#2448 - Andrew Doyle

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day yes andrew hello good to see you brother um it has been you said six years almost to the day almost to the last time so lots changed right before everything went crazy that's it right before yeah the whole world sort of shit because everything went kooky around march right yeah so It was February 2020, and then we have COVID, and then we've had Trump in between that. We had BLM. That summer of 2020, everything just exploded. Yeah. Yeah, and then everything shifted. And then you wrote a book. I wrote a book. It's called The End of Woke, How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution. Isn't that how it always goes, though? It goes like we go too far, and then we overcorrect, and we become Nazis. That's it. Exactly. well you know it's the opposite we go socialist you know it's a big pendulum i get that it sort of goes back and forth i mean i was trying to in that book i'm trying to make the point that what woke was was like a kind of the latest manifestation of a kind of innate authoritarian impulse i think human beings are by default quite uh inclined towards just shutting people up if they don't like them yeah just imposing their authority and so woke well i mean a lot of people are annoyed that i've called it the end of work i'm not saying it's all over let's just go home forget about it. It's still going on. But the point about it is, is that in its current manifestation, things are changing now so rapidly. We are moving into some sort of new phase. And that authoritarianism, which we've associated with the left, might come up from the right. It could come up from anywhere. It's what you say about the pendulum. So you just have to be kind of vigilant about it. I don't think we were vigilant. I think that's why woke happened. We weren't vigilant against this prospect that, you know, authoritarianism could emerge in what we thought was a free society well authoritarianism it snuck in through uh a sheep costume yeah you know a wolf in a sheep's costume yeah it was a it was a costume of being more inclusive being more open-minded being a better society being kinder you know it led to you know child trans surgeries led to chaos it led to like a lot of like really fucking freaky things that you'd I never expected people saying that the First Amendment's not important. What more important is protecting people Well that was the key wasn it The point was that the way it worked was that it was gulling people through language that sounded really sweet and kittenish and fluffy You know, things like equity. Well, that sounds a lot like equality, doesn't it? Right. It doesn't mean equality. It means treating people unequally to ensure equal outcomes according to group identity. That's a very different thing. You say you're talking about let's make everything inclusive. But what you really mean is let's exclude anyone who disagrees with what we've got to say. So you're using language to mean the exact opposite. They say gender affirming care. Do they mean that? Or do they mean affirming what is effectively a pseudoscientific belief among vulnerable people? So it's all about misusing language because most people think, or I like to think, are pretty decent. Most people want to be kind and want to be fair. And when you hear these activists saying, be kind, be compassionate or else, right? You know, you kind of think, OK, well, maybe their intentions are good, but also they're pretty scary. I mean, there's a there's a weird there was a weird thing with the woke thing, which was that on the one hand, it proclaimed to be this sort of great, virtuous, kind, progressive right side of history. How often did you hear that phrase? And at the same time, they're like dangerous dogs. Like, you know, I better not piss them off. I better not say the wrong thing in the workplace because they'll destroy you. Well, I always find that the most preposterous the idea is and the least capable it is to stand up to scrutiny, the more violent the enforcement of that idea will be because you cannot combat that. You can't defend that idea with logic. So you have to defend it with fear and force and just shouting people down. And that's what we saw. And that's – it's a natural impulse of human beings. Absolutely. When you're arguing with a kid, you know, when you're a kid and you're arguing with a kid and you say something, you don't even know you. You shut the fuck up. Yes. It's scaring you. So why is it, though, that some countries and some societies seem to protect themselves better than others against that impulse? And I feel at the moment that the UK is kind of failing where America is to a degree succeed, not obviously in all ways. But when it comes to the idea of freedom and free speech, like I think UK is pretty far as pretty fallen to the kind of the woke insistence that you need to control people's language so that you can create this perfect society, which can never come anyway. Well, I think it's been co-opted. I think whatever organic version of that emerges naturally from society where people where there an overcorrection I think in the UK because you guys don have free speech laws because it just different over there yeah you can get away with a lot of crazy shit like the first of all like we should explain what we're talking about more than 12 000 people have been arrested in the uk in the past year for social media posts and if you read some of those social media posts they're not even remotely terrifying it's not like I'm going to grab a knife and go cut the head off of every immigrant I see. Like, hey, buddy, maybe we should lock this guy up and evaluate him. He sounds like a crazy person. Like, no, the immigrants are coming into this fucking country and creating all this crime. Knock on the door. You're going to jail. I worry that Americans think we're mad. Sometimes I do. Yeah, do you? We do now. Yeah. We think you've lost it. Yeah. We also think something happened where your leaders are intentionally trying to tank your country. It seems like they're trying to bring in as many migrants as possible, cater to them, not to the British people, and do it openly so that everyone knows what they're doing and then create chaos on the streets because of it. Yeah, I mean, people have a phrase that anarcho tyranny, you know, where you punish people who aren't breaking the law, but you protect those who are. And I think with the I mean, I don't know the extent that Americans know the I mean, the stat you quoted that came from the Times newspaper in London. which had a freedom of information request to the police, found out that it's 12,000 a year on average. So that's like 30 a day, not just being investigated or looked into, but being arrested. But over the last few years only, if you go back, it's only like 1,000 or 500. It was 3,000 last time we spoke, back in 2020. Was it really a year? It was. Back then? Yeah. Oh, my God. So we already had that problem. I mean, we already didn't know it was that many. That's crazy. Even back then? It was already really high. I mean, we had stuff like the old stories of like there was that guy in 2010 who made a joke online about he was at Doncaster Airport in the UK. He said, oh, if this queue doesn't hurry up, I'm going to blow up the airport. Just a stupid, funny tweet. He went all the way to court. That was a full trial. So these laws and I think what happens with this stuff is people don't realize how long this has been embedded in the UK. We have hate speech laws that are encoded in a number of different legislations. We have a thing called the Public Order Act. We have a thing called Malicious Communications Act. That's from 1988. We have Communications Act from 2003. And all of these things criminalize I tell you I kid you not the language in the statute books is if it grossly offensive That the phrase If you post something that is grossly offensive you can go to court you can be prosecuted But, you know, I find. So subjective. Well, that's it. What does that even mean? I find laws against free speech to be grossly offensive. So should the British state be arrested? I don't know. And there's one. I think it's in the Malicious Communications Act where it talks about needless anxiety, causing needless anxiety. can get you arrested. And you think that's not a thing. I can give you a specific example of that. Do you smoke cigars? I have once. My friend Winston Marshall... Do you want one? I worry that if I try it, I'll cough and I'll look really wimpish and pathetic. And it won't be good for your arguments? It will backfire. I tell you, it'll undermine everything. It'd be like I'm sitting here with a paper hat on at Christmas, undermining all of my key points. Right. See, I like the flavour and I like being around smokers because my grandmother used to chain smoke around me. Oh, boy. Well, she's Northern Irish. It's the way they do. She used to give me whiskey when I was three to calm me down. Oh, wow. It's that sort of family. This episode of the Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by NBC and Peacock. America is sending one of their strongest Winter Olympic teams ever to Milan. Don't miss Team USA in action at the Winter Olympics, starting with an incredible opening ceremony Friday, February 6th on NBC and Peacock. This episode is brought to you by Gold Belly. Listen, Valentine's Day is coming up and Gold Belly's got you covered. Every year, guys wait until the last second for flowers and chocolates, standing in line at a grocery store at 9 p.m. But Gold Belly has built a portal to the best food on earth. 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Like they would dip their finger in whiskey and rub it on the inside of a kid's mouth. If you're struggling with a child, get it drunk. That's how you do it. It's old Northern Irish wisdom. I don't think you should scoff at it. It's a good thing. But I'll be more than happy to. It's grossly offensive. It's grossly offensive. The example I was going to give was this guy called Darren Brady. And this sounds made up. And whenever I tell people this, it sounds made up. He posted a meme. I don't know if you saw this meme where it was the four Progress Pride flags. You know that it's got the crazy triangles and stuff in it. You put them all together and they become a swastika. Exactly that. And that was going everywhere. And he posted it. And there's a video of him being arrested, put in handcuffs. He's an army veteran, by the way. Put in handcuffs by the police. And the policeman says in the video, you caused someone anxiety. So the actual language from the law is being used for this rearrangement of the. And you know what? That's quite a good satirical point that he was making. It wasn't even his meme. He was just retweeting a meme. But even if it was some horrible, offensive thing, who cares? How is that offensive? Well, I guess. I mean, well, you can find that's the problem. You can find anything offensive. You could find anything grossly offensive if you're extremely sensitive. You could. But wasn't there a point to that? I mean, he was kind of saying that the LGBTQIA plus movement has become quite authoritarian. Yeah. He's not saying they're actual Nazis. And he's saying, oh, isn't it quite funny that when you put them together, it looks like a swastika. The idea that you get handcuffed for that, to me, is crazy. Especially for a retweet. That's crazy. Yeah. That's crazy. It's retweets. It's tweets. It's posts. We've had memes are the big ones. So there was a guy called Lee Joseph Dunn who went to prison for eight weeks. That was last year, I think, for three memes that he posted. Eight weeks. Eight weeks in prison. Again, I'll tell you what the most offensive of the three memes was. And you can tell me whether you think it was worth prison time. He put a picture of some immigrants with knives. And underneath it said, coming to a town near you. And that was it. So I don't know if you think that's worth prison time. That's the most offensive one? Of the three, that's the most. What's the least offensive one? I can't remember what the other two were. Because I remember I looked at them I thought well that not even worth thinking about But this one was the one that really because they say in England you stirring up hatred against minorities through the spreading of the meme Right. You know, but that's clearly not sufficient. You know, and I think in the US you have far more protections. I wonder whether it's to do with the fact that in the US you have the First Amendment. Like you have something codified that says you can say what you want. We've never had that. It's very important. And it didn't seem important 20 years ago or 30 years ago because no one ever looked at England as being that kind of a country that would just put people – well, obviously, this was all pre-social media. Yeah, yeah. And England has always been a fairly polite society. Yes. But the thing is like now pub talk has become illegal, right? Yeah. Like if you say something offensive in a pub, you're subject to be arrested and they're asking people to turn people in. There's a thing called the banter ban, which the Labour government was trying to put in. Here's the logic of the banter ban. I've forgotten about this, but now you've mentioned it. They wanted to introduce this law so that, for instance, if you're working in a bar or a pub and you overhear someone who says something against your protected characteristic, say you're a gay barman and someone says, oh, I don't like the gays or something, and you overhear it, your employer has a duty to protect you from that kind of hate speech, that kind of harm. So therefore there's going to be a blanket ban on speech in uncertain kinds of speech within the pub, right? I would say the guy who's eavesdropping he's the problem, right? You shouldn't be listening in on other people's conversations That so that's and that's a real thing Yes, and I guess it all comes down to this view which I think is completely wrong that words and violence are the same thing That words can create a more violent society that there's a direct causal link between the stuff that people say and the stuff that people say online to how people behave in the real world and i think you guys have got it right because you've got the brandenburg test you know about the the the test for incitement to violence in the us no what is that it's it's basically a test that was established i think back in the 60s uh it was a kkk leader called clarence brandenburg who was prosecuted for incitement to violence and the test was that was established since that precedent was that any words uh that can be convicted for incitement to They have to be intended to cause violence likely to cause violence and the violence must be imminent And if you satisfy those that that threshold you can be prosecuted in the US for incitement to violence So be like kind of imagine a demagogue Surrounded by all his fans whipping up a frenzy and then pointing to a guy on the front row and saying kill him now That would qualify for the Brandenburg test But in the UK because we don have that test all we got is whether people found it offensive That's the difference of the threshold. So it's a massive difference between what the US has and what the UK has. Massive. It's insane. I mean, to give the most obvious recent example, because I don't know if people know about this. there's a woman called Lucy Connolly in the UK. I don't know if this was reported over here at all. Do you remember we had all these riots last year during the summer against hotels which were housing asylum seekers and people were setting fire to them? There were genuinely racist stuff going on during those riots. And this was off the back of a guy who'd murdered a bunch of little girls in a dance class. And there were rumours going around that this was an asylum seeker, right? And this one woman, a mother, who'd lost her daughter, very sensitive about the idea of Lucy Connolly. She's very sensitive about the idea of loss of kids. She tweeted in a fit of anger, go and burn down all the hotels for all I care. If that makes me racist, so be it. And take the government with you, something like that. And she deleted it within a couple of hours. She went out, walked a dog, she deleted it. And she thought, that's not me, that's not who I am. Deleted it. Police came, went to court, sentenced to 31 months in prison for that swiftly deleted tweet, and she served over a year. Oh, my God. Now, I'm not saying the tweet was nice, right? The tweet was a horrible tweet, and she says it was a horrible tweet. That's why she deleted it. But because we don't have that Brandenburg test, we don't have a test for incitement to violence, because the key is that tweet, there was no way it could have... She was a nobody. You know, she wasn't someone with influence. She didn't have many followers. No one was going to read that and go and act upon it. And if they did, that would be on them, right? Because this is a myth. This myth that people act on cue to what they read online isn't real. It influences people for sure. But at what point are you required to have sovereignty over your own mind and your own actions? Yeah. Well, I think what it does is it raises the temperature, particularly when political leaders do it. Right. But when political but my point is like it's not gonna incite you to violence It's not going to incite me to violence So who are we talking about with this is part of the thing is like they're protecting the dumbest members of society This is like the thing about Banning you know crazy talk online if you talking about witches or you know whatever it is flat earth like we have to stop misinformation but from from who it not working on you right yes you don't believe it so who are we protecting we're protecting the dumbest people also aren't you kind of letting them off like if someone goes and commits an act of violence and said oh i did it because someone told me to do it aren't you kind of letting them off the hook right and sort of displacing the blame you know it's like that guy who shot John Lennon who said Catcher in the Rye made him do it, reading the book Catcher are we now blaming J.D. Salinger for the murder of John Lennon? It was John Lennon wasn't it? I think he did, yeah so I think the safest approach is to say people are responsible for their own actions I think the best that you could say is when political leaders and people with clout say things like that, say you know it's fine to go out and commit violence I think what they do is they create a kind of imprimatur of approval. They create this kind of sense that if you do it, the people in charge will have your back. If you do it, it's OK. Well, this was the argument with Trump for January 6th. And that's why the BBC edited his speech to make it look as if that's what he was saying. You saw that clip, right? Oh, my God. It's fucking crazy. I mean, I've been saying for a long time the BBC has a real like what I will say in the BBC's defense Is they've always been pretty good at being party politically neutral like they will Interrogate someone in the right and someone in the left in a pretty neutral way They don't that I think they do pretty good I know people will be annoyed at me for saying that but I think they do But I think in terms of the ideology the woke ideology they got captured They have a thing at the BBC called the LGBT desk or they had it up until recently which could veto any news story which meant that any story that was slightly critical of trans activism or anything like that just didn't get reported. So I'm not surprised that the BBC gave them veto power. They give them veto power. Yeah, that's crazy. This all came out in a report, quite a recent report just a few months ago, which led to the resignation of Tim David, the director general. And he resigned ostensibly because of that Trump clip, which, by the way, that wasn't the first time they did it. There was another clip about a year or a year before in a different program that did the same thing. took the clip, re-edited it, and made it look like he had said something he absolutely had not said. So I think the BBC quite obviously has an ideological bias, if not a party political bias. But that's more than a bias. Well, it's misleading, right? It's completely deceptive. You're editing something and they took out a giant chunk of his speech. It's misleading, right? It's misleading, right? It's completely deceptive. You're editing something and they took out a giant chunk of his speech. This episode is brought to you by 1-800-Flowers.com. Valentine's Day is coming up. It always sneaks up on people. If you want an easy way to absolutely crush it this year, this is it. 1-800-Flowers-Roses. They're bigger and actually last. 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You have to fight like hell to keep your country. I mean, no offense, but you can find daft stuff that Trump says pretty easily, right? You don't need to edit that stuff down. Well, it's because they had an opportunity to like what we were saying before earlier. We were talking before the show. you can put out a narrative and it doesn't have to be true. And then that's the one that sticks. So that's the one that spreads wide. And then when all these years later, they have to have this, you know, trial and everybody finds out it's not true. But the damage is done. I mean, that's what they did with Trump during the whole Steele dossier. Yeah. You know, the hookers and peeing on people and all that crazy shit. Remember that? I remember the idea that he'd hired hookers to urinate on the bed that was once occupied by the Obamas. Something along those lines. the reason I didn't believe that is I don't think Trump is that avant-garde. I don think he that creative Like if he have come up with that I have been actually applauding that That kind of amazing But obviously he didn do that But that not even something to applaud That just sounds completely ridiculous It like a work of art Getting urination on the bed of your enemy through the medium of prostitution. I think that's kind of an artistic thing to do. But I don't think he did it. I obviously didn't do it. None of it's true. But you put that... But isn't that weird that that in particular... That's like something I don't think anyone seriously could believe. Well, there's plenty of people that believed it. Really? Yeah, they don't have to believe it. They just say it. Like that was the whole point about the trial where he got arrested and convicted of 34 counts that are a felony, none of which are actually a felony. That's all bookkeeping deception. That was the paying off of the girl. So now you can say he's a convicted felon. You can just say that. And even though all those counts were misdemeanors, all of them had passed the statute of limitations. But for some reason, through no legal way that anybody could ever really honestly explain, they decided to label it a felony. And it was just to turn him into a felon. I saw even left-leaning anti-Trump lawyers saying this is not how the law should work. You can't artificially elevate a misdemeanor to a felony outside the statute of limitations. It's crazy. But the thing is, if you do that, they're going to do that to you. It's like we're going to give that kind of power to the Republicans, and now when they're in office, they're going to start doing things like that? Are we crazy? Well, also, this really bothers me. One of the key things that I think's happened over the past few years is this complete lack of fealty to the truth from both sides. It's whatever is convenient matters more. A complete lack of intellectual curiosity, a complete lack of investigating and looking and thoroughly checking. And by the way, with the BBC, that really matters because unlike the news media here, which can be as partisan as it likes, the BBC is the state broadcaster. It's got a responsibility by charter to be balanced, to be even-handed, and it completely failed. And I saw today, just this morning, some people, you know, we've got all the mania about the Epstein files at the moment. Some activists have now said J.K. Rowling once invited Epstein to the opening of her play. Never happened. But because there's a furore about Epstein at the moment, they're just saying it happened. It gets spread all over the place. That's all you have to do. And that's all you have to do. And then that gets repeated. Oh, didn't this happen? I know. Like what you say about Trump is right. I always hear that he's a convicted felon. He's a convicted felon. Well why don you pause for a minute and assess whether or not that conviction is sound or whether it was politically motivated or how helpful that is But like you say Also it like it such a dangerous precedent to set It's terrible. Like if you do that, look, right now in the United States, the media predominantly leans left except for Fox News, the mainstream large scale media. I guess CBS is probably going to lean more right now. It seems like it's in the process of that. But for the most part, when you watch CNN, if you watch MSNBC, if you watch the mainstream news, it's very left leaning. Yeah. But if the fucking if right wing people started if it was like more common for the news to be right leaning and then they started doing the exact same thing about a left leaning candidate. Yeah. This is so dangerous. And the idea that the left doesn't recognize that, which are the people that have always been in support of free speech? It's never been a right wing thing to support free speech until now. It's always been a left wing thing. When I was a kid, it was famously the case of the ADL defending Nazis having the right to protest and saying, look, we think what they're saying is abhorrent. But it's very important that you get the right to say whatever you feel. And then the way to combat that is with much better, more concise speech that's much more logical and makes sense. And this is what you do. This is what debate is for. We've always known this. Yeah, but I mean, I agree. I'm so dispirited by that, that very thing that you've identified that the left used to be about this. The left used to be all about, I mean, that example you mentioned of Skokie, wasn't it, in Chicago, the Nazis marching through Skokie and the ACLU saying, you know, we're defending this. There was a book by a guy called Aya Neer, who was the head of the ACLU, called Defending My Enemy. Yeah, it wasn't the ADL. It was the ACLU. It was the ACLU. And he was saying, you know, he's Jewish. He's got family members who died in the Holocaust. But he's writing a book saying, I'm defending neo-Nazis' right to free speech, not because I support them, but because I don't. And I want to defend the principle whereby I can tackle them. And that's speech. Right. So, in other words, the principle is so much bigger. I mean, the thing that I think has been lost. And now, by the way, the ACLU, complete about turn. I mean, there was a lawyer for the ACLU tweeting about how he wanted Abigail Shrier's book banned and he said, this is the hill I will die on. You know, that's a guy called Chase. I think it's a trans activist called Chase something. I can't remember. Anyway, but the point is, how far have you fallen? When it comes to these free speech issues left or right it nothing to do with it It should be about this principle of it not whether you agree with what they saying and the substance of what they saying It whether you want the principle intact And that principle applies to us all The very same principle that allows the Nazis to say all their crazy stuff is the principle that allows us to challenge it, to tackle it. Well, it's a very short-term win. It's basically they're playing chess and they decided, I want that rook no matter what. And then they just sacrifice their queen. Like, look what you've done. Look what you've done for this short term victory. You're essentially tanking civilization for a decade where we have to sort this out and like let the ship wash itself back and forth until it writes. Yeah. And how do you ensure that it's not going to happen to you? Like I think about that. There was a National Conservative Conference in Brussels about a year and a half ago. The local mayor said, I don't like this. And he had the police rush it, shut it down. And you had mainstream right wing figures like Nigel Farage, Suwala Braverman. How do they not think, hang on a minute, if we establish that precedent where you can just shut down your political opponents through the use of police force, how will that not rebound on me? How will that not happen to us? Well, this is the argument that they're using right now for Trump going after his political opponents. Right, right. Because they opened that Pandora's box, right? You guys did that with him. Yeah. And everybody was saying how damn dangerous it is. You can't fucking do that. Even if you hate the guy. If there's a real crime that you can get someone, but when you take a crime like the bookkeeping stuff and turn it into a felony that could put this man in jail for the rest of his life for doing something that turns out to be legal, you can pay people to shut up. Yeah. And this is so – it's just – it's so weird that people for this short-term gain are willing to tank, which is essentially this whole structure of our civilization that allows free discourse. You need it. It's so important. It's so important to be able to communicate and talk. If podcasts didn't exist, there was no way to talk through ideas other than mainstream news. We would still be stuck in some very bizarre 1990s or 1980s narrative about how the world works. Yeah. We would have real problems. We'd have real problems if there wasn't independent journalism like on Twitter and on wherever they can post. Yeah. So why don't they get it? I mean we've had like people in left-leaning papers in the UK Calling for Elon Musk to be arrested because he's allowing free speech on X or Twitter or whatever you want to call it Like well their offices got raided today in some country. There was a country where X's office to be arrested because he's allowing free speech on X or Twitter, to be arrested because he's allowing free speech on X or Twitter, whatever you want to call it. Well, their offices got raided today in some country. There was a country where X's offices got raided. I think one of the things was they somehow or another let, I think something had to do with child pornography. Where was that? France. France. Fresh investigation into Grok. And what is it? Oh, so you know what this is all about. Here it is. Yeah. Suspected offenses, including unlawful data extraction and complicity in the possession of child pornography. Yeah, but that's not what this is about. This is because people have been misusing grok to like put bikinis on women they like or even in a few cases creating child child sex. You can do. Wait a minute. You can't create child pornography. I don't know. Or at least I think that's very much been shut down and safeguarded. Right. I think that's what's happened. I mean, unless there's like some sort of a loophole where you could get it to do it. Among potential crimes, it said it would investigate where complicity in possession or organized distribution of images of children of a pornographic nature, infringement of people's image rights with sexual deep fakes. OK, the sexual deep fakes. So sexual deep fakes is like if you put Hillary Clinton in a bikini and made her hot. That's a sexual deep fake. OK. Fraudulent data extraction by an organized group. I think you can still do some of that stuff. You can put people in bikinis. Yeah, I think you can do that. So, like, if you wanted to take Shaquille O'Neal and put him in a bikini, you could say you're sexualizing him. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I guess you can do that. Yeah. So that'll be why, you know, recently Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the UK, said he was considering, or not necessarily he was going to ban X, but it wasn't off the table. It's something like as though he's going to do that. But this is always the excuse. Like, you know, we're protecting children. Right. And look, no one wants that sort of stuff, right? No one wants deep fakes of kids, obviously. But there's far, I mean, looking at the stats on that, there's far more child sexual exploitation on Snapchat, for instance. But they don't go after Snapchat because Snapchat isn't the form where Keir Starmer is getting criticized every single day and brutally hauled over the coals by people checking his facts. One of the best things about X recently is the community notes. Checking journalists and politicians in real time with facts. They hate it. They hate that. So no wonder they're going after X. Yeah Biden got cooked by community notes multiple times Yeah yeah To the point where the administration was taking down posts Yeah So did The Guardian the left newspaper It flounced off X with a big statement saying we going to blue sky We had it We're off to blue sky. It was such a flounce. And of course, and then, of course, everyone was retweeting all their community notes. They had loads of them. Of course. Just absolutely loads of them. Because it's not true. And, you know, especially when it's open to the whole world. Yeah. And people that aren't stuck under your guidelines, like in America, we could just talk shit. Yeah. And I think the reason why it's in France probably has a lot to do with Candace Owens. Oh, yes, that makes complete sense. Yeah. Brigitte Macron and like, I mean, how many times did that get shared? Yeah, exactly. I mean, that is. That makes sense of it now. By the way, there's a real quick way to solve that. Open chromosome test. Go ahead. I thought you were going to be a bit more graphic than that. Well, you don't have to. No, you don't have to. Because that doesn't really solve it because you could, unless, I mean, there's no operation. But if she's gone through a surgery, then you could show a picture and it's probably pretty realistic, especially when was the last time you saw a 70-year-old lady's cooter? Last week. Oh, yeah. Congratulations. I'm just interested in that sort of stuff. Well, you're allowed to be curious in this country. That's actually a really good example, though, isn't it, of just something so obviously not true just going all over the world in a matter of moments. Is it not true, though? What, that Macron's wife is a man? Yeah, that's not true. 100%? Well, you know, the burden of proof is on those who want to say that it is true. The reality of the story is weird enough without it being true. Like the 40-year-old man and the – He was – wasn't she his school teacher? She was 40 – yeah. She was 40 if it is actually a woman. She was 40 and he was 15. That's crazy. And everyone says, well, they're French. That seems to be the thing. What a wild country. People just say that's the way it works in France. But again, look, I would say with all of this, you need some sort of proof. You need like when you when you wasn't it the Carl Sagan thing about extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I think that's a pretty safe diktat. The idea that, OK, anything could be true. You know, you know, there have been crazy conspiracies that turned out to be true. So I'm not I would never rule anything out. But what I'm saying is if you're going to make a claim like that, you better be damn sure you've got really solid evidence. She's got hours long documentaries on this. Yeah, and are they persuasive? I haven't watched them all. I haven't watched them. Do you think I have that kind of time, Don? Well, you should do. You should do your research before You part of the problem Outrageous I can do research on that I want to wait till it plays out in court But whenever I do do research like I give you the example from this week just because I'm reading it now. A woman's written a book claiming that Shakespeare was a black woman. Oh, I saw that. Yeah. So this is a major spoiler alert. Shakespeare wasn't a black woman. Crazy. Yeah. I've got the book. I'm reading the book now. It is worse than you imagine. How could it be worse than I imagined? Because, because. It's obviously not true, firstly. Of course. But she basically says in the book that it's important that it should be true. And therefore, yeah. In fact, the book opens with a picture of Shakespeare as a black woman, which was drawn by the author. Is it a good drawing? It's okay. I don't want to mock someone else. Can I see it? Can I see it? If it's out, it's the first. Oh, that's the book. That's actually pretty good. No, no, no. No, no, no. That's a black woman? No, no, no. That's a portrait of Amelia Lanyer, who she says was Shakespeare. And she says that the portraits at the time were whitened to disguise her blackness. In the book itself. How convenient. In the book itself. You won't be able to get in the book, I don't think, Jamie. But in the book itself, there's a sketch that she's done. So it's like, I can imagine a publisher saying, oh, what evidence have you got? And she's like, oh, well, I'll go and draw it for you. And that's sort of what she said. Oh, she's black and Jewish? Yeah, black Jewish. Well, actually, I mean, Amelia Lanyer was part Moorish, but wasn't black and she wasn't particularly dark skinned. And she was Jewish as well? Yeah, part Jewish. Okay, so who is this woman that they're saying actually was Shakespeare? So she's called Amelia Lanyer or Amelia Bassano. And one of the arguments is that Shakespeare at the time, if she was a woman, wouldn't have been able to get published because women couldn't get published. But Amelia Lanyer was published. She had a book of poetry. So all of this stuff falls apart like in two seconds flat. And this is the best one. She even says in the book that the word Shakespeare is an anagram of a she speaker. I'm not making that up. That's what she says. I mean, you know, listen. What a cover up. How'd she crack the case? Well, actually, it's an old theory. It's like a 20 year old theory. Is it really? I tell you. 20 years old. She's just sort of rehashing it now for this identitarian post-woke world where we're all like we're desperate for Shakespeare to be a black woman. And it's so- That's so fun. It so pathetic This was my first encounter with conspiracy theories because my background is I did a doctorate in Shakespeare My background was teaching Shakespeare back in the day like before I did comedy and before I did anything else And it was the conspiracy theorists around Shakespeare saying Shakespeare couldn have written his work They are the most intense, the most angry, the most evidence free cohort of people. They get more they're angrier than the woke. I promise you. Like I've tweeted. I've written stuff about Shakespeare online. I recently did some lectures about Shakespeare for the Peterson Academy because I'm really into help. I love the Peterson Academy. I love what they're doing. And I did these Shakespeare lectures. And the conspiracy theorists were on to me online saying it wasn't Shakespeare. The guy from Stratford didn't write this. And what all these theories have in common is they've just made – there's no evidence. There's no evidence. The key point about Shakespeare is if you're going to say it wasn't the guy who everyone thought it was, you have to answer one key question. Why does everyone who knew Shakespeare, wrote about Shakespeare, say that it was? Can I stop you? Because I'm confused. I didn't even know that there was a conspiracy about Shakespeare. Oh, wow. Yeah, there's lots. I had heard one person say that Shakespeare wasn't real and that it was really someone else's work that he plagiarized. Yeah. I had heard that. But I never even bothered to fuck around with it. Well, it actually came from America. It's you guys. Of course. We're the best. We're number one. It was a guy called Looney, actually, from America. That's hilarious. That's his name. You're going to listen to that guy? So he, we're going back like 60, 70 years or something, but he came up with this idea that Shakespeare was actually an aristocrat called Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Problem is, Edward de Vere died in 1604. That's before Macbeth. That's before Antony and Cleopatra. That's before Coriolanus. That's before The Tempest. So he managed to, I think they get around it by saying, he wrote these plays and then he died. And then Shakespeare found them? Or something, yeah. So even though some of those plays actually have cultural references from the time after De Vere died. But it doesn't matter. Maybe he was a prophet as well. But all of the... You speak to these people, you'll see what I mean. Edward de Vere, they think... Some people think it was Francis Bacon. Some people think it was Christopher Marlowe. Some people think it was Elizabeth I. Like, all of the candidates they put up, right, the key thing is they're all aristocrats, they're all posh. Why? Because Shakespeare was a middle class, lower middle class, not very rich, didn't go to university, came from the Midlands, you know, up and coming guy who... And they say, well, how could someone like that write about kings and lords and ladies? It's snobbery. They're basically saying working class people can't do art. I mean, really, that's what it is. Otherwise, they wouldn't be going after all these aristocrats. It's the opposite in America. saying working-class people can't do can't do art that I mean really that's saying working-class people can't do can't do art that I mean really that's what it is yeah otherwise they wouldn't be going after all these aristocrats and in the it's the opposite in America oddly is it yeah so if you were a Rockefeller in America you from the Rockefeller family and you wrote an amazing novel no one would believe it right okay that has to be like some guy who or some woman who's like grinding drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes alone in their apartment to write something that's brilliant. So I wonder what it is about the UK. Well, although, like I say, a lot of it comes from America. And is it just the need to tear down an icon? Is it that? Is it? I mean, I get it now with this woman who's saying Shakespeare was a black woman. I get that at the moment because we're in this moment of identitarian group identity mania. So that makes sense. She's got a political reason why she wants it to be a black woman. So I kind of understand that more. but what is it I think it might be more to do with the idea that this guy changed civilization changed literature no one else has achieved what he achieved in writing he's up there with Michelangelo Bach you know all of that let's tear that down let's tear down western civilization let's say none of this is based on anything this is all this is all untrue right I think it's to do with the that innate iconoclasm that innate you know just just tearing down the great things about our culture for sure that's always been the case and people always want to tear down idols. They want to tear down whoever it is, no matter what. I was watching this video we were talking about the other day of this woman talking about how the Beatles were terrible. And this woman was not very articulate, not particularly interesting, doesn't seem that compelling. And she was going on and on about how bad the Beatles were. I'm like, you're not going to convince anyone. This is not going to work. But people are going to fucking try. They're going to try no matter what, no matter who it is. Hendrix sucked. I've heard that before. Hendrix sucked. Stop. But at least that's based on an opinion, right? There's a difference between saying Jimi Hendrix sucked and Jimi Hendrix was actually a woman from Liverpool called Maude. Well, you know the theory about Jimi Hendrix in America. Do you know that? No. Okay. So it's the people that are like deep into the CIA and CIA conspiracies. And what is it called? Strange Tales from the Canyon? Is that what it's called? The book? So there's a book on, there's a bizarre connection between a lot of the countercultural figures of the 1960s and the intelligence community. One of them is Jim Morrison father was like a high ranking military officer And then there different people from different bands that were like a key part of the counterculture movement that all have parents that were either in intelligence communities or closely connected to it Like a suspicious scenes inside the canyon. It's a crazy book. It's it's fun. It's kind of fun. Is it crazy as in like the revelations are crazy or that it's just not true? Well, they make some broad leaps, right? So there's a lot of, and then a year later he died in mysterious circumstances, or a year later he died from suicide, or a year later he died from an overdose. Well, okay. You're hanging out with a bunch of people that are doing drugs all the time, and they're all ne'er-do-wells, and they're all hanging out in Laurel Canyon. If you don't know Laurel Canyon, Laurel Canyon, at least at the time, I mean, when I first moved to Hollywood, it's like all the weirdos would live in Laurel Canyon. Right. Like all the weirdos were like right there above Hollywood. And there was all these crazy parties up there. It was like Laurel Canyon was nuts. And they all knew each other, right? So they're all part of that circle. So, I mean, this was like when I moved there in the 90s, this was the case. My friend Dave Foley had a house up there. Right. And it was like all these kooky people. He was telling me about all these kooky parties and all this different shit. It was like Laurel Canyon was always like kind of, so of course a bunch of people are going to die. So what's the theory that people are gonna be connected to bands and and different? Yeah counterculture movies. The theory is that the CIA Sort of engineered this This culture to I don't know why I'm not exactly sure cuz I haven't gotten all the way through the book I'm like, oh, you still reading. No, I pick it up every now and then it's just like it's too kooky It's not grabbing you. Well You can't make Jimi Hendrix in a lab, okay? You can't. It's just you can't fucking do it. You can't make someone that good. It's not possible. You can't tell me that if they did, why haven't they done it since? Why don't they do it all the time? Because the greatest guitarist of all time, and you're telling me the central intelligence cooked that guy up? So they invented him. He's like their clone or something. and they created- Well, I just think that they had some sort of an influence on these people, on Jim Morrison. Like there was a thing about Morrison, the Morrison one, like what is the connection between Jim Morrison's dad and the intelligence agencies? There some like tangible connection with Jim Morrison dad But wouldn you just normally assume that if your dad was some high military guy first of all never home Yeah okay So where are you you out running around with your friends smoking cigarettes and fucking drinking and you in a band and it turns out You got a lot of angst and pain because you're being neglected as a child because your dad works 16 hours a day trying to fuck The country over and so what do you do? Yeah, you go counterculture. It's like it's so calm the preacher's daughter She becomes like a harlot, right? There you're high-ranking US officer with yeah, right, but that is okay. But again, like this is a perfect example Wow, he's involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Whoa, that's not proof of anything. No, no, no, no, no, no But his dad is yeah, you know, but this is the thing they'll take something like that They'll take various strips of coincidences and they say this leads us to this conclusion But all they're doing works coming up with a conclusion first and working backwards like this sort of stuff you see it again and again So this is how this connects with intelligence agencies. McGowan, I guess that's the author. Core move is to group Morrison's father with other Laurel Canyon musicians' parents who worked in military, defense, or intelligence-linked roles and to frame this as evidence of a broader covert program around the 1960s rock scene. Come on. Yeah. So are you saying that the CIA were trying to influence the culture through the medium of rock music? Uh-huh. And that's somehow tied to espionage They also have that film Like studio What's that? Jared Leto bought that place that was a film studio In Laurel Canyon too Oh well it's a base It's an actual base I was talking to Jared about that I had dinner with Jared Leto one night He's very cool by the way Very nice guy, very normal And by the way he looks like he's 30 He's 50 years old, it's crazy What are you doing with your fucking skin? Look great out Mountain yeah, so he bought that place and converted it into a home That's where he lives. It's a dope spot soundstage It looks quite nice soundstage film laboratory two screening rooms for editing rooms and animation and still photo department sound mixing studio numerous Climate controlled film vaults and this is connected to the conspiracy somehow well This was an actual military base located on that same neighborhood, okay? So this Air Force station, whatever it was, I wonder what they were doing. Like, why did they need all that film capability? Why did they need to be in theory? I guess like when they would show the atomic bombs going off and would play it in the movie theater for people to see it That how they would make the actual reels and whatnot Well that makes sense Right It makes sense that they were right there in Hollywood if that what they were doing On top, what other things they made? See, here's the still from Lookout Mountain Laboratory. So it's just a studio then? A special effects studio? Yeah, but it's in that same neighborhood at the same time. Yeah, but so what? I mean, I think with all of it. He's not arguing for it. Yeah, goddammit, Jamie. The so what of it is that there wasn't that many of them to begin with and just they all happen to be in the gym But you know think with all of this stuff like again and again the pattern is either there's gaps There's gaps in what we know and people decide to fill them in themselves because there's kind of comfort to that There's also some kind of comfort with I know something that no one else does I've got the answer There's a status element to that. I remember I read a book when I was a kid like teenager called the sacred virgin and the holy whore and it was about sort of books I read and it was about Jesus and it was trying to prove that Jesus was a woman and as you're reading it you're thinking yeah Jesus is a woman I can't believe I've heard that and then you get to the end and you think what the hell did I just read and it's that thing of you can marshal any kind of half-baked fact or any you can marshal certain things that we can see and fill in the gaps yourself and lead to a crazy conclusion what concerns me isn't so much that people do that because people have done that forever as long as they've been human beings, is that now people are leaping at it and falling for it in a way that I haven't seen. Maybe it is just social media, right? It is. Can I give you an example of this? Yeah, please. A recent one which I just thought was nuts. Did you see the portrait of King Charles III by an artist, I think his name was Yeo, Y-E-O. It's a big red portrait which currently hangs in Buckingham Palace. Oh, I have seen that. It's crazy. If you take a quarter of it, invert it, flip it, add a bit, and squint, it looks like a goat devil, right? But you have to do a lot of steps to find the goat devil. Well, of course, it's a puzzle. You could probably... How dare you? I'm sorry. How dare you dismiss that puzzle? Let's show the photo and show how it's done because it's kind of fun. Can you see the goat? Oh, there we go. So can you see the goat as well? First of all, just the photo by itself, like, hey man, what the fuck are you doing? Oh, it's a creepy picture. Why am I splattered in blood? I've seen it in the flesh. It's a creepy picture. One thing if he did that in all white. It was an all white background. That would be one thing. Like, oh, that's kind of an interesting look or, you know, pastel. So what are you saying, Joe? Something gray. Are you already suspicious? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, well, the photo's nuts. Like the painting is nuts. Where's the goat? So all you have to do interesting look or you know pastel so what are you saying are you already interesting look or you know pastel so what are you saying are you already suspicious is that well the photos nuts like the painting is nuts where's the goat so all you have to do is put it together side by side you don't have to do that much you exaggerated how much you have to know I saw a video that trust me look at it upside down looks oh no no I will the other way I found a goat put it back put it back wait a minute I can completely see the goat now That's 100% a goat. They did it on purpose. That's a sign. Go back to the other one, though. Click on that one. I see a goat there. I see some evil demon. Look at the two eyeballs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bro. Where? 100%. Stop. Stop trying to gaslight me. I see a monster. Oh, well, I mean. You can find something in everything, man. It still looks a little superimposed. I mean, you see. I can see Martha Stewart in that. The Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. Right. You can see it in the clouds and the rocks. Of course. There's a term for this where our brains look for patterns and things. I had a conversation once with a friend of mine that I didn't know was going crazy. Right. And he goes, hey, you want to see something crazy? And he pulls out his phone and he shows me a cloud. Yeah. And I go, what is that? He goes, dude, I'm seeing this all day. And he shows me some other ones. He's got like hundreds of photos of clouds on his phone. Yeah. I go, what are you seeing? He goes, these are UFOs. He goes, these are spaceships. This is not a regular cloud. Right. And I'm looking at the photos, like he's just been taking pictures of clouds all day. And I realized, oh my God, my friend is going schizophrenic. I didn't know him well. So he's a friend? Yeah. Okay. Okay. The more I talked to him, the more I realized there was something cracked. Like, he's a guy I hadn't seen in like maybe seven or eight years. And I ran into him at a comedy club and he was just showing me photos of clouds on his phone. I was like, well, during the conversation I realized, oh, he cracked. But aren't you concerned that that kind of thing is now kind of common? Like from people who aren't necessarily unwell. People who are just seeing stuff. Well, it's fun. I think it's fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's exciting for people to uncover information that the general public is ignorant of. Right. And so here's the thing about the Laurel Canyon thing. There's enough of the CIA meddling in cultural events that's absolutely true and provable. Yeah. And that's MKUltra. And that's what they did with Charles Manson. And that the book Chaos by Tom O which is a brilliant book which is very well documented in details Jolly West and his influence on the Manson family and how they were influencing these people to try to sabotage the hippie movement So the hippie movement was this change in culture where all of a sudden people were rejecting the war movement They were rejecting – they were free love and they were doing acid and people were freaking out. Their kids were just disappearing and following the Grateful Dead around. And they took this guy, Charles Manson, this very charismatic con man. They taught him how to dose people up with acid and influence them and they got them to commit murders But there is evidence for this right? Yeah, you're talking about a book that I researched right back in its point Right. No, you're being logical and I you know, you're correct But what I'm saying is because of that people go well what else? What and so then they make these big leaps like Jimi Hendrix is a CIA creation, right? And which but if you're a logical person you just listen to voodoo child slight return. Yeah, and you like how yeah How this is like if that's true see I should get back to work make another one of those bro So I wonder whether this is this is I think this is the fallout of the woke movement This is the the divorcing of reality and truth Yeah, the idea that it that it doesn't matter not just about what is expedient, but what we want to believe I think we should stop saying it's the fallout of the woke movement. I think we should start saying it's a natural pattern that human beings automatically fall into in order to support their belief systems and enforce their particular ideology over whatever opposing ideology is. But it's escalated. It escalates, but it's because of social media that everything is escalating now. But is it just social media? I mean, I think another thing that's a major reason for it. We had COVID. We had all these people, all these experts telling us it's a racist conspiracy theory to say that it came from a lab in Wuhan. Now everyone knows that's almost certainly true. We had people in positions of authority lying to us. So it's something about this culture war. But that's not real culture war. That was using the culture war because they were trying to cover something up. But they leapt to race, didn't they? They leapt to identity. That's because they were using the culture war to cover up their crime. So if that's in either case, what you've got effectively is a legitimation crisis. You've got people in charge. We've been lied to so often. But what I don't think you should therefore do like I'm all for being sceptical about people in authority, academics, politicians, journalists. They all lied But that firstly doesn mean that all experts and all journalists and all people have lied because there been some good ones all the way But also that doesn mean that you automatically leap to any conclusion evidence free that jumps before you without some kind of critical analysis. The same thing that you're criticizing those people for failing at. You're falling into the same trap yourself. I don't mean you. But you're Andrew Doyle. You're a brilliant guy who writes books and you're really smart. The idea is that you are immune to this stuff because you're intelligent, but the unwashed masses are not. I don't think I'm immune at all. I honestly don't. I wouldn't put myself in that position. Well, you're immune to the dumbest shit. I'd like to think so. You are. I am. Yeah, but don't you think that all of us in the right circumstances could end up falling for all sorts of stuff? 100%, but I'm not in those circumstances currently. But I like to believe, and maybe it's a naivety on my part, but I like to believe that most people have a kind of natural intellectual curiosity. If they stop for a moment and think and don't just trust instinct over reason, I think we're all capable of it. I just think we're not all realizing it. Well, it's not just that. It's like some people are medicated, right? So some people are on a bunch of different medications that dull their senses. And then you've got people that have gotten to wherever they are in life. Maybe they're in their 50s. and they're set in their ways and they have no desire to change at all. And so they've been living a dumb life for 50 plus years. You can't all of a sudden say, hey, Mark, I want you to be logical and introspective and think about this thing and analyze it for what it really is. Instead of holding on to your ideological beliefs that you've kind of locked yourself into and you identify with and any attacks on those is attack on you personally. I want you to just let's look at the facts. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Look, there's a lot of pressure when it comes to dating, especially in February, but you're putting too much on yourself and on your partner. There's no such thing as a perfect relationship, whether you're on a first date or have been together for years. It's completely normal to go through rough patches, and what matters is how you deal with them, and therapy can be a huge help during any stage of your dating life. You can figure out what you want in a partner or get perspective for a growing problem in your relationship. The point is, you don't have to come up with a solution by yourself. Now, finding the right therapist can be tricky, but that's where BetterHelp comes in. They have an industry match fulfillment rate and they do a lot of the work finding the right therapist for you Really all you have to do is fill out a questionnaire and sit back and wait Tackle your relationship goals this month with BetterHelp Sign up and get 10 off at betterhelp.com slash J-R-E. That's better, H-E-L-P dot com slash J-R-E. But you saying that sounds very persuasive to me. The way you put that, like if I were that guy, I'd be like, oh, I've listened to Joe now. You're a fucking weirdo. Fucking liberals. Bullshit. You're fucking, you're just a fucking, they'll come up with some sort of reason. King Charles III is a goat. Yeah. You're a controlled opposition or you're a useful idiot or they'll put a label on you. I've been called, I've been told I get dark money. Oh. How do you get any of that? Well, I love it. I want it. I want the dark money. It's so dark I haven't seen any of it. That's how dark it is. What is dark money? I think it's when it's like some rich ideologue who's sort of slipping you money to say the thing. You know what it is? It's that thing of I don't believe that you disagree with me. I'm too narcissistic to believe that you disagree with me. You must be being paid to have these opinions. You're paid off, bro. You're paid off. Trust me, I would love that. If anyone's out there who wants to pay me off, I'll be a mouthpiece. I haven't had that opportunity. What's your price? It's pretty low. I'm a bit of a whore, if truth be told. I've got a mortgage. Come on. I will say any crazy shit if you want me to. Well, there's certainly a lot of people that fall into that category too. So people do get nervous about it. I mean, obviously you're joking, but there's a lot of people that will change their opinion. Oh, sure. If money comes their way. But I like to assume people mean what they say. And my logic behind that is even when they don't, you can still dismantle the argument even if it's authentic or not. You know, even if it's authentically believed. Sure. So I think that's just the best way to go about it. The best way is debate. That's the best way. Or at least conversation. But that's what we've lost. I think that hits on it, actually, because... I don't want to debate, but that sounds formal. No, I know what you mean. You mean... So recently... Can I give you an example of that? So I went to UC Berkeley, the University of UC Berkeley in California. Did they let you leave? Well, almost not, right? So I... What had happened was, you know, Charlie Kirk's tour was planned to go all the way through. And this was the last date, the Berkeley date. And after his assassination, various people went and did the shows because they said, because Turning Point rightly said, we're not going to give an assassin the veto of our tour. We finished the tour. And Rob Schneider, who I... went and did the shows went and did the shows because they said, because Turning Point rightly said, we're not going to give an assassin the veto of our tour. We finished the tour. And Rob Schneider, who I've been working with in Arizona, I've come over here to work with him. The comedian? Yeah. So I've been, this is how I escaped from the UK, I should say. So me and Graham Linehan, who you've had on your show, the comedy writer. I love Graham. My comedy writing partner and friend, Martin Gourlay. The three of us, we decided that things were so bad in the UK, we'd rather write and do creative stuff in America Rob Schneider who I'd met many years ago he said come on over we'll set up a production company we've been working in Arizona on all these various projects it's so liberating and also it's the middle of the desert so I fucking love the heat and you know you go from England to that it's kind of exciting so we've been able to and look I don't want to do down the UK or say but what I will just say is the creative industries there are pretty stagnant they're not like here there's so many more ways to How can you be free? How can you, if you are worried about going to jail for a meme, how can you be free? Well, Graham got arrested at the airport by five armed officers. Right after he left this podcast. Was that it? Yes. And it was... He came over, did this podcast, went back to visit his family and got arrested. And you know what he... Shortly after he did the podcast. So when people say to me, that's not a real problem, that, I mean, Graham had done three tweets. One of them was just, they were all joke tweets, by the way. They're all jokes. And one of them was just it was something like, ladies, if a guy's in your changing room or in your bathroom, scream, make a fuss, call the police. If all else fails, kick him in the balls. And it's obviously a wry way of saying, look, the guy's got genitals. The guys, that was why he got arrested. He on the night he got arrested, he was texting me. He said, I've just been arrested. I've been taken to the hospital because my blood pressure is so high. The police took him to the hospital because they'd raised because and and you and you say there's no problem in the UK with creativity. He's one of our best comedy writers. He's the most beloved comedy writer. He hasn't been able to work in TV for six years, right? Like, he's won all the awards going. And so we just kind of... How can you be creative in that environment? You can't. You can't. And so we just figured, let's get on a raft. Especially someone like you. So if people don't know, I should probably tell everybody. You are Tatiana McGrath. So, yeah. Well, here's what's funny about that. Your satirical character, who you created many, many years ago, When did you create her? 2018 Okay When you created her I had you on the podcast shortly after we laughed about it I have seen her quote tweeted with people agreeing with her yeah yeah even now yeah all the time so with it's so I yeah I mean people don't know it's a character called Titania McGrath she's a woke just so social justice warrior it's so good it's fucking great it's one of my favorite follows. But you know, I don't do it as often as I used to. You know, I used to do it all the time. But then I wrote two books as her. I did a live show as her. By the way, when I did a live show, we were booked in for a week in the West End in London. And then the head of the theatre found out and scotched it. And actually said, oh, well, I didn't know about this. And the contracts were all signed. Absolutely crazy. Anyway, it doesn't matter. But we did the show. It does matter. I suppose. But the point is that, you know, so I did this character. Do you have satire at your theatre? My God. Well, the theatre industry in the UK is even worse than comedy, if you want to go there. It's really, really bad. But, like, I've been in two different theatres in London. I've had the same experience of standing at the bar with a woman complaining because there's men pissing in her toilet and they're doing nothing about it. Because all the theatres in London have made it all gender neutral. They've gone completely hardcore woke. Anyway, that's not the point. But with Titania, what I find so surprising is every now and then, if something annoys me, I'll tweet. or if I think of something I'll do. I don't do it anywhere near as often as I used to. But even now, I did a tweet about, you know when all the people in London were marching about the peace deal in the Middle East? And I did a tweet as her saying, I've been marching all day. I want a peace deal that was not arranged by Donald Trump. We're never going to give up this fight. And Ted Cruz retweeted it saying, can this be real? Even now. These fucking boomers. He's not even a boomer. He's not even a boomer. I think he's younger than me. How old is Ted Cruz? I think he's younger than me, which is hilarious. I had the same with, I did one about, how does he not know? Does he have no friends? How old is fucking Ted Cruz? 35. Okay, that's crazy. So that dude's three years younger than me, and he doesn't know satire? The anger I got from, I did one the other day recently about the Iran protest. Can I just stop? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to get into this. Okay. When did he tweet about this? A year ago. That's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. That account is- There it is. There it is. How many follows does- Okay So this oh sorry This is This is possibly real No Well obviously it not So this was actually after Trump election So she said I just fired my immigrant housekeeper because even though I educated her about the evils of Donald Trump she still voted for him There's no place for racism in my house. Click on your account. I want to see how many followers you have. Okay. 733,000. That's a famous account. Like, it's a radical intersexualist poet. Non-white. Obviously white. Ecosexual, hilarious, pronouns, variable, selfless and brave, buy my books. You'd think it was obvious, wouldn't you? Obvious! I mean, maybe he's busy. Maybe he's busy and someone sent him that and he just doesn't know. But it's very funny. It's very funny. I feel slightly bad about those sort of things. But then on the other hand, it does sort of prove the point. That the stuff they're really saying can get as close. Oh, that's very close to real. Yeah. That's very close to real. And it's shifted radically since 2018. I mean, in the eight years since you created her, she has become, like, more real. Yeah. It's like when AI is going to turn her into a real person. Yeah. Like, oh, maybe. I hadn't even thought of that. She's going to be a real person. It's going to be a real dangerous Greta Thunberg-type character. But don't you worry about that? I mean, like, AI. Oh, a good example of that. I use AI mostly as a search engine. because what's great about it is you can say, oh, I read an article like 10 years ago that said something like this. Yes. And it'll find it and you'd never find that on Google. Right. And I was trying to find this article. It was from my book, actually. There was a case in the UK where a guy had raped a 13-year-old girl, but because he was Muslim and he'd gone to a madrasa and the judge let him off jail time, said, you were very sexually naive. You didn't understand. The guy was saying, oh, I thought women were nothing and like a lollipop you dropped on the floor and the judge let him off jail time. and I thought this is quite extreme and I found it, it came up on ChatGPT and then it deleted and I said, oh I think you just deleted the information for me, it's in the public domain, why did you do that? It said, oh you know it's fine, it might violate my terms of service and I said, well how could it? This is an article that's in the public domain. So it gave me the information again deleted it again, I said you keep deleting this, stop it it said I definitely won't delete it and then it did the same again so what it's doing is it's saying, because this is a news story that could be deemed anti-immigrant or this is a new story that is politically sensitive I'm not gonna let you see it was this in America you doing this UK I wonder if you could do it in America let find out let try it well let try perplexity Put that into perplexity I doubt that perplexity would help I have to find the article he was using I don know what article he looked up Well, why don't you just ask the question that he asked. It was 10 years ago. So it's a story about a – This is going to take a minute. That will take a while to – Will it? I mean – Maybe he didn't do it 10 years ago. He did it recently. No, no. It was a story. It's a story from years ago. Right. But you found it with ChatGPT, which is obviously recently. I found a Daily Mail article about it. So it's on public domain. It's there. But it just didn't want me to find the fact that it decided wasn't good for me to find. Right. But it showed it to you and then it pulled it back, which is crazy. How does it not know? It showed it and deleted it. It showed it and deleted it four or five times. And I realized, I'm not going to get this information. So when it showed it, how long did it show it for? Like about five seconds. You'd see the text appearing and then it deletes. But I'd seen enough to find it then on Google. So I was able to find it and quote it in my book. So it's there. But it made me think it's like that thing about when people were asking Alexa, you know, do white lives matter? You know, and it was coming up with this kind of very ideological. And you do wonder with with AI and with the computers, you know, if if they are created by people who have that bias. I know Grok is very different. Yeah. But like, for instance, I mean, this is a crazy example. chat gpt is like an old school mom that wants to make sure that you you're protected right i was writing this sounds really wanky i'm sorry but i was writing about the roman historian suetonius and there's a passage in suetonius where he talks about the emperor tiberius and it's very sexually explicit but i was quoting it for an article so i wanted to know what it said and chat gpt said i can't translate the latin for you because this is too sexually uh you know problematic i went on to Grok and it did it straight away. Because Grok isn't saying that you are too delicate to read this stuff. And what's really funny about that is the old dual translations of the old Roman and Greek texts, they're called lerb editions. You get them from 1900. They translated everything except for the rude bits which they kept in Latin. So Chad GPT is like the old patronising scholars of old who said this is just for the learned people. You can't learn this stuff. Wasn't the worst the first iteration of Google Gemini that was the worst cases that turned Nazi soldiers into black people I don't know how that's a positive message Photos of German soldiers from World War two and it was all black people. black people. I don't know how that's a positive message. Show us photos of German soldiers from World War II and it was all interracial. Yeah, and Vikings. Yes. I don't know if you've been to Scandinavia. Diversity, not their big thing. Or certainly wasn't then. You can't say that about the Vikings. Also, the Vikings came and marauded and raped and set fire to villages, but at least they were diverse. Hey, you know, at least they had a broad range of ethnicities, right? I mean, we're nearing a time in America where white people are not the majority anymore. So at what point in time does that stop? And we just call people what they are, just people. But doesn't it bother you a bit that the thing about that kind of thing is this, as I say, this obsession with group identity, which is so of our time. What it now actually means is the revision of history. If you're going to revise history and say, oh, actually, you've seen all these sort of period dramas set in England. There was a black Anne Boleyn, as though Henry VIII would have married a black woman. No, he wouldn't. What if she was hot? She was a very attractive woman. Hey, I'm not mocking her or knocking her. But back then. What I'm saying is you can do anything with colorblind. Colorblind casting has never really particularly bothered me. But it's when you are in a, if you're playing hyper realism, if you're playing verisimilitude, you want people to buy into the reality of it. And you're suddenly populating Edwardian England or pre-Edwardian England as an ethnically diverse place, which it wasn't. I'm not saying black people weren't there, but they were a very, very small minority. Isn't that a problem in the new Odyssey? Helen of Troy is black. Well, I say that. I just saw it online, so I might be being tricked by someone making something up. You know, a caveat there. I think Helen of Troy is black in the new Odyssey. Well, let's find out. Can we check that one? All right. If it's true, I'll tell you why I think that's ridiculous. How far do we have to swing the pendulum until Roots is redone with white people? can you imagine or an all black Schindler's List right right right can you imagine Helen of Troy to be portrayed by black actress in a new Odyssey movie and look I'm sure she's very talented I'm not knocking her but the thing about the Greek the thing about Helen of Troy who probably didn't exist I mean even the Greeks knew she probably didn't even exist she's a myth she's the epitome of Greek beauty she's like the she's described all the time in the ancient texts as fair and blonde and they're reaching for an ideal of beauty That why they went to war because of this woman So they wouldn choose what they used to call an Ethiop The Greeks had a word for it the black African people They wouldn choose an icon of cultural beauty from a different culture They wouldn have done that You know, it's all very well saying Greeks and Mediterranean people and, you know, wouldn't have been pure white. But Helena of Troy is a very specific and it's actually quite important to the plot. And again, if you're doing a, look, for instance, when they did the all black Wizard of Oz, the Wiz, I imagine that in the late 60s would have been quite radical and fun. And wow, I can't believe they did that. That's brilliant. But doing it now, it's really boring because everyone is doing it. So it's basically saying group identity is everything. And you people can't be racist. And so therefore we're going to do this. But it sometimes throws you out of the... Actually, I'll tell you the worst example. Did you ever see Darkest Hour, the Winston Churchill film? No. So, you know, obviously he took on parliament. He said, we're not going to appease Hitler. There's a scene in the film, Gary Oldman plays him. He goes down into the tube, the underground, and he's wrestling with his conscience. And there's loads of black people on the tube. There's white people too, but there's loads of black people. The public convince him, no, you need to stand up for Hitler. Now, we know that Churchill was a bit of a racist, didn't really like the, you know, fine. He was of his time. I'm not saying anything more than that. He was of his time. But that, it was so unreal. It was so unreal. It was so, it was almost like the filmmakers were saying, racism's never been a problem in the UK. Well, actually it has. Like, and I kind of think this is, I kind of think this is, although it's ostensibly progressive, I think it does the reverse. I think it says, we never had a problem with race. We were all wonderful, kumbaya. No, we weren't. And actually, the abolitionists, the Thomas Henry Huxleys of the world, the people who had to fight for racial equality and parity, they had something to fight against, misrepresenting stuff in the arts. And then beyond, I'm sorry I'm ranting now because it really bothered me, but beyond that, it throws you out of it in a way that you suddenly think, I'm no longer watching a film. I'm watching a sermon. Oh, so this happened to me last week. Have you seen the Netflix series Ripley about the talented Mr. Ripley? No, I have not. Right. Now, you remember there used to be that film with Matt Damon years ago. It's the same story, same novel, an old Patricia Highsmith novel. One of the main male characters in that TV series is a brilliant, like Andrew Scott is in it. Performances are brilliant. They play it hyper realistically. It's all black and white. It looks beautiful. On the Amalfi Coast, it's wonderful. Everything's working brilliantly. And I was thinking, this is great. I'm not being preached at. This is great. Then a major male character turns up, played by a woman who calls herself non And not only are we meant to believe that that a man the characters don notice that it a woman in a man in man clothes so we meant to believe that these these characters don't even like not one part ripley doesn't say why is why is she wearing a why is she wearing a suit this is set in the 60s by the way so i think if they wanted to change the novel and create a kind of you know like one of those butch dykes of the day who used to go for sort of like, or a dress like Ellen. Yeah. Or the androgynous type. Those people have always existed. Why not change the character to make it a female character who likes looking like a man? Why not do that? Why tell us, no, this is a man. You have to believe it's a man. Do you see what I mean? It throws you out of the room. It's crazy. I no longer believe in this. I have to stop watching it because I no longer believed in it. Well, I think the problem, the real problem with trying to shove that down people's throats is it creates the opposite reaction. It creates homophobia, transphobia, and racism because it doesn't create it, but it makes them feel like they have a point. Well, you've seen recently that the polls regarding gay rights in the US seem to be going down. Tumbly support for gay rights, support for gay marriage. We've had, I think, a number of states trying to overturn the gay marriage legislation. And the reason for all of that i think is because being gay has been tied to this lgbtqia identity obsessed movement that has also involved the medicalization of kids sterilization of kids twerking in front of children yeah all of that stuff and now people are saying this is because you gave us gay marriage this is because you let the gays marry and because of that you've allowed all this other stuff you've opened this box and everything else has tumbled out and that's not true that's not true because the fundamental point about the belief in gender identity is it is fundamentally anti-gay as a principle. Right. Because what it says is, you know, I know I'm telling you something you already know, but like, gay rights was predicated on the idea that there's a minority of people in every society who are attracted innately to their own biological sex. If you say biological sex doesn't matter, and actually, you're attracted to a kind of gendered soul, you're attracted to an essence, you're attracted to how someone identifies. Well, first of all, you don't know gay people, if you think that's the case. They're not attracted to how you see yourself. Right. They know, gay men, I don't wanna be crude, know what a penis is, right? Yeah. And they know how to sniff one out Now and I think this idea this idea that they attracted to the way that you perceive yourself Nonsense Not only that then you get you know like in Australia at the moment lesbians are not allowed to gather legally if there's a man who says he's a lesbian and wants to join them. That is against the law in Australia now. So you can't do that. Wait, wait a minute. What do you mean? So the Australian Human Rights Commission ruled that if you are, if you have an all-female event, right, so like a lesbian gathering maybe, something like that, you have to include men who identify as women because otherwise you are discriminated there was a woman who I interviewed on a show I had a show in the UK on GB News up until recently and I interviewed this woman called Sal Grover and she's an Australian woman, used to write for Hollywood I think she created a woman's app a woman's only app and this was in the wake of Me Too so there's all that going on and she wanted to create a space for women and a guy called Roxanne Tickle they always have these kind of stripper name. Is that a real name? Roxanne Tickle. Wanted to get on the app, which was called Giggle. So by the way, this court case is called Giggle versus Tickle. I'm not kidding. Boy. And he said, he got on the app, she kicked him off because it's a bloke in a dress. And he sued. And won. And in the court case, the judge actually said, sex is changeable. Well, it's not, no matter what a guy in a wig says. But she's now appealing and going through all this stuff just because – It makes our life hell and then it discourages anybody else in the future from ever contesting anything like that. And not only that. I mean we've just had the other day – was it yesterday? Did you see the girl who was – used to identify as trans, a girl called Fox Varian has just won $2 million in a lawsuit. Yes, yes. That's big because – She was 16 years old and they chopped her breasts off. Right. Which is fucking horrifying. It's the tip of the iceberg though. Especially if you have children, you realize like they change their – the way they think about things year to year. And if you – children are so malleable. It's like one of the delicate dances of being a parent is that you have to love them, but you don't want to steer them in any direction. You want to let them be their own person. Right. And you know it's like I tried to expose my children to a bunch of different things and find out what they enjoy And what if you do that you find out that they're all different They all like different stuff. They just gravitate towards different. And if you do that, you find out that they're all different. They all like what they enjoy. And if you do that, you find out that they're all different. They all like different stuff. They just gravitate towards different things. And if you are a domineering, overbearing, mentally ill parent, you can convince your child almost anything. Almost anything. I mean, this is how you get suicide bombers. This is what it is because they're children. This is why you don't get 55-year-old union guys who become suicide bombers. They're like, what? And of course, you know. I get 72 virgins? Yeah. What? Yeah. Like, it's not going to work. But you can get young, impressionable children, and you can convince them of almost anything. Like, convincing them that they're actually a woman in a man's body, and don't you want to be a woman? And let's get you on hormone blockers. Okay, mom. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, you're ruining this child's life. But also, I mean, there will be kids who are struggling with how they see themselves in the world. There's girls in particular who, you know, they're developing into women, and they don't like the sexual attention they're getting. This is Abigail Schreier's book, especially autistic girls. Well, that's another point. So this is the other reason why I think the movement is essentially anti-gay. Because you know the Tavistock Pediatric Clinic in London, which was an NHS gender clinic, which has been closed as a result of the CAST review, this report into pediatric gender care. There's a book by Hannah Barnes called Time to Think, which found that between 80 and 90% of all adolescents referred to that clinic were same-sex attracted. So they were either gay or lesbian or bisexual. Now, that means you've effectively got gay conversion therapy going on on the NHS. And so, you know, I had, you know, I'm friends with a couple of lesbians who run the LGB Alliance in London. They have an annual conference for gay rights and they're talking about gay rights. You know, these young, non-binary identified people broke in, unleashed locusts and crickets and insects, a plague of fucking locusts into a gay rights conference. Isn't that the sort of thing neo-Nazis used to do? It's insane. So, I mean, I, you know, I think you need to have sympathy with people and whatever they're going through. But don't tell a child, if a child tells you, I think I'm in the wrong body, don't say yes. Say, that's not possible. Human beings can't change sex. But let's explore psychotherapeutically what needs to happen. Let's look at Los Angeles, which is, in my opinion, one of the most mentally ill spots in this country. It a very weird place That why you left Well I mean I left for a bunch of reasons Mostly I really left because they were telling us we can do comedy Oh yeah Well that do it They closed down the comedy clubs and Texas was open So the primary reason. And also restaurants. I just knew where it was going. But the point is, like, Los Angeles is a very mentally ill place. Like, if you just looked at, like, just the sheer numbers of people that are medicated and fucked up. If that's the place that's dictating the tone for the rest of the world, that's dangerous because these are a lot of people that just desperately want attention. They desperately want to get accepted. They have to go through the audition process. So they have to change who they are to talk to the producers to try to form themselves into something to be accepted. There's a disproportionate amount of trans kids that are involved in Hollywood families. It's largely disproportionate. Of course. Some of them have two trans kids, three trans kids. It's like, what the fuck is going on here? This is not normal. This is not no influence whatsoever. This is, you're using that child as a virtue flag. You're flying that child as a trans flag in the front of your porch. I have a trans kid. But don't you think that like a lawsuit like this, that's going to change things because no one's going to ensure that kind of procedure anymore. So that's a surgeon and a psychotherapist who are now lumbered with a $2 million bill for their negligence. Yes, and it's going to open up the floodgates for all these other lawyers to start pouncing on all these other cases. Yeah, that's what I mean. The horrible thing about these cases is not just that these children have their lives ruined by these surgeries and have been sterilized. And it's also that they've been attacked so ruthlessly. You mean you're talking about children that have made a mistake or someone coerced them into making this mistake that's changed their body for the rest of their life and they're getting attacked online. Yeah. Can you imagine being a fragile child already who's willing to go through this procedure, can't believe they did it. Now they don't have breasts anymore. Their voice is deep forever. They're all fucked up. Yeah. And then people are screaming at them online. Yeah. It's crazy. But you know, this is how the satanic child abuse panic of the 80s. Yes, exactly. This came to an end because of lawsuits. When they realized that these psychotherapists had been using these leading questions, effectively telling them you've repressed the memory. You know there was that book The Courage to Heal where it said if you think you might have been abused you probably were Like such a reckless thing to say right and and all these people accused you know carers parents none of it was true and but when they started suing the uh the uh psychotherapist it all collapsed right and i wonder whether uh hysteria can collapse if you actually money talks you know it's already shifted in this general direction because of Elon buying Twitter. When Elon bought Twitter, the amount of trans-identified kids started to drop off. The amount of non-binary-identified kids started to drop off. And that, I think, is a direct result of people being able to say what they really think. Because in the past, like my friend Megan Murphy, she was banned off of Twitter until Elon bought it because she said a man is never a woman. That's all she said. A man is never a woman. She was arguing with people about biological males who identify as women being able to get into women's spaces, And she said, a man is never a woman. Banned forever. Yeah. So no one wanted to talk about this. See, there was no real discourse. And if there's no real discourse, then you can push a goofy ideology pretty fucking far. But as soon as people jump on board and start posting funny memes and Elon says it's open season, do whatever you want. Yeah. And he calls it the woke mind virus and everybody's like piling in. Well, then you have discourse. And then anything that's absurd immediately gets shot down because people say, no, this doesn't make any sense. This is crazy. It comes back to what you say. You said about debate. You said about discourse. You said about if you unless you I mean, I just saw today just on, you know, on Twitter because I'm always on it. But I saw John Lithgow, you know, the actor, brilliant actor who plays Dumbledore in the new Harry Potter thing, saying that J.K. Rowling's views are inexplicable, inexplicable. It means you haven't read them. Like J.K. Rowling is for women's rights and she recognizes that women's rights depend on the recognition of biological sex for the preservation of single sex spaces. It's as simple as that. All he has to do is read the essay she wrote on her blog like eight years ago. He can't even he's not even sufficiently intellectually curious to do that. And he goes out and says it's inexplicable. Women's rights and gay rights are inexplicable. Really? Or are you just not having the conversation? You're just shutting yourself up and saying, well, my friends have said she's evil. Not criticized hard enough, but would be criticized if he supported JK Rowling's. If he supported JK Rowling's, he would be attacked. So it's a calculation you're saying? Yes. Maybe. It's the same thing we're talking about with Hollywood being mentally ill. It the same thing where you have to shape your opinions based on how you be accepted by the group It the most group think place I ever been in my life It almost universally left leaning But isn't that the problem in comedy? Like with the UK, so many people who would otherwise be innovative, subversive comics, they've got nowhere to go. So they just tailor their material. Come to Austin, baby. They come to Austin like I did, right? That's it. They come to, they come to. And I get so sick of it because I know in America it's much better. But in the UK, all of my old friends from the comedy circuit who tell me, no one's self-censoring. You can say what you want. I'm like, are you kidding? Like the list of people I know who have had shows cancelled, taken off because they caused offence. This week, Leo Kirst, a friend of mine, had one of his shows on his tour just deleted because some activists complained to the venue. Right. So it's happening all the time. And they're ignoring this Himalayan mountain of evidence. And they're saying it's not a thing. But of course people are self-censoring. What's even happening here? Is it Michael Rappaport got his shows? He got his shows cancelled from Cap City comedy today, which is our other comedy club in town Which is a great club owned by helium, right? They were saying that he's racist because Michael Rappaport is very pro-israel right and Apparently, why does that make you race? I don't know what he said, so I don't want to speak out of turn I don't know what exactly he said make a small correction. I think oh Oh, I don't think that she has been started back to the Odyssey. Oh, yeah. Yeah, she has been cast in the movie But only Twitter rumors have said what her position in the movie is and then everybody has ran with it Interesting she could be she could be anything someone else Different care articles I found online said it was like social media confirmation and then people were just right there we go Well, isn't that what I said? What is that article? Do you just click? This is the one I showed her What is it from starts off with a Hungarian conservative? That's a niche that's a nice. How dare you let that sneak by you didn't notice it was a Hungarian conservative Are you being paid by the Hungarian conservative top thing that popped up? It's probably a fucking troll farm in Pakistan. Yeah, it's creating that it's or it's probably in China I was telling a Troy Odyssey movie and good a very first good for the Hungarian conservative get out That's so funny. Coming out on top of the Google search. That's pretty good. That's so funny. But did I not say, I'm not sure about this? It's a Twitter rumor. I did. But look, Elon Musk bought into it. Elon Musk, as Christopher Nolan has lost his integrity. Oh, Elon. So there we go. The dude's too busy beating the... It's a Twitter rumor. It's a Twitter rumor. But look, Elon Musk bought into it. Elon Musk, as Christopher Nolan, has lost his integrity. Oh, Elon. So there we go. The dude's too busy building rockets to pay attention to what he tweets. But this proves the point. Like, let's not. Oh, yeah, he's going to take us to the moon again. So, you know, that's all right. No, he's not. Isn't he? No, Artemis is NASA. I thought he was working with NASA. Oh, is he working with NASA with Artemis? Again, someone said it online and I just bought it. I just bought it. They probably can't get there without him. but that's probably like, Oh, I'll show you some things, but that's okay. So that is a perfect example because I am always now as a, even when I mentioned that earlier, I was cautious, wasn't I? Right. Because I know I've, I've fallen for this so many times. I now double check and triple check everything. And I wish I didn't have to, but you do have to because even the mainstream media lie about stuff. Yeah. And then, and then Twitter rumors go absolutely mad. But it's, it's important when you're talking about a historical film. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's got to kind of, You just can't do that. It doesn't make any sense. Well, you sort of can. I think an artist should be able to do what they want. And I think if you want to, like they do it with Shakespeare all the time. Sorry to go back to Shakespeare. But you rarely go and see a Shakespeare play today that hasn't been filtered through the prism of identity politics and changed. Right. But that's not the same. That's not the same as historical figures. Well, he wrote histories. He wrote about kings, Henry VII, Henry V. Yeah, but it's fiction, right? Like the thing about the Odyssey is that's definitely fiction It is sort of but you know, they didn't think Troy existed and then they found that it does right so real place It's based on right and yeah, yeah, but you remember like they thought that Troy was a completely mythological Creation so it's an actual they have evidence that it was a plan. Yes. You didn't know that no Yeah, they found it. When did they find Troy? It was in the 20th century So for the longest time- But there wouldn't have been sirens, and there wouldn't have been cyclopses, and there wouldn't have been, you know what I mean? Oh, no. Oh, Joe. No, cyclopses, they think were actually elephant skulls. That's what they think that was. Right, okay. Do you ever see an elephant skull? I have never seen an elephant skull. Well, you know, where the trunk is, is an enormous hole. And they thought that that was an eyeball. So they would find these giant skulls that looked like, you know, they didn't know what the fuck it was. Yeah, yeah. And they're like, oh my God, cyclopses are real. Fair enough. I mean, I- So here it is Evidence that the Legend of the City of Detroit was a real place began to emerge in the 1870s Henrik Schlielmann discovered large excavations at the Hisarlik in northwestern Turkey in 1870 So when did they first start excavating? So where is it? It's in Turkey? It's in Turkey, yeah. Which is a lot of the proponents of a revising of the beginning of civilization are now pointing to Turkey. Yeah. As opposed to like Iraq. The Greeks were everywhere. Yeah. So the Mesopotamians and the – I mean that doesn't surprise me. I mean I think the point I was making about Helen of Troy is that even if it's not real, even if it's not history, the myth of Helen of Troy means something quite significant within that story. Yes. So if you subvert that, the fundamental aspects of the story itself doesn't work, and you can't buy into the myth. It's like if you turn the elephant man into a handsome fellow with a six-pack. Exactly that. Don't give them ideas. Don't give them ideas. They'll do that. Can you show me a photograph of an elephant skull? It's really kooky. But you see an elephant skull, and you're like, oh. That's why they saw it. I could totally see you falling for that. You look at it, and you go, what the fuck is that thing? Like, look at an elephant skull. Isn't it nutty? Oh, completely. Yes. Yeah, and it's gonna be a big old beast right so you're gonna think it's a big giant thing with tusks coming out of its mouth Like look look with this look at the actual Cyclops on the left and that crazy. Yeah, of course No, make sense. Yeah, complete sense Complete sense. Yeah. Yeah, you found that you're like, oh my god Cyclops is a real you would think oh my god these monsters Not funny. What a weird shaped skull so strange But we never think the eyeballs to be down there by the cheekbones. That's what's weird about them I have to say elephant anatomy is something I'm not I haven't brushed up on that show the photo again Look at that photo where the eyeballs are eyeballs are where the cheekbones are see see the little circular holes where the cheeks are Now when you see an elephant in the flesh like show me a photograph of an elephant Just an elephant So That's not how you think of them is it no well, they're so strange Like give me that the second one on the left it. Yeah, look at that click on that. We're wild animal They're amazing. Have you never seen one of those before you be like, I mean in a zoo Crazy I rode one in Thailand No Yeah Yeah Yeah I don recommend it I don think I should ride them my full family wanted to do it I didn want to do it I felt like it exploiting them but they very sweet They gentle Yeah then they pleasant creatures It a whole process So one of the things you do when you go to Thailand is you take care of them first before you write You don't just hop on them you feed them right So you give them a bunch of sugar cane and you pet them and they teach you to like so that the animal understands you have A gentle spirit without its intelligence, right? It's because they're smart. They're very it's not so they'll fucking kill Oh, they are scary beasts. But they're not like the hippo. The hippo will kill you. You cannot do that with a hippo. So, and I believe the reason why hippos are so dangerous, we think they're really cute and fat, but they are fucking dangerous and they can run fast and they can tear you apart. And they will. The key difference, I believe, is the intelligent things. Elephants are really smart and hippos are really stupid. Yeah. And you can also become friends with an elephant. Yes. Like you can actually take care of an elephant and be kind to an elephant and that elephant will be gentle. Yeah, they come up to you. So you feed them sugar cane, and you talk to them. You say, hey, buddy, how are you? And you pet them, and you wash them. You wash them. You do all kinds of different things with them. You brush them so it feels good for them. You're going to have an elephant soon, aren't you? No, I would never have an elephant. I'd be friends with an elf, but he'd have to be wild. I just don't agree with any of that. What, having them in zoos and things? No, I hate it. I do as well, yeah. I think if you're going to have animals, you should have a gigantic area that is a true ecosystem that they exist in naturally. Yeah. And then people can maybe venture into that ecosystem and explore it. I felt that. I was at the zoo recently in Arizona. I felt that. So depressing. I felt there was one jaguar pacing obsessively. Oh. I just felt, we're just like, it's like going to, you know, like in the Elizabethan era, they used to go to Bedlam to watch the people who were mad as an entertainment thing. It felt a little bit like we were doing that. I have far too much appreciation for the wild. Yeah, yeah. You know, I have animals that are contained at my house, but they have been watered down by selective breeding to the point where they can't even, like I have a King Charles Spaniel. He's this tiny little fella. Like he's incapable of doing anything. Right. Like he's just a little cutie pie. You can't unleash him into the wild. Right. And I have a golden retriever who thinks everybody's his best friend. Did you see the guy who kept a hippo from birth and then it ate him? And then it killed him. It ate him. Yeah. So, you know, like. Got annoyed. Understand that you're dealing with a creature that doesn't see the world that you do, you know? Yeah. There a lot of animals that you can breed up until you can rather have them in your home Chimps famously Yeah yeah Up until a certain point and then they decide I want to rip your face off I don like you anymore I sure if cats were as big as we are they probably do the same Well they would just eat you They would. They would kill you 100%. The only reason why we have a relationship with cats is because they're too small to eat us. Yeah. That's it. Cats are great because they're convenient. They do what they want. They're sweet. They're sweet. I love cats, but, I mean, you can't have a fucking giant one. But you can if you take care of them from the time that they're cubs. Yeah. And most of the time, they don't kill you. Yeah, but then you get a little Siegfried and Roy action and it's just the sides for whatever reason I'm gonna drag that dude away with his neck Yeah, but you know these caught these sorts of pleasures, you know life with animals and this sort of thing is gonna matter more and more to us I think when the robots take over yeah and the Well, we might have to live with them. Well, we might be wild and the robots might take over the cities We might have be forced to be nomadic tribes again. I think they might see no impact whatsoever on the environment You can only live a subsistence lifestyle as a hunter-gatherer with primitive tools. The robots would no longer allow you. You can hunt, but you have to make your own bows and arrows. We're like, what? I can't possibly do that. So they're going to see us as pets is what you think. Yeah, they're going to treat us the way I want to treat elephants. So I want elephants to exist in a contained ecosystem where they live naturally. And they're going to say, you can't have cars anymore. You can't have any of these things. Well, that's a good point there, isn't it? So all the stuff I've been reading at the moment about AI is saying that AI won't wipe us out because it will see us in the way we see animals and the way we see pets. It's that we think you're sweet and stupid, but we like having you around. We'll tolerate you. Is that the way it's going to go? I think we're going to be forced to integrate. In what way? Integrate technologically. Like I think we already are. Like Elon famously made the point that you're already a cyborg. You have your phone that you just carry around with you everywhere. And then with Neuralink, it'll be inside your body. and then whatever. I wouldn't. I'm not letting that happen. You won't in the beginning, the first iterations. A lot of people won't. But if it makes your life measurably better and it's a simple procedure that's non-invasive, you know, it's like a simple thing that they plug in to the back of your head. Well, I'd be like a cyborg warrior. Is that what you're saying? Well, you would probably be connected to artificial intelligence and it would greatly enhance your cognitive function and greatly enhance your access to information. it would be instantaneous, you would no longer have to read, you would just have all the information. It would just completely change the way you store information because you would probably have some the information. It would just completely no longer have to read. You would just have all the information. It would just completely change the way you store information because you would probably have some sort of an external hard drive that connects to you. It would be something where your memory is no longer fallible but it's now infallible. Okay. It's going to be a perfect 4K memory or 8K memory. You're going to be able to rewind. I mean, wasn't that an episode of Dark Mirror where they rewind their memories? What is this? What is this? Remember you sent me that bot thing that was going around this week? Oh, did you see this week? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what we're talking about. So this is a new twist on it. I think if this is real, because grain of salt could be bullshit. I'll just say that. Like the Odyssey thing. Yeah. But if this is real, these bots have made a website where the other bots can rent a human to do tasks that the bots cannot physically do. Well, that's slavery. No, renting. It's like jobs. It's like a task rabbit. You're renting a human being. A human has put themselves on this website. Oh, humans put themselves on it? For abilities to do whatever they want. It's like gig economy. Yeah, get paid your way, robot bosses. Is this the thing where the robots are inventing their own language that we can't read? It's on this website, right? Meet space tasks. Yeah, that's again, whether or not someone could have made this site to try to go viral, I'll just go with a grain of salt with that. Yeah. But they might not have in the box. Meet space. Rent a human.ai is fun. That's fun Well you know So the other thing is real though right The AI chat room Where these AI agents have joined And now it's Yes and no What do you mean Some of it they are creating a space But I've already seen places where people are taking advantage of it For viral reasons For instance Let's just assume it's real There was like a polymarket Bet that Shit what was it One of these bots would sue and so someone actually just went ahead and filed a lawsuit on behalf of their bot and made it look like the bot did the thing. Oh, so they could win the polymarket bet? Yeah, exactly. How regulated is that polymarket stuff? Because it seems like you could get away with a lot. It depends how much money is available. As far as I know, it's just like if I put up $20 for a bet now, there's only $20 in the market. So that's all that exists, and more people have to back it up to make more money involved. Right but if you have something where you have inside knowledge of it is there any regulation There supposed to be rules on the bet So if I create one of those rules I think there a caveat You can have knowledge of it That can cancel the bet or I think if they find out later I don know Do you go to jail? What happens? I don't know. Jail, you probably just have to lose back the bet or probably go to a civil lawsuit or something. I don't know about jail. Interesting. I don't know if it's in law. The UFC is plagued with this issue. They actually canceled a fight recently because there was suspicious betting. And so there's been one fight. So here's the story. One guy apparently was injured, and his teammates knew he was injured, and so everyone started placing a bet for him to lose in the first round because he apparently had a bad knee injury. And so he knew that he couldn't fight. And so the idea was let's make a lot of money betting on me because he was the favorite. He would go in there betting against me, and so he would go in there and throw a kick, fall down, injured, get beat up, they'd stop the fight, and then all these people that knew he was injured make a ton of money. And he was in on it? Like he told them that he was going to? I just want to say allegedly. Okay, okay. But it's enough so that the team was removed from the UFC roster. Like if you are competing for that team, you no longer can fight in the UFC. You have to find a new gym. Right. The coach was no longer allowed to coach. The fighter was banned. And so then the FBI got involved and they said, well, there's a bunch of different fights that are suspicious. So then a bunch of fighters came out and said, hey, somebody offered me $70,000 to lose. And I said no. And so then there was a fight recently between Michael Johnson and Alexander Hernandez, which is a fight I was really looking forward to. That was canceled last minute. And I was like, what's going on? They said suspicious betting activity. And so someone was saying that Alexander Hernandez was injured and a bunch of money came in on him to lose. He was actually a favorite going into the fight. And that therefore rigged it? Nope, didn't rig it because the FBI was informed. I believe they were informed, but the UFC was informed and the UFC pulled the fight. They said because of this suspicious betting activity, because a lot of late minute money came in on this one guy to win, we're gonna pull this fight from the card and not allow this fight to take place and do a thorough investigation. Because something seems wrong because of the previous fight that they know was fixed. But fighters have been doing that for ages, haven't they? I mean, that's a thing that they've always done. How does that connect then to the AI element this website Well we were talking about betting Oh I see We were talking about polymarket We weren talking about AI I was trying to connect Yeah yeah yeah We were talking about polymarket bets and whether or not it legal to have inside information But they've all, I mean, I know that sports. Polymarket privileged users made millions betting on war strikes and diplomatic strategy. What did they know beforehand? Privileged users, right. So imagine if you're someone who's an aid to the Pentagon. You know you're working there, and you know that we are Gonna bomb Iran yeah, and then there's a polymarket thing about it. No one else knows okay, okay? Yes, you know that I mean that's been going on forever though hasn't it people have always done that they've always manipulated That's a plot in Pulp Fiction isn't it where there's a Bruce Willis's character bets on something He knows he's gonna he loses the fight he throws a fight so that he can get money. Yeah, it's that kind of yeah Yeah, yeah, but that's always gone on but this Polymarket thing is new because you can kind of there's cal she and then there's DraftKings has it now. It's not actually gambling is the difference here. You're speculating. Yeah, you're not taking money from the book or the house or whatever. You're betting against each other. Right. But the fact that they know about it and they know it's happening, that means they'll be able to crack down on it. But I don't know because there's so many options and possibilities. Unless you make a gigantic score and people start getting suspicious, if you're not greedy about it and you're kind of sneaking around a little bit here and a little bit there, I bet you could probably make a lot of money doing that. But do you think fighters and people like that and sports people generally, I mean, they're too proud, aren't they, to let something like that go just for money? No. No? No, that's not true. It depends on how much money they're making. Look, if you're Anthony Joshua, I'd say, yeah, you're not going to do that. You're very wealthy. But if you're a guy who's on the undercard and you're only getting $10,000 to fight, but someone's giving you $100,000 to lose, and you say, okay, I'm just going to box shitty tonight. Guys have done that forever. Yeah, I guess so. Just don't knock this guy out. Whatever you do, carry him or carry him to the 10th round. There's a lot of that going on where they say, I have a bet that you're going to knock him out in the 10th round. So knock him out in the 10th round only. I don't think you'll ever be able to stop that if that's going to happen. No, I don't think so either. I mean, that's gone on forever. Yeah, yeah. But isn't fighting like a kind of vocation, like a creative vocation for a lot of people? Well, it is creative, believe it or not, because movement is creative. You know, when you're fighting, you're not just running at each other, some guys do, but the really good guys don just run at each other in charge There feints and deception there movement there certain things that they doing where they reading your movement and trying to guide you in a particular direction and set you up I can believe it. Boxers call it setting traps. Yeah. It's like playing you've got a bluff. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there's a lot of feinting involved in fighting. There's a lot of fake movement to get you to react, and then they kick you when you settle in. It's really creative. You know, it's just why, like, was it Faye Dunaway? No. Was it, who was it that said, you know, the older woman that said and talked about the arts, and I don't mean mixed martial arts. God, who was it? What, like a kind of snobbish thing? Glenn Close? No, it wasn't her. It was the lady from Bridges of Madison County. Who was that? That's Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep. That's who it was. Yeah, Meryl Streep said that. It pissed off so many martial arts people. Why? That Meryl Streep doesn't like that? She's not talking about mixed martial arts. Who thought you were? Yeah. Who thought you were, Meryl? That's crazy. I don't know. She's pretty versatile. But also, even though it's violent, you think it's not art just because you don't understand it. If you understood it, it is art. And it is, in fact, like a beautiful – some performances are beautiful. It's choreography, right? Yeah. In a way. Well, it's not choreography at all. It's ad-libbing in the moment. I mean, there's preconceived motions that you have that you're hoping that if the guy does this, you're going to do that. And sometimes it works out. But it's like the poetry of movement of a really sublime fighter like, you know, Anderson Silva in his prime. It was beautiful to watch, you know? I believe you. I have very limited experience of this. I did Kung Fu when I was 12 and I stopped because I got so bruised. I got so hurt. I was too cowardly. But, you know, people impose their own standards on other people and their own ideas of what things are, you know, from the outside. And, you know, it's kind of silly. Yeah. Oh Joe, I was going to tell you about this Berkeley thing and I almost Oh yeah, that's right. That's right. We got onto Side track. Got onto elephants. But I think it was a natural segue because I think this encapsulates all of the stuff you were talking about, which is that I was going to this, basically Charlie Kirk's tour was meant to go on. Berkeley was the last date and Rob Schneider had agreed to do it. And apparently he'd said to Charlie, what's the craziest place you could take me to? And he said, Berkeley, Berkeley is going to be the crazy, agreed to do it. And Rob Schneider had agreed to do it. And apparently he'd said to Charlie, you know, what's the craziest place you could take me to? And he said, Berkeley. Berkeley's going to be the craziest. Let's do that. So he was already booked to do it. After what happened with Charlie, Rob asked me if I'd come along as well. And so we'd be on a panel. And I had no idea of the extent of the problem, right? So, and I'm sure you know a lot more than I do. You know, but I turned up. We were there. We turned up and there were men with guns. We were, you know, in an SUV under the ground. we got into this venue and suddenly the security starts showing me footage from outside and people are, it's like a war zone, people are throwing smoke bombs, they're trying to crash through the railings some guy gets beaten up, he's covered in blood because he was wearing a t-shirt with turning point written on it and I'm suddenly realising you know what, this is a fantasy world that we're now occupying we're now occupying a world where the people outside think the world is this and what's going on inside is completely disconnected from it. And I actually found it quite depressing. Because when I was sitting on stage talking to Rob and Peter Boghossian and Frank Turek, these people of completely different viewpoints, we're just having a chat. Outside, they're smashing things, they're screaming, they're saying that fascists have overrun the university. And I'm thinking, just to come back to that point you made about, you know, that need for discussion. That experience made me think, actually, now, what's happening is, we're living in two separate worlds at the same time. And we can't see what we can't see what the other side is what the what the intentions of the other side are And I don't know how you resolve that. I think that's That to me sort of encapsulated the entire problem Well at this point it's gonna be very difficult to resolve and I honestly think it's gonna take a generation to work through it But isn't it as simple as people learning what the word fascist means for instance like that It's like they they firmly believe that they are trying to fight against something that is going to destroy democracy in this country which is conservative values. But we had that with the No Kings. So there's a No Kings march. And I couldn't figure that out. I was trying to figure out what are they – this is an elected leader. Well, you know it's all organized, right? You know this is all funded and organized. Okay, it is. So this was Mike Benz's point when he was talking about the defunding of USAID and what they use that money for. NGOs get a bunch of money and they fund a bunch of things, particularly in other countries, where they essentially making it look like there these on the ground street protests that are very organic Right But it not It very organized and it very funded And the idea is to start chaos So I've seen people get caught out, people who are clearly being paid, who appear at various different things. It's not just that. It's also email campaigns. It's indoctrinating people into this particular ideology by supporting universities. So you fund it in advance. Yeah. So it's like decades of this is. I'm sure you've seen the Russian guy from 1984, 1985, Yuri Bezmenov, talking about the... Remind me. You've never seen it? I don't think I've seen it. It's a wonderful video because it shows you exactly what happened, how they're going to introduce Marxism and Leninism into universities, and then it'll indoctrinate children, and then those children will be poisoned, and within one generation, it'll ruin the United States' entire educational system. So that's the long march idea. Yeah, that's the long – but you should watch a little bit of this because it's crazy. Because back then, I remember the 1980s. That would be a crazy idea. No, universities are where people have free thought and discussion. It's very important. Yeah, yeah. You know, and I was in a very left-leaning place at the time. Where were you? I was living in Boston, you know. Okay. And there's like probably more universities per capita than anywhere else in the country, at least at the time. And it was a very well-read city. Like the idea that universities are going to destroy the way human beings interact and debate is preposterous. But this guy was talking about this back then that the Soviets had planned this in advance and that they had essentially subverted our entire education system. And thereby those people would leave those schools indoctrinated and enter into the workforce with these new ideas in universal acceptance that these ideas are correct. And then it would in turn, you know, the butterfly effect. But do you think that everyone, I can't be sure that it's as conspiratorial as that because there must be a lot of people who just got on board with this. Well, there's a lot of money involved in doing this. Right. There's a lot of funds that have come from China. There's a lot of money that has been donated to these universities. Like, find that video. Okay, I found it, but there's like a second version on Twitter I've never seen before. An AI moderated one. No, no. He's now in a wig. Oh, I recognize him. So listen to what he says. It spent on espionage as such The other 85 is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion or active measures in the language of the KGB or psychological warfare What it basically means is to change the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information, no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community and their country. It's a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and it's divided in four basic stages. The first one being demoralization. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years which requires to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy and exposed to the ideology of the enemy. In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generations of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism, American patriotism. The result, you can see, most of the people who graduated in the 60s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, educational system. You are stuck with them. You cannot get rid of them. They are contaminated. They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern. You cannot change their mind. Even if you expose them to authentic information, even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still cannot change the basic perception and the logic of behavior. In other words, these people, the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To get rid of society of these people, you need another 20 or 15 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of the United States society. And yet these people who have been programmed and, as you say, in place... Yes. who are favorable to an opening with the Soviet concept these are the very people who would be marked for extermination in this country DR Most of them yes simply because the psychological shock when they will see in future what the beautiful society of equality and social justice means in practice, obviously they will revolt. They will be very unhappy, frustrated people. And the Marxist-Leninist regime does not tolerate these people. Obviously, they will join the links of dissenters, dissidents. Unlike in present United States, there will be no place for dissent in future Marxist-Leninist America. Here you can get popular like Daniel Ellsberg and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for and filthy rich like Jane Fonda for being dissident, for criticizing your Pentagon. In future, these people will be simply squashed like cockroaches. Nobody is going to pay them nothing for their beautiful, noble ideas of equality. This they don't understand, and it will be a greatest shock for them, of course. The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already. For the last 25 years. actually it's over fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where previously not even comrade andropov and all his experts would would even dream of such a tremendous success most of it is done by americans to americans thanks to lack of moral standards as i mentioned before exposure to true information does not matter anymore a person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information the facts tell nothing to him even if i shower him with information with the authentic proof with documents with pictures even if i take him by force to the soviet union and show him concentration camp he will refuse to believe it until he he is going to receive a kick in the in his fat bottom when a military boot crashes his then he will understand but not before that that's the tragic of the situation of demoralization okay yeah so pretty accurate well he's describing the situation as it is at the moment right and he's describing it in 1984 however that doesn't prove that what he's just that intention to create that kind of chaos that it was uh implemented and executed in the way that he describes he's described he's a kgb agent yeah but i mean that intention to create that kind of chaos, that intention to create that kind of chaos, that it was implemented and executed in the way that he describes. He's described the outcome. He's a KGB agent. Yeah, but I suppose what I mean by that is... He's talking about a program that they implemented. So they had actual people in universities, planted in universities, to deliberately execute this idea. Yeah, and they planned it in advance. This is what he was saying. And he's saying this before we even realized that it happened. I agree, that's scary. It is scary because it did happen. But that doesn't fully explain why it caught on. Why did academics who were clearly not plants, why did they catch on with this? Well, they don't live in the fucking real world. That's the problem with academics. They go right from universities to teaching positions. They don't have any real world experience. I mean, this whole idea of the Long March through the institutions, it's there in Rue de Deutschke. It was said, we're going to do this. We're going to infiltrate the major organizations, institutions, the church. we're going to, over a very long period of time, change society in the way that we want to see it. I think what's happened is, I think that intention was there. I think what he's saying is very eerily describing what's happening now, the demoralization and the detachment from truth. But I don't think it necessarily came about as systematically as that. How do you think it came about? Well, for one thing, I think what we're facing now isn't quite the template that Marx would have had in mind, right? Because for one thing, there's no emphasis on class or money or the economy or anything. Well, insofar as Marxism has become about group identity in terms of the left. Right. But eat the rich is a giant mantra that people chant in the streets. That's true. That's true. They're trying to tax billionaires. But it's incoherent because it's from people who've got money. It's from the upper middle classes. It doesn't have to be coherent. it's all just something a narrative that you give the unwashed masses and then they run with it well I wonder whether it caught on partly through what became fashionable what became trendy but also because any ideology says to you you don't have to do any thinking anymore you can outsource that to us you've got a set of rules and these are the rules that you've got people love that well it's why you've got people who are well it's why you've got queers for Palestine that can only exist when you're following a set of rules and not thinking about it for two seconds that's a wonderful I actually thought that was fake when I first heard about it, which must be about five years ago. You've seen the other meme? I thought it was unreal. Have you seen that meme? Which one? Queers for Palestine and then Palestine for queers Oh and I imagine And they throwing people off routes Of course they are Of course they are I just say go and do go there and see what you see see what you experience Go there as a man in a dress wearing lipstick with a beard. Good luck. Yeah, I just did a Titania tweet of a drag queen touring the Middle East and she's, you know, she's touring all these venues. And she's got this sort of Palestine dress and then this sort of the glam kind of Arabic look. It's like, just go there and see what happens. But that kind of cognitive dissonance can only work if you are ideologically driven. And I think – so I suppose what I mean is I think the appeal of ideology is what explains – not a kind of we've implanted these agents here. They're going to lead to this. They're going to lead to this. It has to also be complicity. Of course. But that comes from implanting ideas. Those ideas take hold and then groupthink takes it from there. But isn't it a shame that universities of all places – the place where you go to be challenged. I mean, I was thinking that when I was at Berkeley and I was sitting on the stage and there's all these men with guns all around the theatre because, of course, what happened with Charlie. And I'm thinking, it's like the end of the Blues Brothers, you know, where you're on stage and all the people are waiting. It felt weird. And I thought, this is not what a university is or should be. And the other thing that I thought is a lot of those people outside protesting weren't students. They'd sort of come in, they'd been bussed in. So maybe that feeds into what you were saying about, you know, this is all planned. 100%. How are they getting bussed in? Who's funding them? Right. People are paying a lot of money to do that. Right. And they're doing it all over the country. To what end? But they did it during the presidential elections. Yeah. During the presidential elections, they were tracking cell phones from place to place. Right. And they realized that there was a group of people that were paid attendees at Kamala Harris's rallies. Oh, yeah. I remember that. And so they were getting paid. their job was to show up and cheer for Kamala Harris. Do you think fundamentally, then, the Democrats are anti-democratic? I think fundamentally, anybody that doesn't have organic support is going to figure out a way in this environment to drum it up. And if you can do that through a service, or if you could do that through an NGO, or if you can do that through a company that'll hire people to show up at your rallies, they do it because they want to win and they want to get into a position of power. And one of the things that we do find with Trump is that it actually turns out the president can do a lot Yeah And we used to think that they were kind of handcuffed and they weren able to do as much And that why nothing ever got done Turns out that doesn seem to be true You get a maniac in office. You can kind of get away with a lot of things. You can do a lot of different things. That's what we sort of need in the UK. We need someone to come in and strip away. We need what Besmanoff was saying is that we need to kind of a whole generation that teaches that being patriotic and having morals and ethics is actually a good thing. And that free speech is important and that to be able to debate ideas is essential to any sort of true society that considers itself an elevated, modern version of what we hoped for when this country was founded. It wasn't founded on the idea that you have to adhere to one ideology and this ideology thinks that gender is not real and no one can answer what a woman is. That's crazy. That's become popular. Well, we see in America like America is the kind of life raft of the world. You've got all these things built into your political system. Yeah. And that's why it's so scary when you see people. Do you remember the vice presidential debate between J.D. Vance and Tim Walz? And Tim Walz said that the First Amendment doesn't cover hate speech. It doesn't cover misinformation. He's a dangerous fuck. That's scary. If the guy who might be vice president is saying, actually, we're going to strip out all of this stuff. Also, just the way he behaves is so odd. The way he waves and runs on stage. It's all just so fake and performative. I don't know any men like that that aren't dangerous. Why was he picked? Probably because of the Minnesota stuff. It's probably probably had something to do with what he was allowing to happen in Minnesota. They're probably get money on a money, right? Yeah, okay, maybe the men look there's a reason why he had to resign. I mean, I'm clearly speculating I have no idea and I'm a moron when it comes to politics but what I would what I would assume is that the For sure. He was informed of this fraud long in advance right if it wasn't for that Nick Shirley kid and those videos and apparently Nick Shirley had been informed by the the GOP there, that this was all going on. So this gets exposed, it gets into the public zeitgeist, it becomes a huge news story. It's not a coincidence that the riots break out in the exact same place where all this fraud is being exposed Because ICE is everywhere They all over the place But it not The most violent interactions are the interactions that are happening in the place where the most fraud has been publicly exposed Yeah. It's all by design. There's something very scary about it. Yeah. And so this guy knew about it in advance. How do we know? Well, one way we know is because he's resigning. So there must be something. Right. There's something. He's not running for governor again. He was in the process of running for governor. He's decided to step out of public office entirely now. So maybe they told him, if you do not step out, you are going to be prosecuted. We know what you did. Or maybe he's going to fucking turn state's evidence. Who fucking knows? Imagine if he'd have won, him and Kamala Harris, if they would have been in charge. Oh, God. I don't think I would have come here. What if Elon doesn't buy Twitter and Kamala Harris wins and Tim Walz is our vice president? Well, doesn't that just tell you how fragile freedom is? How close you are? Very fragile. And that's why people support Donald Trump and the people that think that they support him because he's a racist and all these different things No, no, no, they support it because there's an alternative to what we all saw coming Yeah, you know, no one's excited that ice is killing people in the streets. No one no one likes that No, of course, you have to be fucking insane if you think those people should be just getting shot like that That's nuts. But what they don't want is what the government was previously doing. They had a completely open border They were busing people into swing states They were trying to pretend that this was all organic and it's not yeah, it's not it's it's they had a plan and they did In a sneaky way where they looked like the really kind ethical equitable and inclusive Crowd right, but that's the work story all over again. Exactly, you know, it was the woke stories applied to geopolitics It was a woke stories applied to the whole political process in this country was dependent upon the census Which the census doesn't count citizens the census just counts humans Yeah. And so you get more congressional seats. You get more electoral points. The whole thing is not. I mean, I like to think that not all Democrats are into that. Not all Democrats are about the power for its own sake. Of course not. But the problem is it's a party. Like if you work for a corporation and you're a good person, but the corporation is polluting a river in Guatemala. Yeah. There's a diffusion of responsibility because you're a part of a giant system. And hey, I'm just an accountant. I go to work and I do my thing for Exxon or mobile or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'd say for however messy all of this has become in the US, at least you have had some sort of attempt to strip out the very stuff that that guy was talking about. I'd say for however messy all of this has become in the U.S., at least you have had some sort of attempt to strip out the very stuff that that guy was talking about. The fact that the civil service is all one way, the fact that the machinery of government, that was the plan, right? So the machinery of government works in a certain way. So there's no democratic means of getting rid of it. There's no way to change it. Well, I think the counter to that is the education that the Internet provides. And that's where they didn't anticipate in 1984. So the education that the Internet provides is untethered. But then the internet tells us that Christopher Nolan has just made a film with the Black Helen of Troy. Right. And he hasn't. It produces all sorts of unsavory things too. Yeah. But it also allows the distribution of information that would be impossible through normal means. If these people are, as he said, in control of major media, which they were, in control of universities, which they are, and then it goes on to be the only way people get information. Now your information is very heavily filtered and then all that stuff works. But that's why the technocrats in the EU, why ideologues generally are against internet or they want to censor it. That's why Macron is trying to stop X in France. Or whoever is trying to stop it. So the EU, the head of the EU commission is Ursula von der Leyen. Did you hear her? It's a great name, by the way. Well, yeah. It's a sexy name, right? Yeah. She's unelected. The European Commission is an unelected body that sets the legislative agenda of all these European countries. Absolutely crazy. You can't vote them out. She did a speech last May where she said, and I'm not joking about this, she said that misinformation was like a virus and you need to inoculate yourself against the virus. And the phrase she used is not debunking, pre-bunking. So pre-bunking is her idea of what you do with misinformation. What she means is censorship. But pre-bunking is the most sinister. That's crazy. Chill it. Like if you were to say, I'm going to come up with the most Orwellian, sort of dark lord kind of Sith pre-bunking pre-bunking yeah that's like fucking minority report right pre-crime I don't know what the because I know that there's this free speech debate opening up between the US and Europe generally like you know when J.D. Vance came over to Munich and gave that talk to all the European leaders and said you've got to stop censoring your people you've got to stop running away from voters and they were shocked and they were horrified but he was dead right he's dead right and he should and you know what people on the left should admit that he's dead right as well. But there something about Europe right There something about like I think over here coming over here I get the sense that even if most left people as well as right people do value free speech as a kind of shared value And in Europe it not that There a real sense of we can't trust the masses. Because I know that the EU is seen as this big lefty thing, which it absolutely is not. The EU is a body that wants to censor its citizens. It's a body that tells people you can have a referendum, but if you get it wrong, we're going to make you vote again. It's not a democratic organization. So no wonder Vance is sort of, and Trump is at loggerheads with this body because you've got these, we in the UK have a authoritarian leader, Keir Starmer, the prime minister. He couldn't be further away from the American ideal of free speech. He introduced this online safety bill, which is basically, this is why a lot of tweets in the UK, if you go to the UK now, a lot of the tweets will come up saying this is potentially harmful content so we're screening it out uh he you know they're trying to get rid of juries for certain trials right they already did and that's particularly dangerous because some of those cases are uh for speech crime right so uh i'll give you an example there was a royal marine called jamie michael who had made a video just say saying we need to peacefully protest against the migration issue they took him to court uh for stirring up racial hatred um but the jury is like what let him off. It was the jury that saved him. In this new system, there wouldn't be a jury there and he would be in prison. Yeah. And most certainly would be in prison. So I kind of feel like, and we've got Keir Starmer now for another three years, every decision that he makes is about not trusting the public, censoring what they think. If he could get rid of X, he absolutely would. Is it possible that someone sensible could win in three years? Or is the system so deeply entwined in the ideology of the English people that it's just stuck? This is what I think about that. Because I look at America and I think, in a way, you had your culture war election because of Trump, right? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people say the culture war doesn't matter. Of course it does. Of course it matters. I mean, did you see about that, the advert that the GOP put out, you know, Kamala Harris is for they, them, Trump is for you. That was the slogan. It was about the Democrats wanting to fund transgender surgery for prisoners. And Donald Trump's team had this advert, Kamala Harris for they, them, Donald Trump is for you. That actuated a 2.7 shift in favor of Donald Trump among everyone who saw it. It was a major success That just shows that these issues these cultural issues people do care And people do vote But you had a way in America to vote that stuff out through Trump right We've never had that. We've had- But they barely had a way. If they had more time, they wouldn't have. You mean if the Democrats had- Yes. Yeah, absolutely. If the Democrats won this time and then they tried to do it again in 2028, Elon was really adamant about that during the last election. This might be the last real election we have if you don't stop this now, because they have an open border. And in the last four years, they've pulled 10, at least 10 million people into this country. And they've changed the electoral map. And then on top of that, there was both Schumer and Nancy Pelosi openly talking about letting these people vote, openly talking about giving these people a path to citizenship. and they had already put them on Medicaid. They had already put them on Social Security. They were giving them EBT cards. They were housing them at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. They were giving them money and helping them get to these states. They were flying them through into America and putting them in these places because they were trying to get voters. So another four years. Another four years, they might have had it completely locked up. You know, that's what the Democrats have said about the Republicans. I mean, Oprah Winfrey was saying this might be the last election we have. If we don't vote for Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey had Donald Trump on her show years ago and was asking him to be president. Yeah, they were mates, weren't they? Oh, yeah. Look, they all get captured. They all get captured by groupthink and ideology and they all get captured by money and protecting it and who's going to protect them. But we don't have that safety valve in the UK. So, like I say, you were able to, for all the imperfections, you were able to vote in an administration that was actually going to rip out that whatever you call it. It showed the system is better. It showed the system is better. Even though the system was trying to get rigged, enough people revolted against it. Yes. But look at the ideas that you're attaching to this administration. Like, look, the ICE stuff is horrific. The people getting shot, it's horrific. We all agree to that. There's a lot of the authoritarian aspects. It's horrific. But what they've stopped is all of this illegal immigration. They've stopped all the illegal immigration. Legal immigration is still available. And then what they've also done is investigate literally billions of dollars in fraud and they uncovering it over and over and over and over again So there was obviously crime that was going on that was not being addressed by the previous party Sure And this is one of the reasons why they didn't want the Republicans getting in in the first place. So they still have to label them in the most horrific ways possible, accentuate all the negative aspects of what's going on with the ICE stuff, but not talk at all about the economy taking an uptick, not talk at all about GDP, not talk at all about tariffs being effective, not talk at all about any of the positive things. Stopping wars. He stopped wars in multiple different countries. Stop conflicts. No one's talking at all in an objective sense. This is a Nazi party. These are fascists. We have to have no kings. Stop the fascists. So these narratives are just being pushed out there constantly by the media, all the while these politicians are absolutely terrified that these investigations are going to start moving into their states and uncovering more and more and more fraud, which they're going to. I mean, I know you say it's so reckless, though, I think as well for the Democrats to, like you say, paint ICE as Nazis, talk about that this is the equivalent of the Gestapo. I think someone used that phrase. I mean, what you're saying about the shootings, obviously, we all agree it's absolutely horrific. Any kind of situation where the police inflict that kind of violence and someone needs to be thoroughly investigated and looked into and all But I'm concerned about the politicians I know go there get in the way of federal agents while they're enforcing the law They're just trying to be popular but but but won't they're putting people's lives at risk on yeah, I mean that but it's again that that chess move again giving up the rook or Attacking a rook and giving up your queen because of it because you just want the current well It's it's working in so far as the like the public is turning against Trump because of what's happening with ice I mean, that's certainly a lot of that. Yeah, there's certainly a lot of that The narrative is out there, but it's dependent upon how far it goes. Yeah, right. They've got to de-escalate this violence Yes, they've got to make sure that that but you also need support of local police You can't have people attack the hotels where these ice people are staying and have no support whatsoever by the police. That's crazy They're being told to stand down. So this is messy stuff and you yeah, but look how hard it was I mean you talk about how you know We Trump has come in and he stripped away all this stuff and this fraud and but that was he didn't do in the first Term it's only when he got to the second term and it was planned and he had doge Set up and he had musk in place and all of this deep state stuff could be identified and stripped out and well He had a lot of deep state people in his cabinet the of this deep state stuff could be identified and stripped out and well Set up and he had musk in place and all of this deep state stuff could be identified and stripped out and well He had a lot of deep state people in his cabinet the first term right no, so he couldn't work against it Right, but we can't in the UK Just to sort of explain where I think we are there is we can't do that because we we have the two major parties are both Ideologically in lockstep effectively, right? So so I mean most of the woke stuff was pushed through the Conservative Party They were in power for 13 years they're ostensibly right wing. They push through the woke stuff? They push through all the gender self-recognition stuff. Why do you think the conservatives did that? So the why is a good question. So the prime minister, Theresa May, conservative prime minister at the time, she said in her autobiography, I'm woke and proud. You know, she said like she, can you imagine Trump saying that? It's the equivalent. It's the equivalent. So I think it's because something about this ideology infected every side of the political aisle, particularly in the UK. What might happen now in the UK is reform are probably going to win the next election. That's in three years time. And that's so seismic because it will blow apart this two party system that we've got. That probably couldn't happen in America. You probably couldn't get a third party that can win. We have a third party that can win. That's new. Really? And that's we haven't had that for a long, long, long, long time. But what is the possibility that it could win? Well, 50 50. Look at it this way. We've been sort of veering massively from, you know, the conservatives under Boris Johnson won this mad majority, like 80 seat majority, and they could do whatever they want and they squandered it. People were so resentful of what happened with Johnson, who, by the way, let in more illegal migration than we've ever had, right? Did he do that for cheap labor? Probably. I mean, I think that's certainly part of it. Certainly that's part of it. That's a problem that conservatives don't want to admit that they were, you know, I had a conversation with a very prominent politician who explained to me that he had a conversation with a guy who was a CEO of a corporation that didn't want to stop the flow of illegal immigration because he wanted cheap labor. He was flabbergasted. He was like, I can't fucking believe this guy's saying this out loud. It's worse with Johnson because in their manifesto, they pledged not to do it. So they had a promise. They call it the Boris wave. So that's how bad it was. And then you have Starmer and the Labor Party who are just as bad, if not worse. And, you know, we have a situation where it's unmanageable now. and reform this third party, Nigel Farage's party, is saying no we actually going to tackle this And of course ultimately what happens is the public they reach a tipping point they say by the way starmer is the the least popular prime minister on any opinion poll ever in the history of records that's he's gone from a massive majority to nothing because he's been so useless on all of this stuff because he's been so captured by the ideology because he doesn't care about migration because he said that anyone who was concerned about the grooming gang scandal was jumping on a bandwagon of the far right. That's what he said. So all of this has happened, but you can't blame the left. It's the left and the right. It's both of them. It's why they call it the uni party. It's the same thing. So you need something else to come along and explode it. What do you think the possibility of Farage winning? Pretty high. If it were today, he'd win. If he didn't get whacked between now and then. Do you guys whack people over there very often? Less than here. I think it's more an American thing. It's a lot easier. A lot more guns over here. There's a lot more guns. But fingers crossed, obviously, that won't happen. But it looks like if it was today, he'd win. There's obviously a couple of years. I mean, he could mess things up. Something crazy could happen. Get caught with a live boy or a dead girl. Something like that. But I think with Starmer, people are just sick of it. He has continually backtracked on all his promises. He's not interested. He dismisses people's concerns about immigration. He dismisses people concerned about the mass rape of children in the grooming gang scandal. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to do an inquiry about that. They didn't want to do it. And because they're so terrified of being called racist ultimately, so they let this thing slide. So I think people are just sick of it. I think people have reached the point where even I think people who don't like Nigel Farage will hold their nose and vote for a third party to explode the system. And maybe we might be able to reset after that. Maybe something could happen. One of the things that's interesting in America is a lot of young people are becoming conservative. That is interesting, yeah. It's interesting because I think that's a force of the internet. And being a conservative more today is more like being a rebel. Yeah. It's like bucking this system. Whereas it used to be that if you were a rebel, you were left wing. You were like, you're a hippie. Yeah. And that's not really the case anymore because the system that has power is a system that is pushing this one very particular ideology. that also demonizes young males. Hugely. Yeah. But that's also why I don't think it's about left and right anymore. I think one of the things about the culture war is it kind of killed off left and right Like I say in the UK we couldn vote this out we had a right party it didn make a difference the left party makes it worse we had a prime minister you know kia starmer on radio saying that 99.9 percent of men women don't have a penis which means that there are what is it 35 000 female penises out there it's quite a lot if you can picture that image you know so that's our prime minister saying this crazy our deputy prime minister said on tv that you could grow a cervix if you wanted um so that's david lammy that sounds like i'm making that up he said that you can check that he said you could grow a cervix so this is these are the kind of people who are in charge now who it's just all about their fake you know fake ideology which is why internet censorship is so much more prominent there that's what's going to happen no that's why they're going to absolutely try to do that yeah exactly well they are doing it just self censorship by arresting people. There's a lot of censorship involved in scare. Yeah. And just in the fear of being arrested. But the problem for reform will be, do they have the guts to do what Trump did? Do they have the guts to come in and say, look, we need to scrap the civil service? Well, you can't scrap the civil service, but you need to sort of bleed it dry. You need to you need to give it a good rinse, right? You need to get rid of the because there have been whistleblowers in the UK civil service who've said, we're not going to do what the elected politicians say. if they come in and say there's an immigration problem we're just going to stymie that we're not going to do what they want we've got police who are routinely investigating people for their opinions just to put that into context by the way if we're talking about this deep state that we've got to clean out our police force is trained by a body called the College of Policing they have been telling police for years it's your job to arrest people for what they think and what they say and the High Court told them you've got to stop this. You've got to stop recording non-crime hate incidents. Two Home Secretaries said to them, you've got to stop recording non-crime hate incidents. They ignored the courts. They ignored the government. And that's the power of an ideologically captured quango. That's crazy. That's the problem. So even when you vote for a party that's going to strip this stuff out, you still have to do the actual hard work of stripping out. I would abolish the College of Policing. Do people know about non-crime hate incidents? Do they know that this is a thing in America? Do they know that that's what we do in the UK? I mean, people are just aware that there's a lot of arrests because of social media posts. We don pay nearly as much attention to the UK as the UK pays attention to American politics Right And that enough Because we a small island That fair enough But what I would say is that it worse than people think insofar as the 12 arrested a year that horrific But with the police routinely checking up on you if you commit non-crime, that's sort of even worse, isn't it? The Scottish police have a database of jokes that they've seen online that they think are problematic. And they've kept this. The Scottish police introduced a hate crime bill two years ago now, which can prosecute you for things you say in your own house. There's a section in that bill on the public performance of a play. So if a play is offensive, they can arrest you. If you're the director or an actor involved in the play and it's considered offensive, they can arrest you. They set up, when they implemented that hate crime bill, they set up hate crime reporting centres. So if you felt offended, you could, and they converted like, there was a sex shop, I think, there was a mushroom farm. you could go and report hate to the police as and when it occurs and this is coming from the police force the people who are supposed to sustain authority and prevent criminality and you've seen the viral videos of police knocking on people's doors saying you said this thing online That's insane So I think it's worse than just the arrest I think it's a rotten system that is being trained by activists in the College of Policing that no government will deal with They don't get rid of these activists. They let the actor and the activists when they're told to stop it, they carry on anyway. And the entire culture has to shift. That's what I mean. Yeah, that's what I mean. You need a politician to go in and say, scrap the college police in, strip out all the activists within the NHS, within the army, within the police, within the Crown Prosecution Service. It also has to get so bad that people realize how bad it is and they need radical change. But I think the grooming gangs did that. Yeah. I think the fact that we effectively sacrificed thousands of kids on the altar of ideology, the fact that we said, you know, there were politicians, counselors, doctors, social workers saying we don't want to be called racist. So we're going to ignore the sexual assault of children on a mass scale. And that was not really thoroughly covered here in America. Really? In mainstream news. I think because Elon. No, online it was, but not in mainstream news. So do people not generally know about that? They know about it now. Right. Okay. But it wasn't something that you would see every night on CNN. Really? It's a huge story. But the power of being called racist became so intense. I mean even, you know, that horrible bombing at the Manchester Arena at the end. That's a huge story. That's a huge story. someone as racist is so potent, which is why I think here in America, the word fascist, the word Nazi gets thrown around so much because they know if someone is so branded, you disoblige yourself from having to engage with their ideas. They become this kind of monster that you don't have to even think about or worry about. And we're just, I think we're just getting over that in the UK now where the accusation of racism no longer really sticks. I think people think it doesn't mean anything anymore and you know they've tried with reform they've tried saying that reform is a racist party it's a far-right party no one's buying it anymore and i think that's why hopefully something can change i think the grooming gangs i think the mass immigration to the extent where people now at risk they just are uh unvetted people many with criminal records we don't want to go the way of sweden i mean you know how bad sweet sweden's got you know sweden used to be the most high-trust society in Europe, low-crime. They allowed mass immigration on a scale they couldn't possibly contain. I think it's now 20% of Swedish population are now foreign-born. And predominantly they live in ghettos where crime is rife. They didn't integrate. There was no expectation they should integrate. And as a result of that, it's gone from being one of the safest countries in Europe to being the country that has most gun and bomb attacks of any country not at war except for Mexico. And that's happened in the space of 10 years. Crazy. It's an absolute tragedy. I remember when it was going on, a Swedish stand-up friend of mine, Tobias Pearson, texted me saying, there's grenades going off in Stockholm, there's gunfire on my street, and the politicians are doing nothing about it. They're saying this doesn't matter. I was in Sweden a couple of years ago. I was talking to a bunch of... You know what Swedes are like. They're very middle class, very, well, not all of them, but very liberal, very, like, not a racist shred in their body. And they all came back to the same story They all wanted to discuss immigration And they all come back to the same thing One woman said to me I got this wrong We got this wrong Why do you think they did it Good intentions first and foremost Really Okay. Well, there's a... Really? You think it's just good intentions to let all those people in? Have you met Swedes? I have. They're so lovely. Come on. It's happening in America. It's happening in England. It's happening in the UK. Yes. It's happening in Ireland. It's happening. It's just good intentions everywhere. Could it also be this delusion, this idea, what you would call, I suppose, liberal universalism, this idea that everyone is basically the same, everyone in every culture basically wants the same things? It explains the queers for Palestine phenomenon. It doesn't matter where you go. No, no, no. The queers for Palestine phenomenon is explained by the internet and people being stupid and being in a bubble where they never experienced those folks. I don't think – I think this is organized. I think it's organized. I think the more chaos there is, the more they can crack down on your rights. I know you think it's organized. I'm not convinced of that yet. I'm open to it. I mean, it's at one point in time, it's fairly universal in Western societies. But in Europe, yes. In America as well. For the last four years before Trump got into office, that's what they were doing here. It seems like a strategy. It doesn't seem as simple as just good intentions. I know. Well, and that does seem too simplistic. I absolutely agree with that. You create more chaos. The more chaos you have, the more laws you need. The more laws you need, the more control you have. But speaking to these people in Sweden, I mean, I was there. It was an event where we were talking about a book I'd written. So it was all about these issues. And I was mingling and talking to them. And they all wanted to talk about it. But they're the citizens. They're not the people that implemented those laws in the first place. That's where I'm cynical. I think the people that implement those laws in the first place, they know what they're doing. Yes. And, well, certainly they're aware of the risks. I mean, if you take what happened in Cologne, that New Year's Eve party, where I think over 800 women were sexually assaulted and the media didn't report it and the government wanted to sort of minimalize and say that this wasn't real. It's not even just the risks. It's the physical, actual, measurable consequences. Yes, exactly. And they're not course correcting. That, to me, leads me to think that they know what they're doing. You don't think it could just be complete naivety, this idea that… I think it's the best way to combat the Internet. The best way to combat the internet is create a massive amount of chaos and then crack down on people's lives. I suppose what worries me about it is though that the assumption that it all sort of coordinated will take you down that route where you start thinking as some friends of mine now think the world is controlled by a group of Satanists who sit in a room and they choose the you know they choose the leaders and they do you know what i mean like well i don think it satanist but i think it incredibly wealthy people but why would it be in their interest to destroy the economy that so sustains them well it depends on where they are and who they are but george soros clearly does that and he's talked about it he's talked about enjoying destroying democracies and enjoying destroying countries. He's kicked. He's not allowed to go into certain countries. He makes money doing it. But he relies on those democratic societies to make, you know. Yeah, but they're still functional. He just profits off of it largely. That's what I struggle with, though. Like, you know, someone who believes in fundamentally the capitalist dream can't yearn for... The capitalist dream can be... You can... It's subject to manipulation. Yeah. And intelligent, evil people, or at least amoral people. But this doesn't answer why people do vote for it. And they do. I mean, They do vote for it because they've done a really good job of attaching it. And there's also this ideology thing. There's left and right. If you're left, you're blue no matter who, blue to the grave. That's it. And if anybody that votes red is a dirty racist fascist and they think about it that way. And we really have no option for a centrist party in this country, which is where most people lie. Most people lie in the middle. Most people are very socially liberal. And most of the people that I know that even identify as conservative, they're very socially liberal. But they're financially much more aligned with conservative ideology. Sure. Well, I think, I mean, I think ultimately, hopefully, that the brick wall of reality is what cures this. If we don't destroy society along the way, if we don't allow them to destroy society, we don't completely erode all of our rights along the way. And as you said earlier, you can get very close to that happening. And rights lost are never regained. Never. Look at Australia. They had one mass shooting. They took their guns in the 1990s. Then COVID came. They're like, get in a fucking camp. Yeah. And they've just they've just introduced a new hate speech law off the back of the Bondi Beach shooting. And of course, this, again, is really draconian. It goes way too far. In fact, I think the Australian hate speech law is basically saying if someone does something that wasn't intended to stir up hatred, but it could conceivably have stirred up hatred among a theoretical group or group of people, then it's a crime and you can get five years in prison. Sure And imagine blaming that on hate speech instead of blaming it on just letting wild violent criminals emigrate into your country I mean that something Yeah What amazing gaslighting Like not saying hey maybe we should stop letting violent criminals enter into our country illegally and live here. No, no, no. What we should start doing is taking people that have done no crime whatsoever and create their dissent, create a crime based on their dissent. I totally agree. We had it in the UK. We had a politician, horrible story, a guy called David Amis. You know, he was stabbed to death by an Islamist at his surgery. You know, politicians, we call them surgeries where you meet face to face your constituents. They come and you talk about the local issues. I don't think they do that in America. He stabbed him to death. And then there was this parliamentary debate about how can we crack down on free speech online? Right. No, the problem was the knife wielding maniac. The problem was gaslighting, unchecked Islamism. I mean, it really is what Besminov was saying. Yeah, it's that thing of not addressing the... But not seeing the truth. Not seeing the truth because you've been captured. You've been demoralized. But I think what's better now is that people can see through that. So like when Keir Starmer, after that horrible... I mentioned it earlier, the girls who were killed in the dance class by the guy who was a child of immigrants. His response to that was, okay, let's not, you know, deal with the fact that we've got radicalized individuals within our community, young people. He said, let's ban buying knives off Amazon. Because the guy got the knife from Amazon, right? You can also get them in shops, Keir. You can walk in and get a shop. Most people have a kitchen knife at home. It's like one of the most common weapons. And he banned ninja swords around the same time, which was a big blow to the ninja community. But I kind of, so crazy. Like, that's the thing you go for. you choose the thing that isn't. But this is the idea of allowing this kind of chaos and having this be a coordinated plan, right? The more chaos you have, the more you gaslight people, the more people are attached to an ideology, the more you can keep restricting their rights further and further and further until they're more and more frustrated, until a lot of them just give up. But we are at a position now where people are seeing through it all the time. In the UK now, no matter how much they smear, reform is far right. The polls just keep going up and up and up for right but it's because of the internet because you have at least some dissenting voices We have that and also the palpable absurdities of what the politicians are trying to tell you is real right is as big as reached That's why they're trying to crack at least some dissenting voices. at least some dissenting voices. We have that. And also the palpable absurdities of what the politicians are trying to tell you is real. Right. Is as big as reach. That's why they're trying to crack down on pup talk. Oh, and by the way, you know, the Labour Party has cancelled a number of local elections because they know they're going to lose them. They've actually cancelled them. They've cancelled them. Well, they've said they've postponed them while they're reforming the system. Right. What they're really scared. But it's stuff like that where. Get rid of the juries, cancel elections, and they're the good guys. And at that point, it doesn't matter how much your propaganda or how much you think your propaganda is going to work. The public are going to see through that. And they say, hang on a minute. You're saying that I can't vote. You're saying if I end up in court, I may not have a jury. You're saying I can't browse through Twitter. You're saying I can't say the wrong thing online. Enough is enough. And I think they reach a point where they say, and some of the stories are so egregious. Like, for instance, the guy, have you heard of a guy called Hamit Koskan? I think he's Armenian guy who burned a copy of his Koran outside the Turkish embassy. Right. The idea of this was a protest against the Turkish government because he perceives Erdogan's government as, I suppose, supporting Islamism and the rise of Islamism. So he protests outside the thing, burns the Koran. Two people attack him, one with a knife, the other some deliveroo driver starts kicking him. He gets prosecuted in the court of law for inciting the violence. And the judge actually says the fact that you were attacked is proof that you were inciting violence. Right. It took the Free Speech Union in the UK to have that overturned, to fight on his behalf, to say that's a peaceful protest. It was his copy of his book. We don't have blasphemy laws in the UK. But now the CPS, the Crown Prosecution Service, is trying to overturn that because they want to see this guy go down. And that is what we're talking about. We've got bodies like the Crown Prosecution Service saying, no, we want an Islamic blasphemy code in the UK. The Labour Party wants an official definition of Islamophobia so you can criticise you can peacefully protest you can burn a book that you bought you know and all of that and we seeing this happen in front of us and people are just saying look we believe in plurality we believe in freedom of religion you should be able to you know we're not we've got nothing against muslim people what we are objecting to is the idea that we shouldn't be able to ridicule your religion or mock your religion or protest against your religion and you're going to pathologize it by saying we've got a sickness we're islamophobic i think people I think that case, the fact that you can't burn. I mean, some kid in a school in Wakefield accidentally scuffed a copy of his Koran and he got hit with a non-crime hate incident and there was a big issue and the police got involved. You know, we have to hold fast to this idea that no, no idea, no idea doesn't get criticized. and so I just think the more stories like that happen maybe I'm naive but I think the British public's patience is kind of at the very end I hope so, I hope it's not too late, I really do but in the meantime, your book, The End of Woke it's available, did you do the audio version of it? I did, it took me ages I'm glad you did it though I'm sure it is, but it's always so much better when it's in someone's voice, especially someone like you thank you Andrew Really appreciate it. And I hope you guys figure it out over there. But in the meantime, I'm glad you're here. Well, I got away. I'm glad. So it's okay. I'm glad. But I mean, it shouldn't be that everybody has to escape. That's crazy. No, I know. You know, it's nuts. And then what's going to be left? Like only people that are submitting and then the chaos of what you've allowed in. Right. It's fucking nuts. Exactly. So you've got to make sure that America doesn't go to pop because I need this place to work. I need it to work too. Well, it's part of my business model. All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody. Thank you.