Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "The War On The West" with Douglas Murray

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"The War On The West" with Douglas Murray · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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• 4:03
  Can I humans?
• 4:08
  I am currently sitting on the floor of a white washed villa
• 4:17
  in the Greek islands on my summer holidays.
• 4:21
  My winter holidays.
• 4:24
  We winter holidays in Australia
• 4:25
  where it has been raining pretty consistently
• 4:29
  for about eight months straight with horrendous storms
• 4:32
  and floods for much of the east coast of Australia.
• 4:35
  Here in the Greek islands, it is much more pleasant,
• 4:39
  excuse my privilege, white privilege, male privilege,
• 4:43
  financial privilege, etc.
• 4:46
  But it's delightful.
• 4:49
  And as a result, I haven't been able to articulate
• 4:52
  much about Rovers' weighed being overturned
• 4:55
  in the United States.
• 4:57
  However, when the draft opinion was leaked
• 5:00
  from the Supreme Court a few months ago,
• 5:03
  I did do an episode about it,
• 5:05
  which if you missed, I encourage you to listen to.
• 5:08
  It's partly my thoughts,
• 5:09
  and partly an excerpt from a fiery conversation
• 5:13
  that I had with Joe Rogan back in 2017 about RoV weighed.
• 5:18
  It's the May 6th, 2022 episode of Uncomfortable Conversations.
• 5:22
  Go back and take a listen.
• 5:23
  If you want my thoughts about Ro,
• 5:25
  I won't articulate them here,
• 5:28
  but it's enormously depressing
• 5:33
  and enormously depressing
• 5:35
  because the only way around it would seem to be
• 5:40
  a long-term overhaul of American democratic institutions,
• 5:45
  norms, and procedures.
• 5:48
  I just want to point to one thing
• 5:50
  that is getting overlooked a lot in these recent weeks,
• 5:53
  which is a Supreme Court decision
• 5:55
  that came down shortly after the overturning of Ro,
• 5:59
  which is much more consequential for far more people,
• 6:04
  which is that the Supreme Court stripped the US
• 6:07
  Environmental Protection Agency
• 6:09
  of its ability to regulate power plants
• 6:13
  and their carbon emissions,
• 6:15
  which basically means that the sole tool
• 6:18
  that American democracy uses to curb carbon emissions
• 6:22
  and to try to create a plan to avoid climate chaos
• 6:27
  is now muted.
• 6:29
  The ability of what was then the Obama administration
• 6:33
  to set rules about carbon emissions
• 6:36
  has been annihilated by the Supreme Court.
• 6:41
  And while the Ro decision is very important for a lot of women
• 6:45
  in a number of American states,
• 6:48
  the inability for the world's largest carbon emitter
• 6:53
  to get its hands around the problem of our ever-growing climate
• 6:58
  chaos is going to be far more wide-reaching in its impact.
• 7:03
  I mean, now they were talking about not tens of millions
• 7:06
  of women being impacted,
• 7:07
  but billions of people all over the world
• 7:10
  who took no part in the American democratic process whatsoever
• 7:14
  and there no culpability for the decisions of the Supreme Court.
• 7:17
  I mean, at least if you're in America,
• 7:18
  yes, you can be furious, but hey,
• 7:21
  you are part of the demos that has given rise
• 7:23
  to this Supreme Court.
• 7:24
  Whatever has happened, you may be a Democrat,
• 7:27
  but if you're a Democrat,
• 7:28
  there's something that your side of politics was not able to do
• 7:30
  that was not able to convince, persuade.
• 7:34
  You were not able to make the case sufficiently well
• 7:36
  to a sufficiently large number of your fellow countrymen
• 7:38
  to get across the line a Hillary Clinton presidency,
• 7:42
  for example, in which case the Supreme Court
• 7:44
  would look completely different.
• 7:45
  So not to blame the victim,
• 7:47
  but you're not entirely victims if you're Americans,
• 7:50
  not the same way that a Bangladeshi
• 7:52
  who will be suffering from disrupted monsoons
• 7:55
  that will destroy the rice harvest
• 7:57
  and may cause hundreds of millions of refugees
• 8:01
  to go flowing across borders
• 8:02
  and creating political instability
• 8:04
  and catastrophe across South Asia, for example.
• 8:07
  I mean, they had no say whatsoever
• 8:10
  in the political situation in the United States
• 8:12
  that has now given rise to at almost guarantee
• 8:19
  that the United States won't be able to do much
• 8:23
  about carbon emissions at a federal level.
• 8:27
  There is still some hope at a state level,
• 8:28
  states like California are very important
• 8:31
  in the rules that they make.
• 8:32
  There is still some hope, obviously,
• 8:34
  from private industry to drive this,
• 8:37
  but without the US federal government
• 8:39
  being able to play a role, it's a worry.
• 8:42
  Here in Greece, they have this annual wind
• 8:47
  in the cyclades in the group of islands that I'm in,
• 8:51
  called the meltemi,
• 8:52
  which is a dry, hot wind that sweeps through.
• 8:57
  And it's bad at the moment.
• 9:00
  It's strong.
• 9:02
  I was talking to a Greek guy at the car rental place
• 9:05
  on the little island I was in the other day.
• 9:08
  And I was saying, I didn't realize
• 9:09
  the meltemi came this early.
• 9:11
  And he said to me, normally it does not come this early,
• 9:14
  but everything is different.
• 9:16
  And I said, what do you mean?
• 9:17
  He said, everything, where the climate is all different,
• 9:19
  everything is different.
• 9:21
  And I thought back to the eight months of floods
• 9:24
  that Australians have been enduring.
• 9:27
  And a few years before that,
• 9:30
  the most horrendous bushfires that we'd seen in generations.
• 9:35
  And now this little glimpse of the meltemi
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  coming at the wrong time is a harbinger of things to come.
• 9:43
  Things will be more chaotic, more unpredictable
• 9:48
  and more expensive to clean up as a result of the decision
• 9:54
  by the Supreme Court about the government's ability
• 9:57
  to regulate carbon emissions from power plants.
• 10:02
  I know that a lot of Americans are leery
• 10:03
  about the idea of abolishing the filibuster,
• 10:07
  but it is simply unsustainable and untenable
• 10:10
  for a country that calls itself a democracy
• 10:13
  to require a super majority of parliament to do anything.
• 10:18
  This shouldn't be how Congress works.
• 10:20
  It's not how the founding fathers wrote the Constitution.
• 10:23
  It's a made up convention from the 20th century.
• 10:27
  And it has to go.
• 10:29
  You can't need 60 votes in a house of 100 representatives
• 10:34
  to get anything done in the Senate.
• 10:37
  It's just not workable.
• 10:41
  And a lot of people on the left say,
• 10:43
  well, yeah, but if you reduce it,
• 10:44
  if you get rid of the filibuster
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  and you just need 50% plus one in the Senate,
• 10:49
  then well, they'd be able to do anything.
• 10:50
  I mean, imagine when the Republicans are in power,
• 10:52
  they'd be able to pass all these laws.
• 10:54
  Yeah, that's what democracy is.
• 10:56
  I'm sorry that you hate your countrymen so much
• 10:58
  and think so little of them
• 11:00
  that you're not willing to entrust them
• 11:02
  with the democratic ability
• 11:04
  to express their own wishes.
• 11:06
  But the reality is that's democracy
• 11:09
  and you already live in an anti-democratic system
• 11:12
  where nine Supreme Court justices
• 11:15
  are deciding everything.
• 11:17
  And the only way that you can get around
• 11:19
  the problem of living in a system
• 11:22
  where Congress is gridlocked.
• 11:24
  And essentially you have this legislative chamber
• 11:28
  in the form of the Supreme Court
• 11:29
  where nine unelected people are functionally making laws
• 11:33
  for you is to restore the democratic part
• 11:38
  of the democratic institution
• 11:40
  or what is supposed to be the most democratic part
• 11:43
  of the government, which is the legislative chambers.
• 11:46
  The House of Representatives and the Senate.
• 11:49
  So you can talk about the electoral college
• 11:51
  for all of its craziness
• 11:53
  and you can rail against this Supreme Court,
• 11:55
  but that's the constitution that you have
• 11:57
  and that's the system that you work in.
• 11:58
  If you want laws to get passed,
• 12:00
  laws that could be passed to guarantee women
• 12:04
  the right to an abortion nationally,
• 12:06
  laws that could be passed to enable the government
• 12:10
  to do more about climate change.
• 12:13
  Then you need that to happen in the legislative chamber.
• 12:16
  The reason that can't happen
• 12:17
  in from the executive branch,
• 12:19
  the reason why the Supreme Court has stripped
• 12:21
  the government's ability to regulate carbon
• 12:23
  is not because the government couldn't pass a law.
• 12:27
  It's not because there aren't enough votes
• 12:29
  in Congress to pass a law that would empower the government
• 12:32
  to do something about climate chaos.
• 12:35
  It's because the administrative part of the government,
• 12:40
  in other words, the presidency, the executive branch,
• 12:43
  does not have the authority to do so
• 12:45
  on the basis of an old law
• 12:49
  that they're trying to invoke
• 12:51
  to give themselves the power to regulate power plants.
• 12:54
  What they need is a new law
• 12:56
  and that would be fine, that would be constitutional.
• 12:59
  But you can't get a new law
• 13:00
  in the United States of America
• 13:02
  because people in Congress can't agree with each other
• 13:05
  and because they can't agree with each other,
• 13:07
  they can't get over the filibuster threshold.
• 13:09
  No other democracy requires a super majority
• 13:12
  to pass everything.
• 13:14
  That's why Congress is stuck.
• 13:17
  So if you're curious about row
• 13:21
  and if you're frustrated about the Supreme Court,
• 13:24
  focus on things you can do something about.
• 13:28
  Focus on getting rid of the filibuster.
• 13:32
  That would be priority number one.
• 13:34
  Just as the right in America has spent decades,
• 13:38
  generations even working towards this goal,
• 13:41
  building up the Federalist Society,
• 13:43
  which is this pressure group
• 13:45
  that encourages members of Congress
• 13:49
  and presidential candidates
• 13:51
  to sign on to appointing conservative justices
• 13:54
  from a list that the Federalist Society literally writes.
• 13:57
  That's what Donald Trump said.
• 13:58
  He said before his election,
• 14:00
  I will appoint Supreme Court justices exclusively
• 14:02
  from the list that the Federalist Society gives me.
• 14:04
  I'm not interested in this stuff.
• 14:05
  You tell me I will be a good conservative.
• 14:07
  I will do what you want me to do.
• 14:08
  And that's one of the reasons why he won the election
• 14:10
  because he had the backing of conservatives
• 14:12
  who hated his immorality,
• 14:14
  but believed that they could take him to the bank
• 14:16
  on the Supreme Court and they could.
• 14:19
  He was good for his word on that,
• 14:20
  about the only thing he was good for his word on.
• 14:24
  You need that kind of a strategy.
• 14:26
  You need a multi-decade,
• 14:27
  multi-generational left-wing strategy
• 14:29
  to reform American democracy,
• 14:32
  to consider what you can do about the electoral college,
• 14:35
  to pledge to get rid of the filibuster,
• 14:38
  which yes, we'll have it's downsides,
• 14:40
  but hey, that's democracy.
• 14:42
  And to pledge to create a society,
• 14:45
  a culture that is more understanding
• 14:48
  of other people's opinions and ideas,
• 14:51
  and that focuses the locus of power
• 14:54
  in conciliation and compromise instead of stride and see
• 14:59
  and triumph or defeat.
• 15:02
  The way abortion has been figured out
• 15:04
  in every other democracy is not by instantiating it
• 15:07
  as a right that is somehow discovered in the Constitution.
• 15:10
  There is no constitutional right to abortion
• 15:12
  in any other rich democracy.
• 15:15
  Maybe any other country, I don't know,
• 15:18
  I don't know whether or not whether like Nigeria has one either.
• 15:21
  But I mean, comparing apples to apples,
• 15:24
  the way that you normally hammer out a controversial issue
• 15:27
  like abortion is that you elect representatives
• 15:30
  who go into a parliament or a Congress,
• 15:32
  they debate it and they hammer out a compromise.
• 15:36
  And the people who want abortion to be illegal altogether
• 15:40
  realize that they're not gonna get that.
• 15:43
  And the people who want abortion on demand
• 15:45
  right up until birth realize they're not gonna get that.
• 15:49
  And so you settle on somewhere like most Western democracies do
• 15:52
  around maybe the 12 week, 15 week mark.
• 15:56
  America was unique up until row was overturned
• 15:59
  in having a constitutional right that went right up
• 16:02
  to the quickening, 22 to 26 weeks.
• 16:06
  It doesn't have to be that way.
• 16:08
  Democracy shouldn't have to function that way
• 16:11
  with nine unelected people in robes
• 16:13
  decreeing what takes place within their borders.
• 16:17
  Democracy should be hammered out,
• 16:19
  should be figured out through the messy process of negotiation.
• 16:23
  And that means having conversations.
• 16:25
  That means having conversations that are awkward,
• 16:27
  that are difficult to require you to think the best
• 16:30
  of your opponents that require you to hear what they're actually
• 16:34
  saying instead of demonizing them
• 16:35
  and that require you to give a little bit of ground.
• 16:38
  Conversations that are tricky, that are hard,
• 16:42
  but that are so bloody necessary.
• 16:45
  Even if they are quite awful, uncomfortable.
• 16:58
  Today on the show one of the most controversial
• 17:01
  and full-broted defenders of Western civilization
• 17:05
  is the hordes of barbarians and the left.
• 17:08
  Mr. Douglas Murray, he is primarily an author.
• 17:13
  His new book is fantastic, especially as an audio book.
• 17:16
  It's called The War on the West.
• 17:17
  How to prevail in the age of unreason.
• 17:21
  It comes off the back of two previous books,
• 17:23
  the earlier one called The Madness of Crowds,
• 17:25
  Gender, Race and Identity from 2019 and from 2017,
• 17:30
  The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam.
• 17:34
  Douglas is a gay Brit.
• 17:37
  I say that only because one always has to slot people
• 17:39
  into identity buckets at the moment,
• 17:41
  but it gives him a sort of a position
• 17:43
  from which he can articulate some of his concerns
• 17:46
  about the bullshit we can peddle sometimes around.
• 17:52
  Islam, immigration, wokeism, race, gender,
• 17:57
  and he has a no-holds-barred intolerance for bullshit
• 18:02
  and a demand for nuance and rationality
• 18:05
  that is both refreshing and aggravating to people
• 18:08
  who dislike it.
• 18:10
  He receives criticism for sometimes being perhaps,
• 18:14
  well, his critics say blind to the excesses of the right.
• 18:18
  One of the main things that has come up
• 18:20
  in my relationship with him,
• 18:23
  that his critics have always agitate me to bring up with him,
• 18:29
  is his supposed relationship with Hungary's quasi-autocratic
• 18:34
  ruler, Viktor Orban.
• 18:37
  Viktor Orban, who had led this sort of gently authoritarian,
• 18:42
  I say gently, facetiously, regime in Hungary,
• 18:47
  was a big fan of Douglas Murray's book,
• 18:50
  The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, Islam.
• 18:53
  And it influenced Orban's thinking about closing
• 18:56
  Hungary's borders and putting in Hungary faces
• 18:59
  that has control essentially the border
• 19:01
  to the entire European Union
• 19:03
  and closing that border during the Syrian refugee crisis.
• 19:07
  And that controversial decision has subsequently
• 19:09
  been blended up with Orban's attacks on opposition media outlets
• 19:14
  and opposition politicians and so on into a miasma of criticism
• 19:21
  that has then reflected on to people whom Orban
• 19:25
  is a fan of, such as Douglas.
• 19:28
  Don't worry, I get to that and I raise it with Douglas
• 19:32
  and you will hear him respond in a way
• 19:34
  that I haven't heard him respond before
• 19:36
  because I haven't heard him really pressed on it before.
• 19:39
  I hope you enjoy this.
• 19:40
  Douglas is also an associate editor of the spectator,
• 19:43
  the Learned Conservative Magazine.
• 19:45
  He's a columnist at the New York Post and at the Sun.
• 19:49
  He really needs, oh, you may have seen him on Bill Maher's panel show
• 19:52
  recently, but he needs no more introduction from me.
• 19:54
  I hope you enjoy this conversation with the one
• 19:56
  and only Douglas Murray.
• 20:09
  You can be as naked as you want.
• 20:11
  Oh my god, I didn't know that.
• 20:12
  I wouldn't have put on all my best outfits.
• 20:16
  I've produced a shoot of total of you.
• 20:19
  Unbelievable.
• 20:19
  Yes, sometimes I am in my glad, in my glad drags.
• 20:23
  Yeah, that's right.
• 20:25
  Sometimes I'm just going, how are you?
• 20:27
  I'm wonderful.
• 20:27
  How are you?
• 20:29
  So nice to speak, finally.
• 20:30
  I'm so sorry about the week.
• 20:32
  That's all right.
• 20:33
  That day turned out to be a nightmare,
• 20:35
  but you know all about that with little ones.
• 20:37
  Oh my goodness, but you don't have little ones.
• 20:41
  No, I don't know.
• 20:42
  How old are you?
• 20:43
  Four, going on five.
• 20:47
  Great age.
• 20:48
  He's a great age, actually.
• 20:50
  Yes, he's a great age, because I don't really like babies.
• 20:54
  Right.
• 20:55
  I don't like, you know, little lizard creatures
• 20:58
  slimy and screaming.
• 21:01
  So it's nice to be over that, but to have little people.
• 21:05
  Is my own fault for living in such a silly time zone?
• 21:09
  Well, I do a sky-Australia on Sunday nights my time
• 21:12
  because doing it otherwise means 5.30 a.m. in my time
• 21:17
  is Earth, and I said, no, that's not how I want
• 21:20
  to start my week.
• 21:22
  No, not exactly.
• 21:24
  And you've moved to New York now.
• 21:26
  Yeah, I'm a New Yorker.
• 21:27
  How long have you been there?
• 21:29
  I've been here a year.
• 21:31
  As you know, I mean, it's a fantastic city, but it's great.
• 21:36
  He's got a lot of detour.
• 21:37
  I mean, you lived here for there, didn't you?
• 21:38
  Yeah, I lived there for more of my adult life than anywhere
• 21:42
  else.
• 21:43
  I lived there for 12 years.
• 21:44
  I did the predictable thing that newcomers do, which
• 21:47
  is I started in Manhattan and Chelsea on 8th Avenue
• 21:53
  and 18th Street.
• 21:54
  And then I moved to the Lower East Side, to alphabet
• 21:57
  city, to East 3rd between B and C, and then I moved out
• 22:01
  to Brooklyn Heights, and then I moved to Park's Life.
• 22:04
  You start sort of besotted by the neon lights, and you want to be as close
• 22:07
  to it as you possibly can, and then you gradually realize
• 22:10
  that there is a premium that one puts on space and Parkland.
• 22:14
  So did you move mid-pandemic?
• 22:16
  Or was it post-pandemic in your mind and was it a lot of drama?
• 22:20
  Yeah, it was, I mean, it was last summer as I thought
• 22:24
  I would swoop into the city and get an apartment for nothing.
• 22:27
  And other people had had the same idea.
• 22:29
  Right, the 100,000.
• 22:34
  Yeah, I had the great idea during the pandemic of buying a house,
• 22:37
  because I thought, now is finally the time,
• 22:39
  because nobody else is going to want to do this during a pandemic.
• 22:41
  It's just that everybody else in Australia
• 22:43
  and people are going to be like, oh no, no, no, no,
• 22:46
  it's about having fun and else to do.
• 22:48
  And they had money, they had nothing to spend on.
• 22:51
  So I just, just at the top of the market.
• 22:54
  Too bad, let's go.
• 22:55
  Something moved just before it started softening again.
• 22:58
  I love your new book.
• 23:00
  I always love it to hear your voice reading it as well,
• 23:04
  which makes up for the fact that I can't hear you
• 23:08
  on a weekly podcast, but at least I hear dollops of you
• 23:12
  on when you read your book.
• 23:14
  As I always say, I always quote my late friend,
• 23:17
  Clive James, whenever anyone says I love your book,
• 23:19
  it was there.
• 23:20
  Don't be afraid to say that public.
• 23:24
  Oh, Clive, wonderful, Clive.
• 23:27
  I think the interesting, for people who haven't read it yet,
• 23:30
  I think the sense that I get from most people
• 23:32
  who are fed up with workness is that it's hard in the right place,
• 23:37
  but it's gone a bit too far, that me too was extremely
• 23:43
  necessary in order to correct for power and balance
• 23:47
  between the sexes, but maybe it went a little bit too far,
• 23:52
  but it's on the whole good thing that maybe the race riots
• 23:56
  went a little bit too far in 2020,
• 23:58
  but the world is much better for now being as racially aware
• 24:00
  as it is that maybe there's a bit of craziness
• 24:03
  on the transgender extremist front about
• 24:06
  there being no such thing as genders or no connection
• 24:09
  between biology and gender, but life is much better
• 24:13
  for trans people, and that's a good thing.
• 24:16
  Your book sort of takes a different approach.
• 24:19
  It's not saying to make an omelet,
• 24:23
  you just have to break a few eggs.
• 24:25
  What's wrong with the view that I just articulated?
• 24:29
  So my own view has been, I read a bit about this
• 24:32
  in my previous book, The Madness of Krabs.
• 24:36
  That our era is an era of overcorrections.
• 24:41
  That is, we see a problem that exists,
• 24:46
  we see an inequality that exists or an injustice that exists
• 24:50
  or has existed in the past and has remnants today,
• 24:54
  perhaps, and we decide to correct it,
• 24:56
  and in the process of correcting are we overcorrect?
• 25:00
  And I mean, I gave a lot of examples in the Madness of Krabs,
• 25:04
  that happened in a range of issues, sex, sexuality, gender, race,
• 25:12
  and that is so, for instance,
• 25:15
  we know nobody will deny that women in the past
• 25:17
  have not had the same abilities as men to make
• 25:20
  like certain life choices.
• 25:23
  In order to make up for that,
• 25:25
  a certain type of feminist says, for instance,
• 25:28
  we don't need men.
• 25:29
  Men are useless and much more.
• 25:35
  And in the process, they think, I think this is the rationale,
• 25:39
  and certainly some of it is the rationale,
• 25:42
  is that the result is you sort of over swing like that,
• 25:45
  and it means at some point you get to fairness,
• 25:48
  quality or that middle bit of the pendulum.
• 25:53
  There's a lot of things in our time that have had similar
• 25:55
  trajectories, some of us, you mentioned.
• 26:00
  I'm very wary of this as a technique,
• 26:03
  not least, because I think nobody knows
• 26:04
  when they've overcorrected for long enough.
• 26:07
  Nobody knows when it's time to stop.
• 26:09
  And nobody knows the damage that the over correction may have done.
• 26:12
  You know, the period in which you've rubbed certain people's faces
• 26:16
  in something in the name of achieving victory,
• 26:22
  because you mixed up victory and equality.
• 26:27
  But if you don't know, then wouldn't the argument be,
• 26:29
  well, one has to do it, because the injustice needs to be remedied.
• 26:32
  So, life ain't perfect, but gotta give it a shot.
• 26:36
  You'd have to agree on the exact nature of the injustice,
• 26:39
  and unfortunately, it's the nature of our time again,
• 26:42
  that certain fine-tuning experiments are being carried out
• 26:45
  on our societies by people who appear to be wearing mocks and gloves.
• 26:51
  It's like watching a brain surge
• 26:54
  to an operation
• 26:57
  where it mittens.
• 26:59
  It's, for instance,
• 27:02
  you mentioned the Me2 here at Post 2017.
• 27:06
  You know, there's a lot you could say
• 27:10
  about what you might deal,
• 27:12
  what you might do to deal with a certain type of predatory mate.
• 27:16
  Is any of it solved by, for instance,
• 27:19
  slogans like, believe or women?
• 27:23
  Almost certainly not.
• 27:24
  This is dealing with a very fine,
• 27:26
  the balanced issue holding mocks and gloves.
• 27:30
  It makes no more sense to say, believe or women
• 27:32
  that would be to say, believe or met.
• 27:35
  It's a deranging clang.
• 27:37
  It's like saying, believe or people with blue eyes.
• 27:41
  Right, but I think that believe all women actually
• 27:44
  became a right-wing talking point in the sense
• 27:46
  that I think it was originally believe women.
• 27:48
  I think that whoever coined that had said,
• 27:51
  you know, when women say that they've been assaulted,
• 27:53
  believe them, believe women,
• 27:55
  and then, for people, even that,
• 27:57
  like you said.
• 27:58
  Well, no, no, no.
• 27:59
  And they're saying that, believe all women.
• 28:01
  Even that believe women itself is a great,
• 28:03
  and why believe men?
• 28:05
  Believe men believe that women, what does it mean?
• 28:07
  Are people individuals,
• 28:08
  are the individual cases and individual complaints?
• 28:11
  Or are they simply lumped in
• 28:13
  by their chromosomal group hate?
• 28:16
  Well, isn't it pointing to what it sees as a tilted scale
• 28:20
  in the sense that there had been a tendency
• 28:23
  to believe men's claims of being assaulted,
• 28:26
  but there had been a tendency to sort of think
• 28:28
  that women were getting a little bit carried away
• 28:30
  when they said that there was something wrong
• 28:32
  with having their bombs slapped in the office?
• 28:35
  Well, again, I mean,
• 28:36
  we'd have to be so specific to know what we were talking about.
• 28:40
  I mean, of course, it doesn't help
• 28:41
  that, of course, the issue was all carried out
• 28:46
  on the worst possible terrain,
• 28:48
  which was the terrain of Hollywood.
• 28:50
  I mean, if you wanted to very subtly alter
• 28:52
  the relations between sexes,
• 28:54
  the sexual etiquette of our species,
• 28:57
  it's not a good idea to base it on Hollywood.
• 29:00
  The most unlike anywhere else placed on Earth.
• 29:05
  The place which actually came up
• 29:06
  with the term the casted catch,
• 29:08
  the place where people actually use their sexual wiles
• 29:13
  and their attractiveness to advance,
• 29:15
  you know, it's not a very good way to base
• 29:20
  any reformulation of etiquette.
• 29:24
  So what I'm saying is just again and again,
• 29:27
  when there is a, even if there is a problem identified
• 29:30
  which could be addressed,
• 29:32
  we just deal with it in these incredibly fumbling,
• 29:36
  ill-thought-out, non-specific ways.
• 29:40
  And in the process, you know, solve very little,
• 29:45
  I mean, we've just seen with the deaf herd trial,
• 29:49
  one of the consequences of, you know, belief women,
• 29:53
  which is the ACLU back to our amber herd,
• 29:57
  an amber herd in court kept on proving herself
• 30:01
  to be a liar, frankly, she kept contradicting her own evidence,
• 30:05
  something which juries really don't lie.
• 30:08
  It's quite hard to watch amber herd's performance
• 30:10
  and keep saying believe women.
• 30:13
  At the very least say, well, luck is incredibly tricky
• 30:16
  and deal with it on a case-by-case basis
• 30:19
  and hope to hell that it never ends up in court
• 30:22
  any more often than it has to.
• 30:24
  But, you know, these things are just much more complex
• 30:26
  in our age, like, super 10.
• 30:28
  It's an ear of hashtags
• 30:31
  and there's very little you can achieve with a hashtag.
• 30:37
  Remember, I mean, even on really specific ones,
• 30:39
  I do you remember bringing back our girls?
• 30:42
  Do you remember that one?
• 30:43
  What was that one?
• 30:43
  Again, they're all so big.
• 30:44
  Bring back our girls because they go by,
• 30:46
  it's such a great,
• 30:47
  I mean, our girls think in my memory,
• 30:50
  but it's a 300, 300 school girls
• 30:53
  in the north-east of Nigeria about a decade ago,
• 30:56
  by Boko Haram.
• 30:58
  Everybody busily hashtagged away.
• 31:01
  A lot of the girls have never been returned.
• 31:03
  Some of them were, many of them were basically
• 31:08
  held captured by their hostages
• 31:09
  who got them with Stockholm syndrome.
• 31:12
  I point to simply that, you know,
• 31:14
  there's this sort of tendency to think
• 31:15
  we can solve these things in this era by these silly means.
• 31:19
  And I think we should just be much more careful.
• 31:23
  And, you know, there are some of them that are silly.
• 31:27
  Some of the sexual etiquette stuff is basically silly.
• 31:31
  But some of it, when it comes to things like race,
• 31:34
  should we really darn careful?
• 31:36
  Really specific.
• 31:38
  Make sure that this brain surgery is being done
• 31:43
  by level-headed people,
• 31:46
  not maniacs, or from any direction.
• 31:49
  There are a couple of things that I could say to that
• 31:52
  and take whichever one you want.
• 31:53
  One would be,
• 31:55
  there had been a general sense amongst people
• 31:57
  who'd been historically shat on them,
• 31:59
  or who belonged to groups that had been historically shat on,
• 32:01
  that the brain surgeons just hadn't done a good enough job.
• 32:04
  That the brain surgeons kept telling us,
• 32:06
  oh, look, we're going to deal with this.
• 32:07
  The brain surgeons being, I suppose, the smaller liberals.
• 32:09
  We're going to deal with this with finesse and egalitarianism
• 32:12
  and equality before the law.
• 32:15
  And there were people who felt excluded
• 32:17
  from the general sort of ascendancy of well-being in the West,
• 32:23
  who said, but it's not going quickly enough.
• 32:25
  We're still feeling like we're demeaned in our daily lives.
• 32:28
  We still feel like there's casual racism and casual sexism.
• 32:31
  And the justice system doesn't take seriously
• 32:34
  even extreme transgressions by people
• 32:37
  who enjoy the benefits of walking through life
• 32:41
  without their reality being questioned.
• 32:44
  And so we need to do something more.
• 32:48
  So sometimes maybe you do need a boxing glove rather than a scalpel.
• 32:51
  But the other point I would make is it is a bigger one,
• 32:53
  which is I think you're going further in this latest book.
• 32:55
  I think what you're saying here is more like what you're saying
• 32:58
  in the madness of crowds.
• 32:59
  But in the war on the West, I think you're pointing to
• 33:03
  a deeper problem with where the left has gone,
• 33:07
  which is not just that it's an over correction,
• 33:11
  and it's sort of an over-tactical correction
• 33:14
  to good strategic games.
• 33:15
  But actually that the strategic games have become
• 33:19
  fundamentally misguided.
• 33:21
  Fundamentally bad.
• 33:22
  And it looks exactly right.
• 33:24
  Well, that's true.
• 33:25
  I mean, what you just laid out in your first comment,
• 33:27
  there is what was called the gradualist approach,
• 33:32
  that the way there was historical
• 33:35
  unfansist that had occurred,
• 33:39
  they could be rectified gradually.
• 33:41
  The generation of the generation,
• 33:44
  things were getting broadly better.
• 33:47
  That was sort of the, I mean,
• 33:50
  since we're all downstream of American culture really
• 33:53
  in the West, countries like Australia
• 33:57
  and my own country, birth, grapefruit,
• 33:59
  we're actually downstream from American culture.
• 34:01
  And in American culture, the gradualist approach
• 34:04
  had been pretty popular.
• 34:07
  There had been very concerted efforts since the 1960s
• 34:12
  to, for instance, increase Black representation
• 34:15
  at elite colleges and others.
• 34:19
  There had been a very concerted effort
• 34:22
  to make sure that integration was proved
• 34:26
  and that 13% of Americans who accounted
• 34:29
  as Black Americans did, you know,
• 34:31
  felt more part of the nation
• 34:33
  than they had before the civil rights era.
• 34:36
  This gradualist approach I would argue was not perfect,
• 34:39
  but was always getting somewhere.
• 34:43
  And as you say, there are some people who say,
• 34:45
  say, well, that didn't get me where I wanted to get fast enough
• 34:49
  or it didn't get me everything I want
• 34:51
  or there are things in life that I would like
• 34:54
  and I don't know what I can blame them on,
• 34:57
  but this one is available and is useful
• 35:01
  that people seem to take notice where it's used.
• 35:04
  And all of that and much more has gone on
• 35:07
  in recent years, never more so than since the killing
• 35:10
  of George Floyd two years ago.
• 35:13
  Which was one of the catalyst moments
• 35:15
  when people, I think, completely incorrectly
• 35:18
  interpreted this appalling,
• 35:21
  appalling event as being not just the prism
• 35:25
  through which to look at policing in America,
• 35:27
  but the prism through which to look
• 35:29
  at all race relations in America
• 35:31
  and as a result all relations in the wider West.
• 35:35
  And that is for all sorts of reasons I tried to outline,
• 35:38
  but a very, very dangerous path to go down.
• 35:43
  I mean, let me give you one very quick example of that.
• 35:48
  Every year in America, thousands of Black Americans killed
• 35:52
  and they're not killed by police violence.
• 35:54
  So killed by other Black Americans.
• 35:56
  That includes by the hundreds of children every year.
• 35:59
  Hundreds of Black children killed every year in America
• 36:02
  by shootings carried out by other Black Americans.
• 36:09
  Black Americans are 10 times more likely
• 36:13
  between the ages of 14 and 70
• 36:16
  to carry out an act of violence using a gun
• 36:18
  than either white Americans or Hispanic Americans.
• 36:22
  Now, having laid out those
• 36:25
  that very serious problem,
• 36:28
  would it be true to say that the reason for that is racism
• 36:33
  or white supremacy or institutional racism?
• 36:38
  It could certainly be one factor.
• 36:40
  It might be the entire factor.
• 36:42
  It seemed to me unlikely, but we have entered an era
• 36:47
  where there's only one answer for everything.
• 36:50
  And the answer for everything like that must be racism
• 36:53
  or white supremacy or institutional racism.
• 36:57
  And I think that this is a totally inadequate
• 37:02
  attempt to almost willfully misunderstand problems
• 37:07
  that are in front of us, which are actually
• 37:10
  very complicated and have a lot more dimensions
• 37:13
  than we seem to be willing to cope.
• 37:15
  It also requires that we redefine those terms basically.
• 37:19
  So I mean, now I hear white supremacy used
• 37:23
  in a casual way to basically just mean
• 37:26
  the sort of invisible embedded power structures
• 37:29
  of the west of the society that we live in.
• 37:32
  And it's just a proxy for anything really
• 37:35
  that you don't like about the way that society is currently organized.
• 37:37
  You used to be so specific.
• 37:39
  Yeah.
• 37:40
  You used to be a very specific thing.
• 37:42
  It was it was only ever really utilized as a term
• 37:45
  to describe the type of people who think
• 37:47
  that they are superior to other people
• 37:50
  because of the color of their skin.
• 37:52
  You know, and that would be right.
• 37:54
  And that they should dominate over other people.
• 37:56
  And would actively like to see that happen.
• 37:59
  I mean, that used to be, it's not a perfect definition,
• 38:02
  but used to be roughly the definition event
• 38:04
  when we use the term like that.
• 38:06
  But as you say, I mean, we live in this era
• 38:09
  of also of definition, spirit, and expansion.
• 38:15
  I was speaking a little while ago
• 38:16
  to a South African journalist who had a black woman
• 38:20
  who said to me that she lives
• 38:22
  in a white supremacist society.
• 38:24
  And I said, how can you say you live
• 38:27
  in South Africa in a white society?
• 38:29
  You might say you live in a society
• 38:31
  where some South whites
• 38:32
  South Africans still have a disproportionate amount of wealth.
• 38:35
  But you live in a country where all of the government,
• 38:38
  all of the capital are black.
• 38:42
  How on earth could you actually be living
• 38:44
  in a white supremacist society?
• 38:46
  And the answer is she does it.
• 38:47
  She's just redefined the term
• 38:50
  to make life a bit more comfortable
• 38:52
  for herself and her own argument.
• 38:53
  Yeah, right.
• 38:54
  Well, she lives, I mean, I assume she said something
• 38:57
  like I live in a society that's dominated
• 38:59
  by capitalism and by capitalist ideals
• 39:02
  and by megacorporations
• 39:03
  that are people by white men in a country.
• 39:06
  You didn't do that as she could have done.
• 39:08
  Yes, she could have done that.
• 39:09
  Yeah.
• 39:10
  And where there's a passage in your latest book
• 39:13
  that is quite eye-opening,
• 39:15
  we actually sort of take on the challenge
• 39:18
  of defining what is good about the West.
• 39:21
  I actually want to play a bit from the audio,
• 39:24
  but because it's so rare to hear someone
• 39:27
  actually full-throatedly respond to the charge
• 39:31
  that the West is fallen.
• 39:33
  And I'll play here, I don't have it to hand,
• 39:35
  but you know the passage that I'm talking about, right?
• 39:37
  Where Mark Lamont-Hill has asked the...
• 39:39
  Yes, you know, Chris Rufo.
• 39:41
  Yeah, Chris Rufo, what's good about whiteness
• 39:45
  and you sort of actually take a punt on that, have a listen?
• 39:50
  So I knew the form and watched with interest,
• 39:54
  but Lamont-Hill is no fool.
• 39:57
  And when he interviewed Rufo,
• 39:58
  he had a devastating question up his sleeve.
• 40:02
  The question was this,
• 40:05
  if I were to say to you now, Christopher,
• 40:08
  what do you like about being white?
• 40:10
  What would you say?
• 40:12
  Rufo is also no fool,
• 40:15
  and he knew that he had just been led
• 40:17
  onto an unbelievably dangerous,
• 40:20
  potentially career-ending landmine.
• 40:24
  But first, he laughed nervously and struggled for an answer.
• 40:28
  It's such an amorphous term,
• 40:30
  it's like a census term, he said.
• 40:33
  But Lamont-Hill pushed, asking Rufo to indulge him for a moment.
• 40:38
  After all, as Lamont-Hill said,
• 40:41
  if you were to ask me some things I like about being black,
• 40:45
  I could talk about cultural norms,
• 40:47
  I could talk about tradition,
• 40:49
  I could talk about the kind of commonalities I feel around the diaspora,
• 40:53
  if I were to ask you,
• 40:55
  particularly if you are saying whiteness is a thing
• 40:57
  that is being constructed as negative and shouldn't be,
• 41:01
  name something positive that you like about being white.
• 41:07
  Rufo tried to swerve once more by saying that a lot of public schools are claiming that things
• 41:12
  like timeliness, rationality, objectivity,
• 41:15
  and the enlightenment are being ascribed to a white identity
• 41:19
  and that this is wrong,
• 41:21
  and they should be ascribed to all human beings.
• 41:25
  Lamont-Hill said this was a straw man,
• 41:28
  and reiterated that these were all negative things being ascribed to being white,
• 41:33
  while he was asking for something that was positive about being white.
• 41:38
  Rufo laughed and said,
• 41:41
  again, I don't buy into the framework that the world can be reduced
• 41:45
  into these metaphysical categories of whiteness and blackness.
• 41:48
  I think that's wrong.
• 41:49
  I think we should look at people as individuals.
• 41:52
  I think we should celebrate different people's different accomplishments.
• 41:56
  I reject that categorisation.
• 41:58
  I think of myself as an individual human being with my own capabilities,
• 42:02
  and I would hope that we could both judge each other as individuals
• 42:06
  and come to common values on that basis.
• 42:11
  Inevitably enough, Lamont-Hill concluded that the ability to see yourself in this fashion
• 42:17
  was yet another example of white privilege.
• 42:20
  The reason the exchange was so interesting was that Lamont-Hill knew exactly what he was doing.
• 42:29
  He knew that he was leading Rufo onto the most dangerous possible territory,
• 42:36
  both for him personally and for white people as a whole.
• 42:41
  If there are things that are bad about being white,
• 42:44
  then there must be things that are good about being white.
• 42:48
  What are they?
• 42:49
  There are in fact a number of ways this question might be answered,
• 42:54
  ugly though it is to even ask it.
• 42:58
  But a ducking of this issue most likely cannot go on interminably.
• 43:05
  The first way to answer it is to try to take the path that Rufo tried to take,
• 43:11
  that is to say, basically, I do not want to see colour.
• 43:17
  I do not want to see people primarily through the prism of their skin pigmentation.
• 43:22
  I think that skin colour is essentially uninteresting and unimportant,
• 43:26
  and we should leave it at that.
• 43:29
  This is a perfectly respectable answer to give, and it is about the only answer that is
• 43:35
  survivable if asked such a question in any public forum today.
• 43:41
  The second way to answer it would be to step a little further along the same road as that,
• 43:47
  which is to say that effectively what is being described as white culture is in fact no more than
• 43:55
  a part of a universal culture, and that whereas some black people and people of other races might
• 44:02
  decide to cut themselves off from allowing other people to join their party, white people should
• 44:08
  take a different route. That what is called whiteness is something that can be open to all people,
• 44:16
  and that whereas the traditions and cultural norms of black Americans may try to be kept
• 44:21
  back solely for the enjoyment of other black people, white culture should not be identified
• 44:27
  in such a way, and should almost be a synonym for something that is open to all.
• 44:34
  So, in an era that wishes to identify people along tribal lines, whiteness becomes a convening
• 44:41
  body for people of any background or skin colour who wish to engage themselves in an ongoing
• 44:48
  tradition known in shorthand as the Western tradition. Both of these are the softest options
• 44:57
  and eminently respectable. But there is a third option, which Lamont Hill must have known
• 45:05
  could be possible to tease out, and which he almost certainly knew that his interlocutor would
• 45:11
  not say. For this is the currently unacceptable answer, the nuclear answer. That answer to someone
• 45:22
  asking what is good about being white might go along something like the following lines.
• 45:30
  I don't especially think of myself as being white and don't particularly want to be
• 45:35
  cornered into thinking in such terms. But if you are going to corner me, then let me give you an
• 45:42
  answer to the best of my ability. For good things about being white include being born into a
• 45:49
  tradition that has given the world a disproportionate number, if not most, of the things that the
• 45:55
  world currently benefits from. The list of things that white people have done may include many
• 46:02
  bad things as with all peoples. But the good things are not small in number. They include almost every
• 46:11
  medical advancement that the world now enjoys. They include almost every scientific advancement that
• 46:17
  the world now benefits from. No meaningful breakthrough in either of these areas has come for many
• 46:23
  centuries from anywhere in Africa or from any Native American tribe. No first nation wisdom
• 46:31
  ever delivered a vaccine or a cure for cancer. White people founded most of the world's oldest
• 46:39
  and longest established educational institutions. They led the world in the invention and promotion
• 46:46
  of the written word. Almost alone among any peoples it was white people who for good and for
• 46:53
  ill took an interest in other cultures beyond their own and not only learned from these cultures
• 46:59
  but revived some of them. Indeed they have taken such an interest in other peoples that they have
• 47:06
  searched for lost and dead civilizations as well as living ones to understand what these lost
• 47:13
  peoples did in an attempt to learn what they knew. This is not the case with most other peoples.
• 47:22
  No aboriginal tribe helped make any advance in understanding the lost languages of the Indian subcontinent
• 47:29
  Babylon or ancient Egypt. The curiosity appears to have gone almost entirely one way.
• 47:37
  In historical terms it seems to be as unusual as the self-reflection, the self-criticism,
• 47:44
  and indeed the search for self-improvement that marks out Western culture.
• 47:51
  White Western peoples happened to have also developed all the world's most successful means of
• 47:57
  commerce including the free flow of capital. This system of free market capitalism has lifted more
• 48:04
  than one billion people out of extreme poverty just in the 21st century thus far. It did not
• 48:12
  originate in Africa or China, although people in those places benefited from it, it originated
• 48:19
  in the West. So did numerous other things that make the lives of people around the world
• 48:26
  immeasurably better. It is Western people who developed the principle of representative government
• 48:33
  of the people, by the people, for the people. It is the Western world that developed the principles
• 48:39
  and practice of political liberty, of freedom of thought and conscience, of freedom of speech and
• 48:46
  expression. It evolved the principles of what we now call civil rights, rights that do not exist
• 48:54
  in much of the world, whether their peoples yearn for them or not. They were developed and are
• 49:01
  sustained in the West, which, though it may often fail in its aspirations, nevertheless tends to
• 49:09
  them. All this is before you even get onto the cultural achievements that the West has gifted the
• 49:17
  world. The Matura sculptures excavated at Jamal Portilla are works of exceptional refinement,
• 49:26
  but no sculptor ever surpassed Bernini or Michelangelo. Backdad in the 8th century produced
• 49:34
  scholars of note, but no one ever produced another Leonardo da Vinci. There have been artistic
• 49:42
  flourishings around the world, but none so intense or productive as that which emerged around
• 49:48
  just a few square miles of Florence from the 14th century onward. Of course, there have been
• 49:54
  great music and great culture produced from many civilizations, but it is the music of the West
• 50:01
  as well as its philosophy, art, literature, poetry and drama that have reached such heights
• 50:08
  that the world wants to participate in them. Outside China, Chinese culture is a matter for scholars
• 50:16
  and a fissionados of Chinese culture, whereas the culture created by white people in the West
• 50:23
  belongs to the world, and a disproportionate swath of the world wants to be a part of it.
• 50:30
  When you ask what the West has produced, I am reminded of the groups of professors
• 50:35
  assigned to agree on what should be sent in a spacepod into orbit, in outer space,
• 50:42
  to be discovered by another race, if any such there be. When it came to agreeing on what one
• 50:49
  musical piece might be sent to represent that part of human accomplishment, one of the professors
• 50:55
  said, well, obviously it will be Bach's mass in B minor. No, I've heard another. To send the
• 51:04
  B minor mass would look like showing off. To talk about the history of Western accomplishments
• 51:11
  is to be put at great risk of showing off. Do we stay just with buildings or cities or laws
• 51:20
  or great men and women? How do we restrict the list that we put up as a preliminary offer?
• 51:28
  Of course, you may dispute some of these details or you may dispute whole swaths of it,
• 51:34
  think its tone wrong does not show enough humility or self-deprecation. You may even say
• 51:41
  that this understated homily sounds triumphalist or otherwise in bad taste.
• 51:48
  But what cannot be disputed is the most devastating proof of all, which is the simple matter
• 51:56
  of footfall, a footfall that is entirely one directional. For there is even today no serious
• 52:06
  movement of peoples in the world struggling to get into modern China. For all its financial prowess,
• 52:15
  the world does not wish to move to that country. It does want to move to America and will go to
• 52:23
  extraordinary lengths even the risk of life to reach that goal. Similarly, there is no serious
• 52:32
  global effort to break into any of the countries of Africa. Indeed, a third of Sub-Saharan
• 52:39
  Africans pulled in the last decade said that they wanted to move. Where they wanted to move
• 52:46
  is clear. The migrant ships across the Mediterranean go only in one direction. North.
• 52:56
  The people smuggling gangs' boats do not halfway across the Mediterranean meet white
• 53:02
  Europeans heading south desperate to escape France, Spain, or Italy in order to enjoy the
• 53:09
  freedoms and opportunities of Africa. No significant number of people wish to participate in life
• 53:17
  among the tribes of Africa, or the Middle East. There is no mass movement of people wishing to live
• 53:24
  with the social norms of the aboriginals or assimilate into the lifestyle of the Inuit.
• 53:30
  Whether those groups would allow them in or not. Despite everything that is said against it,
• 53:37
  America is still the world's number one destination for migrants worldwide.
• 53:43
  And the next most desirable countries for people wanting to move are Canada, Germany,
• 53:50
  France, Australia, and the United Kingdom. The West must have done something right for this to be
• 53:58
  the case. So, if you ask me what is good about being white, what white people have brought to the
• 54:06
  world or what white people might be proud of, this might constitute the mere beginnings of a list
• 54:13
  of accomplishments from which to start. And while we are at it, one final thing.
• 54:21
  This culture that it is now so fashionable to deprecate and which people across the West have
• 54:28
  been encouraged and incentivized to deprecate remains the only culture in the world that not only
• 54:36
  tolerates but encourages such a dialogue against itself. It is the only culture that actually
• 54:44
  rewards its critics. And there is one final oddity here worth noting. For the countries and cultures
• 54:53
  about which the worst things are now said are also the only countries demonstrably capable
• 55:01
  of producing the governing class unlike all of the others.
• 55:06
  It is not possible today for a non-Indian to rise to the top of Indian politics.
• 55:13
  If a white person moved to Bangladesh, they would not be able to become a cabinet minister.
• 55:20
  If a white westerner moved to China, neither they nor the next generation of their family,
• 55:26
  nor the one after that would be able to break through the layers of government and to become
• 55:32
  supreme leader in due course. It is America that has twice selected a black president,
• 55:39
  the son of a father from Kenya. It is America whose current vice president is the daughter of
• 55:46
  immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is the cabinet of the United Kingdom that includes the
• 55:53
  children of immigrants from Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda and Ghana and an immigrant who was
• 56:01
  born in India. The cabinets of countries across Africa and Asia do not reciprocate this diversity,
• 56:10
  but it is no matter. The West is happy to accept the benefits this brings even if others are not.
• 56:19
  This would have been one way for Rufo to answer that question, but it is understandable that he did
• 56:28
  not. For, at present, such a truthful answer remains at the very edges of permissible sayability,
• 56:37
  and into the silence left by the impossibility of saying what is true, anything and everything
• 56:45
  can roam. Why did you write that and why is it so rare to hear that?
• 56:54
  That passage has brought a lot of criticism already as well as a certain amount of praise,
• 57:00
  and I expected that because I'm aware, as I say in the book, that this is a nuclear answer.
• 57:07
  The issue in question there is it comes down to one of the central ones. I describe in the war
• 57:13
  on the West what I describe as the war on white people. That is the belief that we believe in our
• 57:20
  society such that all the forms of racism are repugged. But if you were to say, you know, I don't know,
• 57:28
  there are forms of black behavior that are so exclusive to black people and it's because
• 57:35
  they're black. You would think if somebody did that, oh gosh, there's a racist person right there.
• 57:41
  And you would think that on any other group of people, but people are allowed to do it with white
• 57:45
  people today, which by the way, among other things, as I say, is a big, big mistake because you're
• 57:51
  dealing with being highly insulting and demeaning towards majority populations, white people
• 58:00
  still being majority in countries like America, Australia and Britain. Very, very, it seems like a very
• 58:05
  unwise thing to do tactically to tell any minority group that they're worthiness, guilty historically
• 58:13
  because of the color of their skin, uniquely guilty, the color of their skin. It seems like a very
• 58:18
  strange thing to do to a minority group, but it probably wouldn't work whatever size that minority
• 58:24
  was. It's a very unlikely thing to work against the majority. And yet that's one of the things
• 58:31
  we attempted in recent years when I described as the war of the West. And what I did in this passage
• 58:38
  was to say, okay, here's your journalist who confronted another journalist. The black journalist
• 58:43
  confronted the white journalist in America saying, what's good about being white? And the journalist
• 58:48
  said the white journalist said, I don't really like thinking those terms, which is perfectly
• 58:52
  reasonable because they're the only careers that in the career surviving where you could answer
• 58:57
  that question. I said, I don't want to be honest with that. And I say, because the interview
• 59:03
  of Mark Lamont Hill, who's black, I met before in Doha, Mark Lamont Hill says, well, I could tell
• 59:10
  you what I like about being black, being black. I grew it's a community, I love the music,
• 59:17
  there's other things. So what's good about being white? And Rufo dodges it again. And I said,
• 59:24
  basically, there are only three answers we can give to this. One is to say what Rufo did,
• 59:31
  which is to say, I just don't like it. And to be fair to him, that's pretty much the way I
• 59:35
  answer that question as well. And I don't really want you to drag me into your sort of racial games,
• 59:42
  you know, I'd like to ask to be passed there. The second way you could answer it was to say,
• 59:49
  effectively, it doesn't matter because whiteness is effectively the United Nations race.
• 59:56
  So you might want to claim that being black is an exclusive thing and people can't join if they're
• 1:00:04
  not exactly a bright background or whatever, but white people don't mind. We welcome all. And
• 1:00:13
  to that extent, do they say it's an integrationist project. That would be a perfectly
• 1:00:18
  reasonable thing to do as well. And I say, but then there's the sort of third option, the
• 1:00:23
  new clear option, which I given a quote, it's not what I'm saying directly as my view, it's a free
• 1:00:29
  full-frored, as you say, offer of what an answer could be. And that is to say, well, I'm going to
• 1:00:35
  tell you all of the things that white people have actually done and have given the world.
• 1:00:41
  And if you're going to tell me all the things that black people have given the world,
• 1:00:45
  let me tell you all the things that white people have given the world. And I hate to talk in those
• 1:00:50
  terms, but if you're going to, if you're going to provoke people into that, this is the kind of
• 1:00:54
  answer you're going to get. And the list is pretty low. The accomplishments are pretty low.
• 1:01:01
  And as I say, this is an answer much to be avoided. It's not a desirable answer,
• 1:01:10
  but it would be the answer of people who have fed up with being told they've done nothing of any good.
• 1:01:17
  And I do fear that in this generation in particular, and I obviously give chapter and verse
• 1:01:22
  on the people responsible for this, in this generation in particular, a white people are being
• 1:01:28
  talked about and two in a way which I think is inevitably going to cause a back then.
• 1:01:34
  Nobody wants to be told that their children are evil because of the color of their skin.
• 1:01:42
  No black parent would want that. No white parent would want that. But it's not being done in
• 1:01:50
  schools in America and elsewhere to black children anymore. Maybe there was a time when it was,
• 1:01:56
  but it's not happening now. It's white children who are told that they bear historic
• 1:02:01
  crimes on their backs. It's white children who are told that they are somehow born with
• 1:02:08
  some stigma caused by history. And as I say, I think no good can come from this. And it's the
• 1:02:17
  worst, the nastiest example of what I said earlier is that a piece of fine tuner that needs to be
• 1:02:25
  carried out with exceptional care and is being carried out with just his brutishness
• 1:02:32
  and a sort of barbarism and a gleefulness it has to be said. There is, there is in our age what I
• 1:02:42
  say sub quoting Nietzsche. There is a tone in the discussion that talks about justice which sounds
• 1:02:51
  to me more like revenge. What do you say Douglas to the the broad leftist who's a little bit
• 1:03:00
  fed up with workism, but it's generally thinks it's on the right side of history who's who
• 1:03:04
  hears what you just said and says, well of course no young white child should be told that they're
• 1:03:08
  evil because of the color of their skin. That's not the point. That's just a misinterpretation that
• 1:03:13
  overly sensitive fragile white people make when they're asked to reconcile themselves with the
• 1:03:18
  fact that they're standing on the shoulders of a history of bloodshed and genocide that the
• 1:03:23
  West wouldn't be what it is today where it not for its colonialism and its history of slavery
• 1:03:29
  and Jim Crow under pressure and genocide of indigenous peoples and so on. And we're just trying
• 1:03:33
  to get people to understand that from an early age. But I mean we're not standing on that. I mean
• 1:03:39
  everyone's standing on a pile of bloody corpses. Who isn't? Who isn't? I mean what civilization or
• 1:03:47
  peoples in the world are not standing on some violent past. Hold down worlds like that. Hold down
• 1:03:57
  world was like that much of it still is today. I mean for instance everybody who lives in modern
• 1:04:03
  Nigeria you could easily go there and say now look you were the people who sold your black brothers
• 1:04:10
  sisters for centuries you stole them and you sold them and you should realize that everything you
• 1:04:18
  have today in Nigeria is a product of that and you should atone and atone and atone whenever you
• 1:04:24
  have a child you should tell the child the evil that their peoples have done. Wouldn't it be a weird
• 1:04:31
  thing to do? Wouldn't it be strange? And would you expect a warm reception from the people that
• 1:04:39
  are in Nigeria if you invited them into this act of self-flagellation? Voltaire remember made
• 1:04:45
  the very important point centuries ago that actually arguably only the only thing even more evil
• 1:04:50
  than what the Europeans did in buying and trading in the souls of black Africans was what black
• 1:04:56
  Africans did to their brothers and sisters by stealing and selling. So you could do this to everyone.
• 1:05:05
  You could do it to absolutely everybody on earth. You know the Ottoman Empire was one of the
• 1:05:10
  widest ranging, longest, in time and geographical expansion of any empire in history was a very
• 1:05:19
  successful empire. But the Turkish people today are not expected to atone for the crimes of the Ottoman
• 1:05:26
  Empire much of Turkey's modern wealth certainly its cities some of the glories of its museums and
• 1:05:32
  much more come about because the Ottoman Empire was repatiously stealing and acquiring and
• 1:05:40
  expanding and much more but nobody would expect to go to modern day Turkey and say look because
• 1:05:47
  of this empire that finished in 1924 you guys have got some atoning to do and we're going to make
• 1:05:52
  you do it forever. So there's something in the West that is peculiar here and here's the thing
• 1:06:00
  and it builds off a virtue because of course self-criticism is a virtue, self-analysis,
• 1:06:12
  self-inspection, introspection these are values and I know I'm all for them and I'm not trying to
• 1:06:21
  stop anyone I say this at the beginning of the one west I'm not trying to stop anyone writing
• 1:06:25
  anything but searching anything saying anything more the merrier I say fill your boots up I actually
• 1:06:31
  think that we benefit from much in the discussion where I think we stop benefiting is where self-criticism
• 1:06:38
  turns into self annihilation where self-criticism becomes something else and I think the moment it becomes
• 1:06:46
  something else is when a generation whose understanding of history is essentially only on the
• 1:06:54
  iniquities of their own past don't know the context both of that past and of the world at the time
• 1:07:04
  I mean the modern american schoolchild is told about slavery they're now told by the paper of
• 1:07:10
  record in New York times that their founding date should be moved 150 years earlier to 1619
• 1:07:18
  the date when slaves were first brought into the american continent and they're told that their
• 1:07:24
  founding must be reframed so that everything is to do with slavery here's something that almost
• 1:07:30
  no american schoolchild realizes which is everybody was slaiving at the time that america came
• 1:07:37
  into being the founding fathers were were unusual in having slaves it was commonplace
• 1:07:47
  the unusual thing in the west was doing away with it that's for sure that's for sure
• 1:07:53
  the the the the british signed the act the anti slave reaction to law in 1807 and spend decades
• 1:08:00
  patrolling the high seats at the high seas at very considerable cost of treasure and lives to try
• 1:08:07
  to stamp out slavery not just in areas that Britain had control of but everywhere in the world
• 1:08:14
  that wasn't an easy exercise and it went on for decades um we have in the world today it's
• 1:08:21
  estimated about 40 million four zero million slaves that's more slaves than they were in the 19th
• 1:08:28
  century and my worry is among other things that people are learning a version of the western
• 1:08:35
  past including western inequities colonialism racism slavery they're learning these things and
• 1:08:42
  they're learning them in a situation of complete context collapse to use an internet era phrase
• 1:08:49
  they're learning them in an era of total context collapse so that it seems that only we did
• 1:08:55
  these things and therefore only we are guilty and only we must atone and this is to use it again
• 1:09:03
  a term that I use a lot it's unfair it's not just untrue it's unfair to judge the west and
• 1:09:13
  past like that there's a I mean you also make an interesting point about one reason why we're
• 1:09:20
  able to have the reckoning in the west is because we have descendants of the of the slaves living
• 1:09:24
  amongst us whereas in other civilizations like Arab countries they don't have the descendants of
• 1:09:29
  their black slaves anymore because they castrated them all so then that's right um one might say
• 1:09:35
  oh excuse me it's early here so I haven't had my coffee yet uh and I'm lost but so one might say
• 1:09:40
  that turkey would be a better place if it were able to to deal a little bit more with its
• 1:09:45
  Ottoman history the Armenians would certainly say that turkey yeah for sure I reckon itself to
• 1:09:49
  for sure but on the point of of ignorance I do I think there's something something there
• 1:09:56
  you know the the brightness with which the light of self-criticism is shining at the moment does seem
• 1:10:03
  to to sort of swamp out everything else in our vision about the context of the past and it's
• 1:10:11
  interesting that you cite Mark Lamont Hill because when I joined Huff post live as a presenter
• 1:10:16
  there he was one of the founding um presenters as well one of the founding hosts and so yeah
• 1:10:22
  and he and so I knew him very well and worked with him every day and was friendly with him
• 1:10:27
  and he's an interesting person to have seen he's he's a good case study for me of what's
• 1:10:34
  happened to culture more broadly in the past 10 years of the focus on the relentless focus on
• 1:10:42
  division and culture warring over nuance and comedy and I still remember one day and my apologies
• 1:10:51
  Mark for throwing it under the bus but I thought this was a revealing anecdote one day he came up to
• 1:10:56
  me in the in the half by the office and he said quick question and this is a guy who has a PhD
• 1:11:02
  he's a very very learned guy he goes how many countries are there in Australia what and I said
• 1:11:08
  what do you mean he said how many countries in Australia I said what do you mean how many countries
• 1:11:14
  are there in Australia he said it's a continent right how many countries are in Australia
• 1:11:20
  said it's said Mark Australia is a country he's like just one country in the whole continent
• 1:11:26
  I said yeah yeah it's a continent and it's also it's a country it's it's it's just one country
• 1:11:30
  he said got it and he walked away I thought what the fuck is going on with the American education
• 1:11:40
  system you're not the first person to think this you can you can have a doctorate and you can
• 1:11:46
  come out one of the most learned people I mean there's nowhere else to go after you've got a PhD
• 1:11:52
  you know you're as well educated as the system can produce and I'm not foolish enough to think
• 1:11:57
  that Australia is a terribly important country you don't need to know how many countries
• 1:12:01
  are in Australia but a rudimentary understanding of global geography would you might want to you
• 1:12:07
  might want to know what like the top 20 economies are you know you might want to have a just a
• 1:12:12
  rough backer than napkin sketch of what the sort of you know 10 to 20 most important Western
• 1:12:19
  democracies are all about just just vaguely like just what is a country and what is not a
• 1:12:25
  concept it's a very telling story I was doing Bill Moore on Friday night yeah I heard it was good
• 1:12:31
  and we had great fun but Bill does this section did this section on Friday of a vague box pops
• 1:12:39
  with various people in America and I don't want to sound like I'm being a snotty Brit laugh in
• 1:12:43
  American economics because you could get quite as many appalling answers from a box pop in the UK
• 1:12:49
  I don't know but I don't know about that Douglas I've had this argument with Americans in America
• 1:12:54
  where they say oh you can find stupid people everywhere I say actually I don't think you can
• 1:12:59
  as easily I mean I could be so people as easily I think I think there's an inevitability about
• 1:13:04
  the the geographical isolation of America compared to separator where you know about the
• 1:13:11
  geographic isolation of Australia well that's true that's true I think it's the I think there's
• 1:13:17
  a gravitational pull of having a culture that large that has created an enormous degree of self
• 1:13:22
  absorption that leads them yes have this sort of self regard and ignorance of elsewhere that
• 1:13:29
  and this also comes back to the sort of woke crisis as well that Americans are super super
• 1:13:33
  imposing and projecting their own parochial sort of raised as a whole rest of the world you know I
• 1:13:39
  mean that's right I mean on country like ours which which which which which which have our own
• 1:13:43
  problems but they're not by any means rebays of the American rock it's not the same I mean I was
• 1:13:49
  traveling in Europe with an American friend a few years ago and we were in France and he saw
• 1:13:53
  he called black people in France African Americans you know because that's just the term for black
• 1:13:57
  people in his brain that's it they're not absolutely that joke that's like that joke in Bruno do you
• 1:14:02
  remember where Sasha Blancar Sasha Barrett and Cohen so he says he does this black he does he does
• 1:14:10
  this sort of talk show where all of the audience are black and he oh yeah he brings out this baby
• 1:14:15
  he's a doctor black and he said he says you know I got him from Africa it's filled with African
• 1:14:23
  Americans and one of the women in your discos no no no those are African and he says I think that's
• 1:14:28
  racist then they ask what he's called the child that he says a traditional black American name
• 1:14:35
  OJ and he looks but yes I to go back to your point Mark will want to yeah Bill Marley
• 1:14:46
  was with had this segment of of going around and saying you know oh I don't know the an
• 1:14:52
  interviewer said it was just saying people right things like where is Venice Italy which country
• 1:14:57
  is Venice Italy and you know like some is like country of Europe or something like that and you
• 1:15:07
  know when it was all like that and one of them was like oh god I should know this I'm a teacher
• 1:15:10
  you know and it is there is a sort of self-absorption there's just there is a failure undoubtedly
• 1:15:18
  if the American education system is probably worse than the failure of education systems in other
• 1:15:23
  countries and and then there's of course the the the I mean I do think that people in that
• 1:15:27
  situation are particularly susceptible to one explanation for things um you know I mean the idea
• 1:15:37
  that there is one lens to look at everything through I think you do end up being particularly
• 1:15:44
  susceptible to to you know um on the um only present on this and single clicks if you don't
• 1:15:55
  realize the complexity of things and can't really cope with them so that for instance if you can
• 1:16:01
  just go well white supremacy or well colonelism well and you do see this and I give an example in
• 1:16:08
  the book it's a slightly cruel one but I give the example of the world the west of an interview
• 1:16:12
  the Damon Olburn blur gave some years ago and when the subject of China came up and problems in
• 1:16:18
  China he didn't know what to do other than to blame Britain and his interview it sort of says well
• 1:16:25
  what about like Mao and like great march and so on and it's he just doesn't know about that
• 1:16:32
  because he's only he's only lens he can look at anything through in the sort of semi-educated
• 1:16:37
  ways the lens of it must be because of us and that is that is itself what I've described in the
• 1:16:43
  past as a peculiar form of um of colonialism itself the assumption that the world can only
• 1:16:53
  screw up if we've made it so yeah um other people can't screw up on their own of their own accord
• 1:17:00
  it must be us that did something it's that great self-absorption and um and also of course again
• 1:17:07
  sort of against nature because most people want to think well of their country and their society
• 1:17:14
  in their past doesn't matter where you go most people kind of you know want to talk it up
• 1:17:22
  in the same way they want to support their national team in the world cup you know and even if
• 1:17:27
  they don't take much interest in the sport they kind of they have an instinct they want their team
• 1:17:31
  to win um and somehow in recent generations you might say that instinct has been inverted so the
• 1:17:41
  people want to think the worst of themselves as long as they're from the west well they've been
• 1:17:45
  told that I think it depends how you're defining themselves Douglas so I think they've chosen
• 1:17:51
  like what are the contours of the team what are the contours of one's team so I think there's a
• 1:17:57
  there's a sub cohort of the west that has thrown its lot in behind what they regard as being a
• 1:18:04
  morally that they believe themselves to have the moral courage to betray the broader team of
• 1:18:10
  of which they regard as being perverted teams of nationalism patriotism conservatism and throw
• 1:18:17
  their lot in with a team of the present the morally yes well that's in quick it should also be said
• 1:18:22
  that that also has a a justification of a kind I mean it's perfectly it's it's understandable to
• 1:18:29
  exit the 20th century thinking that nationalism is a tainted thing you know it's it's I don't
• 1:18:37
  agree with you called to racial privilege right exactly I believe it's it's an understandable take away
• 1:18:44
  from the 20th century it's just that again I mean it's it's wildly simplistic a nationalism can
• 1:18:51
  go bad and can go wrong senses of national belonging can go wrong and we saw that a bit of
• 1:18:59
  that in the 20th century but to take to take away from that that as a result the form of belonging
• 1:19:04
  you should disdain is a national belonging and you should seek belonging by for instance race
• 1:19:11
  or gender or sexuality or something seems to me unwise I mean it's often joked you know
• 1:19:16
  absolutely everything can go wrong I mean the Trojan wars were caused by love um nobody would
• 1:19:22
  think of banning love as a result and also I mean future wars yeah if you wanted to take lessons
• 1:19:28
  from the 20th century sure you could say that what happened was you know that nationalism didn't
• 1:19:33
  help but racial identity politics certainly helped even more absolutely what was worst about
• 1:19:39
  the Nazis was that they loved Germany or was it that they hated Jews exactly there's also a sense
• 1:19:46
  in which I think you're frustrated at the at moral cowardice masquerading as moral courage that
• 1:19:55
  you know I often say to my worker friends who regard themselves as being morally superior to the
• 1:20:01
  flawed heroes of the past you know I know that you would not have been bucking slavery if you
• 1:20:07
  were alive in the 1700s of course because you're not taking a morally courageous stance now you
• 1:20:13
  would have to be demonstrating to me that you believe in something that 99% of your peers think it's
• 1:20:19
  it's horrendous to believe in but you believe in a whole bunch of things that the elites in our societies
• 1:20:24
  condone so you're a performance that's right I mean it's one of the most important points that Jordan
• 1:20:31
  Peterson has made in public and has tried to embed in the public consciousness is the is that that
• 1:20:37
  notorious one that you know people always think that if they were alive in the second world war
• 1:20:42
  they'd be Oscar Schindler no they wouldn't highly unlikely we know because there was a test
• 1:20:50
  and there weren't very many Schindlers right most people would go along with it most people do
• 1:20:55
  that's the nature of people they go along with whatever the thing is and some of them will enjoy it
• 1:21:02
  on top of that and that is an incredibly important insight because you can apply it to case after case
• 1:21:10
  in history I mean you know consider consider that the that the incredible difficulty that Britain had
• 1:21:21
  getting off the slave trade the country needed to pay off the firms that were going to lose money
• 1:21:30
  and that payment wasn't the interest on that payment wasn't fully paid down by the exchequer in London
• 1:21:36
  until I think 2016 that's pretty amazing that the debt to the country took on itself now some people
• 1:21:45
  say yes but that was paid to the slavers there was no other way to stop the trade than to compensate
• 1:21:50
  the people who were going to lose money that it wasn't inevitable that that was going to happen
• 1:21:55
  it's the same in America you know the founding fathers almost certainly if you look at what Jefferson
• 1:22:01
  in particular wrote almost certainly believed that slavery at some point was going to have to be
• 1:22:11
  dealt with and eradicated in the American continent but they knew they knew that they could not hold
• 1:22:18
  what was about to be the United States together if they had that fight first now looking back
• 1:22:26
  everybody thinks I know what I would have been I'd have been an anti-slavery activist to make sure
• 1:22:32
  you think you would you think you know you would in reality are you cleverer than Thomas Jefferson
• 1:22:41
  hmm do you know more is your is your instinct so much more acute than his was that in 1787
• 1:22:51
  you'd have known exactly where the arc of history was going to go and would have held this nascent
• 1:22:57
  republic together remembering by the way that at that point there were no successful republics in the
• 1:23:04
  world right and look it's an easy test isn't it I mean to that person you simply say if you do
• 1:23:10
  have that perspicacity that puts you above a Jefferson and show me the thing right now that you're
• 1:23:16
  going out on a limb and advocating for that other people won't come around to until yes another
• 1:23:22
  hundred years time what is that you know that reminds me Joshua thinking I mean you all appreciate
• 1:23:27
  this I mean I have had an editor have an editor who said to me many years ago a very good rule of
• 1:23:33
  thumb he said you should always assume that because every age in the past has done the stuff that we
• 1:23:40
  think is just a porous and nuts and recognize that we're almost certainly doing things today that are
• 1:23:49
  as well yes and try to work out what those things are yeah and stop them now that's a very useful
• 1:23:57
  exercise right I mean I did yeah I did a show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival about this sort
• 1:24:02
  of stuff and about why social media is deranging as just before the pandemic and I tried to
• 1:24:07
  I tried to throw up in the commit to a comedic effect a few of those things that might come down
• 1:24:12
  the park I mean I just plucked a couple one could be the way we farm animals yeah Richard Dawkins
• 1:24:19
  thinks that you'll imagine that in a hundred years time people will go they knew these things
• 1:24:25
  were sentient and they nonetheless treated them as if the only imperative was to get the kilo of
• 1:24:30
  a pound of the the price of a kilo or pound of flesh to the lowest possible price with no
• 1:24:36
  not for them like why were you complicit in that another could be depending on how bad climate
• 1:24:41
  chaos is the casual way that we fly about and and use fossil I could imagine in 50 years them
• 1:24:48
  watching movies of people just hopping on planes without a care in the world go and treating it
• 1:24:53
  like us slapping the ass of a woman in the office or like we look at madmen or doctors
• 1:24:59
  how do they how did they feel no shame whatsoever about getting on
• 1:25:04
  plans yeah I don't I didn't I did one there was always on my mind these days I'd say
• 1:25:12
  parents deciding that if the child if they're child in in the ages between one and ten ever
• 1:25:19
  dresses in the dress of more commonly associated with the opposite sex the child is trans
• 1:25:27
  and should at some point be put on drugs and then if it's a girl got a double mistake to me
• 1:25:33
  I would have thought that a later age might look at that and think gosh that was the that was
• 1:25:40
  a weird weird time well again it come it will come down to whether or not we regard that as having
• 1:25:45
  been part of an over correction that was none the less on the right side of history because trans
• 1:25:50
  people have subsequently gotten more acceptance and that made it worth it doesn't it yeah I mean
• 1:25:57
  you'd you'd have to you'd have to accept that experimenting on a lot of kids was worth it
• 1:26:05
  there's not not one I could you sounds good I'm very skeptical that I'm horrified by it I'm
• 1:26:13
  pretty confident that not very many years from now people are going to look at what was done in
• 1:26:18
  the last decade in this regard and think they said this was progress one of the risks in all this
• 1:26:26
  Douglas I mean you know one of the things that it tried to me you're what most worried about is
• 1:26:30
  all of this craziness provoking a backlash from and it's that it's my main it's the main thing that
• 1:26:36
  concerns me you know as a gay Jew I don't want people thinking about themselves as their identity
• 1:26:43
  is because I know yeah yeah you're you're in a very precarious position there you're like absolutely
• 1:26:49
  first exactly that's right well not right now you know not right now you know right now the
• 1:26:55
  guys are are could are the cool club and the one that you can see where that would have a backlash
• 1:27:02
  yeah yeah I mean but so the my then my worry becomes and the reason why people worry about your
• 1:27:09
  work is you're so articulate in pointing out the the shittiness of the extremes of the left
• 1:27:15
  that then at what point do you worry that you're playing into the right's hands I mean you know yeah
• 1:27:20
  look we did it me going you know you're you're talking to Douglas who your friends with Douglas and
• 1:27:24
  here's a man who goes on Tucker Carlson to defend Victor Auburn and goes and
• 1:27:30
  hands with Victor Auburn and here's a man you know Auburn is a man who is undermining democracy
• 1:27:35
  in Europe but he loves Douglas Murray and Douglas is charming with him doesn't doesn't that well
• 1:27:41
  first of all like I can't I can't apologize for going on the most viewed television programs in
• 1:27:47
  America you can call it media promiscuity or whatever you like but my my work inevitably includes me
• 1:28:00
  going on shows with hosts who a lot of people disagree with and as for Auburn I mean I always try
• 1:28:08
  to see the prime minister or president or senior politicians of any country I go to and nobody
• 1:28:15
  takes any notice of that until it's a leader they don't like but I mean Victor Auburn calls me
• 1:28:23
  up discovers I'm in hungry and asks me to come and see him for a couple of hours of discussion
• 1:28:29
  I'm not gonna say no but didn't you know they're specifically with Steve Bannon for some kind of
• 1:28:34
  sort of a a hobnob about the problems with no I I managed to discover I managed to discover
• 1:28:41
  this Steve Bannon had had a fib about he didn't know that I was there and I knew he was there
• 1:28:49
  and I don't know I've said this publicly before but I discovered that Steve Bannon was waiting
• 1:28:54
  to see Auburn next and I said Auburn met Mr Bannon before he said no he hadn't and I had the great
• 1:29:03
  pleasure of seeing Steve Bannon's face when he realized that I knew that he had been going around
• 1:29:09
  the world of telling people he'd managed to swing the last Hungarian election and they'd never met
• 1:29:15
  he had nothing to do with it it was always part of the bannon thing that the people believed
• 1:29:22
  what he said about himself and his own influence all right the left wing press in particular
• 1:29:28
  they lapped that up and he claimed the he claimed credit for elections of people he'd never met
• 1:29:37
  so you know it's always interesting what you learn it's always interesting what you learn and
• 1:29:43
  I don't apologize for that my book The Strange Death of Europe is true Victor Auburn liked very
• 1:29:48
  much because I said that between him and Angela Merkel I thought that he was correct on not opening
• 1:29:54
  the borders you know laterally of Europe to whoever wanted to walk into Europe and time has shown
• 1:29:59
  Victor Auburn to have been correct but it's an unpopular point so he and I have discussed migration
• 1:30:07
  of course but I I don't apologize for meeting an elected leader I don't think he is undermining
• 1:30:13
  democracy by the way there were criticisms that you can make of all but he's been elected four
• 1:30:17
  times in totally fair elections and his knowledge is so let me just clarify that so the reporting
• 1:30:25
  that because the prime minister's office in Hungary because I just googled it just before we
• 1:30:29
  chatted they say that in 2018 he held a future of Europe conference at which you attended
• 1:30:37
  and Steve Van and attended and David Goldman attended each had a long informal discussions with
• 1:30:44
  the prime minister they headed well there you go so that was it so Steve must have spoken
• 1:30:48
  after me but anyhow he said he met the prime minister after me I don't know if yeah I don't know
• 1:30:54
  you just happened to be in Hungary would you know well I have been several times because I've been
• 1:30:59
  I've been a lot of times because it was at that particular time it was the absolute frontline
• 1:31:04
  country on the issue I was writing about which is migration it was the first country to put up
• 1:31:08
  border walls yes it was incredibly important but did everybody live here to the country or did
• 1:31:14
  you just happen to be there yeah no I went on the way I see I have accepted speaking
• 1:31:18
  invitations in Hungary including to the Danube Institute but yes and I mean I find it very
• 1:31:26
  interesting to see and meet with politicians wherever I go it's the same in Australia although
• 1:31:32
  when I last was in Australia I was meant to be having lunch at Malcolm Turnbull unfortunately I
• 1:31:36
  had to put him off because I had an event and then the next week he wasn't prime minister anymore
• 1:31:41
  well actually you brought and I have to say lately cruelly I think I ditched everything
• 1:31:50
  you may have had more in common with the with the conservative flank of his party than his
• 1:31:55
  kind of then his route the milk toast well I met I met all of I met all of you know all his
• 1:32:00
  as well I met I had the pleasure of meeting Tony Abbott and John Howard other other
• 1:32:05
  prime ministers of Australia but so yeah I mean what I do this concern one of the things I do I
• 1:32:11
  mean that so the concern is we don't want to embolden and just to part just to okay so you also
• 1:32:17
  mentioned that oh you don't think all of mine is undermining democracy freedom house you know the
• 1:32:21
  think tank yes they've downgraded Hungary about to partly free they say that there's been sustained
• 1:32:27
  attacks on the country's democratic institutions yeah they go press and the judiciary yeah they say
• 1:32:34
  they say sorry you have to remember that all of this stuff is highly precise if anyone wants to
• 1:32:42
  look at interventions into judicial process you can look at what the socialist government of
• 1:32:46
  Spain has done in recent years nobody seems to carry out very much about that because we're slightly
• 1:32:53
  more and maybe for good reasons slightly more tightly wired for right wing governments that do
• 1:33:02
  the sorts of things and left wing governments the main other criticism in Hungary is freedom of
• 1:33:08
  the press I do think that there's been infractions of freedom of the press and people say well you know
• 1:33:15
  for instance that a friend of all buns bought a newspaper and then close it down allegedly I
• 1:33:22
  haven't had a time plug into that one but they're through allegations of that kind and it's
• 1:33:27
  been said by people who say well when you say that food or bun has been legitimately elected
• 1:33:32
  prime minister you've got to remember that he's got most of the press on his side and I'm afraid
• 1:33:38
  in this isn't a flippant point but have you seen America recently I mean have you seen the fact
• 1:33:46
  that in an American election cycle big tech silence a paper I write for the New York Post America's
• 1:33:53
  oldest newspaper and got dozens of former intelligence former and serving intelligence officials
• 1:34:00
  to pretend that the laptop of Hunter Biden was Russian disinformation like nothing has happened
• 1:34:07
  in Hungary as far as I know in the media as completely as corrupt as what happened before
• 1:34:13
  the last American election in deliberately ensuring that a story that was negative about Joe Biden
• 1:34:20
  did not get ad but that sounds a bit like what about this and Douglas no it's not what about
• 1:34:26
  is at all but well it's in discussion about if you have free do you have a free press or not
• 1:34:33
  and the answer is it's always sketchy yes always it's but there's a difference between sort of
• 1:34:41
  you know mildly corrupt and confused woke social media platforms being antagonistic towards free
• 1:34:49
  speech versus the leader of a country shutting down millions of institutions and having his friends
• 1:34:54
  buy them up and close them because they're not like him and I would say that they are all on a
• 1:34:59
  grade scale and in the case of America in the case of the world's most important democracy
• 1:35:06
  the fact that the the papers of record like the Washington Post and the New York Times
• 1:35:11
  took two years to even concede that the contents of the laptop were true and I'm not and I'm saying
• 1:35:18
  I'm not interested in the tittle tattle about the laptop I'm interested in the in the fact that
• 1:35:22
  you can see overt corruption in the immediate family of the man who's now president the the fact
• 1:35:29
  that that was not deemed to be a story because old legacy media and new tech decided to snuff out
• 1:35:36
  the story is a scandal it's not just hard about it yes no I think well no and so it's again
• 1:35:43
  again using using intelligence officials to help do so is of an order of magnitude I would
• 1:35:52
  suggest much more serious than anything I've seen happened in any other democracy including
• 1:35:57
  hungry I mean I think that was an appalling um an appalling move on I can also understand that
• 1:36:03
  in the wake of 2016 with the Komi drop just before the election publications were worried about
• 1:36:10
  being had by you know nefarious forces who were dropping you know what by any journalist in
• 1:36:16
  America the New York Times of the Washington Post could have picked up a phone to any of the people
• 1:36:21
  on the emails that the email cash that was on the laptop and said did you receive this email yeah
• 1:36:29
  you're not if they said yes you said oh okay it appears at least some of the contents of that
• 1:36:33
  proper true it would have taken one phone call they didn't do it why because most of the media
• 1:36:38
  in America in 2020 wanted to get Joe Biden into office all costs yeah they were willing to lie
• 1:36:43
  they were willing to cover up they were willing to silence a newspaper all to get their guy into
• 1:36:50
  office and if you're telling me that's not a form of media corruption we're going to disagree no
• 1:36:54
  I think there is a form of media corruption but I mean it's also true that the United States invaded
• 1:37:00
  Iraq illegally but when what about us point to it it doesn't change the fact that it sounds like
• 1:37:06
  they're just changing the subject I mean for people who don't understand the whole hungry thing
• 1:37:10
  the I'll just elaborate on the freedom house thing so the freedom house says that all bun
• 1:37:15
  has used his parliamentary supermajority to impose restrictions on or assert control over the
• 1:37:21
  opposition the media religious groups academia not non-governmental organizations the courts
• 1:37:27
  asylum seekers in the private sector and observers also from the OECD the sorry from the organization
• 1:37:32
  for security and operation in Europe found that the elections in 2018 were characterized by
• 1:37:38
  quote a pervasive overlap between state and ruling party resources undermining contestant's
• 1:37:43
  ability to come yeah this is this is I'm not asking you to serve up no but it is such an absurd
• 1:37:49
  accusation and do you know that do you know in the referendum of 2016 in the UK on Brexit do you
• 1:37:57
  know which side had the government behind them the remains side every single every single household
• 1:38:08
  in the UK was sent a leaflet a document from the UK government telling them how to vote okay the
• 1:38:20
  leave side didn't have that right only the remains side had that right now is that undue
• 1:38:27
  influence in a referendum oh you bet it is you bet it is that's government using government
• 1:38:33
  resources which are all after all taxpayer resources to tell the public how to vote
• 1:38:40
  what's freedom houses view on that I don't know so do you I'm not clear what you're saying are
• 1:38:47
  you arguing that hungry is just as democratic as other European countries I'm not I'm saying that
• 1:38:52
  there is there are gradations on all of these things freedom house and other entities have had
• 1:38:58
  very good histories some cases much of what is happening now is highly politicized to an extent
• 1:39:06
  which I think needs to be treated with a certain amount of skepticism as I say I have seen some of
• 1:39:14
  what's happening with the press in Hungary I've spoken to Hungarian journalists from much of the
• 1:39:20
  opposition media there is a lot of opposition media in Hungary and they've lost of it if fedege had
• 1:39:26
  total control of the country they wouldn't have lost the Budapest morality two years ago or whatever
• 1:39:34
  I mean you know it's it's it's perfectly possible to make criticisms of Victor Orbán
• 1:39:43
  as with any other leader without falling into what I think is a pervasive thing at the moment which
• 1:39:48
  is there isn't democracy in Hungary no but what can be concerned by its trajectory I'm just trying
• 1:39:56
  and should be and should be as I think people should be concerned with the trajectory of democracy
• 1:40:01
  in Spain for instance so is your is your suspicion that that Hungary currently gets the the
• 1:40:06
  raw end of the deal because people hungry is like all about Hungary is essentially the whipping
• 1:40:11
  boy of Europe along with Poland and Hungary and Poland are the whipping boys of Europe they are the
• 1:40:18
  awkward squad in the EU they are the ones that refused to take migrant quotas in recent years
• 1:40:26
  because they said this was a problem the Angela Merkel had created and they were not going to have
• 1:40:31
  to pay the consequences for that and as a result there's been a long ongoing very bitter dispute
• 1:40:38
  at the highest levels of the EU to literally punish both of those countries and I think that's
• 1:40:45
  I think that's unfair I think that there are criticisms that should be made of Hungarian government
• 1:40:50
  as there can be of the I mean I think the treatment of the the university in that was in in Budapest
• 1:40:59
  and now moved to Vienna it was very unwise to say the least I think the Hungarian government
• 1:41:06
  should have accepted the fact that even though the accreditation of degrees at the European
• 1:41:12
  university was not what they wanted and they should they nevertheless accreditation or not
• 1:41:18
  it was bad it looked terrible to have the university the central Europe move out of the country
• 1:41:24
  a big mistake I think you can do that you can accept all of those things and say we also need to
• 1:41:30
  work out how to treat countries like normal countries and not believe that there are certain
• 1:41:36
  countries in Western Europe that have got everything right and in central Eastern Europe who are sort
• 1:41:41
  of slow learners and I think that is the current you know I wrote about this a lot in the strange
• 1:41:47
  death of your it's it's it's one of the current feelings in the EU which I think will cause
• 1:41:54
  very significant pain going forward in Europe certainly you can't have this like slow learners
• 1:42:01
  club and and the like the good boys and after all look at what the good boys are it's a good
• 1:42:08
  boy in Europe really Germany look who is it that's compromised European stability in recent years
• 1:42:15
  it's Germany it's Germany being reliant on Russian gas it's Germany it's Germany who's
• 1:42:22
  last who's last chance before Angela Merkel is a total traitor to Europe by going directly from
• 1:42:30
  the chance hurry of Berlin to work for Gazprom okay that's not Victor Orban that's not the polls
• 1:42:37
  that was the Germans now the Eastern Europeans were warning like hell about the German
• 1:42:44
  closeness with the Kremlin and nobody listened to them and everyone allowed Berlin to get away with it
• 1:42:51
  and in 20 years time when we look back at this decade and think what might have gone wrong in
• 1:42:56
  Europe in the 2020s I can bet you that much more important than anything to do with law and justice
• 1:43:02
  in Poland or Fidesz in Hungary will be the fact that all of the mainstream parties in Germany
• 1:43:08
  allowed Europe's most important power to be totally in bed with the Kremlin
• 1:43:15
  well even if you just I mean even setting that aside even if you just focus on immigration
• 1:43:20
  the the the insistence by Germany and other countries to to welcome in incredibly large numbers
• 1:43:28
  in an uncontrolled way from the perspective of a country like Australia which has you know
• 1:43:33
  its own problems with its immigration policy but nonetheless has always believed ever since the
• 1:43:38
  end of the Second World War that you have to have a an extremely tight control of the border in
• 1:43:43
  order to win permission from the people to have very high rates of integration and that has
• 1:43:47
  always sustained very high rates of humanitarian immigration by having a rigid and brutal border
• 1:43:54
  policy you know it looks it looks foolhardy what what Germany was absolutely as I say I wrote
• 1:44:00
  about that in straight to the viewer yeah very very critical of Angela Merkel but just one other
• 1:44:03
  thing don't forget also the beginning of the Ukraine conflict I think that by the way all
• 1:44:09
  banners government has been far too cautious about the unanimity on sanction certain sanctions
• 1:44:19
  they've been they've been on board with a lot of the sanctions against Russia since
• 1:44:23
  the war in Ukraine I think they've been far too timorous on some of them but you know what was
• 1:44:28
  the country at the beginning of the conflict there wouldn't even allow refueling of British planes
• 1:44:33
  taking arms to the Ukrainians in the first days of the conflict Germany Germany by the way that
• 1:44:40
  was an exact replay of what happened in 1973 where if you remember the Germans and others wouldn't
• 1:44:46
  allow American planes to refuel to take arms to the Israelis when they were being attacked from all
• 1:44:51
  sides so whenever we see our countries singled out and becoming the bad guys I do always think
• 1:45:00
  you know we've got to wander the extent to which you know other people doing bigger bad things
• 1:45:07
  are getting away with stuff whilst our iris concentrated on say a country of 10 million people
• 1:45:12
  in the center of Europe so just to close the loop on that country if the UK or the US could have
• 1:45:18
  all-bound as it's later would that be good well it doesn't work I mean it wouldn't work because
• 1:45:25
  the central eastern European democracies are very different I mean I spend quite a lot of time
• 1:45:31
  they're very different they have they have very different views on faith they have very different
• 1:45:37
  views on I mean you know remember these are countries where I mean Victor Orbán himself
• 1:45:42
  as with leaders of Czechia and other countries grew up under communists they they have a
• 1:45:48
  totally different view on things they they live in countries where fascism and then communism
• 1:45:55
  smashed them apart they have different memories they've got different sensibilities different
• 1:46:00
  sensitivities they have family policies and things that would not be permissible
• 1:46:06
  Western Europe or America you know they encourage their own people to have children and get
• 1:46:12
  tax incentives and things that most Western countries have given up on so you know it's like
• 1:46:18
  saying would it be a good thing if Joe Biden became president or prime minister of Hungary
• 1:46:26
  with work that a bit I want to see that I mean well just to stretch the analogy then because I think
• 1:46:34
  you can do better at responding to your to your critics than that the the criticism that I hear
• 1:46:40
  most frequently of you is that by being as full-throated about the failings of the left as you are
• 1:46:47
  you embolden a kind of Western chauvinism that risks an illiberal or autocratic nationalist
• 1:46:57
  um you know ascendancy it's it's a weird it's a weird critique because nobody who's read my work
• 1:47:03
  and I usually take for granted that my critics have it it's one of the things it distinguishes
• 1:47:10
  I read their work I read the work of I read the work of writers I disagree with I notice that the
• 1:47:15
  favor is not returned um uh but yes I mean anyone who reads my work knows that I'm not interested in
• 1:47:23
  that stuff at all at all and make pretty full-throated denunciations of that when I feel it's needed
• 1:47:32
  I'm not at all shy in making criticisms of the right I'm perfectly willing to make myself
• 1:47:38
  unpopular on the right by saying things and writing things that do so I can think of plenty of
• 1:47:45
  pieces I've written in the last year alone which do that at the beginning of the Russia conflict I
• 1:47:50
  wrote a piece in the spectator about where the where part of the American right had gone badly
• 1:47:55
  rather on the on the Ukraine and Russia um I thought it was a very important thing to happen
• 1:48:01
  immediately after January the 6th uh disaster in Washington uh Jordan Peterson and I agreed
• 1:48:09
  with each other that since we were both regarded as being to some extent you know figures on the
• 1:48:15
  right who people listened to we should get together and do a multi-hour discussion for as wide
• 1:48:23
  an audience as possible and hand it out for free about where the right was going wrong so um whenever
• 1:48:32
  people say something along the lines of you know oh I don't know you don't pay enough attention
• 1:48:38
  to that think what you know they just don't pay enough attention to my actual work
• 1:48:44
  and uh sure I spend I spend a lot of I spend more time focusing on the things that I think are
• 1:48:51
  problems right now than on things that could be a problem down the road if the things I'm talking
• 1:49:00
  about aren't addressed but I mean you can only see round so many corners and it's not given to
• 1:49:08
  us to see round more than what basically so they also have uh you know my my most recent
• 1:49:17
  podcast I'm may not be the most recent by the time people hear this but but the episode with
• 1:49:21
  Anna Marie Cox is interesting because she's a political reporter who's become very woke and
• 1:49:28
  she treats the where she based in the States um she's a she's founded one kit back in the day
• 1:49:35
  I don't know if you remember that it was a kind of um it was a very fem girl sort of hunter-est
• 1:49:42
  Thompson-y bad kid on the block um political blog and then she was the seems like how
• 1:49:49
  see then she was then she was the chief political correspondent for MTV news and she had a
• 1:49:54
  column at York Times magazine and she's since turned her back on it completely but what was
• 1:50:00
  interesting in my argument with her was where I was taking a more Douglas Murray in position and she
• 1:50:05
  was taking a conventionally woke position was she sees the writers being as sort of coming from
• 1:50:10
  nowhere and coming out of nothing there's almost a sort of Deus Ex mark and a thing of like we
• 1:50:16
  we can be as left wing as we want to and we have to allied the failings of our side for fear of
• 1:50:22
  giving sucker or fuel to yes but my point was sort of I mean they're responding to something
• 1:50:30
  like this is an interplay in which two snakes are hissing at each other and to only look at the
• 1:50:35
  venom on one side seems seems foolish to me so I mean I suppose the yes I mean I needn't belabor
• 1:50:45
  the point I think you get it but I suppose the concern of people who worry that we're focusing too
• 1:50:49
  much on the failings of the left is that we're being a bit too noisy about it and we live in a
• 1:50:57
  real world where the crimes of January 6th were created by a real man who may yet again win power
• 1:51:04
  who seems to have a disregard for the norms of small d democracy and that that's the real
• 1:51:12
  threat that we need to be focusing on but I sort of flip flop back and forth between how much time
• 1:51:15
  do you spend focusing on that versus how much time do you spend getting your own house in order your
• 1:51:19
  own house meaning in my case the smaller liberal left uh so yeah so that the the the so the
• 1:51:26
  tucker Carlson can't become president because I don't think it'd be a good one well let me just
• 1:51:32
  first of all uh tidy up your metaphors like um please it's not two snakes hissing at each other
• 1:51:41
  it's fellow citizens hissing at each other and this is very very important because at some level
• 1:51:51
  particularly in america but this is a case in all other moxies america is about as divided as you
• 1:51:55
  can be without having a civil war these days um as not thank god for the case in australia or
• 1:52:01
  prison um we have our own problems but it's not as bad as it is in america um and in america what
• 1:52:10
  there are many things that are being lost or have been lost for some years and one of them is
• 1:52:15
  the ability to talk to each other instead of about each other um and everybody in america has become
• 1:52:24
  expert in talking about the other side they've become very bad at talking with them or to
• 1:52:30
  trying to understand in fact when I was last in australia uh I did a tour with con
• 1:52:36
  phesicone or west of uh then of harvard um and i'm moderately at five six the melvin wonder yeah
• 1:52:43
  exactly and you'll remember that cornell and i had set out to do that tour in order to try to show
• 1:52:52
  that two people who had very different political conclusions could talk to each other
• 1:52:59
  and could discuss things and i thought i mean i don't know if you agree the evening that we were
• 1:53:03
  together for that um i thought it did a lot of good yeah that was great uh you know because
• 1:53:09
  i think some people turned up hoping it was going to be a boxing match but connell west and i both
• 1:53:15
  feel there's enough boxing how about sitting now and talking and working out where we can find
• 1:53:23
  agreement and much more that's gone wrong in america because essentially people of the left
• 1:53:30
  believe that if you give the right a moment they're going to be fascist and the right believe
• 1:53:35
  if you give the left a moment they're going to be convinced and it's extremely hard to find any
• 1:53:42
  common ground in the situation where you believe your opponent is primed to do the worst thing they
• 1:53:48
  could do in your eyes yeah and and so like you can't give an inch and it is as you say hissing but
• 1:53:58
  come back to the point it's hissing by your fellow citizens and that fact that simple fact that in a
• 1:54:08
  democracy you have to find a way to live together is something which i think is being lost in america
• 1:54:15
  and the result is having a very demoralizing effect across the rest of the west
• 1:54:21
  are you an optimist or a pessimist dagluster's the citizen win or the snake
• 1:54:25
  well i i'm neither by nature i don't think anyone is either by nature we we're optimistic or
• 1:54:33
  pessimistic depending on the hour of the day what we've seen that day well i mean how you
• 1:54:39
  bullish about the the experiment of western civilization at this point i go up and down on it
• 1:54:48
  long term i'm positive i think we're about we are going through and about to go through more of a
• 1:54:55
  very difficult term in which as i say towards the end of the book a coalition of people
• 1:55:04
  of all backgrounds races sexes sex orientations are much more who believe in an idea of pluralism
• 1:55:14
  based in the societies that we've inherited are going to have to argue like hell against people
• 1:55:22
  from all sides who have their own reasons for wanting to tear that down now it is totally true
• 1:55:30
  that there are people on the right who want to tear that down there are figures on the american
• 1:55:35
  right some of whom will not mean anything to your listeners but who have an ugly sway on the
• 1:55:43
  american right in terms of ideas who believe that effectively the democratic process has shown
• 1:55:49
  itself to be lacking the market these people pose a significant problem and a challenge and as do
• 1:55:59
  the people on the left who would make us all reduce ourselves to our chromosomes and more
• 1:56:04
  importantly to our skin pigmentation these people also present a very very serious challenge
• 1:56:11
  the people who want as i say a revenge not justice people of of the wilderness of backgrounds
• 1:56:21
  and ideas if we are able to coalesce we'll be able to see these people off from all sides
• 1:56:31
  and i give examples actually the end of the war in the west of the type of specifically black
• 1:56:37
  american thinkers of today who i think are leading the way in ensuring that this is going to end
• 1:56:44
  well if their voices are heard more and not the demagogues i think that i'm very positive
• 1:56:55
  these are good foundations we're standing on arguably the best
• 1:57:00
  um so as i say in the long term i'm positive i just think that the the immediate future is going
• 1:57:09
  to be filled with turmoil not least because as you well know the whole nature in which we
• 1:57:15
  communicate is undergoing a revolution that makes good and bad luck like a walk in the park
• 1:57:23
  no we we nobody knew when the printing press first came about what it was going to lead to in terms
• 1:57:31
  of conflict we have no idea still what the technological revolution social media revolution is
• 1:57:40
  going is doing to us and our brains but i believe that if there are enough people of sense
• 1:57:47
  who i hope follow what i always say is my minimalist my absolute minimalist
• 1:57:53
  request for people in this era which is first and foremost don't go mad
• 1:58:01
  and i think there are enough people uh but it's it's going to be uphill work for a while
• 1:58:09
  but in the end don't bet against the west
• 1:58:12
  um on that uplifting piece of advice don't go mad uh i will uh i will i will leave this for
• 1:58:20
  our regular subscribers will you stay for for um for short it questions because our subscribers
• 1:58:25
  get a bonus a bonus segment where i ask you a few very left field first eight questions like
• 1:58:31
  what your parents taught you the most about life and what your pleasure yeah your first book
• 1:58:34
  and so on is so if you're not a subscriber to the show thank you for listening if you are a
• 1:58:38
  subscriber stay with us for first date questions um what's the first book you read that really stuck
• 1:58:44
  with you Douglas um probably the Lord of the Flyers i read it too young and uh my other brother
• 1:58:53
  had read it and i got a hold of it and i read it and i was stunned absolutely stunned terrifying
• 1:59:00
  oh almost certainly uh i just you know the injustice of a of a book not ending as you thought
• 1:59:07
  they ending they needed to end because you just hadn't read at all books yeah uh was was the
• 1:59:15
  principle of course who comes to rescue them exactly exactly a very good thing to happen though i
• 1:59:21
  mean and and that that's always um the thrill of that has never left me in a way and they
• 1:59:27
  horror of it of course i have a sub-genre in my head of books like that that are so disturbing
• 1:59:33
  they stay with you and you i slightly wish you hadn't read them yes that was probably the first
• 1:59:38
  grown-out book i read which you know hit between your eyes and maybe one that know a lot more
• 1:59:43
  who um who taught you the most about life apart from your parents
• 1:59:50
  living or dead either i mean it's it's hard because in a way you learn most from people you never
• 1:59:58
  met you know i learned a enormous amount from books um i think tsl it probably had the most
• 2:00:10
  impact in the four quartets probably had more impact than else um and um and then of of people
• 2:00:20
  apart from family i've known uh as usual as with all of us a few remarkable teachers um who
• 2:00:29
  took an interest in encouraging me uh when i was a um uh 15-year-old or so already wanting to write
• 2:00:38
  my first book and but having people who said you know this is how you should don't you should
• 2:00:45
  definitely do that and you should look at this and that rather than don't you think it's a bit early
• 2:00:52
  that matters a lot i mean um encouragement to the beginning is probably for if
• 2:00:57
  people in any walk of life the thing that matters most have you been on any good road trips
• 2:01:05
  i feel like my whole life is a road i'm constantly moving um i've never i've never deliberately
• 2:01:17
  driven from one place to another one place another simply to do the journey
• 2:01:21
  um because i'd travel i mean i used to before as an america i used to be in a different country
• 2:01:28
  every week and um why it's going up and just that's speaking to us partly that partly always
• 2:01:36
  trying to find out what was going on in certain places and reporting from them and much more
• 2:01:42
  there are several journeys i would love to make road trips as it were that they're actually
• 2:01:47
  sea trips i'd love to set out for ithika at some point um uh and uh have the kivafi power by now
• 2:01:59
  you're such a romantic um what's the worst movie you've seen
• 2:02:05
  oh my god that's so hard there's almost all
• 2:02:10
  there's so many what do you have a favorite and then we can get to the worst
• 2:02:14
  i think one of my favorite i have a lot of favorite movies there's one i've become very fun
• 2:02:19
  of in recent years by um uh italian there at palos orantino um called the great beauty
• 2:02:26
  yes which is a wonderful movie and one of the very few movies i've seen several times
• 2:02:33
  because it's it repays rewatching i don't think many movies do oh we could argue about that film
• 2:02:39
  forever i'll absolutely love the first three quarters of it and then worried that it became
• 2:02:47
  what it was critiquing a little bit self-indulgent and bloated and self-regarding and uh and uh
• 2:02:54
  sure but maybe i'm not so good enough and i suppose it could be the greatest
• 2:02:59
  the then the greatest film is probably the film of a book that i'm also very dedicated to which is
• 2:03:04
  the leopard uh as for bad films i mean almost everything i look at on uh the planes
• 2:03:11
  uh is terrible i just watched this film the the lost jungle or something
• 2:03:19
  i saw that we said it was endribullic and it's kind of but oh my god it was so bad and Daniel
• 2:03:24
  radical for so poor and a lot of i mean a lot of movies are just so banal today uh but then you
• 2:03:35
  sometimes find a good one and it makes it all worth it so you're right uh yes that that's we
• 2:03:40
  don't need to go over the litany of terrible terrible movies did you watch tv as a kid what did you
• 2:03:45
  like to watch i did um funny knife i used to watch neighbors uh most days um i that's the
• 2:03:56
  Australian soap not your neighbors across the uh next the way who used to hide them with a small
• 2:04:01
  pair of binoculars very well no actually it was that you got it wrong no the you're right the Australian
• 2:04:08
  soap um i was lucky also in the in that um without telling too serious about things that it's
• 2:04:14
  but i watched a certain television we never know what's too much should good thing um uh and of
• 2:04:21
  course though those days i remember now 42 but in those days television was an event in a way
• 2:04:25
  which it is now um in that you know when a particular thing happened in a soap or a particular
• 2:04:32
  film or something you know it was the talk of everything for days afterwards um and uh
• 2:04:41
  i think the things in looking back that made the most impression on the
• 2:04:44
  television actually were um BBC and other channels doing serious arts programming of a kind that
• 2:04:51
  they don't do anything um there was a program called the south bank show when i was growing up
• 2:04:57
  usually presented by melvin bragg and it would present a serious hour or two of television about
• 2:05:03
  a particular artist um a painter a composer um you know but um it it was one of the things that
• 2:05:15
  told me these are things you should um head towards you should know about these people
• 2:05:21
  these are the people who who who clearly are doing things that matter um and most of them
• 2:05:27
  were alive i think i mean like france is bacon it was a famous south bank show interview with him and
• 2:05:33
  um so i it shows like that which took culture seriously and which now i mean you just don't get
• 2:05:40
  anywhere um those made a huge impression and they they pretty much helped form my taste in the arts
• 2:05:48
  uh uh uh uh uh uh um taste they still have how wonderful it would be regarded as too
• 2:05:54
  prescriptive these days wouldn't it yeah you have to sort of reflect what people um actually into
• 2:05:59
  rather than what they should be aspiring to be mmm um what's the worst household chore
• 2:06:06
  i've tried to raise my life they don't have it
• 2:06:11
  it says replaced replaced dripping with privilege
• 2:06:14
  Exactly. Oh, no, I am I don't know probably making my first coffee in the morning.
• 2:06:19
  Um, the best place I've ever played when you're wondering around the streets of
• 2:06:23
  I don't know. I didn't have a, I don't know a sweet tooth. If I had to go over here,
• 2:06:28
  probably pistachio. Wow. Do you have a savory tooth? Yes, it is. What's your favorite thing to eat?
• 2:06:35
  Well, I mean, the cherry at the bottom of her man hat. Hey. Yes. Yes. I had a few of those in my time
• 2:06:46
  in New York or an olive at the bottom of my, a lot of it. Yes. Exactly. The olive at the bottom of a,
• 2:06:53
  a very dry martini or slightly exactly. Yes. Um, if you lived, if you could live to 100 and you
• 2:07:00
  could either keep your, the body you had when you were 30 or the mind that you had when you were
• 2:07:05
  30 and you didn't know how things were going to pan out, but you had to opt for one or the other,
• 2:07:09
  which would you take? The mind, the mind every time. Yeah. It's the thing that is worse when you see
• 2:07:14
  if it will lose. Yeah. And the truth is, as long as you have your mind, you can still roam anywhere.
• 2:07:23
  Uh-uh. I think it's the right truth or rather wonderful thing that you can, you can revisit
• 2:07:30
  bases. You can't go to anything. Think on them again. Do you worry about death?
• 2:07:39
  Ah, no. I worry about not using my time. Hmm. This is a slightly different thing.
• 2:07:48
  Yes. Have you read Oliver Berkman's book? No. You know Oliver?
• 2:07:53
  No. Oliver's another Brit who was living in Brooklyn until recently when he moved back to the UK.
• 2:07:59
  I think his wife was doing, um, got a job at a university there and he, he had a column in the
• 2:08:04
  Guardian for a long time about sort of personal life management and like pop psychology, brilliant,
• 2:08:09
  brilliant guy. Uh, and his latest book is I think called 4,000 weeks. It's basically, it's, it's,
• 2:08:16
  Oh, yeah. I heard my management for mortals. Um, he has a couple of great episodes of this podcast
• 2:08:23
  should you choose to delve back through the uncomfortable conversations. But his, his book is
• 2:08:29
  well worth a read or the audio book worth a listen, because it's all about how to use,
• 2:08:33
  about time management, not from a perspective of how to manage your time, but how to manage your
• 2:08:37
  life, the fact that you have a finite amount of weeks. What are you really going to do with them?
• 2:08:42
  Yeah, wise. Yes. And then the necessity of not allowing them to direct you or you just being
• 2:08:49
  directed by time. Yeah, you're ranging it. Yeah. All right. Last first date question, the,
• 2:08:55
  the old time machine question, you can go wherever you want to in the past or the future and you
• 2:08:59
  can come back and you know, you can have vaccinations and whatever. Where do you go?
• 2:09:02
  Um, gosh, uh, it's so difficult because the, the bits of my interests kick in.
• 2:09:12
  Obviously, I'd like to be in Elizabeth, Elizabeth in England at a theater on the south bank of the
• 2:09:18
  10s, uh, with penicillin. Yeah. Um, and see what Shakespeare was like in person.
• 2:09:29
  Um, I'd have loved to have known if the stuff just spilled out of him as I think it did.
• 2:09:34
  Um, otherwise, uh, oh, so many things. Um, I'd have loved to have seen
• 2:09:47
  pre-First World War Vienna. I'd have loved to have seen what Sevens Vibe describes in the,
• 2:09:53
  in the world of yesterday. The, the time, what suffraase he is, the time without speed.
• 2:10:01
  Um, everything happened at a different pace.
• 2:10:06
  Um, and you know, there were just various people I would have loved, met.
• 2:10:12
  Um, and seen at work, picked the brains off and, and some I only just missed.
• 2:10:20
  I have some friends in their 90s who knew some of the people I really admire.
• 2:10:24
  But, um, uh, I'd have liked to have gone back. Actually, maybe I, maybe I would have liked to have
• 2:10:31
  gone back in time. I would like to have met Robert Schumann and had some, um,
• 2:10:36
  mental health advice to give him. And maybe some medicine as well and kept him going much longer
• 2:10:45
  than sadly he was able to do. Yeah. That would be a very worthwhile trip. Yeah.
• 2:10:49
  You had to take anti-presence back to the people who exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:10:56
  Just like a pro-zac. Exactly. Yeah. Uh, Douglas, it's, uh, it's lovely to speak with you. I'm so glad
• 2:11:01
  we could catch up again. Or likewise. I hope you can make it to our sunny shores or the, uh,
• 2:11:06
  that I can buy a pie. When I'm next in, uh, in New York,
• 2:11:11
  uh, we should look forward to raising a very dry month. Yeah. That's right. Um, thanks Douglas.
• 2:11:24
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma. Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and
• 2:11:29
  Instagram for all the latest. May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies,
• 2:11:35
  generous and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly, delectably, uncomfortable.