:14:44.640 --> 01:14:48.240] And even then, you are, then you start feeling for him and hating him.
[01:14:48.240 --> 01:14:49.680] And it becomes incredibly complex.
[01:14:49.680 --> 01:14:56.560] And that's where Shakespeare begins his pervention of the soliloquy and really begins developing that idea of the soliloquy, which he masters.
[01:14:56.560 --> 01:14:57.360] No one else does it.
[01:14:57.360 --> 01:14:58.080] No one else can do it.
[01:14:58.080 --> 01:14:58.880] I mean, that's the other thing, right?
[01:14:59.040 --> 01:15:08.640] So, I'm sorry, you're on my favorite subject, but when you get to the soliloquies of Macbeth, is this a dagger that I see before me, the handle before my hand?
[01:15:09.120 --> 01:15:12.320] Or Hamlet, of course, to be or not to be, that is the question, etc.
[01:15:13.600 --> 01:15:16.320] They are so perfect.
[01:15:16.800 --> 01:15:20.160] I don't think you could change a single syllable in those soliloquies.
[01:15:20.160 --> 01:15:39.560] And that innovation of a character on stage, not just doing what Richard III does, which is to tell you the plot, not just being expositional, but delving within their own mind and wrestling with their own psychology, and sometimes even revealing things to you that they don't themselves understand, which Hamlet does, which Yago does.
[01:15:39.560 --> 01:15:52.760] I mean, the brilliant thing, Yago's soliloquies in Othello is fascinating because the soliloquy is meant to be direct address to the audience, one character on stage, speaking the truth because they are revealing what they are thinking.
[01:15:52.760 --> 01:15:59.800] But Yago lies to himself, and then in the course of those soliloquies, he starts believing his own lies.
[01:15:59.800 --> 01:16:04.440] So it reveals so much more about him than he knows he's letting on.
[01:16:04.440 --> 01:16:06.840] I mean, the sheer complexity of that.
[01:16:07.320 --> 01:16:10.440] This is what makes Shakespeare the ultimate playwright.
[01:16:10.440 --> 01:16:15.400] Every character is an individual, breathing, living human.
[01:16:15.400 --> 01:16:18.120] Even the minor characters seem to think for themselves.
[01:16:18.120 --> 01:16:21.640] You even get a sense that you know what they are from just a few lines.
[01:16:21.640 --> 01:16:23.560] And they're all wildly different.
[01:16:23.560 --> 01:16:24.840] How is that possible?
[01:16:24.840 --> 01:16:31.000] Like, it's not like most writers, all of your characters end up sounding pretty much like you in one way or another, right?
[01:16:31.160 --> 01:16:36.920] I often give the example of Quentin Tarantino because I love Quentin Tarantino, but all his characters speak like Quentin Tarantino.
[01:16:36.920 --> 01:16:37.720] That's right.
[01:16:37.720 --> 01:16:42.760] Like, and even Little Girl in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood talks like him.
[01:16:42.760 --> 01:16:44.440] But Shakespeare doesn't do that.
[01:16:44.440 --> 01:16:57.320] I mean, I think we often misunderstand because we're looking back 400 years later at this very kind of stylized, poeticized Elizabethan language, heightened stage language, and we think they all sound the same.
[01:16:57.320 --> 01:17:09.880] But if you learn the language and if you embed yourself in that world, you realize how different they all are in terms of the way they speak and what they say and what they think and their reactions to things.
[01:17:10.200 --> 01:17:17.200] It is almost like he had a split personality and was able to understand every aspect of humankind.
[01:17:17.200 --> 01:17:17.760] Amazing.
[01:17:14.760 --> 01:17:19.120] I could listen to you all day about this.
[01:17:19.280 --> 01:17:28.800] Last point on genius, I like to use a Galton board, which is, you know, Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, pioneer in statistics, bell curve.
[01:17:28.800 --> 01:17:32.480] So a Galton board, you can look it up and see it in operation.
[01:17:32.480 --> 01:17:40.000] You just take a bell curve with a bunch of little columns, and then you drop the little BBs that fall through there and they split it each one.
[01:17:40.320 --> 01:17:44.480] And so you're going to get most of them in the middle of the bell curve.
[01:17:44.480 --> 01:17:54.720] But to get all the way out here and so just make it a huge one where there's like a hundred slots on each side, the chances of any of the BBs getting all the way to the end are very, very rare.
[01:17:54.720 --> 01:17:59.760] So geneticists tell us that even something like height, there's no gene for height.
[01:17:59.760 --> 01:18:01.520] It's like a thousand genes.
[01:18:01.520 --> 01:18:07.040] And so something like IQ or creativity is going to have, you know, probably tens of thousands of genes.
[01:18:07.040 --> 01:18:10.480] So most of us are just, you know, getting in the middle of the bell curve.
[01:18:10.480 --> 01:18:20.720] But, you know, every once in a while, and then you could extrapolate that to the environment and the timing in your culture, the place where you just happened to be born, which is you have no control over.
[01:18:20.720 --> 01:18:22.160] So you're going to end up way out here.
[01:18:22.160 --> 01:18:25.040] So in any generation, yeah, it's only going to be three or four.
[01:18:25.040 --> 01:18:45.920] But at Burt, even within that, even those within the middle of the curve, I mean, even the artists who aren't, you know, even the Salearis, let's say, you know, I mean, not, they're important too, because, not just because I believe in art for its own sake, but also because, and not only because an artist who isn't the height of genius can still produce beautiful, important work, that's true as well.
[01:18:45.920 --> 01:18:52.160] But they also contribute to a kind of artistic culture within which those geniuses can emerge.
[01:18:52.160 --> 01:18:55.040] There would have been no Shakespeare without Marlowe, for instance.
[01:18:55.040 --> 01:18:55.360] Right.
[01:18:55.360 --> 01:18:56.080] So many of those early.
[01:18:56.320 --> 01:18:57.200] All right, that's a good point.
[01:18:57.200 --> 01:18:57.680] You're right.
[01:18:58.160 --> 01:18:59.200] He borrows from Marlowe.
[01:18:59.640 --> 01:19:07.000] You know, there's a reason why the canon of English literature is really formed by the artists and who they mimic and who they imitate.
[01:19:07.000 --> 01:19:09.400] And it's a kind of collaborative thing.
[01:19:09.400 --> 01:19:23.560] And so for all sorts of reasons, I defend artistic freedom, even when it's a mediocre artist, because it's all part of a broader civilizational battle.
[01:19:23.560 --> 01:19:29.400] We need to have a thriving artistic culture and civilization above all things.
[01:19:29.400 --> 01:19:33.080] Are you worried about the assault on meritocracy by the woke?
[01:19:33.080 --> 01:19:34.200] Back to your book.
[01:19:34.520 --> 01:19:35.880] Sorry, yeah, let's go back to the book.
[01:19:35.880 --> 01:19:36.440] I mean, yeah.
[01:19:36.840 --> 01:19:37.880] Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
[01:19:37.880 --> 01:19:40.280] The meritocracy is part of it.
[01:19:40.280 --> 01:19:42.360] And we haven't had that in the arts for a long time.
[01:19:42.680 --> 01:19:50.120] I mean, certainly, you know, in the comedy industry in the UK, for a long time now, you're effectively booked and showcased and put on TV panel shows.
[01:19:50.120 --> 01:19:57.400] If you fulfill certain ethnic or racial or sexual criteria, it becomes a kind of diversity showcase.
[01:19:57.800 --> 01:19:59.640] I'm not saying they're all talentless.
[01:19:59.640 --> 01:20:05.960] There are some very talented people, but a lot of them are pretty bad and pretty talentless, but they get on TV anyway.
[01:20:05.960 --> 01:20:09.640] And this gives the illusion that there aren't more talented people out there.
[01:20:09.640 --> 01:20:18.040] Ultimately, the meritocracy system, but it's difficult with the arts because, of course, there's also the subjective judgment of humor and taste, etc.
[01:20:18.440 --> 01:20:25.320] But it's certainly true that I think genuine artistic genius would probably just not get commissioned, right?
[01:20:25.320 --> 01:20:37.000] I mean, I think that's a real problem because the ideological capture of the arts, you know, someone, the equivalent of Shakespeare today, would come along with a script, and the sensitivity readers would strip out all the best bits.
[01:20:37.000 --> 01:20:42.520] And then the theater commissioner would say, Can we just cast all these people as gay or black or whatever?
[01:20:42.920 --> 01:20:49.280] Oh, and by the way, the messaging here is a bit dodgy, you know, and maybe just censor that bit, please, because that might upset some people in the audience.
[01:20:44.920 --> 01:20:50.640] And it wouldn't work.
[01:20:50.960 --> 01:21:03.440] So even if we had all those thousand different variables that you mentioned in order to fulfill genius, we just, we just, in the woke era, we just don't have the culture for it to emerge.
[01:21:03.440 --> 01:21:04.320] It can't.
[01:21:04.320 --> 01:21:10.720] And I challenge anyone to tell me one major artistic genius within the woke era.
[01:21:10.720 --> 01:21:11.520] Where is it?
[01:21:11.520 --> 01:21:12.320] Not one.
[01:21:13.200 --> 01:21:13.840] Interesting.
[01:21:13.840 --> 01:21:14.960] There are brilliant writers.
[01:21:14.960 --> 01:21:22.000] There are brilliant, there are people I love and adore as writers and filmmakers and novelists, but they're not that.
[01:21:22.000 --> 01:21:27.760] They're not the heights of Bach and Shakespeare.
[01:21:27.760 --> 01:21:29.440] That was the before time.
[01:21:29.440 --> 01:21:33.120] You're the first person I've heard in a long time to use that phrase, the before time.
[01:21:33.120 --> 01:21:35.440] So here's what I wrote about.
[01:21:35.440 --> 01:21:38.480] Here's the depth of my literary scholarship.
[01:21:38.480 --> 01:21:53.280] In a 1966 episode of Star Trek called Miri, a prepubescent heroine of the story explains to the flummox Captain Kirk what happened on her planet in which all the grown-ups died leaving the only children to fend for themselves.
[01:21:53.280 --> 01:21:56.640] That was when they started to get sick in the before time.
[01:21:56.640 --> 01:21:58.640] We hid, then they were gone.
[01:21:58.640 --> 01:22:27.520] As the linguist Ben Zimmer tracks the phrase's entomology, the before time represents a pre-plague world, and the expression has a deep literary history at least as old as the King James Bible, published in 1611, in which the author of the book of Samuel writes, Before time in Israel, when a man went to inquire of God, thus he spake, Come and let us go to the seer, for he that is now called a prophet was before time called a seer.
[01:22:27.840 --> 01:22:34.440] The locution was resurrected in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as tracked by the Atlantic columnist Marina Corin.
[01:22:35.000 --> 01:22:46.760] The exasperated sense is that the days before the coronavirus swept across the country, the before time, as many have taken to calling it, feel like a bygone era.
[01:22:47.080 --> 01:22:48.520] That's such a great phrase.
[01:22:48.520 --> 01:22:48.840] Go ahead.
[01:22:49.080 --> 01:22:50.680] What was the before time before woke?
[01:22:50.680 --> 01:22:52.040] And what happened?
[01:22:52.360 --> 01:22:53.400] Lots of things happened.
[01:22:53.400 --> 01:22:59.960] I mean, I try and trace it in the book, and I'm talking about in the UK, it was very much Brexit was part of it, 2016.
[01:22:59.960 --> 01:23:03.720] And of course, that combines with Donald Trump's election in 2016.
[01:23:03.720 --> 01:23:14.040] I think that sowed the seeds of, I mean, already the woke era had begun insofar as the critical social justice woke activists had started to accrue power around 2012.
[01:23:14.040 --> 01:23:20.760] You start hearing their various phrases in their lexicon appearing with greater frequency in the media, and there's a sudden spike.
[01:23:20.760 --> 01:23:38.520] By the time 2016 comes around, I think Brexit and Donald Trump really consolidated this tribalistic world that we now occupy and this reduction of humanity to this kind of Manichean view of good versus evil, kind of Disney view of the world, where there are villains.
[01:23:38.520 --> 01:23:42.440] You know, if you vote one way, you're good on the right side of history.
[01:23:42.440 --> 01:23:46.120] And if you vote the other way, you're on the side of the devils and you're evil.
[01:23:46.120 --> 01:24:06.600] And it really ramped up, and nothing was ever the same after Brexit or Trump because all of a sudden, and during the Brexit debate, people who were going to vote leave were dismissed as evil, racist, stupid bigots who are not just we disagree over our membership of an international trading bloc, which is what it was.
[01:24:06.600 --> 01:24:13.720] The real absurdity of Brexit is very few people who were very exorcised about the whole thing really knew anything about it.
[01:24:13.720 --> 01:24:16.560] They didn't know what they were so fervently supporting.
[01:24:16.880 --> 01:24:27.920] A lot of people who went out there in their face paint of the EU flags, painted blue like woad in a battle, and like that's something out of Braveheart.
[01:24:28.480 --> 01:24:31.840] They are screaming, we must overturn the result.
[01:24:31.840 --> 01:24:33.440] We must stay in the EU.
[01:24:33.440 --> 01:24:37.200] A year before, if you'd have asked them what they thought of the EU, they would have said, What's that?
[01:24:37.200 --> 01:24:39.680] They don't, it wasn't, they didn't know, didn't know anything.
[01:24:39.680 --> 01:24:48.000] I remember getting a row with a friend about this and asking him to name a member of the EU Commission, and he hadn't even heard of the EU Commission, he didn't even know what it was.
[01:24:48.000 --> 01:24:50.400] So, you know, they didn't know what it was they were getting upset about.
[01:24:50.880 --> 01:24:53.680] What they cared about was that we're the good, we are good.
[01:24:54.000 --> 01:24:55.440] We good, you bad.
[01:24:55.440 --> 01:25:01.840] You know, that was it was just reduces childish, infantile way of thinking about public discussion and public debate.
[01:25:01.840 --> 01:25:02.880] And that never went away.
[01:25:02.880 --> 01:25:03.680] Same with Trump.
[01:25:03.680 --> 01:25:10.880] And that's why for a long time, you know, everyone's saying, if you vote Republican, you're an evil, you're an evil bigot, you're a fascist.
[01:25:11.120 --> 01:25:12.640] And then that word fascist came back.
[01:25:12.640 --> 01:25:18.240] You know, I quote the article by George Orwell that mentions the fact that the word fascism doesn't mean anything anymore.
[01:25:18.400 --> 01:25:19.840] It could have been written yesterday.
[01:25:19.840 --> 01:25:20.800] You know, I know.
[01:25:20.800 --> 01:25:26.160] He says about, oh, it's used for, you know, anything, shopkeepers, JB Priestley broadcasts.
[01:25:26.160 --> 01:25:28.160] Anything I don't like is fascist.
[01:25:28.160 --> 01:25:30.240] And he's writing that when the fascists were around, right?
[01:25:30.640 --> 01:25:31.680] It's so incredible.
[01:25:31.680 --> 01:25:36.320] Yeah, it's absolutely mad that that was written when it was.
[01:25:37.120 --> 01:25:46.800] So, yeah, that's my point: is that I think that 2016 moment really killed off the before times in a way and ended.
[01:25:46.800 --> 01:25:48.560] It moved us into a new era.
[01:25:48.560 --> 01:25:49.680] And we're still in it now.
[01:25:49.680 --> 01:25:54.080] And then the second thing, of course, was 2020, was the lockdowns, was that, I think.
[01:25:54.080 --> 01:26:03.880] So the sort of hysteria that emerged from everyone being locked up and you know, and the fact that the members of the elites were lying to us about various things.
[01:26:04.440 --> 01:26:14.920] You know, the fact that we can no longer trust the figures of authority because for a long time, the idea of being, let's say, well, what was the good example?
[01:26:14.920 --> 01:26:19.160] The example of the theory that the virus had leaked from a lab in Wuhan.
[01:26:19.240 --> 01:26:20.680] Yeah, the lab leak hypothesis.
[01:26:20.920 --> 01:26:24.600] That was always called a crazy conspiracy theory, but it wasn't.
[01:26:24.600 --> 01:26:25.720] It was probably true.
[01:26:25.880 --> 01:26:30.520] And of course, it was probably true because it's the world's biggest coronavirus lab in Wuhan.
[01:26:30.520 --> 01:26:31.400] And that's where it came from.
[01:26:31.800 --> 01:26:36.200] I mean, it took Jon Stewart doing a comedy bit to make it okay to say it.
[01:26:36.200 --> 01:26:36.600] I know.
[01:26:36.600 --> 01:26:38.040] It's absolutely crazy.
[01:26:38.600 --> 01:26:43.800] But no, I think that's the thing that now everyone sort of agreed.
[01:26:43.800 --> 01:26:47.240] But there were actually academic journals saying that this was just a racist conspiracy theory.
[01:26:47.240 --> 01:26:47.560] Yeah.
[01:26:48.440 --> 01:26:57.000] And I think when that happens and when there's such mistrust in people of power, and because the media have been lying to us for so many years about so many things, and they still do.
[01:26:57.000 --> 01:27:01.960] I mean, the BBC, the BBC will tell us that a rapist is a woman.
[01:27:03.000 --> 01:27:04.040] They'll say she, her.
[01:27:04.760 --> 01:27:10.680] There are even some articles they've done where they don't even mention that this is someone who identifies as a woman or they don't even use the word trans.
[01:27:11.000 --> 01:27:12.040] So that's a journalist.
[01:27:12.040 --> 01:27:13.000] That's the national broadcast.
[01:27:13.000 --> 01:27:13.400] Just lying.
[01:27:13.480 --> 01:27:14.440] I quoted J.K.
[01:27:14.440 --> 01:27:19.000] Rowling's tweet quoting Orwell's news speak.
[01:27:19.000 --> 01:27:22.520] And, you know, we're black is white, and this is that, and this is that.
[01:27:22.520 --> 01:27:27.080] And the person with a penis who raped you is a woman.
[01:27:27.320 --> 01:27:29.480] Her last, whatever the exact phrase was.
[01:27:29.480 --> 01:27:30.120] It was so funny.
[01:27:30.520 --> 01:27:31.400] That was a great quotation.
[01:27:31.400 --> 01:27:37.400] I mean, she's, yeah, she's adapting the slogan of the ruling party in 1984.
[01:27:37.400 --> 01:27:38.680] And she's exactly right.
[01:27:39.000 --> 01:27:45.840] We were expected for so long to believe things that we know are not true, to parrot falsehoods, to say that two plus two equals five.
[01:27:45.840 --> 01:27:47.920] And so you end up with this legitimation crisis.
[01:27:44.920 --> 01:27:50.000] You end up with a situation where no one believes figures of authority.
[01:27:50.080 --> 01:27:59.920] So I think off the back of the tribalization and the of 2016, the good versus evil dynamic, which the woke is all about.
[01:27:59.920 --> 01:28:02.560] You know, if you disagree with them, you're not just wrong, you're bad.
[01:28:02.560 --> 01:28:03.040] Yeah.
[01:28:03.360 --> 01:28:05.120] And you have to be quashed.
[01:28:05.440 --> 01:28:15.360] That's then combined with the hysteria of 2020, which emerges partly due to lockdown, and then that sort of spark, the cataclysm of George Floyd.
[01:28:15.760 --> 01:28:19.120] And then all of a sudden, we're in a new world, absolutely in a new world.
[01:28:19.120 --> 01:28:21.120] And so we can look back to the before times.
[01:28:21.120 --> 01:28:36.640] One of the examples I give in the book is, of course, I have a nostalgia for being at university and arguing with friends late into the night, getting roaringly drunk and disagreeing brutally, and then being friends still in the morning, and it's fine.
[01:28:36.640 --> 01:28:39.840] And actually, more than that, it was part of our friendship.
[01:28:39.840 --> 01:28:43.920] Part of our friendship was the idea that we could disagree and still be friends.
[01:28:43.920 --> 01:28:44.800] That's gone.
[01:28:45.040 --> 01:28:49.120] So now the slightest point of political disagreement is interpreted as evidence of fascism and evil.
[01:28:49.120 --> 01:28:57.280] Well, we just did a study at the Skeptic Research Center of how many people no longer speak to friends that they disagree with politically.
[01:28:57.280 --> 01:29:04.400] Or would you allow your son or daughter to marry somebody of a different political party or would you object to it?
[01:29:04.400 --> 01:29:06.480] And those numbers have gone way up.
[01:29:06.480 --> 01:29:07.120] Yeah.
[01:29:07.360 --> 01:29:10.720] I quote a poll by Frank Luntz about the very same thing in the book.
[01:29:10.720 --> 01:29:13.360] I can't remember the exact figure, but it's pretty sinister.
[01:29:13.600 --> 01:29:19.040] You know, the idea now that, yeah, there's a complete intolerance for the idea that someone might think differently than you.
[01:29:19.040 --> 01:29:21.920] That is escalating, and that is something new.
[01:29:21.920 --> 01:29:24.080] And that wasn't there in the before times.
[01:29:24.080 --> 01:29:26.720] But about, I'd love to get that back.
[01:29:26.720 --> 01:29:28.000] Don't you think that would be good?
[01:29:28.640 --> 01:29:29.960] If we could somehow get that back?
[01:29:29.960 --> 01:29:38.600] If people could, if people who disagree with what we're saying, Michael, today could watch this podcast and go away and think, Oh, well, maybe I'll read some of the books they're talking about, and maybe I'll think about it.
[01:29:38.600 --> 01:29:48.040] And you know, and maybe I'll criticize what they're saying, and maybe that a dialogue can start rather than you're evil, fascist, bigot, block, cancel, and you know, this.
[01:29:48.040 --> 01:29:52.040] I think it's, I think this is why I say the culture war is infantilism writ large.
[01:29:52.120 --> 01:29:55.320] Yes, it's how children, it's how children behave.
[01:29:55.320 --> 01:29:58.680] I quote Jefferson, let friends be wrong.
[01:29:59.000 --> 01:30:02.200] And of course, you said friends don't think they're wrong, they think you're wrong.
[01:30:02.200 --> 01:30:07.560] So, okay, we're all wrong, like we're all wrong about quite a lot, quite a lot of the time.
[01:30:07.560 --> 01:30:13.400] This is why, if I make a factual error in an article and someone contacts me and lets me know, I thank them for it.
[01:30:13.880 --> 01:30:16.840] I don't get defensive and start saying, you know, let's have a row about it.
[01:30:16.840 --> 01:30:19.720] It's just ego, ego has taken over.
[01:30:19.720 --> 01:30:20.600] And we all have an ego.
[01:30:20.600 --> 01:30:21.720] We've all got a sizable ego.
[01:30:21.720 --> 01:30:22.920] I'm not saying I'm immune to that.
[01:30:22.920 --> 01:30:23.240] Yeah.
[01:30:23.240 --> 01:30:27.240] But you kind of, you kind of train yourself, don't you, to not respond like a kid.
[01:30:27.400 --> 01:30:28.760] There have been all sorts of studies, haven't they?
[01:30:28.760 --> 01:30:30.680] And you'll probably know more about this than I will.
[01:30:30.680 --> 01:30:35.000] Where when people disagree with you, people tend to react as though they've been assaulted.
[01:30:35.000 --> 01:30:36.040] Yes, right, right.
[01:30:36.040 --> 01:30:36.600] Yes.
[01:30:36.600 --> 01:30:46.280] And that it's so I recognize that it's hard to take the bruising of being proven wrong or even being challenged.
[01:30:46.280 --> 01:30:50.280] But we have to part that's why I go back to education and the importance of that education.
[01:30:50.280 --> 01:30:56.520] I think the key thing you can teach kids is to be able to do that, to be able to disagree healthily, to not take it personally when they disagree.
[01:30:56.520 --> 01:31:02.280] To in other words, reject their instincts, because I think it is instinctive, right?
[01:31:02.280 --> 01:31:06.360] I think a lot of this plays on instinct, and that's why you need socialization.
[01:31:06.360 --> 01:31:08.680] And again, coming back to that word, civilization.
[01:31:08.680 --> 01:31:09.880] That's why you need civilization.
[01:31:09.840 --> 01:31:13.560] And I fear that what woke did is dismantled a lot of what we have.
[01:31:13.560 --> 01:31:19.280] All right, speak to the transition from the idea of equal opportunities to equal outcomes.
[01:31:20.240 --> 01:31:21.440] It's a key thing, isn't it?
[01:31:21.440 --> 01:31:24.480] Because that word equity sounds so much like equality.
[01:31:24.480 --> 01:31:25.040] Yeah.
[01:31:25.040 --> 01:31:29.120] And therefore, people were duped into supporting things they would otherwise oppose.
[01:31:29.120 --> 01:31:33.360] I mean, if you have equality of opportunity, you have meritocracy.
[01:31:33.360 --> 01:31:39.280] You say, it doesn't matter what your background is, what race you are, sexual orientation you are, it doesn't matter.
[01:31:39.280 --> 01:31:40.800] You have the same opportunities as everyone else.
[01:31:40.800 --> 01:31:42.640] And that's hard to achieve.
[01:31:42.640 --> 01:31:45.600] And it takes a degree of social tinkering, doesn't it?
[01:31:45.600 --> 01:31:50.400] Because the truth is, some people are born in circumstances where they're going to have fewer opportunities.
[01:31:50.400 --> 01:32:08.640] And that's why I do have, and we go back to that welfare state thing, I do have some sympathy for that idea of to a degree helping to level the playing field, but only leveling the playing field so that you have a true meritocracy, not artificially changing the situation so you get a job you're not qualified for just because you're gay or whatever it might be, right?
[01:32:08.640 --> 01:32:10.240] That to me is an absolute nonsense.
[01:32:10.240 --> 01:32:11.680] It's patronizing.
[01:32:12.080 --> 01:32:14.720] It's patronizing to the minority groups in question.
[01:32:15.040 --> 01:32:16.640] And it's also inefficient.
[01:32:16.640 --> 01:32:22.880] So you end up with people who cannot do the job in positions, in positions of power, which is an absolute disaster, right?
[01:32:23.040 --> 01:32:28.640] You end up with people like Claudine Gay at Harvard, who was by no means an exceptional academic.
[01:32:28.640 --> 01:32:32.160] And am I fair in saying that she was proven to be a plagiarist?
[01:32:32.160 --> 01:32:32.640] Yes.
[01:32:33.360 --> 01:32:36.880] I'm astonished that that has not been followed up on.
[01:32:36.880 --> 01:32:40.240] I mean, if she was a grad student, she would have been kicked out.
[01:32:40.240 --> 01:32:46.080] Well, I asked that question just to make sure I'm not libeling anyone, but as far as I know, that still stands.
[01:32:46.400 --> 01:32:49.440] And again, if I'm wrong, and you can present the evidence, I will happily retract that.
[01:32:49.440 --> 01:32:50.960] So let's just make that clear.
[01:32:51.480 --> 01:32:55.760] But on, but on the other hand, you know, that's not, you know, you don't want to be a diversity hire.
[01:32:55.760 --> 01:32:56.560] It's the worst thing.
[01:32:56.560 --> 01:33:02.200] You know, if someone said to me, I'm going to give you a job on this panel show because you're gay and we need more gay people on.
[01:33:02.520 --> 01:33:04.600] I mean, I would feel absolutely gutted.
[01:33:04.600 --> 01:33:05.880] I'd feel so worthless.
[01:33:05.880 --> 01:33:06.120] Right.
[01:32:59.680 --> 01:33:07.000] So undervalued.
[01:33:07.160 --> 01:33:09.960] And also, people, see, what happens now in a way that they never used to?
[01:33:09.960 --> 01:33:21.400] You know, if you see, say, a show and there's a black actor in there in a role that doesn't really sit right with the character being black, you start thinking, oh, well, maybe he just got it because he's black and probably not that good.
[01:33:21.400 --> 01:33:24.840] And even if he is good, you start seeing him through that lens and it's so terrible.
[01:33:24.840 --> 01:33:25.800] I know, it's not good.
[01:33:25.800 --> 01:33:27.240] And sometimes they're not that good.
[01:33:27.240 --> 01:33:40.680] I mean, like, I saw a play recently set in the interwar period, an old play, about, and the character was a number of characters are sort of old bigots, and they really object to the sexual behavior of one of the other characters.
[01:33:40.680 --> 01:33:45.560] But there's in the middle of this, there's a young couple, and one of, and the man is white, and the woman is black.
[01:33:45.560 --> 01:33:54.120] Now, I'm sorry, in early 1930s England, with a with a with a boarding house full of elderly bigots, they are not going to like that.
[01:33:54.120 --> 01:33:57.080] And then, and we were expected to believe they were totally fine with that.
[01:33:57.080 --> 01:33:58.760] They didn't even notice.
[01:33:58.760 --> 01:34:01.000] So the play then became incoherent.
[01:34:01.000 --> 01:34:02.760] The play no longer worked.
[01:34:02.760 --> 01:34:07.960] But on top of that, the girl who was playing the black girl who was playing the character was a very bad actor.
[01:34:07.960 --> 01:34:08.920] She couldn't act.
[01:34:08.920 --> 01:34:13.240] And she was in there, obviously, to tick a diversity box.
[01:34:13.240 --> 01:34:20.040] And it wasn't helpful to her because she was on stage with really talented people and it made her look 10 times worse.
[01:34:20.040 --> 01:34:22.280] So this isn't helpful to anyone.
[01:34:22.280 --> 01:34:27.320] And I've never had a problem with colorblind casting or whatever you want to do or however you want to present a play or anything like that.
[01:34:27.320 --> 01:34:33.760] What I resent is that when I was a kid and you saw diverse casting, and you didn't even notice or care.
[01:34:33.920 --> 01:34:35.640] Like, none of us cared.
[01:34:35.640 --> 01:34:44.600] And now we've hyper-racialized and re-racialized society and made it, frankly, more racist to such a degree that now we see race in a way that we didn't need to before.
[01:34:44.600 --> 01:34:47.200] And I do believe in that ideal of colorblindness.
[01:34:47.200 --> 01:34:52.880] Not to say that we don't see it, because obviously we see it, but that we don't care.
[01:34:52.880 --> 01:34:54.640] That we just treat everyone.
[01:34:54.640 --> 01:34:57.200] You know, Sam Harris makes the comparison with ginger hair.
[01:34:57.200 --> 01:35:03.600] You know, what if we, you know, we see it and we know it's different, but no one treats people with red hair any different than anyone else.
[01:35:03.600 --> 01:35:06.560] Can't we get to that aspirational point with race?
[01:35:06.560 --> 01:35:08.880] Wouldn't that be so beautiful?
[01:35:08.880 --> 01:35:09.840] Right, exactly.
[01:35:09.840 --> 01:35:11.840] All right, let's talk about the trans issue.
[01:35:11.840 --> 01:35:16.240] Here's how I recently summarized what I think is going on here.
[01:35:16.640 --> 01:35:24.000] Here, I'm putting myself into the mind of a good liberal who supports civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, workers' rights, children's rights.
[01:35:24.000 --> 01:35:26.160] And what's the next one?
[01:35:26.160 --> 01:35:31.200] Like all good liberals, we want to be allies and support everyone in their desire for the very human.
[01:35:31.200 --> 01:35:39.200] Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments when the killer's identity is about to be revealed?
[01:35:39.200 --> 01:35:46.880] During that perfect meditation flow, on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment.
[01:35:46.880 --> 01:35:56.720] That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.
[01:35:56.720 --> 01:36:03.920] Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts, Ad-Free, included with Prime.
[01:36:04.240 --> 01:36:10.480] Longing for rights and liberties and dignity, and this includes black women, children, workers, the poor, and LGBT.
[01:36:10.480 --> 01:36:16.000] Trans people are telling us that they're oppressed and discriminated against, so we should support them.
[01:36:16.320 --> 01:36:20.880] The next cohort in the rights revolution deserving of equal rights, liberties, and dignity.
[01:36:20.880 --> 01:36:29.120] Three, women are telling us that they don't want men in their bathrooms, changing rooms, locker rooms, sports, prisons, and other women's-only spaces, and we support women's rights.
[01:36:29.120 --> 01:36:35.080] Four, we know that biological men cannot actually become biological women, and vice versa, so that presents a dilemma.
[01:36:35.320 --> 01:36:39.080] Delusion, number five, they aren't actually men, they're women.
[01:36:39.080 --> 01:36:41.720] Trans women are women, trans men are men.
[01:36:41.720 --> 01:36:54.920] Now, we know how risably ridiculous it is to point to an adult man with a penis and call him a woman and pretend he can chest feed infants, or to celebrate a six-foot, two-inch, fully intact male swimmer and crown him an NCAA champion swimmer.
[01:36:54.920 --> 01:37:01.080] So, six, we're changing the definition of biological sex to fit whatever it is that trans people want it to be.
[01:37:01.080 --> 01:37:15.240] Since it can't be gametes or genes, which inexorably leads to sexual binarity, it has to be based on other criteria, including how a person feels inside, born in the wrong body, assigned at birth incorrectly, and so on.
[01:37:15.560 --> 01:37:18.600] Anyway, so this goes on a few more steps, but you get the idea.
[01:37:18.600 --> 01:37:23.400] Is it just, do people just think, well, this is what I should support because this is the next thing?
[01:37:23.400 --> 01:37:25.000] They think it's the next civil rights movement.
[01:37:25.000 --> 01:37:32.920] They haven't really grappled with it, and they don't understand that the gender identity ideology movement or genderism, as Gareth Roberts calls it, which I think is a really neat way of phrasing it.
[01:37:33.160 --> 01:37:34.040] Genderism, yeah.
[01:37:34.040 --> 01:37:40.600] Genderism is against gay rights, and it is against women's rights, and it is moving backwards in terms of civil rights.
[01:37:40.920 --> 01:37:43.480] So, it's very complicated when you see it in those terms.
[01:37:43.480 --> 01:37:44.520] Let me explain why that is.
[01:37:44.520 --> 01:37:51.560] Firstly, biological sex and the recognition of biological sex underpins women's rights and women's rights to single-sex spaces.
[01:37:51.560 --> 01:37:53.240] It also underpins gay rights.
[01:37:53.240 --> 01:37:58.040] It is the recognition that there are a minority in any given population who are attracted to their own sex.
[01:37:58.040 --> 01:38:00.200] You obliterate that, gay rights is gone.
[01:38:00.200 --> 01:38:09.560] This is why plenty of lesbian apps, dating apps, now have men with beards and penises on the apps saying you should be ashamed if you don't want me in your dating pool.
[01:38:09.560 --> 01:38:17.360] It's why even a gay hookup app such as Grinder does not allow its gay users to filter out women anymore.
[01:38:14.840 --> 01:38:19.680] It says you can filter according to gender identity.
[01:38:20.080 --> 01:38:24.480] Can't filter out a woman who identifies as a man because that makes you a bigot.
[01:38:24.480 --> 01:38:26.880] It says that's we don't tolerate transphobia.
[01:38:26.880 --> 01:38:35.520] So if you think about that, that is a gay hookup app that has made a fortune off the sex drives of gay men, shaming gay people for being gay.
[01:38:35.520 --> 01:38:40.240] So the people who are meant to be supporting gay rights are now the homophobes, are now the anti-gay people.
[01:38:40.480 --> 01:38:44.000] It's absolutely all, it's completely backwards.
[01:38:44.000 --> 01:38:49.520] Once you recognize, you know, here's the liberal, the liberal solution is you can identify however you like.
[01:38:49.520 --> 01:38:51.120] You can call yourself whatever name you like.
[01:38:51.120 --> 01:38:52.880] You can use whatever pronouns you like.
[01:38:52.880 --> 01:38:54.480] You can dress however you like.
[01:38:54.480 --> 01:38:55.840] You can do anything you like.
[01:38:55.840 --> 01:39:00.800] And there's that key caveat, right up until the point where you encroach on the rights of other people.
[01:39:00.800 --> 01:39:04.240] The gay rights movement did not seek to encroach on anyone else's rights.
[01:39:04.240 --> 01:39:05.440] And that's why it won out.
[01:39:05.440 --> 01:39:08.240] Same with black emancipation, same with women's rights.
[01:39:08.240 --> 01:39:13.680] It didn't say we're going to, we want equal rights, but we also want to take some rights away from you.
[01:39:14.000 --> 01:39:16.320] Trans lobby does precisely that.
[01:39:16.320 --> 01:39:19.200] What it says is we want single-sex spaces to be gone.
[01:39:19.200 --> 01:39:22.320] We want men in women's prisons, even if they're rapists.
[01:39:22.320 --> 01:39:24.400] We want men in women's sports.
[01:39:24.800 --> 01:39:34.800] We want gay spaces to be obliterated so gay people can no longer gather, as in Australia, where lesbians, it's illegal for lesbians to have a gathering without men who identify as women.
[01:39:34.800 --> 01:39:39.120] So this is all going backwards on civil rights and it is taking away the rights of other people.
[01:39:39.120 --> 01:39:43.600] So the trans lobby, genderism, is simply not the next civil rights issue.
[01:39:43.600 --> 01:39:44.800] It's the opposite.
[01:39:44.800 --> 01:39:50.800] If you're supporting that, you're supporting anti-gay, misogynistic discourses.
[01:39:50.800 --> 01:39:53.760] And I think it's just down to the point that people don't understand.
[01:39:53.760 --> 01:40:07.720] You know, you say that the solution, the only solution in that logical, those logical steps that you outlined was to effectively redefine biology, was effectively to say woman and man are now identity categories rather than biological categories.
[01:40:08.040 --> 01:40:09.800] And there are all sorts of implications once you do that.
[01:40:09.800 --> 01:40:15.720] And particularly when you say people can self-declare as a woman through this circular definition, I'm a woman because I feel like one.
[01:40:15.720 --> 01:40:16.840] Well, what is a woman?
[01:40:17.000 --> 01:40:19.320] A woman is someone who says they're a woman.
[01:40:19.320 --> 01:40:20.120] What the hell is that?
[01:40:20.120 --> 01:40:20.360] Right?
[01:40:20.360 --> 01:40:21.960] So these crazy circular definitions.
[01:40:21.960 --> 01:40:31.240] No, a woman is a human adult whose body is organized around the production of larger gametes.
[01:40:31.560 --> 01:40:32.920] That's what a woman is, right?
[01:40:32.920 --> 01:40:33.640] That's it.
[01:40:33.640 --> 01:40:34.280] That's it.
[01:40:34.280 --> 01:40:36.520] And that's non-negotiable, right?
[01:40:36.520 --> 01:40:45.480] So you can't identify yourself into that category without significantly impinging on the rights of the people within that category.
[01:40:45.800 --> 01:40:50.280] So absolutely, I think this has been broadly misunderstood.
[01:40:50.280 --> 01:40:54.920] The notion, and it's been misunderstood, I think, largely through people who want to be kind and want to be compassionate.
[01:40:54.920 --> 01:41:02.600] And they're constantly told that trans people are the most marginalized, the most discriminated against.
[01:41:02.600 --> 01:41:04.600] There's no evidence for that.
[01:41:04.600 --> 01:41:13.320] Trans people, trans-identified people are three times roughly less likely to be murdered than anyone else in the population, both here and in the US.
[01:41:13.320 --> 01:41:19.560] So the stats tell us they're actually among the safest of all demographics, just going by the murder rates.
[01:41:19.720 --> 01:41:20.840] But then you get onto other points.
[01:41:20.840 --> 01:41:22.440] You know, this is a group.
[01:41:22.440 --> 01:41:27.640] This is a lobby that has the support of all major corporations, the government, the police.
[01:41:27.640 --> 01:41:32.600] They can get the police to arrest who they want by putting a complaint in about misgendering.
[01:41:33.000 --> 01:41:34.360] No one else can do this.
[01:41:34.360 --> 01:41:37.480] This is incredible power, not marginalization.
[01:41:37.480 --> 01:41:42.040] There is a trans day of remembrance for all of the trans people who've lost their lives through violence.
[01:41:42.040 --> 01:41:47.920] Now, look, if someone gets beaten to death for being trans, that is a horrific tragedy that anyone must oppose.
[01:41:47.920 --> 01:41:49.680] But it just doesn't happen very often.
[01:41:49.920 --> 01:41:50.880] It really doesn't.
[01:41:50.880 --> 01:41:52.160] The stats on this are incredible.
[01:41:52.480 --> 01:41:56.320] There's over 20 countries in Europe where that has never happened on record.
[01:41:56.560 --> 01:42:07.280] There's in the UK, I mean, they had a Trans Day of Remembrance last November, and there was a flag flying from Edinburgh City Council for all the trans people who've lost their lives through violence.
[01:42:07.280 --> 01:42:12.560] There was one Scottish person on that list, and that person hadn't lost his life through violence.
[01:42:12.560 --> 01:42:20.960] He was a criminal who had been stalking a 13-year-old girl who was considered one of the most menacing people in the Scottish state who had died due to unrelated causes.
[01:42:20.960 --> 01:42:32.400] So they were flying a flag for this criminal on the Edinburgh City Council under this delusion that violence against trans people is rife.
[01:42:32.400 --> 01:42:45.680] There was a moment where one of the politicians in the UK was tweeting about Trans Day of Remembrance and someone tweeted underneath, this was very smart, said, Could we have, would you mind reading out in Parliament the names of all the trans people who've been murdered and lost their lives?
[01:42:45.680 --> 01:42:46.880] And she said, that's a great idea.
[01:42:46.880 --> 01:42:48.000] Where do I get their list?
[01:42:48.000 --> 01:42:48.800] There weren't any.
[01:42:49.600 --> 01:43:03.040] You know, and this is the, it was a neat thing to do because, you know, this is not to denigrate anyone who attacks anyone for how they identify or how they dress, which I fundamentally find abhorrent and I oppose.
[01:43:03.040 --> 01:43:21.760] But the only way you get these statistics about trans people being uniquely marginalized or uniquely susceptible to violence is if you take global statistics and start bringing in, for example, the statistics in Brazil, where there is a high preponderance of trans-identified people in sex work, which is a particularly dangerous form of work.
[01:43:21.760 --> 01:43:24.400] That's the only way you get these elevated statistics.
[01:43:24.400 --> 01:43:25.600] They're not marginalized.
[01:43:25.600 --> 01:43:27.280] They're not uniquely vulnerable.
[01:43:27.280 --> 01:43:30.120] And if anything, they have unique power in society.
[01:43:29.920 --> 01:43:31.560] It's completely 100% backwards.
[01:43:31.880 --> 01:43:45.400] The power to take away someone else's rights, to completely deplete gay rights, so that Stonewall, the leading gay charity in this country, is now effectively an anti-gay charity because the policies that it pursues are antagonistic to gay rights.
[01:43:45.400 --> 01:43:48.200] Even though it claims that's not the case, it absolutely is the case.
[01:43:48.760 --> 01:43:51.080] The power of that is absolutely immense.
[01:43:51.080 --> 01:43:56.040] So I think it comes down to this point that people just don't know what it is they're supporting.
[01:43:56.360 --> 01:43:58.600] That's what it is, I think.
[01:43:59.240 --> 01:44:01.240] Okay, so I'm with you 100% on that.
[01:44:01.240 --> 01:44:11.400] But the objections I hear is like on the sports, for example, there's, I don't know, a couple dozen trans athletes in the collegiate population of what, 50,000?
[01:44:11.400 --> 01:44:15.160] There's something like 50,000 college athletes in America.
[01:44:15.160 --> 01:44:16.840] You're making a big deal out of nothing.
[01:44:16.840 --> 01:44:18.040] This is a moral panic.
[01:44:18.040 --> 01:44:20.440] Come on, there's just a few of them that want to compete.
[01:44:20.440 --> 01:44:21.720] Why not be supportive?
[01:44:21.720 --> 01:44:26.440] Or how many prisoners are really transitioning and so on?
[01:44:26.440 --> 01:44:28.040] It's not that big a deal.
[01:44:28.040 --> 01:44:38.760] So the report by the United Nations that I quote in the book shows that 600 female athletes have lost at least 890 medals to men within their category.
[01:44:38.760 --> 01:44:41.000] That doesn't seem trivial to me.
[01:44:41.400 --> 01:44:43.880] By the way, even if it were one, it would be wrong.
[01:44:43.880 --> 01:44:45.080] Yes, right, of course it would be.
[01:44:45.240 --> 01:44:45.960] But it's hundreds.
[01:44:45.960 --> 01:44:46.200] Right.
[01:44:46.200 --> 01:44:47.000] It's hundreds.
[01:44:47.720 --> 01:44:51.960] Now, the number of men in the female estate, there are quite a few.
[01:44:51.960 --> 01:44:54.040] And there are people who absolutely should not be there.
[01:44:54.040 --> 01:44:56.760] And it's, I mean, this is the question.
[01:44:57.480 --> 01:45:01.800] Look, sexual assaults by trans-identified people in women's toilets are very rare.
[01:45:01.800 --> 01:45:03.560] And I absolutely accept that.
[01:45:03.560 --> 01:45:05.080] Very, very rare, right?
[01:45:05.400 --> 01:45:13.240] But safeguarding doesn't work on the principle that you take a subcategory of men and say, because they're very unlikely to attack, we'll just move them out.
[01:45:13.240 --> 01:45:14.680] The truth is, men are men.
[01:45:15.120 --> 01:45:24.240] Now, I can't go into a woman's toilet, or I won't, not because I don't take that as an insult that, oh, they think I'm a rapist, they think I'm a criminal.
[01:45:24.320 --> 01:45:32.560] It's because of safeguarding, because statistically, 98% of all convicted sex offenders are men, and 91% of their victims are female.
[01:45:32.560 --> 01:45:34.560] That is a major safeguarding risk.
[01:45:34.560 --> 01:45:40.320] So, what you do is on a statistical basis, you just keep all men out.
[01:45:40.320 --> 01:45:43.440] We know that women's single-sex spaces are far safer for women.
[01:45:43.440 --> 01:45:53.520] There was a report by the Times that found that 90% of all cases of sexual assault, abuse, and voyeurism in public toilets occurs in unisex facilities.
[01:45:53.520 --> 01:45:56.960] Single-sex toilet facilities are far safer for women.
[01:45:56.960 --> 01:45:59.600] And you might say, well, yeah, but predators are going to find a way in.
[01:45:59.600 --> 01:46:04.160] Actually, an awful lot, I'd say the preponderance of these attacks are opportunistic in nature.
[01:46:04.160 --> 01:46:10.880] So, when you have a situation where someone, a man in a dress, can be in a woman's toilet, it's far more likely to happen.
[01:46:10.880 --> 01:46:13.600] That isn't to say that trans people are more predatory.
[01:46:13.600 --> 01:46:17.760] No one's saying that trans-identified people have an innate predation about them.
[01:46:17.760 --> 01:46:20.240] The truth is that self-ID is being exploited.
[01:46:20.240 --> 01:46:31.280] Now, it is true, and I have to say this: trans-identified individuals are far, there's a disproportionate, are disproportionately represented in the statistics of sex offenders, right?
[01:46:31.600 --> 01:46:41.680] Now, I think the reason for that is men are exploiting self-identification to gain access to women's spaces, not that trans people are inherently more predatory.
[01:46:41.680 --> 01:46:43.280] But let's have a look at the stats.
[01:46:43.760 --> 01:46:51.360] The last census in the UK, one in every 2,750 men in the UK are convicted sex offenders.
[01:46:51.360 --> 01:46:57.920] When you talk about trans-identified men, that figure goes up to one in every 585.
[01:46:57.920 --> 01:47:00.840] Now, what explains that disparity?
[01:47:01.160 --> 01:47:11.080] Either you are saying that my suggestion, which is that men, predatory men, are exploiting gender self-ID to get what they want.
[01:47:11.080 --> 01:47:14.840] The only other explanation is that trans people are five times more predatory.
[01:47:14.840 --> 01:47:16.120] than anyone else.
[01:47:16.120 --> 01:47:24.680] So the people who are denying that self-ID is being exploited by predators are making the case that trans people are just more predatory, right?
[01:47:24.680 --> 01:47:28.600] That they don't see it that way because they haven't thought about it, but that is the truth of it.
[01:47:28.600 --> 01:47:36.840] And by the way, even if it's just a handful of cases, which it is, how many rapes are you willing to tolerate for your ideology?
[01:47:36.840 --> 01:47:37.400] Exactly.
[01:47:37.640 --> 01:47:48.840] You know, the case of the boy who wore a skirt into a girl's toilet in Ludon in Virginia, and the father was arrested after that sexual assault for complaining about it because the school tried to cover it up.
[01:47:48.840 --> 01:47:50.760] There's a massive lawsuit going on about that.
[01:47:50.760 --> 01:47:52.440] Was that tolerable for your ideology?
[01:47:52.440 --> 01:48:10.760] What about Katie Dolotowski, the six foot five bloke who wore a dress, who went into a public female toilet in the UK and sexually assaulted a 10-year-old girl, went into another toilet and filmed a 13-year-old girl on the toilet, and he was sent to a female prison.
[01:48:10.760 --> 01:48:15.320] Now, I want to know from these people who say self-ID, no ifs, no buts.
[01:48:15.640 --> 01:48:21.000] I want to know how many of those sexual assaults do you think is acceptable who uphold this ideology?
[01:48:21.000 --> 01:48:25.320] Or how about we just have safeguarding, say all men stay out of women's spaces.
[01:48:25.320 --> 01:48:26.840] That's the safest way.
[01:48:26.840 --> 01:48:30.600] This is just a topic that isn't broadly thought about or understood.
[01:48:30.600 --> 01:48:31.640] I think that's the problem.
[01:48:31.640 --> 01:48:37.880] You mentioned the We Spa, I think, in LA incident where the guy went into the all-women's spa.
[01:48:37.880 --> 01:48:42.360] And then the women got in trouble for objecting to this.
[01:48:42.360 --> 01:48:51.840] That was terrible because, of course, you know, you have a guy we subsequently found out has a criminal record for indecent exposure, walking in there with a young girl, a mother with a young girl.
[01:48:52.160 --> 01:48:54.640] He's apparently allegedly semi-erect.
[01:48:54.960 --> 01:48:57.840] The woman goes to the counter to complain.
[01:48:57.840 --> 01:48:59.840] This is filmed, it becomes a viral video.
[01:48:59.840 --> 01:49:05.600] The staff effectively say, We, you know, he, this is a woman because this person says they're a woman, but it was a man.
[01:49:05.600 --> 01:49:08.080] You know, the clue was the penis.
[01:49:08.400 --> 01:49:21.760] And then you get feminists, of course, very rightly protesting outside there, but you also get far-right activist groups protesting because they hate the idea of trans for different reasons because they're not liberals and they think you shouldn't be able to identify as you.
[01:49:21.760 --> 01:49:24.240] So you get the two clash, and the media conflate the two.
[01:49:24.240 --> 01:49:26.640] And you actually have the Guardian, and I think this is unforgivable.
[01:49:26.640 --> 01:49:31.280] The Guardian, which is a major paper in the UK, I know they've got an outlet in America as well.
[01:49:31.280 --> 01:49:37.440] They claimed it was a hoax that this girl hadn't, this woman hadn't seen this man exposing himself.
[01:49:38.160 --> 01:49:43.120] And they said that, and they conflated the feminist protesters with the far-right protesters.
[01:49:43.120 --> 01:49:44.400] And they did it more than once.
[01:49:44.400 --> 01:49:50.400] And they did it even after news broke that this guy was a criminal sex offender.
[01:49:50.720 --> 01:49:51.760] Unforgivable.
[01:49:51.760 --> 01:49:57.360] And again, like it's outlets like The Guardian who prioritize their ideology over women's safety.
[01:49:57.360 --> 01:50:07.360] I don't think in the future, when we get past whatever period this is and go back to something more resembling the before times, I don't think they'll be forgiven for that.
[01:50:07.360 --> 01:50:09.440] And I probably don't think they should be.
[01:50:09.440 --> 01:50:14.400] All right, let's think about gender dysphoria versus rapid onset gender dysphoria.
[01:50:14.400 --> 01:50:19.360] The latter seems to be a new phenomenon that happens in teen years.
[01:50:19.920 --> 01:50:32.360] The former, though, tiny percentage, maybe one half of 1% at most, people that feel uncomfortable, even at a young age, that seems to be a real thing, however small it is.
[01:50:33.560 --> 01:50:35.000] What do you make of those two?
[01:50:35.080 --> 01:50:38.040] Is one a real phenomenon, the other's a social contagion phenomenon?
[01:50:38.440 --> 01:50:41.480] Well, I mean, I'm not qualified to talk about the medical aspect of this.
[01:50:41.480 --> 01:50:44.600] I would say that, you know, the phrase used to be gender identity disorder.
[01:50:44.600 --> 01:50:45.000] Yeah.
[01:50:45.000 --> 01:50:53.400] And campaigners at WPATH campaign to have it change to gender dysphoria, which sounds more like something pathological, innate.
[01:50:54.200 --> 01:50:57.400] You know, it muddies the waters somewhat.
[01:50:57.800 --> 01:51:03.640] But ultimately, do I think that I don't believe we have a gendered soul?
[01:51:03.640 --> 01:51:07.480] I don't believe we have an essence that doesn't align with our body.
[01:51:07.480 --> 01:51:08.760] I think we are our body.
[01:51:09.480 --> 01:51:25.800] And so, therefore, I think it is perfectly possible for children who are obviously socialized in a world where there are men and women and we do have conventions that are affixed to what it means to be masculine and what it means to be feminine, whether that is how you dress or how you behave.
[01:51:25.800 --> 01:51:27.240] Those things are all real.
[01:51:27.240 --> 01:51:34.360] And they are for the most part socially constructed, but there are also obviously biological differences between men and women and behavioral differences, I mean.
[01:51:34.840 --> 01:51:36.280] So there's all of that.
[01:51:36.680 --> 01:51:48.040] But I don't believe, so I can conceive that a child could feel more comfortable with the social accoutrements of what is typically associated with the other sex.
[01:51:48.200 --> 01:51:50.040] That makes complete sense to me.
[01:51:50.040 --> 01:51:55.960] But that's something that is a social problem or at least requires a psychotherapeutic solution.
[01:51:55.960 --> 01:52:07.880] The solution to that is not to medicalize the child's body, put the child on drugs, block their puberty, which always, almost always leads to cross-sex hormones and in some cases, irreversible surgery.
[01:52:07.880 --> 01:52:14.280] What's the statistics I quote in the book about the number of double mastectomies of under 18 girls in the thousands?
[01:52:14.280 --> 01:52:16.080] It's up to like 6,000.
[01:52:16.320 --> 01:52:19.120] And 50 of those were sort of under 13, I think.
[01:52:20.080 --> 01:52:21.760] I mean, shocking stuff.
[01:52:21.760 --> 01:52:28.880] Mutilating children because of a supernatural, pseudo-scientific belief in a gender essence.
[01:52:28.880 --> 01:52:29.760] What the hell is going on?
[01:52:30.160 --> 01:52:34.400] This is one of these things that I think future historians will not be able to grapple with.
[01:52:34.400 --> 01:52:37.200] How the hell did we ever allow that to happen?
[01:52:37.200 --> 01:52:38.080] It's absolutely insane.
[01:52:38.080 --> 01:52:56.000] And it happened, of course, because of the likes of WPATH, the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, whose files, which were leaked to Michael Schellenberger and then published in the report by Mia Hughes, revealed that they knew that so many of the experts within WPATH knew that a lot of these patients could not give informed consent.
[01:52:56.000 --> 01:53:09.520] You know, they were transitioning, giving transitional surgery to people with dissociative disorders and schizophrenia and homeless people, people on drugs, and children who had no understanding of what it meant to lose your sexual function.
[01:53:09.920 --> 01:53:10.880] They couldn't understand it.
[01:53:10.880 --> 01:53:12.400] How could you if you were pre-prebested?
[01:53:12.400 --> 01:53:14.720] I mean, that should have been the end of WPATH.
[01:53:14.720 --> 01:53:18.400] You know, those files should have been the end.
[01:53:18.400 --> 01:53:25.680] You know, when it was revealed that the WPATH standards of care, I mean, they had explicitly a section on eunuch identity.
[01:53:25.680 --> 01:53:28.160] And they said that it is a doctor's responsibility.
[01:53:28.160 --> 01:53:38.880] If a patient comes along and says, I do, I was born a eunuch, I'm innately, I have a eunuch soul, and therefore I want my testes removed, that a doctor should go along with that.
[01:53:38.880 --> 01:53:39.600] What?
[01:53:39.600 --> 01:53:43.360] Like that eunuch isn't an innate identity.
[01:53:43.360 --> 01:53:44.480] This is absolute nonsense.
[01:53:44.480 --> 01:53:52.320] I mean, if I went to a doctor and said, I want my arms removed because I feel like I should have been born without arms, it would be dead against the Hippocratic oath for any doctor to go.
[01:53:52.400 --> 01:53:55.040] It would be completely unethical for that doctor to do it.
[01:53:55.040 --> 01:53:57.760] I don't buy this idea that once you're an adult, you do what you want with your body.
[01:53:57.760 --> 01:53:59.480] Because what about the doctor's ethics?
[01:53:59.800 --> 01:54:00.040] Right?
[01:54:00.680 --> 01:54:08.680] So, look, and that is where I probably depart with some libertarians on that, but I just think you know, the ethical standards of the doctor have to be taken into account.
[01:54:08.680 --> 01:54:17.000] But I think WPATH should have been totally discredited right when they published that ridiculous version 8 standards of care with the eunuch identity in there.
[01:54:17.000 --> 01:54:30.280] And in their draft version, by the way, that document linked to a pornographic website, the Eunuch Archives, which had thousands of stories about older men getting sexual kicks out of castrating children.
[01:54:30.520 --> 01:54:34.680] That's that's that was exposed by Genevieve Gluck at Redux magazine.
[01:54:34.680 --> 01:54:37.160] I urge people to read what she wrote about that.
[01:54:37.160 --> 01:54:39.160] She's waded through all those horrible stories.
[01:54:39.160 --> 01:54:40.680] I don't know how she did it.
[01:54:40.680 --> 01:54:50.520] And I just think that should have been the end of that document, by the way, with that link to the Unich Archives, was uploaded on the official NHS Scotland website.
[01:54:50.760 --> 01:54:51.160] Right?
[01:54:51.160 --> 01:54:51.480] Wow.
[01:54:51.480 --> 01:54:53.400] That's child castration porn.
[01:54:53.400 --> 01:54:53.960] Yeah.
[01:54:53.960 --> 01:54:54.840] On the NHS.
[01:54:55.240 --> 01:54:55.960] Are you joking?
[01:54:56.280 --> 01:54:57.080] How does that not?
[01:54:57.240 --> 01:55:00.920] I mean, now you see, after that, the NHS has been backtracking.
[01:55:00.920 --> 01:55:03.080] You know, they're moving away from WPATH.
[01:55:03.080 --> 01:55:05.560] They don't want anything to do with it.
[01:55:05.560 --> 01:55:07.720] Why has that not happened in America yet?
[01:55:08.840 --> 01:55:11.000] Why are other countries not now?
[01:55:11.000 --> 01:55:14.280] But it's mostly a state by state issue.
[01:55:14.760 --> 01:55:18.360] It's not clear that Trump can come in with the federal government and change it.
[01:55:18.440 --> 01:55:19.400] He might be able to.
[01:55:19.400 --> 01:55:20.680] You're ruining kids' lives.
[01:55:20.680 --> 01:55:21.080] No, I know.
[01:55:22.120 --> 01:55:22.440] I know.
[01:55:22.440 --> 01:55:22.920] I know.
[01:55:22.920 --> 01:55:23.800] There's no excuse for it.
[01:55:24.280 --> 01:55:25.720] There's no justification for it.
[01:55:25.720 --> 01:55:33.720] Even if the people perpetrating this, and I'm sure some of them do, genuinely believe it is possible for a child to be born in the wrong body, which it isn't.
[01:55:33.720 --> 01:55:35.600] Even if they genuinely have this belief.
[01:55:35.400 --> 01:55:38.120] Oh, it's a form of allowed to do it.
[01:55:38.120 --> 01:55:40.280] It's an old form of dualism.
[01:55:40.280 --> 01:55:44.560] You know, that there's a gendered soul floating around in there and it landed in the wrong body.
[01:55:45.360 --> 01:55:48.480] What about the idea that there's actually no such thing as trans?
[01:55:44.120 --> 01:55:50.240] These are gay kids.
[01:55:50.880 --> 01:55:59.040] Well, we know that between 80 and 90% of the adolescents referred to the Tavistock Pediatric Gender Clinic in London, which has since shut down since the CAS review.
[01:55:59.040 --> 01:56:03.120] Between 80 and 90% of those kids were same-sex attracted.
[01:56:03.440 --> 01:56:13.600] So there is a high preponderance of kids because we also know that every study into this shows that most gender non-conforming young people grow up gay.
[01:56:13.600 --> 01:56:14.160] Okay?
[01:56:14.480 --> 01:56:17.760] Just that's just verifiable and indisputable.
[01:56:17.760 --> 01:56:20.480] So, yeah, the majority of these kids are just gay kids.
[01:56:20.480 --> 01:56:26.240] You know, they're just camp boys, effeminate boys, and tomboys, you know, girls who behave in traditionally masculine ways.
[01:56:26.240 --> 01:56:29.520] And, you know, a lot of them are just lesbians, a lot of them just gay.
[01:56:29.520 --> 01:56:37.120] And they're being, you know, they're being told that this is, that they effectively need to be heterosexualized.
[01:56:37.120 --> 01:56:38.880] You know, they need to be straightened out.
[01:56:38.880 --> 01:56:48.960] And I made the point of the book about what the NHS were doing with the Tavistock is no different from what the Iranian government does, which is because they, you know, homosexuality is illegal, can get the death penalty.
[01:56:49.440 --> 01:56:58.880] The government there, with the endorsement of the Mullahs and the Ayatollah, by the way, will fund your sex change to straighten you out, to fix you, to heterosexualize you.
[01:56:59.200 --> 01:57:08.640] If you want to say that the trans movement is just another civil rights movement like gay rights, you have to explain to me why it is trying to eliminate homosexuality.
[01:57:09.840 --> 01:57:19.360] The movement is, I mean, I don't use the word homophobia lightly because I think it's used against people who just have, say, reservations about gay marriage, or they just personally don't like it, or whatever.
[01:57:19.320 --> 01:57:22.640] Like, I just think it's a word I don't trust.
[01:57:22.640 --> 01:57:30.120] But if castrating and sterilizing and medicalizing children for being gay isn't homophobic, I don't know what is, right?
[01:57:29.520 --> 01:57:35.320] That I mean, it's just the ultimate form of there was even a joke at the Tavistock Clinic amongst the staff.
[01:57:35.640 --> 01:57:38.440] They used to joke, soon there aren't going to be any gay people.
[01:57:38.440 --> 01:57:38.840] Right.
[01:57:39.080 --> 01:57:39.560] Right.
[01:57:40.040 --> 01:57:41.000] Or they knew what they were doing.
[01:57:41.000 --> 01:57:42.600] Where did all the lesbians go?
[01:57:42.920 --> 01:57:45.080] They knew what, yeah, it's unbelievable.
[01:57:45.080 --> 01:57:49.000] And every whistleblower has pointed to this endemic anti-gay sentiment.
[01:57:49.000 --> 01:57:53.400] Sometimes, even parents who just don't want a gay kid, they straighten the kid out.
[01:57:53.400 --> 01:58:04.840] What about this idea of autogonophilia where these young men are attracted or sexually aroused by either dressing as women or thinking of themselves as women?
[01:58:04.840 --> 01:58:08.680] But they're still, it's just a sexual arousal thing.
[01:58:08.680 --> 01:58:11.240] Yeah, high preponderance of that.
[01:58:12.040 --> 01:58:18.600] It's something that's never talked about because trans, the umbrella of trans has now expanded to include what we call old-fashioned transsexuals.
[01:58:18.600 --> 01:58:23.080] It incorporates cross-dressers, fetishists, AGP, autogarnifiers.
[01:58:23.080 --> 01:58:26.120] So actually, or non-binary, anything can go under that umbrella now.
[01:58:26.120 --> 01:58:33.480] So, you know, it's no longer as simple because I think a lot of people in the before times might have known one or two transsexuals.
[01:58:33.800 --> 01:58:37.080] An individual who, you know, for whatever reason has to go through that.
[01:58:37.080 --> 01:58:38.360] Very painful and expensive.
[01:58:38.600 --> 01:58:41.000] So when I ask, what is Odoo?
[01:58:41.000 --> 01:58:42.520] What comes to mind?
[01:58:42.520 --> 01:58:45.160] Well, Odo is a bit of everything.
[01:58:45.160 --> 01:58:52.280] Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth.
[01:58:52.280 --> 01:59:00.680] But you know, some people also say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable.
[01:59:00.680 --> 01:59:07.480] But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks.
[01:59:07.480 --> 01:59:12.920] I mean, whatever your business needs: manufacturing, accounting, HR programs.
[01:59:12.920 --> 01:59:17.280] You can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company.
[01:59:17.280 --> 01:59:19.040] So, what is Odoo?
[01:59:14.840 --> 01:59:21.760] Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything.
[01:59:22.080 --> 01:59:27.680] Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstock building blocks for business.
[01:59:27.680 --> 01:59:29.280] Yeah, that's it.
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[01:59:33.040 --> 01:59:36.000] Learn more and sign up now at odo.com.
[01:59:36.000 --> 01:59:38.000] That's odoo.com.
[01:59:38.640 --> 01:59:42.320] Surgery and not a thing taken lightly by any means.
[01:59:42.320 --> 01:59:49.360] You know, this is something that for psychologically, for whatever reason, probably those social reasons we discussed earlier, this is the only way they can be happy.
[01:59:49.360 --> 01:59:51.440] And I have sympathy for those people.
[01:59:51.440 --> 01:59:55.920] I don't want them in women's spaces, and I'm not going to pretend they've changed sex.
[01:59:55.920 --> 01:59:58.640] But I have that, they have my sympathy, right?
[01:59:58.640 --> 02:00:07.920] But that's not the same as an autogynophilic fetishist who gets an erection whenever he puts a dress on and wants to go into women's toilets because he is sexually aroused.
[02:00:07.920 --> 02:00:13.840] And by the way, in women's rape crisis centers, and is sexually aroused by the idea of breaking those boundaries.
[02:00:13.840 --> 02:00:16.000] It's more prevalent than you think.
[02:00:16.320 --> 02:00:19.840] I've interviewed an autogynophile on my show, Debbie Hayton.
[02:00:20.000 --> 02:00:29.120] So, this is a man who went through all the transitional surgery to become Debbie Hayton and has written very well about this subject.
[02:00:30.240 --> 02:00:35.200] Now, I was interviewing Debbie about a book called Transsexual Apostate.
[02:00:35.200 --> 02:00:36.560] Transsexual Apostate.
[02:00:36.560 --> 02:00:46.480] It's worth reading because, I mean, Debbie's one of the few AGPs who admits that this is a that AGP is the reason for the transition.
[02:00:46.800 --> 02:00:47.600] Isn't that interesting?
[02:00:47.600 --> 02:00:48.720] Very few people do that.
[02:00:48.720 --> 02:00:50.160] Very few people will admit that.
[02:00:50.160 --> 02:00:52.240] It's become like a kind of taboo.
[02:00:52.240 --> 02:01:05.320] So, that's a book worth reading if you want to understand how the sexual impulse, which is an incredibly powerful impulse in humankind, and particularly, I have to say, in men, can be a particularly intense drive.
[02:01:05.640 --> 02:01:12.920] People are willing to ruin their lives, upend everything for their sex, for their sex drive to satisfy their libido.
[02:01:12.920 --> 02:01:27.160] If you don't think that male predators who are turned on by the idea of breaking women's boundaries will use any opportunity to do so, including government-sanctioned gender self-ID, you are deluding yourself hugely.
[02:01:27.160 --> 02:01:28.920] So the AGP thing is an issue.
[02:01:28.920 --> 02:01:30.360] It's just something we have to be able to talk about.
[02:01:30.360 --> 02:01:33.400] Like, it is a thing, and we can see it's a thing.
[02:01:33.400 --> 02:01:36.840] You know, that guy exposing himself in a women's spa, semi-erect.
[02:01:36.840 --> 02:01:38.440] What else is that if not a fetish?
[02:01:39.000 --> 02:01:47.080] If you want to be in a women's changing room and have your penis out, you know, that's going to be part of it, probably.
[02:01:47.080 --> 02:01:51.240] In almost all, maybe not in all cases, but in a significant number.
[02:01:51.640 --> 02:01:53.320] Why do women have to bear the brunt of this?
[02:01:53.560 --> 02:01:55.240] Why is it always women who have to bear this?
[02:01:55.240 --> 02:01:59.960] Like, I hate this when there's these male celebrities saying, you know, women are just bigots if they don't.
[02:02:00.360 --> 02:02:03.080] Well, you're not the one who has to get undressed in front of these people.
[02:02:03.320 --> 02:02:04.680] You're not the one it affects.
[02:02:04.680 --> 02:02:06.840] You know, I just think it's a complete lack of empathy.
[02:02:06.840 --> 02:02:09.000] Do you know Deodra McCluskey?
[02:02:09.000 --> 02:02:10.040] I do not.
[02:02:10.040 --> 02:02:14.120] She is the, well, it used to be Donald McCluskey, then she transitioned.
[02:02:14.520 --> 02:02:21.880] And she's an economist and basically a sort of classical liberal or conservative economist, libertarian, maybe.
[02:02:21.880 --> 02:02:26.600] Anyway, she's written quite a few big works on the history of economics.
[02:02:26.600 --> 02:02:28.680] She does economic history.
[02:02:28.680 --> 02:02:32.440] But yeah, she also wrote a book about transitioning and how painful it was.
[02:02:32.440 --> 02:02:34.680] Family won't talk to her, kids disowned her.
[02:02:34.680 --> 02:02:37.080] It's a horrible, it's a heartbreaking story.
[02:02:37.080 --> 02:02:40.280] Whatever's going on in there, I just really don't know.
[02:02:40.280 --> 02:02:42.600] Like Bruce Jenner, now Caitlin Jenner.
[02:02:42.600 --> 02:02:43.080] I don't know.
[02:02:43.080 --> 02:02:44.120] It's complicated, right?
[02:02:44.120 --> 02:02:45.280] Humans are really complicated.
[02:02:44.520 --> 02:02:45.600] Yeah, really complicated.
[02:02:46.240 --> 02:02:55.920] I mean, the human sex drive thing, yeah, the evolutionary psychologist, like David Buss on the show, his latest book is on men, when men behave badly.
[02:02:55.920 --> 02:03:01.120] And it's really this sex drive is so hugely different for men than women.
[02:03:01.120 --> 02:03:03.120] And the data is just stunning.
[02:03:03.840 --> 02:03:06.320] Well, like you said, 98% of sex criminals are men.
[02:03:06.880 --> 02:03:08.240] So we have to accept this reality.
[02:03:08.800 --> 02:03:10.400] But we go back to that word civilization.
[02:03:10.400 --> 02:03:12.240] It seems to be a bit of a theme of what we're talking about today.
[02:03:12.240 --> 02:03:23.280] But, you know, I think civilization is the armor that we build up against these baser instincts, whether that be authoritarianism or a sex drive that can be damaging.
[02:03:23.280 --> 02:03:28.880] And civilization, the institution of marriage, is largely about the containment of that sexual drive.
[02:03:28.880 --> 02:03:30.480] You know, that's part of it.
[02:03:30.480 --> 02:03:36.640] Well, there's all these women coming out now saying, you know, feminists told us we can have all the sex we want just like men.
[02:03:36.640 --> 02:03:37.680] And guess what?
[02:03:37.680 --> 02:03:39.600] It doesn't really work that way.
[02:03:39.920 --> 02:03:41.040] Well, you know, I like it.
[02:03:41.120 --> 02:03:41.920] I'm liberal.
[02:03:41.920 --> 02:03:42.880] You had Perry.
[02:03:43.280 --> 02:03:46.080] You talked about Perry in your, what's her first name?
[02:03:47.200 --> 02:03:48.080] Louise Perry.
[02:03:48.080 --> 02:03:50.320] She wrote the book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.
[02:03:50.320 --> 02:03:50.640] Yeah.
[02:03:50.640 --> 02:03:50.960] Yes.
[02:03:50.960 --> 02:03:51.200] Yeah.
[02:03:51.680 --> 02:03:53.520] And there's others like this.
[02:03:53.520 --> 02:03:53.840] Yeah.
[02:03:54.000 --> 02:03:55.120] I mean, I take the point.
[02:03:55.120 --> 02:03:57.600] I think, you know, she makes a very strong argument.
[02:03:57.600 --> 02:04:02.880] And I'm, you know, I think it's a debate that we need to have, but I also think I am, my instincts are liberal.
[02:04:02.880 --> 02:04:06.000] I do think consenting adults should be able to have sex with whoever they want.
[02:04:06.000 --> 02:04:07.200] You know, not my business.
[02:04:07.200 --> 02:04:07.440] Yeah.
[02:04:07.440 --> 02:04:07.680] Yeah.
[02:04:07.920 --> 02:04:11.520] You know, and I don't want to shame anyone for doing that.
[02:04:11.520 --> 02:04:15.520] My only concern, my only concern, is when it encroaches on someone else's rights.
[02:04:15.520 --> 02:04:24.720] It becomes a big debate then, insofar as if we have the OnlyFans culture, if women are as promiscuous as some of these women who are sleeping with a thousand men a day or crazy stuff like that.
[02:04:25.360 --> 02:04:26.960] What does that do to the culture?
[02:04:26.960 --> 02:04:31.640] What does that do to our perception of women, girls, upper sex?
[02:04:32.920 --> 02:04:36.600] These are all valid concerns and valid arguments.
[02:04:37.880 --> 02:04:42.200] But I still err on the side of individual adult autonomy.
[02:04:42.200 --> 02:04:42.760] Yeah.
[02:04:42.760 --> 02:04:44.760] So long as they're not hurt.
[02:04:44.760 --> 02:04:46.840] As soon as there's a non-consensual element, no way, right?
[02:04:46.840 --> 02:04:48.920] You know, that's my line.
[02:04:48.920 --> 02:04:54.760] Yeah, David's got these huge databases from the dating sites where you can get information like this.
[02:04:54.760 --> 02:04:59.800] Like, how many dates would you need to go on before you'd be intimate with somebody from the site?
[02:04:59.800 --> 02:05:01.800] And for the women, the average was seven.
[02:05:01.800 --> 02:05:05.000] For the men, it was like one, 1.2 or something.
[02:05:05.000 --> 02:05:08.840] So for every guy that said two, somebody said, why even go out on a date?
[02:05:08.840 --> 02:05:09.240] Yeah.
[02:05:09.560 --> 02:05:11.240] But of course, but we know this.
[02:05:11.240 --> 02:05:11.400] Yes.
[02:05:11.960 --> 02:05:16.440] Everyone knows that this is a reality that, which is why we have women safeguarding.
[02:05:16.760 --> 02:05:18.840] This is absolutely not rocket science.
[02:05:19.480 --> 02:05:19.960] All right.
[02:05:19.960 --> 02:05:21.160] A couple other quick things here.
[02:05:21.160 --> 02:05:23.720] We're going on two hours as I could listen to you all day.
[02:05:23.960 --> 02:05:30.360] So we used to read about the authoritarian right and the woke left, but now we have the authoritarian left and the woke right.
[02:05:30.680 --> 02:05:31.160] Yeah.
[02:05:31.160 --> 02:05:32.920] Well, I mean, look, I've talked about this in the book.
[02:05:32.920 --> 02:05:34.840] I know that the woke right is a contested term.
[02:05:35.080 --> 02:05:39.640] I know that people get very angry about it, largely because of what you were talking about earlier, about the idea that woke is a pejorative.
[02:05:39.640 --> 02:05:44.920] And particularly, if you're someone who has used the word woke as a pejorative, you're not going to like it when it's thrown back at you, right?
[02:05:46.120 --> 02:05:50.920] And I know, like Benjamin Boyce has argued that it was almost engineered in order to goad.
[02:05:50.920 --> 02:05:56.200] Whereas for me, I've always used woke as a, not as a pejorative, as I say, as a descriptive.
[02:05:56.200 --> 02:06:05.720] And according to the definition that I outlined to you before, I think that wokeness is all about group identity monomania with that added authoritarian aspect.
[02:06:05.720 --> 02:06:06.200] Okay.
[02:06:06.200 --> 02:06:09.000] So, of course, that can exist on the right and the left.
[02:06:09.000 --> 02:06:11.960] I mean, we know that there are crazed identitarians on the right.
[02:06:11.960 --> 02:06:13.640] We've seen them throughout history, right?
[02:06:13.640 --> 02:06:16.000] Not just the white nationalists and the groipers of today.
[02:06:16.000 --> 02:06:17.440] We've seen them all before.
[02:06:17.440 --> 02:06:20.000] So, and certainly authoritarian as well.
[02:06:20.000 --> 02:06:25.280] So, yeah, it's a no-brainer to me that wokeness is not tied to any one political party.
[02:06:25.280 --> 02:06:26.800] I understand that that's contentious.
[02:06:26.800 --> 02:06:33.680] But look, the example I give in the book is, I think, a good one, insofar as there was that conference in Cambridge in 2021 back at the university.
[02:06:33.680 --> 02:06:42.160] A bunch of woke left academics, Priyam Varda Gopol, Hendy Andrews, talking about how Hitler was the, sorry, Winston Churchill was the true villain of World War II.
[02:06:42.160 --> 02:06:48.400] I think Hendy Andrews said something like he was presided over a society which was worse than the Nazis.
[02:06:48.400 --> 02:06:51.040] I think he said, was that Daryl Cooper that was promoting?
[02:06:51.200 --> 02:06:52.160] Well, I'm about to say.
[02:06:52.560 --> 02:06:54.000] Compare it in the book to Daryl Cooper.
[02:06:54.480 --> 02:06:54.960] Yes, that's right.
[02:06:55.040 --> 02:07:00.960] He's the podcaster who goes on Tucker Carlson and says, you know, Churchill was the true villain of World War II.
[02:07:00.960 --> 02:07:08.160] And of course, so you have there two sides, they're politically opposed, but they're reaching the same conclusion.
[02:07:08.160 --> 02:07:11.920] There's a lot of discourse at the moment in right-wing circles, and I've seen a lot of it online.
[02:07:11.920 --> 02:07:14.640] A lot of anti-Semitism, very much on the rise.
[02:07:14.640 --> 02:07:19.200] And I'm seeing it, and of course, that's where the far left and the far right completely agree.
[02:07:20.320 --> 02:07:29.120] We're seeing a lot of that, but also this idea of revising history, revising truth, saying that maybe it would have been better if Hitler would have won the Second World War.
[02:07:29.120 --> 02:07:30.800] And some people are saying that very seriously.
[02:07:31.040 --> 02:07:35.600] You know, some of it is that sort of shit posting, let's just be as offensive as possible.
[02:07:35.600 --> 02:07:38.640] The opposite of virtue signaling now is vice signaling.
[02:07:38.640 --> 02:07:41.360] Let's say the meanest, most shocking thing possible.
[02:07:41.360 --> 02:07:49.600] So there's a lot of that, you know, epitomized when Kanye West put up that image of Hitler with the goat emoji, greatest of all time, right?
[02:07:49.600 --> 02:07:50.080] Stuff like that.
[02:07:50.080 --> 02:07:54.800] So there's all of that kind of muddy, uncertain discourse going on.
[02:07:54.800 --> 02:08:12.200] But there are people genuinely who believe that if you look back at where we are now, if you look at where we are now with wokeness, if you look at the drag queens at the Paris Olympics, that ceremony, that pastiche of the Last Supper, remember Darrell Cooper put a photo of that up alongside a photo of Hitler entering Paris.
[02:08:13.560 --> 02:08:14.920] He prefers the Hitler, right?
[02:08:14.920 --> 02:08:19.560] Now I don't know to what extent that was a satirical point or whatever, or whether he was joking.
[02:08:19.560 --> 02:08:22.040] A lot of people say he wasn't.
[02:08:22.040 --> 02:08:42.920] But the point is, there are a lot of people reaching that conclusion that the degeneracy, which is the word they use, which is also the word that the Nazis used, the degeneracy of modern society with the LGBTQIA plus fetish parades, with the drag queen story hour, with all of the kind of things that we're seeing, such as the drag queens in that church in Dallas that I mentioned.
[02:08:43.080 --> 02:08:50.440] You know, all of this kind of stuff is evidence that Western degeneracy cannot be repaired.
[02:08:50.440 --> 02:08:51.720] It's irreparable.
[02:08:51.720 --> 02:08:58.120] And that actually maybe it would have been better if the Third Reich had won because the West is irredeemable, unregenerable.
[02:08:58.120 --> 02:09:00.920] Now, and that's sort of the argument of the woke left, isn't it?
[02:09:00.920 --> 02:09:06.120] That the West is singularly evil and unregenerable and needs to be dismantled.
[02:09:06.360 --> 02:09:09.000] So the woke left, woke right thing.
[02:09:09.000 --> 02:09:12.760] I know people get very upset by this, but that's a bit of a no-brainer, isn't it?
[02:09:12.760 --> 02:09:16.040] I mean, the similarities are kind of incontestable, aren't they?
[02:09:16.840 --> 02:09:31.640] Yeah, I encountered some of this when I was writing my book on the Holocaust deniers, of people like Pat Buchanan and others on the right who thought, yeah, Hitler was bad, but you know, not all of his ideas were bad.
[02:09:31.640 --> 02:09:34.040] And, you know, he did fight against the communists.
[02:09:34.040 --> 02:09:43.720] And then I encountered the historia strike in the 1980s in Germany, where German historians were trying to parse out the good parts from the bad parts and all that.
[02:09:43.720 --> 02:09:51.520] And so you take some legitimate debates among historians, and then you, and then you just run with it, and you end up like a Darrell Cooper.
[02:09:51.520 --> 02:09:52.320] Yeah, same thing.
[02:09:52.320 --> 02:09:55.840] Is that that co-channeling David Irving, if you don't mind my interrupting there?
[02:09:55.840 --> 02:09:58.560] Because that's stuff he's been doing.
[02:09:59.520 --> 02:09:59.840] Yeah.
[02:09:59.840 --> 02:10:01.680] But the David Irving case is another, yeah, exactly.
[02:10:01.680 --> 02:10:03.680] And the best, again, well, I'll be David Irving.
[02:10:03.680 --> 02:10:05.360] I mean, they put him in prison in Austria, didn't they?
[02:10:05.360 --> 02:10:06.560] For a Holocaust.
[02:10:06.640 --> 02:10:08.960] They're just showing up at the airport.
[02:10:09.280 --> 02:10:10.240] Such a bad move.
[02:10:10.240 --> 02:10:16.240] And again, it's this thing of it's the same reason I say all these people wanting to censor Kanye West's Harl Hitler song.
[02:10:16.240 --> 02:10:18.240] You're getting this 100% wrong, right?
[02:10:18.400 --> 02:10:30.000] You know, and when you lock people up for Holocaust denial for being wrong about history, you grant them a martyrdom they don't deserve, and you imply that maybe they've got a point because people's instincts are like, well, why are you trying to silence that person?
[02:10:30.000 --> 02:10:31.360] Maybe there's something to it.
[02:10:31.360 --> 02:10:32.480] It's such a disaster.
[02:10:32.480 --> 02:10:40.400] The best response was Richard Evans, the historian, Richard Evans, taking his position apart through historical knowledge.
[02:10:40.400 --> 02:10:49.040] There's a reason, by the way, that Daryl Cooper refuses to debate Andrew Roberts, the foremost historian of Winston Churchill.
[02:10:49.040 --> 02:10:50.480] I think he's even admitted it.
[02:10:50.480 --> 02:10:54.000] But, you know, because Darrell Cooper doesn't claim to be a historian.
[02:10:54.160 --> 02:10:56.960] I know Tucker Carson introduced him as a historian.
[02:10:56.960 --> 02:11:00.240] And he knows that he knows nothing compared to what Andrew Roberts knows.
[02:11:00.560 --> 02:11:03.680] He knows that that can't be sustained in a debate.
[02:11:03.680 --> 02:11:05.680] Well, fair play for him for admitting that, right?
[02:11:05.680 --> 02:11:14.160] But, you know, but we're dealing here with false narratives about history, which is exactly what the woke have been peddling with the 1619 project and all sorts of things.
[02:11:14.480 --> 02:11:20.320] Well, I went to several of these talks by David Irving when I was tracking the Institute for Historical Review.
[02:11:20.320 --> 02:11:21.520] They're in Southern California here.
[02:11:21.520 --> 02:11:26.200] So they would bring him in to give his talks periodically at these, you know, tiny little hotel rooms.
[02:11:26.200 --> 02:11:28.960] Not that many, a couple dozen people, maybe 50 people.
[02:11:28.960 --> 02:11:30.600] But he played that up.
[02:11:30.600 --> 02:11:32.440] Like, you know, they arrested me.
[02:11:32.440 --> 02:11:33.960] And you know why they arrested me?
[02:11:33.960 --> 02:11:35.240] Because I'm onto them.
[02:11:29.840 --> 02:11:36.120] I know what's going on.
[02:11:36.440 --> 02:11:38.600] And he was well received for that.
[02:11:38.600 --> 02:11:39.320] Of course.
[02:11:39.320 --> 02:11:40.120] Proves my point.
[02:11:40.120 --> 02:11:41.480] That's exactly what I'm saying.
[02:11:42.120 --> 02:11:42.760] Such a design.
[02:11:42.840 --> 02:11:43.960] We had a similar case in this country.
[02:11:43.960 --> 02:11:47.160] There's a woman who wrote what she called were satirical songs.
[02:11:47.160 --> 02:11:51.320] A woman called Alison Chablos went to prison, I think, more than once.
[02:11:51.720 --> 02:11:53.960] And she denied the Holocaust.
[02:11:53.960 --> 02:11:57.480] She denied that the gas chambers existed, all sorts of things like this.
[02:11:57.480 --> 02:11:59.400] And such a bad idea.
[02:11:59.400 --> 02:11:59.880] Why?
[02:11:59.880 --> 02:12:01.240] Like, she is in time.
[02:12:01.240 --> 02:12:07.240] I can't stand what she was saying, but I think the principle of free speech is more important.
[02:12:07.240 --> 02:12:09.880] And I think she should never have been in prison.
[02:12:09.880 --> 02:12:13.080] But when I say that, people, of course, say, oh, well, you're supporting Holocaust.
[02:12:13.160 --> 02:12:16.680] No, I'm supporting the principle of free speech, which goes way above anything else that's right.
[02:12:17.000 --> 02:12:22.760] I actually wrote a letter to the judge in Irving's case in Austria saying, You should, I've debunked this guy.
[02:12:22.760 --> 02:12:26.040] I completely disagree with him, but you should let him out.
[02:12:26.040 --> 02:12:26.760] You know, I know.
[02:12:27.400 --> 02:12:28.600] And I hate that argument.
[02:12:29.720 --> 02:12:31.080] And these audiences he has.
[02:12:31.080 --> 02:12:32.520] There's like, you know, two dozen people.
[02:12:32.520 --> 02:12:35.640] I mean, he's not like he's filling the O arena or something.
[02:12:35.880 --> 02:12:37.720] Well, his popularity went up a hell of a lot after being.
[02:12:37.880 --> 02:12:38.600] Yes, I know.
[02:12:38.600 --> 02:12:39.240] Right.
[02:12:39.880 --> 02:12:41.160] Yeah, that's crazy.
[02:12:41.160 --> 02:12:41.480] All right.
[02:12:41.480 --> 02:12:43.640] One last thing I'm going to read here on the deep state.
[02:12:43.640 --> 02:12:48.680] I just want to get your comments because somebody was asking Trump yesterday, all right, you're in there now.
[02:12:48.680 --> 02:12:51.240] So tell us what's really going on behind the scenes.
[02:12:51.240 --> 02:12:52.280] Here's what you write.
[02:12:52.280 --> 02:12:57.400] In discussions around the demise of woke, one often hears references to the deep state.
[02:12:57.400 --> 02:13:10.840] It sounds like the most conspiratorial of phrases, evoking images of mass men in wine red cloaks, blazing torches in hand, gathered around a large pentagram chalked onto the floor of a subterranean crypt.
[02:13:10.840 --> 02:13:16.000] Perhaps they have secret handshakes or coded expressions to signify allyship.
[02:13:14.600 --> 02:13:21.280] It's probable that they sacrifice adolescent wombats to appease the spirits of the sticks.
[02:13:21.920 --> 02:13:23.200] That is such great writing.
[02:13:23.200 --> 02:13:24.640] And you go on and on about that.
[02:13:24.640 --> 02:13:27.680] Is there such a thing as a deep state or something like that?
[02:13:27.680 --> 02:13:33.360] And back to your woke stuff, could Trump actually do something about this, you know, from the top?
[02:13:33.680 --> 02:13:34.080] There is.
[02:13:34.080 --> 02:13:35.680] I mean, I'm having fun with the imagery there.
[02:13:37.120 --> 02:13:38.720] The absurdity of this.
[02:13:38.720 --> 02:13:46.160] A lot of the conspiratorial theories and thinking is going really, really nuts, you know, and really extreme.
[02:13:46.160 --> 02:13:50.080] But that phrase deep state, as I understand it, actually makes a lot of sense.
[02:13:50.080 --> 02:14:08.160] Insofar as take the UK, we have a civil service, the machinery of government, and whistleblowers have said that members of the civil service routinely try and obfuscate and obviate the instructions from the elected government because they see it as their role to promote social justice irrespective of what's coming from above.
[02:14:08.160 --> 02:14:09.920] And you can't vote those people out.
[02:14:10.480 --> 02:14:13.040] So that is a kind of deep state, right?
[02:14:13.040 --> 02:14:22.240] The example I give in the book, which was exposed by the Daily Wire, of the female workers who, the supervisor who said, if you see a Trump sign outside of a house during the hurricane, don't offer support.
[02:14:22.240 --> 02:14:24.080] Well, that's not coming from above, is it?
[02:14:24.080 --> 02:14:33.440] So that's there is a low-level middle management ideologues, activists who are going to pursue their goal irrespective of what the elected government thinks.
[02:14:33.440 --> 02:14:41.120] In our country, we've got the College of Policing, who are training police in England and Wales to investigate non-crime explicitly.
[02:14:41.120 --> 02:14:43.440] They're called non-crime hate incidents.
[02:14:43.440 --> 02:14:49.360] In our country, we have 12,000 people arrested a year, arrested a year for offensive speech.
[02:14:49.360 --> 02:14:51.200] Not just investigated, arrested.
[02:14:51.200 --> 02:14:53.600] So we are, that's 30 a day.
[02:14:53.600 --> 02:15:02.760] We are, that's all because of the College of Policing, which is now an activist body who ignores instructions from the Home Office to stop recording non-crime.
[02:14:59.760 --> 02:15:06.040] The Home Office said twice, two different Home Secretaries said it.
[02:15:06.360 --> 02:15:08.760] The High Court said to them, you can't do this.
[02:15:08.760 --> 02:15:09.720] You've got to stop doing this.
[02:15:09.720 --> 02:15:11.240] They ignored the High Court.
[02:15:11.240 --> 02:15:13.480] Activists do whatever the hell they want.
[02:15:13.480 --> 02:15:15.320] And that's deep state.
[02:15:15.320 --> 02:15:16.600] That's what I mean by deep state.
[02:15:16.840 --> 02:15:24.440] What I mean is activists embedded in quangos who will work against what the elected representatives do, right?
[02:15:24.440 --> 02:15:29.480] This is why I have nervousness about unelected judges overturning what the president says as well.
[02:15:29.480 --> 02:15:37.480] Now, there's a case, of course, that you know, when it comes to the tariffs, for instance, maybe constitutionally it is the case that Congress has to be the ones to authorize that kind of thing.
[02:15:37.480 --> 02:15:40.200] And I'm not qualified in any way to talk about that.
[02:15:40.200 --> 02:15:41.960] But what I would say is I'm nervous.
[02:15:41.960 --> 02:15:48.920] I'm nervous about judges, even in our country with the Supreme Court, overturning what the government is, because we've elected the government.
[02:15:48.920 --> 02:15:56.120] I mean, when it comes to the tariffs, you can't say that Trump didn't explicitly say what he was going to do throughout his campaign.
[02:15:56.120 --> 02:15:58.920] And he won the popular vote and the Senate and the House.
[02:15:58.920 --> 02:16:02.760] He has a huge public mandate to do the things he's doing.
[02:16:02.760 --> 02:16:06.120] So I'm very nervous about anyone trying to thwart that who isn't elected.
[02:16:06.120 --> 02:16:07.240] Let's just put it that way.
[02:16:07.240 --> 02:16:07.800] Yeah.
[02:16:08.120 --> 02:16:08.680] Wow.
[02:16:08.680 --> 02:16:10.040] Andrew, too much.
[02:16:10.040 --> 02:16:12.360] That's almost two and a half hours.
[02:16:12.360 --> 02:16:13.320] Well done.
[02:16:13.320 --> 02:16:14.680] I could listen to you all day.
[02:16:14.680 --> 02:16:18.680] We're approaching almost a Joe Rogan length.
[02:16:19.000 --> 02:16:19.560] Almost.
[02:16:19.560 --> 02:16:23.880] But you know, there's a lot of stuff because, as you know, in my book, I cover a lot of stuff.
[02:16:23.960 --> 02:16:24.360] You do.
[02:16:24.360 --> 02:16:25.560] There's a lot in there.
[02:16:25.960 --> 02:16:30.680] It's really a political tract on liberalism and all that.
[02:16:30.680 --> 02:16:32.200] It's just so important.
[02:16:32.520 --> 02:16:35.880] Well, I mean, we've lost the thread in so many areas.
[02:16:35.880 --> 02:16:38.200] I mean, you want to know why Trump got elected?
[02:16:38.200 --> 02:16:41.400] That's why, because the other side lost their minds.
[02:16:41.400 --> 02:16:42.200] Yeah, absolutely.
[02:16:42.200 --> 02:16:53.520] And, you know, and you're one of the first Americans to read it, of course, because it's not out in physical copy in America for many, many months, but it is out in Kindle and on Audible with my stupid voice reading it.
[02:16:53.520 --> 02:16:58.320] But, you know, so you're one of the few to have read it over the Atlantic so well.
[02:16:58.480 --> 02:17:08.480] I mean, if you're getting your defense of free speech from, you know, Sean Hannity on Fox News or defense of women, you know, from Ducker Carlson or from Trump, wow.
[02:17:08.480 --> 02:17:09.120] Okay.
[02:17:09.440 --> 02:17:11.280] Liberals, really?
[02:17:11.280 --> 02:17:12.320] You're going to let this go?
[02:17:12.320 --> 02:17:14.160] You're going to drop this one?
[02:17:14.480 --> 02:17:14.880] Yeah.
[02:17:15.200 --> 02:17:16.080] Well, that's it.
[02:17:16.080 --> 02:17:21.680] I mean, that's why, you know, I appreciate having the opportunity to talk to you about these things because I think it's so important.
[02:17:21.680 --> 02:17:22.480] Oh, totally.
[02:17:22.480 --> 02:17:23.360] All right, Andrew.
[02:17:23.360 --> 02:17:25.440] We'll see you next time in New York or wherever.
[02:17:26.080 --> 02:17:28.160] I'll see you next week in the UK.
[02:17:28.160 --> 02:17:28.800] Fantastic.
[02:17:28.800 --> 02:17:30.160] Look forward to it.