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

Douglas Murray is a journalist, author and associate editor of The Spectator. As the turmoil of global events dominates the media, it can feel as though the world is spiralling into chaos. If we can't agree on what's happening, how can we make sense of the world? What's the solution in a post-truth world? Expect to learn how Victoria’s Secret betrayed the body positivity movement, why people are struggling to agree on what's true anymore, how the “Gays for Gaza” movement will get on, whether we are past peak wokeness, why there is such a huge increase in conspiratorial thinking, what the most recent South Park episode has to say about our culture and much more... Sponsors: Get a 20% discount on your first order from Maui Nui Venison by going to https://www.mauinuivenison.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at https://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ Buy my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom #culture #politics #media - 00:00 Have Douglas’s Predictions Come True? 01:55 Victoria’s Secret Revert Back to Sexy 07:01 Society’s View of Having Children 12:03 Why Can’t We Agree on Truth? 17:24 Did New Atheism Actually Work? 24:31 How Celebrities Use Causes to Look Good 27:18 Why Women Support Body Positivity 30:13 The Negative Impacts of Low Self-Esteem 35:52 Who Actually Was George Orwell? 40:14 How K-Pop Is Causing Female Mental Health Issues 46:38 How Successful Will Gays For Gaza Be? 55:01 Is Douglas a Conspiracy Theorist? 1:03:10 The West’s Move Beyond Peak-Woke 1:12:40 People Who Have the Same Opinions on Everything 1:25:25 Humans Are Supposed to Be Resilient 1:37:23 HSBC’s Reimagined ‘Fairer’ Tales 1:45:33 Creating a Positive Vision For the Future 1:59:56 What’s Next For Douglas - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 0:18Douglas Murray?

  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. So whenever anyone sort of boasts about their predictive capabilities, I always think you have to do it with a certain amount of humility, because,

• 0:36Douglas Murray?

  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 round the corner. Yeah, I mean, some things I've written about for years, particularly in my book, A Strange Death of Europe, that came out in 2017, which I think are sadly coming to fruition. I say sadly, because people think that if you 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 something I was dreading. And that was the transformation of our country of birth,

• 1:18Douglas Murray?

  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 in A Strange Death of Europe has been out there, and now I realize you were right. But it gives me no pleasure for them to say that. Because I always sort of think, well, if you'd have agreed back then, some things might not have happened. But, so, but, you know, as Mark Stein said, you know, demographics is destiny. So it's one of the things you can predict with the most ease. Yeah.

• 1:50Chris Williamson?

  Did you have Victoria's Secret's plan to bring sexy back on your 2023 bingo card?

• 1:57Douglas Murray?

  Why Victoria's Secret's bringing sexy back?

• 2:00Chris Williamson?

  After experimenting with 300-pound mannequins, plus-size models, disabled models, trans models, a male model, and a 38-year-old football player, Victoria's Secrets have made the controversial decision to switch strategy and start using hot women to model their underwear again.

• 2:15Douglas Murray?

  That makes commercial sense, to my mind. Um. Yeah, it is quite, 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 the merchandise, which pretty much writes itself.

• 2:33Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I'm not particularly surprised that if you stick Lizzo in a bikini, it's not as appealing as a bit of sales merchandise. But, you know, live and learn, I suppose.

• 2:46Chris Williamson?

  Listen, learn.

• 2:47Douglas Murray?

  Listen, learn.

• 2:49Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends owns a very big clothing company. And for a while, they tried plus sized models.

• 2:57Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 2:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh, mostly for women. There's not much of a body positivity movement for men.

• 3:02Douglas Murray?

  No, like a beer gut.

• 3:05Chris Williamson?

  The skinny fat revolution. And he said, we've split tested this into oblivion. Big girls don't sell clothes.

• 3:13Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 3:13Chris Williamson?

  So when you see that, when you see a company, you know, and Summers are making double plus sized dildos or whatever.

• 3:22Chris Williamson?

  The, the company is actively hurting their top line and bottom line to be able to send the right message.

• 3:29Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  And that's all well and good, up until some shareholder meeting, where some seventies year old guy looks at the far right column of an Excel sheet and goes, what the fuck's this?

• 3:43Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  And they go, no, no, you don't understand. It's this really cool, new movement. It's very progressive. And he goes, I don't care.

• 3:53Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 3:54Chris Williamson?

  I want more money than we had last year, and this is less money than we had last year.

• 3:58Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. Yeah, they, um, 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 the 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 did that. They they they they run all the way. I wish you could just have sort of healthy looking women on the ads and and

• 4:43Douglas Murray?

  just draw the line there. But as ever, they they sort of don't know where the line is. Until, as you say, something wrenches them back. And I think wrenches them back is normally, as you say, the bottom line.

• 4:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I uh I've been thinking about this sort of performative empathy point for a while. Got this idea. I need to meme 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.

• 5:17Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Or good girl.

• 5:18Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 5:19Chris Williamson?

  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 it 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. And if you're the person who's saying, hang on a second.

• 5:40Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  That's not what you want long term. 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. You're seen as bigoted or judgmental or whatever.

• 5:55Douglas Murray?

  Because there's no countervailing force in the culture. The the unlimited empathy, people 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. But ordinarily, you would have some other counterforce 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, long term gratification better than short term or, you know, whatever, don't then then yeah. And and then that's a sort of unappealing position in our society now. 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're still living in a society where

• 6:36Douglas Murray?

  effectively to own an ice cream truck, you know, in the sort of language of a child would seem to be a great thing. To have the short term thing.

• 6:46Douglas Murray?

  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 realise that the short term gratification thing was leading to diabetes or whatever, but.

• 6:58Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 7:08Douglas Murray?

  Well, the economist put it as the child tax, the amount of money you have less if you have a child. Weird way around 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.

• 7:27Chris Williamson?

  Death of regret, perhaps. Yeah. Well, you know, it's kind of the, as well, the the Mexican fisherman story. Are you familiar with that? The parable of the Mexican fisherman?

• 7:37Douglas Murray?

  No, I don't think I am.

• 7:38Chris Williamson?

  This is cool. You'll like this. So an American businessman goes on holiday to Mexico. And while he's there.

• 7:45Douglas Murray?

  Is it a true story?

• 7:46Chris Williamson?

  It's a parable.

• 7:47Douglas Murray?

  Okay, right. Okay, got it.

• 7:48Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hell. He goes on holiday. He gets taken out fishing by a local Mexican. And he asks the Mexican how he spends his time. The Mexican says, I fish a little on 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, and 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

• 8:33Chris Williamson?

  you could own the entire production process and you could then sell the company for a lot of money. He said, and why would I do that? He said, because once you've 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.

• 8:47Douglas Murray?

  Very good.

• 8:48Chris Williamson?

  And I often think about that as a much more direct route to to happiness, you know.

• 8:53Douglas Murray?

  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 proved to be incapable of doing so. So young people wanting to wanting to both get on the property ladder and have and start a family, think they have to do either or, and they're not entirely wrong. But that's something that governments could have sorted out, and none of them do. They're so hopeless at it, and they have been for years under consecutive governments.

• 9:37Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 9:48Chris Williamson?

  Intergenerational competition theory is something I learned about a couple of weeks ago. Are you familiar with this?

• 9:53Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  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 their parents. And it seems if you.

• 10:00Douglas Murray?

  Well, they're not the first, first a little while.

• 10:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 10:03Douglas Murray?

  First in two generations.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And it seems like millennials actually probably just about managed to get over on average. But Gen Z materially.

• 10:12Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Chris Williamson?

  Difficult in getting in the property ladder, the most common living arrangement for men under thirty five is still at home with their parents.

• 10:19Douglas Murray?

  Awful.

• 10:20Chris Williamson?

  And uh, yeah, you know, it it bakes in this sort of

• 10:26Chris Williamson?

  intergenerational competitiveness and a dissatisfaction when you look at where your parents were in this.

• 10:33Douglas Murray?

  Sure.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  You know, felt sense that your parents got advantages that you never did.

• 10:37Douglas Murray?

  Which is usually not true. I mean, they didn't suffer inflation at the same rate, but they suffered very high taxation in the post-war period.

• 10:46Douglas Murray?

  We haven't had taxation as the levels it was at in the nineteen sixties and seventies, for instance, in the UK.

• 10:53Douglas Murray?

  There was a time when people were top rate taxpayers were paying ninety nine percent tax. A friend who once in that period paid over a hundred percent tax one year for reasons.

• 11:00Chris Williamson?

  How's that possible?

• 11:01Douglas Murray?

  It will be back tax and that sort of thing. So I mean, there's a tendency, particularly 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, inadequate to to get to the average property price. You see the split go on. But you you always have to factor, I mean, if you say, you know, the millennials, the first ones or Gen Z, the first ones, and said whoever to have a

• 11:44Douglas Murray?

  better standard of living, you have to bake in things like, oh, yeah, well, they had a world war, you know.

• 11:50Douglas Murray?

  So that's quite a big P S. Well, that's a big footnote. So, yeah, everyone, everyone has their challenges. I just don't see why, why, once you've identified them, know the way out of them, you don't do them, but.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 12:11Chris Williamson?

  Why, in your opinion, do you think?

• 12:14Chris Williamson?

  Everybody struggles to agree on the truth now.

• 12:18Douglas Murray?

  Oh, that's quite straightforward. We can't agree on what's happened. So broadly speaking, an event happens now, and some people believe it has happened, and other people think it hasn't.

• 12:32Douglas Murray?

  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 it was all planned. And I mean, nobody agrees what happened. That's just to take one example. In America, you have obviously the fact 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'd be nice if we could just agree that one thing that's just happened, happened.

• 13:16Douglas Murray?

  But then nobody wants to. As I say, you must be a W F 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 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.

• 13:38Douglas Murray?

  And it seems to me, among other things, it's allowed people to have their own version of recent events, recent history, the 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 that just makes everything much harder than it used to be. And that isn't to sort of particularly pine for the era of a mono-narrative, if that era ever particularly existed. And you read history, not clear that it did, but it's just massively worse. And news is coming at us at such a pace these days, and it's just like, you know, every

• 14:19Douglas Murray?

  day feels like, you know, a month's worth of news in the past. Things just fly by you so fast that you don't even have time to absorb it before it's happened.

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 14:32Douglas Murray?

  So I think that's part of the reason. 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.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 14:43Douglas Murray?

  Well, truth, for instance, used to be the basis for university education and the basis of university inquiry, that you sought the truth wherever it led you. That was a point of academia, for instance. Politics was different. Politics was always about having to find a way around truth and deal with it and address it.

• 15:07Chris Williamson?

  Asking inconvenience.

• 15:07Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, address it where you could, but, you know, get around it if it was too awkward. But inquiry used to be about seeking truth. And they've been like that for a couple of thousand years or more, since Greeks certainly. And then it changed at some point relatively recently. And truth is now not a desirable thing because truth hurts people and it can be mean.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  So it's not only that people have different opinions on things.

• 15:37Douglas Murray?

  They don't agree that the thing we used to agree on is worth.

• 15:40Chris Williamson?

  They have different facts as well.

• 15:41Douglas Murray?

  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. 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 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.

• 16:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's interesting to think about the motivations that people have for not believing something which is already on an unshaky foundation of we can't agree on the thing that we're not believing about. And Gwinder, one of my friends, has this idea that uh

• 16:44Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 16:52Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, that's Jonathan Swift beautifully put it as you can't reason somebody out for a position they weren't reasoned into.

• 17:03Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, of course. And 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 am not very interested in their views 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.

• 17:23Chris Williamson?

  I asked Sam this about whether or not

• 17:28Chris Williamson?

  it obviously whatever 10, 15 years ago, who's a big part of the new atheist movement? And I guess you were tangentially on the

• 17:33Douglas Murray?

  I was a little bit of a whippersnapper.

• 17:35Chris Williamson?

  Ancillary.

• 17:35Douglas Murray?

  I was a whippersnapper.

• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  You were an orbiter. It's referred to.

• 17:39Douglas Murray?

  I was a short trousers. New atheists.

• 17:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay. But, you know, your book, uh, The Madness of Crowds, talks about the collapse of grand narratives. And one of the biggest collapses of grand narratives was religion. So I asked Sam whether or not, looking back, he believed that his deconstruction of religion was on balance a net good or a net uh net negative.

• 17:59Douglas Murray?

  What did he say?

• 18:01Chris Williamson?

  Uh, he he managed to evade being too committal either way, uh, I think. But what do you think? What's your opinion?

• 18:09Douglas Murray?

  Well, I think it's like a lot of things that you deconstruct.

• 18:13Douglas Murray?

  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. Not comparing Sam to a child, but I mean, I just, I think that is, it is something you notice only once you've taken apart. Once you can't reconstruct it, you'd realise what function it might have performed. I said to Sam on stage a few years ago that I, I thought that it would all be fine if most atheists were as rational and level headed as Sam. But it's not Sam Harris all the way down. It's like Sam Harris followed by total mentalists.

• 18:52Douglas Murray?

  And who just will not reason or rationalize anything and are just screaming harpies of insanity. Yeah. So that's a shame.

• 19:06Douglas Murray?

  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, Schopenhauer, among others, saw it was, religion was philosophy for the masses.

• 19:21Douglas Murray?

  Absent religion completely, except lots of options of what will happen. One is that 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 trans, we have the religion of gender. We have religion of race and, you know, and all these things have just stepped into this void. And they're all dogmatic things with their founding texts. They're, they've all got their own catechisms of a kind. Priests.

• 20:03Douglas Murray?

  They have priests, they have excommunication rites. 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, funnily enough, partly because we knew its flaws. And the sweet point where you see the flaws of religious belief but can still live through it is is one even I can, well, I can especially feel nostalgic for because I don't like the new priesthood. I find them as corrupt as any priesthood in history with the negative attribute that not everyone's woken up to them yet, you know. I mean, do

• 20:47Douglas Murray?

  we have, do we have in our culture an equivalent, for instance, of the meme of the paedophile priest? I don't think we do. I mean, for instance, I would love it if the the sort of adults who push, you know, gender dysmorphia stuff on children were regarded as the equivalent of paedophile priests. I think that'd be fine. 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.

• 21:21Chris Williamson?

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• 22:04Chris Williamson?

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• 22:27Douglas Murray?

  It makes me think, as we were talking earlier on, about.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 22:52Douglas Murray?

  You don't have to give up everything.

• 22:54Chris Williamson?

  Well, no, there's certainly better solutions.

• 22:56Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  Right, but the world is trying to maximize everything. It's, there is, and it goes back to the shallow pond of empathy, that accepting that trade offs are an inevitability doesn't fit into that paradigm, right? We will always optimize for what is, what feels most pleasurable or empathetic in the short term.

• 23:20Douglas Murray?

  I don't know, I don't feel that.

• 23:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's what, that's how it plays out, I think.

• 23:26Douglas Murray?

  For a lot of people.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 23:27Douglas Murray?

  If they have no character.

• 23:28Chris Williamson?

  If they have no character.

• 23:29Douglas Murray?

  Well, what do you optimize for?

• 23:32Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 23:48Douglas Murray?

  I love it, the peace in your, in your private life.

• 23:50Chris Williamson?

  I try.

• 23:51Douglas Murray?

  It reminds me of Lady Bracknell's line about the general at the end of The Importance of Being Earnest, and she says, the general was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life. But you're the other way around.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:06Douglas Murray?

  You're a man of peace in your domestic life.

• 24:08Chris Williamson?

  Except for my public life.

• 24:09Douglas Murray?

  Maybe you are generally.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't, I don't think I am.

• 24:12Douglas Murray?

  You're a highly agreeable person.

• 24:13Chris Williamson?

  I'm fucking not.

• 24:14Douglas Murray?

  Really?

• 24:15Chris Williamson?

  I try as best I can to keep a, keep a lid on it. But yeah, the, um, this lack of, of meaning and people's desire, their absolutely fervent desire to try and fill that hole with as many things as they can.

• 24:31Douglas Murray?

  Like Lizzo.

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  Like Lizzo, indeed. Did you, did you see the stories that came out about Lizzo?

• 24:37Douglas Murray?

  Oh, it was wonderful.

• 24:38Chris Williamson?

  About her Amsterdam.

• 24:40Douglas Murray?

  My favourite story of the year.

• 24:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Douglas Murray?

  A long way.

• 24:42Chris Williamson?

  What, for the people that don't know, Lizzo was on tour in Amsterdam, took her backup dancers to the red light district.

• 24:51Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 24:51Chris Williamson?

  And made the backup dancers, some of the backup dancers eat bananas out of the vaginas of Amsterdam strippers.

• 24:58Douglas Murray?

  My view was, what happened here was that Lizzo thought you could outsource the eating of your five fruit and veg a day.

• 25:07Chris Williamson?

  To the vagina, to the vagina of the stripper or to the mouth of the.

• 25:10Douglas Murray?

  She's so reluctant to eat healthily. She even outsources the five fruit and veg a day. That's my view.

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, it seems to me that, it's, it's, it seems to me that both Lizzo, Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Kimmel, all of these people who up front.

• 25:27Douglas Murray?

  Oh, isn't it wonderful? It's so great.

• 25:31Chris Williamson?

  The schadenfreude is palpable.

• 25:32Douglas Murray?

  The nicest squeak, not that Lizzo have looked nice, but like the squeaky clean Ellen DeGeneres thing, you know, just dance and, you know.

• 25:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Douglas Murray?

  And of course they're horrible in real life.

• 25:42Chris Williamson?

  People behind the scenes.

• 25:44Douglas Murray?

  It's a sort of rule that, by the way, actually with public figures is that the ones who are most, you know, sort of sweetie, sweetie in public tend to be the nastiest in private. And sometimes the opposite can be true. Some people who are thought to have a very hard edge in public can actually be lovely, lovely people in private. Margaret Thatcher was a good example.

• 26:00Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:01Douglas Murray?

  Very, very nice to people around her, you know, but could make tough decisions.

• 26:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, to me, it's a counter signal. If I see someone doing the Lizzo thing of I am so body positivity, I, it becomes their identity of how they're a flaming sword, card carrying paragon of whatever this thing is.

• 26:19Douglas Murray?

  Well, it's also, it's also a bit like the, um. Uh, the Jimmy Savile, um, uh, the hospital, uh, what was it called? Uh, 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, Savile, you go, oh, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna hurt the hospital for kids. You know, you sure you wanna run that story? Oh, that's gonna hurt the hospital. So there are lots of people in our own age who have a thing like that. They build like the equivalent of the Jimmy Savile Children's Hospital facade up.

• 26:50Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 26:50Douglas Murray?

  In order to protect themselves.

• 26:52Chris Williamson?

  Right. Are you saying that, uh, Lizzo's work with the body positivity movement is in a case to try and effectively put a wall?

• 26:58Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 26:59Chris Williamson?

  Of large.

• 26:59Douglas Murray?

  Wall.

• 27:00Chris Williamson?

  Bodied people in front of.

• 27:02Douglas Murray?

  A very difficult wall to get over.

• 27:04Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think it's probably easy to get over. Getting around it might be more difficult. Um.

• 27:08Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, no, I don't get. I got into a car and it ran out of gas.

• 27:12Chris Williamson?

  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 could only support the WNBA, the way that you support a fat chick who is 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,

• 27:42Chris Williamson?

  some non-zero number of women may deep down in their darker moments realize that they don't discourage some of their friends from, uh, gaining weight.

• 27:52Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 27:52Chris Williamson?

  Because they can eat themselves out of their intrasexual competition for potential partners.

• 27:57Douglas Murray?

  Oh, it's, oh, come on. Men are like that as well.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  How do we play that game?

• 28:03Douglas Murray?

  I mean, this is gonna show a low side of my character, but you, you can't say always that you're sad if, uh, somebody you're not very close to, but you knew, 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's different versions of that with with men, I think, and I I think men can be complicit in that as well. Yeah, you know, the thrill when a friend bolts early, you know, I think that's very common.

• 28:33Chris Williamson?

  Thrill, there needs to, there'll be a German word for that.

• 28:35Douglas Murray?

  Of course.

• 28:36Chris Williamson?

  Like schadenfreude, but specifically for the.

• 28:38Douglas Murray?

  For the scalp.

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:41Douglas Murray?

  I think, yeah, I think lots 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, taking out of the competition for sure.

• 28:50Chris Williamson?

  I was thinking as well about how material conditions, you were saying before, people's parents maybe had it better in some ways, but also would have had it way worse.

• 29:00Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, of course.

• 29:02Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 29:13Douglas Murray?

  Well, as George Orwell said, by the age of fifty, every man gets the face he deserves.

• 29:18Chris Williamson?

  What do you mean by that?

• 29:20Douglas Murray?

  I think that's actually true. I think there's a certain age, it might not be fifty now, but it's a certain age where you do show your life on your your face. 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.

• 29:39Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 29:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 29:46Douglas Murray?

  You know, and

• 29:50Douglas Murray?

  yes, it's, there's a great truth in it. I mean, we know that because we judge people by their faces, by the way they interact with us, by the way they look at us. That's perfectly sensible.

• 30:03Chris Williamson?

  I've found a quote the other day that said, people with low self-esteem will always find a way to be miserable. And it made me think that material conditions a lot of the time are what? Young people, but many people lay at the feet of their despondency or the nihilism or the critical nature or whatever it might be. And I've seen enough of my friends.

• 30:27Chris Williamson?

  Vassalate through varying levels of affluence or relationship or singletonness or whatever. 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.

• 30:46Douglas Murray?

  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, preordained. I mean, almost. I mean, if you just get, there were some people with wild luck, but most people, a lot of people, let me say, who are successful, look back and they think, well, I don't understand this person who hasn't made it to the same rung of ladder as I have. Why didn't they work hard? And so there's a sort of callousness, actually, that can creep in there. But equally, people are, to a great extent, masters of their own fate. And it's a very hard one to analyze that, as I say, because the outriders skew the whole statistics. I mean, the outrider who does very well, not everyone can do what

• 31:30Douglas Murray?

  he or she has done, but he or she is likely to think they could have done.

• 31:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, you retroactively, lots of people that achieve success look back at the route that was particularly designed by them for them to achieve the very specific type of success that they managed to get, and then retrofit that as a universal law that anybody else could follow. 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 hoc rationalization about one person's very, very idiosyncratic

• 32:00Douglas Murray?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:01Chris Williamson?

  solution for this thing. And they say, these are the universal principles of X, Y, and Z. And you go, no, they're not.

• 32:07Douglas Murray?

  They're highly personal.

• 32:09Chris Williamson?

  It's your personality just spun up and tuned up to 11.

• 32:13Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I mean, most very successful people I've ever met have some story of their own growth, which is both inspiring and not replicable.

• 32:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's

• 32:27Douglas Murray?

  They're unusual people.

• 32:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, what's the alternative? As you said before, like, you have to lay the agency at your own feet. Because if you were to perhaps admit the truth, which is, I was in the right place at the right time, was

• 32:38Douglas Murray?

  Well, that's, yeah, that can be the case. And not many people say that. But yeah, some do. Yeah.

• 32:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:42Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. If you're in Britain in the eighties, for instance, is a good time to make money. Easier, better.

• 32:48Douglas Murray?

  Um, than today. So then some people will say, yeah, it was a great place at the right time. But most people do sort of vaguely think they've made it that they it was sort of preordained. I mean, I 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.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  I had a friend who joined Goldman Sachs in nineteen ninety eight.

• 33:12Douglas Murray?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:13Chris Williamson?

  And he said he had an absolute golden period.

• 33:16Douglas Murray?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:16Chris Williamson?

  For about for about.

• 33:17Douglas Murray?

  Ten years.

• 33:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, a little bit less. Uh, he said he was already starting to wind down.

• 33:22Douglas Murray?

  Before Lehman Brothers.

• 33:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, uh, some of that was to do with D E I, a very early instantiation of D E I.

• 33:29Douglas Murray?

  That's right. Yes. There's several books that make that clear.

• 33:32Chris Williamson?

  Is that right?

• 33:32Douglas Murray?

  Text. Yeah. Several books that make it clear about some of the hiring processes going on.

• 33:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, like two thousand and six, he was already seeing it. But he told me, uh, he made a trade, uh, on, uh, nine eleven. He made it. He made a very particular trade and 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.

• 34:01Douglas Murray?

  What did his boss think of the trade?

• 34:02Chris Williamson?

  Came over and said, like, what the fuck are you doing? And he said, look at this, if this, then that, if this, then that, ran it all the way down. He said, this is the outcome. This is what's going to happen. And he's like, we would like, I don't know what. So first off, he was concerned that it was going to go wrong. And then he made the most ungodly amount of money in the space of three hours. And then all the markets shut for ten days from.

• 34:27Douglas Murray?

  Well, yes.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  From September twelfth.

• 34:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  And, uh, the only organization that had spare capital was Goldman because of this particular trade.

• 34:36Douglas Murray?

  Wow.

• 34:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 34:46Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, of course.

• 34:46Chris Williamson?

  That you made this.

• 34:47Douglas Murray?

  He shorted the market. Yeah, I mean, it was it was widely thought of nine eleven that because the the stock market tanked, of course, immediately. And we didn't know if there's going to be a world war, if this was a world war. And it was regarded very swiftly as actually being the duty of Wall Street to to not do that.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Well, Bush came back. You remember he did that ground zero announcement. We will do that. And that was as much for the the market. Stock market as it was for the fucking popular.

• 35:15Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, yes, because I mean, the 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.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 35:26Douglas Murray?

  Americans are.

• 35:27Chris Williamson?

  With 401K.

• 35:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, more than 50% of the population in America has some investment in the in the stock market. So it's different from in the UK where when the stock, when when the pound was shorted in the 1990s by Soros and others. They, a lot of British people are not that sympathetic because they don't see themselves as being involved in the stock market, which of course they are, they just don't know it.

• 35:51Chris Williamson?

  You mentioned George Orwell there. The Telegraph recently spoke about his bi- his wife's biography or autobiography.

• 35:58Douglas Murray?

  Oh, there's a new biography of Sonia Orwell. Yeah.

• 36:00Chris Williamson?

  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. Should we unperson George?

• 36:15Douglas Murray?

  Well, it would be the obvious end point to the.

• 36:17Chris Williamson?

  Full circle.

• 36:18Douglas Murray?

  Full circle.

• 36:21Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I this is just a way 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. Nancy Boys and so on, as you would have called them, were not, you know, people weren't.

• 36:43Chris Williamson?

  That sounds like a like a 1990s taxi driver's insult that they've thrown at them.

• 36:48Douglas Murray?

  It was a sort of word that Orwell and people of 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 fucking what? I don't care. I mean, was he sadistic? Probably in some ways, sometimes.

• 37:07Douglas Murray?

  Was, could he be cruel and nasty, probably, being a human being? I just think that the absurdity of our age of judging people and the passing, 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.

• 37:28Douglas Murray?

  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, 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, you would, 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?

• 38:13Douglas Murray?

  Well, he gives us visions of the universe and our place in it, which it would do us well to listen to.

• 38:23Douglas Murray?

  And that might include exposing human follies, human weakness, human pride, human sin, human lust, the tendency to do evil in the name of doing good or think you're doing good and do great harm. So much more. All of this is in Shakespeare's work, in his characters, in the things 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 of the latter? It's so boring. Human being from the past, inhuman being in the past, shocker.

• 39:06Chris Williamson?

  Has it always been this way? Has it always been people of the present judging people of yesterday by the standards of today?

• 39:13Douglas Murray?

  Well, most people didn't have time in the past to engage in that, too busy trying to put food on the table, or surviving past the age of 25, you know.

• 39:28Douglas Murray?

  But what it is in our current society is there's a very strange lack of respect for wisdom. Henry Kissinger said this in the early years of the internet, he said, all the knowledge is there, but where's the wisdom? People might not like me quoting Dr. Kissinger in that regard, but again, he knows a lot more than most of his critics. I do think 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. And you think you know more than Shakespeare? Do you know more than Orwell? These are minnows, snapping giants. I don't care for them.

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  One potentially unfortunate situation is that women's mental health is in part down to misogynistic songs. When BTS lead singer Jungkook changed to a more misogynistic music, a disturbing trend followed. A psychiatrist's point of view on BTS's Jungkook and 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 Jungkook's songs. They include a woman telling her man that she will be

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  your fantasy and swallow your pride to make him never think about cheating. Lyrics that identify-

• 40:59Douglas Murray?

  So why, he said swallow your pride in a particularly suggestive way?

• 41:02Chris Williamson?

  I did not at all. I've got more-

• 41:04Douglas Murray?

  What's the subtext?

• 41:05Chris Williamson?

  I've got, I've got more to go here. 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 fuck you longer. Of course, in reality, Jungkook's songs are par for the course, or even tame.

• 41:20Douglas Murray?

  Does that work, by the way, what you just described?

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  You've never increased your stamina by having a warm up-

• 41:27Douglas Murray?

  I thought the lyric more likely, I did that before you came, and now I just like to get a better.

• 41:34Douglas Murray?

  I'd kind of like to lie down.

• 41:35Chris Williamson?

  I did that before you came and that's why I texted saying I'm not so fussed about you.

• 41:39Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I don't mind. I'll have a quick dinner now, I gotta go.

• 41:41Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends had a had a rubric for this that was masturbate before you evaluate.

• 41:48Douglas Murray?

  Oh, well, that's true. Yeah, that's that can be sensible advice.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure if I liked you or I was just horny.

• 41:53Douglas Murray?

  Horny, yeah, yeah.

• 41:54Chris Williamson?

  But no, girls, mental health.

• 41:56Douglas Murray?

  You were reading out these charming lyrics.

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  That's it. Those hoes over there, I wanked before you came so that I can fuck you longer.

• 42:04Douglas Murray?

  Well, where to start?

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  Downstream from K-pop is a litany of female mental health problems. That's what I'm saying.

• 42:12Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 42:19Douglas Murray?

  I was at a gym recently where I actually asked the gym staff to to turn off the music because it was a load of rap, very unpleasant rap, with a repeated use of the N-word in it. Obviously, it was a black rapper or so I was assuming.

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  Right. You didn't find yourself mouthing along to the lyrics and were worried about it?

• 42:37Douglas Murray?

  But actually, I don't. That's fine. What problem could possibly emerge from singing along?

• 42:44Chris Williamson?

  Mate, just to interject there, someone got cancelled on TikTok for mouthing the N-word along to a song.

• 42:50Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 42:51Chris Williamson?

  So it's it's no longer.

• 42:52Douglas Murray?

  It's possible.

• 42:53Chris Williamson?

  It's no longer the sound of the word, it's the mouth shape that that word engenders.

• 43:00Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  Lord Voldemort.

• 43:07Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, very, very strange. But no, I just said to the I said to the gym staff, 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.

• 43:18Chris Williamson?

  Is that gym that we trained at?

• 43:20Douglas Murray?

  We can discuss this another time. But anyway. No, I just don't like it. I have certain things I don't want on my ears. And that's one, actually. I have no interest in hearing the word because it's a banned word. So why would I want it in my mental background?

• 43:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Douglas Murray?

  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 culture, apart 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 its creature, as Shilla 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.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 44:27Douglas Murray?

  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 is not quite right. And 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 the sort of thing that you would be discussing just before you will get, you know, macheted. I'm totally serious about this. It's, sometimes it's like,

• 45:04Douglas Murray?

  one of the things that actually genuinely shocked me in recent weeks, particularly after 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, ah, what have you got? I've got to say this carefully, but a moment of seriousness, which is, you know, take the music festival within a few miles of the Gaza border that Hamas attacked. All the young people there were at this sort of peace rave. And, um, this isn't in any way to victim blame. These are people just wanting to dance and, um, dance into the early morning.

• 45:47Douglas Murray?

  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 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, if you have any idea of the world out there, if you had any idea of the things that was lurking,

• 46:32Douglas Murray?

  you couldn't possibly be complaining about this.

• 46:35Chris Williamson?

  Well, how do you think gays for Gaza will get on long term?

• 46:39Douglas Murray?

  Well, the joke at the moment is that there aren't enough tall buildings in Gaza to throw gays for Gaza off. But

• 46:48Douglas Murray?

  these, I mean, these people are, you know, I've said very often, they're, they're part of the same phenomenon as turkeys for Christmas and chickens for KFC. I mean, I, I just, I'm fed up with these 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 Palestine. No, you fucking can't fuck off. Just, you know, I can both argue for a 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've got to choose. I've got a video to show you. I'll show you this video.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Can someone please explain to me what this means? What does reproductive justice mean? 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?

• 48:04Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  What? It's such a huge sign. There's five people holding this thing. It's massive.

• 48:14Chris Williamson?

  That's very good. That's Danny, the other half of Ryan, who wasn't there the day that you that you came.

• 48:20Douglas Murray?

  Boy's cast.

• 48:21Chris Williamson?

  Reproductive justice means free Palestine. What do you think?

• 48:25Douglas Murray?

  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 interlink and interlock and you're either the majority or minority for minority rights and issues or for majority rights and issues and all minority rights and issues intersect and overlap so that if you're queer somehow you, no, no, it's not even that. These ignoramuses who couldn't point to the river Jordan if you showed it them on a map, walk along the streets of America and say, shout, you know, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Because they 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

• 49:09Douglas Murray?

  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 selectively, highly selectively. I mean, the people who are talking about Israelis being colonizers. When I saw that the other day on the streets of London, I thought, yes, if only there was a name for large numbers of people who came from outside to a country. And if only we could identify what they might be called in Britain. Oh, it would be immigrants, wouldn't it? Do you want to call immigrants colonizers in Britain? You sure you want

• 49:53Douglas Murray?

  to follow this logical conclusion? That talk about indigenous peoples. Oh, okay, great. Anyway, you don't want to apply that. Might there be a country or 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.

• 50:11Douglas Murray?

  Welcome to hell. So, no, all it is happening is a very selective mapping of a particular interpretation of the world that very dumb people in America have tried to put on certain selective other cases. And it doesn't work, it just doesn't work, but may they never find out how much it doesn't work. May they never find out. 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.

• 50:47Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking for a good while about how hypocrisy is a purpose-built tool for the internet to use. It's like catnip for the internet. It's the thing, because the reason it's so purpose-built, it's like one of those can you spot the difference competitions on a touchscreen iPad. This is what's on the left, this is what's on the right. And what you have is here's something that someone once said, or a position that they used to hold, and here is what they hold now, or here is what they do in their real life, or here is whatever. And it's kind of what you're identifying here, that you have a worldview which is self-contradictory. You're just using different words for one thing that is almost exactly the same for another thing.

• 51:24Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  And then complaining about this one, saying, don't look over here at this one.

• 51:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Douglas Murray?

  Well, I mean, everyone is inconsistent to some extent. And I don't think, by the way, that, 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. The worst thing about him is hypocrisy. And there's a weird, hypocrisy is the easiest one to catch people on, is the truth of that.

• 51:59Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yes.

• 51:59Douglas Murray?

  It's the easiest one to spot.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 52:02Douglas Murray?

  You just, and they do it, as you say, on this is what this person said 20 years ago, this is what they say now. Again, human being in growing up, shocker.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 52:13Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. People are allowed to evolve, they change their minds, they grow up. It'd be rather boring to say the same thing and think the same thing only for 70 years. But yeah, people find hypocrisy very, very easy to see, and it's about the only vice you can really catch somebody on. I think, it is if you say one thing publicly and do another thing privately. It's about the only one that people are really confident on. Or most other moral judgments, for better or worse, have sort of ebbed away, but people still are able to judge hypocrisy.

• 52:50Douglas Murray?

  But I think, I mean, I think there are worse things, and I think not standing up for your loved ones, not standing up for your country, not standing up for yourselves in the face of horrible opposition from within and without, probably worse than hypocrisy.

• 53:05Chris Williamson?

  I heard you say recently, you don't have to agree with everyone's principle to respect the principle they're sticking to.

• 53:12Douglas Murray?

  Did I say that? Yeah, it sounds good.

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's nice.

• 53:14Douglas Murray?

  I didn't know I said that, but yeah.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  You did. But the reason that I like that is I think it shows

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  why the bravery conversation or standing up for something that you believe in is something that is a price, 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 a good amount of faith that Sam believes the things that he says.

• 53:45Douglas Murray?

  Well, why would he not?

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

  He pays an unbelievably high price to continue to flip flop from one tribe to another tribe to another tribe.

• 53:53Douglas Murray?

  I don't think it's an unbelievably high price, but a price, let's say.

• 53:55Chris Williamson?

  Relatively high price, yeah.

• 53:58Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I mean, very early in some people's careers or when people first make it to public notice, people say things like, you know, do you really believe what you say? The answer to which for most people is or ought to be, well, why would I say it if I didn't believe it? There are people who obviously do say stuff for lols or clicks or monetary purpose, but at a certain point, I mean, you've got to accept that the person thinks what they think and, 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, I wonder if they actually even believe it. I think they don't. I think they're just doing it for money.

• 54:37Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 54:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the shill grifter accusation.

• 54:54Douglas Murray?

  Very boring accusation.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Douglas Murray?

  I don't doubt there are some people who that is the case with, but.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  Way fewer than.

• 55:00Douglas Murray?

  Way fewer than people think.

• 55:01Chris Williamson?

  Michael Malice has a hierarchy of different, I think it's like the hierarchy of grifters.

• 55:07Douglas Murray?

  Don't know why, when I only say Michael Malice, my face immediately sort of starts to smile.

• 55:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's terrible. One of the, it's like, um, industry plant, paid opposition, controlled psyop.

• 55:19Douglas Murray?

  Yes, yes.

• 55:20Chris Williamson?

  It goes all the way up and he said that he descended recently. He's not quite at paid opposition, but I think he's industry plant now. I think Lex Friedman is paid opposition.

• 55:30Douglas Murray?

  Paid is different from controlled opposition.

• 55:32Chris Williamson?

  Uh, maybe it's controlled opposition, I fucking know.

• 55:34Douglas Murray?

  Controlled opposition is, these are such weird terms that have cropped up in our era.

• 55:39Chris Williamson?

  I love it.

• 55:40Douglas Murray?

  Again, I think they're sort of low resolution explanations, but they're really, really low resolution explanations for things. Whenever I hear somebody describe things as that, I always sort of know you're not dealing with somebody who actually understands the world.

• 55:53Chris Williamson?

  Do you find there's a definitely a trend of, um, conspiratorial thinking, conspiracism. Much stronger in our adopted homeland than it is in the UK, I think.

• 56:04Douglas Murray?

  Yes, that's true.

• 56:07Chris Williamson?

  What do you think, are you, how conspiracy pilled are you? Do you see?

• 56:13Douglas Murray?

  I mean, it's, it's, this is the moment when people say, ah, controlled opposition.

• 56:22Chris Williamson?

  You've offended, this is me allowing you to graduate from.

• 56:25Douglas Murray?

  I think I talked about this on the boys cast, that's right. And briefly, and, and, uh, various people wrote to me saying, ah, there you go. That's proof you're paid.

• 56:34Chris Williamson?

  You're glowing, as it's called.

• 56:35Douglas Murray?

  But it's, what's that?

• 56:36Chris Williamson?

  You heard you're glowing?

• 56:38Douglas Murray?

  No, what's that?

• 56:38Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 56:58Douglas Murray?

  Oh.

• 56:59Chris Williamson?

  It's an intelligence operation that's breached the surface and people can see it. They comment on TikTok saying like, you're glowing.

• 57:04Douglas Murray?

  Oh, it's like the people alleged to be FBI who are at certain protests.

• 57:10Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yeah.

• 57:10Douglas Murray?

  All wearing chinos and T-shirts. Yeah.

• 57:13Chris Williamson?

  So you're conspiratorial.

• 57:15Douglas Murray?

  Well, so the conspiracy, the thing with the conspiracy theory is it's very difficult in our era because some of the conspiracies are true, of course, have come true. Well, known to be true, a lab leak conspiracy theory, 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 hypotheticals to explain what happened with Covid. So a lot of things get called conspiracy, which are not, they're just hypotheses that should be allowed to remain on the table. And that makes a certain type of person increasingly prone to believe that everything that's called conspiracy theory is not a conspiracy theory. And before you know it, you get sane-ish individuals thinking that the moon landings

• 58:00Douglas Murray?

  were a conspiracy, that we didn't land on the moon, the American didn't land on the moon. I don't know whether the people who now claim that believe that the Russians also faked it. It's an interesting question to ask them. Do you think that the Soviets were capable of getting to the moon, but the Americans were not? The Americans set up like a blow fan and a flag on a dodgy papier-mâché set, but the Soviets did make it? Or did the Soviets and Americans both agree to pretend to have gone to the moon, but not really have gone? None of it makes sense to my mind. But there's this, but, but, but it's, I have noticed, and well, it's actually all the literature demonstrates that there's certain types of mental problems that people have

• 58:41Douglas Murray?

  that make them disproportionately likely to believe conspiracy theories en masse. And one of them is paranoia. The more paranoid a person is, the more likely they're to believe that sort of thing. And that's the observation in my own life. I've known a number of people who've, 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, which adds up.

• 59:06Chris Williamson?

  So fear engenders.

• 59:08Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, and it's, as I say, it's a sort of low resolution explanation for complex phenomena. And you know, and I think it's also that conspiracy theories come about and are used by people who, and this isn't an original point, many people have made it, they're made, the claims about them are made by and large by people who don't understand how unbelievably chaotic the world actually is, or can't face it. So they can't face the fact that, yeah, somebody you followed in the newspapers every day for 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

• 59:52Douglas Murray?

  that cruel. It can't be that random. You want a bed?

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  It's got to be coordination. It can't be coincidence.

• 59:58Douglas Murray?

  Exactly. So people who can't cope with the wild frivolity of the roulette table of our lives, always go to the, there must be somebody behind it. There must be somebody who's controlling all this. Are you joking? Nobody's controlling this. If anyone was controlling the damn thing, I'd want to know by now. But of course they're not. It's a very unsatisfactory place to arrive at in your life. And by the way, my own observation is not very good for people personally because they start to lose agency themselves.

• 1:00:28Chris Williamson?

  Locust of control gets externalized. I'm at the mercy of the world.

• 1:00:31Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. And the real answer is the world doesn't care.

• 1:00:35Chris Williamson?

  No, doesn't even know that you exist.

• 1:00:37Douglas Murray?

  Is deaf to you.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  The, the ability for people to hold two conflicting thoughts in their mind at the same time is supposed to be the mark of sophisticated thinking. But it does show up here, which is, the government is both so useless that they can't get anything right, and so sophisticated that they're able to coordinate.

• 1:00:55Douglas Murray?

  Oh, that's masses of versions. The Arab world is filled with that. The Muslim world is filled with that. Things like, I've noticed repeatedly on my travels, things like, nine eleven was an inside job of the Americans to allow the Jews out of the World Trade Center. And also, yay, nine eleven. Good for Osama bin Laden. They can do both.

• 1:01:16Douglas Murray?

  There's a somebody I knew interviewed the father of the main nine eleven 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 Shaheed, a martyr for Islam, and that nine eleven was an inside job with Americans. What? What the fuck? Like, choose. It's, I mean, do you think your son was an agent of the FBI and also a martyr? Like, hey, people do this. The Muslim world is particularly prone to conspiratorial thinking because it's

• 1:01:57Douglas Murray?

  a it's a source of flattery to itself to explain why they have created so few successful societies.

• 1:02:06Douglas Murray?

  And and Bernard Lewis made this point many years ago, that the problem in the Muslim world is that there's a they is that they have to find explanations, because if you're given the revelations of Muhammad and you're told it's the last revelation ever from God, and that you are the people who have received this revelation, and everything's going to go great for you because you've got the revelation. And then, like, the Jews, you have one country that 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 of your citizenry, and nobody's coming up the ladder, and the economy's 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. So I mean, there's massive things like that

• 1:02:48Douglas Murray?

  that sit underneath the movements of our time, which maybe billions of people on the planet believe. And they believe them because it flatters themselves. It flatters the governments who aspire to run these countries or claim to run these countries. Yeah.

• 1:03:06Chris Williamson?

  Billions of people believe this shit. I was thinking about the extremist worldview beliefs largely in the West, but I guess everywhere. And I was wondering whether we have finally moved beyond peak woke. And a study came up recently that was kind of interesting. Researchers from Change Research polled over a thousand registered US voters from eighteen to thirty four. A majority of both women and men consider far rightism and far leftism to be red flags in a potential partner. Seventy six percent of women and fifty nine percent of men consider identifying as a MAGA Republican to be a large turn off. Sixty four percent of men and fifty five percent of women say they'd also swipe left on someone identifying as a communist. Fifty five percent of women.

• 1:03:51Chris Williamson?

  Sixty four percent of men, fifty five percent of women swipe left on a communist, that's a no. Fifty five percent of men said that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag.

• 1:04:01Chris Williamson?

  Forty one percent of men said the same for a woman being into astrology. Oh, that's now I'm with that one. If somebody says, what's your star sign, date over. Well, there's a really famous meme where it's on iMessage and the text says,

• 1:04:20Chris Williamson?

  Mum, what time was I born at? And the reply from mum says, stay the fuck away from that girl.

• 1:04:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. It is. The heart sinks when it comes up as a question.

• 1:04:34Chris Williamson?

  A shame.

• 1:04:36Chris Williamson?

  Forty one, thirty three percent of men said for Black Lives Matter, it was a red flag. If they say Black Lives Matter, fourteen percent of women. Fifty three percent of women said it was a red flag if they refuse to see the Barbie movie.

• 1:04:51Chris Williamson?

  Thirty one percent of men. Fifty eight percent of women red flag if they say there are only two genders. Thirty four percent of men. Fifty four percent of women thought they identify as a conservative. Thirty three percent of men for they identify as a liberal. So next time you're vibing with someone, maybe save the podcast recommendations and daily horoscopes for the second date. Wow. Fifty five percent of women say that listening to Joe Rogan was a red flag. I wonder if the species has any future. Because they can't listen to Joe Rogan. Well, no, I mean, just like all these people are wiping out like. No, no, no, no. Significant numbers of potential future partners.

• 1:05:32Douglas Murray?

  How weird and Joe turning up in that.

• 1:05:35Chris Williamson?

  Fifty five percent.

• 1:05:36Douglas Murray?

  So that's amazing. I thought, what's happened to all the good old people who used to say, I don't really have an opinion on that.

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 1:05:43Douglas Murray?

  What happened to those guys?

• 1:05:45Chris Williamson?

  I got pulled in a good bit recently on the internet for not commenting on the recent socio-political furor that's happening in the Middle East. And I quoted you pseudonymously and said, I'm trying to make a habit of something which is very rare on the internet to not comment on something which I know nothing about.

• 1:06:06Douglas Murray?

  It's a very good rule.

• 1:06:08Chris Williamson?

  And yet, it's the rarest thing of all. Why shouldn't I? People, people care about my insights into health and fitness, or my, my learnings about social psychology. Why, why shouldn't my fiscal advice be important? Why, why shouldn't my views on immigration?

• 1:06:29Douglas Murray?

  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,

• 1:06:42Douglas Murray?

  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, I don't really know much about the Middle East, but this is blah, blah, blah. And I was just like, in that case, don't speak. Don't speak and say, but, if I think, if you don't know, just agree not to do it. That's one reason why there's a lot of, I mean, there's a lot of television these days in the UK where you can be invited on to debate the total ignoramus who's only there for balance, you know, for Ofcom-related balance. And I just can't do that stuff anymore. It's too demeaning.

• 1:07:26Douglas Murray?

  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 Hamas wars and Israel Hezbollah wars. Um, I just can't be sitting there with somebody, I hate to say this, and it's not not meant in a misogynistic way, but there's a lot of um, uh, women who are currently invited on things for balance. Firstly, because they're women, secondly, because they provide usually a left-wing perspective and that's needed if it's me, there's some 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,

• 1:08:09Douglas Murray?

  I say, oh, why I don't, why don't 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 like that and it's just, yeah, if you don't know about it, don't talk about it. It's a very good rule of thumb. Or try it out in private with friends and mates and like, try to learn something, read a book.

• 1:08:37Chris Williamson?

  Are we morally obliged to have a take on everything?

• 1:08:40Douglas Murray?

  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. I need to listen to you. First of all, you don't live in the country. Unless you

• 1:09:21Douglas Murray?

  live in a country, be pretty damn sure, surely you should be a bit humble about telling other people about their lives, you know. And also, like, who made you the tactician de jour on everything? Well, it was the same as Covid. Everyone became a virology or epidemiology expert. Yeah, and then they became a withdrawal from Afghanistan expert, and then they became a Ukraine expert, and now they're all Middle East experts. And I just think it should be regarded as a massive red flag that the person in question is. Normally, what's happened is they've downloaded the set of opinions they believe that their tribe should have. Correct. And that's why the morons marching in London and other cities, you know, with the exception of the Muslims who are just whipped up all the time by the fact that the

• 1:10:06Douglas Murray?

  Jews do anything. I mean, 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 70 years. And yet, whenever the Israelis do anything, the Muslims across the West come out on the streets because they hate the Jews. And, you know, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Yemen. Not a peep on the streets of Britain and other places. Certainly not big protests. Bashar al-Assad has killed more Muslims in the last 10 years than everybody on every

• 1:10:51Douglas Murray?

  side killed in every war involving Israel since 1948, including the War of Independence. Nobody cares. The Muslims don't come out on the streets. They don't care. The only thing they care about is the hatred of the Jews. And it motivates them like nothing else because it hits at the core of their self-esteem. They can't bear it. And so that one is very interesting to me.

• 1:11:15Douglas Murray?

  But the, there are these fellow travellers who go along with them who have downloaded, as I say, a sort of pathetic American interpretation of colonisation, decolonisation, racial justice, reproductive rights, and try to map everything on.

• 1:11:32Chris Williamson?

  My friend's got a theory called Gwinder's Theory of Bespoke Bullshit. Many don't have an opinion until they're asked for it, at which point they cobble together a viewpoint from women and half-remembered hearsay before deciding that this two-minute old makeshift opinion will be their new hill to die on.

• 1:11:50Douglas Murray?

  That's very good. My friend Freddie Gray at The Spectator tends to run very popular pieces each time a new big thing emerges, which is The Bluffers' Guide to Whatever. And it's great. It usually involves, in foreign policy, usually involves saying things like, well, they better get this done before the brutal Afghan winter kicks in. You go, who made you an expert on like meteorology in Afghanistan? Like, what? Ah, no, the Ukrainians have got to make this advance before the dreaded Ukrainian May. And I just, I mean, I tried to have-

• 1:12:25Chris Williamson?

  The Bluffers' Guide.

• 1:12:26Douglas Murray?

  It's a very useful rule. 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 just, I can't bring myself to do it. I find it too embarrassing.

• 1:12:40Chris Williamson?

  It's so interesting when you talk about knowing one opinion that a person holds and from that one opinion being able to accurately predict everything else that they believe.

• 1:12:51Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:52Chris Williamson?

  That mono-thinking just proves that you're not a serious thinker.

• 1:12:56Douglas Murray?

  Well, I just, it's fairly obvious. If, for instance, you say, you know, what's the problem with a big bearded guy winning the 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 slightly out of sorts with their own political side and stuff.

• 1:13:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's exactly the point, that-

• 1:13:19Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:13:33Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:33Chris Williamson?

  If you're just permanently, oh yeah, it's like an old leather pair of shoes. Here we go again, 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.

• 1:13:56Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:13:57Chris Williamson?

  It's everybody else's. It's outsourced thinking.

• 1:13:59Douglas Murray?

  And what's really sad about that is that it means that you're not really living your life. I mean, you're living a pastiche of a prescribed set of opinions. That's so sad. I mean, it's so sad. The wasted energies and wasted lives of people who've just downloaded a set of opinions and they're just running them. Yeah, well, that's not your life. It's just someone else's life you're just replaying.

• 1:14:23Chris Williamson?

  What was that quote you taught me about, about being shunted to the side of the road of your own?

• 1:14:28Douglas Murray?

  It's a Philip Larkin quote from a poem, yes, his description of a couple. And he says that something is pushing them to the side of their own lives. It's a beautiful line, terrifying line, horrifying line. It should make everyone judge themselves.

• 1:14:43Chris Williamson?

  What's it mean to you?

• 1:14:45Douglas Murray?

  Oh, well, it means that there's a life that you hoped to live, your life you saw yourself living and you got pushed to the side of it and ended up not living that life.

• 1:14:57Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 1:15:13Douglas Murray?

  Another is to face up to the fact that you are in some way a coward. Or a victim of circumstance or something else. But I think a lot, I mean, you know, is 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 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, particularly if you can feel yourself slowly being pushed away from it, I think that's a terrible, terrible feeling.

• 1:15:48Chris Williamson?

  It's like watching your own demise occur second by second.

• 1:15:51Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. Fortunately, I've never felt it, but I definitely fear it.

• 1:15:54Chris Williamson?

  Where do you go to find or to avoid cowardice or to find resilience or bravery? Because a lot of the time, the easier path is easier, and it's the one that's got the least resistance.

• 1:16:07Douglas Murray?

  Surround yourself with courageous people.

• 1:16:11Douglas Murray?

  Surround yourself with brave people.

• 1:16:15Douglas Murray?

  And that can be bravery of all sorts of different kinds. And when I turned forty, I had a dinner, which I think you weren't invited to, but it's only because you weren't in town, if I remember rightly. But I did get a lot of my favorite people in the room at least. And it was interesting that a friend made a speech in which he said, it's striking, 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 very touching speech, I was very moved by it, which he said, how noticeable it was that Douglas has surrounded himself with courageous people. And it was from a very wide array of bits of the world and different disciplines and so on. And I was really touched by that because I hadn't particularly noticed that I'd done it. But then I realized I sort of had that

• 1:16:59Douglas Murray?

  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 be around courageous people. And that might be different types of courage, some of it physical, some of it mental.

• 1:17:21Douglas Murray?

  So that's one thing, yeah, surround yourself with courageous people, or at least not cowards, not cretins, 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.

• 1:17:37Chris Williamson?

  One of my friends, it wasn't a friend at the time, I'd just met him for the first time, but someone that I'd been interested in for a good while, I met in Austin a while ago, and he'd had an interesting story and he'd faced a cancellation over the last few years. And he'd sort of told me the story and he said, uh, he 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 liked to do man things and surround myself with masculine people. And I was into, you know, like guns and shooting and fitness and friends with Navy SEALs and all the rest of it. He said, my entire life, I was scared that I was a coward.

• 1:18:18Douglas Murray?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:20Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:18:30Douglas Murray?

  Beautiful.

• 1:18:31Chris Williamson?

  And then this cancellation thing came along.

• 1:18:34Douglas Murray?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:34Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:18:51Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:51Chris Williamson?

  But when the entire world comes to bear

• 1:18:54Douglas Murray?

  Cool.

• 1:18:55Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:19:13Douglas Murray?

  Good.

• 1:19:14Chris Williamson?

  Uh, which, but just, yeah, I could always hear my better self clearing his throat in the room next door.

• 1:19:19Douglas Murray?

  Well, the, the thing with that is, uh, um, the, the difference between, um, uh, situations you find yourself in that are dangerous through choice and ones that you've,

• 1:19:31Chris Williamson?

  Been thrust into.

• 1:19:32Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, been thrust into and probably know that, that, that, the consequence of being thrust into dangerous situations is much more likely to lead to PTSD and things like that, um, than if you choose to. Um, and, uh, I've been fortunate in my life, the most of the dangerous situations I've been in have been ones I've chosen to be in. Um, and that's, that's very different. Um.

• 1:20:00Douglas Murray?

  But yes, I'm glad he found out that he was more courageous than he feared.

• 1:20:04Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. 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.

• 1:20:15Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 1:20:16Chris Williamson?

  This fear of your own nature.

• 1:20:18Douglas Murray?

  Well, that but that is perfectly sensible. I mean, there's a horrible example I sometimes use, but I mean,

• 1:20:24Douglas Murray?

  if you're ever mugged for your wallet, let alone you're 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. There's 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?

• 1:20:39Chris Williamson?

  Stabbed.

• 1:20:40Douglas Murray?

  Or stabbed for a hundred hundred bucks and a.

• 1:20:43Chris Williamson?

  A few phone calls to the bank.

• 1:20:45Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. So that's like the reason to hand over the wallet. What 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 to you would torture him if you could get your hands on him and the brutal way in which you would have revenge if you ever find him.

• 1:21:12Chris Williamson?

  It might be easy to just get your head kicked in a bit.

• 1:21:15Douglas Murray?

  Yes. And are you sure you can live with the version of yourself that is you handing over the wallet? I said this recently in a piece in New York Post about the people on the New York subway where there's this awful thing you've probably seen where people, you know, like a woman will be being abused by some maniac, fentanyl-addled, 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.

• 1:21:58Douglas Murray?

  And yeah, 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, particularly 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.

• 1:22:36Chris Williamson?

  Didn't that guy?

• 1:22:37Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Chris Williamson?

  Do a thing and now, is he in jail? Did he get jailed for it?

• 1:22:40Douglas Murray?

  He's charged, he's coming up for trial. This is, uh, Daniel Needy, I think, then, 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 was like, I'm going to kill you or something like this. And this Marine at that point stepped in, got him into a chokehold, was clearly not meaning to do it, but the chokehold was too hard and he, 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

• 1:23:21Douglas Murray?

  not, 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.

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Where's he being convicted?

• 1:23:33Douglas Murray?

  In New York, right. Um, because you could say that the guy, because there's a racial element, like 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 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 is like a good Samaritan act gone wrong.

• 1:24:16Douglas Murray?

  But I, I, it's, there's, it's very salutary that, that, that sort of stuff. There was a guy in London about fifteen years ago, I remember. Very much haunted me because the, the fiance, the girlfriend did a victim impact statement that was particularly harrowing. That they were on the top of a bus in London and a guy on the bus started throwing chips like 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 an, and, and in the wake of a story like that, a lot more people in the society will be craven on the bus. Because they'll have that example in their head. My, and my fear about this case in the New York Marine case is that he, the Marine.

• 1:24:59Douglas Murray?

  By doing what he did and it going wrong and the publicity it got will stop other people doing good. Stepping in, one hundred percent will have done while it's pending. Whilst 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 a member of the community and had. Was it video? I don't think it was videoed or at least they didn't see. Yeah, quite a lot of it was videoed, but he'd also had previous things where he had like done. It was a whole litany, like a laundry list of, of times that he'd been in. Arrested for. Yeah. Violent conduct. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:40Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 1:25:53Chris Williamson?

  Going back to that sort of where you go when you need more resilience thing and the bravery piece, what was that C.S. Lewis quote about the times not being optimal?

• 1:26:03Douglas Murray?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:26:04Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:26:05Douglas Murray?

  Oh, that's one of my favorite, one of my favorite sermons ever given was by C.S. Lewis at University Church in Oxford in October 1939. Yes, I love that. Lewis was a master of prose as well as theological writing and he, he gave this beautiful, beautiful sermon in which he said, yes, he said, you know, the conditions are not optimal at the moment. The search for truth and beauty that our species goes through, you know, is going through such a trial. But he says, the point is, the conditions never were optimal, they never are. He says, even those periods of history which, which seemed to be tranquil, like the 19th century, turn out on closer inspection to be filled with crises, alarms, panics and

• 1:26:49Douglas Murray?

  all the rest of it. He says, if, if, if, if human, if humankind had put off the search for truth and beauty until the conditions were optimal, the search would never have begun. And the main point he makes is that there is something wonderful and unusual about human beings. He says that the ants, for instance, have chosen their own route. They've chosen the safety and the security of the hive and presumably they have their rewards. But as he says, he says, men are different. And he gives this beautiful list, I think I can remember it, he says, "They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cells.

• 1:27:31Douglas Murray?

  They quote the latest poem whilst advancing on the walls of Quebec, make jokes on scaffolds and comb their hair at the gates of Thermopylae. This is not panache," he says, "it is our nature."

• 1:27:50Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, that's cool.

• 1:27:52Douglas Murray?

  It's true as well, in my observation, absolutely true.

• 1:27:55Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 1:27:56Douglas Murray?

  Well, because I've seen people in beleaguered cities many times, cities under fire, cities under bombardment, cities that are being razed to the ground, and um, and human life goes on.

• 1:28:09Douglas Murray?

  It's an extraordinary thing. People continue their studies if they can. People continue their family life if they can.

• 1:28:19Douglas Murray?

  They, they've realised that the conditions, conditions will never be optimal. I mean, 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.

• 1:28:56Douglas Murray?

  Or until the world is peaceful, which will never happen. Never happen. Never has happened, never will happen. Don't put it off till then, because if you put it off till then, it means you'll put it off forever. So do whatever you're meant to be doing now. Start now if you haven't started already, and if you've 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 times, I've said this before, but part of the cost of our times is enormous expense of energy on idiotic things that you can do nothing about. And I think we should say to more people, don't howl at the moon. Don't shake your fist at the skies.

• 1:29:40Douglas Murray?

  Get on with what you're meant to be doing.

• 1:29:43Douglas Murray?

  And that'll be different for everybody. But I just, I'm very, um, um...

• 1:29:53Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 1:30:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think a lot about the arrival of victimhood culture.

• 1:30:13Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I've got no time for.

• 1:30:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it seems to me that like an existential crisis is actually a luxurious position to be in because the bottom levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs have been sorted. And victimhood culture is so rampant at the moment because the human system's demand for challenge is outstripping reality's ability to deliver it to it.

• 1:30:36Douglas Murray?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:37Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:30:44Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean.

• 1:30:46Chris Williamson?

  Our sensitivity to challenge has now been tuned up.

• 1:30:48Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, hunger and so on. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:54Douglas Murray?

  I think that's true. By the way, I'm just amazed by that. I mean, I feel sometimes we're increasingly like I'm just from a different world than the one we're now in. Certainly 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 a place which liked resilience. I mean, we admired resilience. We didn't admire people who whined and muled. In fact, those are the people you avoided.

• 1:31:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:23Douglas Murray?

  At all costs. Gosh, he's a whiner. God, he's a whiner. 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 would say, well, actually, I've got stage four cancer.

• 1:31:42Chris Williamson?

  Not sure that's grumbling.

• 1:31:43Douglas Murray?

  I know, but we talked about it like that. People from that generation still say things. I have a friend of that generation who's got cancer at the moment and she's like, oh, it's so boring.

• 1:31:53Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it's so boring.

• 1:31:56Douglas Murray?

  Everyone I grew up with was like that. Now, you might say there's something unhealthy about that, but there's actually something healthy about it, too.

• 1:32:05Douglas Murray?

  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. Instead, you don't bring them down.

• 1:32:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's a weird sort of self fulfilling prophecy of pedestalizing victimhood that there is a limitless sky on how much victimhood you can claim.

• 1:32:30Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 1:32:31Chris Williamson?

  Whereas if your status and your prestige is downstream from your accomplishments, there is a limit on how much you can accomplish because you need to go out and fucking do it.

• 1:32:42Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 1:32:43Chris Williamson?

  Right? Reality is going to constrain how much impressive stuff you can go and do, but there is a ineffable universe of athletes' foot and my gluten intolerance and my chronic flatulence and my, you know, whatever else.

• 1:32:59Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 1:33:00Chris Williamson?

  Those are things that you can just continue to accumulate like trinkets.

• 1:33:03Douglas Murray?

  Yes. I just find those people boring. I just don't care for victimhood. I think it's an undesirable emotion. It's a sign of a rather undesirable person.

• 1:33:18Douglas Murray?

  But I don't know why we've given into this. I just genuinely, particularly in Britain, I'm just baffled by it because it wasn't the country we had.

• 1:33:26Chris Williamson?

  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 memetic wave.

• 1:33:34Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 1:33:35Chris Williamson?

  Almost moving through where fewer courageous people are around, which creates fewer courageous role models, which means to, you know.

• 1:33:41Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you have the thing of men being persuaded to become cringing eunuchs. Not a good thing.

• 1:33:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's another reason why, you know.

• 1:33:52Chris Williamson?

  This conversation around the guy in the subway is so interesting.

• 1:33:55Douglas Murray?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:56Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:34:09Douglas Murray?

  Well, of course, the answer to that is the era has to say, you know what? There's no such thing as mansplaining, or at least it's not very important. Get on to something more important, like women not being assaulted on the subway. You know, choose, choose, choose your priorities.

• 1:34:22Chris Williamson?

  With the denial of sex differences would lead to the conclusion that that woman can, like, why shouldn't the woman? Why shouldn't the women stand up?

• 1:34:30Douglas Murray?

  Why shouldn't they use their upper body weight?

• 1:34:32Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yeah, to push this fentanyl fuel maniac off this lady.

• 1:34:37Douglas Murray?

  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 women, the women in the carriage, go on, go on.

• 1:34:49Chris Williamson?

  Your turn.

• 1:34:50Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, we've had centuries of patriarchal hierarchy warfare. What is it? There's one that got my goat recently with somebody, was it in the US? Well, it always happens now whenever anything comes up about conflict. Hillary Clinton was one of the worst culprits at doing this, but they always say this thing of, you know, one of the reasons you've got to stop any war once it starts is, they say, you know, the first victims of war are women. They're fucking not, they're men, they're men who do most of the fighting and the dying. Hillary Clinton's point is, well, then they're widows and then, ah, yeah, the, the, the poor widows of the men that are dead.

• 1:35:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, there's actually the British MOD has a thing of, there's a special section now dedicated, I think, thanks to the impressive insight of that military expert, Angelina Jolie. They have a special bit of the MOD dedicated to women in conflict, suffering of women in conflict. Why don't we have the suffering of men in conflict as well? Such weird priorities our age is totally unserious. This age is so unserious. It's why you can't help thinking that at some point the maniacs, the barbarians will just break in because we've made ourselves so weak.

• 1:36:03Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:36:17Douglas Murray?

  They're just, I'm so bored of these people. They're so ridiculous. Can't spend any more of my ti- life 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 hermaphroditic species, or that you can, that the clownfish is a useful species to interpret behaviour of human beings. Like, we can't go at this speed. No, no. Twenty years ago, at the dawn of the internet age, we had hoped that we would get so much farther in the 21st century.

• 1:37:02Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 1:37:15Chris Williamson?

  Emma Raducanu did an advert for HSBC recently, which you may have missed. HSBC rewrote three classic fairy tales. Their book's called Fairer Tales, and it shows that women don't need men at all. With financial attitudes shaped as early as five years old, the new book challenges traditional gender stereotypes. The new book, called Fairer Tales, princesses doing it for themselves, reimagines Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel as successful businesswomen, prince charming.

• 1:37:46Douglas Murray?

  Successful businesswomen, really?

• 1:37:49Chris Williamson?

  Prince Charming is erased as the main character. Emma Raducanu 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."

• 1:38:06Douglas Murray?

  That's a quote.

• 1:38:08Chris Williamson?

  Said the tennis player.

• 1:38:09Douglas Murray?

  That's the worst. I mean, I read Meghan Markle's book, The Bench.

• 1:38:16Douglas Murray?

  And that's worse. That's worse. Um, wow.

• 1:38:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Douglas Murray?

  Um, what an inspiring tale.

• 1:38:26Chris Williamson?

  Faire tales.

• 1:38:27Douglas Murray?

  Um, it's so.

• 1:38:27Chris Williamson?

  Princesses doing it for themselves.

• 1:38:29Douglas Murray?

  Have you seen the, um, the, uh, the, uh, the South Park episode of the, where, um, uh, Cartman wakes up? He has a dream, a nightmare.

• 1:38:37Chris Williamson?

  You told me about this at lunch yesterday. For the people that haven't seen it, what is it?

• 1:38:40Douglas Murray?

  Cartman, um, Cartman has, it has a nightmare. It turns out he's, it'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 Cartman wakes up from the nightmare. No. And his mother comes in, what is it? What is it? Are you having another dream where, here, once again, all my, all my favorite characters in, in the cartoons have been replaced by ethnically diverse women.

• 1:39:08Douglas Murray?

  And she goes, it's okay, Cartman. It's okay. Uh, the, the CEO of Disney isn't hiding under your bed.

• 1:39:14Douglas Murray?

  Would you check? Would you check? Would you check, mom? Okay, I checked. She's not there. I'm worried that she's gonna come out again. Replace 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, there was that rather unappealing, um, young woman who, uh, uh, was meant to be placed, well, is playing Snow White in the new Disney Snow White.

• 1:39:37Chris Williamson?

  Rachel Zegler.

• 1:39:39Douglas Murray?

  No, no, no, somebody else. And she.

• 1:39:41Chris Williamson?

  It is. Is it?

• 1:39:42Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Chris Williamson?

  And Rachel Zegler, Zegler. Well, she said, uh, Prince Charming wasn't a prince, he was a stalker.

• 1:39:48Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 1:40:04Chris Williamson?

  You think your sister's keeper.

• 1:40:08Douglas Murray?

  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 loved?

• 1:40:15Chris Williamson?

  Well.

• 1:40:15Douglas Murray?

  Make your boring movie about an inspirational tale of a woman who wants to start a business and then does and has some success. I mean, okay, make that into a film. Why do you have to go and ransack and rape all of, pillage all of the storehouse of stories that people like?

• 1:40:34Chris Williamson?

  Brett Cooper's playing Snow White for Daily Wire. Did you see that announcement?

• 1:40:37Douglas Murray?

  What?

• 1:40:38Chris Williamson?

  You don't have seen this, let me tell you. Jeremy Boring and Ben Shapiro are doing their own live action remake of Snow White with Brett Cooper as Snow White. Because she's like West End trained, right? So she's very well trained, supposedly a very well trained actor who can sing, apparently. Like the triple threat, podcast, act thing.

• 1:40:59Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 1:41:01Chris Williamson?

  And they announced it the other week. It's going to be coming out next year.

• 1:41:04Douglas Murray?

  God, I hope they'd slay Disney.

• 1:41:07Chris Williamson?

  There's a rumor that Disney has had to reshoot a ton of scenes, including all of the dwarf scenes, because originally the dwarves weren't dwarves.

• 1:41:16Douglas Murray?

  That's right.

• 1:41:17Chris Williamson?

  They were like a multi racial just group of different people.

• 1:41:22Douglas Murray?

  They were diverse ethnic women.

• 1:41:23Chris Williamson?

  It was the South. Thing again, 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.

• 1:41:36Douglas Murray?

  Oh.

• 1:41:36Chris Williamson?

  So they've gone full.

• 1:41:37Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, because I know that there was a, there was a revolt of the dwarves, which is something you don't hear every day.

• 1:41:43Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:41:44Douglas Murray?

  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 cert jobs.

• 1:41:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you'd have presumed that there should have at least been seven.

• 1:41:55Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:41:56Chris Williamson?

  Plus a stunt actor, stunt dwarf.

• 1:41:59Douglas Murray?

  Stunt, one to do all seven stunts.

• 1:42:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, you could have 14, I guess. It depends how, how demanding the acting.

• 1:42:06Douglas Murray?

  How much largesse you want to spread around the dwarf actor community. But yeah, the, the point is, is, is that there actually was apparently a rebellion about this because like, these are some of the few like dead cert roles we've got.

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, is this not the same, the, 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 a.

• 1:42:25Douglas Murray?

  Those people are such, I won't use the word. Yeah, I mean, that again, we haven't got time to go at the pace of these people. Acting is pretending to be other people.

• 1:42:38Douglas Murray?

  People will be shocked that most people who play hamlet are not themselves members of the Danish royal family.

• 1:42:46Douglas Murray?

  Welcome to the world of make believe.

• 1:42:49Chris Williamson?

  A charity shop in Swansea 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.

• 1:43:04Douglas Murray?

  When they say we want like your old books, your old toys, they didn't mean sex toys. I think that's a perfectly good policy for a secondhand shop.

• 1:43:12Chris Williamson?

  Customers were reminded.

• 1:43:14Douglas Murray?

  You don't want to be caught rifling through the secondhand dildo bin.

• 1:43:19Douglas Murray?

  You don't.

• 1:43:21Douglas Murray?

  What have they got in here?

• 1:43:29Chris Williamson?

  It's a redressing room. Customers were also reminded that the branch had CCTV so that these items can be traced back to the original owners.

• 1:43:37Douglas Murray?

  Oh. Oh.

• 1:43:39Chris Williamson?

  According to.

• 1:43:40Douglas Murray?

  So that means that you, there's like a, what's it called, that thing in Australia? The boomerang. That's a boomerang effect.

• 1:43:48Chris Williamson?

  You try and give your dildo away and it keeps coming back to you.

• 1:43:51Douglas Murray?

  Then it's back on your doorstep the next morning.

• 1:43:53Chris Williamson?

  God damn it.

• 1:43:54Douglas Murray?

  Why can't I get rid of this thing? Put it over the hedge.

• 1:43:57Chris Williamson?

  But it keeps landing in Barnardo's.

• 1:43:59Douglas Murray?

  And then they bring it back. It's a dildo that will never die.

• 1:44:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Douglas Murray?

  Well, thank you for that story. That was beautiful.

• 1:44:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, I've got another one.

• 1:44:08Douglas Murray?

  Is there a lesson we can take from this?

• 1:44:11Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I think just be careful where you put your dildos, really, is the meta.

• 1:44:14Douglas Murray?

  There's a moral of the story.

• 1:44:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah. Never leave your dildo in Barnardo's. Yeah, definitely not in the bargain bin. School in Lafayette has refused to celebrate Halloween because it isn't inclusive while going all out for LGBT plus history month. Is there much history with LGBT plus?

• 1:44:33Douglas Murray?

  There's gay history. I mean, there are lots of gay people in history and there is that, but it's also what we used to call history.

• 1:44:42Douglas Murray?

  There isn't much tea history.

• 1:44:46Douglas Murray?

  There's.

• 1:44:47Chris Williamson?

  Bee history?

• 1:44:49Douglas Murray?

  I mean, there are sort of, I'm a bit skeptical about bisexuality, but there's a bit of bisexuality in history, of course.

• 1:44:58Douglas Murray?

  But, I mean, again, these people are such ignoramuses, they never know anything. I can't tell you, Chris. I mean, I have to deal with some of this shit and. They just don't know anything and they keep record, it's like the Orwell thing. They keep reporting their so-called 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.

• 1:45:32Chris Williamson?

  We're here at ARC and we're going to be attending at some point this week. I can't remember, but the tagline is something about a better vision for the future, a more positive vision for the future.

• 1:45:41Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, better story.

• 1:45:42Chris Williamson?

  Better story for the future, sorry, Jordan. And what is your, or 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?

• 1:46:10Douglas Murray?

  Well, that's a particularly British view, of course.

• 1:46:12Chris Williamson?

  Very much, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:13Douglas Murray?

  If that guy's got something, it's because I've not got it.

• 1:46:16Chris Williamson?

  He's taken it from me.

• 1:46:16Douglas Murray?

  Taken it from me.

• 1:46:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but what's a more positive vision of the future?

• 1:46:20Douglas Murray?

  Well, one would be that we're not facing imminent apocalypse and catastrophe all the time from every possible direction. And particularly not ones that people have whipped up a new generation into a further over. I mean, I think 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 global climate catastrophe. I mean, every time there isn't an actual catastrophe going on in the world, our leaders go straight back to the climate catastrophe. Well, the climate crisis, they now call it.

• 1:47:02Douglas Murray?

  What is happening is not a crisis.

• 1:47:06Douglas Murray?

  It may be a problem to be managed, but you know, there's a luxury in calling such things a crisis. A crisis is like, my shoes are on fire.

• 1:47:18Douglas Murray?

  That's a crisis, not like it's possible that in forty years we'll need more A C. I don't see that as a crisis. But so, yes, but I think that in general, there are several things that are big stories, big narratives, people are being spun, which are incredibly innovating. That is, they sap energy out of the society and you can feel it. The hopelessness, if you tell young people they're not going to live into adulthood, they're all going to burn to death. The hopelessness of saying, you know, you can't change anything or that this is the trajectory we're on. I think that one of the other ones in the green stuff is that the hopelessness of

• 1:47:59Douglas Murray?

  saying to people effectively, you shouldn't leave any footprint on the planet. Including children. Including children. And just to put one thing out there about the hopelessness of that, I mean, there's this new thing that many cities have signed up to, including London, which is a future in which, among other things, we will not be allowed to move around very much and we will be allowed a flight perhaps every six years, I think it is. What's this? It's this cities, what's it called? I'm blanking on the name. It's this new proposal for cities in twenty thirty or something. Sadiq Khan has signed up London to it. It's one of these carbon neutral fantasies. No fun twenty thirty.

• 1:48:45Douglas Murray?

  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, apart from the fact that the airline industry is destroyed, is what it means is the cost of an airline ticket will be like forty times higher.

• 1:49:05Douglas Murray?

  But so they always assume you can do all of these things and nothing will change. But amazingly, you'll be able to put a rule like that in and you won't destroy the airline industry or whatever. But all of it is just so anti-human. I mean, it is so anti-human, like that the aspiration of human beings should not be to be born, fight against the patriarchy, leave no carbon footprint and die in the most ethically fine manner, preferably taken out at a Swiss clinic, you know, and then like burnt in a cardboard box. It's not a very heroic narrative, you know?

• 1:49:44Douglas Murray?

  And I think that actually we do orient our lives around stories and around narratives. And we should not have the eunuch narrative that I've just laid out. We should have heroic narratives. I mean, for instance, you know, the narrative of the 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 counterpart of the one I laid out earlier, which is the. You know, everything is going to happen if you go along this path of things other people have persuaded you to say.

• 1:50:29Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 1:50:48Douglas Murray?

  I don't know with that certainty. I don't know what will happen, but if I put one foot fairly sure 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.

• 1:51:33Douglas Murray?

  Just repeating like a parrot.

• 1:51:37Douglas Murray?

  In order to keep in with a group of people you shouldn't seek the affirmation from, you will live your life.

• 1:51:46Chris Williamson?

  Remember that the outcomes that most people get are ones that you don't want in any case. The average American is obese, divorced and with less than one K in the bank. So doing what

• 1:51:56Douglas Murray?

  Sobering, isn't it?

• 1:51:57Chris Williamson?

  Doing what everybody else does sounds like a very surefire strategy, but the outcomes are ones that you don't want.

• 1:52:04Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, well, I mean, and that can be the case 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 again, it's interesting. I mean, some of them are, there are ones that people apologize for as you talk to them. You notice that there's certain, normally these days, one of the biggest self-deprecating professions is lawyers. You say to somebody, what are you doing? I'm a lawyer. I think, why that?

• 1:52:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you spent five years in full-time education, three years in developing to

• 1:52:35Douglas Murray?

  And normally it's like they think, oh, well, it's not very interesting or something. But I think, why wouldn't you do something where you went, I am a lawyer. It's fantastic. I love doing this.

• 1:52:45Chris Williamson?

  That's British lawyers again for you.

• 1:52:47Douglas Murray?

  Well, no, I've seen Americans do that as well. My point is, is that they're financially well rewarded.

• 1:52:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:53Douglas Murray?

  You know, and there's, there's rules you can follow on that, like, 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. 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.

• 1:53:21Chris Williamson?

  Or you could go, you know that there are other options and other routes open to you that would allow you to also provide for the family you're providing for.

• 1:53:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Chris Williamson?

  The bravery narrative is definitely one that I think is lacking.

• 1:53:35Chris Williamson?

  And this risk aversion that we have, this young people getting their driver's licenses later than ever, most commonly living arrangement for men under the age of 35 is still living at home with their parents.

• 1:53:46Douglas Murray?

  It's just such such an awful stat.

• 1:53:49Chris Williamson?

  People going into full time employment later than ever. And I think about, you know, when we were, actually, no, you are the worst person to talk about this. You told me you didn't get your driver's license until some ungodly age.

• 1:53:59Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:54:00Chris Williamson?

  But most people couldn't wait.

• 1:54:03Douglas Murray?

  But I'm not risk averse. I was just lazy on that.

• 1:54:04Chris Williamson?

  They manifest similarly. Most people, 17 years old in the UK, drives license. I want to be free. I want to be liberated. I don't want to have to be asking mum and dad for lifts, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, there's not a, there's not a narrative of adventure.

• 1:54:21Douglas Murray?

  No. And I think that 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, you know, you are disproportionately likely to to live a more miserable life. I think probably both of us, to some extent, have worked our way out as we've done it. And, you know, trodden a path that's not completely clear. And if you said to me, what are you going to do in 10 years' time, Douglas, I couldn't particularly tell you. I'd tell you roughly what I'd like to do, but it's not entirely clear.

• 1:54:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:54:58Douglas Murray?

  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 lack of clarity on it is, should be energizing, I'd have thought.

• 1:55:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's what's exciting about it. 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.

• 1:55:37Douglas Murray?

  Well, look at, look at what happens, the narrative of leaving home, or leaving the village, or leaving the town. There's every reason not to go. Because if you go, you risk a lot of things. One of them is failing.

• 1:55:59Douglas Murray?

  And if you go and you fail, then you have to go back to where you were from.

• 1:56:07Chris Williamson?

  With your tail between your legs.

• 1:56:09Douglas Murray?

  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, this is a story as old as our species. They finally make it to the city or a large gathering place and they they make they make it there. You know, and 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.

• 1:56:50Douglas Murray?

  The millionaire's 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 mean, I don't mean that in a judgmental way in the case of the V E F A, but desperate.

• 1:57:13Chris Williamson?

  Your life.

• 1:57:14Douglas Murray?

  Yep. Very close to each other. And I suspect that both of these things uh fire up New Yorkers all the time.

• 1:57:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, you're getting to see how far you could go and how far you could fall. Showing in front of you all the time.

• 1:57:28Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a an interesting study by Candace Blake in Australia that looked at wealth inequality in local ecologies positively predicting

• 1:57:41Chris Williamson?

  self sexualization of women in online dating profiles.

• 1:57:46Douglas Murray?

  So I think I followed that.

• 1:57:48Chris Williamson?

  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

• 1:58:10Chris Williamson?

  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 the bottom end of the inequality distribution and instead they end up in the clouds where they've seen people's outcomes occurring.

• 1:58:30Douglas Murray?

  Well, of course, there are also people who fake it. So, I mean.

• 1:58:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the effective way to play the game.

• 1:58:36Douglas Murray?

  I was once in India and had a guy who I got talking to and I said, I said, we're talking about how easy or otherwise dating was in the outskirts of Delhi, which means the slums. And he said, the trick is, he did describe it as a trick, is that you, if you meet a girl you like, 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 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.

• 1:59:13Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 1:59:15Douglas Murray?

  And the idea.

• 1:59:15Chris Williamson?

  They have one good dating outfit and vehicle between 10 people.

• 1:59:18Douglas Murray?

  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 it was somebody else's shoes.

• 1:59:26Chris Williamson?

  Your shit shoes.

• 1:59:27Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. Which I thought was both horrific, admirable, he told it to me like that, and horribly recognizable. 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 entrap a mate, I think.

• 1:59:50Chris Williamson?

  People do a lot for sex.

• 1:59:52Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I know. I've seen.

• 1:59:54Chris Williamson?

  Douglas Murray, ladies and gentlemen. Douglas, I really appreciate you. What's coming up next? What can people expect over the next few months?

• 2:00:00Douglas Murray?

  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.

• 2:00:08Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you. Thank you, mate.

• 2:00:09Douglas Murray?

  Thank you.