#928 - Douglas Murray - Why Has The World Gone Insane?

Speaker 1 Douglas Murray, welcome to the show.

Speaker 2 Very good to be back with you in your native Austin.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes, you have. You're here for 24 hours.

Speaker 2 Salubrius. Wonderful.
Watching your success with great admiration.

Speaker 1 Thank you.

Speaker 2 No, and great pride as well, in a way. I don't know why I feel pride, but I just...

Speaker 1 Well, you definitely contributed to it. I think I managed to get you to take a dice roll

Speaker 1 many, many years ago, five years ago, six years ago.

Speaker 2 That's right. I think I was doing the Manners of Crowds, and you were in your place in Newcastle with a mold on the ceiling.

Speaker 1 It wasn't mold. It was because I had, as I explained for a long time, it's because I had a Yankee candle addiction, which also actually is something to be embarrassed about, not quite as bad as mold.

Speaker 1 And I had to get it repainted. After our episode, the internet shamed me so much that I had to get the ceiling of my old bedroom repainted.

Speaker 2 And now you're here in Austin.

Speaker 1 Look at me now.

Speaker 2 It's great to see you. Well, you too.

Speaker 1 Trump's been in office for 78 days. What do you make of his efforts so far?

Speaker 2 Mixed, I think, as with anyone.

Speaker 2 He

Speaker 2 got the very, very large and considerable mandate,

Speaker 2 won the popular vote, made it pretty impossible for people to criticize him from the election onwards.

Speaker 2 First couple of months, there's been very little

Speaker 2 I think pushback or rallying around against him.

Speaker 2 Then inevitably, there are things that are now happening. You may have noticed if you keep an eye on the markets or anything like that, which very much people are going for him on.

Speaker 2 But yes, I mean, it's kind of early days, but

Speaker 2 a mixed bag, I'd say.

Speaker 1 It feels like a lot's happened.

Speaker 2 Well, a lot has happened.

Speaker 1 78 days.

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, one of the things you can say, whatever your views on Trump, you can say with certainty, and I did ahead of the election have since, which is that

Speaker 2 he does what he says he's going to do.

Speaker 2 So, whether it's tariffs or foreign policy or domestic policy, border, you know, he

Speaker 2 campaigns about it and then he does it, tries to do it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I am always quite amused by the people who are surprised that that, you know, what's he doing with all this tariff stuff? And I mean, like, every rally I covered of his tariffs was a big thing.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 so, yes, there are, there are some corners of it,

Speaker 2 principally the Ukraine stuff, which I'm concerned about.

Speaker 2 But it's early days.

Speaker 1 There's

Speaker 1 a sense of sort of the move, fast, break things

Speaker 1 thing

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 1 I think is kind of sexy in Silicon Valley and tech and building businesses and stuff. Not convinced how perfectly it ports across onto governance.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 the normal problem that people find when they get elected and in fact i think he had in his first term is that you don't it takes up four years or so to work out which levers you can pull and something happens and which levers pull and you get a big clown appears and

Speaker 2 and which levers you pull and just absolutely nothing happens

Speaker 2 and i think he's come in this time

Speaker 2 knowing which levers to pull and a lot of presidential orders and much more

Speaker 2 And so it's certainly more

Speaker 2 efficient and effective so far than his first months in office in the first term.

Speaker 2 I think things like the border are huge accomplishments. Very, very big reason for his election was: we've got to sort out the border.
We can't just have a porous border

Speaker 2 with Central and Southern America and indeed the rest of the world. And border crossings have gone down to almost nothing.
Is that right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 And the

Speaker 2 and I think that the

Speaker 2 removal of illegals who have no right to be in America and have been committing crimes whilst in America or very dangerous criminals is a very good place to start.

Speaker 2 And inevitably, when you do that,

Speaker 2 some people will holler and wail, like the mayor of Boston, who insists that somebody who's been paying taxes all their life in Boston and whose predecessors also paid taxes in Boston

Speaker 2 have the same rights as somebody who recently broke into Boston and

Speaker 2 wants to squat there on the street shooting up.

Speaker 2 And quite a lot of people disagree with that.

Speaker 2 There are lots of people, of course, who are finding a way on the deportation thing to criticize him, some of which is perfectly legitimate, which is, of course, stuff like,

Speaker 2 you know, there have been some cases of people who've been deported who haven't done nothing wrong.

Speaker 2 And that's also something that always happens when you try to institute a policy like that. I don't think it means you don't institute the policy.
It means you do it better.

Speaker 1 Yeah. More accurately.

Speaker 1 There was an issue in El Salvador when the president came in and just decided to go scorched earth with everybody into these football stadium-sized prisons, these new things.

Speaker 1 And yeah, one of the, I remember I did some research on that, and one of the concerns was the collateral damage of

Speaker 1 brothers, younger brothers of people who are criminals.

Speaker 2 And you just sort of sweep everybody up.

Speaker 1 You have a smoke detector principle of either you pattern match incorrectly when it's not there or you don't pattern match when it is there.

Speaker 1 And I think in these sorts of situations, people tend to over-index on being a little bit more

Speaker 1 sensitive to the patent matching.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 they should remedy that and make sure they've got things accurate.

Speaker 2 But I think none of that means that the status quo that existed is remotely right.

Speaker 2 And this is all the sort of blowback that I'd have imagined that he and the people who are working with him on that would have expected.

Speaker 2 It's a little early to say what's going to happen with the market stuff and the tariffs.

Speaker 1 Do you know anything about tariffs?

Speaker 2 Do you know how they work? I mean, I'm not one of those people who pretends to be an expert on absolutely everything. So I'm not going to pretend to be a tariff expert.

Speaker 2 I noticed the people who are tariff experts this week are the same people who were experts in

Speaker 2 Ukrainian mineral deposits just a matter of weeks ago. It's amazing what people people can know.
It's quite starting.

Speaker 1 Pace of learning on the internet.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Unbelievable. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think there's a masterclass course about that. But no, I look the all I know is that I got a message from my accountant saying

Speaker 1 might be a good time to put more money into the SP, might not.

Speaker 2 We'll see.

Speaker 1 That was a message that I received this morning.

Speaker 2 Thanks for that.

Speaker 2 This is what Trump has said, not just for the last four years campaigning. It's what he said for 40 years.

Speaker 2 He believes that America is being taken advantage of.

Speaker 2 And we'll see whether, I mean, I would have thought my expectation, I guess, from the little I know is it'll be some quite a lot of short-term turmoil.

Speaker 2 If in the long term it doesn't sort it out, if manufacturing cannot return to America as fast as it should, then that's a problem.

Speaker 2 That's the case in every Western country, though. We've all been

Speaker 2 satisfying ourselves with cheap goods imported from China, usually using slave labor that we wouldn't want to see at home, but we turned a blind eye.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there's there's there's there's much manufacturing, many goods that there's no reason why you couldn't make them in America.

Speaker 2 Whether or not you can persuade people to actually take up those jobs, start those firms, that's another another matter entirely.

Speaker 2 But if anywhere can do that, America can.

Speaker 1 It's strange that a lot of people who would maybe complain about a cost of living crisis and

Speaker 1 quality of jobs and employment, opportunities for progression and student loan debt and housing and so on and so forth,

Speaker 2 also

Speaker 1 I would guess at the same profile of people that shot on Timu and Sheehan.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ones we can buy a top for $4

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 throw it away after two uses. Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, there's a an industry called the rag industry, and these are

Speaker 1 a lot of them are engineering. That's That's right.

Speaker 2 Get yourself charged up.

Speaker 1 They're working in manufacturing, working in engineering, and they use rags, used t-shirts or whatever. They'll be washed.
But they get trickled down.

Speaker 1 Maybe it goes to charity shops, something like that. And to clean off grease, to do all of this other stuff.
The rag industry in the West is dying.

Speaker 1 because the quality of the clothes that people are wearing are disintegrating so quickly that they can't even be used to mop up oil and water.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 I'm going to sound incredibly old now, but when I was growing up in West London as a boy, I remember there was a rag and bone man.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Do you remember that?

Speaker 1 There was one that used to go past in Stocknapontees.

Speaker 2 A guy sort of...

Speaker 1 Wheeling a thing?

Speaker 2 A traveler, usually, I suspect, with a horse-drawn cart calling out rag and bones. Yep.
Rag and bone.

Speaker 2 And if you tell the young now, they won't believe you.

Speaker 1 Fucking prehistoric.

Speaker 1 Don Lemon said

Speaker 1 people love AOC, Jasmine Crockett, and Eric Swalwell. I think the Democratic Party should put people out there who the people want, who they're asking for.

Speaker 1 Is that a good strategy for the future of the land?

Speaker 2 I'm not sure about that.

Speaker 2 Eric Swalwell was the one who was found banging Fang Fang, wasn't he? Do you remember that?

Speaker 2 Chinese spy Fang Fang.

Speaker 2 She infiltrated. Stop saying it like that.
No, Fang Fang. What's wrong with that?

Speaker 2 Stop saying it like that. Bang, bang, fangfang.

Speaker 2 Everyone knows that. Okay.
Yeah, he was infiltrated by a Chinese Communist Party spy.

Speaker 1 Okay, sexually.

Speaker 2 Very much so. Okay.

Speaker 2 And regrettably so. And that was a big national security breach.
But

Speaker 2 yes, the others,

Speaker 2 look,

Speaker 2 Don Lemon, why, I mean.

Speaker 2 like asking to find sense in the entrails of a chicken.

Speaker 2 His analysis is of no value. And if the the Democrats listened to him, they'd never be in power again.

Speaker 2 What?

Speaker 1 Let's say that you were an advisor to the left.

Speaker 1 And in many ways, I imagine that you do have desires to have a burgeoning, flourishing left that doesn't make everybody sort of shuddering cringe in that way.

Speaker 1 What would you advise them to do?

Speaker 2 In America? Yes.

Speaker 2 A very straightforward one, which is you listen to your defeat and you learn from it and you work out what you did wrong.

Speaker 2 And I think they are, to some extent, my friends who are on the left and my other Democrats,

Speaker 2 the sensible ones are trying to do that. You'll notice that that since the election in November last year, they've definitely changed their strategy a bit.

Speaker 2 When we haven't got Russia, Russia, Russia, and you're all Nazis so much.

Speaker 2 They're still doing it a bit, but not anywhere near as much.

Speaker 2 Partly because if if your opponent has has won the popular vote it's tricky to pretend that every that the majority of people in america are nazi supporters the wiser democrats realize that's not a good strategy losing strategy yeah don't insult the voters in their majority

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 they should learn from it they should uh and i think they are i think this time around as much less denial

Speaker 2 And I mean, now the books are starting to come out as we knew they would be, explaining that, you know, actually, you know the democrats kind of knew that joe biden wasn't there

Speaker 2 these expose memoir exactly the people who spent uh the years of the biden presidency assuring us that there's nobody who was a sharper tack in the box and now they're all saying oh actually you know he didn't know whether he was the president of the united states or the head of nato and things like that and so that stuff is starting to come out and uh there'll be lots more and they'll they'll they'll tear themselves apart for a a bit uh but the main problem for the democrats is just they don't really have anyone leading the party uh chuck schumer when he made his deal with uh uh trump on the budget the other week immediately was the most hated person on the left and even you know uh pelosi uh criticized him on that so it's hard to see who's really sort of leading the party it's not cohesive at the moment no and um so they should they should they should learn i mean my view is if i was a democrat advisor strategist i would say what what what anyone would from observing them, which is they tacked very far to the crazy left.

Speaker 2 And the American public didn't want it, as indeed most publics don't. And they didn't want all their children to be trans.

Speaker 2 And they didn't want all of the crazy identity politics stuff that had gone just completely deranged.

Speaker 2 They also didn't want, I mean, the more sensible ones have already realized that it's a party, a very, very distinguished party with a considerable history. It's not a street movement.

Speaker 2 It's not a protest movement.

Speaker 2 I can't remember which one it was who the other week, I wrote about him in my column in the New York Post, who led a protest on a street in New York against Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 And I think it's probably the most illiterate speech I've ever heard against some really quite stiff competition.

Speaker 2 And it ended up with him saying, You take your Moscow money, you moo, moo, moo, moo.

Speaker 2 Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 1 Not good. Line for the ages.

Speaker 2 Line for the ages. Cicero would have envied it.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 the wiser ones were just, that's not how you become serious again.

Speaker 2 You don't give in to the street protest people, don't give in to the most radical people.

Speaker 2 There are really impressive people in the Democratic Party, but they're going to need to allow them to come up. Tim Waltz.

Speaker 2 If I was a Republican strategist, I would tell the Democrats to keep going with

Speaker 2 Tim Waltz.

Speaker 1 The pinnacle of masculinity.

Speaker 2 I mean, all that stuff is just a disaster. Everyone knows that he was a horrible candidate.
Everyone knows that Kamala was a horrible candidate. You just got to find the talent and encourage it up.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 they've got time.

Speaker 2 I don't think they should panic or start, you know.

Speaker 2 But they do at some point have to have a coherent opposition to Trump and Trumpism.

Speaker 1 Well, it certainly seems like one of the things that everybody's probably noticed

Speaker 1 how much is the blowing with the wind that we're seeing at the moment of Mark Zuckerberg, not only a sartorial rebrand, but meta-policy-based rebrand, getting rid of fact-checkers and opening up conversations specifically around, I think, trans or gender identity was one of the points.

Speaker 2 I think what, as I understand it, what happened with Zuckerberg was that he discovered that, you know, with whatever it is, 80,000 employees, you set up a philanthropic wing with like 1,000 employees, and then they spend all their time warring on the 80,000 people making money and derange the whole company.

Speaker 2 And so you get rid of it.

Speaker 1 But you've seen that, right?

Speaker 1 Lots of different companies seeming to move in that direction.

Speaker 2 So BlackRock,

Speaker 1 they exited climate groups, eliminated diversity targets, ends its ESG stuff. HegSeth says he's eliminating DEI within the military.

Speaker 1 And then even European companies like Aldi and Santander are rolling back their DEI programs over here.

Speaker 1 So it does feel a lot like, I don't know, everyone's blowing with the trumpet and wind, whatever the sort of direction is that things are going in.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. I mean, I said to you many years ago, I'm sure, it was madness of crowds.

Speaker 2 I mean, one of the problems with all of that stuff was, you know, at some point it gets serious and the bridges start to fall down. You know,

Speaker 2 I was never totally confident that if the bridges fell down because of

Speaker 2 DEI, that people wouldn't say that's just yet more evidence of the patriarchy.

Speaker 2 But it sort of got it gets serious. It gets really serious at certain points.
It gets really serious with the military. I'm very glad that Pete Hexeth is addressing that.
You do want extremely tough,

Speaker 2 mainly men, at the forefront of your nation's military and your nation's defence.

Speaker 2 It's it's not about, you know, to use the most perhaps hackneyed but most extraordinary one, it's not about that that like CIA recruiting ad where the obese,

Speaker 2 diverse woman of color who explains how many mental disorders she has is necessarily your ideal poster child.

Speaker 1 I didn't get to see

Speaker 1 it.

Speaker 1 She was great.

Speaker 2 It's just like a bipolar drone operator or something.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Right. Well, I

Speaker 1 the performance enhancing effects of different mental maladies, I guess, can work quite well on in the military, but most of them would be like psychopathy. Yeah.
I think.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 You said you don't want somebody on a lot of hormones in charge of a drone program. Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I don't know. I think it'll be very interesting to see what the next

Speaker 1 sort of two years has

Speaker 1 in store, especially for what did the Democrats do in reversing some of the positions that caused them to sort of fall behind so much. How much faith has been lost?

Speaker 1 You know what it kind of feels like a little bit to me,

Speaker 1 the period that we had during COVID, where kind of the veils fell from people's eyes a little around, huh, the mainstream media don't really

Speaker 1 know what they're talking about.

Speaker 1 And they roll back their positions and the institutions that are supposed to be in charge of this stuff, and people that are supposed to know what's going on in terms of virology or epidemiology or public health or whatever.

Speaker 2 Huh.

Speaker 1 I actually think that the people that there's no adults in the room. I don't think there's any adults.

Speaker 2 The thing is, there are. It's just the

Speaker 2 what always happens is, you know, something goes deranged in one direction, then you get a correction.

Speaker 2 But as we've discussed before, the question is always whether the correction goes back to level or whether it's an over-correction that goes to somewhere equally crazy or recognizably crazy.

Speaker 2 Take that one of the

Speaker 2 COVID era and the post-COVID era.

Speaker 2 There's lots and lots of things that clearly went wrong. That doesn't mean, in my view, that you should discourage people from taking, giving polio vaccines to their children.

Speaker 2 There's lots that has gone wrong in public health and lots that can be corrected. But, you know,

Speaker 2 it doesn't mean that

Speaker 2 there should be no guardrails in society. Look at the way in which the term gatekeeper is used these days as if

Speaker 2 there should be no gatekeeping.

Speaker 2 And actually sometimes,

Speaker 2 people might disagree with this, but actually, sometimes if there's somebody who's an expert in a field and they should be trusted and can be trusted, they do need to draw the line of

Speaker 2 what is within the parameters and what is not.

Speaker 2 That's obviously why RFK Jr. caused a lot of concern when he came in: was, you know, is this a suitable correction or a wild over correction?

Speaker 1 You described the West as a civilization trying to erase itself.

Speaker 1 Do you reckon we've got any better over the last few years?

Speaker 2 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 I think that the anti-Western

Speaker 2 assault has been halted.

Speaker 2 As I say again, we'll see whether or not it corrects or overcorrects. But I don't think that in the era of Trump's second term, that in America that's going to be

Speaker 2 as much of a problem.

Speaker 2 Elsewhere, usual story. Our country of birth, usual story.

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Speaker 1 How are you feeling about the UK at the moment?

Speaker 2 Well, I don't know when you will ask back, but my experience of going back to the UK now is that everyone is supremely depressed and doesn't think life will get better.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's kind of like a Gary's economics monologue just being played on repeat, but like that sentiment of you're broke and your children are going to be broke and no one's going to get a house and you're going to die destitute.

Speaker 2 Yeah, everyone's going to to be poorer than than this generation and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's I've I've I was very depressed when I got went back to the UK last because I think I had just come fresh from the inauguration in DC and I mean, which was bracing for lots of reasons, but uh I just noticed that all you know there are lots of opportunities for things to be righted in America and put in a more sane direction.

Speaker 2 Again, we'll see if that happens, but I think there's a great opportunity, there's a whole set of great opportunities in America, economic and much more for the country, educational reform, a lot of problems that America needs to address that have now the opportunity to be addressed.

Speaker 2 Whereas Britain, like most of Western Europe, it just stumbles on.

Speaker 2 It's very depressing. And I noticed that.
It's not very inspiring. I've noticed that my friends are all wildly depressed and were rather surprised at how upbeat I was.

Speaker 1 I mean, they beat it out of me.

Speaker 1 Having just come from a war zone, a slightly war zone.

Speaker 2 But, you know, within 24 hours of being in the UK, I was suitably depressed and at the equilibrium that was expected.

Speaker 1 I cortisol level and come into line with everyone else.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You said I've seen a lot of

Speaker 1 plenty wars up close, but it's the UK that I'm most concerned about.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, actually, I am.

Speaker 2 It may be a sort of dramatic overstatement, but

Speaker 2 yeah, I mean

Speaker 2 what gives you hope in any country, whether it's a peace or a war, is whether the people in the country want to fight for the country metaphorically or literally.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 in the last few years, I think since I last saw you, yeah, I've seen, spent a lot of time in Ukraine and more so in Israel and the Middle East, and seen people literally fighting for their survival and for their country.

Speaker 2 And that's always, but particularly in those cases, a very remarkable thing to see.

Speaker 2 When you then see a de-energized, ennovated society

Speaker 2 where everyone's split and no one knows how to go forward, it's yeah, it's very uh it's very concerning. Um,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 and I just see that for the time being rolling on in the UK. As I say, the stop has been put to it of a kind in the US.

Speaker 1 But how much is bottom-up and how much is top-down, do you think?

Speaker 1 How much of this is sort of structural, bureaucratic because of the leadership, because of things that need to be changed at an institutional level?

Speaker 1 And how much of this is, as you mentioned, the the sort of culture of the people that they're sort of reveling in their own uh

Speaker 1 i guess binding together over their own sort of shared discontent well having

Speaker 2 having few economic opportunities causes everything else to go wrong i mean i'm i'm completely persuaded by my economist friends who say you know the one job of politics is to keep the economy good and if if you don't do that everything else can go wrong as well i think that's true but i just

Speaker 2 it's a combination of the economics of the the the market not working,

Speaker 2 growth not happening, wages being stagnant, unaffordability of housing,

Speaker 2 and then plus the just wild innovation

Speaker 2 of all the cultural crap.

Speaker 2 I think you can go.

Speaker 2 You can have weak economics, but keep strong culture. But if you've got weak economics and weak culture, I mean, mean, I was just watching this morning.

Speaker 2 You know, there's a there's a row that's been going on because that's just something I helped to fuel.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 there's a bunch of labor MPs who've been busily campaigning against a third runway at Heathrow Airport, which is just like, seriously, this has happened all my adult life.

Speaker 2 Any healthy country doesn't debate for 20 years

Speaker 2 a third runway at your major airport. You just

Speaker 2 get it done. Just build it.

Speaker 2 Um, same thing with there's like infrastructure like HS for like HS2, which has one virtue in it, which is that it can the plan is to be able to get out of Birmingham faster.

Speaker 2 And uh,

Speaker 2 these

Speaker 2 but these big infrastructure projects have been like endlessly debated in the UK for like 20 years, yeah,

Speaker 2 and um, that's very depressing.

Speaker 2 But but yes, a group of Labour MPs, um, uh, all with diverse constituencies or not, uh, have been busily anti-runway at Heathrow, but have been urging the funding of an airport in Mirpur

Speaker 2 because their constituents want to be able to get back and forth to see family

Speaker 2 in Pakistan.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 they're very insistent that

Speaker 2 anti-building of runways in England, but very

Speaker 2 in Pakistan. And

Speaker 2 those things are just crazy. And everyone in Britain can see it.
And, you know, and then people criticized

Speaker 2 these MPs for this obvious, ridiculous double standard of saying, you know, if there isn't, if the Heathrow expands, you know, it will kill the planet. And they go, but Mypur.

Speaker 2 Great. Good to go.
And everyone can see that. And then people in Britain, a couple of MPs called it out and then were immediately called Islamophobic racists by these

Speaker 2 other MPs who,

Speaker 2 you know, that's just typical Britain. It's a typical Britain and nobody knows how to get out of it.

Speaker 2 Because it's, you know, it's the same thing, you know, everyone now knows, you know, you complain about anything in Britain, online or off, and these weird eunuch-ized police will tap on your door with a...

Speaker 2 And none of it's metaphorical. You know, as Konstantin Kissing said the other week,

Speaker 2 thousands and thousands of people who've had police come to their door because of like saying something critical of their school on Facebook. And this sort of thing.

Speaker 2 It's just bizarre, the weak situation that Britain has got into. We weren't like that.

Speaker 2 We don't have to be.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the

Speaker 1 culture of a stiff upper lip appears to have been sort of

Speaker 1 lost in its entirety.

Speaker 2 It hasn't been. It hasn't been.
It's just been wildly suppressed, like everything else, like masculinity, like natural, you know,

Speaker 2 the natural culture of the country.

Speaker 2 I wrote the other week about this ridiculous thing where the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust inevitably is waging war on Shakespeare, you know, and that the new thing is like, why are we doing so much Shakespeare at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust?

Speaker 2 And why aren't we spending more time celebrating this Bengali poet?

Speaker 2 Said Bengali poet wasn't born in Stratford-upon-Avon, you jerk.

Speaker 2 Probably if you go to his birthplace, you won't find all that much Shakespeare.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 But, you know, it's just filled, all of the institutions, all the cultural institutions, it's all filled with stupid thinking like that.

Speaker 1 I think the slight difference is there's a sense of rebelliousness in America that we don't.

Speaker 2 Well, there is in Britain as well. There is everywhere.
It's just that you can very effectively squash it.

Speaker 2 And, you know, for some years in America, they tried to squash that in America. And Americans used the biggest hammer they could find to hit back against it, which is Donald J.
Trump.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the British public haven't yet found a hammer.

Speaker 1 Very interesting. You know, if you think about who Americans are the progeny of, I'm aware that immigration, recent immigration

Speaker 1 waters this down a little bit, but they're the

Speaker 1 they're the descendants of people who said, eight-week journey at sea, limited chance of survival, not really too sure what I'm going to. Count me in.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know there is an explanation of that, yes. But there's also, you know, there's.

Speaker 2 I'd like to think there are plenty of belligerent buggers back home as well. And there's plenty of brave people and plenty of people who may not have left the islands, but who

Speaker 2 still have similar instincts, you know.

Speaker 1 It just seems like there's a, at least in the UK, and not among

Speaker 1 most of the friends that I spend my time with, but that's because I... you know, very carefully sort of selected my group of friends to not be those people.

Speaker 1 But when I hear the sort of commentary that happens online, I do think, huh,

Speaker 1 this shared reveling in discontent, in you know, if you were to ring one of your friends and say, in the UK, get that in you. Thank you, Douglas.
Time for you to do your first ad read.

Speaker 1 There we are. Yeah.
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Speaker 2 If I become wildly ill from drinking this, it's bad for you, isn't it?

Speaker 1 Uh, it would look bad, but you can hold it together. I'm sure you've taken worse

Speaker 1 across your illustrious career.

Speaker 1 Thank you. Very good.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 2 There we go. Cheers.

Speaker 1 Chin, chin. Cheers.
Cheers, chin. Chin chin.

Speaker 2 It's delicious. Very amazing.

Speaker 1 That's good. Yeah.
You were paid to say that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, this,

Speaker 1 I always remember I rang a friend and I said, hey, man,

Speaker 1 what are you doing today? Tell me about what you've done today.

Speaker 1 Oh, man, living the dream. Took the bins out this morning.
It's been raining all day. You know, that classic British

Speaker 2 sort of... That's sort of banter, though.

Speaker 1 It is.

Speaker 1 But it feels to me like it.

Speaker 1 Be careful sort of what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be in some ways. And rarely, that's Kurt Bonnegutta.
Rarely you.

Speaker 1 It's hard to reverse that. Like people bond in the UK over this sense of shared suffering, over this sense that things are sort of a little bit crap and not necessarily.

Speaker 2 Well, you have to make them better then. Yep.
I think so. Sort of.
I don't really like whining. Although we're doing a bit better at the moment.
Well, we can bond together over that.

Speaker 1 Conor McGregor, Saviour of Ireland.

Speaker 2 Interesting figure.

Speaker 2 Interesting figure.

Speaker 1 Big fan of stimulants.

Speaker 2 Really? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay. Oh, yeah.
I've been reliably told.

Speaker 2 Yeah. What sort of stimulants are we talking about?

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 1 prototypical nasal delivery system. The patented.

Speaker 1 Conor McGregor likes his cocaine.

Speaker 2 Oh,

Speaker 2 I see. Right.
Oh, gosh. Right.
Yeah. Huh.

Speaker 2 Wasn't immediately what I was thinking when you mentioned him. But no, I just, I quite like the fact that he stood up and said

Speaker 2 what a shithole the politicians are making of his home country of Ireland at the moment. And then

Speaker 2 his statement was confirmed by the fact that all Irish politicians condemned him for saying it. That's always

Speaker 2 a sign that you're right. Because you're right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, always a sign that you're right.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I admired him for saying that. I don't know everything about him is admirable, but I admired him for saying that.
Again, I'm like, well, since when did the Irish become such weak

Speaker 2 people?

Speaker 2 When I was growing up, they were car bombers.

Speaker 2 No, I didn't joke about that. But no, there was some years ago in Derry, Londonderry, it was made European City of Culture.
I mean, I'm leaping to the Northern Ireland, but

Speaker 2 and...

Speaker 2 the moment that it was announced that Derry, Londonderry, was to become European City of Culture, somebody put a car bomb outside the offices of the European City of Culture.

Speaker 2 Fortunately, it didn't go off, but as a local friend of mine said, in one way, we were introducing them to our local culture.

Speaker 2 Anyway,

Speaker 2 no, I mean, I have lots of views about the Irish,

Speaker 2 but I never thought of them as people you could just walk over.

Speaker 2 And the current generation of politicians with their immigration policies and much more seem to have suggested you can just walk over the Irish. It's rather surprising.

Speaker 1 Have you tried to tie any of these threads together, sort of what we're seeing?

Speaker 2 Well, I tried in a book some years ago called Strange Death of Europe and

Speaker 2 said almost everything I had to say about that. And

Speaker 1 how much of a Cassandra do you feel like now?

Speaker 2 I think I was pretty much right on everything.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I didn't know how fast the timeline I'd be right on or which countries, but

Speaker 2 it didn't require a a profit. It just required somebody with eyes.

Speaker 2 If you madly import

Speaker 2 people from all over the world who don't particularly want to be part of your society and

Speaker 2 shove them in to

Speaker 2 County Kerry,

Speaker 2 you'll create problems.

Speaker 1 I've been fascinated by the pace of the news and how quickly there's a lack of stickiness that they've all had.

Speaker 1 Is it disturbing that we regularly just forget or sort of look away from catastrophes, or is it just sort of par for course in the modern world now? Because, like, remember when Trump got shot?

Speaker 1 No, me neither.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 That disappeared within days. It was amazing.
And it just seems like you haven't even got much of an explanation about the shooter.

Speaker 1 And I don't see anybody really because there's always something new. The velocity of news.
I remember

Speaker 1 in AS level media studies in Stockton Sixth Form College, I was told this story about a lady on September 12th, 2001, who was a PR agent, and she advised all of the companies that they were working with to dump every piece of bad news that they had.

Speaker 2 Oh, there was somebody in the British government who was an advisor. Good day for bad news.
Good day for bad news. That's right.
And then she lost her job.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I don't think it I think that the the devices we all have in our pockets speed everything up. But

Speaker 2 what I can't quite understand is that, I I mean, I have to be across all or most of the news, certainly about the things I need to know about,

Speaker 2 because it's my job as well as my passion. But

Speaker 2 I can't understand the people who have the buzz on their Apple iPhone for updates of news when they're...

Speaker 2 They're not in the business of it. It seems, it's very, very unhealthy to

Speaker 2 my view.

Speaker 2 I think it creates a sort of cycle of panic and uh and it's you know

Speaker 2 and forgetfulness and self-aggrandizement. And you know, oh my god, have you heard? You know,

Speaker 2 been an earthquake in Myanmar, and that's bad, but it's it's it just it all flows by and it's always like that.

Speaker 2 I'm not quite sure what people are meant to do with most of the information that's coming their way if they're not in the business.

Speaker 2 Not quite sure what's expected of them, other than to kind of some people they think following it, yeah, or sort of prove they care or something. I don't know.
I wish more people would read books.

Speaker 1 It just, you know, you've spent the last few years

Speaker 1 not in the US that much. You've been traveling.

Speaker 1 Not maybe the way that most people would consider traveling.

Speaker 2 I didn't take a gap here in Thailand.

Speaker 1 Shame.

Speaker 1 But with that, you know, we've had an awful lot of turmoil over the last few years, and it just, it doesn't. Very few things seem to stick now.

Speaker 1 Even causes that people were once unbelievably ardent about.

Speaker 1 Sort of manana, manana, something new, something more sexy, something more recent.

Speaker 1 That's true.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the ability for anything to be Lindy is

Speaker 1 increasingly difficult. To be what? Lindy.

Speaker 2 The

Speaker 1 life cycle of a non-perishable good, like an idea, it's a Taleb sort of repopularized it. Basically, the classics are the classics for a reason.

Speaker 1 If something's been around for 500 years, it's probably likely that it's going to be around in the future.

Speaker 1 The problem being that we are living in a never-ending now where almost all of the content that you consume today was created in the last 24 hours.

Speaker 1 In fact, that's exactly how Instagram stories and Snapchat and stuff like that work. Yes.

Speaker 1 If you see something today that's on the trending side of X and it's still there tomorrow, you think, fucking hell, that's a big, that's a big story. It's still here tomorrow.
It's a big story.

Speaker 2 I often say this about some of the war zones I've spent recent years in, is that it's it's um

Speaker 2 you I sometimes come back and I and usually you know it happened in America

Speaker 2 and people I get this sense that like people are fed up over the war

Speaker 2 and you go but

Speaker 2 it's not your place to be fed up over the war you're not in the war you're nowhere near the war what you're saying is you want the story to change but the story is not there for you It's not there for your edification or entertainment.

Speaker 2 That's a a very unhealthy attitude I come across quite a lot. Oh, can't it just be over?

Speaker 2 Oh, bet no one in the region wishes that.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 that's a peril of

Speaker 2 coming back from places where the news is real, you know, where

Speaker 2 none of it's metaphorical and none of it's

Speaker 2 abstract. No.

Speaker 1 The criticisms from people who are getting pinged on their iPhone a few too many times per day seem a little bit ridiculous.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I just got back from Ukraine again the other day, and

Speaker 2 I watched the

Speaker 2 unfortunate episode in the Oval Office between President Zelensky and the President and Vice President.

Speaker 2 And I watched it with some Ukrainian soldiers in a trench at the front line. And well, I watched it and then

Speaker 2 noticed that a bit later that they'd noticed it. And I was profoundly depressed by what I saw.

Speaker 2 And then I actually was rather energized by the fact that the response of the troops was different.

Speaker 2 How so?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I said to the commander of the drone unit that I was embedded with,

Speaker 2 you know, I can't help noticing that as you were scrolling through your Instagram and a down moment, that was one of the things that came across your phone, along with, you know, the usual cat videos and sort of hot chicks sort of thing, you know.

Speaker 2 And there was a picture from the Oval Office, and I said,

Speaker 2 do you have

Speaker 2 reaction to that? And he said, Well, we were kind of encouraged not to

Speaker 2 spend too much time focusing on the

Speaker 2 international to-ings and throwings.

Speaker 2 And he said, I was rather pleased to quote it in the post. He said, Shit happens all the time, but I've got a job to do.

Speaker 2 He went out and he put the bomb on the drone and sent it off.

Speaker 1 Keep calm and carry on droning. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's always rather encouraging in a way that that that what people get head up about nevertheless there's a level at which people are still

Speaker 2 and you know n n whatever one people's thoughts about that war, you know, um he and the other people in the trench, their um

Speaker 2 their homes are like thirty kilometers behind us and the Russians were one and a half kilometers that way, so none of it is abstract, you know.

Speaker 1 Do you know Freya India? You familiar with her?

Speaker 1 No. Blonde a young blonde girl, writer, very good

Speaker 1 on Substack and doing some stuff with the free press things.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I've seen the byline. And

Speaker 1 she, I had this conversation with her at the start of last year. She was talking a lot about how people criticize Gen Z

Speaker 2 for

Speaker 1 taking stuff that they see online and turning it. That's right.
Come on.

Speaker 2 Keep feeling yourself. Very good.

Speaker 1 And they

Speaker 1 see it as reality. And people criticize Gen Z for turning the virtual into the real in this way.

Speaker 1 And she said, Well, you have to realize that a lot of these kids are spending, you know, eight, ten hours a day on screens,

Speaker 1 far less asleep, far less around other people. So I understand it makes sense, sort of

Speaker 1 rationally, if you were to just sort of explain the situation, why are you overprioritizing what's happening digitally over what's happening in the real world or your real world?

Speaker 1 Again, news stories from outside of your

Speaker 1 territory, of your domain of control,

Speaker 1 externalizing of agency, all this sort of stuff.

Speaker 1 But yeah, she said the online world is the real world for these people.

Speaker 1 And I kind of get the same sense here.

Speaker 1 I kind of get the same sense that

Speaker 1 people who don't know what's happening on the ground, who don't understand sort of the implications of what this is, they get to LARP within the sort of narrative.

Speaker 1 And then you're in the trenches with these people. And they say, well, I've got a job to do.
So I kind of can't afford to.

Speaker 2 But we shouldn't be

Speaker 2 of

Speaker 2 the dejected belief that people are always what they are now.

Speaker 2 One of the things that's much struck me in the last 18 months in Israel

Speaker 2 has been that the generation that I hardly write about in this new book

Speaker 2 are

Speaker 2 very largely people from a generation who their elders thought

Speaker 2 were you know iPhone obsessed

Speaker 2 Snapchat and Instagram brain rot yeah brain rot just wanted to party and have fun and you know be on Instagram

Speaker 2 that was what a lot of older Israelis thought who fought in 67 and 73 and you know and so on and and then actually when their country was was attacked that that this is a generation that has stood up and shown its matter.

Speaker 1 They've been galvanized.

Speaker 2 They really have. I mean,

Speaker 2 I've been with them, you know, for much the last 18 months, and whether it's in Gaza or in Lebanon or in Israel or Judea and Samaria.

Speaker 2 And I'm constantly struck by this, that these are people whose contemporaries in America and Britain are still described in the terms that they were described as until October the 6th, 2023.

Speaker 2 So it's not inevitable that people can't rise to an occasion or can't change.

Speaker 2 It's not inevitable that because, you know, there's a sort of virtual era you've been in, that you'll always be stuck in it.

Speaker 2 I do think when I came back from

Speaker 2 the Middle East at Christmas last year, I spoke to a friend who's a politician.

Speaker 2 And I mentioned this phenomenon of, you know, just because people have been, this does not mean that when a time of trial comes, which is something I've had on my mind a lot in recent years, it's not inevitable that at the moment of trial, some people, a lot of people don't step up and really show what they are for the good.

Speaker 2 And this friend said, yes, it's true. It's circumstances, isn't it?

Speaker 2 And I said, I've got a slight tweak to make to that observation, which is, yes, it's circumstances.

Speaker 2 But it's not just circumstances. It's circumstances plus whether you have well-cultured people up until that moment.

Speaker 2 This is why

Speaker 2 I've cited a few times, and I cited in this book,

Speaker 2 the terrible, terrible statistics for

Speaker 2 the percentage of young Americans who'd be willing to fight for their country if it was under imminent threat of invasion, the number of British young people who'd be willing to fight for their country if it was an existential risk.

Speaker 2 And this is something, I say this in Democracies and Deaf Culture, but if you look at the stats, it's terrifying.

Speaker 2 Shortly after Ukraine was invaded by Russia in February 22, there was a poll asking Americans, you know, what percentage of them would be willing to stay and fight if their country was invaded.

Speaker 2 And only just a majority of Republicans said that they would stay and fight, and only just a majority of Democrats. And as I quipped at the time,

Speaker 2 that means the rest of them would hot-foot it to Canada, assuming that Canada wasn't the invader. I think when I first made that observation, that seemed like a joke.
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Speaker 1 modern wisdom. I don't know whether you know that Canada owns Pornhub.

Speaker 2 Does it indeed?

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm not quite sure.

Speaker 2 Is that just what happens? I say Canada and you go, yeah, Pornhub.

Speaker 1 No, you haven't, wait for my 300 IQ move here.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm watching this with interest.

Speaker 1 The secret weapon in the trade war that Canada needs to use is to restrict access to to porn.

Speaker 1 That's how they fight back.

Speaker 2 You want to talk about tariffs?

Speaker 1 We'll see what happens when you don't have as free and easy access to millions of

Speaker 1 people. Honestly, that's that.

Speaker 1 This comedian came up with the idea.

Speaker 1 I think it's a strong solution.

Speaker 2 Strong. We'll see if Mark Carney has the balls to do that.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, I was fascinated by that. And when that poll first came out, a lot of Americans wrote about it and said, crack it, you know,

Speaker 2 that's not good news.

Speaker 2 But I wasn't so depressed about it because in my interpretation,

Speaker 2 the concept for most Americans of their country being invaded by a land invasion from another country is not just hard to imagine. It's impossible to imagine.

Speaker 2 It's not impossible to imagine if you live in Donetsk or indeed in Kiev, but it's in... it's not impossible if you live in Latvia or Lithuania or Estonia anymore.

Speaker 2 But it's impossible for most Americans to imagine. So in a way, it's not really a fair question.

Speaker 2 It's like me saying, you know, how do you think you'd behave if UFOs landed and Martians started telling you what to do? You just don't know.

Speaker 2 But it was the same in the UK after

Speaker 2 about a year ago, I think partly because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Speaker 2 But there was also a, I think the head of the chief of the defense staff said, you know, if this, if this escalation continued in Europe, then we might have to have conscription in the UK.

Speaker 2 And again, I mean, that sounds like

Speaker 2 nobody from this generation can even imagine that. But that was just what he said.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, there's a poll and it asks young people from the ages of 18 to 40, which is the ages that our forebears were when they went to fight in 1914, 18 and 1939 to 45.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 the majority of people said that they wouldn't fight, even if Britain was at existential risk of invasion. And by the way, when I looked at the figures, I mean, it was

Speaker 2 some great, I think it was YouGov who did it. There were some fantastic gems inside that.
One was

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 one of the main reasons why people said that they wouldn't fight was like just the most banal things that they've been told by Hollywood films and things, which is, oh, and you know, and little bits of Gandhi, which was, you know, the number of people who said things like, war doesn't solve anything.

Speaker 2 You know, want to bet.

Speaker 2 So there was that.

Speaker 2 And another one, I think what I was fascinated by, the fact that I think 9% of the young people questioned said that they couldn't fight because they had someone at home they were looking after.

Speaker 2 Also, say mysterious answer to me.

Speaker 2 I'm looking after my nan, so I can't fight to protect her.

Speaker 2 Too busy bringing her tea in the morning to stop making a teacher.

Speaker 1 Someone doesn't kick the door down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's very strange. Anyway, but the point is, the reason I mention this rather laboriously is I do think that it's very, very hard to predict

Speaker 2 how people actually react at a time of trial. One of the reasons why I tell some of the

Speaker 2 personal stories I do about the

Speaker 2 people I've spoken to in the war in Israel in the last year and a half is because it's so interesting to see see who

Speaker 2 steps up and how people react,

Speaker 2 and you know, the heroism of some people, indeed, many people,

Speaker 2 when you realize what's at stake.

Speaker 2 Um, I quote at the opening of

Speaker 2 on democracies and deaf cults, this, this, um,

Speaker 2 this thing I've thought about a lot, which comes up in Tolstoy and War and Peace, which is when the two armies are facing off against each other in the old Napoleonic style, you know, where they'll do this around,

Speaker 2 they face each other on the battlefield and

Speaker 2 the order has not yet been issued to advance. And Tolstoy brilliantly describes how

Speaker 2 every soldier on each side knows

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 the step they're going to take is not just a step,

Speaker 2 it's a movement into a totally different realm.

Speaker 2 And that,

Speaker 2 you know, that in that case, you are from the realm of standing there, uniform polished,

Speaker 2 on guard, meant to be holding a line. And when you're, from the moment you're one step that way, you're in the place where you'll just have to do anything.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that's one of the reasons why

Speaker 2 I'm interested in this, because

Speaker 2 this is the most real it's why war is so terrible and and also for a writer so fascinating is because it's that that transition from one world to another totally different world seems unfathomable until you're in it what have you learned about what wartime does to people

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 a lot but i would say the simplest and most important one is that it shows

Speaker 2 people, it shows humanity, humankind at its absolute worst

Speaker 2 and also at its absolute best.

Speaker 2 There's nothing comparable to it in human experience that brings out the appallingness of which our species is capable and the greatness.

Speaker 2 And sometimes at the same moment.

Speaker 1 What greatness have you seen?

Speaker 2 An awful lot. I mean,

Speaker 2 there are some stories I tell in the book. Like,

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 there was a young woman I met

Speaker 2 early in the conflict who'd lost her

Speaker 2 fiancé.

Speaker 2 He had been at the Nova party in the desert when Hamaz attacked at 6.30 in the morning. You know,

Speaker 2 hundreds and hundreds of young people arrive.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when Hamas terrorists fired rockets and then drove in on military jeeps and started raping and killing and butchering, he managed to get he was one of the people that did manage.

Speaker 2 The young people trying to get into cars and get out were blockaded by Hamas and killed in the cars. And then it caused a backlog of the cars of people trying to escape.

Speaker 2 And then people were just being killed where they were. There were a couple of other exits from the party.

Speaker 2 And one, this young man found and he took four strangers in his car, car, drove them to a nearby town called Bathsheba, dropped them off, drove back. They begged him not to.

Speaker 2 He spoke to his girlfriend on the way and she said, Please don't.

Speaker 2 He went back, filled up the car with another group of young people from the rave, drives back.

Speaker 2 He goes back a third time, and on the way back, the third time, Hamas killed them all.

Speaker 2 But this is just

Speaker 2 amazing, amazing human-greatness.

Speaker 2 There's a friend who I mentioned in the book who

Speaker 2 has a story

Speaker 2 that

Speaker 2 should be much better known. He's a wonderful young man called Nimrod and

Speaker 2 he on the morning woke up in his home outside Jerusalem when the sirens were starting to go. with the rockets coming in, thousands of rockets from Gaza.
And he

Speaker 2 was in reserves,

Speaker 2 being a special forces guy. And he was in reserve he woke up realized for messages from people in the south how serious it was

Speaker 2 uh got a call from his commander and his unit in jerusalem you're called back we're you know and he said no we're needed south and he drove and he picked up a pistol on the way and i think eight rounds of ammunition He went past every police checkpoint, security army checkpoint that

Speaker 2 started to go up.

Speaker 2 He said he didn't see a live body until early hours of the afternoon but then he engaged the terrorists and he fought with them for the next 48 hours saved many lives but on the way he

Speaker 2 uh he he said to me he said i i when i got to the junction where there are all these dead bodies lying around party goers and others he said when i got to the motorway junction i

Speaker 2 was certain I would not survive that day.

Speaker 2 And he stopped, he pulled that, pulled that, that, got out of the car and pulled into a ditch. And he made a phone.

Speaker 2 He got onto his phone, he made a video for his two children.

Speaker 2 And he said,

Speaker 2 I wanted them to have a message for me, so that when the phone was found on my body, they'd have something.

Speaker 2 And he survived.

Speaker 2 And I just am

Speaker 2 filled with admiration. filled with admiration for people like that.
Amazing. Amazing.

Speaker 2 Be very, very lucky in America, Britain, or any other country to produce people like that. But we could.

Speaker 2 We should.

Speaker 1 Explain the title to me again.

Speaker 2 On democracies and death cults.

Speaker 1 It's currently in between a lot of Easter books.

Speaker 2 I showed you Amazon bestseller lists, yes, just before we started. There's an awful lot of.

Speaker 2 I will explain the title, but yes, it did amuse me that I'm currently

Speaker 2 battling in the Amazon.com bestseller lists with

Speaker 2 I'm currently at number 12, but number 13 sneaking up behind me is

Speaker 2 It's Not Easy Being a Bunny,

Speaker 2 an early reader book for kids, beginner books. You've probably got it.

Speaker 2 And also, but I'm chasing, I'm getting very close to catching up with

Speaker 2 a great tome you probably know as well called Hippity Hoppity Little Bunny Finger Puppet board book for Easter.

Speaker 2 Also, Little Blue Truck Springtime's doing very well.

Speaker 2 You know, there was a humorist in the UK many years ago who discovered that in the seventies or so, the three things that sold books in Britain in those days were anything to do with cats, anything to do with golf,

Speaker 2 and anything to do with Nazis. So he wrote a book called Golfing for Cats with a cat with a swastika armband on the cover.

Speaker 1 How did it do?

Speaker 2 Quite well, actually, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I'm not sure there's a perfect crossover in the Venn diagram of those readers, but yeah, no, next time I'll call it democracies and death cults and Easter bunnies.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 the title goes to

Speaker 2 something

Speaker 2 I had

Speaker 2 thought about for a long time and which I try to answer in the book, which is

Speaker 2 what attitude

Speaker 2 people in free liberal societies, democratic societies, societies that are at peace

Speaker 2 can take towards

Speaker 2 what I call the death cults.

Speaker 2 I should stress, by the way, that our societies have experienced plenty of death cults in the past.

Speaker 2 I give the example, there was a

Speaker 2 Spanish philosopher from the last century who was much opposed to the rise of fascism in Spain, Francoism.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 a meeting at the university he taught at, the students at one point started chanting viva la muete, long live death. And he said, this is the moment when this necrophilic utterance, this is

Speaker 2 This is the moment when it all goes wrong. So it has happened in the past, but the the death cult I'm primarily

Speaker 2 writing about and talking about in this book is the deaf cult of Hamaz and Islamic

Speaker 2 jihadists in general.

Speaker 2 I say that the

Speaker 2 I was one of the shortly after the 7th of October when I went to the region, went to Israel first, I went to a reunion of some of the survivors of the Nova party and one of the young men who'd survived said to me

Speaker 2 after showing me his footage from the morning, which was

Speaker 2 too graphic to go into,

Speaker 2 but he said, what would you do if this happened in your country?

Speaker 2 And I thought, but I didn't say to him, but it has,

Speaker 2 you know, it has happened in my country. It happened at the Manchester Arena.
in 2017.

Speaker 2 It happened at the Battaclare Theatre in Paris in 2015. It happened at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2015.

Speaker 2 It's just that it,

Speaker 2 first of all, people sort of don't know what to do about it and try to pass it over.

Speaker 2 Or it hasn't happened, thank God, hasn't happened

Speaker 2 as much.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 it's

Speaker 2 it really, I suppose it's in part, as well as being a first-hand account of war, the purpose of this book is to try to answer this question that I've tried to answer all my life, which is what attitude you can take and what response you can make

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 people

Speaker 2 who have totally different values to yours. Because there has been this presumption, which we both grew up with, which is what we have is

Speaker 2 what everyone has or wants to have, and we all have the same desires in this life. And

Speaker 2 some people do,

Speaker 2 and some people just don't.

Speaker 2 And some people want to, you know, they want to make the world burn and some of them want to make other people burn and take as many people as they can with them and much more. And

Speaker 2 the taunt

Speaker 2 that al-Qaeda,

Speaker 2 Islamic Jihad, ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah, the taunt they always have

Speaker 2 is the same, which is

Speaker 2 some variation of

Speaker 2 we love death more than you love life.

Speaker 2 And in fact, Hassan Nasrallah, who went to meet his maker

Speaker 2 last year in Beirut, the head of Hezbollah, he said this for decades. He said, you know, the thing with the infidels is that they love life

Speaker 2 and this is their great weakness.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think that's not the case.

Speaker 2 But I know for sure, and it's one of the things that this book is about, is that

Speaker 2 it's not enough to just like life or to enjoy life. If you're going to enjoy life, you also have to be willing to fight for it.

Speaker 2 And sometimes that's metaphorical, and sometimes it's really not.

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Speaker 1 That's functionhealth.com/slash modern wisdom. Been pretty fascinated by the reaction online over the last, I think, with the Ukraine, with the Middle East,

Speaker 1 with sort of a broader conversation about

Speaker 1 the Jewish community at large generally.

Speaker 1 I wonder how much Elon's opening up of X has contributed to outgroup tribalism now that maybe some of the

Speaker 1 guardrails have been taken off with regards to that.

Speaker 1 But yeah, it it feels to me like the world has reached some new fever pitch of sort of outgroup passion against whoever they see as a scapegoat, whoever they see as being in the wrong.

Speaker 1 And nobody can agree on who is in the wrong, which is one of the most sort of interesting observations that everybody acts as if the facts are already settled, whilst never being able to actually agree on what the facts are.

Speaker 1 So I say they're settled.

Speaker 1 You say they're settled. We don't agree, but both of us act as if they are.
And yeah, just the reaction, especially in the West, to

Speaker 1 a rapidly developing kinetic situation on the other side of the planet.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean,

Speaker 2 I think I've said you before that one of the things I noticed in the Internet age was that

Speaker 2 we'd gone from the era of

Speaker 2 we disagree about our opinions or our interpretations of an event. And then

Speaker 2 well, the Internet age has given us the great things of we disagree about what just happened.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that does throw up its own uh manias

Speaker 2 so one of the reasons i try to see things with my my own eyes is because i'm always pretty confident that someone's going to try to tell me i haven't seen something i've seen with my own eyes

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 and uh sure enough that happens all the time but you have the reassurance if you know how's that you know

Speaker 2 And I, but I do find that interesting. There are,

Speaker 2 for instance, I mean, there are people who would like to regard themselves as civilized people, I'm sure,

Speaker 2 who just will not accept that what happened on October the 7th happened, which was one of the reasons why I went there straight away was because I knew that would happen.

Speaker 1 When did you get there?

Speaker 2 I got there in October of 2023. I went because I was in Times Square the day after the massacre, as it was still going on.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there was an anti-Israel, pro-Hamaz protest happening in the center of Times Square

Speaker 2 with people supporting the massacre. And I thought, well, this is one of the things that's going to happen is they're going to pass over the massacre.
They're going to celebrate it and pass it over.

Speaker 2 They're going to pretend it didn't happen or try to diminish it or minimize it.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I just didn't want to see that happen. There's what many people said, but it was like watching Holocaust denial in real time.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 yes, I mean, and in the other main conflict going on at the moment in Russia, Ukraine, you know, I mean, at the highest level of the American government, there have been people who've implied that, you know, Ukraine started the war

Speaker 2 or is the aggressor. And that's

Speaker 2 disturbing to see because there are some things that just have to be agreed upon.

Speaker 2 You know, it was Russian tanks that rolled into Ukraine in February 2022.

Speaker 2 It was Hamaz terrorists who invaded by the thousands into Israel on October the 7th, 2023.

Speaker 2 Like, let's at least agree to that.

Speaker 2 What you describe as the sort of

Speaker 2 the online

Speaker 2 thing

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 definitely massively worsened. And I think it's because,

Speaker 2 I mean, the sort of all the sluices are up,

Speaker 2 all of the guardrails, all of that. And that's good in lots of ways.
I mean,

Speaker 2 look at what happened when our societies tried to say there's only one

Speaker 2 explanation for, for instance,

Speaker 2 the COVID

Speaker 2 virus coming out of the area where that virus was being made and that it was to do with Chinese people eating bats and from a wet market and not to do with the lab that was making that virus happening to be leaky.

Speaker 2 We were told

Speaker 2 consistently that the lab leak was a conspiracy. And one of the reasons why that's so

Speaker 2 poisonous to the discourse as a whole is because it understandably makes people say, if I've been lied to about that, what are the other things that are true?

Speaker 2 What are the other conspiracy theories that are not conspiracy theories? It becomes a gateway drug. Yeah.
And I think a a lot of people are on that.

Speaker 2 And then, of course, it's a great habit and it's a kind of enjoyable.

Speaker 2 And people believe everything is being kept from them. And doubtless, some stuff is being kept from us, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes not.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think that the conspiratorial mindset is

Speaker 2 flourishing. Flourishing at the moment.
And it's funny because you can,

Speaker 2 well, it's funny, but it's also more importantly, it's serious because it's a sign of very unhealthy thing in society.

Speaker 2 When the JFK files were released the other week,

Speaker 2 there was a lot of excitement that,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 finally

Speaker 2 we're going to discover exactly what happened. And

Speaker 2 I wrote a column a while afterwards saying, you know,

Speaker 2 the thing we've learned from the JFK files is that the president was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald with the the gun that Lee Harvey Oswald owned, that Mrs.

Speaker 2 Lee Harvey Oswald noticed was missing from the house that morning.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it was funny because I noticed that to the extent that I monitor reactions to anything I say, I noticed how many people were annoyed.

Speaker 2 No, there's still this question. Yeah, he wasn't as good a sharpshooter as he used to.
You can't stop it.

Speaker 2 It looks, by the way, on that one, it's quite interesting.

Speaker 2 It looks like what happened was the CIA were monitoring him pretty carefully, Lee Harvey Oswald, because he tried to defect to Russia once before, and he tried to defect Cuba. And

Speaker 2 so the CIA were monitoring him, and they didn't want to reveal the methods by which they did that. In the process, one of the biggest conspiracy theories of the modern era was born.

Speaker 2 But I don't think I'll persuade anyone who thinks otherwise on that, who's deeply into the idea that LBJ desperately wanted to do this or X wanted to do that.

Speaker 2 And the problem is, is what you allude to: is that the problem is that the algorithm rewards the crazy.

Speaker 2 I noticed on the day that the JFK files were released,

Speaker 2 some

Speaker 2 wank rag online

Speaker 2 started a live stream that was suggested to me.

Speaker 2 And it was its title was JFK Files Reveal

Speaker 2 Israeli

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 plot or something

Speaker 2 and there was no such thing

Speaker 2 but that

Speaker 2 gets engagement

Speaker 2 whereas

Speaker 2 JFK scholars reading documents live it'll take about four months

Speaker 2 less sexy less engagement you're not going to watch them reading

Speaker 2 the documents

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, that's just the reality of the era we're in.

Speaker 2 And you can't stop it, but I think people should be alive to it, should be aware of it. This is one of the things that's being done to us

Speaker 2 by these darn devices that tell me all about Easter Bunny books.

Speaker 1 It seems like the sort of scapegoat out-group finger-pointing dynamic, it feels like that has been tuned up, at least over the last couple of years.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And as I say in this book, I mean, it's inevitable because historically we know this is the case.
And I say this to somebody who isn't Jewish, but it will almost always end up with the Jews.

Speaker 1 Why is that the case?

Speaker 2 Very interesting question.

Speaker 2 One is that right and left can both do it.

Speaker 1 Oh, like an equal opportunity victim.

Speaker 2 Yes. Right.
Both right and left can do it.

Speaker 2 I say at one point in the book, one of the interesting things about anti-Semitism is that it's, which isn't to say that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, which isn't, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But I think that one of the interesting things about anti-Semitism is that it's famously a shape-shifting virus. It can come from anywhere.
It can come from the political left.

Speaker 2 It can come from the political right. It can come from people wearing jack boots.
And it can come from people wearing COVID masks. You know,

Speaker 2 latterly, we've been less attuned to the existence of the second, you know, because there's always this expectation that it'll be the same as last time, but it doesn't. It moves.

Speaker 2 But the reason why I do think that that's a perennial to the conspiracy mind is because

Speaker 2 the Jews can be blamed for everything and just have been historically.

Speaker 2 They get blamed for, they get simultaneously blamed for being poor and for being rich. You know, 19th century British anti-Semitism

Speaker 2 and indeed continental anti-Semitism relied relied on the trope of the Rothschilds and of the impoverished Jews from Eastern Europe. And they just did both at once.

Speaker 2 They can be accused of being very religious and trying to push religion and also being ultra-secularist,

Speaker 2 the most secular,

Speaker 2 pushing atheism.

Speaker 2 They can be blamed for

Speaker 2 being stateless, rootless cosmopolitans. It was the line that the anti-Semites of the right used to use and the left about Jews, and now they get blamed for having a state.
So

Speaker 2 it's a sort of perennial. And I think if you wanted to go down exactly on why it is, it's

Speaker 2 many reasons. There's different types of anti-Semitism, there's Islamic anti-Semitism, there's types of Christian anti-Semitism.

Speaker 2 I think that it ends up usually being that

Speaker 2 historically, Jews are almost perfectly positioned

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 mirror whatever your own failings are.

Speaker 2 And this is

Speaker 2 a line I quote in the book from a great Russian writer, Vasily Grossman, who said in the 20th century in his masterpiece Life and Fate, he said, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of.

Speaker 2 It's fascinating insight, this.

Speaker 2 It's a mirror to your own failings.

Speaker 2 So for instance, the main accusation that the revolutionary Islamic government in Tehran uses of the Jewish state of Israel is that

Speaker 2 it's a colonial power.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it

Speaker 2 this is quite funny to me because, I mean, by the way, the Supreme Leader of Iran last year wrote a thank you letter to students at Columbia and other American Ivy League universities for coming out for the last year and a half on anti-Israel protests.

Speaker 2 He wrote them a thank you letter in joining him in the anti-colonialist cause.

Speaker 2 There is one country in the Middle East which has been colonizing the place more than any other in our lifetimes, and that's the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran.

Speaker 2 They colonized the great country of Iran in 1979.

Speaker 2 They've, in the years and decades since, they've colonized Iraq, colonized Syria, colonized Yemen, colonized and destroyed Lebanon.

Speaker 2 But they say the Jews are the colonialist power.

Speaker 2 Another very good example, just right there,

Speaker 2 the president of Turkey,

Speaker 2 sometime very close enemy of mine,

Speaker 2 Reciptayb Edouan, who I initiated a... Defamatory poetry competition against many years ago.
That's a byway.

Speaker 1 You have friends in high places.

Speaker 2 I do. And then good enemies, the best.

Speaker 2 The recipe type of Erdogan, President Erdogan of Turkey accuses the Jewish state of being an occupying power,

Speaker 2 which is hilarious, if you know Cyprus at all.

Speaker 2 Because the north half of Cyprus is occupied by Turkey. Now, still,

Speaker 2 has been for 50 years. totally illegal occupation that nobody in America or Britain or the West seems to give a damn about.

Speaker 2 So when Erdogan says the Jews are occupiers, all he's doing is telling us about himself. That's all.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 when, I mean, it works every which way you do it. The Nazis accuse the Jews of being racists.

Speaker 2 It's almost as if it tells us something about the Nazis.

Speaker 2 It's an extraordinary thing,

Speaker 2 and this works almost every way.

Speaker 2 Yeah, people accuse the Jews of things they're guilty of.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 because they're a small enough portion of the global population

Speaker 2 and tend to outperform, not always by any means, but

Speaker 2 tend to outperform in the areas they go into,

Speaker 2 they're almost the perfect scapegoat.

Speaker 1 Is this not true of other groups too?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, for sure. Never anywhere as

Speaker 2 because of this shape-shifting thing I describe

Speaker 2 and because there are very deep theological reasons for it. You know,

Speaker 2 it took until the 1950s for a Pope in Rome to say the Jews are not responsible for the killing of Christ.

Speaker 2 That's a long time

Speaker 2 for the church to confirm that.

Speaker 2 So, you know, you have many centuries of Christian anti-Semitic pogroms and much more.

Speaker 2 The Islamic world has not yet caught up with that, and much of it still blames the Jews for rejecting the revelation of Muhammad. Because

Speaker 2 when the inventor of Islam came up with the idea and went around trying to get other people to join him, the Jews were among the first people who said, No, thanks, we've already got our religion and we'd like to keep it.

Speaker 1 What

Speaker 1 are the lessons for the wider world from the Ukraine, from the Middle East over the last few years?

Speaker 1 What should people take away from the way that these sort of conflicts have unfolded and the response? Because it seems, and a lot of people sort of say this,

Speaker 1 ever-escalating

Speaker 1 kinetic engagement,

Speaker 1 the sort of burbling below the surface. You mentioned before about the only job of the politicians in government is to keep the economy going.

Speaker 1 There's maybe some fertile ground to sow seeds in with regards to that, which is going to raise tensions.

Speaker 1 Say more. I watched a video from the PM of Singapore who, as far as I can tell, I'm sure there's critics of Singapore out there and I'm not a geopolitics expert.

Speaker 1 As far as I can tell, Singapore's kind of a shining light of some areas of growth, governance.

Speaker 2 Oh, for sure, of economics. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And he said said himself, you know, that

Speaker 1 economic

Speaker 1 turbulence like this has preceded a lot of pretty big conflicts in the past.

Speaker 1 And if you've got a few Petri dish examples of this actually happening before you've got the economic pressure happening as well globally, the era of free trade is over, you know. Could be, yeah.

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Speaker 1 What should everybody keep in mind, given what you've seen from the front lines of the two most recently

Speaker 2 about

Speaker 2 using other people's tragedies as mere sort of learning, you know, points.

Speaker 2 But I can tell you the few

Speaker 2 the few sort of positive things that I have picked up. And one is a very straightforward one, which I think is a very important one for the West, which I go into in this book, which is,

Speaker 2 because I mentioned, I mean, it's about this these twin worlds

Speaker 2 and how does the democracy, whatever, whether you're Democrat, Republican, doesn't matter, Labor, Conservative, doesn't matter.

Speaker 2 But what can anyone who, broadly speaking, likes the societies we're from and wants them to continue and wants them to do well,

Speaker 2 what can they do if those societies are tested?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think one of the things that is really

Speaker 2 very obvious to me now is you need to know what you're fighting for.

Speaker 2 You need to know that

Speaker 2 what you're fighting for is something

Speaker 2 that you cherish and you love.

Speaker 2 And I think that there has been

Speaker 2 in the period of de-energizing, which hopefully we're coming out of, but in that period, we have all been told in America and Britain and elsewhere that what we have is not good.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 as I said in my last book, In The War on the West, we have been told that, you know, like we're guilty.

Speaker 2 I mean, this is all horseshit, by the way. But I mean, you know, that we're uniquely guilty from colonialism or uniquely guilty from

Speaker 2 slavery or uniquely guilty from racism or all of this stuff. It's total horseshit.

Speaker 2 We should never have put up with it for so long that among other things, people from around the world wanted to come to countries in the West and then tell us how bad we were.

Speaker 2 Should never have agreed to that. If somebody came into my home and said they didn't like my home and they thought it was uniquely awful, I think I'd tell them to scram.

Speaker 2 So, why we put up with this for so long, I don't know. But we have been, and arguably many young people in particular, younger than us, have been put up, have been told

Speaker 2 what they have been born into is not good.

Speaker 2 And one of my first instincts when I saw that poll of young Americans and young Brits, you know, would you be willing to lay down your life for the country if something terrible happened and you had to step up?

Speaker 2 I think one of the reasons why the yes vote is so low is because it doesn't matter whether you're patriotic or not, you've been told your country's rotten.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 there was an article written in the Daily Mail the other week by a very smart young British guy who's right-wing. I think he's a sort of reform voter type, saying,

Speaker 2 Why would I lay down my life for my country when it's let me down so badly? When our politicians don't listen to us.

Speaker 2 So it's not just a left-right thing by any means. But I think people have been told from a lot of different directions that our countries are not good.
And I think that's not true.

Speaker 2 I never thought that was true. I've got a long enough memory and I've traveled enough,

Speaker 2 run up enough enough air miles in this life

Speaker 2 to know that's not true.

Speaker 2 But if you tell people that it's the case for a long time and you de-energize them and you demotivate them, you tell them that they're rotten, then yeah, you can really demoralise a society.

Speaker 2 I think that needs to turn around. I think that people need to recognize what what we have that's good.

Speaker 2 And as I've said to you before, the footfall alone tells us all we need to know. The footfall alone tells it.

Speaker 2 Nobody

Speaker 2 is trying today

Speaker 2 to make their way out of America to get to the safe harbor of Venezuela.

Speaker 2 Nobody's even leaving Britain to go to France. Certainly nobody's leaving France or Spain or Italy to try to get

Speaker 2 to

Speaker 2 Algeria.

Speaker 2 And in turn, nobody from Algeria is trying to to break into sub-Saharan Africa.

Speaker 2 Very few people are trying to break into communist China.

Speaker 2 Absolutely no one is trying to hot-foot it to North Korea.

Speaker 2 Okay, so like

Speaker 2 all of the countries that people in the world most want to come to are now what they have been for decades: America, Canada, Australia, Britain, France, and so on.

Speaker 2 So why did we put up with being told that these countries that are demonstrably the places people want to come to are bad places and everywhere else is good?

Speaker 2 It's just so sickening to me. I've had enough of it, and I think most people have.

Speaker 1 Is that

Speaker 1 sense that things would be better if we were more like them over there?

Speaker 1 Is that a dynamic that's sort of fueling some of of this

Speaker 1 which bit do you mean the fact that if only we were a little bit more like well

Speaker 1 the middle east they they're living a little bit sort of closer to to

Speaker 2 simplicity their whole yeah yeah yeah that's that's the real uh uh colonialist thinking that's the real uh that's the real orientalist thinking of our time is the idea that it's it's actually rather wonderfully sent up in white lotus among other things is it is that stupid stupid idea that

Speaker 2 other cultures have like a depth of philosophy that we don't have, or other cultures have a spiritualism that we don't have.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, it's the phenomenon I've described before of

Speaker 2 people going backpacking to see temples in Thailand. Wonderful things, absolutely.
Going to Myanmar to see temples, wonderful things to see, absolutely.

Speaker 2 But you should also visit Winchester Cathedral or Salisbury or St. Peter's in Rome or Chartres.

Speaker 2 On and on and on.

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 a very interesting mindset that the Western mindset is that what we have isn't rich enough. I described this recently at ARC.
I borrowed Eric Weinstein's great analogy about

Speaker 2 ice cream. Have you heard this?

Speaker 2 It's a brilliant observation. Some years ago, Eric and I were talking about this weird thing where

Speaker 2 the West had been sort of tricked into thinking, or we'd been sort of told that

Speaker 2 we need other flavors to make ourselves interesting because otherwise we're not interesting.

Speaker 2 You'll notice, by the way, that doesn't work any other way around.

Speaker 2 Nobody goes to Ghana and says, I just can't help noticing you don't have enough Welsh people.

Speaker 2 And you could really do with it because it'll bring you some color, some much needed diversity. Nobody would think of going to

Speaker 2 Pakistan and saying,

Speaker 2 you know, guys, you seriously,

Speaker 2 you just don't have enough French culture here.

Speaker 2 But you do do it always with the West. You do do it always.
And Eric's observation, which I thought was just brilliant, that classic way he can do to sort of refine a complicated question.

Speaker 2 He said, he said, he said, you know, Douglas, when I was growing up, I had the impression for a while that

Speaker 2 vanilla ice cream was the base ice cream. It was like the base flavor.

Speaker 2 And that all other flavors of ice cream were flavors added onto vanilla ice cream.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's the same with us in the West.

Speaker 2 Vanilla, if you want to look at it like that, is a very complicated and rich flavor of its own.

Speaker 2 It's not the case that everything added to it is being added to a non-flavor.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I wish we realized that. I wish we had a little bit more.

Speaker 2 I know I always say I never want sort of, I don't want tub-thumping nationalist stuff, but I would like people to have some darn pride in things they should have some darn pride in.

Speaker 1 How have you avoided becoming, or maybe you have,

Speaker 2 more

Speaker 1 nihilistic, despondent, down? I'm interested in what the sort of personal price is that you pay to be on the front lines of these things.

Speaker 1 I've seen an interview with you and Piers Morgan where there was a brief interlude for a rocket to go overhead and then you sort of brushed yourself off and kind of got back to it.

Speaker 1 I'm interested in sort of what it's been like for you over the last couple of years.

Speaker 2 not really for me to say. Um

Speaker 2 I I think it goes back to that point about seeing things at their best and at their worst at the same time, you know.

Speaker 2 Uh I

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 I can't deny that when you see some things too much, too close up, it has some kind of effect on you.

Speaker 2 Um I describe some of that in this book actually, but

Speaker 2 it's countered by the encouragement one gets.

Speaker 2 I don't mean encouragement for other people. I mean literally seeing people who are encouraging to me in their actions.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 there have been in both conflicts,

Speaker 2 I spent more time in the Israel

Speaker 2 Gaza conflict than in Ukraine. But I was very struck near the beginning of the Ukraine conflict when I was with the Ukrainian armed forces when they retook Kherson from the

Speaker 2 Russians. And all these, you know, unbelievable sights, all these people coming out from their houses after eight months under Putin-esque rule,

Speaker 2 coming being liberated by their own army, and

Speaker 2 unbelievable scenes and conversations and sights. And

Speaker 2 I find

Speaker 2 I find real heroism

Speaker 2 on the battlefield

Speaker 2 a remarkable thing. I mean, unbelievably encouraging and

Speaker 2 positive.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I like

Speaker 2 and feel enormous encouragement from

Speaker 2 seeing

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 people fighting for life.

Speaker 2 I think it's uh uh

Speaker 2 almost unequalled

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 as a thing to make you feel optimism about the species

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 and particularly fighting for life against people who worship death you know

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 i tell a story in this book about which is um

Speaker 2 slightly difficult stories to retell actually but um the the mastermind of october the seventh Yachir Sinwa, who was a proper psychopath. I mean, as you'll see when the

Speaker 2 segments about him, I mean, a proper psychopath, you know, was in an Israeli prison in the 2000s for

Speaker 2 strangling to death various Palestinians who he had fallen out with. You know,

Speaker 2 anyway, he

Speaker 2 had such necrophilic fantasies as

Speaker 2 as a man,

Speaker 2 you know, promised even before the 7th of October. He said, we will go over and we will get the Jews and we will tear their hearts out of their bodies.

Speaker 2 In the end,

Speaker 2 he was killed by a young soldier from a regiment called the Bislach,

Speaker 2 who aren't even fully soldiers.

Speaker 2 And this young man who killed Sinoir

Speaker 2 within less than a year of the 7th of October was not even in uniform when Sinoir invaded.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I went into Rafa just after Sinois was killed. I went to see where he was

Speaker 2 and was with the unit. that included the the men who killed him.
And I thought, what an extraordinary and wonderful thing that this man, high on death,

Speaker 2 finally had death delivered to him by someone who wasn't even in uniform. Some part-time squaddy.

Speaker 2 He created his own downfall.

Speaker 2 And that sort of thing, I mean, I think that,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 we all know there are different ways and different philosophies and different theological systems to look at the battle between good and evil.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 this one, that one is a very clear one to me

Speaker 2 and uh i i yes i've um i've i've got far more

Speaker 1 uh optimism actually funnily enough than i have uh pessimism despite everything does it make dealing with criticisms or accusations of motive or whatever from the internet does it put those sort of things into perspective

Speaker 2 i never gave a shit about that as you know i'm fascinated fascinated by it.

Speaker 1 I'm fascinated by how few shits you give.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I always have been.

Speaker 2 I just don't care.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 I was saying to somebody recently that I really, I mean, I slightly wonder what would have happened if I'd have grown up in the social media era and I have, you know, friends and family.

Speaker 1 I felt more of that sort of surveillance.

Speaker 2 But I think,

Speaker 2 I think the truth is, is simply that I think that people's sense of

Speaker 2 whether you're going right or or wrong in your life or your career and your whatever,

Speaker 2 who takes advice from complete strangers?

Speaker 2 And don't we all, I'm sure you as with me, you listen to advice or criticism even

Speaker 2 from people who care for you and you care for or love and you know, who love you,

Speaker 2 who you admire

Speaker 2 and who admire admire you.

Speaker 2 I mean, I reckon, I mean, and without getting all small, I reckon that if you said to me, I saw this interview you did, and I think you shouldn't have said that, or whatever, I would actually listen to that.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 because, you know, there are some people who I respect whose opinion I think, yeah, that's that matters.

Speaker 2 But if

Speaker 2 you were, you know, just some rando online saying, why, why the hell would that,

Speaker 2 you know, I think I've said to you before that one of the interesting things is, of course, is because the very nature of criticism is that you have to work out, I think I said this to you when we first spoke, you have to work out whether the person criticizing you is criticizing you to improve you or to demoralize and destroy you.

Speaker 2 And the friendly critic, so I was saying, I'd like to think it was the same thing. If I said, you know, I would just think, you know,

Speaker 2 you might think, I wouldn't be saying something critical of you

Speaker 2 other than if I thought it would improve you in some way

Speaker 2 or make something better for you.

Speaker 2 But if

Speaker 2 I was some malevolent troll who desperately wanted to destroy Chris Williamson, hated him, and wanted him to fail, and I like started screaming advice at you.

Speaker 2 Why the hell would you listen? You shouldn't.

Speaker 1 But I mean,

Speaker 2 you know, you definitely have an advantage if you grew up before the deranging in online era because I think some of that sense is created from that. But

Speaker 2 I mean, you know, it's, it's,

Speaker 2 I don't think it's a difficult superpower to acquire. I really don't.

Speaker 1 Yeah, as said everybody that is fantastic at something that comes naturally to them.

Speaker 1 What do you mean? Well, just

Speaker 1 I think you seem to have a big fucky streak.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 Ryan Long taught me this, a comedian. He said he always.

Speaker 2 Oh, I like him. I did his podcast.
Yes, I introduced him. Yeah, yeah, he's great.

Speaker 1 Him and Danny.

Speaker 1 He said he always sort of discredited the things that came easily to him.

Speaker 1 He always assumed that there was more value in something that he had to work harder at. So he's really great at sketch comedy.
Yes.

Speaker 2 And And to him. He's naturally very funny.

Speaker 1 He's fucking fantastic. And to him, sketches just they fall out of him on a daily basis.
So he always looked at other twists and art forms.

Speaker 1 Maybe they were comedy or maybe they were tangential or maybe they were totally separate.

Speaker 1 And he always assumed that those were the ones that were really valuable because he discredited the thing that came so easily to him.

Speaker 1 He always thought, well, the sketch comedy thing, like, you know, everybody's got access. He said, no, no, no, no, no.
Not everybody has access to that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're a freak. Yeah.
And you have that skill. So.

Speaker 2 Do you have something like that?

Speaker 1 Things that come easily to me? Yeah.

Speaker 1 I

Speaker 1 were always, at least for me, I'm my own worst critic. Stuff that comes easily to me that I think other people

Speaker 1 assume that that's the case is networking.

Speaker 1 That was something that...

Speaker 1 As an only child who then becomes a club promoter, you are perfectly, you're perfectly positioned to sort of observe social networks and see how they go.

Speaker 1 It's never anything that I've sort of practiced myself. It's just something that kind of came out of

Speaker 1 life and programming

Speaker 1 and yapping. I've always been good at yapping, you know, from a kid.

Speaker 2 Right. But so do you think you look down on those things as skills?

Speaker 1 I certainly, I don't look down on them, but I do assume I

Speaker 1 because they come easily to me, I'm not convinced that I value them in the same sort of way. I value them in myself and it's something I'm I'm very happy that I've got.

Speaker 2 But so, what are the things then that you put an onus on that you don't think you have? Oh, that's a good question.

Speaker 1 Fuck you, energy would be one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, instead of getting mad, I tend to get sad. Uh, I'll sort of turn, I don't know, yeah, oh, but it's true, it's true,

Speaker 1 uh, yeah, in many ways, I think you can you can work past that quite easily, interesting, uh, or at least operationally, you can, but there is a there is an initial hurdle where I will

Speaker 1 I will tend to blame myself for something. So it's one of the reasons to ask about the criticism, actually, I would say I'm a criticism hyper-responder sometimes.

Speaker 1 And I created a list of different ways that me and perhaps other people have dealt with criticism with varying degrees of success. Oh, yeah.
Get bitter.

Speaker 1 Think of any critic as a hater, just throwing envy and shade. Recite the quote, don't take criticism from someone you wouldn't take advice from.

Speaker 1 Number two, channel your inner David Goggins and use it as fuel to prove people wrong. Number three, get equanimous and see every criticism as a gift which you can learn from.

Speaker 1 Number four, get psychoanalytical and think of criticisms as a window into the mind of other humans.

Speaker 1 Bonus points for inferring sweeping generalizations about the public at large from whatever you read.

Speaker 2 That's very good.

Speaker 1 Be incredibly precise with language, so no spell words which could be misconstrued at present.

Speaker 1 Front-run potential criticisms by caveating before speaking. Hey, I'm just an idiot spitballing a bro science theory here.

Speaker 2 Oh, no, that one's awful.

Speaker 1 Acknowledge both sides. Hey, look, I think climate change or women's mental health or poverty in Africa is an important issue we should focus on.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 that's a weak one.

Speaker 1 Avoid exposing yourself to it. Never search your own name on Twitter or Reddit.
Don't read the comments. Oh, that's definitely true.

Speaker 2 Yes, of course.

Speaker 1 Dampen down the edginess of your opinions and statements so the point gets made, but in such a gentle way that people can't find anything sufficiently objectionable to get mad about.

Speaker 2 That's not great advice, always.

Speaker 1 This isn't necessarily advice. These are just strategies that I've gone through.
Interesting.

Speaker 1 Deny that it gets to you and just breathwork, busy, meditate, scroll, Brazilian jiu-jitsu your way to distraction.

Speaker 1 Or final one, take it to heart, doubt your abilities and fear that you're not cut out for any level of exposure at large.

Speaker 2 I think that it's probably the last one, which people online, a lot of people online, would be hoping with anyone they're attacking to be able to. It's going to slow them down.

Speaker 2 What they're hoping is that they'll do something that will demoralize you. And

Speaker 2 I imagine.

Speaker 2 I mean, I know that when I really want to demoralize someone,

Speaker 2 that's the sort of thing I'd do.

Speaker 2 I always think that if the,

Speaker 2 I actually think the only

Speaker 2 most effective form of really nasty criticism is to find out what the really weak spot is on someone.

Speaker 2 There was a crazy woman many years ago in London who used to, she was actually Jewish, but she was the most very vicious, vicious anti-Israel protester imaginable.

Speaker 2 And she used to turn up with a group of other maniacs and like disrupt things like the Jerusalem string quartet played at the Wakemore Hall. And they were like,

Speaker 2 attack the string quartet.

Speaker 2 Couldn't you find a stronger target?

Speaker 2 But I remember writing a piece about her.

Speaker 2 And for some reason, I knew that if I just said, you know, you're just anti-Israel, anti-roll, you're just a maniac, whatever, I wouldn't, you know, she'd had it all.

Speaker 2 But I remember thinking, because she would sing these mad songs, like, she'd sing something, it was a song with new lyrics by herself that were like hating.

Speaker 2 And I remember just describing her as a semi-trained singer.

Speaker 2 Oh, that was the one.

Speaker 2 I put my finger on the thing there. She was just like, ah, how dare you? I was trained.

Speaker 2 i just thought it was so funny you just you just watch and think i bet that's the one you know

Speaker 1 adolf hitler world leader failed artist

Speaker 2 but yeah i that's an interesting list yeah what happened with you in the guardian

Speaker 2 oh um

Speaker 2 Yeah, they they libeled me and lied about me so badly in a column that they

Speaker 2 had to pay very substantial expenses in libel damages to me.

Speaker 2 I'm actually, there's a there's a

Speaker 2 and expenses and read out a an apology in the High Court in London, which was they tried to do the classic thing. I think I could say this.

Speaker 2 Sometimes when somebody's forced to do a libel

Speaker 2 retraction,

Speaker 2 they sort of they don't tweet or publish anything and then they suddenly they do it and and then they do masses of things so that it gets buried even on their own timeline.

Speaker 2 But I made sure that didn't happen. How?

Speaker 2 Well, I went quite big on the retweets, and um, so and Elon helped by um uh retweeting it. And actually, I think currently it's the most viewed apology in the history of British legal cases,

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 I wasn't unhappy about that.

Speaker 2 You did ask.

Speaker 1 Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 There's a principle among journalists generally, you don't sue

Speaker 2 because, you know, it's all kind of rough. And, you know, but this one was so egregious that I just...

Speaker 1 What did they do?

Speaker 2 I don't.

Speaker 2 I don't want to fucking repeat the libel that I've just had the

Speaker 1 library. Right, okay.
Yeah. Well, it was incorrect.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's fair.

Speaker 1 I don't know. I mean,

Speaker 1 I only sort of spied it. I knew that there's something happening, and I didn't really understand what it was.
And then I went and had a little bit of a look.

Speaker 1 And then the way that these libel things are written out as well, they're so odd.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, everyone knows that. I mean, despite being a member of the press myself, I mean, you know, one of the worst things about the press is

Speaker 2 that, you know, sometimes they get something like wildly wrong, but it's like front page. And then the correction is three years later on page 49 in a, you know, small type and so on.

Speaker 2 And everyone knows that. And, you know, it's just part of the rough and tumble.
But, but, um, uh, I, I, I think,

Speaker 2 uh,

Speaker 2 I think,

Speaker 2 I mean, having opinions that you disagree with or are wrong is all just fair enough, but, you know, you can't go around and just make shit up

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 claim that it's true.

Speaker 2 Or at least you oughtn't to, and you certainly oughtn't to if you're the Guardian Observer newspaper group and present yourselves as kind of

Speaker 2 guardian of the truth. Holding now.

Speaker 2 So, um,

Speaker 2 yeah, I but I don't do I don't do that very often, but I um there are a few times when I've had substantial donations from

Speaker 2 people who've libeled me and I I wait

Speaker 2 and then uh

Speaker 2 act

Speaker 2 and win.

Speaker 1 Is there a uh proposed use for the proceeds from this?

Speaker 2 I thought I'd extend the moat around my house

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 build a new drawbridge, actually.

Speaker 1 Some more butlers?

Speaker 2 I'm not sure there's room for them.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's got to be a limit, don't there? I mean, you can't have.

Speaker 1 What do you think?

Speaker 1 I know you don't care, or it seems like you don't care. What do you think people commonly misunderstand about sort of your view, your positions?

Speaker 2 Don't really know. I mean, um

Speaker 1 it fascinates me how little time you sort of spend in

Speaker 1 uh self-critical self-reflection. Not that you don't see where sort of failures and stuff come from, but that there's just so few shits given.

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, I'm very self-critical. One of the

Speaker 2 one of I learned this from Anthony Pohl years ago from his novel. There's a brilliant observation in one of them that

Speaker 2 you should always presume that people are very critical, who are very critical, do turn the criticism inwards as well. That's absolutely true.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I think it's actually constructive. I mean, I think it would be wildly odd if you were critical of other people and not of yourself.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think broadly speaking, it's a good thing

Speaker 2 to be self-critical. So I'm that.
But I don't know. I don't spend much time thinking what other people think about me.
I generally take the view,

Speaker 2 I mean, of course, I think it's healthy because I think it. And nobody says, I have this really unhealthy thing I like to think.

Speaker 2 So have you noticed

Speaker 2 everyone's a good judge of character? That is one of my favourites.

Speaker 2 Almost nobody says, actually, I'm just not a very good judge of character. I'm just not good at telling who's a serial killer and who isn't.

Speaker 2 and there are various ones like that that are very uh obvious. But I think that in general, my attitude is to be wary about thinking about other people's thoughts about me because

Speaker 2 uh I think that people who are uh express great admiration or um

Speaker 2 you know whatever about me I kind of don't

Speaker 2 obviously that's nice, but I don't want to absorb it too much because I don't want to become a dick or any more of a dick.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 people who really don't like what I say, I

Speaker 2 don't really, I don't think that's great either.

Speaker 2 I mean, I go back to this thing.

Speaker 2 I think that, I mean, where you, you know, where I, where I would be very, very sensitive would be if I made an error or something like that, because then I'd feel that I made a mistake, I'd got something wrong.

Speaker 2 And that would,

Speaker 2 that would bother me.

Speaker 2 And does when I do, you know, if I make a factual error or something, that's really annoying. It has happened.

Speaker 2 But I don't think it pays to spend very much time thinking about what other people think about you.

Speaker 2 I just don't. I think it sort of means you don't get on with things.
And I've got a lot to do.

Speaker 1 What's coming up?

Speaker 2 Well, this book, obviously,

Speaker 2 which has got to beat the bunnies,

Speaker 2 and with your help

Speaker 2 to the top.

Speaker 2 I'm doing a lot of travel to roll out the book,

Speaker 2 which is great,

Speaker 2 which I love. It's a funny thing with books.

Speaker 2 How's your coming along, by the way?

Speaker 1 Hiatus at the moment. Taking over.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I've got other fish to fry from.

Speaker 2 Yeah, one of the great things about books is that you or the odd things about books is that when you've done and when you've done the book or when you finished it you've you haven't finished that's when the work starts just because

Speaker 2 the moment like i think we're talking well we are talking on the day that the book's officially out in america

Speaker 2 and uh

Speaker 2 uh so

Speaker 2 you know it's like from now that people start reading it and for me that's

Speaker 2 great

Speaker 2 because that's when the book really starts

Speaker 2 and of course, people can listen to it on Audible, where you get these dulset. No, not you.
You don't read it. I read it on Audible.
And the,

Speaker 2 yeah, so, I mean, that's nice as well. And that, by the way, I mean, that is, as you know,

Speaker 2 it's fantastic. That's one of the great things.
Doesn't get enough attention, the upsides of some of the tech.

Speaker 2 I discovered that there's a, you know, there's a wonderful readership, listenership, which was

Speaker 2 not there before audiobooks took off to the extent they have now, which is thanks partly to podcasters and the way in which people are able to, you know, are able to absorb and wishing to absorb

Speaker 2 information and discussion and books.

Speaker 2 And that's just fantastic.

Speaker 2 There's a fantastic audience out there of people who, you know, might not come home and crack open a book at the end of the day, but will listen to it and they get the same thing.

Speaker 2 Plus, with me in their ear.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 so I love the business of a book being out, um,

Speaker 2 even one about some pretty dark stuff like this one. But, um,

Speaker 1 yeah, when you do a fun one next, when do we have a nice fun one?

Speaker 2 Well, that's a good question. Um,

Speaker 2 yeah, I

Speaker 2 have a backlog of books in my head of the ones ones I want to write.

Speaker 1 Are there any fun ones?

Speaker 1 Easter 26 is calling.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, now I know the frigging competition.

Speaker 1 The bunny market.

Speaker 2 No,

Speaker 2 I've always got a lot to do. Always a lot on my mind.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 projects. And

Speaker 2 yeah, a lot to do.

Speaker 1 I look forward to seeing it happen. I appreciate you, man.
I always, I always love getting to speak to you. It's, it's, it's really, really lovely.

Speaker 2 Likewise, right back at you as I've discovered San America.

Speaker 1 While you're here for a little while until you fly off again. Douglas, I appreciate you, man.

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