Why Can Nobody Think For Themselves Anymore? - Douglas Murray (4K)

you've spent a lot of time studying history and writing about current events at the moment how would you rate your predictive ability given the current state of the world were the things that you foresaw coming or things that you've been particularly surprised by um well nobody gets to predict with 100% accuracy anything because among other things all the time things happen that you could never have seen coming I could never have seen covid coming I just didn't um so when anyone sort of boasts about their predictive capabilities I always think you have to do it with a certain amount of humility because I mean things happen all the time you couldn't see you can only see Round the Bend of the road you're coming to you can't see around the corner um yeah I mean some things I've written about for years particularly in my book The Strange death of Europe that came out in 2017 which I think are sadly uh coming to fluish and I say sadly because it people think that if you've predicted something and got it right you would feel any pleasure and that would only be if the thing you were predicting was something you looked forward to and what I was predicting was somebody I was something I was dreading and um that was the transformation of our country of birth uh and many other countries in the west due to demographic change and I mean every day now pretty much somebody says to me gosh I used to think what you were saying and the strange death of Europe was a bit out there and now I realize you were right but it gives me no pleasure for them to say that cuz I always s of think well if you'd have agreed back then some things might not have happened but so but you know as um Mark Stein said you know demographics is Destiny so uh it's one of the things you can predict with the most ease yeah did you have Victoria Secrets planed to bring sexy back on your 2023 bingo card why are Victoria Secrets bringing sexy bag after experimenting with 300 mannequins plus- siiz models disabled models trans models a male model and a 38-year-old football player Victoria Secrets have made the controversial decision to switch strategy and start using hot women to model their underwear again it makes commercial sense to my mind um yeah it is quite E I'm always amazed that advertising Executives find it complex this stuff I mean all you need to do is stick sexy guys on stuff and stick sexy girls on stuff and you can sell merchandise which pretty much writes itself um yeah I'm I'm I'm not particularly surprised that if you stick lizo in a bikini it's not as appealing as a bit of sales merchandise but you know live and learn I suppose Liz and learn Liz and learn uh one of my friends owns a very big clothing company and for a while they tried plus-sized models yeah uh mostly for women there's not much of a body positivity movement for men no not like a beer gut movement the skinny fat Revolution uh and uh he said we've split tested this into Oblivion Big Girls Don't sell clothes right so when you see that when you see a company you know and summers are making double plus- siiz dildos or whatever uh the the company is actively hurting the top line and bottom line to be able to send the right message and that's all well and good up until some shareholder meeting where some 70s year old guy looks at the far right column of an Excel sheet and goes what the [ __ ] this yes and they go no no you don't understand it's this really cool New Movement uh it's very Progressive and he goes I don't care right I want more money than we had last year and this is less money than we had last year yeah yeah they um well I mean I suppose it all starts off from a good place like some or many things but uh look if you you might agree that you know it's not a good thing to sell anorexic looking models to young women that's yeah okay let's all agree on that but you can you can stop somewhere before morbidly obese you know that's where the whole thing goes wrong with body positivity thing plus there's a place where body positivity shouldn't occur it should be I mean if somebody is so morbidly obese that they're at significant risk of heart failure you shouldn't celebrate them you should say hang on a minute steady on the donuts but they don't say that they just do they they they they they run all the way I wish you could just have sort of healthy looking women uh on the ads and and just draw the line there but as as ever they they sort of don't know where the line is until you just say something wrenches them back and I think wrenches them back is normally as you say the bottom line yeah I uh I've been thinking about this sort of performative empathy point for a while got this idea I need to meet it better but I think something like um short-term empathy or the shallow Pond of empathy I've been thinking about what is most popular in culture at the moment is something that optimizes for its immediacy to signal that you are a good guy or good girl right even if that's at the expense of the ultimate outcome for the person so let's say you're able to do something giving the child ice cream it may be what wants right now it may be bad for it long term but if you're the ice cream promoter for the young children you will be seen as a good person uh and if you're the person who's saying hang on a second yeah that's not what you want longterm maybe responsibility in Peterson language maybe not casual sex in Louise Perry language maybe you know not as much food as you want in body positivity language uh you're seen as bigoted or judgmental or that's because there's no countervailing force in the culture the the the unlimited empathy people have run a long way very fast because as you say there's a short-term gain to be seen to be being empathetic you know let's celebrate yourself um but ordinarily you would have some other counter force in the society and different for different forces have provided that in history including the church but if there is no counterforce to say for instance you know uh long long-term gratification better than shortterm or you know whatever don't then then yeah and and and then that's a sort of unappealing position in our society now there's there's plenty of room for people to be in that space but it's still you're still on the defensive you know we still live in in a society where effectively to own an ice cream truck you know in the sort of language of a child would seem to be a great thing they have the short-term thing um yeah not many people want that role it's sort of uncool in some way it might become cool at some point in the future when more people realize that the short-term gratification thing was leading to diabetes or whatever but it's the same as one of the justifications I think for why people aren't having children that upfront children you just see a very very large cost on all of the joy and and stuff well the economist put it as the the child tax the amount of money you have less if you have a child very weird way round to look at the future of the species isn't it if only I died with more money in my bank account life of regret I death of regret perhaps yeah well you know it's kind of the uh as well the the Mexican fisherman story are you familiar with that the parable of the Mexican fisherman no I don't think I am this is cool you'll like this so an American businessman goes on holiday to Mexico and while he's there true story it's a parable right okay got it [ __ ] hell he goes on holiday he gets taken out uh fishing by a local Mexican and he asks the Mexican how he spends his time the Mexican says I fish a little on in the morning I catch enough for my family we go back we cook we laugh around the fire and I spend time with my children and the American businessman goes that's stupid here's a better idea what you should do is actually spend most of your day fishing and then with the Surplus fish you could sell them at the market and the Mexican fisherman says why would I do that so well once you've got the additional money you could start to employ some of your friends and they could come out fishing with you too and you could catch more fish which you could sell at the market for more money he said why would I do that he says well once you've done that you would be able to incorporate in America and you would maybe be able to start a canning Factory so that you could own the entire production process and you could then sell the company for a lot of money he said why would I do that he said because once you'd done that you'd be able to fish a little on a morning and then go back and spend time with your children around the fire very good and I often think about that as a much more direct route to to happiness you know yeah um well that's that's the classic thing that you the place you uh end up is the place you started from but yes um there are lots of reasons why people aren't having children um and a lot of them are simple economic things I mean all of the Western countries that have terrible replacement birth rate figures are because of very easy things to solve like cost of housing and things like that it's not hard to build affordable housing we just Prov to be incapable of doing so so young people wanting to wanting to both get on the property ladder and have a and start a family think they have to do either or and they're not entirely wrong but that's something the governments could have sorted out and none of them do they're so hopeless at it and they have been for years under consecutive government they never build enough housing so young people don't see a future don't feel hopeless and then don't have kids and then everyone wonders why there's a demographic crisis intergenerational competition theory is something I learned about a couple of weeks ago you familiar with this yeah yeah I didn't know about it before but it makes complete sense you know there was always this talk of Millennials are the first generation to have done worse than parents and it seems well they're not the first first in a little while yes in two generations yeah long um and it seems like Millennials actually probably just about managed to get over on average uh but jenz materially difficulty in getting in the property ladder the most common living arrangement for men under 35 is still at home with their parents awful um and uh yeah you know it it bakes in this sort of intergenerational competitiv and a dissatisfaction when you look at where your parents were and this sure you know felt sense that your parents got advantages that you never did which is usually not true I mean they didn't suffer inflation at the same rates but they suffered very high taxation the postwar period um we haven't had taxation as the levels it was at in the 1960s and70s for instance in the UK um uh there was a time when people were top rate taxpayers were paying 99% tax a friend who once in that period paid over 100% tax one year for reasons he can possible it will be back tax and that sort of thing so I mean there's a tendency particular among Millennials and after to think that their parents had it very easy and my experience of people from that generation the boomer generation it didn't feel easy at the time and yeah there were certain things getting on the property housing ladder was a little bit easier than it is or significantly easier once you have what is it five times average earnings being you know the inadequate to to get to the average property price you see the a split go on but you you always have to factor I like if you say you know the millennial the first ones or gen Z were the first ones in said whoever to have a better standard of living you have to bake in things like oh yeah well they had a World War you know so that's quite a big PS well that's a big footnote um so yeah everyone everyone has their challenges I just don't see why why once you identified them and know the way out of them you don't do them but I was talking to mutual friend Eric Weinstein about this I also spoke to Sam about this I've spoken to a bunch of people why in your opinion do you think everybody struggles to agree on the truth now oh that's quite straightforward We can't agree on what's happened so uh broadly speaking an event happens now and some people believe it has happened and other people think it hasn't um I mean we've been through a number of deranging years since we first spoke in which for instance you know as I say there's been a global pandemic which some people believe was something which killed millions and millions of people in their own country and think they were just about saved from dying themselves and other people think it was a fake and other people think we just massively overreacted and other people think uh it was all planned and um nobody agrees what happened uh that's just to take one example in America you have obviously the fact that that nobody agrees who won an election that's a problem and so you just have basic things nobody can agree on it just happened I always say in America you know it' be nice if we could just agree that one thing that's just happened happened but then nobody wants to and says You must be a WF shill if you if you if you believe that so I think it is the problem and then obviously underneath that is just the problem the fact that uh the treadmill of social media has totally changed the way in which we communicate the way in which we learn things absorb things and we don't know what the consequences of that are we're so early into it um and it seems to me that among other things it's allowed people to have their own version of recent events recent history past few days and so when you sit down to talk to somebody you can fairly swiftly work out whether they're somebody who's open to the idea of things that happened having happened or whether or not they will fight you all the way and um that just makes everything much harder than it used to be um and that isn't to sort of particularly Pine for the era of a mono narrative if that if that era ever particularly existed and and you read history not clear that it did um but it's just m massively worse and news is coming at us at such a pace these days that it's just like you know every day feels like you know A month's worth of news in the past things just fly by you so fast that don't even have time to absorb it before it's happened um so I think that's part of the reason um and in any case the whole concept of Truth as being a desirable thing in the society seems to have eroded from both the right and the left and how um well uh Truth for instance used to be the basis for University uh education and the basis of University inquiry that you sought the truth wherever it led you that was a point of Academia for instance uh politics was different politics was always about having to find a way around truth and deal with it and address inconvenience yeah address it where you could but you know get round it if it was too awkward but inquiry used to be about seeking truth and they' been like that for couple of thousand years or more since the Greeks certainly and then it changed at some point relatively recently and um truth is now not a desirable thing because truth hurts people and um it can be mean so it's not only that people have different opinions on things they don't agree that the thing we used to agree on is worth they have different facts as well well they have different facts but they don't agree that the I mean they don't agree that you should just follow truth wherever it takes you um because other things are prioritized over truth I still prioritize truth over all things if I can and try to and uh I think that's the interesting thing about the world is finding out what in it is true and what is not but other people don't seem to have that same um appetite anymore and uh would rather live in lies which I think is very dangerous for an individual and very dangerous for society um in fact it's it's it's dangerous for an individual and lethal in a society I'd say yeah it's interesting to think about the motivations that people have for not believing something which is already on an un shaky Foundation of We can't agree on the thing that we're not believing about and uh ginda one of my friends has this idea that uh if no amount of evidence would dissuade someone of what they believe then they don't have a rational belief they have a religious ideology yeah yeah that's Jonathan Swift uh beautifully put it as if you can't reason somebody out for position they weren't reasoned into of course I you're dealing with Dogma with many people today it's just they don't know which Faith they belong to but it's Dogma for sure I just I'm not very interested in their views uh because I think they can't defend them and if you can't defend your views I'm not very interested in them because I don't find them persuasive I asked Sam this about whether or not it obviously whatever 10 15 years ago who was a big part of the new atheist movement and I guess you were tangentially on there was a little bit of a whipper snapper there was a whipper snapper new you're an Orbiter it's referred to I was I was a short trousers uh new atheist okay um but you know your book uh The Madness of crowds talks about the collapse of grand narratives one of the biggest collapses of grand narratives was religion so I asked Sam whether I'm Not Looking Back he believed that his deconstruction of religion was on balance a net good or a net uh negative what did he say he he managed to evade being too committal either way uh I think but what do you think what's your opin well I think it's like a lot of things that you deconstruct um you you only know afterwards whether or not it's something you could have put back together it's like children with bicycles very fine at taking them apart very bad at putting them back together um not comparing Sam to a child but I mean I just I think that is it is something you no only once you've taken AP part once you can't reconstruct it You' realize what what function it might have performed um I said to Sam on stage a few years ago uh that I I thought that it would all be fine if most atheists were as rational and levelheaded as Sam but it's not Sam Harris all the way down it's like Sam Harris followed by total mentalists and um who just will not reason or rationalize anything and are just screaming harpies of insanity yeah so that's a shame um but yes I mean I think that that whole thing works for some people but obviously doesn't work for others I mean religion is you know shophow among others saw it was um religion was Philosophy for the masses um absent religion completely lots of options of what will happen one is the the the the general public lose the overarching framework of their lives and have nothing to replace it with and another one is that they do replace it with other things you know which are new religions which crop up all the time we have the the religion of the body negativity movement you know we have the religion of um trans we have the religion of gender we have the religion of race and you know and all these things are just stepped into this void and uh they're all dogmatic things where they're founding texts um they they've all got their own catechisms of a Kind priests they priests they have uh excommunication rights and I my my only observation really would be on that is that I preferred the old gods you know I preferred the old priesthood funly enough uh partly because we knew its flaws and um the sweet point where you see the flaws of religious belief but can still live through it is um is even I can well I can especially feel nostalgic for because I I I don't like the new priesthood I I find them um uh as corrupt as any priesthood in history uh with the negative U um attribute that that not everyone's woken up to them yet you know I mean do we have do we have in our culture an equivalent for instance of the meme of the pedophile priests I don't think we do I mean for instance I would love it if the the sort of uh adults who push you know gender dysmorphia stuff on children were regarded as the equivalent of pedophile priests I think that'd be fine uh but my point is it doesn't come with that yet it's like the Catholic church in Boston circa 1950 the priests are still fiddling with the kids but no one wants to talk about it so in other news this episode is brought to you by Maui newie venison Maui Nei venison brings the healthiest red meat on the planet direct to your door not only is it the most nutrient-dense meat on the planet they're the only 100% stress-free wild harvested venison that you can get here's my super secret hack if you are sick of buying meat that always goes off put it in the freezer from Frozen salt both sides of it put it in an air fryer for 10 to 12 minutes each side and you have a perfectly cooked steak from Frozen that will never go off because it's going from freezer to mouth in the space of 25 minutes to complete Game Changer all of their cuts are spectacular and you can get them Frozen delivered to your door but their venison sticks are my favorite while I've been on the road you can get the healthiest red meat on the planet delivered directly to your door and get 20% off by going to the link in the description below or heading to mauw venison tocom slod wisdom and using the code modern wisdom check out that's M A UI nuu venison docomond wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout it makes me think as we were talking earlier on about uh some of the ways in which lots of decisions need to be made and you don't know how the outcomes are going to occur that there are no Solutions only trade-offs quote I keep coming back to that in my personal life as well but thinking about what people want to optimize for in their existence there are no Solutions ultimately like and you have to give up certain things you don't have to go up everything well no there's certainly better Solutions right but the world is trying to maximize everything it's there is and it goes back to the shallow Pond of empathy M that accepting the tradeoff are an inevitability doesn't fit into that Paradigm right it's we will always optimize for what is what feels most pleasurable or empathetic in the short term I don't know I don't feel that well that's what the that's how it plays out I think for a lot of people yes if they have no character if they have no character in well what do you optimize for I try to optimize for peace that seems to be the thing that for me in my personal life I try to do if the price is my sanity the cost is too high no matter what it is and I continually throw that rule out of the window all the time that's what I try and aim for right my own rubric is I love the peace in your in your private life I try reminds you of L lady brell's line about the general at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest she says the general was essentially a man of peace excep in his domestic life you're the other way around yeah you're a man of peace in your domestic life except for my maybe you are generally as well I don't I don't think I am you're highly agreeable person [ __ ] not really uh I I I try as best I can to keep a keep a lid on it but yeah the um this lack of of meaning and and people's desire their absolutely fervent desire to try and fill that hole with as many things as they can like lizo like lizo indeed did you did you see the stories that came out about lizo oh was wonderful about her Amsterdam my favorite story of the year yeah a long way what for the people that don't know lizza was on tour uh in Amsterdam uh took her backup dances to the red light district yes and made the backup dancers some of the backup dancers eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers my view was what happened here was that lizo thought you could Outsource the eating of your five fruit and veg day she to the vagina to the vagina of the stripper or to the she so reluctant to eat healthfully she even outsources the five fruit and veg day how's my view well it seems to me that it's it seems to me that both lizo uh Ellen degenerous uh Jimmy Kimmel all of these people who upfront oh isn't it wonderful it's so great it's always it's always the nice nicest sque not the Liz ever looked nice but like the the squeaky clean Ellen deera thing you know just dance and you know and of course they're horrible in real life people behind theen of course it's a sort of rule there by the way actually with public figures is that the ones who are most you know sort of sweety sweee in public tend to be the nastiest in private sometimes the opposite can be true some people who have thought to have a very um hard Edge in public can actually be lovely lovely people in private like Margaret Thatcher was a good example very very nice to people around her you know but could make tough decisions yeah it's to me it's a a counter signal if I see someone doing the lizo thing of I am so body positivity I it it becomes their identity of how they're a flaming sword card carrying Paragon of whatever this thing is well it's also it's also a bit like the um uh the Jimmy savl um uh the hospital what was it called it still goes but um there was a hospital for children that he raised money for all the time and whenever anyone would try to do an investigation s go oh you know it's going to it's going to hurt the hospital for kids you know you sure you want to run that story well that's going to hurt the hospital so there are lots of people on our own age who have a thing like that they build like the equivalent of the Jimmy savl Children's Hospital facade up in order to protect themselves right are you saying that lizzo's work with the body positivity movement isn't in a case to try and effectively put wall yes large a wall bodied people in front of a very difficult wall to get over well I think it's probably easy to get over getting around it might be more difficult um I got into a car and it ran out of gas so uh I had this idea about um why certain women are very Pro body positivity movement and I was listening to Bill Burr do a live show and he said uh Ladies If you only support the WNBA the way that you support a fat chick who is uh gaining weight and no longer a threat to you that it would be doing more numbers than the NBA is and I realized that some some nonzero number of women May deep down in their darker moments realize that they don't discourage some of their friends from uh gaining weight yes because they can eat themselves out of their inter seexual competition for potential Partners well come on like that as well how do we play that game I mean this is going to show a low side of my character but you can't say always that you're sad if a somebody you're not very close to but you new and you see them after some years and they look and they're fat I mean you can't say there isn't a slight sort of you'll never guess he's become fat there there's different versions of that with with men I think I and I I think men can be complicit in that as well yeah you know the thrill when a friend balds early you know I think that's very common thrill that needs there'll be a German word for that yeah of course like shud but specifically for for the for the scalp yeah yeah yeah yeah scalp yeah I think lot of people do that but it's it's a pretty bad thing to encourage among people but yeah I think it is part of the competition take taking out of the competition for sure I was thinking as well about how uh material conditions you were saying before people's parents maybe had it better in some ways but also would have had it way worse yeah of course material conditions often don't impact people's demeanors in the way that they might have predicted like rich people can be bitter idiots and poor people can be grateful Heroes although George Orwell said by the age of 50 every man gets the face he deserves what do you mean by that I think that's actually true I think there's a certain age it might not be 50 now but it's a certain age where you do show your life on your your face m oh yeah I mean for instance somebody who's very profoundly depressed for a long time it writes itself across the face it writes itself in their eyes I think um PE particularly unhappiness writes itself on somebody's face Joy does as well I mean if somebody if somebody smiles a lot they have laugh lines yeah you know and um yes it's there there's a great truth in it I mean we we know that because we we judge people by their faces by the way they interact with us but the way they look at us it's perfectly sensible I found a quote the other day that said uh people with low self-esteem will always find a way to be miserable and it made me think that uh material conditions a lot of the time are what young people but many people lay at the feet of their despondency or their nihilism or their critical nature or whatever it might be and I've seen enough of my friends vacillate through varying levels of uh affluence or or or relationship or singlet tenness or whatever uh and one of the things sometimes it impacts the way that they show up but many times they are the common denominator between all of those situations and the material conditions don't actually impact the way that they show up all that much that's true well there's a problem of analyzing this which is that anyone who's successful inevitably looks at their own path to success as being to some extent pre-ordained I mean almost I mean if you you just get there were some people with wild luck but most people a lot of people let me say who who are successful uh look back and they think well I don't understand this person who hasn't made it to the same rung of the ladder as I have why didn't they work hard on so there's a sort of um uh callousness actually that can creep in there um but equally uh people are to a great extent masters of their own fate and it's it's it's a very hard one to analyze that as I said because the out Riders skew the whole statistics I mean the the outrider who does very well well not everyone can do what he or she has done but he or she is likely to think they could have done well you retroactively lots of people that achieved success look back at the route that was particularly designed by them for them to achieve the very specific type of success that they managed to get and then retrofit that as a universal law that anybody else could follow one of the things I've realized is I've spent more time digging into personal growth and self-development and all of that stuff so much of it is post Haw rationalization about one's very idiosyncratic solution for this thing and they say these are the universal principles of X Y and Z you no they're not they W highly personal it's your personality just spun up and tuned up to a level yeah I mean most very successful people I've ever met have some story o of their own growth which is both inspiring and not replicable they're unusual but what's the alternative as you said before like you have to lay the agency at your own feet because if you were to perhaps admit the truth which is I was in the right place at the right time was well there's a yeah that can be the case not many people say that but yes some do yeah yeah yeah if you were in Britain in the ' 80s for instance it a good time to make money easier better um than today so some people will say yeah it was a great place and right time but most people do sort of vaguely think they've made it that they it was sort of pre-ordained I mean I we all do that to some extent I often describe myself as being lucky and then need somebody to remind me of how hard I've worked no I had a friend who joined Goldman Sachs in 1998 and he said he had an absolute golden period for about for yeah yeah a little bit less uh he said it was already starting to wind down before Layman brother yeah um some of that was to do with Dei a very early instantiation of Dei that's right yes there there's several books that make that clear in sub text yeah several books that make it clear about some of the hiring processes going on yeah like 2006 he was already seeing it but he told me uh he made a trade uh on uh 911 he made he made a very particular trade and uh bypassed all of the security um concern the limits on everything and the Pit Boss or whatever he's just some young dude he's been there for two years right out of whatever University or something what did his boss think of the trade came over and said like what the [ __ ] are you doing and he said look at this if this then that if this then that run it all the way down he said this is the outcome this is what's going to happen and he's like we like I I don't know what so first off he was concerned that it was going to go wrong and then he made the most ungodly amount of money in the space of three hours and then all the market shut for 10 days from yes from September 12th yeah yeah yeah and uh the only organization that had spare Capital was Goldman because of this particular trade wow and uh he was basically told we may need to cut this I'll check with him he was basically told go home don't tell anybody yeah of course that you made this he shortened the market yeah I mean it was it was widely thought off 911 that because the the stock market tanked of course immediately and we didn't know if there was going to be a World War if this was World War um and um uh it was regarded very swiftly as actually being the duty of Wall Street to to not do that but Bush came back you remember he did that ground zero announcement we will do and that was as much for the uh stock market as it was for the [ __ ] popular yeah absolutely well yes because I mean stock market collapses I mean many many more Americans I can't remember the percentage but are invested in the stock market than in Britain I mean like three times more or something Americans 1K yeah more than 50% of the population in America has some uh investment in the in the stock market so it's different from in the UK where when the St when when the pound was shorted in the 1990s by uh um Soros and others uh they um uh a lot of British people are not that sympathetic because they don't see themselves as being involved in the stock market which of course they are they just don't know it you mentioned George OA Telegraph recently spoke about his bi his wife's biography or autobiography oh there's a new biography of Sonia Orwell yeah George Orwell was sadistic misogynistic homophobic and sometimes violent biographer of the legendary writer's wife says darkness that runs through 1984 is a reflection of his soul yeah should we unperson George well it would be the obvious end point to the full circle full circle um yeah I I this is just a way of the for the author to get publicity is to to repeat things everyone knew I mean George Orwell held the views of his time about gay men for instance we know he was a little bit homophobic but it was the 1940s you know um Nancy boys and so on as you would have called them were not you know people weren't that sounds like a like a a 1990s taxi driver's insult that they' thrown it was a sort of word that all well and people his generation would use you know fairies that sort of thing and he does in some of his letters and some of his articles but I mean so [ __ ] what I don't care I mean was he sadistic probably in some ways sometimes was could he be cruel and nasty probably being a human being I just think that the the absurdity of our age of judging people and the P well you know just just wait till people do that to you yeah you know wait wait till somebody weighs up your own life in the balance and finds you wanting you know I mean I think it's Preposterous human beings are what we are being amazed at us in the past is always just an expression of our own vanity and thinking we've got past all that it's like the way if a friend of mine was saying to me the other day when I was at Oxford if you want to get a grant to study these days say in English and you were to choose Shakespeare as your subject of study which is sort of unusual these days uh you would um you would for instance have to find Shakespeare guilty of you know racism colonialist thinking and so on and it doesn't seem to strike these people that actually their job is not to judge Shakespeare Shakespeare judges us and he might find us wanting how so well he gives us visions of the universe and our place in it which it would do us well to listen to um and that might include exposing human Foles human weakness human Pride human sin human lust the tendency to do evil in the name of doing good or think you're doing good and do great harm so much more all of this is in Shakespeare's work in his characters and the things he in he created in his mind and his work I think that that if you look at a panoply of a vision like that you should think I wonder what he's telling us rather than I wonder how I can judge him what's the point point of the latter is so boring human being from the past inhuman being in the past shocker has it always been this way has it always been uh people of the present judging people of Yesterday by the standards of today um well most people didn't have time in the past to engage in that um too busy trying to put food on the table or surviving past the age of 25 you know um uh but what what it is in our current Society is there's a very strange um um lack of respect for wisdom uh Henry kiss just said this in the early years of the internet he said I all the knowledge is there but where's the wisdom people might not like me quoting Dr Kissinger in that regard but again he knows a lot more than most of his critics um I do think that's a that's a Oddity of the age I think the Oddity the vanity of trying to judge everyone from the past by our current standards is just absurd you think you know more than Shakespeare think you know more than Orwell uh these are minnow uh snapping at Giants I don't care for them one uh potentially unfortunate situation is that women's mental health is in part down to misogynistic songs when BTS lead singer Yung cook changed to a more misogynistic music a disturbing trend for followed a psychiatrist's point of view on bts's young cook and the the messages of pop music early in their teen career BTS took a deliberate stance to refrain from objectifying or sexualizing women despite going against a music industry Norm they achieved huge success now as part of his solo launch different imagery has surfaced in Jung cook songs they include a woman telling of her man that she will be your fantasy and swallow your pride to make him never think about cheating lyrics that identify what's why you said swallow your pride in a particularly suggestive way all I've got I've got more to go here uh lyrics that identify women as those hoes over there and a male rapper telling his female partner I wanked before you came so that I can [ __ ] you longer of course in reality Yung Cook's songs are part of the course or even tame does that work by the way what you just described you've You' never increased your stamina by having a warm up I would have thought the lyric more likely I did that before you game and I just let to get a better i' kind like a lie down I did that before you came that's why I texted saying I'm not so F yeah don't I have a quick dinner and then I'll go to bed one of my friends had a uh had a a rubric for this that was masturbate before you evaluate oh well that's true yeah that's that can be sensible advice I'm not sure if I liked you or I was just horny horny yeah yeah but no girls mental health you were reading out these that's it those hoes over there I wanked before you came so that I can [ __ ] you longer well where to start Downstream from K-pop is a Litany of female mental health problems that's what I'm saying there's a problem here isn't there because on the one hand popular culture does have a massive impact on the way we see the world uh I was at a gym recently where I actually asked the gym staff to turn off the music because it was a load of rap very unpleasant rap with a repeated use of the NW in it obviously he was a black rapper or so I was assuming right um You didn't find yourself mouthing along to the lyrics worried about no but actually I know that's right what what problem could possibly emerge from singing along just to interject there someone got canceled on Tik Tok for mouthing the nword along to a song right so it's it's no possible it's no longer the sound of the word it's the mouth shape yeah that that word engenders um well we know that it's a magical word in our time which even the speaking of suddenly summons up the Demons of the past Lord Voldemort yeah very very strange but no I just said to this I said to the gy I I said I just don't want to hear it because I don't want I just don't want it in the background of my life you know um was it that gym that we trained at we can discuss this another time but anyway um no I just don't like there are certain things I don't want to in my ears and that's one actually but I have no interest in hearing the word because it's a banned word so why would I want it in my mental background yeah um but so but anyway the point is is of course popular culture has a huge impact on people it has a huge impact on the way in which people see themselves it does it does at the same time you can overstate it you know somebody is not generally unhappy just because of the popular cultureart from anything else because you can easily step out of it as I try to do um and you know be a part of your time but not be creature as schilla says um and so no I I think it's a sort of weak excuse for unhappiness the popular culture happens not to be to your taste or avoid it get out look up from the screen when is cancel culture going to come for rap lyrics because it seems to me that you know as we're fighting against the misogyny of air conditioning temperatures in offices that are conditioned to the male body temperature as opposed to the female body temperature or I mean the the the levity of the era is just astonishing to me you know lots of people attribute to me this quote that it's not quite right I don't think it's quite for me but that um that we'll be talking about gender pronouns when The Barbarians break in but I've said something like it quite a few times but I mean you know gender norms and air conditioning it's a sort of thing that you would be discussing just before you will get you know machete I'm totally serious about this it's sometimes it's like one of the things that actually genuinely shocked me in recent weeks particular after the Hamas massacre in Israel was you know and then something which I do think at some point when when it's all died down a bit might there might be a moment of of of uh what youve I've got to say this carefully but a moment of um seriousness which is you know take the music first of all within a few miles of the Gaza border that hamad's attacked all the young people there this sort of Peace Rave and um this isn't in any way to victim blame these were people just wanting to dance and um dance into the early morning and I think it was called the peace Rave the peace and love Rave something like that um and then this hideous other world broke into to them into their lives and ended the lives of hundreds of them there's something there's something haunting about this I find because it's especially haunting because it sort of demonstrates that your slogans and your attitudes only go so far and they can't keep out some of the things that are lurking at the edges and I think that when I hear people whining about minor things you have any idea idea of the world out there if you had any idea of the things that was lurking You couldn't possibly be complaining about this well how do you think Gaye for Gaza will get on long term well the joke at the moment is there aren't enough tall buildings in Gaza to throw gays for Gaza off but these I mean these people are you know I've said R often they're they're part of the same phenomenon as turkeys for Christmas and chickens for KFC I mean I just I've fed up these INF Fringe idiot cases I mean they're so mentally defective these people uh and and Incredibly narcissistic you know I can be queer and also celebrate panis now you [ __ ] can't [ __ ] off just you know I can both argue for two-state solution and also celebrate queerness and also not let myself down no you can't no you can't you can't do all those things at some point you got to choose I've got a video to show you me show you this video can someone please explain to me what this means what does reproductive Justice Means free Palestine what does that even mean like what does it mean I'm pretty sure I'm not pretty sure abortions are illegal in Palestine unless it's like you know a super medical emergency and the mother will die from what I understand actually a lot of Palestinians have to go to Israel to get the abortions they want so what does this mean yeah what it it's such a huge sign there's five people holding this thing it's massive that's very good that's Danny the other half of Ryan who wasn't there the day that you that you came um Bo cast yeah reproductive Justice Means free Palestine what do you think can this is just this is just incredibly ignorant young people in America who have been taught this weird version of the world where all oppressions inter link and interlock and you you either the majority of the minority for minority rights and issues or for majority rights and issues and all minority rights and issues intersect and overlap so that if you're queer somehow you well no it's not even that these ignoramuses who couldn't point to the River Jordan if you showed it them on a map uh walk along the streets from AR you know from The River To The Sea Palestine will be free because I think the Palestinians are the underdogs in this weird version where they've mapped American racial well they've mapped a very specific version of American racial politics onto everything else in the world it's the same thing who talk people who talk about colonizers I mean there's this language of colonizers apartheid all this stuff and they've just tried to map it everywhere well I say everywhere actually it's highly selective L highly selectively I mean the people who are talking about Israelis being colonizers um when I saw that the other day on the Streets of London I thought yes if only there was a name for large numbers of people who came from outside to a country and um if only we could identify what they might be called in Britain oh it would be immigrants would it do you want to call immigrants colonizers in Britain you sure you want to follow this logical conclusion that talk about indigenous people oh okay great anywhere you don't want to apply that might there be a country or continent say oh Europe where you don't want to start talking about the indigenous peoples I notice that people don't but if you do want to Welcome to Hell so no all that is happening is a very selective mapping of a particular interpretation of the world that very dumb people in America have tried to put on certain selective other cases and it doesn't work it just doesn't work but may they never find out how much it doesn't work may they never find out um I I wish them Bliss in their ignorance because if their ignorance ever gets popped it will be as brutal a day as Can Be Imagined I've been thinking for a good while about how hypocrisy is a purpose-built tool for the internet to use it's it's like catnip for the Internet it's the thing because the reason it's so purpose built it's like a one of those Can you spot the difference competitions on a touchscreen iPad this is what's on the left this is what's on the right and what you have is here's something that someone once said or a position that they used to hold and here is what they hold now or here is what they do in their real life here is whatever and it's kind of what you're identifying here that you have a worldview which is self-contradictory you're just using different words for one thing that is almost exactly the same for another thing right and then complaining about this one saying don't look over don't don't look over here at this yeah uh well I mean everyone is inconsistent to some extent and I don't think by the way that I mean I mean on hypocrisy or you know for instance I can see a scenario where somebody might say oh Douglas you're hypocritical on this particular question I might say well you know there are some things I think are even more important than not being a hypocrite such as I don't know surviving I the worst thing about him is hypocrisy and there a there's a weird hypocrisy is the easiest one to catch people on is the truth of that correct yes it's easiest one to spot yes um you just and and they they do it as you say on this is what this person said 20 years ago this is what they say now okay again human being in growing up shocker yes yeah um people are allowed to evolve they change their minds they grow up be rather boring to say the same thing and think the same thing only for 70 years um but yeah people find hypocrisy very very easy to to see and it's about the only Vice you can really catch somebody on I think which is if you say one thing publicly and do another thing privately it's about the only one that people are really confident on uh or most other moral judgments For Better or Worse of sort of ebbed way but people still are able to judge uh hypocrisy um uh but I think I I mean I I think there are worse things I me I think not standing up for your loved ones not standing up for your country not standing up for uh yourselves in the face of horrible opposition from within without probably worse than hypocrisy I heard you say recently you don't have to agree with everyone's principle to respect the principle they're sticking to did I say that yeah sounds good yeah it's nice okay I I didn't know I said that but yeah you did uh but the reason that I like that is I think it shows why the braver conversation or standing up for something that you believe in is something that is a at least then if someone is prepared to stand up for whatever their beliefs are that you can assume they're telling the truth especially if they pay a high price for it it's one of the reasons why I have uh a good amount of faith that Sam believes the things that he says why would he not he pays an unbelievably high price to continue to flip-flop from One Tribe to another tribe to another tribe I don't think it's an unbelievably high price but a price let's say relatively high price yeah yeah I I I mean very early in some people's careers or when people first make it to public notice people say things like you know do you really believe what you say the answer to which for most people is or ought to be well why would I say it if I didn't believe it uh there are people who obviously do say stuff for LOLs or clicks or manitary purpose but at a certain point I mean you you got to accept that the person thinks what they think and you know respect them for it or at least do them the decency of believing that they mean it and I think that even on people I disagree with wildly I mean it's such a boring argument that one some people use it particularly on the left is like you know wonder if they actually even believe it I think they don't I think they're just doing it for money okay well that's an easier way to try to ignore them than actually trying to contend with the possibility that what they're saying is something they mean and believe and trying to work out if there's anything in it much easier to say the person's only doing it because they're paid or something yeah that's the shill grifter accusation very boring accusation don't doubt there are some people who who that is the case with but way fewer than way fewer than people think Michael malice has a a hierarchy of different uh I think it's like the hierarchy of grifters don't know why the moment you say Michael mice my face immediately sort of starts to smile yeah terrible one of the it's like um industry plant paid opposition controlled scop he goes all the way up and he said that he descended recently he's not quite at paid opposition but I think he's industry plant now I think Lex Freedman is paid opposition um is paid is different from controlled opposition maybe it's controlled opposition [ __ ] know controlled opposition is these are such weird terms that have cropped up in our era I love it again I think there're sort of low resolution explanations for really really low resolution explanations for things whenever I hear somebody describe things as that I always sort of know you're not dealing with somebody who actually understands the world do you find there's a definitely a trend of um conspiratorial thinking conspiracism uh much stronger in our adopted Homeland than it is in the UK I think yes that's true what do you think are you how conspiracy pilled are you do you see I mean it's it's this is the moment when people say ah controlled opposition you've ascended this is me allowing you to graduate from I think I talked about this on the boys cast that's right and and and brief briefly and and and uh various people wrote to me saying ah there you go that's proof that you're paid you're glowing as it's called um but it's was it you're you heard you're glowing no was it so tell me if I'm wrong with this Mark you're the resident glow expert but you're glowing means you're you're like a planted person who's saying something that is outing their like oh it's an intelligence operation that's that's breached the surface and people can see it they comment on Tik Tok saying like you're glowing oh it's like um the people alleged to be FBI um who are at certain protest yeah or wearing chinos and t-shirts yeah um so your conspiratorial so the conspiracy the thing with conspiracy theories it's very difficult in our era because some of the conspiracies are true of course have come true um well known to be true uh lab leak conspiracy the probably true they shouldn't have ever called nobody should ever have called it a conspiracy theory because it wasn't a conspiracy theory it was one of a set of hyp of hypotheticals to explain what happened with uh with uh with covid um so a lot of things get called conspiracy which are not they're just hypotheses uh that should be allowed to remain on the table and that makes a certain type of person increasingly prone to uh believe that everything that's called a conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory and before you know it you get sanish individuals thinking that the moon landings were a conspiracy we didn't land on the moon the American didn't land on the moon I don't know whether the people who now claim that believe that the Russians also faked it it's an interesting question to ask them do you think the the that the Soviets were capable of getting to the moon but the Americans were not the Americans set up like a a blow fan and a flag on a dodgy papia mese set but the Soviets did make it or did the Soviets and Americans both agree to pretend to have gone to the moon for not really have gone none of it makes sense to my mind but there's this but but but it's I have noticed and well it's actually all the literature demonstrates this that there's certain types of mental um uh uh problems that people have that make them disproportionately likely to believe conspiracy theories on on mass and one of them is paranoia uh the more paranoid a person is the more likely they to believe that sort of thing and that's the observation in my own life I've I've known a number of people who who've gone into the world of conspiracy and not come out and they are all people who have suffered paranoid episodes in their lives so which adds up so fear and genders yeah and it's as I say it's a sort of low resolution explanation for complex phenomena uh and you know and I think it's also that see conspiracy theories come about and and are used by people who and this isn't an original Point many people have made it they're made the claims about them are made made by and large by people who don't understand how unbelievably chaotic the world actually is or can't face it um so they can't face the fact that yeah somebody you followed in the newspapers every day if all of your life did actually just die in a freak car crash because the driver was drunk they can't bear the idea the world can't be that cruel it can't be that random you want a bed it's got to be coordination it can't be coincidence exactly so people who can't cope with the wild frivolity of the roulette table of Our Lives um always go to the there must be somebody behind it there must be somebody who's controlling all this you joking nobody's controlling this if anyone's controlling the damn thing I'd want to know by now but of course they're not it's it's so it's a very unsatisfactory place to arrive at in your life and by the way my own observation it's not very good for people personally because they they start to lose agency themselves locus of control gets externalized I'm at the mercy of the world yeah and the real answer is the world doesn't care no doesn't even know that you exists it is Dea to you the the ability for people to hold two conflicting thoughts in their mind at the same time is supposed to be the mark of of sophisticated thinking but it does show up here which is the government is both so useless that they can't get anything right and so sophisticated that they're able to coord masses of versions the Arab world is filled with that the Muslim world is filled with that things like I've noticed it's repeatedly on my travels things like um uh 911 was an inside job of the Americans to allow the Jews out of the World Trade Center and also yay 911 good for oama bin Laden they can do both uh there was a somebody I knew interviewed the father of um the main 9/11 hijacker his name's gone out of my mind I don't care he must he should be forgotten but interviewed the father in Jordan and he was simultaneously capable of holding in his head that his son was a great Shahid the mar for Islam and that 911 was an inside job with the Americans what what the [ __ ] like choose it's I mean do you think your son was an agent of the FBI and also a mar like hey people do this the Muslim world is particularly prone to to conspiratorial thinking because it's a it's a source of flattery to ex to explain why they have created so few successful societies um and and Bernard Lewis made this point many years ago that the problem in the Muslim world is that there's a they is they have to find explanations because if you're given the revelations of Muhammad and you're told it's the last Revelation ever from God and that you are the people who have receive this Revelation and everything's going to go great for you because you've got the Revelation and then like the Jews you have one country and it does much better than any of your countries and you know you can't get the economy of most of your countries going at all and you can't provide for most your citizenry and nobody's coming up the ladder and the economies in the dust and all this you've got to find an explanation for it because like what we were given the Revelation and they're doing much better I mean there's massive things like that that sit underneath the movements of our time which maybe billions of people on the planet believe and they believe them because it flatters themselves it flatters the governments who aspire to run these countries or claim to run these countries um yeah billions of people believe this [ __ ] I was thinking about the extremist worldview beliefs largely in the west but I guess everywhere and I was wondering whether we have finally moved Beyond Peak woke and a study came up recently that was kind of interesting researchers from change research pulled over a thousand registered us voters from 18 to 34 a majority of both women and men consider far rightism and far- leftism to be red flags in a potential partner 76% of women and 59% of men consider identifying as a Maga Republican to be a large turnoff 64% of men and 55% of women said they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist 55% women 64% of men 55% of women swipe left on a on a communist that a no uh 55% of men said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag uh 41% of men said the same for a woman being into astrology oh that's that I I'm with that one uh got if somebody says what's your star sign date over there's a a really famous meme where uh it's on iMessage and the text says um Mom uh what time was I born at and the reply from Mom says uh St stay the [ __ ] away from that girl yeah it is it is the heart sinks when it comes up as a question I know a shame uh 41 33% of men said for black lives matter it was a red flag if they say black lives matter 14% of women 53% of women said it was a red flag if they rece refus to see the Barbie movie uh 31% of men 58% of women red flag if they say they're are only two genders 34% of men uh 54% of women thought they identify as a conservative uh 33% of men for they identify as a liberal uh so next time you're vibing with someone maybe save the podcast recommendations and daily horoscopes for the second date wow 55% of women say that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag I wonder if the species has any future because they can't listen to jogan well like all these people are wiping out like very significant numbers of potential future Partners um how weird and Joe turning up in that 55% so that's amazing I thought what happened to all the good old people who used to say I don't really have an opinion on that well I what happened to those guys I got pulled in a good bit recently on the internet for uh not commenting on the recent sociopolitical furor that's happening in the Middle East and I quoted you pseudonymously and said uh I'm trying to make a habit of something which is very rare on the internet to not comment on something which I know nothing about it's very good Rule and yet it's the rarest thing of all why shouldn't I people people care about my insights into health and fitness or uh my my learnings about social psychology why why shouldn't my fiscal advice be important why why shouldn't my views on immigration or it's much to be avoided that and I mean in the end you make much less of a dick of yourself if you don't start talking about everything I mean there's um I mean somebody recently sent me an article a relatively well-known person sent me an article recently they wanted to publish about the Middle East and near the opening said um I don't really know much about the m but you this is and I was just say in that case don't speak don't speak and say but here's my thing if you don't know just just just agree not to do it um that's one reason why there's a lot of I mean there's a lot of Television these days in the UK where you can be invited on to debate with the total ignoramus who's only there for balance you know for offc related balance and I just can't do that stuff anymore it's too demeaning you know that if there's a subject you know about a war that you've covered or covered many times as in my case with the Israel hamz Wars and Israel hpah Wars um I I just can't be sitting there with somebody I hate to say this it's not not meant in a misogynistic way but there's a lot of um uh women who are currently vited on things for balance firstly because they're women secondly because they provide usually a leftwing perspective and that's needed if it's me that's on as well and you know I just it's so depressing to you know to give your informed opinion about something you've seen and reported on firsthand and and then they go to the other person and they go well like I think it's I say why I don't why would I just at home why I could be doing anything else and I've got to listen to somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about whisk up an opinion live on air that's so depressing but masses of people are that and it's just yeah if you don't know about it don't talk about it it's a very good re or try it out in private with friends and mates and like try to learn something read a book are we morally obliged to have a take on everything no no most people's opinion doesn't matter I mean it just doesn't and I also think the people who spend their time online broadly speaking you know trying to broadcast out their opinions on things should be told more often doesn't matter um doesn't matter what you think I mean one of my rules on on any war is you should never as a writer try to give advice to a government you know this is what the Israelis must do this is what the ukrainians must do they need to listen to you Ian first of all you don't live in the country and unless you live in a country be pretty damn sure sure that you should be a bit humble about telling other people about their lives you know and also like who made you the tactician dour on everything well it was the same as Co everyone became a virology or epidemiology expert yeah and then they became an withdrawal from Afghanistan expert and then they became a Ukraine expert and now they're all Middle East experts and I just think it's a it should be regarded as a massive red flag that the person in question is normally what's happened is they've downloaded uh the set of opinions they believe that their tribe should have correct and that's why the morons marching in London and other cities you know with the exception of the Muslims who just whipped up all the time by the fact that the Jews do anything I mean like Muslims don't care about other Muslims Arabs don't care about other Arabs nobody cares about the Palestinians nobody cares about them can't tell you how little they care about them jordanians loathe them the Egyptians loathe them the Lebanese loathe them they've done nothing for the Palestinians for 7 years and yet whenever the Israelis do anything the Muslims across the West come out on the streets because they hate the Jews and you know hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen not a peep on the streets of Britain and other places certainly not big protest uh Bashar al-assad has killed more Muslims in the last 10 years than then everybody on every side killed in every war involving Israel since 1948 including the war of independ nobody cares the Muslims don't come out on the streets they don't care the only thing they care about is their hatred of the Jews and it motivates them like nothing else because it hits at the core of their self-esteem they can't bear it and so that one is like very interesting to me but the there are these fellow Travelers who go along with them who have downloaded as I say a sort of pathetic American interpretation of colonization decolonization racial Justice Reproductive Rights and try to map everything on and my friend's Got a Theory called gwi's theory of bespoke [ __ ] many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it at which point they Cobble together a Viewpoint from whim and half remembered hearsay before deciding that this twom minute M two-minute old makeshift opinion will be their new Hill to die on it's very good my friend Fredy gr The Spectator TS tends to run very popular pieces each time a new big thing emerges which is the bluffers guide to whatever and it's great and usually involves in foreign policy us usually involves saying things like well they better get this done before the brutal Afghan winter kicks in who made you an expert on like meteorology in Afghanistan like what oh no the ukrainians have got to make this Advance before the dreaded Ukrainian May and they just what I I mean bluffers guide it's very useful rule I I try for instance never to write about any foreign policy issue if it's about a country I've not visited preferably visited multiple times I I just I can't bring myself to do it I find it too embarrassing it's so interesting when you talk about um knowing one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion being able to accurately predict everything else that they believe yeah that mono thinking just proves that not a serious thinker well I I just think it's fairly obvious if for instance you say yeah what's the problem with a big bearded guy winning the weight women's weightlifting I go okay I know all of your other opinions as well and to be fair that probably works the other way around as well to a great extent the interesting thing with most people is where they're um slightly out of sorts with their own political side and some well that's exactly the point that you if it's been a long time since you were surprised by the opinion of your favorite thinker or writer or commentator or whatever it is that's probably a reliable signal that they're not really thinking for themselves yeah if you're just permanently oh yeah it's like an old leather pair of shoes here we go again the the covid things happened and I can already predict such and such's opinion on it you go every single time all of the time every single time you know the idiosyncrasies of this person's very very particular worldview well that's because it's not theirs yeah of course it's everybody else's it's outsourced thinking and that what's really sad about that is that uh it means that you're not really living your life I mean you're living a pasti of a prescribed set of opinions that's so sad I mean it's so sad the wasted energies and wasted lives of people who've just downloaded a set of opinions and they just they're just running them well that's not your life it's just someone else's life you're just replaying what was that quote you told me about about being shunted to the side of the road of your own it's a Philip Lin quote from a poem yes a description of a couple and he says it something is pushing them to the side of their own lives it's beautiful line terrifying line horrifying line should make everyone judge themselves what's it mean to you oh well it means that there's a life that you hoped to live you life you saw yourself living and and you you got pushed to the side of it and ended up not living that life I I think a large number of people have that almost all unhappy people I've met have that feeling to some extent and then you've got a choice of poisons one of which is to choose the poison of um other people held me back another is to face up to the fact that you in some way a coward or a victim of circumstance or something else but I think a lot I mean you know you know one thing that young people you know can be encouraged to do is to set out the sort of Life they would like to live imagine the sort of Life they would like to live and then aim for it and um working it out is sometimes difficult sometimes not but if you do have that image of your life that you think it should be lived and you end up not living it that that is if you can feel yourself slowly being pushed away from it I think that's a terrible terrible feeling it's like watching your own demise occur second by second yeah fortunately I've never felt it but I definitely fear it where do you go to find or to avoid cowardice or to find resilience or or bravery because a lot of the time the easier path is easier and it's the one that's got the least resistance andu surround yourself with courageous people surround yourself with um with brave people and that can be bravery of all sorts of different kinds and when I turned 40 I had a a dinner uh which I think you weren't invited to but it's only because you weren in town if I remember rightly but I did get a lot of my favorite people in the room at least and it was interesting that uh a friend made a speech in which he said it's striking I won't say the names of the people around the table but some of whom will be familiar to listeners but a friend of mine gave a rather very touching speech I was very moved by which he said how noticeable it was that Douglas has surrounded himself with courageous people and it was from a very wide AR array of bits of the world and different disciplines and so on and I was really touched by that because I hadn't particularly notic that I'd done it um but then I realized I sort of had that actually yes I had must have subconsciously but maybe now consciously wanted to be around courageous people because I think that courage is something that rubs off on other people I think it's enormously to be desired to to be around courageous people and there might be different types of Courage some of it physical some of it mental um so that that's one thing you surround yourself with courageous people or at least not uh cowards not kettin not the sort of people who just say the same things that everyone's meant to say and so on there's many ways people can get out of this non-life that they are being shunted into one of my friends who wasn't a friend at the time I just met him for the first time but someone that I've been interested in for a good while uh I met in Austin a while ago and he'd had a interesting story and he' faced a cancellation over the last few years and he sort of told me the story in he said uh who sat on some rooftop late at night talking about this thing and he was regaling me with the story he said throughout my entire life I thought I was a hard man I like to do man things and surround myself with masculine people and I was into you know like guns and shooting and fitness and and friends with Navy Seals and all the rest of it he said my entire life I was scared that I was a coward terrified that I was a coward and he said uh in my darker moments I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door beautiful and then this cancellation thing came along and he said you know even even the people that do really hard things hard intellectual work hard training work hard physical work all the rest of it there's a difference in the kind of difficulty that they do because it's elected right you've chosen to do the hard workout but when the entire world comes to bear on you in a way that feels like chaos and catastrophe whipped up into a whirlwind and he said uh yeah I that was a genuine test and he was he was very grateful he said my my my better self stopped his coughing and kicked the door in and came to help good uh which but just yeah I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door well the thing with that is uh um the difference between um uh situations you find yourself in that are dangerous through choice and ones that you've uh into been thrust into and probably know that that that the consequence of being thrust into danger situation is much more likely to lead to um PTSD and things like that um than if you choose to um and uh I've been fortunate in my life the most of dangerous situations I've been in have been ones I've chosen to be in um and that's that's very different um but yes I'm well I'm glad he found out that he was more courageous than he feared but think about that what a beautiful line you know to be to be more courageous than you feared you were right you know this this almost this war against yourself yes that's right this fear of your own nature well that but that it's perfectly sense I mean there a as a horrible example I sometimes use but I mean um if you're mugged for your wallet let alone you mugged with somebody else let alone if you're mugged with a girl that you were with or looking after and you just handed it over they're like there's there's several reasons that it's worth handing over the wallet for one of which is like why do I need to risk getting shot for like or stabbed or stabbed for 100 100 bucks and a few phone calls to the bank yeah so that's like the reason to hand over the wallet what do I care uh the reason not to hand over the wallet uh is are you sure that you're not going to spend the succeeding weeks Dreaming Dreams of pornographic violence against your attacker and thinking thinking of how you're going you would torture him if you could get your hands on him and the brutal way in which you would have Revenge if you ever find him it might be easier to just get your head kicked in a bit yes and are you sure you can live with a virsion of yourself that is you handing over the wallet I said this recently in a piece of New York post about the people on the New York subway where there's awful thing you've probably seen where people you know like a woman will be being abused by some Maniac fentanyl adult you know um drug addict and and you know people like either look into their phones including men or they will get their phones up and like record and I mean somebody said Douglas is trying to get people killed and I wasn't obviously but what I was saying was where are the men just like stand up and like confront the guy if he's got a woman by her hair and is parading her around the carriage and yeah the the backlash was like what do you know these people might get killed if they step in but I say yeah but also maybe we'll have a more Civil Society if people don't think they can go around and do this stuff without consequence um I'd like to see far more standing up like that I think it's a pathetic position for particular for men to be in to sit there like getting out their mobile phones but you know it's everyone's choice I don't exactly know what I would do in some of the situations I've seen you know read about on the New York subway didn't that guy yeah do a thing and now is he in jail did he get jailed for it he's charged he's coming up for trial this is the I think his name Daniel NY I think former Marine uh there was a guy on the subway who was um clearly off his head on various drugs um was very very violent towards people in the carriage some point tore off his top and like I'm going to kill you or something like this and this Marine at that point stepped in got him into a choke hold was clearly not meaning to do it but the choke hold was too hard and he he suffocated the guy and he died at the scene and that man the ex-marine is is is charged with I think murder if not man I think manslaughter um and uh he could face a very significant prison sentence there's a lot of discussion in New York as to whether or not a New York jury would actually convict him where's he being convicted in New York right um because you could say that the guy because there's a racial element like with everything in America uh and because the former Marine was white and the guy off his head uh was black there was an attempt of course to put the the racial lens on it and we'll see if a New York jury which will be comprised half or so of women who have been on the subway and have probably had unpleasant interactions uh will convict this man for stepping in and genuinely think that he meant to kill the guy or just this was like a Good Samaritan act gone wrong but it's there it's very salary that that sort of stuff there was a guy in London about 15 years ago I very much haunted me because the the fiance the girlfriend did a victim impact statement was particularly harrowing that they were on the top of a bus in London and a guy on the bus started throwing chips like at people's heads and her fiance got up to say look mate lay off and the guy stabbed him he died and that's Ana and and in the wake of a story like that a lot more people in a society will be Craven on the bus because they'll have that example in their head and fear about this case in the New York Marine case is that he the marine by doing what he did and it going wrong and the publicity it got will stop other people doing good SM 100% will have done while it's pending whil it's pending yeah so a lot rides off the verdict that's a lot of pressure it's a lot of pressure and in America with a jury when you're on one of these cases where Society could break out in rioting I'm not sure it will for this guy because the victim wasn't enormously um upstanding as was a member of the community and had quite I don't think it was videoed or at least they didn't see video quite a lot of it was videoed but he'd also had previous things where he had like done there's a whole litany like a laundry list of of times that he'd been in arrested for violent conduct so he won't be that sympathetic a character but then there are quite a lot of unsympathetic characters who get dragged through the the laundry of racial Justice stuff in America and become Saints I won't name any names but going back to that sort of way you go when you need more resilience thing and The Bravery piece what was that CS Lewis quote about about the times not being optimal oh yeah what's that oh that's one of my favorite um one of my favorite sermons ever given was by CS Lewis University Church in Oxford in October 1939 um yes I love that leis was a master of Pros as well as theological writing and he um he gave this beautiful beautiful sermon in which he said yes he said um you know the conditions are not optimal at the moment the search for truth and beauty that our species goes through you know s of going through such a trial um but he says the point is the conditions never were optimal they never are he says even those periods of History which which seem to be tranquil like the 19th century turn out on closer inspection to be filled with crisis alarms panics and all the rest of it he says if if if if human if humankind mind had put off the search for truth and Beauty until the conditions were optimal the search would never have begun and the main point that he makes is that um there is something wonderful and unusual about human beings you he says the ants for instance have chosen their own route they've chosen the safety and the security of the hive and presumably they have their rewards but he says he says men are different and he gives this beautiful list I think I can remember he says they propound mathematical theorems in baguer cells they quote the latest poem whilst advancing on the walls of Quebec make jokes on scaffolds and comb their hair at the gates of theropo this is not panach he says it is our nature [ __ ] that's cool it's true as well in my observation abs absolutely true how so well because I've seen people in baguer cities many times cities Under Fire cities under bombardment cities that are being raised to the ground and um and human life goes on it's an extraordinary thing people continue their studies if they can people continue their family life if they can they they've realized that the condition conditions will never be optimal me they can be better and they can be worse but they're never perfect and I think that the real lesson of what Lewis is saying is and I think it's an important lesson for young people in our time don't put off whatever it is you're meant to do until the situation is optimal don't don't fail to pursue what it is you think you're meant to pursue in your life until you have total Tranquility for instance you know that you have the house or the apartment you would like until you have the relationship you would like until you have the don't put it off until then or until the world is peaceful which will never happen never happen never has happen never will happen don't put it off till then because if you put it off till then it means you'll put it off forever so do whatever you're meant to be doing now start now if you haven't started already and if you started already don't go any slower for God's sake and and this is part of the you know the the cost of our time times I've said this before but part of the cost of our times is the enormous expense of energy on idiotic things that you can do nothing about I think we should say to more people don't Howl at the Moon don't shake your fists at the skies get home with what you're meant to be doing and that will be different for everybody but I just I'm very um um uh well I'm too irritable to put up with going at the slow speed that a lot of people want to make us all go at these days so I want them out of my way yeah I think a lot about the arisal of victimhood culture yeah got no time for yeah it seems to me that like an existential crisis is actually a luxurious position to be in because the bottom levels of maso's hierarchy of needs have been sorted and victimhood culture is so rampant at the moment because the human systems demand for challenge is outstripping reality's ability to deliver it to it all of the problems most of the problems that previously would have captured the front of our attention have been moved out of the way yeah absolutely I mean our sensitivity to challenge has now being tuned up yeah hunger and so on yeah yeah um I think that's true by the way I'm just amazed by the I mean I feel sometimes we increasingly like I'm just from a different world than the one we're now in um suddenly a different Society I'm sure it was the same with you when you were growing up but the Britain I grew up in was um a place which which liked resilience I mean we admired resilience we didn't admire people who wh and muled in fact those are the people you avoided yeah at all cost gosh he's a wher god he's a wher I mean you know and people said things like you know mustn't Grumble it's one of my favorites how are you mustn't Grumble now i''d say well actually I've got stage four cancer not sure that's grumbling I know but we talked about it like that people from that generation still say thing I've friend of that generation she's got cancer at the moment and she she's like oh it's so boring so boring everyone I grew up with was like that now you might say there's something unhealthy about that but there's actually something healthy about it too um and there's something healthy about assuming that everyone has their troubles and so they don't need you to add yours to their list of things to worry about that day and you know cheer people up and encourage them where you can and so on so they don't bring them down well it's the it's the weird sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of pedestal victimhood that there is a limitless sky on how much victimhood you can claim yes whereas if your status and your prestige is Downstream from your accomplishments there is a limit on how much you can accomplish because you need to go out and [ __ ] do it yes right reality is going to constrain how much impressive stuff you can go and do but there is a a ineffable Universe of I athletes foot and my my gluten intolerance and my chronic flatulence and my you know whatever else yes um those are things that you can just continue to accumulate like trinkets yes I just find those people boring I just don't care for victimhood I think it's an undesirable emotion it's it's it's a sign of a rather undesirable person um I but I don't know why we've given into this I just I'm genuinely particularly in Britain I'm baffled by it because it wasn't the country we had well maybe it's you know how you said your solution for courage was to surround yourself with courageous people if you kind of get this mimetic wave yes almost moving through where fewer courageous people are around which creates fewer courageous Role Models which means to you know yeah yeah yeah and you have the thing of men being persuaded to become cringing Unix not a good thing well that's another reason why you know this conversation around the guy on the subway is so interesting because is he is he really supposed to stand up for the women or is that is he mansplaining what if he mansplains while he stops a woman from being dragged around by her hair well of course the answer to that is the era has to say you know what there's no such thing as man explaining or at least it's not very important um get onto something more important like women not being assaulted on the subway you know choose choose choose your priorities with the denial of sex differences would lead to the conclusion that that woman can look why shouldn't the woman why shouldn't the women stand up why shouldn't they use their upper body weight yes yeah to push this fentanyl fueled Maniac off this lady well as I say it's a luxury belief that one and doesn't meet reality very well I'm not sure anyone would be very happy if the men in the carriage said to the woman women in the carriage go on go on your turn yeah we've had our centuries of patriarch hierarchy Warfare what is it there's there one that got my goat recently with um somebody was it in the US or UK it always happens now when everything comes up about conflict Hillary Clinton was one of the worst culprits at doing this but they they say they always say this thing of one of the reasons you've got to stop any War once it started they say you know the first victims of war are women they're [ __ ] not the men they're men who do most of the fighting and the dying Hillary Clinton's point is well then the W they're widows and then ah yeah the the the poor widows of the men that are dead yeah there's a actually the British mod has a thing of has a special um section now dedicated I think thanks to the impressive Insight of that military expert Angelina Jolie uh they have um a um special bit of the mod dedicated to women in conf the suffering of women in Conflict why not have a the suffering of Men In conflict as well such weird priorities our age it's totally unserious this age is so unserious so why you can't help thinking that at some point The Maniacs the The Barbarians will just break in because we've made ourselves so weak but it's so captivating right this is what I meant when I said you know have we progressed beyond Peak woke because it seems to me like both the hyper woke and Hyper anti-woke thing is capturing so much of the attention well just I'm so bored of these people they're so ridiculous can't spend any more of my life life listen listening to them I don't want to listen to the slowest kid in the class I don't want to go at his or her speed I don't want to talk to somebody so mentally impaired that they think that we are a weirdly hamitic species or that you can that the clownfish is a useful species to interpret behavior of human beings like we can't go at this speed no no 20 years ago at the dawn of the internet age we had hoped that we would get so much farther in the 21st century and here we are with this stupid Society slowed down by Maniacs debating the first thing we knew boy or girl like no not going at that speed Emma ranu did an advert for HSBC recently which you may have missed HSBC rewrote wrote three classic fairy tales uh their book's called fairer tales and it shows that women don't need men at all with financial attitudes shaped as early as 5 years old the new book challenges traditional gender stereotypes the new book called fairer Tales princess is doing it for themselves reimagines Cinderella Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel as successful business women Prince Charming successful business women Charming is a raised as the main character uh Emma ranu read to them so in the end the princesses didn't need a prince to save them they set up their own businesses saved their money and then spent it very wisely maybe one day you'll buy a tower or set up your own shoe business that's a quote said the tennis player that's the worst I mean I read Megan markle's book The Bench and that's worse that's worse um wow yeah um what a inspiring tale faah Tales um it's so princesses doing it for themselves have you seen the um the uh the the South Park episode of where um uh Cartman wakes up he has a a nightmare you told me about this lunch yesterday for the people that haven't seen it what is kman um kartman has has a nightmare it turns out he's he is a diverse black woman his character is recast and all of his friends Kenny and everyone else are diverse female or transracial characters and then Carman wakes up from the night no and his mother comes in what is it what is it are you having another dream where once again all my all my favorite characters in in the cartoons have been replaced by ethnically diverse women and and she goes it's okay K it's okay uh the the CEO of Disney isn't hiding under your bed hey would you check would you check would you check Mom okay I checked she's not there I'm worried that she's going to come out again place all my favorite characters with ethnically diverse women I love those guys God they keep doing it um yeah I mean it's the same thing with there was that rather unappealing um young woman who uh uh was meant to be play well is playing Snow White and the new Disney Snow White Rachel Zigler no no no somebody else and she it is is it yeah Rachel Ziggler ziger well she said uh Prince Charming wasn't a prince he was a stalker yeah and uh she didn't need a prince charming to discover that she could be the woman she could be I mean this is like sub Barack Obama Circa 2007 like the princess is the person she's been waiting for or something you your sister's keeper I I I why don't they invent new tale that's what I can never understand with that why don't they just invent new Tales instead of screwing up every existing tale that's love make your boring movie about an inspirational tale of a woman who wants to start a business and then does and has some SU success I mean okay make that into a film why do you have to go and ransack and rape all of pillage all of the the storehouse of stories that people liked Bret Cooper's playing Snow White for daily wi did you see that announcement what you hav seen this let me tell you Jeremy boring and Ben Shapiro are doing their own liveaction remake of Snow White with Brett Cooper as Snow White because she's like West End trained right so she's a very well trained supposedly a very well- trained actor who can sing apparently it's like the triple threat podcast act sing right uh and they announced it the other week it's going to be coming out next year God I hope they'd slay Disney there's a rumor that Disney has had to re-shoot a ton of scenes including all of the dwarf scenes because originally the dwarves weren't dwarves right they were like a an multi-racial just group of different people they were diverse ethnic women it was the sou thing again uh but apparently they this is just a rumor but apparently they've reshot it all of the scenes with the dwarfs to CGI actual dwarfs in oh so they've gone full yeah because I know that there was a there was a Revolt of the dwarves which is something you don't hear every day no there was a Revolt of the dwarves because of course dwarf actors who have their Equity cards are annoyed because there's not many dead jobs yeah you have presumed that there should have at least been seven yeah plus a stunt actor stunt dwarf stunt one to do all seven stunts well you could have 14 I guess it depends how how demanding the ACT how much lest you want to spread around the dwarf actor Community but yeah the point is is is is there actually was apparently Rebellion about this because these are some of the few like dead roles we've got well is this not the same the people who didn't cast that is that not the same group of people that would say we can only have a gay actor playing a gay man and we can only have a black actor playing a black man and we can only have people are such I won't use a word uh yeah I mean again we haven't got time to go the pace of these people acting is pretending to be other people people will be shocked that most people who play Hamlet are not themselves members of the Danish royal family welcome to the world of make Bel a charity shop in Swansea uh asked people not to donate sex toys barnardo's customers have been asked to refrain from donating used and unused marital aids as they aren't quite the sort of toys we're looking for when they say we want like B your old books your old toys they didn't mean sex to toys right I think that's a perfectly good policy for a secondhand shop customers were rifling through the secondhand dildo Vin you don't what have they got in here is there a dressing room yeah I uh customers were also reminded that the branch had CCTV so that these items can be traced back to the original owners oh oh according to so that means that means that you there's like a um a what's it called that thing in Australia the boomerang that's a boomerang effect give your dildo away then it's back on your doorstep the next morning God damn it can I rid of this thing over the hge but he keeps Landing in bernados and then they bring it back it's a dilder that will never die yeah yeah thinking about well thank you for that story that was beautiful well I've got another one is there is there a lesson we can take from this oh I think just be careful where you put your dildos really is the matter there the moral of the story yeah yeah never leave your dildo in bernardos yeah definitely not in the Bargain Bin uh School in Lafayette has refused to celebrate Halloween because it isn't inclusive while going all out for LGBT plus history month is there much history with LGBT plus there's gay history I mean there lots of gay people in history and there is that but it's also what we used to call history um uh there isn't much tea history um there's uh B history I mean they're sort of I'm a bit skeptical about bisexuality but but um um there's a bit of bisexuality in history of course um but I mean again these people are such ignores they never know anything I can't tell you Chris I I have to deal with some of this [ __ ] and they just don't know anything and they keep record it's like the Orwell thing they keep reporting their So-Cal discoveries as if people didn't know them before and everybody knew most of the stuff that they are trying to bring out and it's just very tedious and again what's happened to the mainstream thing of it why aren't we concentrating on big subjects big authors big historical issues instead of this boring slow pace we're here at ARC and we're going to be attending at some point this week I can't remember what the tagline is something about a better F vision for the future a more positive vision for the future I think yeah better story better story for the future sorry Jordan and um what is your or H How would how do you think that we can begin to tell a more positive story for the future because it seems to me that much of the proposals are quite easily criticized and often rightly so but does this sort of Zero Sum view of happiness and growth that somebody else's happiness somehow detracts from mine well that's a particularly British view of course very much yeah yeah yeah yeah if that guy's got something it's cuz I've not got it he taken it from me Tak it for me uh yeah but what's a more positive vision of the future how can we well one would be that we're not facing apocalypse and catastrophe uh all the time from every possible Direction and particularly not ones that people have whipped up a new generation into a further over I mean I think that the green apocalyptic thing is particularly damaging to young people I think it's very very bad for their mental health very had very very detrimental to their sense of how they build a future and I think a lot of young people have been lied to about the proximity of uh Global Climate catastrophe I mean every time there isn't an actual catastrophe going on in the world uh our leaders go straight back to the climate catastrophe or the climate crisis they now call it what is happening is not a crisis um it may be a problem to be managed but you there's a luxury in calling such things a crisis a crisis is like minut know my shoes are on fire that's a crisis not like it's possible that in 40 years will need more AC I don't see that as a crisis um but so yes and but I I think that in general there are several things that are big stories big narratives ofit people are being spun which are incredibly um innovating that is they they sap energy out of the society you can feel it the hopelessness if you tell young people they're not going to live into adult hood because they're all going to burn to death uh the hopelessness of saying you know you you you you can't check change anything or that this is the trajectory we're on I think that one of the other ones in the green stuff is the hopelessness of saying to people effectively you shouldn't um leave any footprint on the planet including children including children um and just to put one thing out there about the the hopelessness of that I mean the there's this new thing that many cities have signed up to including London uh which which is a future in which among other things we will not be allowed to move around very much and we will be allowed a flight perhaps every 6 years I think it is what's this it's this cities what's it called I'm blanking on the name it's this new proposal for cities in 2030 or something sadique Khan has signed up London to it it's one of these carbon neutral fantasies no fun 2030 yeah and one of them is that you won't be allowed to fly more than once every X number of years and of course none of it makes any sense because among other things all that means is part from the fact the airline industry is destroyed is the what it means is the cost of an airline ticket will be like 40 times higher um but so they always assume you can do all of these things and nothing will change you know amazingly you'll be able to put a rule like that in and you won't destroy the airline industry or whatever but all of it is just so antihuman I mean it is so anti-human like the the aspiration of human beings should not be to be born fight against the patriarchy leave no carbon footprint and die in the most ethically fine manner preferably taken out at a Swiss Clinic you know and then like burnt in a cardboard box it's not a very heroic narrative you know and I think that actually we do Orient our lives around stories and around narratives and we should not have the unic narrative that I've just laid out we should have heroic narratives I mean for instance you know The Narrative of the um of Adventure of life being an adventure that you set out on a path and hope you know hopefully you set yourself out on a heroic path or at least an exciting path you know I mean the Counterpoint of the one I laid out earlier of the one you know you don't know you know sorry the counter part of the one I laid out earlier which is the you know everything that's going to happen if you go along this path of things other people have persuaded you to say MH is well you know where you're going you know everything to say and you know kind of what trajectory your life will be on well you know I say well yeah and there's another trajectory as well and it's the one that I and I suspect you Orient ourselves in our life which is I don't know exactly I don't know with that certainty I don't know what will happen but if if I put one foot fairly sh footedly in front of the next and and tread well and Orient Myself by things like truth sure I don't have the certainty but it's an adventure and it's my adventure your adventure you actually own it and then fancy that you'll actually have your life you can feel proud of what you got to right because you weren't being ventriloquized by somebody else's you didn't spend your life saying things you don't know or mean or believe or just a repeating like a parot um in order to keep in with a group of people you shouldn't seek the affirmation from you you you will live your life remember that the outcomes that most people get are ones that you don't want in any case the average American is OB Beast divorced and with less than 1K in the bank so sobering isn't it doing what everybody else does sounds like a very sure fire strategy but the outcomes are ones that you don't want yeah well I mean look and that can be the case with with financially successful people I mean it can be the case with people I mean I often say that people who go into professions which they don't like and and again it's it's interesting I mean some of them are there are ones that people apologize for as you talk to them you notice that there certain um normally these days is one of the biggest self-deprecating professions is lawyers you say to somebody what are you doing I'm a lawyer I think why that yeah you spent five years in full-time education three years in developing to and normally it's like they think oh well it's not very interesting or something but I think why wouldn't you do something where you I am a lawyer it's fantastic I love doing this that's British lawyers again for you I bet well know I've seen Americans do that as well my point is is it is and they're financially well rewarded yeah um you know and there's there's rules you can follow on that like um like there are ones I don't understand if you are doing a job that pays you well and allows you to provide for your loved ones that's worth doing if even if it's not your optimal role um doing a role that you don't much care for and you're not providing for other people and you don't see any particular purposes like that's probably not a good idea or you could go so you you know that there are other options and other routes open to you that would allow you to also provide for the family you're providing for yeah yeah The Bravery narrative is definitely one that I think is lacking and this risk aversion that we have this young people getting their driver's licenses later than ever most common living arrangement for men under the age of 35 is still living at home with their parents yeah it's just such such an awful stat people going into full-time employment later than ever I think think about you know when we were actually no you are the worst person to talk about this you told me you didn't get your driver's license until some ungodly age late but most people but I'm not risk Avers just lazy on that they manifest similarly uh most people could 17 years old in the UK driver's license I want to be free I want to be liberated I don't want to have to be asking mom and dad for lifts etc etc and uh yeah there's not a there's not a narrative of Adventure no and I think is important because I think that you if you don't have a narrative of Adventure and success and an idea of what that looks like um you know you are disproportionately likely to to live a more miserable life um and I think probably both of us to some extent have worked our way out as we've done it and you know TR in a path is not completely clear and if you said to me what are you going to do in 10 years Time Dr I couldn't particularly tell you i' tell you roughly what I'd like to do but it's not entirely clear yeah it might be if I was in a corporate law firm and hoping to make partner or something like that but yeah I mean the the um lack of clarity on it is should be energizing I'd have thought well that's what's exciting about it for also for the desire for certainty which is also exactly where the conspiracism comes from right because it it removes random chance from the world and makes everything coordinated rather than coincidental that desire for certainty really dissuades people from going and doing something which has potentially outsized outcomes well look at look at what happens The Narrative of leaving home or leaving the village or leaving the town um there's every reason not to go because if you go you risk a lot of things one of them is failing and if you go and you fail then you have to go back to where you were from a failure with your tail between your legs and then you can console yourself that you tried it but it didn't work a lot of people will not even make the try because they think it won't work so they never leave and other people go and they finally make it to the city and I mean that's this is a story as old as our species they finally make it to the city or large Gathering Place and they they make they make it there you know one of the reasons why New York is a thrilling city is it's filled with people making it you know I mean plenty of people who will fail uh and it's it's very harsh in a way because the the two are so close together you know the millionaires blocks will have a a veteran with a sign lying on the street outside so you always and and then you get that simultaneous thing of success and the and the mirror of it of desperate failure or I don't mean that a judgmental way in the case of the veteran but desperate life yep very close to each other and I suspect that both of these things uh fire up New Yorkers all the time yeah well you're getting to see how far you could go and how far you could fall shown in front of you all the time yeah there's a an interesting study by Candis Blake in Australia that looked at uh wealth inequality in local ecologies positively predicting uh self uh sexualization of women in online dating profiles so okay I think I followed that yeah if uh there is high wealth inequality women both see the sort of partner they could get in their wildest dreams and in their worst nightmares and it positively predicts uh more sexualized images in online dating profiles and social media and her uh argument was that it amps up a woman's um Competitive Edge in terms of finding a partner that they think would be able to ensure they don't end up down at at the bottom end of the inequality distribution and instead they end up in the clouds where they've seen people's outcomes occurring well of course there are also people who fake it so I mean um well that's the effective way to play the game I was once in India and uh had a a guide who I got talking to and I said um I said we're talking about how easy or otherwise dating was in the outskirts of Delhi which means Islams and he said the trick is um he did describe it as a trick is you if you meet a girl you like you you go for a date with her but you borrow your friend's shoes for instance there'll be a friend who has a pair of trainers sneakers that that are nice good and you borrow his shoes for the date and then like another time you might borrow a friend's motorbike so like the pool of men helps like swap around okay and the idea is one good dating outfit and vehicle between 10 people yes and he said the idea was that you get the woman to say she loves you and she'll marry you and then you do the reveal of somebody else's shoes your [ __ ] shoes yeah which I thought was both horrific admirable he told it to me like that and horribly uh recognizable um think of all the people who Splash around money in restaurants and things who don't really have it or pretend to live above their means or do live above their means it's all to try to ENT trap a mate I think people do a lot for sex yeah I know I've seen Douglas Murray ladies and gentlemen Douglas I really appreciate you what's coming up next what can people expect over the next few months uh I don't know I don't know what I expect over the next few months I'm going to a couple of War zones and we'll report back I appreciate you thank you mate thank you thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Douglas you will love my full length over 2hour long podcast with Jordan Peterson go on give it a tap