Topics People Are Too Afraid To Talk About - Douglas Murray | Modern Wisdom Podcast 219

Douglas Murray is a journalist, author and associate editor of The Spectator. Gender, race & identity have been the most inflammatory topics of 2020, Douglas returns today in an effort to throw some sand on the fire of social justice. Expect to learn whether Douglas is bored of talking about identity politics, whether looting is an effective method for political change, whether Ben Shapiro is a better rapper, what Douglas' gym routine looks like & much more... Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 85% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Buy The Madness Of Crowds - https://amzn.to/35j0uus Follow Douglas on Twitter - https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #douglasmurray #socialjustice #chriswilliamson - 00:00 Intro 04:00 The Cancellation of JK Rowling 11:21 Why We Shouldn’t Focus on Cancel Culture 21:04 Hastening Change by Looting 30:43 What the Silent Majority Need to Speak Up About 50:15 Woke-fishing & Modern Dating 1:02:07 Are We Wasting Brainpower on Woke Debates? 1:12:01 Douglas’ Gym Routine - 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?

  Somebody did a video the other day from Portland, Oregon, of one of these parks where they've really done their best, you know, protesters. And it's just, it really does look like the apocalyptic wasteland they deserved. Just covered in piss and just people just lying zonked out on whatever illegal or legal drugs they've been able to get. And everyone just looks like they've pissed themselves and they've taken, all the statues are down, of course. The whole place is covered in plinths, beautiful plinths everywhere. Uh, no, but then, and all the plinths are covered in BLM graffiti and the state and police are this. That's what these people inherit and they deserve to inherit it. A urine stench, graffitied wasteland in which just zombies lie around until they die.

• 0:45Chris Williamson?

  I'm joined by Douglas Murray. Douglas, welcome to the show.

• 0:49Douglas Murray?

  Great to be with you again. It's been, uh, what, two, a year probably. Yeah.

• 0:53Chris Williamson?

  One year, one year since we spoke and it feels like-

• 0:56Douglas Murray?

  And you've done your ceiling.

• 0:57Chris Williamson?

  I've done my ceiling. So all of the people on the internet that were complaining and saying, what was that mould on the ceiling? It wasn't, it was candle soot. I went through a period where I loved Yankee candles for a while, but we're out the other side. But yeah, it was only a year ago, which feels like 75 years ago.

• 1:13Douglas Murray?

  Doesn't adjust, doesn't adjust. Uh, we're both looking okay despite that, I'd like to think.

• 1:19Chris Williamson?

  I hope so. I mean, I've lost an Achilles, but um, that's, that's really the only thing that's gone wrong. So at the, at the end of 2019, when The Madness of Crowds came out, I asked you what chapters you could have added, which you omitted, and you said mental health and green. What's your answer in 2020?

• 1:38Douglas Murray?

  I think I'd stay with that. Um, green in particular has been really doing well in the lunatic Olympics.

• 1:49Douglas Murray?

  They, they've, they've got a whole new wardrobe of lunacy. Uh, they've got new makeup that shows they're mad. They actually dress to say I'm mad. Um, so I, I do feel still a bit annoyed that I never did the green chapter. But as I say, there's, there's an awful lot of material in those guys and girls.

• 2:14Douglas Murray?

  I would observe simply though, that since we last spoke, everything I write about in The Madness of Crowds- Everything I do put in on gay, on women, on race and on trans has just

• 2:31Douglas Murray?

  which, you know, I could see coming. It was why I was trying to warn people about it. And but goodness, particularly in the last few months, so much more than I ever feared could happen this fast.

• 2:45Chris Williamson?

  Do you feel vindicated that you got it right or sad that it occurred as you prophesized?

• 2:50Douglas Murray?

  Do you know, I don't like vindication all that much.

• 2:52Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, it's good. You should try it sometime.

• 2:54Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, I mean, it's always nice when people point it out, but it actually doesn't feel that great that because if you say, look, here's this terrible thing that's coming towards you and then it happens anyway, you know, you feel like maybe you didn't warn well enough or you didn't warn, you know, clearly enough or something like that. But I might be overdoing what you can achieve in in in warning. But, you know, I do feel that those of us, and there are a number of us who said, look, dig down into these identity traits things and you won't heal society. You'll make it more discombobulated and eventually you'll make it more divided. And you're not going to solve it. You're

• 3:38Douglas Murray?

  going to make it worse. You know, a number of us said that, but, you know, too many people thought, no, we love the sound of the apocalypse you're talking about. Let's get there faster. Let's take the fast route.

• 3:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're right. They got first class. They went VIP upgrade. They got the trolley, the trolley service as well. What have we learned from J K Rowling this year?

• 4:02Douglas Murray?

  Wow. Well, who ever thought that the creator of Harry Potter would become Goebbels?

• 4:11Douglas Murray?

  I mean, the most unforgivable cancelled person. It's extraordinary. I never thought that the Harry Potter, or I mean, I never thought that the people who are great fans of J K Rowling would would turn on her this much.

• 4:29Douglas Murray?

  The only thing I I've ever seen that really that I can think of that it reminds me of was I once saw some footage from Trafalgar Square of some young girls who had stayed out all night waiting for Leonardo DiCaprio to come for the premiere of a movie. And it was raining and he didn't stay very long to greet them because it was raining. And I remember this footage of him saying, I hate him.

• 4:53Douglas Murray?

  And they'd turned from so devoted, so devoted, they had camped out and arranged their lives around the possibility of a glimpse and got to, I hate him, he's the nastiest man in the world in no time. And that seems to be what's happening with J K Rowling. Um, now, of course, not with all her fans. I don't I don't want to overemphasize it, but. You know, there is a portion of people who believe that the Harry Potter woman who they relied on all the time when they were growing up and who gave them all this, you know, great time uh, has become a Nazi when they weren't looking. And I don't, I should stress, I don't think she has.

• 5:36Douglas Murray?

  Uh, but there's a lot to learn, firstly, in the dementing tones of the time. Second, in the way in which public figures can just be made versions of them that have no resemblance to what they are, become, you know, uh, played out there in the public sphere. And then you get the very interesting other lessons. I I don't like this term cancel culture. I think it's sort of, uh, it's already stale and it's not quite accurate because, you know, J K Rowling hasn't been canceled or anything like that, you know, there's a bunch of very insane people who think that the Ichabod is too difficult for them

• 6:18Douglas Murray?

  to cope with in this life. And by the way, I mean. Because that was the attempt, the attempted walkout at her publishers, Hachette, was not because they didn't, the, I think, 150 or so people, mainly young, at Hachette, who said they couldn't work on the latest J.K. Rowling book and didn't want to be in the same places. They weren't publishing J.K. Rowling's big book of trans. It wasn't Chicks with Dicks by J.K. Rowling.

• 6:51Chris Williamson?

  Dumbledore and Harry Have an X-Rated Adventure. It wasn't that.

• 6:54Douglas Murray?

  No, it wasn't that. It was a new children's book to be called The Ichabod. And if you are an adult in the world and you can't be in the proximity of a children's book called The Ichabod, it's possible this world isn't going to be able to be arranged around you anymore. You know, that's a bad place to be. And so J.K. Rowling's story has lots of things to tell us, but one of them is what can be done by one person, just one person. Second thing is, we are learning lessons about who can be cancelled and who

• 7:33Douglas Murray?

  cannot, and the fact that, clearly, it matters that she makes money and that she has money. Now, that's not all a good sign, because it means that those of us who aren't multi-zillionaires are still vulnerable. And I wouldn't like to be in a position where only the very rich can survive attempted cancellation. But it shows that one person with a voice and with some guts, she certainly has that, can say, "Look, I'm not persecuting anyone. I'm just telling you, I'm not going along with the following crazy thing you made up yesterday." And I admire her for doing that. Yeah, she didn't have to get into any of this. She

• 8:17Douglas Murray?

  could quite easily have, you know, continued buying, you know, Harry Potter castle-sized houses and living very happily. Most people, most people would be very happy to have a quiet life. And and enjoy their their their their loot. But she she she's done this and I have all all respect for her for doing so.

• 8:37Chris Williamson?

  It's a sort of thing, her legacy in whatever form that will be, I'm sure that she is going to be remembered. You know, Harry Potter is one of the most popular children's series ever. And and really sort of was a pivot as well with regards to children's literature, I think, that was adult friendly as well. You know, like you had kids, they even did special adult cover versions.

• 8:59Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 9:00Chris Williamson?

  So that adults were less less embarrassed reading your kids.

• 9:03Douglas Murray?

  Very poorly of the adult. I read the children's editions. I thought very poorly of the adults who who thought they were fooling everyone by reading it.

• 9:10Chris Williamson?

  Still Harry Potter, mate. Yeah. But yeah, and you're right. She could have just quietly allowed that legacy to roll forward without doing anything to potentially upset the balance. But she decided not to.

• 9:21Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah. And I I just think that we need to reflect more on when things go well. You know, you hear an awful lot about, you know, when things are going badly. This has gone very well, you know. There was a fear around the time of the J K Rowling thing that maybe even making money for a company didn't protect you. You know, that look at Netflix. Netflix has been willing to to take financial hits in order to do worse programs so long as they're in the right political realm. I worried in the publishing industry that that would be the case with J K Rowling, but but fortunately not. Fortunately, it's still, you know, success still speaks. And I'm I'm delighted by the people, by the way, I don't

• 10:05Douglas Murray?

  want to be snotty about this, but some of the people who resigned, there were some people who resigned from her literary agency because the literary agent was now representing an anti-trans person. And I just, it was one of the funniest reads of the year, reading the authors who'd resigned from J K Rowling's literary agency. I I can tell you, her literary agent isn't any poorer.

• 10:32Douglas Murray?

  I'll just, I'll put it at its most diplomatic.

• 10:34Chris Williamson?

  The literary agents praying to their gods, thanking them that they've finally rid themselves of some non-selling authors.

• 10:40Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah. So, um, so no, but it's been, it's been a very, it's been a very good thing because I think we might have spoken about this when we last spoke, but you know, I, I've always said that cowardice is catching. And when a society sort of, you know, encourages people to be sort of cowardly and meek and shut up and all that sort of thing. And if the public figures all do that, then other people do it. But the reverse is also true. And if, you know, mainstream and totally responsible and respected figures like J K Rowling, uh, do, do this and fantastic. More, more, more men and women will say what they think and they won't go along with stuff just because they're told they have to, particularly when it's mad stuff that was just made up yesterday.

• 11:21Chris Williamson?

  So you've said cancel culture is a term that you're not super happy with. What is the cancellation sphere that's, that's out there in the world at the moment?

• 11:33Douglas Murray?

  Well, the, the clear one that does exist is the attempt to find people whose employment is vulnerable to mob stampeding. So, you know, somebody says something on Twitter, for instance, uh, in support of, uh, somebody that Twitter doesn't like and they, Twitter then finds where they work and, uh, you know, lobbies their boss until they're sacked sort of thing. That, that's, that's, that's the aim. And there's lots of sort of versions of that, um, lobbyist company, uh, pretend that the company's going to lose masses of money because it's just destroyed its market, you know, capability because everyone's unhappy with it. Um, that stuff does go on.

• 12:19Chris Williamson?

  But you're not happy with that being called cancel culture?

• 12:21Douglas Murray?

  Well, no, no, no, it's not that. What I'm, what I'm worried about is that we get stuck on it. Um, because I believe it's much more important to focus on what is winning.

• 12:36Douglas Murray?

  And what winning looks like. And, you know, there is a certain, you notice this in American journalism a bit more than you do here. There is a bit of, oh, I was so nearly cancelled, oh, I was cancelled. There's a sort of certain, you know, you always have it in writing, because writers are a very self-obsessed bunch and tend to think of themselves as being brave. I mean, you know, Mark Stein made a famous quip years ago, you know, like, writers are forever giving each other awards for bravery. And you know, you don't, all of the professions where they're, you know, like, you've got to run into burning buildings and save people, they don't spend all their time talking about bravery awards, you know. But writers are very big on bravery. And writers like, quite a lot of writers like the idea that they're sort of, you know, edgy and all that sort of thing. And so the

• 13:21Douglas Murray?

  idea of being cancelled is a little bit, you know, for them. I don't really care about that stuff. I care about people saying what they think. And I'm really, I really think that people should not pay so much attention to a very, very rarefied and demented minority of people. And I don't think we should give these people the right to dictate the cultural weather in any way, in any way. Why should a small demented group of people who believe that the big bearded man with a penis is a woman if he says he is, that they should dictate the cultural weather across the country, and make major authors have to fear for their

• 14:02Douglas Murray?

  careers, and make all politicians become gibbering wrecks when the subject comes up? Why should that be the case? Why can't we just have discussions out in a reasonable fashion, and, you know, advance your case to the best of your capability? But you don't do that. I think we've given, in issue after issue, very deranged minorities, minorities of minorities, the right to basically dictate the weather. And we don't need to. Because on any estimation, on any estimation, you know, most of those people are not doing that well. You know, the authors who were the anti-rolling people are not doing as well as her.

• 14:45Douglas Murray?

  So why not, you know, why not say, actually, the person, the point about this is, is to say, the person in your life you should want to be is J K Rowling, not just because you should want to be rich, but because you should want to be in a position in your life where you can tell the truth. That should be the position you aim for. And I'm worried that all of this sort of actually encourages people to say, the position I would like to sort of hold in my life will be the one where nobody notices me and nobody comes for me and I sort of get away with it and then die.

• 15:12Chris Williamson?

  How vanilla can I spend the remainder of my life? I would like to be somewhere in between the color eggplant and beige.

• 15:19Douglas Murray?

  Absolutely. On the, on the great color chart of humanity, human experience. And that's, but that's what, that's what, that's what they're doing. And I just, I think we should encourage people not, not to play that game.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  It's hard though, right? You've, you've hit on something there that people like yourself or Sam Harris or J K Rowling, by virtue of success or financial backing or a level of independence with regards to your platform or whatever it might be, have taken great, gotten great lengths to make yourself uncancellable. But not everyone has that luxury.

• 15:53Douglas Murray?

  Sure. No, no, I don't, I don't underestimate it at all. Just my experience in life is that I've always said what I think. And it's worked well.

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  Not a new, that's, that's the thing. I said before our first podcast, how do we get through all of these topics without stepping on a landmine? And you increasingly just sort of do a ballerina dance through this landmine back and forth every single day.

• 16:17Douglas Murray?

  I like to think it's slightly more butch than that, but, but I agree. It's something like, it's somewhere in that, yeah, yeah. Nureyev, Nureyev like leaps around. That's what you're, that was the image that was in your mind.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 16:32Chris Williamson?

  I've got this image of you in a pink tutu that's just dancing through a minefield, but that's, we're too cliched here now, right?

• 16:38Douglas Murray?

  I'm just thrilled that the image is in your mind.

• 16:45Douglas Murray?

  But, but no, I mean, I, uh, yeah, that's my experience. Um, it is not to say that it's completely easy. I mean, you know, you, you have to do your work and you have to work hard and you have to, you know, weigh your words and you speak them as when you write them, but you, you know, any normal person would anyway. And, um, but yeah, I, I, I just, I think we've got to change the, um, you know, there's this thing that's gone on in our era in general. I think it's came out last time that, that we've moved from the heroic mood in the society to the victim mood. You know, we've moved in general from the, who is the person who's been most heroic in their lives to the sort of celebration of whoever's can say they've been the most

• 17:29Douglas Murray?

  victimized. And this is all a little bit of that. It's a little offshoot of it. And I'm not really that interested in victimhood. Not because I'm, um, hard-hearted or anything like that. It's just that my observation of life is that we can all of us whinge endlessly if we want to about our lot, because human experience is extraordinary in lots of ways and will always include an awful lot of mundanity and pain and grief and much, much more. So we could all do it. Um, I'm just not sure that our society should encourage it as much as it does.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right. There's an interesting translation change that I came across recently. Um, the Buddha said, uh, life is suffering, but the word of suffering is dukkha, D U K A. And as with all ancient translations, it's a nearest, closest term that they try to find, right? And suffering was one of the translations, but there's some scholars that contest that it's not suffering, it's unsatisfactoriness. Life is unsatisfactoriness. And if you spend a bit of time in evolutionary psychology, you realize that that unsatisfactoriness is fitness enhancing. If you were

• 18:43Douglas Murray?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  Fully actualized upon killing your first bison, you'd never kill another bison. Upon having sex the first time, you'd never have sex again.

• 18:51Douglas Murray?

  Exactly. Uh, I do know people like that, but the

• 18:57Chris Williamson?

  Come on.

• 19:00Douglas Murray?

  No, you're right. Look, the unsatisfactious is of course wanting to do better, wanting to do more.

• 19:07Douglas Murray?

  A lot of people find this with the accretion of wealth, never get enough of it. It's not the best way to do it, but it's one thing. Yes, unsatisfiedness isn't an entirely bad thing.

• 19:24Douglas Murray?

  It's an enormous drive for a lot of people. It's obviously one of the things behind ambition. And, and yes, I think there's, there's, there's an awful lot of things going on in our age, but we, we, we should try to identify the things that we are erroneously holding up as good. And I do thi- I do think that holding up victimhood is, as not just good, but meaning that you specially deserve a platform or a microphone has turned out to be an unhelpful way to start a new generation off in this world.

• 20:00Chris Williamson?

  It's a Jordan Petersonism, right, where he talks about the fact that a rabbit isn't inherently good because it's unable to commit evil. It's the enacting your shadow, fully, fully internalizing your shadow from the Jungian perspective. And the same with that, like you, you're very correct. There is no bravery in avoiding courageous challenges.

• 20:22Douglas Murray?

  Right. And, and one of the things, again, I touched on this when we last met, but one of the things I'm particularly worried about in this era is what's happening to men in all of this. Because men seem to me the primary people at the moment who have been persuaded to lessen their capabilities, lessen the things they could achieve. And sort of just find a way to get through this strange period that we're in. And, and it's, it's not healthy. It's not healthy for men. It's not healthy for women. It makes very unhappy men and it makes very unhappy women because the women don't want those men.

• 21:04Chris Williamson?

  What are your thoughts on looting as a method of hastening change?

• 21:08Douglas Murray?

  I'm mainly against it.

• 21:11Chris Williamson?

  Are you ever for it?

• 21:13Douglas Murray?

  No, not I can think of. You're referring, I assume, among other things, to the book that's just been published in America in defense of looting.

• 21:21Chris Williamson?

  2016 that came out, you know.

• 21:23Douglas Murray?

  Did it really? Gosh, that was a prophetic book.

• 21:25Chris Williamson?

  Which is really, really interesting. So I'll, the-

• 21:28Douglas Murray?

  It's had its moment now, that book, hasn't it?

• 21:31Chris Williamson?

  She is so much more insightful than you. Her ability to see what's going on in the future is that much greater than yours.

• 21:37Douglas Murray?

  Yeah.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  And so Vicky Ostervile, for anyone who doesn't know what it is, I've got a little, a little breakdown here and then I'll, I'll get your opinions on it. So NPR summarizes the book as an argument that, quote, "looting is a powerful tool to bring about real lasting change in society," end quote. Ostervile's argument is simple. "The so-called United States was founded in, quote, 'cis-hetero-patriarchal racial capitalist violence.' That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living and the justice of law and order. Ownership of things, not just people, is innately structurally white supremacist.

• 22:19Chris Williamson?

  Looting is good, she says, because it exposes a deep truth about the great American confidence game, which is that, without, quote, 'without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free.'" She came to this conclusion six years ago and in her book, which is written in love and solidarity with looters the world over.

• 22:39Douglas Murray?

  Well, the obvious question is, where does she live?

• 22:45Douglas Murray?

  Only thing you need to know.

• 22:46Chris Williamson?

  Do you know that at the front of the book, they have the classic, "this is copyrighted by whatever publishing."

• 22:56Douglas Murray?

  I know, because a colleague of mine at The Spectator wrote to her publishers the other day, saying, "We are publishing our own edition of this."

• 23:05Chris Williamson?

  Looting her book?

• 23:06Douglas Murray?

  You were just looting her book. And the publishers didn't seem to be up for that. You'd be amazed to hear. I mean, I just said, "Look, if you see it in the bookshop, take it. It's yours. All property is theft. Why not?" Turns out, actually, nobody wants to steal her book. Certainly not if it's filled with stuff like you just read. These people, I mean, they're so reprehensible on so many levels. I mean, first of all, by the way-

• 23:28Douglas Murray?

  How ignorant can somebody be? I mean, how ignorant do you have to be to make that claim about the foundation of American society? And I suspect, like a number of authors of the American far left, she's never been anywhere else in the world in her life. I strongly suspect that. If she can send me photos of herself in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa, across a lot of the Middle East and the Far East and things, I could be persuaded. But I would suspect that she's been brought up in America, hasn't travelled very much further, and has simply been indoctrinated in this now completely boring and predictable way, where all you need to do is throw out this same word salad about heteronormativity

• 24:10Douglas Murray?

  and indigenous people and all this sort of thing. And before you know it, you've got a not very well-selling book that you can't even get stolen. But the...

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  That's like, do you remember the Sargon of Akkad thing that he got really, really in trouble for? Where he said, "I wouldn't even rape you." That was his thing to the politician. I can't remember the lady's name, and that was what got him in trouble. "This is a book so bad, you wouldn't even steal it."

• 24:36Douglas Murray?

  It can't be stolen. I mean, if anyone can show me an example of it being stolen, but yeah. It's also, I mean, it's amazing we're in this era and that people are talking and thinking like this. I simply think it's, she is a product of capitalism at this particular stage where she doesn't know very much, she hasn't been very far in the world, she's not been educated well, she's not seen anything of the world, she doesn't know anything about life, she doesn't know how life is normally run. And all of that is playing out on the streets of various American cities at the moment,

• 25:19Douglas Murray?

  primarily Portland, Oregon. But there are a lot of people in this strange position. I have a lot of friends in America who tell me that this is very common, this sort of thing, among their children and grandchildren. They say that they genuinely think, like this woman, that their country is uniquely bad. And these people just don't know anything. They just don't know anything. They don't know anything about history. They don't know anything about geography. They don't know anything about the world. And I'm, I'm very uninterested in the thoughts of these intensely parochial so-called internationalists, because that's what they are. I mean, they just, they have never seen

• 26:00Douglas Murray?

  the consequences of their own thought. They, they, the idea that you take away the police and everything will be, was it free, I think she said? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you also will get a massive upsurge in rape, murder.

• 26:17Chris Williamson?

  Disproportionately in minority communities as well.

• 26:21Douglas Murray?

  Yeah. And, and then what are you going to blame it on? Maybe the period when we still had police and there's a lingero, there's a lingering overness that makes people do that for a time. I mean, this is juvenile thinking. This is, it's not juvenile. This is wicked and juvenile thinking. Again, I don't think very many people believe it. And I think that this is, there is an argument, it's a bleak argument, that people like her simply have to see this tested close up at some point.

• 26:51Chris Williamson?

  Did we not see this with Chaz Chop? Was that not a perfect microcosm for this? That you could have, you can have idiocy masquerading as moral virtue.

• 27:02Douglas Murray?

  Hmm.

• 27:03Chris Williamson?

  Uh, within a few.

• 27:06Douglas Murray?

  There are certain, there are certain very, very pertinent, that Chaz Chad was a very good example of it. There were lots of individuals who, who demonstrated. Do you remember that big story? I think it was in the New York Times when it was still a newspaper, which, where there was a description of a couple, an American couple, again, some like Oregon, someone. No, that could be another couple. This couple didn't have guns as far as, in fact, they're very anti-gun. They were very pro peace though. And they feared that the world was lacking in love and they just needed to give a bit more love to the world. And you can see how this ends already, can't you? They decided to go on a cycling holiday

• 27:46Douglas Murray?

  and sort of spread, spread wealth, something or other. And then they ended up just getting killed by a jihadi cell in like Tajikistan.

• 27:58Douglas Murray?

  And they did a blog of their stops in various places in the Far East and the Near East, cycling, I think on a tandem even. And then they just, you know, one day, they just, you know, it's all, and it's all the stuff is like, we just, you know, you think the world just needs more love and, and more tandem holidays.

• 28:16Chris Williamson?

  So they've got rose petals, they've got a basket of rose petals in front.

• 28:19Douglas Murray?

  And, and, and this, this couple of guys, couple of jihadis saw them one day and just, you know, on the flip, they couldn't believe their luck clearly and just, just took them out. So, human naivety is very familiar and one has to be careful not to love too much at the people who, you know, it's very, it's a very common thing, uh, to be totally naive about the nature of the world. Ordinarily, you get over it when you're very young. Unfortunately, in America in particular, we have a generation of juveniles who are growing up and still juvenile and who actually believe these things, who, who actually believe that, you know, life is really quite straightforward. You know, if you just don't have the police and

• 29:03Douglas Murray?

  you say defund the police and you don't have, don't have the patriarchal cis heteronormative state, then, then what? I mean, by the way, did you see, somebody did a video the other day from Portland, Oregon of one of these parks where they've really done their best, you know, uh, uh, the protesters. And it's just, it really does look like the apocalyptic wasteland they deserved. Just covered in piss and just people just lying, zonked out on whatever illegal or legal drugs they've been able to get. And everyone just looks like they've pissed themselves and they've taken, they've taken, I'm, I'm.

• 29:37Chris Williamson?

  Is everyone wearing a trench coat? That's what I imagine. Lots of trench coats.

• 29:41Douglas Murray?

  They're all wearing someone else's trench coat. Yeah. And, and, and the, and they've got, all the statues are down, of course. The whole place is covered in plinths, uh, beautiful plinths everywhere. Uh, no, but then, and all the plinths are covered in BLM graffiti and fuck the state and police are this. And that's what these people inherit and they deserve to inherit it. A urine stench, graffitied wasteland in which just zombies lie around until they die.

• 30:09Chris Williamson?

  I really want to just put that as the trailer. That's just.

• 30:13Douglas Murray?

  That's, that's, you know, that, this is what they deserve. This is what they deserve. This is the final endpoint of their stuff. I can't believe that there are actually adults talking about this or stuff and the New York Times and the NPR and things taking these discussions seriously. We've done the experiment many times before in human history of what happens when you have a total breakdown of law and order and it always comes out looking exactly like Portland, Oregon.

• 30:43Chris Williamson?

  What does the silent majority need to stop being silent mean?

• 30:48Douglas Murray?

  Yes, this is something I very keen people take into account. I've fed up of hearing about the silent majority.

• 30:55Douglas Murray?

  I've heard about it all my life, I'm sure you have. People say, well, the silent majority don't believe that. I've always said, but why are they silent? What's the problem? And if they're a majority, even more so. That's, it makes no sense to me.

• 31:12Douglas Murray?

  The thing that we've been told in recent years is the silent majority only stops being silent at elections when it silently votes in ways that surprise the rest of the country.

• 31:24Chris Williamson?

  Which it seems is kind of, kind of true, right?

• 31:27Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, the obvious example is Brexit vote in 2016 and the Trump vote in 2016. And then they say, well, now we've heard from the silent majority. And then that silent majority is said to be totally deplorable and it should be somehow expunged in the democratic process because it doesn't know what it's doing, says the losing minority. But yeah, I don't understand why it should be the case that people only make themselves heard at the ballot box once every four years or something like that. So what I think is happening is back to where we started, actually, is that a very small

• 32:10Douglas Murray?

  number of very valuable people are making all of the weather.

• 32:16Douglas Murray?

  And I don't see why they should. And the only reason they do is because they manage to intimidate the majority into going along with things that we don't have to go along with. I just, I refuse, and I think everyone else should, to go along with any more of the crap. I strongly urge people to stop going along with the crap now. What does that mean? It means, for instance, if you work in a company and you are told that you're going to have a day where you've all got to think about racism, you either say no, or you say, what is it you're trying to make us learn? And what are you trying to make us conclude? And are you right in that?

• 33:00Douglas Murray?

  So I published a while ago, a letter I'd been leaked from NHS Trust, where this NHS Trust chief in Birmingham told everyone working for her what books to read. And I think that the people working for her and with her should not just laugh at her or say, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize how racist I am in the NHS Trust in Birmingham. I had no idea that the NHS Trust in Birmingham was a place where the Fourth Reich was going to reemerge. Why, we must stop it. They don't just do that. They say, no. No, we're not going to spend the rest of our lives being told what to read and told what to think and told what to say and told how to dance and everything else. No, we're not going

• 33:45Douglas Murray?

  to do it. And if the so-called silent majority did that, then we would be so much further forward as a society. And what's more, we can do it in a perfectly reasonable way. I've had the experience a lot in recent weeks, I'm sure you have, of wanting to have conversations about, you know, by the way, you're always told, oh, we just want to have the conversation about this. No, you don't. You want to lecture people. But I'd be very happy to have conversations about colonialism and slavery and racism and the existence of racism throughout history, across all races. And I'm very happy to have all those conversations. But actually, the people who say they want those conversations don't want the conversations. They just want to win.

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  What they want is to wear a unitard, spandex, khaki-colored, sort of one-piece thing and to tell you that you're racist and put their PayPal address up on the board. That's what they want to do.

• 34:41Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They want to be the Kim Jong-un of anti-racism and to tell everyone what to believe. And I don't think that's, I'm not going along with that.

• 34:56Douglas Murray?

  And I don't think other people should either.

• 34:57Chris Williamson?

  I got a small confession to make, both to yourself and to the audience. I've been holding on to this story since we got to speak. So I had Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, on the show a few months ago, and it was slap bang as Chaz was happening. So we're talking peak race tensions, right? And I've spoken to Carl before, we got on really well, episodes are great, but for some reason I had this ambient anxiety throughout the day leading up to it. And I started talking to him and I was really nervous. I don't usually get nervous, especially when speaking to guests for a second time. So it's just a friend, how are you? How's this, that and the other?

• 35:36Douglas Murray?

  Sure.

• 35:36Chris Williamson?

  And I found myself being super, super, it felt like I was training on eggshells as I'm talking to him. And then upon listening back, even some of the things that I said I didn't agree with, I didn't agree with myself.

• 35:48Douglas Murray?

  What sort of things?

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  So, yeah, so go on. For, for instance, we were talking about should the Faulty Towers episode be taken down? What's happening with Little Britain? Variety released a list of 10 problematic movies which need warnings under discussion before and after watching. And I put this stuff forward to Carl and he gave his thoughts. And I just, after that was done, I said, I pushed the rhetoric of my compassion too far. I was saying, basically, I don't think that anyone should be offended, which isn't true, because in order to communicate, you have to risk being offensive. That's the way it works. Another Jordan Petersonism. So anyway, what I found was that I had somehow managed to, and the listeners may be able to sense this within their own lives, I'd become so ignorant to where the goalposts

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  were, that I wasn't, I didn't even know what sport I was playing anymore. And I feel like this is the end goal, which a lot of the smarter people who are using just justice movements to further a particular agenda are hoping to achieve, to move the goalposts so fast that you don't know what's right, what's wrong, what's anything else. And I was super nervous. And that

• 37:00Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, you're completely right. You're completely right. And here are a couple of examples of that.

• 37:08Douglas Murray?

  Tony Abbott, former Australian Prime Minister, was appointed by the UK government as a trade adviser the last week. In the days leading up to his appointment, various people, led by a number of left-wing broadcasters and newspapers, claimed that Tony Abbott is a "you can do it", "homophobe, misogynist, granny killer", they did actually do that, weird, and "global warming denier".

• 37:31Chris Williamson?

  Bingo, that's the, that's the big four, isn't it? Bingo.

• 37:34Douglas Murray?

  Well, no, the big, the biggest one, the fifth one, they actually weren't quite brave enough to do, which was to accuse him of racism, but they accuse him of all the other stuff. And he's none of those things, by the way, he's none of those things. He's a terrific, terrific guy and a terrific public servant, and the former Prime Minister of Australia, for goodness sake. So anyway, but the point is, is that the day, the day before the appoint, the day of the appointment and the day after it, The Guardian had on the front page both days, "the government appoints misogynist adviser", okay? As if that's proven, okay? It's proven, I mean, they put it in quote, scare quotes, just to make sure they were legally a bit on better terrain, but that was what they said.

• 38:14Douglas Murray?

  Now, if I was a young woman, or a young man, growing up with an ordinary level of incuriosity, I would look at that, or might look at that, and think, "That's awful. I mean, that's awful. The British government's deliberately appointing someone who, who hates women." Now, as it happens, the, the longer you go on in life, the more you, you, you get a sense of things, and the more you realise what's bullshit in The Guardian and what's real life. But it is easy to see how somebody can be given a wrong view of an entire society once you imbibe little things like that. Now, that's an easy one, let me give you a harder one, the killing of George Floyd.

• 39:02Douglas Murray?

  We are in a very perilous position on this, all of us, because I don't know how much time you've spent in the US. I spent a bit of... okay, so like me. They have racial problems that we don't have here, I would submit. Every country has racial problems, there's a peculiar and particular one that has existed in America throughout history. You could also argue that in the most militarized country in the world, the most militarized law enforcement, it has a likelihood of fatal encounters with the public that is higher than, say, in Britain, where most of the time the police just spend their time running away from protesters.

• 39:47Douglas Murray?

  And, but the point is, is that if you didn't know America that well... I'm giving here the nicest, best analysis of something that's going on at the moment that I can do. If you didn't know America very well, you didn't know very many Americans, and you read that this white cop had been allowed to kill a black man on camera for eight minutes, and that that was okay, is it right? And that this happened a lot, you would join Black Lives Matter. Absolutely. You would want to join something that said, "That's not on, that's not right." And the problem is that there are these moments...

• 40:32Douglas Murray?

  by the way, Black Lives Matter was just primed for a George Floyd-like event, and lots of reasons to do with lockdown, I think, the sort of the world was, in a way. But what I think happens in those moments is, it's very hard for people to get a correct sense of exactly what is going on. So maybe the police in America do kill black people with impunity, is a thought that crosses your mind. Maybe America is a racist state. Maybe the British police are like that. Maybe Britain's like that. Maybe we're all racist. Maybe there's such a thing as white supremacy and it's everywhere and so on, so on, so forth.

• 41:13Douglas Murray?

  And it all starts from that first inaccurate estimation of what's going on. So the killer of George Floyd is in custody, awaiting trial on charge of murder. He literally has no defenders in the public sphere. He had a lawyer, but nobody says, I think he did great. So what is this utoization of this one appalling incident? And it's widening out, not just to encompass, say, all police in the Minnesota area or all police in that state, all police in America, every white person, every white person on the planet. No, no, you don't get to do that. No way.

• 41:57Douglas Murray?

  But in that moment, you see certain very, very bad actors advancing because they feel they've got an advantage. And that is the moment when people become worried because it's hard to interpret exactly what the situation is. And bad actors deliberately pump lies into the system. They say, yes, you can do this in America because black lives aren't worth anything. There was a very moving press conference with some of the police in New York. The police chief was just standing with his colleagues saying, people are getting away with saying things. Like one activist said, I don't even know if, we don't know if we're black,

• 42:39Douglas Murray?

  if our children will return from school or whether they'll just be shot by the police. And his policeman was saying, that isn't the case in America. Oh, he's mental, yeah. It's not the case. But again, if you don't know the country very well, or if you do and you have a certain understanding of it or a misunderstanding of it, or if you're a long way away, it's possible to imbibe those ideas. And so that's why I say that one of the deranging things in our time is that a very significant number of people, particularly young people, have been given

• 43:12Douglas Murray?

  Or have given themselves an erroneous interpretation of the society they're in. And that's how you end up with the lunatic, you know, writing a book about the, in defence of looting. And that's how you end up with people on the streets of Portland, running around looking for Nazis and not being able to find them. And so smashing in some old woman's face. Now that's, that's how you get there. And reasonable people of any political direction just have to be able to say, no, we're not going along. You know, you, you, what it is actually, it's like the Roman legion thing that the people in Portland sort of tried to do.

• 43:49Douglas Murray?

  They use terrible and very freakish events to push forward. And behind them is a whole legion of hell. That is the purpose. That is what BLM and others have been doing. And it has to be said by people of every background, that is not on. You should not be able to make defamatory claims, sweeping claims about whole races of people and whole societies in this manner. And at the moment, certainly in the weeks immediately after that, it was very, very difficult to say that. It's becoming easier.

• 44:34Douglas Murray?

  But I wish, it's a classic example of, I wish we weren't stopped from having that discussion. And we're only stopped from having it because dishonest actors say, if you add any nuance to, to it, then you are basically on the side of the guy who killed George Floyd.

• 44:50Chris Williamson?

  I think a big part of this is to do with the fact that we are not built to imbibe the entire world's news instantly, 24/7.

• 45:02Douglas Murray?

  Yes.

• 45:03Chris Williamson?

  There is too much stimulus and too much information. And also in the past, in order to have got your message to reach. 10,000 people, half a million people, 10 million people, you would have had to have had, jumped through some hoops that made sure you had integrity or virtue or capacity, whatever it might be. Whereas now, the right tweet at the right time about the right thing, that just sounds good, can get a million impressions within 24 hours. We're not, that's not the way that it's supposed to be. This isn't, this isn't a counter to free speech. Your desire to be able to say whatever you want does not mean that I have to listen to it. This is what Helen Pluckrose said the other day. And as a, it might be a little outdated now,

• 45:48Chris Williamson?

  but I know that you're a massive fan of Sam Harris's Pull Back From The Brink podcast, which as far as I was concerned, was the best sense-making I saw around this. Wonderful. And that ties back to what we were saying about J K Rowling, that if you have the capacity and the platform and the uncancellable-ness that gives you licence to do this, doing it is a good idea.

• 46:10Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, but let me just add one other thing. It's not just people in that position.

• 46:18Douglas Murray?

  The hero of the hour to me is a young woman in the DC restaurant who wouldn't raise her fist when the mob told her to. She isn't famous, or she wasn't famous. She certainly, almost certainly had no idea that she was the person who would stand against the crowd. She did.

• 46:44Douglas Murray?

  And everyone should want to be her. That's the goal. That's the goal in this era, is not to go along with the crowd. You see, because the crowd says, this terrible thing has happened, and as you say, our sense-making apparatus is all shot, and we don't have the time and like, okay, I could study all the footage of the arrest of George Floyd and then look into the arrest histories of the arresting officers and his own past and all of that. I could do all that, or I could live my bloody life. But, okay, if we're forced to do all of this sort of thing, whenever there's an explosion like this.

• 47:26Douglas Murray?

  At the very least, there should be a, there should be a reward to people who do not say, "Yeah, of course, I'll go along with whatever it is you're telling me I've got to go along with." That's why I say that the job in this era of reasonable and decent people is to not join the crowd. I'm very, by the, I mean, it may just be, I don't have a great crowd love in Bill particularly. You and me both. Right, I'm not, I don't even particularly like large sporting events for that reason. Been bliss for you this summer though. Oh, yeah, no, I, no, I mean, I, I don't, and I wouldn't want to go and be the only person in the stadium either.

• 48:07Douglas Murray?

  But the point is, I just don't, I don't like very, very large crowds because I know what they can do. And I'm much happier as a, just, I speak for myself, I'm very happy to hold my own opinion and justify it to whoever wants to take it on. But I do feel that the crowd fear that some of us have is because we know how swiftly it can stampede in a wicked direction. And I do think that's happening, I'm not overstating it, I do think it's happening. I think that the people who are allowing that Roman Legion-like thing to happen,

• 48:51Douglas Murray?

  who behind them have people saying, "We want to destroy capitalism, we want to destroy the free market, we want to destroy the foundations of civil order, you know, property rights." And I mean, they now say this thing, mainly, and they say, "Oh, well, these businesses are insured, so it doesn't matter." How dare you, how dare you? When some family has saved and worked like anything, all their lives to have some a business that can provide for their children, and you decide that you can guess in advance what their insurance policy is, so you have the right to burn the damn thing down?

• 49:30Douglas Murray?

  They are trying to smuggle all those things in at the moment behind the first shield. And I say the job of the era is for people to say no, to resist the crowd. Doesn't matter what it tells you to do, don't do it. Hold your own counsel, don't go along with it. If for no other reason than that we cannot operate as a species vulnerable to one person acting appallingly somewhere else on the planet at any one time. There's no way.

• 50:07Chris Williamson?

  It's a Trojan horse delivery mechanism with a bunch of, a bunch of very bad actors behind it. Have you heard of woke fishing?

• 50:19Douglas Murray?

  No, I don't think I have.

• 50:21Chris Williamson?

  You are going to love this. The New York Post sums it up as the woke fish dating trend. Shady men are pretending to be progressive on apps in an effort to bed progressive girls. According to writer Serena Smith, woke fishermen are masquerading as progressive in order to get laid. Similar to the phenomenon of catfishing where there is people post fake dating profile photos. And there's a quote here from Reddit of a particular successful woke fisherman who said, "It worked. I went to an anti-Trump rally, started screaming fuck Trump and a bunch of people joined in. I kept doing it all night until some girl, some cute girl entered our group and then we hooked up later that night."

• 51:07Douglas Murray?

  He is, this is what I call cattle fishing, of course.

• 51:11Chris Williamson?

  I think this is different. I think that this is doing it from a much more trolley sort of, I think he's purposefully doing it to say, right, this is just a tool that I can use as opposed to someone who genuinely believes it. I think the-

• 51:25Douglas Murray?

  No, no, no, no, but I always said the cattle fish didn't believe it.

• 51:28Chris Williamson?

  You don't think? I think that some of the guys are so self deceptive that they genuinely believe that that's what they're doing. It's just their method of getting themselves in that-

• 51:36Douglas Murray?

  One of my, no, one of my, one of my favorite conversations that I've had regularly in the year since Manners of Craz came out was with young heterosexual men who I described the cattle fish maneuver to and they burst out laughing.

• 51:47Chris Williamson?

  Because that was their dating strategy of choice.

• 51:50Douglas Murray?

  It's the laughter of self recognition. Um, it's happened so many times in the last year and um, I do think it's cynical. Uh, I think woke fishing is obviously just a, an extension of this. I like the, I like this idea, the woke fisherman. With his gnarled hands.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  With a beard and one of those little hats on top, smoking a pipe.

• 52:16Douglas Murray?

  At the woke sea. Um, uh, but, well, these people deserve each other. Um, and of course, it's all a consequence, again, of us not having the conversations we should have been able to have. Um, if we, if we had reasonable conversations about men and women and relations between the sexes, instead of allowing the craziest and most deranged and unhappy people to dictate all of the weather. Then you wouldn't be able to have the situation where one person, knowing they're being a liar, attracts another person who they have contempt for.

• 52:55Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean.

• 52:55Douglas Murray?

  Which seems to me to be a suboptimal start to a relationship.

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps. Um, also, if the difference between you sleeping with someone and not sleeping with someone is whether or not they shout fuck Trump.

• 53:08Douglas Murray?

  Oh, yes.

• 53:09Chris Williamson?

  I think that there's something amiss here with, you know, the knobs and the, the dials need to be adjusted.

• 53:15Douglas Murray?

  There's, there's a, there's a more than a little bit that's wrong with that.

• 53:20Douglas Murray?

  I don't think you just restrict yourself to one thing being wrong with that. Um.

• 53:27Douglas Murray?

  There's an awful lot of oddities in this, by the way, but in general, in recent years, the sort of, the politicization of dating is something that's very, very interesting. And what I'm always interested in that is the way in which it's one directional. Um, as far as I know, on gay and straight dating apps, you don't find people saying, um,

• 53:52Douglas Murray?

  no Democrats.

• 53:55Douglas Murray?

  Or, um, no, no pro EU.

• 54:03Douglas Murray?

  It's only ever the other way around.

• 54:04Chris Williamson?

  So there's a running joke.

• 54:05Douglas Murray?

  No Brexiteers, no Trumpies.

• 54:07Chris Williamson?

  There's a running joke in the dating scene. Any guy who puts moderate on Hinge is a Republican. And the sense here is that the Overton window of optimal political preference on dating has been shifted so far left that moderate is now Nazi.

• 54:28Douglas Murray?

  Yes, yes, now I can see the problem there. By the way, The Spectator, we published a very good column a couple of years ago by Cosmo Landersman, a wonderful journalist, who's one of those journalists who I particularly love because he always writes columns that you think, oh my God, I can't believe that somebody wrote that and allowed it to be published. That's fantastic. He wrote a very funny column about why sex with right wing women is a lot better than having sex with left wing women. And one of my favorite details of this was that during sex with somebody who he said worked at The Guardian.

• 55:05Douglas Murray?

  At some point during the encounter, he used the phrase, you love it, you bitch. Now, you and I might think that using the term you love it, you bitch to a Guardian employee is treading in risky terrain. Anyhow, it struck Cosmo as being the mocheuse at the time, and he came out with it. She immediately, immediately, apparently immediately stopped proceedings and made it clear that something along the lines of just because we're having sex doesn't mean that you can degrade me as a woman. And Cosmo was sort of, you know, stuck in a tricky position here.

• 55:49Douglas Murray?

  And I think said something along the lines of, no, no, sure, sure, sure, sure. Can I start again, though? Can I get back in? And, uh, and I don't know exactly how it finished. Maybe it didn't. But anyhow, the point is, is this, he said, he said, this is a nightmare. This is the sort of thing that happens with left wing women and right wing women are an awful lot more fun in the sack. And this is provable. And I, I don't think we have pie charts, graphs.

• 56:18Chris Williamson?

  If someone can provide them.

• 56:19Douglas Murray?

  This, but I hear it.

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  Please.

• 56:21Douglas Murray?

  But I hear this story all the time and I, I think, I think it's, um, it's, uh, it's definitely the case, uh, and the gay scene. Uh, uh, you, you, you wouldn't want, uh, you wouldn't want to date an extinction rebellion protester. You, you wouldn't want that. You wouldn't want to be, um, you wouldn't want to be with somebody who's, who you had to weigh. I mean, I'm not even just talking about the sex. I'm talking about the fact that you wouldn't want to be with somebody who you were forever having to check what you were saying with and who might, instead of the normal thing, most sort of normal people, it's not even a left, right thing. If somebody says something that they sort of don't agree with, they say, well, I don't agree with that. And then, then you say, that's interesting. Why?

• 57:06Douglas Murray?

  And then they tell you that's a normal human interaction.

• 57:10Chris Williamson?

  That is a relationship. You argue about the kid's name. Oh, I want to call it Alicia. No, no, I don't like Alicia. My aunt used to be called Alicia. She was a bitch.

• 57:17Douglas Murray?

  Yes, uh, uh, exactly. Or, or just, you know, things like, you know, I've always had this, I've always thought this. And, and then, you know, you, that's, that's what, that's one of the nice things about relationships. You just discover the other person, discover the oddity of the other person quite often. And, uh, you know, and that's all, that's all good. You wouldn't want to be with somebody, nobody should want to be with somebody who's policing all the time around the boundaries to make sure that you're exactly in lockstep with what you're meant to believe today.

• 57:46Chris Williamson?

  It seems.

• 57:46Douglas Murray?

  Who would want that?

• 57:47Chris Williamson?

  It seems bizarre to me, especially that 69 is quite a popular sex position. It seems bizarre to me that you can have seen someone's asshole inches from your eyes and not be allowed to call them a bitch. It's like, look, we have.

• 58:02Douglas Murray?

  I agree, it's outrageous.

• 58:04Chris Williamson?

  Look, the sex police need to steam in and have a discussion.

• 58:10Douglas Murray?

  As I've always said, by the way, I mean, the hardest one on that one is, is how the rules are like that. And what's her name? E.L. James? I don't want to say P.D. James.

• 58:21Chris Williamson?

  Fifty Shades of Grey.

• 58:21Douglas Murray?

  Fifty Shades of Grey woman. That sells by the bucket load. I mean, that, I think I say that in manners of crowds somewhere. That's a very weird, I mean, you know, it's a very weird thing that nobody bothered to have out. But at the same time as, you know, all of the increasing policing about relations between sexes were going on, women were buying hardcore S and M fiction porn by the truckload. I mean, it definitely wasn't all men buying that.

• 58:50Chris Williamson?

  You know, it sold, it sold like more copies than the next four top selling of the top five books ever, like combined. Insane.

• 59:00Douglas Murray?

  Exactly. And so, and all of this is so damn interesting.

• 59:04Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 59:05Douglas Murray?

  It's so interesting. And I, nobody talks about it or can have the conversation about it.

• 59:12Chris Williamson?

  We are, right now. Subscribe below. Are you bored of talking about social justice?

• 59:19Douglas Murray?

  Hmm. In one way, no, because they're so endlessly entertaining. The opposition, you think they can't come up with anything worse and madder, and then they do. And you think, I'm sure that must be a satire. And it turns out not to be. And they make the same mistakes in the same order every time. Yeah, I mean, that stuff is endlessly, you know, I mean, there are, by the way, there's a very serious ones. I mean, there was one that came up the other day, the America Psychological Association decided to become a sort of racist organization. It's announced that all white people have the

• 59:58Douglas Murray?

  Have white supremacy, a blood, a blood problem, basically, by being white. And now, of course, American Psychological Association last year decided that men were a problem. So I just sort of think at some point, American Psychological Association is going to have to refer itself to a psychologist, I suppose. But, but, but, but, you know, they do this on a very regular basis. The UN did it today. The UN declared that, oh, what was it? Yeah, until we address, oh, you know, the usual thing, it says cis heteronormativity, patriarchy, there won't be peace in the world. And you think, yeah, I don't know if that's going to solve Yemen. But, I mean, it's actually what you do if you can't solve Yemen, isn't it?

• 1:00:40Douglas Murray?

  You start jabbering on about heteronormativity somewhere in Geneva. But, but, yeah, they come up with things every day. I'm fascinated by that, but I also don't spend all my time on it. Well, at least, let me rephrase that. I spend too much of my time on it, but I always balance it out with something worthwhile. I literally think of it like sustenance. If I spend some hours imbibing the latest crazy shit that everyone's doing today, I read a really good book, or I watch a terrific movie I've never seen.

• 1:01:19Chris Williamson?

  So you're allowed, you're allowed to eat the hamburger as long as you go and go to the gym at some point?

• 1:01:24Douglas Murray?

  Right. I absolutely advise this for everybody. Like, the joy of reading old books, the joy of watching old movies. You know, just take a classic movie you never bothered with, or a classic book you've never read, and read it. It's the best antidote to it. And by the way, it's not just an antidote. It's very important because it reminds you of how people lived until the weird era we're in. Helps give you very basic things that our era is losing, perspective, sense of judgment, and much more. So that's, you know, that really is an important tip, if I can say so. People cannot imbibe just what we're being told to imbibe.

• 1:02:08Chris Williamson?

  You said on the trigonometry episode I watched that we're standing on the precipice, and it's interesting that you use that word, because I've been thinking about this for quite a while. Toby Ord, who is from the Future of Humanities Institute at Oxford, he wrote a book called The Precipice, and it's all about existential threat.

• 1:02:24Douglas Murray?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes, I've heard him, yes.

• 1:02:27Chris Williamson?

  Wonderful, Australian dude, also big into the effective altruism movement.

• 1:02:32Douglas Murray?

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I read him on altruism, that's right.

• 1:02:34Chris Williamson?

  Huge, big-picture thinking. And he called his book The Precipice, and he gives humanities' chances of surviving the next century, one in three. He gives humanities' chances of reaching our full potential as a civilization, spacefaring, colonizing the galaxy, at one in two. So the vast majority of our risk as a species is front-loaded within the next century. My concern is that smart people, like you, like Gad Saad, like Sam Harris, are using up brain power on things that are self-defeating.

• 1:03:19Chris Williamson?

  There's a concept by Robin Hanson called the Great Filter, which explains the Fermi paradox. Why are there not aliens out there? He suggests that there is a particular section that we need to get past. And given that some of the smartest minds of the last few years have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work out whether men are women or not, to me, feels like...

• 1:03:43Chris Williamson?

  That could be the, if that's the reason that as a species, we don't reach our full potential, because we decided to have these stupid tribal, like childish, completely idiotic, self-defeating discussions. When the asteroid comes, or a slightly more effective pathogen hits, or pick your, any one of the other existential risks that Toby brings up in his book, like, we did this to ourselves, we blew it.

• 1:04:11Douglas Murray?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I couldn't be more, I've said this quite often, in my own defence, and if I'm not going to do it, who would, the purpose of, for instance, the madness of crowds is to give everyone else a fast track out. I can't stress this enough, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose, as you just mentioned, you've spoken with, all to do an excellent task in a portion of this, to do with the academic element in their new book, cynical theories. The point is, is that I don't want everyone to spend their life reading unreadable books. I've read a significant number of them, in order to tell people not to read them, because

• 1:04:56Douglas Murray?

  it's not worth their time. And it's the same with quite a lot of the subjects I deal with in the madness of crowds, is to say, this doesn't work, don't fall for it, this is a Ponzi scheme, that's a fraud. Now, that is not because I want to spend the rest of my life talking about mad Ponzi schemes invented by frauds, it's because I want everyone else to get through and all round or across this, or over the top of this, or burrow underneath it, however you're going to do it, as fast as possible. It's very hard to do it if you don't know what you're facing. Because if you don't know what you're facing, you've got a disproportionate likelihood of getting killed, blown up.

• 1:05:42Douglas Murray?

  If you know what you're facing and you know the shortcut ways through, it's likely you can get on with the rest of your life. And that's why I did them, that's why I wrote The Man is a Crowder, first of all, and why I've now updated it is because I wanted to stop particularly young people, first of all, feeling intimidated by this, including intellectually intimidated, because they shouldn't feel intellectually intimidated by this. Secondly, for them to realize the size of the thing that was, that they're being faced with. In other words, a total reorganization of everything, which I submit is not going to work.

• 1:06:24Douglas Murray?

  But crucially, that in knowing and understanding this, you can get through and get on with your life. And this is, this is a very important task because I absolutely agree that for a lot of us, I mean, millions and millions of us, everybody on the planet, we are wasting an opportunity at the moment. And the opportunity is, as you, as you describe, is that at this time in our history, there is so much we can do because we have access to knowledge in a way that we never did in the past. Our forebears had to,

• 1:07:02Douglas Murray?

  had to live with ignorance on a lot of things, a lot of things. And the most obvious one is, if you didn't have access to a book, you didn't know what was in it. Who doesn't now have access to a book? If they've got a relatively small sum of money, they can join a lending library or they can buy a book online, they, you can get a classic book, you can, you can get hold of things. Very recently, our parents' generation, our grandparents' generation, certainly, that wasn't the case. So that's, that's the case in area after area. We live in a time where instead of being in ignorance about So many things. You can just put it into a search engine.

• 1:07:45Douglas Murray?

  And why in that situation are we spending our time, as you say, talking about whether or not intersex people with a particular condition are the same as trans people? I mean, I often used to joke, you know, this is what happens when the barbarians break in, you know, we'll all get Kalashnikov whilst talking about gender neutral bathrooms. What a horrible last thought to go through your head. And I've always thought that. And as I say, a self-appointed task of mine is to try to help other people get through that itself. But I stress, and I think I said this the other day to the people on Trigonometry, there is also a very, very important thing

• 1:08:29Douglas Murray?

  that people need to bear in mind, which is not to put off what you're meant to be doing with your life. Not to put it off in particular because you want the conditions of life to become optimal. I think, I have it here somewhere, I said to the Trigonometry people the other day, I was reading a sermon that C.S. Lewis gave in 1939, just at the outbreak of war. It's such a moving sermon because he says in it, you know, these aren't optimal times, but they never were. They never were. And as he says, if human beings put off their

• 1:09:08Douglas Murray?

  search for beauty and truth and creation until the times were optimal, they'd never have got started. We would never have started doing anything. And the thing that's so desperate about the politicization of everything, and the reason I say to people, please de-politicize your lives, is because it is not what you were meant to do. It's not what we were meant to do, to spend our time endlessly going around.

• 1:09:41Douglas Murray?

  Such issues, all of us, every single person watching, you and me, all have an enormous amount that we could do with our life, an enormous amount we can contribute. Probably the least positive thing we can contribute is to some mass movement that's almost certainly got enough members anyway, even if it was going in a good direction, and they almost never do. And what you're meant to be doing should not be put off until that movement gains total ascendancy. Firstly, because it won't, and secondly, because it'll be hell even if it did. So don't put it off. Whatever it is you're meant to be doing, but do work out how to survive in this era,

• 1:10:25Douglas Murray?

  and then get on to doing the thing you should be doing with your life, because I can assure every single person watching, it is going to be so much more damn rewarding than what you're being offered at the moment.

• 1:10:36Chris Williamson?

  Topics like that, and that particular passage that you pulled from the sermon in 1939, that's what I want more of. That's what I want, people like James Lindsay with a PhD in pure mathematics. Bro, stop, I don't want the world to have, he should be getting us to Mars, he should be trying to do, that's what I want to hear, I want to hear more of that. Timeless, evergreen wisdom, you know, that is going to be the sort of thing that's usable in 50 years' time, or 100 years' time.

• 1:11:06Douglas Murray?

  I agree.

• 1:11:07Chris Williamson?

  Because critical race theory isn't. I have two quick questions before we go. First one, who wins the US presidential election this year?

• 1:11:15Douglas Murray?

  I don't think it's going to be clear.

• 1:11:17Chris Williamson?

  You're going to stick to both sides don't agree?

• 1:11:22Douglas Murray?

  I think that there's going to be a lot of contested areas, and I think that it'll be hard for either side to concede, I think it's hell.

• 1:11:35Chris Williamson?

  That's going to be the end of that. Final thing. What's your gym routine looked like in 2020? Because there was a period that I brought up with Dave Rubin when he came on the show. Maybe sort of the last 18 months up until the start of this year, where you went from normal Douglas Murray to jacked Douglas Murray. And I want to know, I want to know what you've been doing.

• 1:12:02Douglas Murray?

  Not the subject I talk about very much. The simple reason is I've stopped wearing suits, partly because I thought if it was going to be the end of the world, I didn't have to put on a tie. And

• 1:12:17Douglas Murray?

  and but I've worked out all well, quite a long time, 15 years, 20 years or so.

• 1:12:25Douglas Murray?

  For me, it's, it's, it's like the most important point of the day when I turn my mind off. I think it's very, very good for people for that. People like me who basically work all the time. It would not work all the time, think all the time. You know, when I'm not writing, I'm reading and, and, and, you know, and that's great, but I actually do need a time to turn off. And so for me, the gym has always been that. And well, I mean, I don't know if I can tell you my exact routine.

• 1:12:55Chris Williamson?

  I mean, is it a chest, is it a push pull leg split? What are you, are you in five days a week? The people might know.

• 1:13:01Douglas Murray?

  Normally four or five days a week, three at the absolute worst. Lockdown was tricky as it was for a lot of people because however many of those banned things you get, they never quite approximate the weights. And, and I'm also very anti running in public.

• 1:13:22Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:13:23Douglas Murray?

  Very, I'm very, very, I was not just, I don't like to do it myself. I don't like seeing people coming towards me on the pavement, gibbering and sweating and dribbling.

• 1:13:34Douglas Murray?

  So, so for me, exercise has to be in the gym. It has to be confined to that place.

• 1:13:40Chris Williamson?

  But I think whatever you did over the 18 month period, there was, I can't remember where the photo was, that went sort of semi, semi sort of viral online.

• 1:13:49Douglas Murray?

  I was, weirdly, I know exactly what you're talking about because it was when I discovered.

• 1:13:52Chris Williamson?

  It's from behind. There's a lot of tricep in it and you've got a little bit of a beard.

• 1:13:56Douglas Murray?

  It was when I discovered what a thirst pic was, which was not something I'd ever encountered before. People said to me, you've posted a thirst pic. And I said, what's that? And yes, I know exactly what it was. I was in Mexico and I happened to be in the study that Trotsky was assassinated in. Which is not the obvious place that if you.

• 1:14:16Chris Williamson?

  That was the thirst trap picture in Trotsky.

• 1:14:18Douglas Murray?

  If you were deliberately posting a thirst pic, you probably wouldn't choose an assassination site.

• 1:14:24Douglas Murray?

  Anyhow, it was very kind of flattering of people. And I'm deeply grateful. And obviously the next book will be a Davina McCall like workout with Douglas.

• 1:14:36Chris Williamson?

  I want a home DVD booty bums and tums with Douglas Murray. And comment below, comment below if you'd buy it and maybe we'll get that. Oh, this is the final thing. I lied to you. You said if you hit the bestseller list that you might consider reading the lyrics to WAP. Is, do we think that might happen?

• 1:14:56Douglas Murray?

  I have actually just heard the news from my publishers that we have made the bestseller list this week on its first week. Yes, I.

• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  This is, the internet is listening, man.

• 1:15:10Douglas Murray?

  I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be held to this, aren't I?

• 1:15:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:15:13Douglas Murray?

  It was, it was, it was, it was a, started as a dare with a friend. It was because, as you, as you probably know, I recited the works of Anne Minaj in, in, particularly her work on Anaconda. In the audible version of Madness of Crowds and a lot of people particularly enjoyed that. So I said, if you enjoyed that, then if this becomes a bestseller, I'll do WAP. Also because Ben Shapiro.

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  Smashed it.

• 1:15:40Douglas Murray?

  Smashed it.

• 1:15:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42Douglas Murray?

  I, I, I feel a certain level of competition with Ben Shapiro's rendition.

• 1:15:45Chris Williamson?

  Do you think he's kind of tried to take your thunder a little bit there?

• 1:15:49Douglas Murray?

  I was worried about that. I was worried about that. I thought it was quite a strong play and.

• 1:15:56Douglas Murray?

  And so I do think if if madness of crowds audible addition, which I strongly recommend, and which is updated with the new material and all that, if that makes it into the bestseller lists again in audible, then I will do a rendition. And unlike Ben, I can promise now I will not say the P word for the P word. I will do the whole thing.

• 1:16:19Chris Williamson?

  There we have it. Ladies and gentlemen, a link to the new updated paperback version of the madness of crowds is below. If you've got an audible subscription, I implore you for the good of all that is holy. Please use your credit for this this month on the madness of crowds. Douglas, it's so good. I can't wait to get you back, man. It's I always love talking to you.

• 1:16:39Douglas Murray?

  A great pleasure. Well, likewise. See you soon, I hope, and take care.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

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• 1:17:19Speaker 03

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• 1:17:20Speaker 02

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