506. Europe Imploding | Andrew Doyle & Graham Linehan

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with playwright Andrew Doyle and comedy writer Graham Linehan. They discuss their near-cancellations, the woke epidemic which has made comedy a criminal offense in the United Kingdom, the broader decay of the cultural landscape across Europe, why progressive ideals ruin honest works of creativity, and the totalitarian hellscape awaiting the Brits should they not change course. This episode was filmed on November 27th, 2024 | Links | For Andrew Doyle: On X https://x.com/andrewdoyle_com?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@andrewdoyle983 On Substack https://www.andrewdoyle.org/ For Graham Linehan: On X https://x.com/Glinner?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor On Youtube https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamLinehan/videos On Substack https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:14Speaker 00

  Así que, un par de anuncios primero. Estoy en una vuelta de vuelta, así que si vas a jordanbpetersen.com puedes encontrar ciudades y fechas, y eso empieza en diciembre y va a través de abril, así que chequea eso si está dispuesto. La vuelta trata de los problemas que he planteado en mi nuevo libro, que salió el 19 de noviembre. Se llama "Nosotros que peleamos con Dios", y en ese libro 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 部分一段 Así que, esa es una buena combinación de abstracción de alto nivel y aplicabilidad práctica inmediata.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  Necesitas saber estas historias, porque son las historias que son fundamentalmente sobre ti y sobre todos los que conoces y sobre cómo la sociedad está estructurada y nuestra relación con la naturaleza y el divino. Así que, ven a la vuelta, echar el libro si está dispuesto. Hoy tuve la oportunidad de hablar con Andrew Doyle, con quien he hablado antes. Hemos estado en contacto por un número de años ahora. Andrew es un comediante en el Reino Unido. El famoso creador de Titanium McGrath, quien fue uno de los personajes más efectivos que se han diseñado para satirizar a la izquierda sensible. Y Andrew ha estado en eso durante mucho tiempo, así que pasamos un buen tiempo discutiendo lo que está haciendo. Como inmigrante a Phoenix, y junto con Andrew hablé con Graham Linehan, quien está uniendo a Andrew

• 1:44Speaker 00

  en el establecimiento de una nueva empresa de entretenimiento en Phoenix, con Rob Schneider y otras personas. Su esperanza es que puedan hacer algunas cosas que serían divertidas. Y eso sería una cosa hermosa de ver, ya que el humor está en escasez en el mundo totalitario sensible que vivimos ahora. Aunque tal vez los comediantes, los verdaderos comediantes como Jill Rogan, en realidad tendrán su último ruido. Así que, hablamos de la vida de Graham en detalle en el comienzo del podcast, porque él pasó de ricos a rancas, ¿verdad? bastante traumáticamente. Graham era... Maybe the most successful sitcom writer in the UK and the man who penned a number of shows that were beloved by, well, by

• 2:28Speaker 00

  by very large audiences. And despite that, when he had the temerity to have some perfectly reasonable opinions about perfectly reasonable subjects, he, his life was demolished. His marriage ended. He was persona non grata in the artistic community, which is a complete bloody catastrophe. And eventually was inclined, not by, at least by necessity, to sever his ties with his own country. Everyone he knew virtually turned the other way. And that's a terrible thing. And Andrew, by contrast, has sort of ridden the woke wave, I would say. He's one of the few individuals, particularly in the UK, who has managed to turn the fact of the woke mob into something approximating

• 3:13Speaker 00

  enhanced commercial success. And so as Graham's ship was sinking, Andrew's star was rising. In any case, they have joined forces now and with Rob Schneider to start this new enterprise. We talked about the dismal state of the UK and Europe. We've seen a revolution in political, in the political landscape. In the United States, there's one coming to Canada, but man, things are looking rough in the UK. The, they're true home of common law and the tradition of free speech and the home of, at least once, of the greatest comedians the world has ever seen, I think. And so that's a terrible thing to see. And the same dismal fate at the moment appears to await Europe. And so we delved into that in some detail,

• 3:58Speaker 00

  touching along the way, the absolute pathology of the Canadian liberal landscape under our head narcissist, Justin Trudeau, who's fated for an electoral defeat of unimaginable magnitude, but not for a whole year during which he'll do plenty of damage in precisely the way that a wounded narcissist would. Anyways, if you're interested in any or all of that, join us on this podcast. So gentlemen, welcome. I think the first thing we should probably do is let everybody know what you have done in the past to be sufficiently reprehensible to be a worthwhile guest on this particular podcast. Graham, why don't you let everybody know, well, yeah, the nature of your sins and crimes, yeah?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Well, I was, for most of my adult life, I was a sitcom writer, comedy writer, and quite a successful one. You know, got a lifetime achievement award at the Comedy Awards, standing ovation. I think I've won about five BAFTAs personally, one Emmy, done about five sitcoms, three of which are kind of had, you know, near household names.

• 5:12Speaker 00

  What were they?

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Father Ted was the main one. Father Ted actually was so influential that they say it had, it had a little bit to do with the Irish Church releasing its hold in the 90s on Ireland, you know, just because we weren't as very satirical, we were very silly, we were always a surreal and silly show. And so that had more effect, something I'm, I'm, I am in two minds about now, and actually kind of just helped limit the church's influence to some extent by simply throwing a banana peel in their way, you know. So everything

• 5:51Speaker 01

  was going great. I was asked to write an accompanying play for a Peter Schaefer farce, which I love, called Black Comedy, which has got the most extraordinary premise. And that was the first thing, I think, oh, and I was, I was supposed to go and teach comedy in Australia. That was the first.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  They need that, they need some.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  That was the first thing that went. They said they couldn't, I heard something I heard over and over again, that it was security problems, you know, they couldn't afford the security. You'd hear that a lot. Then the.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Security for you or for the people that you were going to offend?

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. You know, they, you know, I, I, but that was the first time I said, can I speak to my accusers? Can I, can I, can I see if I can, I know, yeah, I was very in the early.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  How old fashion can you get?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Well, this was the very, this was the very earliest days when I still felt that there were people of good faith within um things like uh gender ideology and they, you just, if you just explained certain things, they would, like for instance, one of the things that I started talking about, because I was paying attention to women who were being bullied offline, who were called TERFs, you know, and I was trying to figure all this out, but I saw that women were getting death threats and rape threats for even discussing it. And one of the earliest things I, I saw was actually a Canadian story that the Vancouver Rape Relief had a dead rat nailed to their door because they wouldn't accept men in their in their sessions, you know, or their, or, or whatever they're called.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Was that before or after the government cut off their funding for refusing to accept men?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  I think it was after. And, uh, you know, I, I helped raise money for them and

• 7:38Speaker 01

  I just thought as soon as saw someone, they, as soon as some people saw it, they would go, what? A rat nailed to the door of a rape crisis center?

• 7:47Speaker 00

  A dead rat, unfair.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  A dead rat, what can we do to help? And there was none of that. No one stood up for me. I just started the, the kind of propaganda piece, uh, paper, Pink News published, has now published over seventy five stories about me. They famously did forty two stories on uh JK Rowling in a single week, you know, so seven stories, six stories a day for seven days.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  The world's most famous TERF?

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 8:16Speaker 00

  Trans exclusionary radical feminist, right? That's the acronym of the day.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and as far as I could make out, it did not seem uh exclusionary. It, it, the, the feminism these women were practicing. Was basic feminism that I've.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  You mean the kind that believes that that women exist?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  That women exist.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  That kind of.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  That they have value, that that that the sex that sex is important. And that men shouldn't be allowed in women's sports and all this type of thing. And I started saying.

• 8:43Speaker 00

  Especially fetishistic men, the sorts of men.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  And especially the kind of men who would want to do it.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, right, especially those kind, yeah.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, uh, so, yeah, so it was almost instantaneous. I I lost every every job I I got would just disappear within moments sometimes. I was I was I'm the shortest uh uh term director on a on any project, I think. When I was asked to to direct Steve Martin's Only Murders in the Building and then, you know, put down the phone and a few minutes later got an email saying, actually, someone else has stepped in. And I I suspect that the real reason for that was that he being excited announced to the to his colleagues, we've got Graham Linehan and someone put up their hand and said he's a bigot. And I think that that's basically what means I can't really work in the UK at the moment.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  I had a musical based on Father Ted that would have made millions. And they just took it from me, refused to make it if my name is associated with it.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I've often thought that, you know, when people are no longer, uh, what would you say cynical and evil enough to be greedy, we're really, really in trouble.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Definitely, definitely.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  I hate, you see, I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't want to, um, uh, you know, uh, take over. But basically, maybe, maybe we should get rid, I should leave the rest to bike, because there's so much.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Well, I wanna, I wanna just get the story exactly straight, so everyone knows. So were you the most set successful sitcom writer in the UK? Is that is that a reasonable statement or in the top five? Like, what what do you think's fair?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  I think it's, I don't.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  I'd say, I mean, definitely top five.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Okay, so definitely that and and.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  There's probably not even five good sitcoms.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  No, there probably isn't, no.

• 10:33Speaker 00

  Right, right. The tallest midget in the world. Right, right. And so, okay, now, and you said you had three extremely famous sitcoms, one of which was Father Ted. What were the other two?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  The other was one called The IT Crowd, which was set, was about IT, an IT department. Because I, it was, we wrote it in around 2005, and I noticed the internet becoming a thing. And I was always told, well, I, I went to an early Danny Simon course, who was one of the writers on Bilko. A lot of things that Woody Allen worked on, Neil Simon's brother, you know. And he said, a sitcom should always be about social change. So if you see something coming around the corner, write about it. So I always had my ear to it.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  The Jeffersons or All in the Family, right?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Kind of on the cutting edge of, of social inquiry. Right? Those were extremely well timed.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yes, the, the one example he gave was Mary Tyler Moore.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  Right, yeah, another great example. Yeah, absolutely.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Although he used the phrase women's livers, which was very funny. He's this old guy.

• 11:35Speaker 00

  I know. It's like 90 year old people.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But, but, but so, yeah, so I wrote The IT Crowd. Like, we have an early parody ad for Facebook. It was so unusual to us. And I still feel that about the internet, that we've still all got whiplash and we didn't,

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, definitely.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  know what it's done to us as a species.

• 11:56Speaker 00

  So Father Ted, the it crowd, and?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Uh, I'd say that one that might be well known is called Black Books. The other is a, a, a show called Motherland that was quite successful recently.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  That's quite a string of hits.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Okay, so now, what exactly did you do that was so unforgivable? And when?

• 12:18Speaker 01

  I think it was, it was about 2016 or 17.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's when things really went insane.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, also I had a bit of, you know, Trump derangement. I don't know how you were when he won the first time, but I thought the world was gonna end. I was fully taken in by, by the, you know, the way he was being portrayed. In fact, what was being done to him was, was, was about to be done to me.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  Well, he said, they're after you. I'm just in the way. Right? There's some real truth in that. Absolutely. 100%. It became quite a famous statement in this, during this election cycle. Yeah, yeah. It appealed to a lot of. Well, a lot of mega types and a lot of people who had been cancelled unexpectedly by their by their friends and compatriots.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  Well, I always think of that Muhammad Ali line where he said, you know, the Vietnamese never called me no N word. And I feel the same way about the left. You know, the right never called me.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, right.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  And they called me a bigot for for for basic things like saying, hey, you shouldn't be cutting the breasts off little girls. You shouldn't be.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yep, there's one non hate crime incident.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  We can keep piling them up.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  There shouldn't be men in women's prisons. It's actually, it's actually against the Geneva Convention to put men in women's prisons.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, what is a man, sir?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  All over, yeah. There's a terrible story in Ireland. This bloke who was, you know, he had an awful childhood. He was, he was forced by his father to rape his mother and he was severely disturbed. His name was Barbie Kardashian. Because Ireland sneaked in self ID without allowing the people of Ireland to really discuss it. Barbie Kardashian, who hates women with a completely tunnel, with complete tunnel vision.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  In a manner you would not want to imagine ever, even in your darkest nightmares.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. He's now sharing a living space with with female prisoners.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  Well, no psychopaths would pretend to be women just to get access to women. I know they're not that sort of people, you know.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  I used to say about the Catholic Church, at least priests had to learn Latin, you know? These guys, all they have to do is is is put on my shadow and every door is open to them.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Or complain about the fact that the bigots are using eye shadow as a marker of gender and that's not fair.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, the rules change all the time. And that's something I didn't realize as well, is that the rules were very fluid and there were.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  Just like identity.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But it's like, it's like they try and pretend that identity is fluid by making the conversation fluid and hard to understand. I mean, part of me is very angry for the fact that no one stood in my career stood up for me, you know? But another part kind of understands because the the language around this issue is so deliberately confusing. They did a.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  And the cost of standing up is high. Of course, the cost of not standing up is higher, but but it is understandable why.

• 15:17Speaker 00

  You can understand why people choose to remain silent. That doesn't excuse it, but you can understand it.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Well, there's an interesting, I can't remember who did the, um, people are wondering who the hell is this guy on Graham's left.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  No, it's I know, I feel terrible that I've been talking so much. Um, uh, uh, but this guy, I can't remember who, who, who said it, but he said that during the Nazi years, there's a kind of widespread assumption that everyone was afraid of being terrified, of being tortured by a, by a guy with a scar on, a dueling scar on his face. And, and he says, no, the reason that, that, that ordinary Germans went along with it for the most part was because of career advancement. They did not want their careers

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Well, you can understand ever since COVID, ever since all this cancellation, you can understand exactly what happened in Germany. And I think they actually had far more excuse because it was a lot easier to make sure people didn't know what the hell was going on when everyone wasn't connected to everything all the time.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 16:15Speaker 00

  Plus, I would also say that the crimes that the Nazis were undertaking were of sufficient magnitude so that it's not surprising that people didn't believe they were happening. I mean, you know, what's his name, Michael Schellenberger, when, when he broke the W path files, he told me that he had listened to the conversation I had with Abigail Schreier, which was a very early conversation on the child mutilation and sterilization front. And he said that his response, you know, and he's liberal in his orientation fundamentally, was that there was no way that that could be happening. And then, you know, two years later, while he investigated it in great detail and came to the conclusion that, yeah, in fact, it was happening. It was led by a pack of the most reprehensible people you could possibly imagine. But

• 16:58Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 16:58Speaker 00

  It's not, it's not worse than insane, truly malevolent and fetishistic and demented in the way that we've been describing that W path people and in unforgivable. So, so you were standing up for like normal reality and, and that was that. And it happened very quickly.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Okay. So let's turn to Andrew for a moment. We'll get back to you right away. So Andrew, I think people probably on this podcast are a little bit more familiar with you in all likelihood than they are with Graham, not least because of your famous character.

• 17:30Speaker 00

  Now, of course, your name is going to escape me.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  It's Titania McGrath.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Titania, yes, of course, of course. And you wrote a book as her, which was very comical. And you had a, you had and still have? How are, how, how, how active is Titania X now?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Less active than she used to be, but you know, I was very active as her for a long time. I wrote two books as her. We did a live show where I had an actress play her. We got to do a West End show in London. We only got to do one because we were booked for a week, but the person who runs the theatre found out and scotched that. So we ended up with a deal, so we only did one.

• 18:02Speaker 00

  That's funny. It's very funny that Titania McGrath got cancelled.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's that. Exactly. Yeah, she would, she probably wanted to cancel herself.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  But I'm in a different position from Graham because I was never fetid or successful in the way that he was. So I wasn't cancelled. In a sense, all it means is that, you know, I was satirizing this movement and that kind of meant that I was put in the bad pen.

• 18:24Speaker 00

  Right, right. So you were in early part of the movement to monetize the social justice warriors.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Exactly. It was as cynical as that, yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Someone absolutely wanted to do that. So, yeah, so explain, let's go back to the time of Titania McGrath. Explain what you were doing and then also tell everybody all the other things that you've been involved in. Well, not.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Well, I suppose, I mean, like a lot of people within the comedy industry, because my background is stand-up comedy and playwriting and writing musicals and that kind of thing. A lot of people in the creative arts got dragged into this culture war because by virtue of what we do, we're on the front line of it, insofar as creative people are often either teasing the boundaries of tolerance or addressing issues, certainly with satire, when you're holding up to ridicule and scrutiny, the most powerful elements of society. But then, all of a sudden, this movement came along, which we might call wokeness or critical social justice, or whatever you want to call it, which was effectively a new powerful force in society, which no one was ridiculing. It was as though for all of us, this one closed system of thought had somehow successfully

• 19:28Speaker 02

  portrayed itself as the underdog and therefore became ring-fenced from satirical attention, which is an interesting unprecedented thing. You know, normally we know the church, the state, the government, whatever, we know who the powerful. People are and we know where the satirist's target will be. But this was a group that said, if you mock us, you're actually punching down.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  A bully.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  You're a bully, even though, of course, their whole movement was legitimizing bullying. And and because of the whole thing was played.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  It's also a movement that was based on the belief that virtually every form of interaction can be construed as a kind of bullying. Given that there's no human motivation fundamentally, other than that of power.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So it's this power obsessed, identity obsessed movement that plays with language, plays elaborate word games. So that they can.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Very effectively, too.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Hugely effectively. So they can be the bullies and say that any criticism is bullying. They can be regressive and call themselves progressive. They can be illiberal and call themselves liberal. They can twist everything linguistically around.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  Men, call themselves.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Men and women. So everything is up for grabs in that.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's that, I think, is the real danger, especially if you're a writer. That if you can change the meaning of fundamental word combination like men and women, then everything falls apart.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  That's that's exactly right. I think like I've looked into this quite deeply at a psychological level. And I think you can make a strong biological case at the level of perception. That there is no distinction more fundamental than the distinction between male and female. It's more it's more. It's more fundamental than up and down. It's more fundamental than black and white or night and day. And if you can get people to swallow the equivalence of that fundamental pair of opposites, there is absolutely no lie whatsoever that they'll resist.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  And in a sense, that would be fine if it was confined to the sort of the the flesh pots of academia. If it were just the old postmodern theorists.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Or a gay club.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Oh, well, fine, yeah.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean?

• 21:21Speaker 00

  Or or.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  There's certain things that have been weaponized, and one of them is the empathy the gay people feel for outsiders. You know, they've always been very protective of them and they've.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Well, that's not quite my point. My my point is that if if it was just at the level of theorizing, which it was at some point until the late eighties. And then all of a sudden it became applied into society. What I mean is.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  What I'm saying.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  The government now pursues policies based on this inversion of what man and woman means, what truth and fiction is. It wouldn't matter if it was just theorists. It's an activist.

• 21:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  That's my point.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  But though.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  It's the compulsion too, that's the problem, right?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  The fact that you, this is why I objected to Bill C sixteen back in about two thousand sixteen. It's like.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Your original sin.

• 22:01Speaker 00

  You know, I can say whatever I want fundamentally, but the government doesn't get to compel it. And I don't care if the reason is hypothetically empathy and compassion. It's like, first of all, I doubt that. And second, it doesn't matter.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Well, actually, to Graham's point, there was a recent, a couple of weeks ago, the government spokesperson for equalities in the House of Lords, his Baroness Jackie Smith, was asked explicitly, what is gender identity? What is the government's working definition of gender identity? Given that so many public health policies are being implemented on the basis of this concept, what is your definition? And she's turned it around and said, that's, that's a gotcha. She said, you know, don't, you should take this, you should take this seriously, you know? In other words, not answering the question, fudging the answer and turning it around and blaming the person for asking in the first place.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And, you know, we have this similarly, just today in the House of, in the House of Commons, we have a, a, a member of the House standing up, calling for blasphemy law, calling for the desecration of the Quran to be illegal. We've had cross-party discussions in the UK on the definition of Islamophobia. And it was agreed by both parties that Islamophobia is a type of racism, but say, based on Muslim-ness or perceived Muslim-ness, whatever that means. But it's not racism because Islam is not a race. It is a very ethnically diverse belief system. So when you have governments, and I know it's very bad in Canada, but when you have governments actually, uh, uh, proceeding on this slippery linguistic terrain, where even they don't understand the terms that they are deploying,

• 23:31Speaker 02

  uh, then that means that those activists that I'm talking about have won, they've won, they've won out. And they are the most powerful, which is why, you know, we've been satirizing them. That's why we've been mocking them because.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  They're in, they're in charge.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  We have a YouTube channel where we talk about, you know, the gender issue. And one of the important things we felt was you got to show people it's safe to laugh at this stuff. You know, because they're, they, it, because it is ridiculous. One of the things I got into trouble for was, um, uh, Eddie Izzard said that he would have been a victim of the Holocaust. And I said, yes, the Nazis famously, famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair. You know, that got me called a Holocaust denier by trans rights activists.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  And didn't, didn't J K Rowling sort of, or other, other people supported that point of view and they got called Holocaust deniers?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh yeah. Rowling is now a Holocaust denier because, because, you know.

• 24:23Speaker 00

  Well, what can you expect from a TERF?

• 24:26Speaker 01

  So yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Isn't that crazy that you?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  But my point, my, just to come back slightly to my point about gay, gay clubs. I think this is a really important one because I heard one of, you, you're gonna have to tell me the details, but Foucault, is that how you pronounce it?

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Foucault, yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Foucault's, one of, one of his observations is that in a small village, there might be a, a, a guy who calls himself mayor, but he's not the mayor. He's, he's just a crazy guy, but everyone says, oh, hello mayor, and they, they listen to him and they take his advice and stuff like that. And that seems to be what affirmation is.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Right?

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  But the thing is, once you widen it throughout society, it falls apart. It's, it's untenable. Once you get outside of that small village. And what I think gay clubs were was a place where outsiders could come. You wanted to dress as a woman, you wanted to dress in ridiculous clothes. The gay club was a safe place to do all that.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  But that empathy has been weaponized by straight white men in, you know, AGPs, who are, who are basically manipulating the empathy that both women and gay people have for the outsider.

• 25:29Speaker 00

  There's a problem there fundamentally that's akin to the problem of the center and the margin. No.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  The, the postmodernists, the French intellectuals assumed that the reason that any center was established was for no other reason than that of power. And so they construed the center against the, against its opposite, let's say. That's like a dialectic of thesis and antithesis, but there's a problem with that conceptually because. The center is always a unity and any unity is surrounded by a margin, right? Now, and there's an uneasy balance between the center and the margin because all centers have a margin and the margin is where all the experimentation takes place. That's necessary for the center to propagate itself across time because it has to change somewhat as it moves.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  But the problem with the margin is that every element of the margin has a margin. And then every element of the fringe of the margin has a margin. And if you go out far enough into the margin, you don't encounter the oppressed. You encounter the truly monstrous and that's a very big problem.

• 26:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  But maybe part of the problem is that we no longer tolerate the eccentric. I mean, John Stuart Mill writes about the importance of the eccentric within society.

• 26:46Speaker 00

  UK was always great at that.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. But if you don't, if you problematize eccentricity and, and, and demand conformity, you, you, in other words, you empower those even those further marginal states that you're talking about. Those realms of the monstrous.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Is that so much, I think that they're, uh, it seems to be more that they're, they're giving eccentrics too much power. I'm sorry, that's what you said.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Well, I'm saying that those aren't eccentric, I'm saying the ones that they're empowering.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  But there's people like, there's one guy, a famous guy in the UK. He's got a beard and he appeared on this video that a wonderful, uh, um, Scottish turf, who died very young, thirty four years old, Maglin Burns, absolutely wonderful, was first on the scene of the crime and her videos are amazing. Uh, I really recommend everyone watch them. But, um, but she did a famous one about Stonewall where this, it was the early days. So they were, they were quite kind of upfront about saying these ridiculous things. And he, and it was a guy with a beard named Alex Drummond. And he was saying things like, I want to expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a woman, you know? And Maglin said very, you know, uh, in one of her many famous lines, why don't you expand the bandwidth of what it means to be a man, you know?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  And, uh, uh, there's people like him in, in any normal world, someone like that would just be an eccentric whose friends tolerated him and. Oh, it's just Alex being Alex. But now he's like the figurehead for a movement.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Well.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  A bearded woman.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  That also.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Bearded man, woman.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  That also might be a consequence to some degree, an unintended consequence of the technology that unites us, the internet. Because before, if you were an eccentric, by definition, there was one of you. But now online, you can find the other thousands sprinkled throughout the world and you're no longer an eccentric, you're a movement.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Right. And so, and, and we have no idea what it means, what, what that possibility of, what would you say, aggregation of the truly, not even the eccentric, but the monstrous. We have no idea what that aggregation means.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  I suppose, I suppose what I mean though, is that if we don't cherish eccentricity, eccentricity, we don't have the arts. We don't, we don't have creativity.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  And so we've been demanding conformity from artists, from the most free-thinking types. And I don't think it's a coincidence that at the same time in our history, we've empowered these extremists.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, maybe, maybe one of the ways that you can tell when empathy for the marginal has exceeded its boundaries is when the marginalized who are being empathized with start to restrict eccentricity. Right. When, when the, when the now included marginalized become intolerant, the empathetic endeavor has gone too far.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Because they've become the powerful.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  It's what Graham said.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  They're now making the rules.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Well, Graham said to me once, you said to me once about the jester now sitting in the king's throne.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  And I think that's, that's sort of what's happening. It's a, a complete inversion, you know, so we don't have, I mean, this is why Graham and I are now in America. Because we have to, we're, we're going to work in America rather than.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  We don't, we don't think the creative arts in the UK are really fostering.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Departed for, for, for places unknown too, into the United States for exactly the same reason.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. Well, I mean, we've.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Oh, you're not exactly.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  No, no. We've ended up in this situation, I suppose I should clarify because

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Rob Schneider is setting up a new company with myself and another producer I've worked with a lot called Martin Gorely. And we've brought Graham in as well because Graham's in a similar situation. We're all over in Arizona. We never expected to be here. We're working on various projects now. I genuinely don't think it's an exaggeration. It sounds histrionic. But I don't think we could have the kind of artistic freedom in the UK now.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  I haven't written comedy in five years. I haven't written comedy in five years. I had to write my memoir for for free, basically, to be paid a bit on the back.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  I don't I don't think it's histrionic. Like, you

• 30:35Speaker 02

  I think people were thinking it is.

• 30:36Speaker 00

  amount of creative freedom and a certain amount of like supportive social infrastructure in order to think creatively. Because you really have to be free to think creatively because it's risky and you're going to certainly you're going to transgress against boundaries explicitly and implicitly because while you're casting about for humor, you're going to go too far from time to time, like obviously.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  You know, and you know, too, that the best comedy is the closest it can possibly be to being offensive without quite managing it.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  There's a great phrase in Seinfeld writer has, he says laughter is a very strong spice. So if you can make someone laugh at something, then they probably will forget to be offended.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Have you noticed though, Graham, that the shift within the comedians, well, you've noticed more than most, but within comedians themselves, I mean, I remember years ago, maybe maybe even 10 years ago, there was a one club in London that had a document, a contract you had to sign, which sent out a list of the topics you couldn't discuss. And that was widely ridiculed within the comedic community. No one thought this was a good thing.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  And now you there's a club in London.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Now it's kind of standard.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Kind of. I mean, I wouldn't say it's standard insofar as most clubs don't do that.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  But but but but the clubs that do, the few clubs that do are not ridiculed. They're they're given awards and they said this is this is the ideal now. And you also have a more than a signed contract anyway. You have comedians kind of policing each other in a more surreptitious way.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  There's there's only one kind of comedian that thrives in that kind of environment, and that's a mediocre comedian, you know.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  I call them regime comedians.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  That's a great phrase.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  Well, they're also thrilled about the regime because it's The only, see, one of the things I've noticed about woke books, especially the ones for children, is the illustrations are, they're absolutely hideous.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:20Speaker 00

  They're talentless, dull, and, and like, they're monstrous in their, in their what? In their incompetence.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:28Speaker 00

  They're so bad that, well, the only possible reason you got to illustrate that book and have it published is because it has the right political message. Because no one in their right mind would look at a drawing that you made for more than two seconds without turning aside. And so you see the same thing is that, this is one of the, this is certainly one of the things that I saw in universities, and it was awful, is that ideological purity was the best possible camouflage for appalling mediocrity. It's like, well, I can't do what I'm supposed to do, but I can certainly toe the bloody party line. And if you need an enforcer, well, here I am, partly because I have nothing better to do.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:03Speaker 00

  Or nothing better, or nothing that I would like to do more, which is even worse.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  But what's great about all of this is none of this really ever caught on with the audiences. Insofar as I think generally, even though when you go to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival now, most of the shows you go and see will be lectures dressed up as comedy shows. Sermons in disguise.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  I was supposed to do a gig and they closed every venue that I tried to do.

• 33:23Speaker 00

  Yes, I remember that when I was, yeah, yeah.

• 33:25Speaker 01

  It was just unbelievable.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  Right.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Like, you know, you can see here, I'm, I'm not like.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  You're not evil.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not rude or anything. I, I try and put myself across.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Wait, wait until the beast will be unleashed later.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  That's what I'm hoping.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  But like, basically, this picture has been built of me. I, I, the way I describe it is that I'm the victim of village gossip on a global scale.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  Definitely.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  You know, like Wikipedia, my Wikipedia page, the, the, the thing it puts for, at, at the front is that I once compared gender surgeries to Nazi experiments on children. But it's like, like, they, what they.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  It's not so much a comparison as an identity, I would say. I'm serious, like, I've looked into medical atrocities a lot and into the psychological motivations of the people that commit them. And I don't think, the only things that I've read, and I, I truly believe this is the case, the only things I've read on the medical side that are worse than what the trans surgical. Butchers are doing right now are the experiments conducted on the Chinese by Unit 731 in Japan. And that is like the, for everyone watching and listening, do not go and read about Unit 731. You will seriously regret it. And that is the only trigger warning I've ever offered publicly to my students. And I mean it, so beware. But that comparison is entirely apt. It's entirely apt. And so.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Well, the first vaginoplasty was performed by a guy, I think his name was Gerhardt, who was in the Luftwaffe and performed hypothermia, is that how you say it, experiments on prisoners at Dachau.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  Uh huh. Yeah, well, that's Unit 731 territory right there. Yeah, because that was what they specialized on.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  That's the first vaginoplasty. And now they're just practicing it everywhere on mentally, mentally unstable people, on people who have autism, on people who have depression.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Even the intervention of puberty blockers, I mean, even that isn't justifiable. If you're saying that we all have a gender identity, something we cannot define, some esoteric essence within ourselves, and you're blocking the puberty of a child on the basis of that pseudo-religious belief. I mean, that's already unjustifiable on any metric, I would have thought.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was assuming you accept the principle of non-contradiction, and we're way past that. It's like, gender is entirely fluid, and it's divorced from sex, except in the case of children who are confused about their gender, who have to be surgically transformed into the opposite sex.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Like, I see. So I'm supposed to accept all of that, including the logical impossibility, to say nothing of the absolute bloody barbarism that's part of the surgery.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  I mean, those surgeries, it's no wonder Schellenberger wouldn't believe it, because you don't want to know anything about those surgeries. Once you clamber into the dismal realm of their actual reality and the side effects and, oh my God, and the absolute foolish and preposterous notion that surgeons are capable of creating something as complex as a vagina or a penis, the bloody things barely work when you have one that's actually real. So, well, seriously, man, it's like, we're gonna make one. It's like, no, I don't think so.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  Well, you know, in a lot of the photographs you see of the young girls who've had double mastectomies, we always see lots of tiny little scars along their arms.

• 36:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, right, right.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And you know the way they firm the skin from the arm to make the false penis?

• 36:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I once saw one of them, those false penises, and they had those little tiny self-harming scars all over them.

• 36:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  This young woman was having a fake penis that would never work, that they put in through the side. I think they have to come in from above to create the hole that the fake penis goes into.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Jesus.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  You know, does a

• 37:03Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the stuff of body horror. That's

• 37:05Speaker 01

  It is. It's like, uh, I, one of the other things I got in trouble for early on, and I said, this is a Cronenberg movie.

• 37:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, right?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  This is medical horror and body

• 37:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  You know, and all these kids are not being told any of the, the consequences of puberty blockers.

• 37:21Speaker 00

  I talked to, I talked to Chloe, I don't remember Chloe's last name at the moment, but she was one of the very Cole, yes, one of the very early trend, de, de sisters, let's say. Um, very nice girl and, uh, very straightforward. And the interview I did with her devolved quite quickly or evolved into essentially a clinical interview. Because I was interested in what she had been told prior to embarking on puberty blockers and hormonal transformation. And then ultimately at a very young age surgery. And I asked her, so like, so it's well known in the psychological community by anyone with even a modicum of training that negative emotion increases in women when they hit puberty.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  So if you measure la, levels of negative emotion, which include bodily self-consciousness, by the way, in boys and girls, they're pretty much the same. But once they hit puberty, women are more sensitive to negative emotion than men. And they stay that way for the rest of their life. And so there's various theories about that. One is, uh, sexual risk. One is the difference in body size that emerges between men and women at puberty. Cause boys and girls are about the same in strength, but juvenile adolescents obviously aren't. Certainly men and women aren't. And of course, sex is way more dangerous for women, obviously. And maybe the world as such is, plus they have to take care of infants. So they're more sensitive to negative emotion.

• 38:45Speaker 00

  And in women, more than in men, negative emotion tends to take the form of bodily shame and self-awareness. And there's all sorts of reasons for that as well. Maybe one of them being that women are judged more harshly on their looks than men are. And, and it's a big Anyways, this is well established and no one who's trained um is unaware of it. Women have more anxiety disorders, more depression worldwide. These are cross culturally stable findings. Everyone knows this and it's known that it emerges at puberty. And I asked Cole, I said, well, you know, you were unhappy with your body. What she told me was she had had fantasies of having a body like Kim Kardashian. Very curvy, right?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  And she realized early on correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't really matter, that she was likely to have a boyish figure. Now, she's a very attractive girl and men have a very wide range of, what would you say? Types. Absolutely, absolutely. There's a wide range of feminine beauty. So she had no, there was no reason for her to be concerned on that, on that front any more than any other girl might be. And I asked her if anyone had ever told her that an increase in negative emotion was common in puberty for girls, or that it often took the form of body dysmorphia, because that's extremely common and might even be the norm in pubertal women. It's extremely common and those are the first things she should have been told.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Third thing, first two things, the third thing should have been, do you know that 90% of people with body dysmorphia, which is very common in puberty, desist by the time they're 18. They just, and that's been the standard approach for so-called gender dysphoria for like four decades. And again, no one trained, remotely trained, doesn't know that. Yeah. She was told none of that. Yeah. 20 minute bloody consultation session and she ended up with a double mastectomy. And even more uh fun, you might say, is that the surgical scars on her breasts never healed properly. Yeah. So that's her life, you know, and compared to someone who's had a.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Reconstructed penis, she got away lucky, you know, and that's a terrible thing to say. And so, yeah, it's just, it's.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Someone I heard from, um, I think her name is, that when these mothers who have had double mastectomies and gone on to have children, um, when the baby cries, there's still fibers from the breast muscle uh, in, in their chest and it reacts and it hurts them when the baby cries, but they can't do anything about it because.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  They've cut off their breasts because, you know.

• 41:29Speaker 00

  Well, the, the surgeons will reassure the girls that you can always have new breasts installed if you change your mind. And that's one of the marketing ploys of people who are promoting this absolute bloody butchery.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Didn't one person, I can't remember who said it, but one person said, uh, your breasts would grow back, you know?

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Really?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can't remember who said it, but like, I mean, there's all sorts of kooks in this movement as well, like we, it shares with.

• 41:53Speaker 00

  The a priori presumption should be not only kook, but, but what would you say manipulative narcissistic and malevolent kook?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Opportunists, you know, I mean, it just goes like, you know, I always think about the line of men outside the courtroom going into the Giselle, uh, Mercur, is that her name, Mercur? Uh, Giselle, you know, the woman who's raped in her, in her sleep, her husband?

• 42:16Speaker 00

  Right, right, right.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  I always think about that line of men going in, you know, and I just think, well, you know, that's opportunity. And, and, and we all think that we're all kind of good and, but there's always going to be men who, if you move the line a little bit, they're going to follow the line.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Well, there's another thing to point out on that side too, is that our default assumption when we see a man participating in women's sports is that that person is a malignant narcissist. Because first of all, obviously, because all you have to do is think about it for 15 seconds. And I'm dead serious about this. It's like, okay, you're Leah Thomas. I think that was William, if I remember correctly.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  And that's a non-crime hate incident for those of you in the UK who want to report it. And so, um, he's six foot four, I think that's about right, massive shoulders, you know, a fairly powerful swim. I think he ranked four hundredth in the US among American swimmers of his age, which is not bad, right? I mean, it's not number one, and he definitely wanted to be number one. But then you think, just put yourself in this position for a minute. You're like a foot and a half taller than the people that you're competing against, and six inches broader in the shoulder. And when you get up on the podium and there's a claim, not only do you enjoy it, which is a sign that there's something seriously wrong with you to begin with, but you also are so deluded that you think you deserve it?

• 43:40Speaker 00

  And that you're a brave once victim for managing it? Now, just contemplate that. Imagine writing a script about that. Do you know how staggeringly narcissistic you have to be to accept even one of those propositions? Let alone to play yourself off as a heroic victim while you're doing it?

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Well, not to be embarrassed.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Off their podium, and it's like you're the forthright champion of what? Civil rights or some other thing? It's so sickening.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  Laurel Hubbard, the weightlifter in New Zealand, was the son of a billionaire. He's like the son of, like, the equivalent would be Kellogg's. You know, something like that in New Zealand. And he beat two indigenous women who had worked their whole lives, you know, to get to where they are. And now they've got second and third, and this man, this clear man, is got first.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  He's an average man, but he's a hell of a woman.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  But what I can't, what I find difficult to explain, I'd love to see what you think of this, is the people who really confuse me are the people who stand by and just let it happen. I don't, I don't understand psychologically why there was such an agreement for the last five years amongst all my friends and even some family members that I had become evil.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  Well, I think there'd be two reasons. Well, the first thing we need to understand is that the... Camouflage in which the narcissists and butchers that we're describing

• 45:18Speaker 00

  enmesh themselves is in the camouflage of empathy. And empathy is a cardinal moral virtue. Now, the problem is, the problem starts when you believe that the fundamental essence of goodness is empathy, because that's wrong. Goodness is much more complex than a mere one-dimensional analysis would presume. But if you're, if you're, if I can accuse you of being non-empathetic, that's a pretty decent slur. Now, empathy also was a valid impetus, motivation, for many things that were laudable. So, the American Civil Rights Movement, for example, right? Now, the problem is, is that it can, and this is the problem.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  This is being demonstrated time and again by game theorists working in the biological realm. Imagine you have a community of cooperators, a game that's set up so that people only cooperate. If everyone cooperates, the game can sustain itself and improve as it's played. But if you throw one shark into the tank, then it takes everything. So, there's a, empathy is a very useful foundation for social interactions. "I trust you, and I trust you." Great, now we can cooperate. The problem is, is that if you get a community of cooperators established, non-cooperators can move in and dominate. And so, there's an ambivalence between trust and skepticism that's bound to emerge.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  Okay, so, we produced a society that was very trust-based, in which empathy could function very effectively. And then it got weaponized. Now, it got weaponized by psychopaths and narcissists fundamentally, and sadists. We know their type. They're Machiavellian, so they use language to get what they want. They're narcissistic, so they want undeserved attention. They're psychopathic, so they're predatory parasites. And they're sadistic. So, they're fun people, and they weaponize empathy, and it's unbelievably effective. Now, part of the reason it's effective, and part of the reason I think that people didn't stand up, they didn't stand up for me in Canada, although some people did, and some journalists, none of my professional colleagues to speak of,

• 47:31Speaker 00

  almost no psychologists, virtually no physicians.

• 47:36Speaker 00

  Agreeable, empathetic people don't believe that the parasitic, predatory, Machiavellian narcissists exist. They don't have that space in their imagination. And for them, so their default assumption is that anyone who's misbehaving is a victim.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:52Speaker 00

  Now, you can even, even that's understandable, because you could say, look,

• 47:58Speaker 00

  eighty percent of the people in prison were victimized. Now, not everybody who's victimized turns into a criminal. In fact, quite the reverse. So that's, you know, a rather weak demonstration. But that, that still also leaves the twenty percent, right? And they're the twenty percent that include the psychopathic rapists who, when the Scottish National Parliament decides that men and women are the same, decide that it's time for them to go into the women's prisons. All the agreeable people think, oh, those people don't exist, they're just misunderstood.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Then why don't they?

• 48:30Speaker 02

  No, I think there's other factors in your case, though. No, because the other, there are two other factors, I think, and one of which is that psychopaths are scary. And I think that to stand up for Graham in that situation would have made yourself a target. I think that can't be underestimated. I think that's very, very important.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  But I think also, you know, just hearing you, you're discussing-

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Especially now that they've aggregated online, right?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:52Speaker 00

  They can really attack effectively. With almost no, you can't even face your accuser.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  No, they've got a-

• 48:56Speaker 00

  There's zero consequences of accusing someone. So that also enables everybody who delights in accusation. You think, oh, there's no people like that.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Right, well, they've got, they've got a, they've got a digital militia, they've got, they've got that. But there's also the, you know, I mean, when you're talking about some of the things you're describing, about the body horror stuff, about the, the beliefs that we're expected to swallow, I think if you would have played this conversation to someone fifteen, twenty years ago, it would have been incomprehensible to them, what they're hearing. I think a lot of people just simply did not understand what was happening. Did it, did not-

• 49:25Speaker 00

  I think it's incomprehensible to most people now.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Did not comprehend, exactly. So how can you stand up for, how can you expend that energy to understand the incomprehensible in order to defend you? I think a lot of it is, is simply that- No smoke without fire. There's so many people are saying Graham Linehan is a bigot. That's readily comprehensible in one sentence. I can, I can understand that. But I cannot understand this whole other thing.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  And well, it's also cost free.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Like the cost to any given person for writing you off, you know, now you might argue about that with regards to your very close friends, but like I, I, when we, we met at a restaurant the other night and I mentioned to you that I'd been following you on X for a long time. And it was probably, probably took me six months of following you before I trusted you.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  Well, because even though I know that this thing happens all the time.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  And, and even though I know that, I knew that in all likelihood, you were one of the people that it happened to, I still wondered, well, you know, as everyone does, where there's smoke, there might be fire and, and it's just, that's in, in addition to, to Andrew's point. It's like, you're asking a lot of people to defend you. They have to admit to the existence of an evil that first of all, they can't comprehend. And second of all, they do not want to admit to, and no bloody wonder. It's not surprising.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  So, I mean, it happened recently where a well-known author, Boyne, John Boyne, came out and who was someone who had attacked, he wrote The Boy in the Shy Pyjamas, very famous novel. He had attacked Graham back in the day. And I saw this, it was an incredible post. He wrote an apology online and said he's, he now understands it. He's now looked into it. He says, I was wrong. You were right. I'm sorry. He said that for you.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  It's quite a brave thing for him to do. By doing that, he's also put himself in the fire line to a, to a degree. But of course, every time someone does that, and every time they are piled on and destroyed and demonized and monstered, it, it sends a message out to everyone else that you don't want to be that person. It takes a certain kind of strength.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Well, it's also the case too, that a lot of this is now instantiated in law.

• 51:28Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:28Speaker 00

  So for example, in Canada, if you're a physician or a psychologist.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  And you object to gender-affirming care, which is one of those phrases that's so pathological that it's truly a miracle of deception, then. The probability that you'll be reported by an activist somewhere and that you'll face at minimum like years of legal entanglement at your expense with a high probability of losing your professional status in your license, like the probability of that is virtually a hundred percent.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  Is it worth exploring, I mean, the weaponization of the law in the UK?

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  You've mentioned non-crime hate incidents.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Would it be worth me explaining what that is? And because that's the key weapon that activists have.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  Well, we do want to delve into that because one of the things we also want to explore is why you guys decided to move to the United States.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  You know, and so, and I'm spending a lot of my time in the United States for very similar reasons and know of very many other people who are doing the same thing.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  It's no bloody wonder this country thrives, say, because whenever any other place becomes unstable, you can flee, so to speak, if you're the least bit creative and pursue whatever it is you want to pursue here and, and actually be, I would say, actually be appreciated for it. Okay, so talk about the situation in the UK and define this non-crime, non-crime hate incident.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  I think people here find it incredible because obviously you have the First Amendment in the US. We don't have a codified constitution.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  It's not quite as central in the UK, freedom of speech.

• 52:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. Even though it's basically an English principle that the Americans adopted.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Sure, that's an understatement, but, which is why a lot of us were so disturbed when in that vice presidential debate with Tim Walz and J.D. Vance.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Tim Walz effectively said that hate speech wasn't covered by the First Amendment. A comment, by the way, which didn't make it to the official transcripts, I noticed. Anyway, it doesn't matter.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Did it not?

• 53:16Speaker 02

  It didn't, no. I think it was because he was speaking at the same time as Vance. That might be the excuse. Chilling thing to say, though.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 00

  Well, especially when the question, who the hell defines hate, immediately exists.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  No one.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  And the answer is, the person that you least want to.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  Always, yeah, yeah. Well, that's leveraged immediately.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  And also Walz has a lot to, to, to cover up, you know, because it's going to come out, what's been happening to these kids, and he kind of made that possible in his mind.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Absolutely. But I, I, I think, I suppose to, to explain what happened in the, because I don't think people in the US will, will understand what, how the police will.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Lay it out there.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  So what happened, there was a horrific murder of a black teenager called Stephen Lawrence in the early nineties. As a result, and that was racially motivated and as and there was a failure among the police to take it seriously in the way that they should have done.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  It was raised or terrified them, which was institutionally race.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. So there was a report commission called the McPherson Report. Came out in nineteen ninety nine, which did find that there was institutional racism within the police. Or there was a problem, certainly a problem within racism. That was the first time that we had a document which outlined the difference between crime racist incidents as being defined as criminal and non criminal. It didn't use the phrase non crime hate incidents, but it made this distinction and it said that both ought to be reported. This was the recommendation of McPherson in that report. But then you have to fast forward a long time. You go forward to two thousand and fourteen. Two thousand and fourteen is the time when the College of Policing, this is the body in England and Wales, which is responsible for training all police forces across England and Wales.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  And they are a kind of quango. They are an administrative body that effectively the government has outsourced the responsibility to train police in the law in this country. They invented this idea of non crime hate incidents with one eye on the McPherson Report. So that's the origin of it. And they decided that if anyone perceived that a non crime had been committed, something offensive, something that hurt them. If they perceived that it had been motivated by a prejudice or hatred against one of the protected characteristics, race, gender, sex.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  Expanding. In Canada, it includes gender expression, which is fashion.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  In UK law, it includes a gender reassignment. But it's interesting that the College of Policing changed that to trans identity. So they actually, they made it up as they went along. So you had now a system. Implemented in UK law, not in law, sorry, implemented among the UK police, where the police were told, if anyone contacts you and says, I've been offended and I perceive it was to do with this, you report it, record it as a non-crime hate incident against someone's name, it's on file, you don't notify the person who's being recorded as such.

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Doesn't come up in a superficial search, but it can come up in a deep search, I believe.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  There's a thing called a disclosure and barring service cheque, where if you apply for a job which is sensitive in some way, say you want to be a teacher or a carer, you have a DBS cheque, it will come up there, and if it is flagged, if it's flagged there...

• 56:26Speaker 00

  So that's a social credit system by another name.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  You won't get the job. So there's no headmaster or headmistress in the world who's going to see something flagged and then employ you.

• 56:34Speaker 00

  Zero. You're done.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  So you have a situation now, where members of the public with a grudge can weaponise this against anyone they like for whatever reason.

• 56:44Speaker 00

  Or systems of activists with grudges.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  And the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, and the College of Policing have explicitly said that no evidence is required for hate to be recorded. There doesn't need to be evidence of hate, it's just solely about the perception of this. Now, this all came to a head recently because it's...

• 57:01Speaker 00

  How could that go wrong?

• 57:02Speaker 02

  Oh, well, sure. By the way, I should note that this isn't just about McPherson. The chief executive of the College of Policing, at the time that non-crime hate incidents were implemented in 2014, was a man called Alex Marshall, I think. He was the, he'd won the previous year Stonewall's top award in the country. He became an LGBT envoy. So in other words, he's an activist. You have high-ranking activists within the police, within the College of Policing, who are effectively dragging the police force along in their wake, often reluctantly. But the reason why this is, I think, so chilling now, and it's become, a lot of people are talking about it now, because it's effectively

• 57:43Speaker 02

  a form of pre-crime, it's effectively Philip K. Dick's idea of pre-crime. Their justification is... Non, uh, non, uh, sorry, what do they say? They say that unless we record non-crime hate incidents, we won't be able to monitor them in case they escalate into actual crime. But of course, all crime is preceded by non-crime. It cannot be any other way.

• 58:02Speaker 00

  We, you know, we've actually superseded new characters in the UK and Canada.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  I know about this, yes.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  Bill C sixty-three, I gotta tell you about this bill. It's, it's in second reading in the House, and I think the bloody Liberals will pass it before Trudeau gets turfed.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 58:16Speaker 00

  And so, not the T E R F, turf, but the other kind.

• 58:23Speaker 00

  Okay, so this is sandwiched in the layers of a bill that purports to protect children from online sexual abuse. Okay, so, and who could object to that, obviously? Even though the bill does almost nothing to actually make that, to decrease the probability of that.

• 58:42Speaker 00

  I've read this like five times, because I can't believe it's actually true. I keep thinking, I can't say this, because it can't be true. It's, but here's what I understood. I can take you in front of a provincial magistrate.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  And if I can convince that magistrate that you might commit a hate crime in the next year, so a non-crime hate incident.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Yes, but you might, not even that you have, you might.

• 59:05Speaker 00

  I might, that I'm afraid that you might.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  If I can show that my fear is justified, whatever the hell that means, then you can have an electronic bracelet affixed to your ankle for a year. You can be confined to your house. Your communication with the outside world, including social media, can be restricted to virtually nothing. And, for reasons that I really can't understand at all, you will be required to provide samples of your bodily fluids to the authorities on a regular basis. I think to determine whether you've been consuming alcohol or marijuana. It's like marijuana doesn't make you commit hate crimes, alcohol might. But, but I think they probably got that from domestic abuse law, right? Because if, if you're a drunk and you're a domestic abuser, you're much more likely to reoffend.

• 59:53Speaker 00

  But, so we, we've surpassed the non-crime as a precursor to crime.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  We have fear of non-crime as a precursor to crime.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  Okay, can I, can I, can I put, uh, let's, let's have a competition then. Uh, I think you're winning at the moment.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Competition of stupidity. Canada's really in the forefront of this.

• 1:00:08Speaker 02

  A competition of authoritarianism and stupidity. I think we've, we've got a few more cards to play in the, in the UK. Insofar as, um, for instance, um, there have been estimates around a quarter of a million non-crime hate incidents recorded against UK citizens.

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  They happen at the dinner table all the time.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  I think it's, I think it's like sixty-two a day or something is the average.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Especially in the UK, because you guys are so cutting with your tongues. I mean, it's like a national sport.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. But, but worse than that is that the College of Policing has been instructed twice by the Home Office to stop doing this. Two Home Secretaries in succession, uh, uh, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman said to them, you can't do this anymore. Issued new guidelines. Not only did they ignore the guidelines, but incidents of non-crime recording has gone up since the government has said you can't do this. In addition to that, the High Court ruled, uh, that it was effectively, um, uh, they said it was a chilling, it had a chilling effect on freedom of speech. The judge compared it to the Stasi, said we've never had a Gestapo in this country. They effectively said, uh, you know, this is not lawful. And, uh, so in other words, the College of Policing, an individual activist group that trains the police in our country,

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  has ignored the government twice and the High Court once, and has fudged the language. And now we have a Labour government that has said it wants to, uh, ramp up non-crime hate incidents. We've had a Vet Cooper saying, these are really important. We need to record non-crime. Now, you might still be winning on the candidate front because we haven't got to the point where if I think you've, you might commit a crime. But, but to give a very specific example, which is why it's so, it's been written about a lot over the last few weeks is because a journalist in the UK, Alison Pearson, Telegraph journalist, was visited on Remembrance Sunday morning by two police officers. And they said, we are investigating you for a crime of stirring up racial hatred. And she said, uh, what is the complaint against me? What is the crime?

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  We can't tell you what the crime is or what the tweet is. It was a tweet from a year ago.

• 1:02:03Speaker 00

  So you don't even know the crime or the accusers, right?

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  She asked about the accused and they said, it's not the accuser, it's the victim. So in other words, so, so, so we don't have due process, we don't have due process either. Now, you'll know the novel The Trial.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  No presumption of innocence.

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  Because who needs that?

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. But in The Trial by Kafka, the first scene is two police officers turning up at his house, and he says, "What have I done wrong? We cannot tell you that. You do not need to know that." This was a replay of that.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  So when she describes it as Kafkaesque, she's not being hyperbolic.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  It's straight out of the first chapter of The Trial. And he never finds out what he's done wrong in that novel, right until the grisly end of that novel. So, go on, sorry, Graham.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  No, I was just gonna say, I've had three visits. I've had two visits from the police, one on a Sunday morning.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  As befits a big.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  Yes, tell him, because it'll beat Canada if you tell him about this.

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  Well, we'll see. I've got one up my sleeve today.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that's true, that's true.

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  Okay, so yeah, like, tell the story.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  Well, I started reporting on the activities of a serial con man.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Victim.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  I'll be.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Victim.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Who was taking women to court, getting them put in prison cells and so on. And he called that harassment, used it, first of all, to call the police on me, then sent me a summons. He sued me at the same time, because he's what I call a prison lawyer, you know?

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  He knows about the law. And that's what he does. He just, he just puts people under the stress of a.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Called malignant narcissism, by the way.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  That's it, yeah. And then, just, just at the end, he drops it. You know, he owes, he owes me costs, he owes everyone costs. Anyway, found out recently, apart from all this, he was a sexual offender, he was imprisoned for sexual offences against a 14-year-old boy, you know? This is the guy who has the British police working for him, going to people's houses, knocking on doors.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Did they tell you?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Actually, to be.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  They told you your sin, though, didn't they?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  They told me that, yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  Well, it's nothing then.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  You could hear it in the voice of the guy, of the policeman on the other end of the phone. This was the first first time, it was just a phone call. And you could tell he did not know what was going on, you know. And he said.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's even worse.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of like, it's just pure procedure. And he said to me, can you block them on Twitter or something? And I said, I already have them blocked. This was, I knew immediately this was a malignant and appalling person. I blocked them. I said, I blocked them years ago, you know. And he was confused by that, you know, because he didn't, he didn't, he, he just didn't really know what's going on. So they just, these activists just say the right words to wind them up and they go to people's doors.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  The real fear I have is that you can't vote it out because all of this came about during the Tories. And now we've got Labour and so, you know, whatever you get, because the, because the College of Policing and because the police are, they do their own thing, they decide their own thing. They don't care about what they're told to do by the government. It's not a right or left issue, both are bad. But I do think, and we've had a conversation about this, I do think that with a Labour government in the UK, things are getting a lot worse, a lot quicker.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  So no matter how stupid the Conservatives are, the Labour Party can do, do worse.

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  Well, it's, well, it's not just now about non-crime. We've had a lot of cases since the riots in summer, after the murder of those three children in Southport.

• 1:05:27Speaker 00

  By that Christian Welshman.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  The ethnically, well, no, this is a, yes, I know what you're doing there. He, you know, we've had people who wrote.

• 1:05:36Speaker 00

  And Al Qaeda.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  He had an Al Qaeda training manual.

• 1:05:40Speaker 00

  Every Christian Welshman has that.

• 1:05:42Speaker 02

  Standard Welsh practice to have that. But, but he, there were riots, there was anger, there was a lot of obvious justified anger. There were also some horrendous people opportunistically turning up from the far right to attack and, and destroying, defame. All of that is true, but the problem is we've had people who've, in anger, have tweeted things out that I do find objectionable, you know, the things that are racist, things that are unpleasant. And there's a, let me give you an example, there's one woman, Lucy Connolly, and she wrote out, I don't care anymore, we should burn down the hotels that they're in, we should just, you know, I don't care.

• 1:06:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Not pleasant.

• 1:06:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Thirty one months in prison, said in anger, by the way. Deleted very quickly, said in anger. Thirty one months in prison. There have been a number of cases like that.

• 1:06:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 02

  And one of the common factors is that all of the judges have said, we are setting an example. We're giving you the harshest jail term to set an example to others.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, those were the court cases that were sped along so.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  They were.

• 1:06:39Speaker 00

  So efficaciously.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  And and previous to that, Keir Starmer had said that he wanted judges to do this. So it's all, there's a weird.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Sex offenders removed from their cells to make room for these women.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  My problem with this is.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  They were victims.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  My problem with this is manifold. I mean firstly, the draconianism of the jail terms is a problem in and of itself for language, for speech. I don't approve of the speech, but there is no evidence whatsoever that that tweet by that woman caused any violence in the real world. None whatsoever. And no one can tell you different. We've had decades of research into this. We know that that's not how it works. People don't tweet and then violence happens as a direct result. You know, we know that.

• 1:07:18Speaker 00

  Otherwise we'd be knee deep in violence.

• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  It's it's why in this in the U S you have the Brandenburg test for incitement to violence, which would mean that, you know, that firstly, it has to be, there has to be an intention to cause violence, that it is likely to cause violence, and that there is imminent risk of violence. So none of these people currently languishing in prison cells in the U K for tweets meet anywhere near the threshold of the Brandenburg test. We don't have that. So the the chilling effect that this has, not just on people who are saying nasty things, the chilling effect on people expressing themselves in any way. We've got a guy who's just been found guilty of stirring up hatred because of a Halloween costume that he wore. He dressed up as the Manchester bomber, which is sick and unpleasant. That's the point.

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  Halloween too.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  It's Halloween.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Which is like when you do.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  It's about horror.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  Up in sick and unpleasant costumes.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  There's a kind of joke in that. It's that you're trying to out gross everyone else. He's waiting the prison sentence. We don't know how long he's going to be in prison.

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  But why is someone?

• 1:08:20Speaker 00

  Who was the comedian who got nailed for teaching his dog to do the Hitler salute?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Oh, that's, I'm involved in that story.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Count, count, uh.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Count Dankula.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  Dankula.

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, Graham should tell this because he, uh.

• 1:08:31Speaker 00

  Okay, okay.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  You made it worse.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I, these were the days just before I got cancelled. And, um, and I believed everything that was being told to me about the new right.

• 1:08:44Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  You know, or the online right or whatever.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  Which you are now an honorary member of, by the way.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  And so I understand.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  Who?

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  And, uh, and this guy, uh, was doing these kind of videos and he did one video where he got his dog, his, he had a pug.

• 1:08:59Speaker 00

  It was his girlfriend's dog.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  It was his girlfriend's dog.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  And he didn't like it and he shouldn't have because it was a pug.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:04Speaker 02

  No, it's a lovely dog. I've missed it.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  So he secretly taught it to do a Hitler salute and, and I, rather than seeing this as a, quite a funny gag to play on your girlfriend. Um, saw it as, as hidden messages, anti-Semitism, all this sort of stuff.

• 1:09:20Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  And he, he really was just messing about and having a joke and, uh.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Well, it's not like a pug is a testament to Hitler.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:28Speaker 00

  You know, I mean, seriously.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Well, actually, didn't you?

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  But I had to do one of my many apologies.

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  I don't want to drop you in, I don't want to drop you in it, but didn't.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I called it my apology tour.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Didn't you try and stop his crowdfunder from getting?

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I did, I did. Something, something for which I'll spend a few years in, in limbo.

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  Even better, by the way, for this conversation, I at the time wrote a satirical piece. I was writing this character called Jonathan Pie. I was the co-writer of this character. And, uh, we wrote this satirical piece mocking the court's decision where the character, you know.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  And Graham attacked me for that online.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, I did.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you called me alt-right or fascist or something.

• 1:10:01Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm so sorry.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not saying it to embarrass you. I think it's quite a funny, it's a nice little connection we have. Back, back in the day before we were friends.

• 1:10:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  We, we, I was a fascist.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  But, you know, I, I did that.

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  No, it's important to highlight these sorts of things though, because you, you want to see where you're, just like I said, it took me like six months to trust you on X. You want to see, it's not like only those people are susceptible to this like mass hysteria. It's, you go to watch and see where you're susceptible and if you, and if you have been susceptible in some manner, you should admit it. Well, you know, at one point during the COVID epidemic, the so-called COVID epidemic.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  I got vaccinated twice. Now, in my defense, I was very ill at the time and wasn't really able to think. But I did get vaccinated. But I also said at the end of one podcast, and I would say in some ways, despite some inner prompting, that people should just get the damn vaccine. You know, and my thinking at the time was, was seriously, I was like, I'll take the shots. Here's the deal. I'll take the shots. You leave me the hell alone. And then I found out instantly that the deal was you take the shots and then you take six more and forget about being left alone. And that was the end of that as far as I was concerned.

• 1:11:24Speaker 00

  But still, I made a mistake, you know, I made a mistake. And I would say, it was very difficult for me at that point to believe that pharmaceutical companies had become so corrupt that you couldn't trust their vaccine policy.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  You know, it was, it was easier to think that it was the more conspiratorially minded, you know, alt-right types that were pushing this doctrine.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  And saying something cures that cognitive dissonance, even briefly.

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  You get to turn it off just for a few seconds and think, oh, at least I made a decision.

• 1:11:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, right. There's that too.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  All of this is suggestive of this idea that there is a real problem we have at the moment where there's an expectation of moral purity from all sides. I've seen a similar thing there, like where people have, people either, you know, didn't understand what was going on during the pandemic and maybe supported lockdowns or et cetera. And they get piled on and attacked by, by these very sort of, almost like an equivalent of the woke on the, the sort of lockdown skeptic side as well. I don't think any particular group is, is, is immune to this idea, this kind of expectation. Everyone must think the same way as me on every single point.

• 1:12:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's part of group identity, really. Like, I mean, it's necessary for human beings to cooperate, to reach consensus. That's almost universal on everything rapidly, right? Because otherwise, we can't cooperate.

• 1:12:42Speaker 02

  No, but something's changed because I, I remember being at, at university, debating friends late into the night, drinking, rowing, but in a good natured way. We didn't not be friends the next day because we fundamentally disagreed. We actually relished the the fundamental disagreements and they were part of the friendship.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  That's not possible now.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  The net has enabled the the reputation savaging psychopaths. So, you know, the the female pattern of bullying, because there's a female pattern of antisocial person- personality. The female version isn't violence. The female version is reputation savaging.

• 1:13:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  And men can also partake in reputation savaging. If they do that in real life, they they get into a fight. Women don't, because women won't fight physically. And so, but men will. But online, there's no consequences to reputation savaging whatsoever. In fact, it's probably amplified by the social media companies and the algorithms. And so, I think not only can the reputation savagers aggregate, they can do so anonymously. They can levy accusations without any consequences whatsoever. And the consequences of that are rapid and devastating, partly because it's easy to write someone off.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Is it as mobilized as that, though? I I don't think it's I don't think it's mobilized. I think it's more like something has changed in the air.

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  No, it's. I think it's mobilized, too. There are definitely aggregations of activists who are weaponizing the professional colleges, for example.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. No, no, I think that is happening. But I think for a lot of people, they are being caught in a wave of societal change where this is just now the norm.

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  But can I say?

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Go on, sorry, Graham.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  I think it's like, uh, it's not just as weaponized. It's that is that the the panopticon, or whatever you want to call it, is frictionless, right? You like, there's a very funny onion thing about arson at a party being disproved by the sixty thousand photographs that were taken at it, you know?

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  And everyone just has a different angle of a cigarette falling to the floor, you know, that was taken.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  I've seen that, yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's just because we, without realizing it, have become the apparatus of a police state, you know? But it's all it's all just part of the fabric of our lives. We would not, it's like recently I found out, do you remember Pokemon Go was big for a while? So people were going down the street and they were finding Pokemons. Well, apparently, that was a company who wanted to get people to do their GPS work for them. So they got all this, they put they put Pokemon Pokemon in places where there wasn't a GPS record of it. And they got all these people to go out and and film it for them.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  That's smart.

• 1:15:13Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? So so the the.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  So, you know, in the in the story of the tower, the story of the Tower of Babel is a very interesting story in this regard because. So what happens in the opening chapters of Genesis is you have a account of the two ways that society collapse. So it's propelled by the sin of Cain, and he becomes vengeful and bitter because his offerings to God are rejected. So he's a bitter and resentful individual who isn't offering his best, and he becomes murderous and his descendants become genocidal. Okay, so that's the individual pathology, the disintegration of the descendants of that pathological individual, and then you have the flood. And so the flood is a descent into utter chaos, right?

• 1:15:57Speaker 00

  But then you have the Tower of Babel, and the Tower of Babel is equally catastrophic, but opposite. It's the imposition of the all-seeing eye of Sauron, or the Panopticon, right? And it's literally built by engineers, because the people who build the Tower of Babel in the biblical accounts are the descendants of the people who build cities and machines, right? So they're aiming at the wrong goal, right? And they build this massive machine that's dedicated to the wrong ideal, and the immediate consequence of that is that words lose their meaning and everyone is at odds with one another. Yes. You know, and we have got this problem, right?

• 1:16:39Speaker 00

  We've built this new Tower of Babel, which is this interconnected world, which is biologically revolutionary, right? Yes, yes. What happens when everyone's immediately connected? Well, maybe bad ideas spread 50 times faster than good ideas. Like, we have no idea, right? Maybe the psychopaths are unleashed, like, and you know, maybe there's an infinite possibility to educate everyone, like, there's a lot of things on the table, but we have no idea what we're doing. And it's certainly the case that words, in many ways, have lost their meaning. We've talked about exactly that. We can't assume that we're referring to the same thing, no matter what we talk about. And so, you know, you see in China, of course, they're much farther along the totalitarian

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  road than we are, maybe we won't go down that road, but 600 million CCTV cameras, right? Which is about one for every two people, and they can do perfect face But if you cover your face, they can recognize you with unerring accuracy merely by gate. Every bloody thing you do is tracked.

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  And that's certainly a road we could walk down. I mean, you go into an airport now and before you board a plane, your picture is taken. Now you can opt out for now. And the gates are increasingly automated, which is all well and good and convenient when the goddamn things open. But pretty rough on you if they don't.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:17:58Speaker 00

  Because then what? We're gonna talk, what are you gonna do? Talk to the gate?

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  Seems unlikely. And so it, I mean, it's easy even to point to the political, what the hypothetical political causes of this. It's the progressive left. It's like, yeah.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  Something else.

• 1:18:15Speaker 00

  Partly, but it's certainly partly the fact that we don't know what the hell we're doing in this interconnected world.

• 1:18:21Speaker 02

  It might be that period of time when, you know, we have this revolutionary new technology that we don't know how to handle. We don't know what it will produce. I did read somewhere that the, at the invention of the printing press, there were similar moments of hysteria.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred years of it afterwards, wasn't it?

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  In other words, it took a kind of calming down, a readjustment process before we understood how to deal with books.

• 1:18:39Speaker 00

  Well, it also blew the, it blew Christendom apart, right? Because you had the massive.

• 1:18:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:18:45Speaker 00

  What, what altercations between the Protestants and the Catholics?

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Well, you had something very.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Direct consequence of the printing press.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Something very freeing about that. All of a sudden, you can read, read God's word in the vernacular, which was the, the church was, was protecting its power by, by preventing that.

• 1:19:00Speaker 00

  Well, it also meant eventually that the entire world was made literate. Like, it was a major league transformation.

• 1:19:06Speaker 02

  So maybe, to be positive, maybe this Tower of Babel at the moment that we're building, maybe this, this period we're in, uh, will have a settling down period in its wake.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  Well, it depends on how we conduct ourselves. Like, if you guys move to Phoenix.

• 1:19:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:19:18Speaker 00

  And you start your entertainment consortium and you start making comedy that can actually be viewed by people and that's genuinely funny and free. Then you're gonna tilt the world a little farther away from the all-seeing eye of Sauron and the Tower of Babel and towards something approximating freedom.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  That tilting.

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  Now we just need to turn that into a logo.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, if you can think of anything.

• 1:19:39Speaker 00

  You can use the Tower of Babel, although the EEC has already managed that, right?

• 1:19:44Speaker 02

  But there's something about tilting the world in that in that direction. It's it's it's the it's not new. I mean, it's not it's what you're identifying really is the is the is the enduring appeal of authoritarianism throughout human history.

• 1:19:55Speaker 00

  Forever.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  Which forever, which will manifest itself in one way or another. And it just so happens that at the moment, it's manifesting itself in this way.

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  And it seems to me that

• 1:20:02Speaker 00

  And fast.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  And quicker than ever before.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Uh, so it's been it's been catalyzed in this strange way. But I it feels to me as though the struggle in of itself between liberty and authority is one thing, but the struggle to recognize the threat of authority of authoritarianism seems to be another battle you have to have.

• 1:20:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. Well, sure, because the attack doesn't come from the position you expect, not if it's going to be effective.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  Well, the Labour Government don't think that they're authoritarians. They don't they think that they're doing good. When the when Keir Starmer said in Parliament today that he felt that desecrating a holy book was unacceptable and divisive and awful, he wasn't thinking of the bigger picture in terms of this is a gateway to authoritarianism, blasphemy laws, you know, once you start down that line. In other words, it's the well-intentioned authoritarian, which which which is particularly what we have to challenge at the moment.

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  Or the one who wants to appear well-intentioned in the moment with no further thought or effort.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:57Speaker 00

  Right, they were the religious hypocrites fundamentally, so.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  It's the psychopaths who who are proceeding along that line. What concerns me more is the fellow travelers who are benevolent and who subscribe to this tyranny out of a sense of this is better for the world. Those are the ones that I find harder to deal with.

• 1:21:16Speaker 00

  Well, I have less I have less sympathy for for those people, I would say, too, because the problem I have with them, and I think Keir Starmer certainly, Justin Trudeau fits into this category, is they want the moral approbation for being good people without doing the work. It's actually really hard to be a good person. You have to work at it all the time and against your, what would you say, alternative inclinations? So I want to tell you another story that's relevant to your venture here in the United States, too.

• 1:21:47Speaker 00

  There's a story in the biblical texts, in the story of Abraham, that has to do with the probability that a city will be destroyed for ethical impropriety. And cities are destroyed for ethical impropriety all the time, right? They go to hell, and they go to hell in a handbasket, and then all hell breaks loose, and that's the end of that. That happens all the time. Sodom. So, well, this is the story. So, angels of God visit Abraham, or God, it's ambivalent in the story, and they tell Abraham that they're gonna, that Sodom and Gomorrah are gonna be destroyed in totality. And Abraham says, "That's not fair. What if there's good people there?" And God or the angels say, "I don't think there are." And Abraham says, "Well, what if I can go to the city and find fifty?"

• 1:22:32Speaker 00

  And God says, "You find fifty, no problem." And Abraham, who's a stubborn bastard, says, "Well, what if there's forty?" And God says, "You know, you're pushing your luck." And I think, I think Abraham gets them down to ten. And it's a fascinating story, because this is what I think it means. And this is also why I think your venture is so crucially important. And I also think this is relevant on a day, on the day after Jay Bhattacharya was elected to head the NHS, after being an outsider and, and, and, what would you say, cancelled. The moral of that story is if there's ten people in a city that are still willing to tell the truth, the city won't be destroyed. And I believe that's true,

• 1:23:14Speaker 00

  because I think the truth is so powerful, that if a culture is, hasn't become so totalitarian that everyone is silenced, there's still hope. And I do think there's still hope in the West. And the fact that you guys can come here to Phoenix, right? Home of the, home of rebirth, so to speak. Yeah. And you can do your thing, you can do what comedians have always done, which is to tell the truth. And God only knows what the consequence of that will be. More than, possibly more than you think. Yes. It's possibly, there's a reason stand-up comedy is so entertaining and so popular. It's possible, because it's possible that it's because it's really necessary. It's really necessary for you to be allowed to be funny,

• 1:23:57Speaker 00

  because one of the things that's so cool about comedy is that people don't laugh on purpose. Right? You can't... You can pretty much tell when someone laughs falsely.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  So it's it's actually a form of spontaneous honesty. It's pre-conscious.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  So it's a very effective. Yeah, it's very interesting.

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  I saw recently a clip of one of the, I won't name those, but one of the very woke comics in the UK in a BBC audience. You could tell the audience were forcing themselves to laugh because they wanted to show approval for the message that was being.

• 1:24:28Speaker 00

  Moral virtue.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  And I felt like, I think it was maybe Leo Curse at GB News. He was saying that that's the punishment for the woke. They have to sit through these things and force themselves to laugh.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  It's that distinction between what they call clapto, you know, when you see where people are applauding out of approval for what is being said.

• 1:24:43Speaker 00

  Aren't we good guys?

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  What's much better is that involuntary laugh when you think, I really shouldn't have laughed at that.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Also, well, that's the thing. It's even better than the best kind of laughter is when you're ashamed of yourself for laughing. It's like, oh, my God, or for saying it's like, oh, my God, I can't believe I said that. But it was like necessary and it was funny.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  It's an escape of, you know, and we've known, there's been, I've never seen riots in Dublin until last year. You know, I think it was last year they had, it wasn't earlier this year. Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  I've never seen riots in Dublin. I grew up in Dublin. I've never seen a riot in Dublin, you know?

• 1:25:14Speaker 00

  Montreal too, by the way.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  Really? Yeah, horrible.

• 1:25:16Speaker 00

  God, yes.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying, I'm not making any great claims for comedy, but one of the things that it does do is that it lets a little bit of steam out when everyone notices the same thing at the same time. Right? And maybe people aren't talking about it elsewhere. So comedy and satire is a great place to let this steam out. But we have a show called Have I Got News For You in the UK. And if it was, if it's supposed to be collect the news of the recent week. And you could watch it and not have a clue that any of the stuff we spoke about today is going on.

• 1:25:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  You know, because they deliberately avoid anything that will get them complaints. And as a result, it's like completely toothless as a satirical show. We need things that make people, that that just make people feel a bit sane. That's what my, we tried to do with my YouTube about the gender issue.

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08Speaker 01

  Just wanted to make people, yeah, you have noticed that people are.

• 1:26:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, right, right.

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:26:12Speaker 00

  Well, that's the re-establishment of a consent. consensus of truth like you know you you notice that it's much harder to make ten people laugh in a crowd if there's only ten than thousand.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Speaker 00

  Right? And so there's something about the anonymity of a crowd. But there's also something about the fact that when everyone laughs together. It's the establishment of a new consensus of the previously unspoken. Based on the self evident truth, because everyone wouldn't be laughing if it wasn't true, right? It has to. And if that wasn't a true response. And it's also sudden and uncontrollable.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  You know, there's another weird thing about laughter. I used to do this as a joke with a couple of my friends when we were lifting weights. In the gym, because if you make someone laugh when they're in the middle of a bench press that that they'll drop the weight.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  You'll kill them.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  Well, you lose all your muscular control when you laugh.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 00

  Which is also extremely interesting, eh? Because it it means that in the moment of laughter. You render yourself defenseless and vulnerable, which is also extremely interesting, right? Especially because it's also intensely pleasurable. Yes, exactly. It's a very weird.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  But don't you find it depressing, though, that so many comedians, you call them regime comedians? But comedians in the UK don't recognize that this is a problem. They don't think it is a problem because their opinions are the orthodox opinions. But also, I mean, we had, we did a stand up gig in Dublin, what, four months ago or something? Which was cancelled on us.

• 1:27:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  Um, activists phoned up the, it was Graham and I were both performing that night, a couple of other comics. It was part of my comedy unleash thing.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  And they, they, the activists phoned up the venue and they said, okay, we won't put it on then, they're too scared.

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  And then we found another venue at the last minute and it was fine. But how can you talk to, how can any comic today say that that is a situation that's.

• 1:27:52Speaker 00

  You answered that question earlier. It provides an avenue to success for absolutely mediocre people.

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:58Speaker 00

  Right? And then they can say, they can say two things. I'm just as funny as Graham Linehan, for example, plus I'm definitely morally superior. And that's a big, that's a, that's a huge accomplishment.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  Or do they genuinely think that we are spreading hate through the medium of humor? Do they believe that Count Dankula was trying to recruit people to neo Nazism through the medium of pugs?

• 1:28:19Speaker 00

  Look, it's com- well, that's the thing.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  It's com-.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  He did think that, you see?

• 1:28:23Speaker 00

  I know, I know. I know, it's a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  You never want to underestimate the, the, what would you say? The attractiveness of unearned moral virtue. Like, in the gospel accounts, for example, the people who end up crucifying Christ are the Pharisees, right? It's Pharisees, that's religious hypocrites. Those are the people who are claiming to be good when they're not. It's the scribes, those are the academics, right? Who use truth in the service of their own self-interest? And the lawyers, and they're the ones who use legalism as an alternative to morality. That proclivity has been around forever.

• 1:29:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:29:00Speaker 00

  The temptation, I, see, one of the commandments is do not use the name of God in vain. And everyone thinks that means don't swear. That isn't what it means. It means don't claim to be doing the work of the divine when you're pursuing your own self-interest.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:16Speaker 00

  And it's really necessary to understand that that's a temptation. You know, so for example, when I said, "Just get the damn vaccine." Now, was I being good or was I signaling a kind of moral virtue? And I would say, "I think I wasn't being good at all in that situation. I think I was signaling a form of moral virtue." It's like, "Come on, all the sensible people like me are going to do this." And you can tell that in consequence of the fact that I've already done it. You know, like I said, I can plead illness at the time, but that's still...

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  But that, but, but, but there's also the apparatus that I was talking about earlier.

• 1:29:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  You, you just take it as a normal thing that you would, you would issue a statement on it. And we all do. You, I, I remember that in the before times on Twitter, if everyone's talking about something, you sit there thinking, "Oh, I better come up with a joke."

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  You know, who cares if you talk or not? I don't, I don't really like knowing, you know, the way in, in the old days, you'd watch a show like The Monkees. Like, I used to love The Monkees, the, the, uh, the TV show they had, you know? And then you'd, you'd wonder about these people and you'd hear from them every so often for the rest of your life, just in little spots, then when they die. But now, they're telling you their political opinions all day, every day. Which you either don't want to know... Or or maybe you think you wanna know and you actually don't.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  Worse still, they're not necessarily their opinions, they're the opinions they feel they have to transmit.

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  Well, they're also no more interesting than anyone else's opinion.

• 1:30:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:30:44Speaker 00

  You know, I went and saw John Cleese, who, like, I love John Cleese. He he was like a savior to me in my adolescence. All of my friends were John Cleese freaks, you know, and he's so funny. And I went and saw his live show five years ago, and he talked about Making Life of Brian and and about well, all the great movies they made, and that was so interesting. And then he talked about Trump, which was like, not interesting. It was like listening to your neighbor talk about Trump. And it's it's it's, well, I suppose that's another one of the cataclysmic problems of this interconnectedness, is that.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but why, I mean, I don't I don't have.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  What I'm saying is that we're all on a stage now, you know, as soon as you have a Twitter account or Facebook or whatever, you step onto a stage.

• 1:31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  You know, and I think that always being always all being audience facing is perhaps not the best thing for us.

• 1:31:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:31:37Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:31:37Speaker 00

  Well, can you imagine having that problem when you're a teenager?

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  And having that following you for the rest of your life?

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  How many lives have been ruined?

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  But I would say that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with a celebrity expressing an opinion. Oh, oh, oh, and I think there's a distinction to be drawn. I mean, I've spoken with John Cleese about his his he he has sincerely held convictions that he's entitled to express. And I I think that is very different from, for instance, to give an example, an actor friend of mine during the Black Lives Matter riots was contacted by her agent saying, um, you haven't put up a black square in support of Black Lives Matter. If if you don't do that, you'll I won't be able to find work for you. That's not going to happen.

• 1:32:14Speaker 00

  Right, right, right, yes, yes.

• 1:32:16Speaker 02

  You have someone in the arts industry now feeling they have to trans convey an opinion that they don't sincerely hold, otherwise their livelihood will be taken away from them. Now, I think that's I think that's the risk is is is.

• 1:32:28Speaker 00

  Well, part of the problem here might be, and I've certainly had this problem on Twitter, it's like. Twitter is like talking to your friends or your roommates in college, except that it's not, because it goes out to millions of people.

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  But it's performance.

• 1:32:44Speaker 00

  It's like seriously not that, even though it feels like that. And so, you know, maybe one of the rules with X, for example, or social media in general, is if you play with fire, you're going to be burned. And you're playing with fire, whether the match is hot or not on social media. You know, my son has told me, he said, "Dad, you have to remember when you're on X that you're actually publishing." Right, and it's certainly the case that I spend a lot less time on any given tweet than I would on any sentence that's in one of my books.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  Well, that's that. I'm often catching myself in that. If I get into a Twitter spat, an argument which I do more than I should.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  Sometimes I think, I catch myself and I think, "Am I trying to be seen to win?"

• 1:33:27Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  More than getting to the truth of the point.

• 1:33:30Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  And that's the point.

• 1:33:31Speaker 00

  Well, anger will certainly, anger will certainly motivate that.

• 1:33:34Speaker 02

  And that's when I tend to withdraw from it. If I think it's, "I'm messing up now. I'm trying to humiliate this person."

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  It's a power game now.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Right, and I don't like that about myself. I'm sure everyone has it.

• 1:33:44Speaker 00

  Oh, definitely.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  But I think being aware of the performative element of social media, it's just not the...

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  It's hard to be aware of it, though.

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:33:52Speaker 00

  You just have to go click and away you go, you know?

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  It's just not the forum.

• 1:33:55Speaker 00

  There's no lag.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  It's not the forum for discussion, it just isn't. Something about it, it rewards extremism, it's...

• 1:34:00Speaker 00

  Well, it rewards impulsive behavior.

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  It does.

• 1:34:02Speaker 00

  Right, it's set up to incentivize impulsive behavior.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:34:06Speaker 00

  We have no idea. Like, impulsive behavior is a bad medium-to-long-term strategy. And that's the sign quinone of Twitter. And so, it just might be a game that degenerates as you play it.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  I'm kind of confused by Elon's decision to put in the "For You" tab, which seems like a surefire way to create kind of discord and arguments.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  I just don't look at that tab. I look at the things that I'm following.

• 1:34:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, I also don't look at it. It's because it's too pathological.

• 1:34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:32Speaker 00

  Like, it just aggregates bad actors. Well, they're trying to... No one knows what to do with Twitter. Like, and they're... So, I have to ask you another question, because my daughter won't forgive me if I don't.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  And there are other reasons, too. You taught a course for Peterson Academy.

• 1:34:49Speaker 02

  I did. We live in a time when many of us think that human progress is inevitable. When it comes to the arts, this is a kind of wishful thinking.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  It's the psychological complexity of his characters and his insights into human nature, not the plots. He wasn't interested in plots.

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet. This is a girl on a balcony, a lover below. Could you change a single syllable and improve it? Not possible. You can read Shakespeare, I don't care who you are, these are plays about human beings. This is why they've never stopped being relevant. He broadens our sense of what it means to be human. People found it very uncomfortable because it doesn't have poetic justice. His characters, Iago, Cleopatra, Titus, Cordelia, Brutus, they all think differently.

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  I do think that Shakespeare has the capacity to illuminate our modern world. As Solzhenitsyn said, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." I like the fact that Shakespeare absolutely doesn't attempt to preach at you. It's incumbent on us to have a familiarity with, well, the greatest writers who've ever lived.

• 1:36:07Speaker 00

  Tell us about the course.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  So the course is on Shakespeare's tragedies and we filmed it in London, was it last year, I think, yes. My sense of time has completely gone. And it was excellent. And I'm not saying that just to be a sycophant, but the whole premise, I'm so 100% behind, which is that I was told you can teach this course and in whatever way you want. You can focus on the things you want, which I think is the way to get the best out of people who want to teach.

• 1:36:35Speaker 00

  Well, we only invite for, we only invite people to participate who we want to hear from. And so one of, this is something I definitely learned in academia. It's like, once you have the right person, leave them the hell alone. And if they're not the right person, then fire them, right?

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  What's, what's great about it as well, because that's, that's my background. That was, you know, that was my doctoral degree was in Shakespeare. I used to teach Shakespeare at Oxford University, part-time, while I was completing the doctorate. It's everything. And I've, obviously I've retained the love of Shakespeare and I continually read him all the time. So it's, it's, I tell you what it is. It's, I've been dragged into this cultural stuff. By virtue of my creative work, comedy, playwriting, etc. Because you have to address this as a creative. If there's such an obstacle, such an impediment, you have a kind of duty to to to address it.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:30Speaker 00

  Right, when the political is an obstacle to your creativity, you can't ignore it.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  But it then becomes a an obstacle to other enthusiasms in your life.

• 1:37:40Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  And for me, Shakespeare-

• 1:37:41Speaker 00

  And more lasting enthusiasms, hopefully.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  And actually, I think the um, the the the the study of the likes of Shakespeare, who who the activists are trying to problematize. You know, the Globe Theatre in London, which is supposed to be the custodian of his work, has a an annual anti-racist Shakespeare webinar, where sort of anti-racist experts gather to berate Shakespeare for his problematic elements. And and you think-

• 1:38:06Speaker 00

  I'm morally superior to Shakespeare.

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  I'm better than Shakespeare, right. And I think one of the great things, so in the in the course that I did for you, for the Public Art Academy, I started the first lecture with a question, which is why has Shakespeare, as a playwright, never been bettered? How can that be the case? You know, this is, he he he began in in the late 1580s. The public theatres had only been around for about a decade. This is a new thing. This is a new medium. How is it that a man, right at the start of this new thing, isn't ever bettered for four centuries? How does that happen? And I hope by going through it, we sort of get to some kind of answer. But I think it's that prioritization of genius, which has now become suspect within the academy. You know, the idea that he's he his work can be reduced to the idea of just a white male,

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  effectively trying to empower other white men through his work. That's how they see art. That's how they see creativity as just a kind of conduit.

• 1:39:00Speaker 00

  Can you imagine a temptation more profound than the one that would allow you to be morally superior to the great geniuses of history? Just because you hold the the the same cost-free political opinions?

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:39:11Speaker 00

  I mean, that is a good deal. I can barely tolerate going to museums now. Because you have a masterpiece and then an explanation by someone whose subtext is how they're morally superior to this person who's so outstanding that it's shitting them.

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  There was a an exhibition of Hoag- Hogarth in London where they there was a self portrait and because he was sitting on a chair which was made of wood. The panel explained that the wood had probably come from a from a plantation and it's connected to slavery and therefore we need to judge Hogarth. I also I and I and I think so I think these little lectures that you get. It's so of this, it says so much about our time, but nothing about the art.

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:39:48Speaker 02

  And nothing about the the transcendent capacity of art. And and I that's why I'm very careful now.

• 1:39:54Speaker 01

  It's so rooted to the ear.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  It is, absolutely.

• 1:39:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  And whenever I see I'm I I research it very carefully now if I go and see a production of Shakespeare. Because nine times out of ten, it will be a a mangling of Shakespeare to promote the ideology. And by the way, I don't think that's a problem if you want to. People do all sorts of things with Shakespeare.

• 1:40:13Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  And and that's fine. They're free to do that. And I don't care if you want to turn it into a a pro Marxist thing or a pro, because whatever you want to do with it.

• 1:40:20Speaker 01

  Queer Shakespeare.

• 1:40:21Speaker 02

  Or queer, but everyone's doing the same thing.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  You want you want.

• 1:40:24Speaker 00

  Well, when it's mandatory, it's something completely different. Yes.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Even more confusing.

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, well.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  But they are anyway.

• 1:40:30Speaker 00

  The other thing that happens, of course, is that as soon as the theatrical presentation becomes woke, no one watches it.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:40:38Speaker 00

  And then all the activists say, well, obviously Shakespeare is passe because no one's paying any attention to him anymore.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  But why is it that all in our current culture, I think all art at the moment is, as you say, mandatory in terms of it must be conveying the message. It feels like state sanctioned art, propaganda rather than art. And that's the only way you're going to get commissioned. That's the only way you're going to get a play on. Well, no, in the UK, I mean.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  Oh, it's oh, it's increasingly the case in classical music and everywhere in the arts. And theatrical productions all across the United States. I think fifty percent of the theatres now in the United States are are um. The the prophecy is that they'll go broke within the next two years. And it's it's like the problem with propaganda is no one wants to watch it.

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  Well, Graham, if you if you were working, if they were letting you work today, all of your scripts would be passed by a sensitivity reader in advance. You would be told which bits you have to take out.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:33Speaker 02

  You know, even the poet Kate Clancy, who's, you know, on the left and, you know, etc. She wrote this. This piece about sensitivity readers, her experience. She'd written a, and I will do it, not do it justice, but she, as a poet, had used the word disfigurement relating to the landscape, relating to the, she was doing something poetic.

• 1:41:49Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:41:50Speaker 02

  And the sensitivity reader said, that's an ableist slur. So all they can see when they read these texts is how does this either promote or oppress people on the basis of identity groups? And that's not art.

• 1:42:03Speaker 01

  I met a guy who was writing a biography of, I can't say who it is because it would get him into trouble, but a very famous figure in the 50s. And he, I believe he had a heart attack from dealing with sensitivity readers. Because the two, because the correspondence that he'd unearthed.

• 1:42:20Speaker 00

  Another dead, another dead white man.

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:21Speaker 00

  Was he old? Hopefully, that's another old.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Another evil, yeah.

• 1:42:26Speaker 01

  But all the, all the stuff, all the, the information that he'd unearthed, the letters, you know, they were all using, you know, the F word for gay men or the, you know, N word and stuff like this, but this is the past. It is the truth.

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  What's that story you're telling in your book about Tom Stoppard?

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it was so funny, but Tom Stoppard, this was when Sonia Friedman, who was going to produce the Ted musical, which by the way, we have still, we have exactly the same kind of problems with theatre in the UK in terms of funding. And the Ted musical would have kept people employed for years, you know? Um, so it's just an outrageous act of censorship that they've destroyed it, you know? Um, but Tom Stoppard was, was, I, I was very flattered because I was following a meeting she had with Tom Stoppard. And she said, oh, he's complaining because he, you know, he doesn't think there should be black people in the Warsaw ghetto, you know? And, and she said, but he's having them whether he likes it or not, you know? And I thought, well, would you have Jewish people in a play about the, you know, the Bronx, you know, like,

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  what are, what are the rules here? Is diversity only one way? Is it just visual diversity? You know what I mean? But it's extremely.

• 1:43:37Speaker 00

  There's a diverse range of diversities, unfortunately.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, you were talking about Monty Python, but Terry Gilliam, because the Old Vic Theatre is now run by the people who who sell its ice creams, uh, had to take uh, the Stephen Sondheim musical out to Bath to get it on.

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  Well, and Cleese also had trouble with part of The Life of Brian, because there's a character in it, I think, is it Chapman?

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Loretta.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, Loretta, right, which is a very funny part of the movie, which is also a very, very funny movie. But yeah, he decides that he's a man or a woman, right?

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  I think he said that that was overblown, that was a headline.

• 1:44:10Speaker 02

  Well, not what what what happened.

• 1:44:12Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 1:44:12Speaker 01

  Oh, you know.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  Well, I've spoken to him about it.

• 1:44:14Speaker 00

  Me too. And I know that they had trouble with that when they were bringing the play on stage.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  It was the actors, they did a read. So John has done a stage version of Life of Brian.

• 1:44:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  He's written a stage version. And in the reading, I think it was in New York, the actors then said, you have to take out the bit where the man says he wants to be a woman.

• 1:44:31Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  Where he wants to be called Loretta, and he wants to have babies. And they say, but and John's character says, but you can't have babies. And they say, no, but we want to fight for his right to be able to have babies.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:44:40Speaker 02

  And it's so prescient, it's such a brilliant.

• 1:44:42Speaker 00

  It's so perfect, yeah.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  But but he he said he won't take the scene.

• 1:44:45Speaker 00

  No, that's right. He said he wouldn't do that.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  Which is fantastic.

• 1:44:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  But but but that.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  I think Eric Idle bent the knee, though.

• 1:44:51Speaker 02

  Oh, did he?

• 1:44:52Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah.

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  It's it's it's so sad that the but I wonder about this, and it's a broader question is, is it possible for artistic genius to even emerge within the conditions that we are currently creating?

• 1:45:04Speaker 00

  Well, how much artistic genius emerged in the Soviet Union?

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  Well, that's the point, isn't it?

• 1:45:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, none, that's pushing it, but virtually none.

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  So there's a great book by Victor Hugo about artistic genius, and he he estimates that about three or four major artistic geniuses emerge in every generation. That's his view about this. He says that this is, how does he describe it? He says this is God distributing himself on earth. He says every masterpiece is a kind of miracle. It's a really beautiful idea. But what I think Hugo, and he's probably right, he's talking about the big one, like Iskildus and Homer and Dante and Shakespeare. And I think he's right about.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  About me.

• 1:45:40Speaker 02

  I'm I'm sorry about that, Graham. But you will reach Homer's heights at some point. But but no, but I think he's talking about these. He's saying that this will inevitably happen within humankind. Three or four generations, you'll get a Mozart, you'll get a whatever. But that won't, I think Hugo takes for granted

• 1:45:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  that we live in a culture that values the arts and doesn't value this

• 1:46:03Speaker 00

  It doesn't punish it.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  Quite.

• 1:46:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  So I don't think within the grip of this movement, with the arts so captured by this movement, those people cannot emerge because the conditions are simply not there. They're probably there, there probably are those

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  I would say though, at around the time of Hugo, there would have been just as many impediments to creating art.

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:25Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  But how, so yeah, that's the question. So how is it that under the oppression of medieval Christendom, great artists still emerge through it? What does Michelangelo do with the Sistine Chapel? He's given narrow parameters in terms of what he can represent, but he finds a way to, to

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  Well, as a manifestation of God on earth, so to speak, it's very hard to stop. You know, I collected Russian realist art from the 20th century, a lot of it. Like I have like 500 pieces of it. And I looked at tens of thousands of paintings from the Soviet Union.

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:47:00Speaker 00

  A lot of it rush, rough impressionism. It wasn't exactly realism. And many of the pieces I got are spectacular from an artistic and technical perspective, even though to some degree they're subordinated to propaganda. But what was really cool about having the pieces around is that as we recede from the propagandistic milieu of the work, the art shines through. And in a hundred years, these will just be pieces of art. There'll be no propaganda left in it at all.

• 1:47:29Speaker 02

  That's so interesting, the way that true creative genius finds a way through the impediments.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Yes, it's like a flower in a pavement stone.

• 1:47:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  But I love that, like, so for instance, with Shakespeare, you know, he can't write, produce his narrative poems, Venus and Adonis or Rape of the Cries, without patronage. So each poem is preceded by this effusive praise of Henry Ruthley, his patron, which you could say, well, that's dispensable, but the beauty then comes through in the A poem in of itself.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Well, you could argue as well that like cinema is a very interesting one because cinema is such a strange marriage of art and economics, you know?

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  And it's like, but still we have these classic films that broke through.

• 1:48:09Speaker 00

  Well, the other, we, we should probably stop with this.

• 1:48:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:48:12Speaker 00

  To the very side. No, I'm very happy about it. I mean, one of the things, and this is very much worth considering, no doubt you gentlemen have already considered it, but you know, the way that you circumvent the propagandists isn't by explicit political statement, you do it by story.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:48:28Speaker 00

  Tell a great story and a great, if a, if a story is great, it isn't subservient to propaganda because that would destroy the greatness and there isn't anything that's more destructive to propagandistic totalitarianism than greatness.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:48:41Speaker 00

  So this is why I'm so excited, partly why I wanted to invite you on the show too. I'm so excited that you've come to Phoenix and that you're starting this new enterprise and that you found each other because God only knows what you could accomplish and who knows what the consequence of actually producing some things that are genuinely funny might be again. It's not like there's not a market for it. I mean, Rogan's comedy club in Austin is just thriving and he's fostering a whole new generation of comedians who will say anything.

• 1:49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09Speaker 00

  As long as it's funny, you know, and they don't allow cell phones in the crowd. You can't record any of it.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14Speaker 00

  And so people go out and it's such a fun place to go because everyone knows that there's trouble afoot and that all sorts of things that can't be said will definitely be said.

• 1:49:25Speaker 02

  Isn't it quite an exciting, it's quite an exciting time. All of this oppressive woke stuff actually could produce something amazing.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  Well, if there's one thing we do as, as, as a species, it's over correction. So I quite like the idea of a comic over correction.

• 1:49:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:41Speaker 00

  Well, maybe that's what's, I think that's happening already because there's so many things that are happening even within the Trump administration that are comic over corrections. Right? It's like, really? They appointed him? That's the maximally possible, that's the maximally comical possible outcome, right?

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:49:58Speaker 00

  So, all right, gentlemen, we should probably stop on this side. So thank you very much for coming in to talk to me.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  Absolute pleasure.

• 1:50:04Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm, we'll, we'll meet again. on the podcast, especially once you guys get up and rolling because everyone's going to want to know just exactly what the hell

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, we've done.

• 1:50:15Speaker 00

  They have all sorts of plans, by the way, which we didn't discuss today because it's a little bit premature to announce them, but those announcements will be coming soon. Thank you to everybody watching and listening on the YouTube side and to the Scottsdale crew here for making this possible and and also for putting this together on relatively short order because we decided to do this podcast, what, yesterday?

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:36Speaker 00

  The three of us anyways, and so that worked out extremely well. And we're going to continue on the Daily Wire side. I think probably what we'll do there is delve a little bit more into the ugly underbelly of totalitarian woke wokeness, especially, I think especially in the UK and in Europe, because a correction has obviously already occurred in the United States and God willing, that will actually have some teeth and we'll see what happens. And in Canada, Trudeau's numb days are absolutely numbered. There isn't a chance that he's going to survive beyond next October. Now, he'll be able to do a lot of damage in the intervening year, but he's pretty much done. But Europe is in rough shape and the UK, they're in rough shape.

• 1:51:18Speaker 00

  And so I think we'll turn our attention on the Daily Wire side to a discussion of that situation and also what might be done about it that would be practical and useful. So join us for that.