DOUGLAS MURRAY | The Price Of Thinking Out Loud | Modern Wisdom Podcast 109

Douglas Murray is a journalist, author and an associate editor of The Spectator. What is the price of thinking out loud about the most inflammatory topics of our age? Gay, Women, Race & Trans make up the four chapters of The Madness Of Crowds and today Douglas jumps feet first into all of them. Expect to learn which chapters Douglas could have added to the book but didn’t, how the LGBTQ community are less united than you may think, why we should be skeptical about the number of gay stories in the press, why Piers Morgan seems to be in the middle of so many controversies, what Douglas thinks about Nicki Minaj shaking her butt in everyone's face and why the demands of men by women may be totally unrealistic. A massive thank you to all of you for your support over the last year as this episode marks Modern Wisdom's crossing of 1 Million Total Downloads!! This episode is brought to you by The 6 Minute Diary, get yours here - https://amzn.to/2ALGrnN #douglasmurray #freespeech - Extra Stuff: Buy The Madness Of Crowds - https://amzn.to/35egrPU Follow Douglas on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Douglas Murray?

  First of all, just because somebody is of a particular group does not mean they're right.

• 0:04Chris Williamson?

  Piers Morgan, that's brought up a few times throughout the book. Is it coincidental or does he just happen to imbue himself in these situations a lot?

• 0:11Douglas Murray?

  The references to him are not that obliging and he's definitely one of those characters who throws himself into things. In his case, with just, you know, glee. The moment when you're integrated really into a society is not when you get anything special or anything X or anything more. The moment when you're really integrated is when you rise, you just have to put up with the same shit the rest of us have to put up with. We're, we're, we're living at a stage where we might be among the first people in human history to have absolutely no explanation for what we're doing here. I'm now going to be accused of biphobia around all my other many, many crimes. But anyhow, ridiculous person who complains on the BBC that they are often ridiculed in public. And that's not nice, but I point out, if you're ridiculous, you will be ridiculed.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  I am joined by Douglas Murray, author of The Madness of Crowds and bestselling author of The Strange Death of Europe. Douglas, welcome to the show. It's been a great pleasure to join you so far. We've had a couple of, a couple of technical issues, but got through them fine. Um, and now we get on to the real issues. First things first, Madness of Crowds, your new book, four chapters, women, gay, race and trans. Each one of those is a nuclear warhead ready to come off underneath my foot. Um, how, how are we going to be able to navigate this conversation? And how also did you navigate this, uh, without getting blown up?

• 1:40Douglas Murray?

  Well, um, I, I don't know. I've survived so far, the book's been, been out a fortnight. I'm still here.

• 1:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Douglas Murray?

  Um, look, my, my, my view is, is that we, we've become in our societies really bad at having conversations. Um, we've become very bad at thinking because we can't think out loud. Or at least the price of thinking out loud has become. Potential total career and life destruction. So when people wonder why people don't do it, it's it's not hard to find the reason. I think that for some some reason in recent years, I noticed that these four issues in particular, there are others, but these four issues in particular were the ones which people just kept on. You know, the moment they knit the tripwire, it was just detonated.

• 2:33Douglas Murray?

  And I just found that really interesting also because I think all four issues are unbelievably interesting and and actually significant, I mean, have significant effects on people's lives and on our societies. So my view is that we've got this strange position in our societies at the moment where the only people who can sort of speak or think out loud are people who don't have any hierarchy above them, that's vulnerable to crowd stampedes and mobs and so on. So those of us who can think aloud, whether we're right or wrong, I don't know, but sort of have a disproportionate duty to talk and think and write.

• 3:16Douglas Murray?

  And so I decided just to take each of the absolute nuclear bomb issues head on and just go jumping on in.

• 3:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you certainly did. Were there any, I was going to ask you this at the end, but I'm going to ask you now. Were there any chapters that you could have considered adding that you didn't?

• 3:31Douglas Murray?

  That's a very good question. There were there were two that I could have done that I didn't.

• 3:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 3:36Douglas Murray?

  One, one was green.

• 3:38Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:39Douglas Murray?

  Which I have been becoming more and more interested in. And I think that there's whatever people's views about the about the nature of climate change and the best way to deal with it and so on. It's clear there is at this point an element of crowd mentality that's kicking in. And I suppose the other one that was that what I could have done, I thought about doing, but decided to put off to another day was mental health. Because I think that mental health in general is a fascinating, fascinating issue. It's come very fast. Into the mainstream and I think that's sort of, you know, good in all sorts of ways.

• 4:21Douglas Murray?

  But there are lots of issues around mental health that I'm very skeptical about. Not that, you know, we don't need to get into all of them, but I, I, I don't entirely share a lot of the presumptions of the age. And I think that it basically, it has some of the same attributes of the things I'm discussing here is that you get on to the thing and you don't know where to correct, or it becomes almost impossible to say stop at any point. And I tell you, I mean, with the mental health one, just not bang on, but one of the ones I noticed a few years ago was that there were certain mental illnesses that people clearly wanted to have and ones they didn't. Well, okay, sorry, you just invited me to jump into the entirely new atomic bomb, but I will, here we go.

• 5:05Chris Williamson?

  Let's do it.

• 5:06Douglas Murray?

  I noticed, for instance, speaking to doctor friends and everyone, that bipolar, this isn't to say that there aren't people who are bipolar, but that it was a good thing some people thought to have diagnosed.

• 5:20Chris Williamson?

  Similar to OCD.

• 5:21Douglas Murray?

  Right. And, and what's striking to me is that there are mental health afflictions that are just definitely not the ones that people would want, and they are under diagnosed by comparison. So schizophrenia, like, nobody thinks it's cool to be schizophrenic. And like, whereas on a date, somebody saying, and I, you know, have bipolar issues, it's not that everyone loves that, but there'll be some people who'll be like, you know, that's, whereas if you say, and by the way, I should tell you, I'm, I'm a schizophrenic.

• 5:56Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 5:57Douglas Murray?

  It has a different.

• 5:58Chris Williamson?

  It's the branding, right? It's, it's people talk about I'm OCD, but I'm really only OCD in the kitchen. You're like.

• 6:04Douglas Murray?

  Right, right. And also the general thing of, I've got mental health, as if.

• 6:10Douglas Murray?

  As if there's some kind of calling card.

• 6:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Douglas Murray?

  Uh, anyhow, so, uh, yeah, I, I could have done that, but I, I decided to put that off for another day. Um, and it's just, there's an entire book just on that.

• 6:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 6:22Douglas Murray?

  But I decided, I decided that the four I'd thought about most and the four I had been digging into most were, yeah, were gay, uh, women, specifically relations between sexes, uh, race and trans. And in a way, the last one of those was, was the most interesting for me because it's the one that we've been thinking about for the least amount of time.

• 6:43Chris Williamson?

  Mm hmm.

• 6:43Douglas Murray?

  And therefore, which I would argue we have run furthest and worst, uh, without having much questioning, actually.

• 6:51Chris Williamson?

  Removed from reality the most, would you say?

• 6:54Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, well, just that things get sort of waved by in the general discourse, which I, I don't think I necessarily buy. And, and, and, uh, I mean, the one that's come up in recent days again, thanks, thanks to Sam Smith, has been non-binary. And I, I just, I don't think there's any such thing. And, um, and, and it, on that occasion, it's, it's not for me to prove that there isn't. It's for people who say they are non-binary to prove to me that, tell, or no, just to tell me what it is. And they can't. They don't. They just say, shut up, bigot. And I'm not interested in that mode of discourse. So.

• 7:28Chris Williamson?

  Regardless of whether you think that argument does or doesn't have credence, it shouldn't be news. I think everyone should be able to agree. Like, that was so all over my Twitter that I just logged out for the rest of the evening.

• 7:43Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Chris Williamson?

  It's like, it is not a story.

• 7:47Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, well, um, the news websites are partly responsible for a lot of this. There, there's a, there's a feeling, I explain, as you know, in the madness of crowds, where I, I say there's sometimes when you feel the news isn't the news, it's about something else. It's some kind of re-education program. I notice this, because I happen to be gay, I could probably say this, where some heterosexuals saying it mightn't sound so good, but there are days when I wonder, how does it feel like to read the news if you're heterosexual? Because, um, there's so much about the gay thing. I mean, there was a, a very, very minor celebrity who had married his boyfriend, and it was front page news on the BBC website. He's a guy of such little consequence that, I mean, he's not even a well-known reality TV star.

• 8:33Douglas Murray?

  And he was like, why are you telling us about it other than to say gay wedding, gay wedding, gay wedding?

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 8:38Douglas Murray?

  And and that sort of stuff worries me because I think, well, that's there's stuff like that which I regard as being what I call the the possible over corrections, where to make up for something that was wrong in the past, i.e. homophobia, you over correct. And I think that's happened in a lot of the cases I write about in this book, a lot of the subjects I write about in this book. And I'm really interested in it because then the question is, if you've over corrected, how would you know? And how would you stop? And how would you get back to equal? Which is pretty much all I'm interested in.

• 9:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's you are right. Some of the examples that you use in the book, like in the business section of the New York Times.

• 9:18Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Chris Williamson?

  Japanese, the Japanese is a cultural approach to gay gay people in the in the workplace.

• 9:25Douglas Murray?

  The main, the first two pages of the business section in New York Times are about a gay businessman in Japan who came out and it wasn't a problem because they're not all that homophobic in Japan, Japanese workplace. Okay, that is the definition, I know from being a journalist myself, that is the definition definition of a non-story. Something happened in another country and nothing happened as a consequence. It's like, that's not new, that's the opposite of news. Have you heard? We've got a Canadian who doesn't like cats. Oh, anything happened? No.

• 9:53Chris Williamson?

  No, cats were fine about it and now everyone's got on with their day. Yeah, it's it's bizarre that. I don't really know, I don't really know sort of where to go with that. You are right, though, that the fact is over correction, that we're potentially moving towards a a situation where gay stories are being shoehorned into the press. One of the, one of the things that that instantly does is it down regulates the virtue or the integrity of any real achievements which are made by people that are gay. The same, the same thing as calling everyone a Nazi. It's like, if you call everyone a Nazi, it loses its power. The same thing as if, if, if, if a gay, if a gay person in Japan being gay is worthy of being in the news, then what happens when something really newsworthy happens? It's like, oh, well, whatever, mate.

• 10:39Douglas Murray?

  It's, it's, it's like the thing of first woman or first ex of race in a particular role.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Douglas Murray?

  There are definitely times when it makes sense, but there are times when, you know, it's, I say, I say to the women chapters, I. There were times in recent years when you wouldn't have thought that, for instance, in Britain, we lived in a country with a female head of state, a female prime minister, female heads of Supreme Court and so on, and just, you'd thought we lived in some Margaret Atwood novel, judging by the way in which it's being written about. And you sort, yeah, it's not, like, we have women inside, we know that. Like, what are you doing other than, at some level in the media, and I show how the tech companies have done this too,

• 11:27Douglas Murray?

  in some way, sort of correcting the public, yes, telling us, or saying, this is another way of looking at it, saying, I dare you, I dare you to mind. The sort of Greta Thunberg phenomenon as well. It's like, I dare you, go on, go on, criticize a 16-year-old autistic kid, go on.

• 11:50Chris Williamson?

  You're totally right. It's like in volleyball, the, this, whatever it's called, that one before they come in and they hit it, it's the little throw up in the air, it's like, look, do you want to have a go at that? Do you want to have a go? And it's like, okay, we'll make this even less newsworthy. Do you want to have a go at that? Because if you do, I'm immediately going to be able to say, you fucking bigot, not, I wrote a shite story.

• 12:16Douglas Murray?

  And as it happens, the only people in the world who jump up and hit that ball are all mates of mine.

• 12:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they are. They are. They're the, whatever, like, the striker or whatever you're having volleyball. There'll be some volleyball people listening who are tearing their hair out because of how little we know about volleyball.

• 12:33Douglas Murray?

  I'm absolutely winging this. The limit of my knowledge.

• 12:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, absolute sort of domain of competence. I was gonna wait for this as well, but I've wanted to ask this, this question as well since reading the book. Piers Morgan, right, gets brought up a few times throughout the book. Is it coincidental, or does he just happen to embroil himself in these situations a lot? What the fuck's going on with Piers Morgan?

• 12:57Douglas Murray?

  That's a very interesting point. I actually saw Piers Morgan this morning because I was doing his morning show. And he, uh, his wife wrote a very nice column mentioning my book the other day. And I thought, okay, she's read it. I wonder if he has, because yes, the references to him are not that obliging. And unfortunately, this morning, I went with a copy of the book and at the end of the show, just we finished recording, Pierce said, is that one going spare, Douglas? I said, uh, yeah, can I have it? I said, yeah, no, of course. And I thought, oh, maybe I should have taken that page out, but never the, I didn't really, no, but he, um, yeah, it is actually coincidence in a way because, I mean, he's obvious, whether one agrees or disagrees or likes or dislikes or whatever.

• 13:39Douglas Murray?

  I mean, he's definitely one of those characters who throws himself into things, in his case with just, you know, glee. But it does mean sometimes that people like that are sometimes there at interesting cultural turning point moments. And I think to the two times he comes up in the book, I don't want anyone viewing this to think this is like a biography of Piers Morgan. No, it's, I can, I can assure them that it definitely isn't. But the two times he comes up, um, it's because, yeah, he's sort of, he's thrown himself right into the middle of a culture war and something happened as a consequence. And, and it is interesting, there are figures, sort of slight lightning rods for good and ill,

• 14:17Douglas Murray?

  who you notice, yeah, crop up. Um, but I, I'm, um, one of the things I'm proud of about this book is that I tried to do everything from looking at the philosophy and deep ideas that cause some things we're going through, right up to, you know, what happened on The View or Good Morning Britain yesterday, because it's quite easy for people who love books, as I do, to think books create the world or, you know, massively influence them. They do have an influence, but so does television, so does pop music, so does, so does rap, so does like. Twitter. Twitter. And, and really the, the interesting challenge, which I hope I, I managed to rise to the occasion of,

• 15:01Douglas Murray?

  was to try to encompass all of that, say, you know, this is the era we are in and this is the madness we are going through. And to do that on everything from the level of the deep, deep ideas, all the way through to these television events, for instance, which have a massive impact on the culture, you know? If somebody is destroyed live on air for not saying the thing that nobody said till yesterday.

• 15:30Douglas Murray?

  Everyone learns. Everyone learns.

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  You're right. It's the BuzzFeed's 15 second clip, Piers Morgan destroys homophobic bigot live on air. There was a guy who was doing gay conversion therapy is one of the examples in the book. And one of the things that I thought was very interesting, you have this quite balanced view. You went to go and see his particular film and Piers Morgan had annihilated this guy live on air.

• 16:00Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  But this particular individual wasn't working with anyone who didn't come to him. Wasn't saying that it was, he wasn't making a value judgment on gay or not gay. He was simply offering people a service for, that, that wanted to become straight. And you're totally right. This, that was the little ball in the air and Piers Morgan just came in and hit the bigot button.

• 16:19Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 16:19Chris Williamson?

  Immediately.

• 16:20Douglas Murray?

  That's right. And I actually, I felt sorry for the guy in question. I mean, I, I, I caveat this a lot and I say like in a different era, if he'd have had more power, I wouldn't have liked to have necessarily had him in any kind of control, this guy. But if, um, look, I mean, if you live in a free and liberal society, then, you know, what's goose for the, what's it, what's source of the goosey source of the gander or whatever it is. You can't just change one set of demands of a society and then just demand a new set. And you've got to express tolerance even to very, you know, things you disagree with a lot. And I say that as long as, as long as that, that, that group, I don't like what they do.

• 17:01Douglas Murray?

  But, uh, I don't, I don't think that, that I want to look at their ideas. I want to weigh it up. And then I can come to my own conclusions. But yes, I'm very suspicious of this thing where people just are brought on air to be shouted at and told they're bigots and then waved off into the distance.

• 17:19Chris Williamson?

  Why, why do we need to be tolerant of other people's views?

• 17:23Douglas Murray?

  Well, the main, the main reasons are, the classical reasons for it, that certainly in the tradition of English liberty is, is, which is sort of the one that became the idea in America as well, is that you need to hear other views, in fact, you specifically need to hear the, the views which are the minority views. Because first, basically, the first reason is that you might be wrong, and if you are wrong, you want to have access to the correction to your error. And even if you're not completely wrong, you might be wrong in part, which, I mean, my own experience in life is that that's happened quite often.

• 18:04Douglas Murray?

  I've, I've had a presumption and, and quite often, that, that whole process, it's inevitable that we don't like to do it because it's, it's more work to, to correct your opinion when you're wrong. I mean, there's even fascinating studies, there was a fascinating study at Harvard that Cass Sunstein and others did a few years ago, that showed that, you know, we might think that when somebody's wrong, literally has the wrong view, that, that it's a fact they are wrong about, and they meet the correction to the view. We might think, we tend to think, that, that you would just say, oh, I, I see, I didn't, didn't realize I was wrong, but as anyone who's had a boyfriend or a girlfriend for a long time will know, often it doesn't work like that. They dig their heels in even harder.

• 18:46Douglas Murray?

  You don't immediately say, darling, I, I absolutely see your point, thank you. Yep. You know, you, so, and actually, the, the, the studies show that people double down on their error. Mm-hmm. But anyhow, my point is, is that that's the first reason. You might be wrong and you should correct it if, if you are actually wrong. It's for your own good, as well as the good of society, that you, that you don't go around in error. But the second reason, actually, the second broad reason, which is really interesting, is, is that even if you're, you're not in error... And the other person is, being reminded of it helps you keep your own knowledge of why you're you're in the right, right? So it's like a like a knife sharpening. Well, we're not allowed to use metaphors anymore, are we?

• 19:30Douglas Murray?

  But but but so scrap that. That's obviously an incitement to kill or something. But but anyhow, but but but but it's it's a way to keep our brains honed to to know that we don't slip into dogma. That's what John Stuart Mill said about it, that we we avoid slipping into dogma. And the reason why it's worth not slipping into dogma is just that you end up becoming lazy and unable to defend things you really need to defend. And I think our society is, I say this, and I quote G K Chesterton, as well as Nicki Minaj in the epigraph, to say, to say that our our era is, I mean, is filled with dogmas. And we pretend it isn't, but it really is. I mean, there's a lot of dogmas in our society.

• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  One of the things that you bring up right at the beginning is that you say that the grand narratives that we used to identify with, that the root cause of this crowd derangement is the collapse of all of our grand narratives. Why is that enabled this this broader situation that we're seeing in front of us? Because this crosses all of the, it's enabled the gay, the trans, the the the race discussions to be so sort of visceral.

• 20:37Douglas Murray?

  So my my feeling is that we, look, there's something incredibly deep has happened underneath our societies, which we're in, if not in denial about, we don't face up to, which is, we're we're living at a stage where we might be among the first people in human history to have absolutely no explanation for what we're doing here. And no story to tell about what we should do. Other than, I know, there are narratives, they're pretty weak ones, I know, accumulate as much money as you can and enjoy yourself. There's one.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Gain some Twitter followers.

• 21:15Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, it's it's not the worst idea in human history, but it's a it's a fairly shallow one. As I say, I mean, this this paucity of ideas, and I say it's it's obviously the consequence of the collapse of religion, which is pretty much an irreversible issue now, and the collapse of organized religion, the collapse of all major political ideologies in the 20th century, other than.

• 21:41Douglas Murray?

  The present structure, which is a, you know, broadly a liberal state of the capitalist economy. And I think that in the last ten years, basically in the wake of the two thousand and eight financial crash, a lot of confidence, self-confidence was lost in capitalism, which is, I think, a disaster in all sorts of ways because it's, you know, as like Churchill famously said about democracy, it's the worst system apart from all of the others. And, and we've, so we're in this strange position where we've really run out of things to believe in and we sort of pretend that, well, just find your own meaning in the world. And that's one of the reasons why, as I say, I mean, I think that it's very understandable

• 22:24Douglas Murray?

  that people then get caught up in, in new ideologies of this. And my view is that the social justice movement, intersectionality, all this stuff, is a version of, it's a, it's a way to give life meaning. And the problem with it, among other things, is that all of these things, equal rights for women, equal rights for sexual minorities, equal rights for racial minorities and so on, are very good things and they are the products of liberal rights. But we've tried to, instead of being the products of them, it's like we've flipped the whole bar stool around and trying to sit on the products of the right. And it, it, it doesn't support itself because as I, as I show in each chapter, each of

• 23:08Douglas Murray?

  these, not only are each of these things, gay relations between sexes, race and trans, not only are they going against each other in very interesting ways, trans against women, trans against gay and so on, but, but they each in themselves are more unstable than we're willing to admit. So for instance, we still don't know very much about being gay, we don't know quite what causes it, and there's been this study that's just come out since my book came out, which sort of vindicates what I say, which is that it's a bit more, it's a bit more complex than we, than we, we pretend. Relations between the sexes and our attitudes as a society towards women in particular are very contradictory and we pretend they're not.

• 23:51Douglas Murray?

  So we pretend that women are simultaneously exactly the same as men and magically better on occasion.

• 24:00Douglas Murray?

  And we just decided to hold that idea. And with race, we are very, very unsure for good reasons, for good reasons, because who wants to open that up really? Well, a lot of people, it turns out, but I explain why I think that's going to be risky. And then you have the trans one, and that's just really, really uncertain and really, really not something we know enough about, or say not as much as we're pretending. And, and so I'm just saying, let's lean on all of these things a little less. Let's not make everything about these identity issues. Let's,

• 24:40Douglas Murray?

  let's try not to lean as much as we are on them and try to get back to what I thought was the aim, which was equal, not better, equal, and focusing on the content of people's character.

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  You make a, an analogy between Martin Luther King and his, the content of someone's character, not the color of their skin, which has that, if there was a Barstool analogy to be used, it's that now, right? That it is all about the color of someone's skin.

• 25:13Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  And then on top of that, are they gay? And are they, did they used to be a man?

• 25:19Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:20Chris Williamson?

  And then how many more of these can we layer on top? That's how Barstool's been flipped, right?

• 25:24Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, and I, I think this is just all profoundly dangerous.

• 25:29Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 25:29Douglas Murray?

  Profoundly dangerous. Well, because first of all, just because somebody is of a particular group does not mean they're right. Or indeed, it doesn't always by any means, if, if ever, mean they have a particular right to be heard. It's true that you wouldn't want a conversation between a hundred people about women and none of them to be women.

• 25:51Douglas Murray?

  Although the Catholic Church has tried that amount, but more than a hundred, you get it right. But but generally speaking, we recognize that that that people do bring contributions, right? We're just not entirely sure what and what the what the particular mix is that's needed. But nevertheless, there isn't a particular virtue you bring by being of a characteristic. There's a very brilliant young American writer who happens to be black called Coleman Hughes, who who mentioned this in an essay a while ago, and I quote him in the introduction, that he said that when he was at university quite very recently, I think maybe he still is in America, some of his contemporaries treated him as if he

• 26:32Douglas Murray?

  had a special moral insight for being black. Well, I think some black people obviously will have special moral insights, just like people of all sorts of backgrounds and skin colors will. But but just being black in itself doesn't doesn't bring that. In the same way that we all know, I mean, just because you're a man or just because you're a woman does not mean you have a magical virtue or insight. There will be things you notice and there'll be things you can see. And but but that sort of it's that all depends on the individual. It's like if you said, I just think that women are so clever, or something you say, what do you mean? What do you mean? It's like saying, I think men are all clever.

• 27:15Douglas Murray?

  Like, what are we talking about? It's just there's individuals, you point you to plenty of brilliant women, like I can point you to plenty of brilliant men, plenty of brilliant black people, as well as plenty of brilliant white people. But why would you be doing these categories? What do you think they bring? And I think in each of them, it's very strange. It's almost like we in in the course of my lifetime, actually, I've only just turned forty, but in the course of my lifetime, we've it's almost as if on these things, we've gone past equal and overcorrected slightly, as if because men and particularly white men have had, you know, certain advantages, I think there's a lot to dispute in that

• 27:57Douglas Murray?

  interpretation, but that for a bit, we'll be mean to them. We'll make white people feel a bit of the racism that some of them have expressed in the past to other people in order to make up for the past.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  This compensatory mechanism.

• 28:17Douglas Murray?

  To compensate and if it's the same thing with it's not enough that women are equal. We should also punish men a bit. And on each of these, I think, well, there are a set of questions, aren't there? How would you know when you've overcorrected? Who would announce it? What would the signs be and how would you get back to equal? And are you sure you could? Are you absolutely sure you would know how to orient yourself? It, I mean, there being by that point, among others, careers and jobs and pensions of people who are very happy with the overcorrection.

• 28:55Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh. Yeah, there's a quote from your interview with Candace Owens, where one of you says that after a while, when I think she's referring to black people and she says, after a while, being treated as special as black makes being treated normal feel like a being undervalued.

• 29:12Douglas Murray?

  Right. I had a, I had an Irish immigrant friend, one of my best friends died some years ago, who you had a beautiful phrase on this. He's, he used to say about integration, he used to say, the moment when you're integrated really into a society is not when you get anything special or anything X or anything more. The moment when you're really integrated is when you rise, you just have to put up with the same shit the rest of us have to put up with. I like that.

• 29:42Chris Williamson?

  But it's indifference, isn't it? It's the same thing as we do, we do a relationship series and we were talking about how to get over someone. And I was saying that the ultimate, ultimate conclusion to a relationship and any residual feelings for your ex isn't hatred or resentment, it's indifference. It's seeing them in the street and feeling nothing. That, you know, that, that to me is completing it. Some people may be able to actually continue on with nice memories of their ex, but that indifference that again, you're seen just judged on the basis of your character. So I want to, I want to jump onto the women thing because the Nicki, Nicki Minaj quotes throughout just had me, I absolutely loved that. But before we did that, I only realized.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  Upon reading this book, because I haven't looked that much into LGBT recent history, when did gay rights get like amalgamated in with LGBT? And does that?

• 30:39Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Chris Williamson?

  Is there a, I don't know whether you know, you're not, not exactly like tip of the spear of like the gay movement or whatever, it doesn't, not that you're the representative. But I wonder, I wonder how gay people feel about having to have their movement adopted amongst this broader group of people. It used to be gay rights, and I remember, I'm thirty one, I remember when it was gay rights.

• 31:00Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 31:00Chris Williamson?

  I don't remember when it became LGBT.

• 31:03Douglas Murray?

  Well, it's the beef history, as what Dave Chappelle refers to as the alphabet people in his recent show, is, he's actually, he has a very good summary of what I, part of what I say in the gay chapter. Basically, the gays and the lesbians got together and they didn't have much in common, other than the fight for lesbian and gay rights.

• 31:30Chris Williamson?

  The fact that none of them were interested in each other.

• 31:33Douglas Murray?

  Yes, I mean, it's a really, I love the sort of presentation of the LGBT community, as if like, the gays and the lesbians never meet, they have nothing, nothing to say to each other.

• 31:45Douglas Murray?

  And in my opinion, my experience, the lesbians all find the gays ridiculous, because they think they're essentially sort of silly and obsessed with sex and lots more. And the gays think the lesbians are kind of dowdy and boring. And that's the, I'm not saying this is my view of it.

• 32:06Chris Williamson?

  I know, I just, I love, I love the, I love the interplay of the politics, it's great.

• 32:11Douglas Murray?

  So anyway, but the point is, is that no one ever talks about this, but basically the Ls and the Gs didn't get on at all, really, ever, and had nothing in common. And then the Bs came along, and nobody quite believed the Bs existed. And I think there's still a lot of doubt about that.

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 32:27Douglas Murray?

  Well, to put it another way, most, most men who say they're bisexual, women don't then. Women almost never cool with that. And the gays think that's just somebody who hasn't made their mind up yet. And whether that's right or wrong, I'm now going to be accused of biphobia around all my other many, many crimes. But anyhow, and then the Ts come along who have absolutely nothing in common, apart from also some suspicion from wider society. And the Ts morphs in the space of a few decades from dressing up as something, some of the clothing of the opposite sex to full on sex changes.

• 33:09Douglas Murray?

  And this happens incredibly fast now to this position where people say there are people who are born transsexual, which is, as I say in the trans chapter, it's all really fascinating, but it's by no means as clear as that. But by the way, I also say that the Ts run against the Ls and the Gs. And that's overwhelming. Well, now if a child is diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is a really troubling whole business this. Eighty percent of children diagnosed as having so-called gender dysphoria will grow up not to have it. I.e. they will grow up to be straight or gay. And a lot of gay men and women look at that and they think, whoa, that could have happened to my younger self.

• 33:53Douglas Murray?

  You know, the sort of tomboyish lesbian might have been told, actually, you're a boy. And we're going to give you hormone therapies and block your puberty and then you can have an experiment, you know, medically on you and a bit later and then. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I mean, that is really, there's like a lot of.

• 34:10Chris Williamson?

  Totally right.

• 34:11Douglas Murray?

  There's a lot of tension there.

• 34:12Chris Williamson?

  Pushing people towards the extremes. I brought this up with Zuby, that I don't, I don't remember the last time I heard tomboys. Like, there's no such thing as a butch girl anymore, or like a girl that likes to do sports. There's a future boy trapped inside of a girl's body.

• 34:27Douglas Murray?

  And, and, and one of the strange things, you see, one of the strange things, I mean, like LGBT, that's a bloody minefield. I mean, as I said, that's just one great big contradiction there. But it's much worse when you see what the T does to the women, because. Women have spent decades fighting not to be judged according to male standards, among other things. And then when trans comes along, people who were born men say they're women and quite often do a lot of things and approximate women in a way that is highly offensive to women, highly offensive to women.

• 35:07Douglas Murray?

  For instance, I give an example in the book of, well, one second way feminist in Britain described as, you know, the assumption that a woman's natural body shape is that of a sort of Brazilian transsexual, you know, all, all big breasts and sort of horny and, you know, and all that. A lot of women are like, that's exactly the kind of sexual objectification of, by men of women that we were trying to get away from.

• 35:32Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 35:33Douglas Murray?

  And so anyhow, all of this, the point is, all of this is just a bloody great big mess. It's much messier than everyone pretends. They're like, oh, all of this interlocks and if we can tackle trans rights, we can also address women's rights. Go, no, they might go like that, like that, and just keep happening like that. There was, there was an event the other day in the UK, there was a meeting of feminists, British feminists, and they were barracked by trans activists outside, the police were protecting the trans activists. And these people who were men until quite recently are banging on the windows, intimidating the women inside. And it's like, trans rights. Yeah, I was like, what? In what other situation are the men allowed to intimidate the women other than if the men say they're now women?

• 36:16Chris Williamson?

  When they wear heels, that's why.

• 36:17Douglas Murray?

  When they wear heels. Uh, yeah.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  That's exactly when they're allowed, unless they take them off and then start using them as a weapon.

• 36:25Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, this is like, this is really messy and everything in our day says all of these things are linked and it's really straightforward. And I'm, I'm, I'm kind of pissing on that party in this book, among other.

• 36:38Chris Williamson?

  There's a number, there's a number of parties getting pissed on in the book. Yeah, there is.

• 36:41Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  Great. Um, I want to move, I want to move on to Nicki Minaj, just because she, she just, first off, she fascinates me. Second, she appears a number of times in the book, but. You have this beautiful, this beautiful quote, which I think's hit on something that I've seen and not known what it was. Women can be as sexual as they like, but they cannot be sexualized and heaven help any man who responds.

• 37:05Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Chris Williamson?

  Um, could you just take us through that little, the Nicki Minaj video thing that happens before? Cause it's, it, it absolutely strikes at the heart of what I felt as a, you know, a young, single man for quite a while.

• 37:16Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I, I am, I'm really interested in these things in our age, which are basically impossible demands. Um, the most obvious one is that I write about is the insistence that, there's, there's this insistence that goes, you have to understand me and simultaneously says, you will never understand me. The same person can do both of those.

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Douglas Murray?

  All the time. And we have that everywhere in our society. Now, there are other things of just impossible demands. For instance, I say at one point, I cite a ridiculous person who complains on the BBC that they are often ridiculed in public. And that's not nice, but I point out, if you're ridiculous, you will be ridiculed. You, you can't escape it, other than by not being ridiculous. And my favorite impossible demand is the one that you just hit on there, which is the, the demand that is currently just very uncomfortably in the culture in relation to, the relations between the sexes, which is, yeah, women, women are allowed to be as sexual as they

• 38:29Douglas Murray?

  want, as sexy as they want, but must not be sexualized. And this, as I point out, is not possible. Now, does this mean that men can do whatever they want? Obviously not. Obviously not. And you see, this is one of the conversations that's so hard to have because somebody always leaps in and goes, oh, I suppose, I suppose you, you, you're just a positive.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  Victim blaming.

• 38:51Douglas Murray?

  You know, I always say, you think women should be raped? No, there are gradations between total chastity and rape, you know? That's how we're here.

• 39:08Douglas Murray?

  Otherwise, we wouldn't have Skype, we wouldn't have you, we wouldn't have me, all the nice people watching.

• 39:14Chris Williamson?

  It's just just a TV.

• 39:18Douglas Murray?

  But but it's a sort of it's a sort of dementing, you know, we don't allow ourselves to have this conversation. And my point is, none of this means that men can do what they want. But if a woman is entering the sex game by being highly sexualized, that, you know, and I'm talking about, the reason I give the Nicki Minaj example is because it's it's so overtly sexual. And and I particularly am interested in this video of Anaconda. I, by the way, the audible version of my book, I read myself, and it means that I read.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  Have to read the lyrics. Oh, that is amazing.

• 39:52Douglas Murray?

  Somebody has already put it into a video on YouTube.

• 39:55Chris Williamson?

  And cut the music over the top.

• 39:56Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:58Chris Williamson?

  Whoever that is, whoever that is, I salute you. Also, to the to the people who are listening, obviously, the link to Manistah Crowds, the book on Amazon will be in there. But I'm gonna put the link to the audible version as well, so that you have to hear.

• 40:10Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I, yeah, it's it's gonna be my party piece, I can see, even in the next couple of years. Go on, do Nicki, do Nicki.

• 40:18Chris Williamson?

  Do Nicki again, mate, yeah.

• 40:19Douglas Murray?

  But no, but the fascinating thing about this this this video, and I just I talked over a lot of straight trends and I I just. So what she does in Anaconda is, among other things, it's all completely sexual. I mean, just totally sexual, just her wiggling her butt and her friends wiggling their butts. And they sometimes hit each other's butts and they sing about each other's butts and their own butts. You get the gist. And and then, in case none of this has settled in, she then has a scene where she eats a banana, sprays her breasts with whipped cream and licks the cream off with one of her fingers, which is also obviously impossible to interpret. And then there's this really interesting last 90 seconds or so of the video,

• 41:03Douglas Murray?

  where she crawls on all fours into a sort of darkened room towards a very handsome, fit, black guy in a chair. And she just does everything in front of him. It's, you know, it's not just as it's not, some people say, oh, it's just like strip, it's like a.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  A lesk.

• 41:21Douglas Murray?

  It's, yeah, it's a, but it's not. She's she's all over his body. This is the thing, it she's wrapping her legs around him, she's wiggling her butt in his face. She's it's a total predatory thing.

• 41:35Douglas Murray?

  And towards the end of this interminable scene, the guy, you see, he's starting to, you know, and he goes eventually and touches her slightly on the side and she whips around and smacks his hand away and walks out. And obviously, the message of the video that Nicki Minaj is giving is, I can do all of this, but don't you dare think you can control the game. And this seems to me to be a dementing demand, a dementing claim, which is, apart from anything else, deeply unfair to men. Because the whole problem of relations like that is, when does the game become about that?

• 42:20Douglas Murray?

  When does it, when do we enter the sex business? When are we in that proximity? And, and the Nicki Minaj thing is, only if I get, lead you all the way there and give you permission all the time, all the way, but if I'm just enjoying myself in a skimpy outfit, wiggling my butt in your face, et cetera, et cetera, don't you even think that you still control the situation? I control it all the time, I the woman. And I think that is dementing and deeply unfair to men and not possible. It's not possible. And it's the sort of thing which our society is really bad at thinking about because we,

• 43:05Douglas Murray?

  as I say, we fall into these incredibly basic things. The woman always must do X or the man must always do Y. And you see, I think that one of the things that's causing so much trouble in our society is that simultaneously, we pretend that we know about things we don't. The trans one is the example I just gave, we just don't know very much. But simultaneously, we pretend not to know about things we all knew till yesterday. There is a massive amount of stored knowledge we all have, straight, gay men and women, a massive amount of stored knowledge we have about what is actually going on in these situations.

• 43:46Douglas Murray?

  And it's, it's complex, but it's not as complex as we're making it by putting these impossible layers on top. And and one of the, I just had one other thing, if I may, which is that one of the problems of this, of course, is in recent years, we've been talking about etiquette of sex, and particularly sex between the sexes, through the prism of Hollywood and celebrity. And it's just, should be clear to us by now, this isn't the best prism to see these things through. It's, I don't know, it's like trying to work out drinking etiquette from a

• 44:24Chris Williamson?

  Geordie.

• 44:25Douglas Murray?

  Football team, or a Geordie, or like, it's, or a Scotsman.

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 44:30Douglas Murray?

  I can say that.

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're allowed to say that. And I'm, I'm in Newcastle, so I'm allowed to say Geordie, so.

• 44:34Douglas Murray?

  Right. So, but, you know, th- this has become a real problem in our societies because, apart from anything else, I think, young men, young heterosexual men are being told things that are not possible to do and sustain. And, you know, and I, I spoke recently to a friend whose son had just, just left school. I said, and I hadn't seen the son for a while. Friends a bit older than me, and I said, oh, how's, how's the boy? And he said, good. I said, what does he think about girls? He said, there was nothing to do with them. And I said,

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 45:05Douglas Murray?

  I know. And I said, well, what, what, well, well, he's, he's not gay, is he? He said, no, no, no, he's okay. So it's just, they're more trouble than they're worth. So it's just, he thinks they're a nightmare. And I've come across that quite a lot, actually, because it is, it is being made harder than it needs to be made.

• 45:27Chris Williamson?

  I think the, the relations between the sexes has definitely got a lot less exciting. Um, the, the, you remember flirting? Do you remember when flirting was a thing?

• 45:36Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 45:37Chris Williamson?

  It's the same as, it's flirting's the same as tomboys and emos. Remember emos? Where have they gone?

• 45:42Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Chris Williamson?

  Where are emos at? I haven't seen an emo in like a decade.

• 45:44Douglas Murray?

  I don't miss them, I have to say.

• 45:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, fair enough, but too much eyeshadow. But anyway, you get me, like, you, you, all these things, like, they feel like fucking nostalgia now.

• 45:52Douglas Murray?

  I know. Yeah, no, flirting, flirting is an amazing one because there's a load of thing. Oh, we just had this, by the way, in the UK today, about the ridiculous claims that our Prime Minister once put his hand on a woman's leg 20 years ago. And this is the headline. This is the headline on the day we're, we're speaking. The number one news item. And not like there's much else to talk about in the world, is there? But, you know, there's this strange thing where I mean, the point is, this is so complicated because, again, we keep having this stuff out on that sort of level. The former Defence Minister, Michael Fallon, had to resign. And like, being the Defence Minister is a really serious job. It's not like agriculture.

• 46:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, transport, yeah.

• 46:34Douglas Murray?

  No, but I don't know, transport. I shouldn't say, oh my god, I get the farmers are gonna be off. I know agriculture is the most important one. No, no, they're transport people I don't mind losing. But it's not like transport. It's like, you're a Defence Minister, you've got part of the control of the nuclear capability. You could destroy Paris if you wanted. You,

• 46:53Douglas Murray?

  no, but it's a serious job.

• 46:55Chris Williamson?

  He's embroiled, he's embroiled in touching a woman's leg or something.

• 46:58Douglas Murray?

  And, and, and, and somebody, as it happens, who I, who I know, a journalist in the UK, had told the story some time before that he touched her knee or something. And she'd said, again, not all women can do this or want to do this. It's not to say this is always good, but this, this woman, you know, said, if you keep your hand on my knee, I'll sock you in the bloody face or something. And he took his hand off pretty fast. That was it. That was it. And then, you know, fifteen or twenty years later, the story came out again, he had to resign. I mean, it's just, in a way, it's a sort of very British sex scandal. There's no sex. It's like liberal Democrat sex scandal. They're always that, like that. There's always like, a fat man asked a woman for coffee and she said no, and that was it. And then

• 47:39Douglas Murray?

  he has to resign. And that actually happened. That actually happened with Lord Renner. Anyhow, the point is, is that these are, people look at this and they think, what exactly are the rules? And the answer is, we're making them up as we go along, which is not uncommon, but we're making up rules that are completely contradictory. And I give the example in the book of like, what are you to make, growing up, of the fact that you are simultaneously told that women must always be believed?

• 48:11Douglas Murray?

  And the most popular book for women in recent years are the Fifty Shades stories where women have rape fantasies. Like, growing up is hard anyway. And these levels of not being able to discuss things mean that people just see these totally contradictory messages in the culture. And I don't blame them for being utterly bemused.

• 48:40Chris Williamson?

  And you know what the solution is? The solution's that of your friend's son, which is just to exit, to just be like, you know what it is? I can't do any sense making. I either don't have the desire or the capacity, or the fucking sanity to spend my time thinking, trying to work out where the rubber meets the road to this issue. So do you know what it is? It's simpler for me to simply not engage.

• 49:07Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 49:08Chris Williamson?

  Recently, I got asked to do a job for a particular company as a brand ambassador. As a part of this, I went on a training course with them. And the training course, I run nightclubs in Newcastle. The training course was about sexual discrimination and sexual predation in nightclubs. Now, as a nightclub operator, that's something, that is the calling card that you do not want. You do not want that that story in your in your venue. And the group that were that were giving the presentation,

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  throughout the whole course, there was this odd undercurrent where it was supposed to be equal between what men were doing and what women were doing. It was supposed to be that every example, for instance, would you throw this woman out of your venue if she did X, Y, Z? And one of them was like, lift her top up and expose her breasts to a group of men. And the equivalent for the man was like, take his pants down and expose his penis to a group of women. And in the in the bureaucratic elements of it, it was even.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  In the rhetoric and narrative based elements, it was exclusively women being the subject of some sort of predation by men. And I, down the road from this, I actually went through the course, then sent an email to my agent and said, I'm really sorry, I, I just can't, I can't get on board with this. I think that what they're doing is great, but I'm concerned, I'm concerned about the delivery. And I think that it may make me out to be a target, which I don't think is, is quite right. Cause I don't think they've quite got the course correct yet. Email them and say, sorry, sorry. But one of the things that I brought up while I was having this big course, and it was run by, there was, I was the only man in the room. And I think of

• 51:00Chris Williamson?

  the five or six women, there was only maybe one that was straight. So there was a number of different layers of narrative going on there as well.

• 51:07Douglas Murray?

  Wow, that's a, that's a high ratio. Yeah.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  Yes, for sure. And the, one of the things that got brought up there was about what women wear on nights out.

• 51:16Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  And about how they dress. And I was trying to say, I was trying to be as empathetic as I could. And my empathy is crippling. I was trying to be as empathetic as I could. And I was saying, well, look, like if I had a daughter, I would tell her to dress carefully. That would be the terminology that I would use.

• 51:35Douglas Murray?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 51:36Chris Williamson?

  Dress, just dress carefully.

• 51:37Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:38Chris Williamson?

  And immediately, there was a quick sort of head snap to the side, where it was like, well, why? Well, if I, if I need to explain why, then I, I get pushed down this hill and at the bottom of that hill is a bog of bigot. Yeah.

• 51:57Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, the bottom of his death. You, I mean, here's, here's one way. I, I, I try to, I try to get to where we need to get to, at least in having a reasonable conversation about these matters in wider society is, is there such a thing as a predatory female?

• 52:16Chris Williamson?

  So I know I learned on that course that there's no such thing as statutory rape as a woman in English common law.

• 52:24Douglas Murray?

  Right.

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  Which I never knew. There's sexual molestation or whatever the one down from that is, which would be the equivalent of a man putting anything which isn't his penis into a woman. But there is no, no such thing.

• 52:39Douglas Murray?

  But go, go up a stage from that to just normal interaction. As it were, non, non-physical interaction. Can women prey on men?

• 52:51Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 52:52Douglas Murray?

  Right. This is stored knowledge that we've pretended we don't have. Everybody knows it. Everybody. And it's unbelievably dangerous to talk about. This, I give the example in the book of the Indiana Jones films, one of the Indiana Jones films.

• 53:10Douglas Murray?

  There's a famous scene where the whole class of sort of very attractive young women all looking moonily at Harrison Ford and his teaching and, and they're all the sexy, hot, you know, archaeology guy, which is of course completely familiar in real life. And anyhow, he, uh, uh, he's giving the class and one of the women, or the girls, I mean, they are girls really in the class, has written "love you" on her eyelids and it's, and she blinks at him so he can see this. And I find this fascinating because this again, sometimes, sometimes it comes up as a meme online still. But everybody knew this type. It was so familiar as a type, the woman or even the young woman.

• 53:52Douglas Murray?

  Making a really overt play for the male. It's so familiar that it was in family movies.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  And what about the spinster with the toy boy?

• 54:04Douglas Murray?

  You know, and we sort of pretend that these types don't exist. We, we sort of denied ourselves access to archetypes that we pretended don't exist.

• 54:15Chris Williamson?

  It's unlearning, really important learning.

• 54:17Douglas Murray?

  Yes. Well, uh, because in, in these things, we're in the realm of, for a lot of this, you know, because within the law, as I was saying earlier, there's just, we're in the realm of manners. And the manners, manners are things that you, you're best trying to acquire as you go along from other people and learning from your elders and other things. And the elders at the moment are saying.

• 54:43Douglas Murray?

  We don't know what we know. We're not passing it on. Don't touch.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  Good luck figuring it out for yourself.

• 54:51Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, and and by the way, some of them are men.

• 54:55Chris Williamson?

  That's the note, isn't it? That's the be be home be home by one.

• 54:59Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, but it's just, as I say, it's complex. It's complex, but it's not as complex as we're making it.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  What do we do to move forward then?

• 55:09Douglas Murray?

  Several things. The first thing is we have to realise what's going on and like just just get out of it. We have to get out of this. We have to get out of this zero sum game. Particularly the zero sum game whereby in order for we think for women to do better, men have to do worse. Or for gay people to thrive, straight people have to do worse. Or for black people to thrive, white people have to do us. We've got to get out of this. This is just so unhealthy. It's it's a waste of individual life and it's a terrible opportunity cost for society. Because none of it is fixable, is my view. You know, there are things you can do worse and there are things you can do better, but we're never going to fix it.

• 55:55Douglas Murray?

  It there's never going to be the lovely interlocking nirvana that means that we all move to some perfect state. It's just not the case. So what should we be doing? And this is the really, this is this is the thing. And I think that a lot of clever people and particularly a lot of people who've had certain advantages in their lives are helped through this and they know how to get through this era. I give various examples of this.

• 56:22Douglas Murray?

  The sort of cuttlefish phenomenon among others, but my point is, is that there are people who've worked it out. And I'd quite like their knowledge that among other things, a lot of this is bullshit. To be more widely understood because we need to get out the other side of this in larger numbers. Now, my view is that this is, this is because it's partly just something for people to do. It's a, it's a lifestyle choice of its own and a hobby and a religion among other things. It's worth thinking, what, what, what should we be doing then? If we're not doing this, but let me put it this way. I mean, imagine if we actually solved the identity politics thing, which I say is not going to happen. And what would it look like?

• 57:07Douglas Murray?

  It would look like us saying, it's great. I've worked out where I am in the hierarchy this morning. And I'm allowed to speak between eleven thirty and eleven thirty-two. And you do that for some decades and then you die. Now, I'm not up for that. And I trust you aren't either. No. Um, now, what could we be doing? Well, um, I think we should be hugely ambitious and I don't have all the answers by any means, but I know that we should be much more ambitious than that in what we're going to do. I, we have the twenty-first century ahead of us.

• 57:48Douglas Murray?

  We have better luck than anyone in human history. Anyone. Not just anyone alive today, but anyone alive ever. So why would we be wasting our time playing identity, quick fix, politics? I would submit that we should try to get ourselves off this in order to dream bigger dreams, to do really meaningful things, to not work out what we shouldn't be doing and what we're not allowing ourselves to do and what we don't think is in our lane, but to break out of that.

• 58:29Douglas Murray?

  You know, the, the, something, uh, um, Jordan Peterson and I and others have discussed a few times in the past has been this strange view of life in this era, as if. As if the ideal life is to be harmless, like harmless from cradle to grave, not cause harm, at least I didn't emit any CO2 and I never, never upset anyone and I never spoke when I shouldn't have spoken and so on. I just think we've got to break out of that and say, no, no, the aim of this generation is not to just, is not just to be harmless is our highest aspiration. It's to be extraordinary, to be great, to be inventive, to be intelligent,

• 59:13Douglas Murray?

  to be loving, to be caring, to be great in all of our personal relationships if we can and recognize that we'll fail a great deal, but do as well as we can. And then in the rest of our lives, be extraordinary and, and, and great and do things that people will talk about for generations afterwards and look at with admiration. You know, we don't look at the great buildings of the past that have stayed standing and, and look at them with anything but awe. And I can't see that in this generation if, if our ambition is to look at our navel long enough to believe we've understood ourselves totally and then

• 59:56Douglas Murray?

  die. I see nobody standing, looking at a statue of that and think if anyone could do that in marble and thinking, those are the guys.

• 1:00:09Chris Williamson?

  Two thousand, two thousand nineteen really nailed it, didn't it?

• 1:00:12Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Chris Williamson?

  I get it. I, I, I agree. I agree. I, I think that when you think about how much energy goes into these issues, these non-issues, um, and some of the, first off, when you think about how much dilution of real issues is done by the non-issues. And then secondly, when you think about how much talent and cognitive power that could be spent on real, genuine, lasting, epoch world changing stuff.

• 1:00:44Douglas Murray?

  And, and, and just, and just, just, just another, one little thing on that, which is, you know, this whole thing of hold yourself back, stay in your lane, timidity is exactly the opposite. It's exactly the opposite of what successful lives look like.

• 1:01:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Douglas Murray?

  It's not, I wonder how I can make sure I don't veer out of my lane, but how can I burst out of my lane and into the world? How can I do something unbelievably meaningful and important to me in my life and that will benefit other people too? There's an aspiration, but it's entirely in contradiction to what we are told. So break out of the era, I'd say.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Douglas, today's been absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. The madness of crowds, everybody who is listening or watching, if you're on YouTube, the link will be in the show notes below. Where can people hassle you if they need to find you online, Douglas?

• 1:01:48Douglas Murray?

  I'm on Twitter at Douglas K Murray and I do have Facebook and things like that.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  You are not Douglas Murray three on Instagram, as I found out earlier on today.

• 1:02:04Douglas Murray?

  Oh, poor guy.

• 1:02:06Chris Williamson?

  That is a professional footballer at, I think, Washington State, but he's got a blue tick. So.

• 1:02:11Douglas Murray?

  There's, there's an ice hockey player who shares my name in Sweden.

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:02:16Douglas Murray?

  Because I used to have a colleague who used to check when people were saying things about me and I used to say, I don't really like to know about that. But she, she used to say, oh dear, what's he done now? Because it'd be like Murray smashes opponent and then grinds him onto the ice and go, oh, no, no, no, no, no, that's fine.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Well, obviously my, my name's Chris Williamson. So the number of anti Semitic accusations I've had, but I did, I did Love Island about four years ago. So I went on Love Island and I, I often post like, oh, my, my anti Semitic alter ego's at it again. And one of my friends, one of my friends commented on that below saying, I wonder when you get in the press, whether he says, oh, for fuck's sake, my Love Island alter ego's done it again.

• 1:03:02Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, but Douglas, thank you so much for your time. Book's fantastic. It's made, it's made a lot of sense to me. I hope it makes a lot of sense to everyone else as well.

• 1:03:11Douglas Murray?

  I hope they enjoy it.

• 1:03:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Douglas Murray?

  Thank you for the time.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  It's been great. Thank you.