41: Douglas Murray – Heroism 2020: Defense of Our Own Civilization

	Heroism 2020: Defense of Our Own Civilization
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Guest	Douglas Murray
Length	04:52:12
Release Date	23 October 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
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Portal Blog	Read
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If you don't know Douglas Murray, in the estimation of the The Portal, this may well be the most important voice you will hear from the United Kingdom for some time. In the tradition of De Tocqueville and Alistair Cook's famous "Letter from America," Douglas Murray is America's true friend. He is not the man who tells you that you look great and laughs at all your jokes, but the one who pulls the big mac out of your mouth, flushes your cigarettes down the toilet, locks your liquor cabinet and personally drives you to rehab until you straighten yourself out.

I have met many men who train in combat sports, or extoll the virtues of masculinity. However, I know of none braver than Douglas Murray. In our time, this is one voice of relentless reason that everyone needs to hear.

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Transcript[edit]

Audio Essay[edit]

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [intro music] Hello all. The subject of this audio essay is my absence, the tech platforms, the twenty twenty election, Gene Seberg, and oddly enough, Article fifty-eight of the former Soviet Union's Russian Penal Code. I don't want to say too much quite yet about what I've been up to, but suffice it to say that I'm fine, or at least as fine as anyone is in twenty twenty. Also, rest assured that I have not forgotten about you all or lost interest in the podcast or, more importantly, our community. Far from it. In fact, it's the exact opposite of that. I want to ensure that we can continue talking and building the community that has sprung up around the podcast. Portal Nation, if you will, is a place where I choose to spend my own free time with perhaps less distance than I should have with my audience, as many of you have become my friends. Some time ago, I started warning many of my friends to be very careful on the Internet in the immediate run-up to the twenty twenty U.S. election. In particular, I warned people associated with the intellectual dark web that they should be very careful not to lose their accounts. In the time since, we have seen new levels of bizarre behavior on Twitter and Facebook, which seem to be catching up to Google in terms of naked attempts to manipulate the national conversation. Not all of it is sinister, mind you. I don't hate having actual facts checked by true fact-checkers, although the words actual and true are doing a lot of heavy lifting in the sentence. The idea for the warning was simple. Back in November of twenty sixteen, I started commenting on the idea that the, quote, fake news, close quote, panic was not authentic, that it was likely constructed in November of twenty sixteen as a placeholder to be used by institutions stunned by the results and rocked in their faith that they could broadly control every election to make sure that both candidates were broadly acceptable to the institutional class with no Ralph Naders, Ron Pauls, Ross Perots, or Bernie Sanders to worry about. Now, that is an odd thing to say. What does that mean, inauthentic or constructed? Many of you are no doubt thinking, "I remember everyone talking about fake news all during the election." Isn't that interesting? Because that is not what happened at all. That's a fake memory, and it's not even yours. In fact, as late as the end of October of twenty sixteen, almost no one was talking much about fake news. In fact, the concept didn't really spike until after Trump's victory. It was not until the week of Sunday, November thirteenth, twenty sixteen, that the hypnotic and invariant phrase fake news exploded and went from being an extremely minor news story to the supposedly settled explanation for everything that had caught The New York Times, the Democratic Party, and the heavily anti-Trump tech giants measuring the Oval Office drapes while about to lose the race of a lifetime. Which is to say I wasn't buying it. I just sat there and watched helplessly as everyone I knew responded to the perseverated phrase being repeated into their minds. Interestingly, this was seemingly an exact repeat of the so-called Dean Scream, which occurred twelve years earlier on Monday, January nineteenth, two thousand and four, when the news media destroyed the political campaign of Howard Dean over a total and complete non-event by perseveration alone to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or FUD as it is known to conspirators who practice this disinformation technique. At that time, the entire United States, save for a few contrarians, got brainwashed into seeing a candidate supposedly lose his mind on stage, which would never have occurred to anyone if the institutional media hadn't repeated it into a so-called alternative fact in the minds of Americans. If you doubt me, Dave Rubin and I arranged to have me on his show, The Rubin Report, before Trump's inauguration so that there would be a permanent archival record of my claims and to which all folks who would later question these claims could return. I further went to the trouble before the election of having my employer acquaint everyone in the firm with the theory of preference falsification due to economist Timur Kuran, one of our first guests, because I was all but certain that the polling data and the gated institutional narrative had not accounted for people lying about their hidden support for Donald Trump. And perhaps now you understand more about the title of the last Portal episode as a mildly coded message to my treasured audience. I once again suspected that almost everybody who is not sufficiently disagreeable to be considered Milgram negative, Asch negative, and Zimbardo negative, according to the three famous psychology experiments, was about to go completely insane as we did four years ago. It is simply too hard for ordinary people whose ability to feed their families depends on working for institutions to resist the drumbeats of either the Democratic or Republican master narratives. Now, most of you in my audience were born after nineteen eighty, and so you cannot obviously remember the revelations of the mid-nineteen seventies the way I do when I was around ten years old. But for me and others in progressive American families, the revelation that the FBI had secretly planted totally false stories like the one that destroyed the reputation, career, and ultimately the sanity of law-abiding progressive Hollywood star Gene Seberg in mainstream newspapers and news magazines like The Los Angeles Times and Newsweek casts a long shadow. The reason is simple: we have all the chilling receipts, as the kids say today. The idea of the U.S. deep state's use of mainstream media to destroy lawful citizens' lives and sanity simply for political beliefs is not a conspiracy theory. It is, in fact, a one hundred percent certain conspiracy fact that for some odd reason isn't taught much in U.S. high schools. It is also the reason that we must investigate the investigators and eavesdrop on our own spies if we wish to remain a truly free society. Well, I am of the belief that destroying people is considered fair play in elections by the insiders who view these contests as their own private blood sport to which ordinary dissenting Americans are viewed as interlopers and thus prey. And increasingly, very few of us outsiders seem to believe in democracy anymore, as we increasingly believe that our side must always win against the implacable foe by any means necessary, to quote Brother Malcolm. When this sport of personal reputational destruction is coordinated by members of the complex formed by institutional media- The intelligence community, the political parties, political consultants, finance, tech, and the academy. I call it seaburging to remind us of just how real the threat is to all who have idiosyncratic politics but who have done nothing legally wrong. Now, as many of you might guess, if I had a strong belief that I could do something to save us by telling you to vote Biden or vote for Trump, I don't think I would let this stand in my way. But truth be told, I don't think we are playing the lady and the tiger with these two parties anymore. It's more like the Bengal tiger versus the Siberian tiger. So naturally, I was trying to figure out any way to plausibly open both doors to try to get the two parties to focus on eating each other rather than the rest of us. And I'm sorry to say that I, along with absolutely everyone else I know, have failed to come up with any plausible options. We seem to be on autopilot. We have built institutions that are going to oversee our undoing unless someone figures out a way to stop playing with the failed septuagenarians and octogenarians who came in as young people to the national stage in the nineteen seventies and have rewritten the rules for their own plunder and enrichment for thirty to fifty years. This essay is a bit heavy. Right? Well, pause the audio. Pace yourself. Take a deep breath. Maybe think about puppies. I don't know. Continuing. So to sum up the above, I don't believe almost any of what we are talking about on a daily basis makes any sense. We are going to wind up with one of two candidates that should not be running for control of the nuclear missile launch codes. Four years ago, I called the twenty sixteen election the Sophie's Choice election, and I barely got myself to vote for Hillary Clinton, who I could not stand. This year, I put the pen directly over Biden's name and could not get the pen to move towards the paper. This was a bit of a surprise. That's never happened to me before where I could not vote for my own party. Was it true that I had become a Trump supporter? I tried the same Ouija board maneuver, and this time I couldn't even get the pen to hover over Trump's name. So what was happening? Well, I won't bore you with who I voted for because it doesn't matter. I'm only telling you this because I failed this basic test and threw my vote to someone who will not win. And with that, I will promise you that I will not judge you for your vote. You cannot do worse than I did, so I have no way to blame you for whichever way you choose to fail. This is not the Sophie's Choice election. This was actually supposed to be the King Solomon election in my mind, where if either candidate truly loved the country more, he would have been the first to resign. So getting back to my absence, I became convinced that the portal was of very little value to you in the election per se. Many of you flattered me by saying, where are you when we need you most? As if I had somehow abandoned you. And I am touched, but that is not where we are. I don't have your answers, and I am lost as well. So I have been trying to look past the election for months. I'm just being honest here. Whatever we are going to do to save ourselves from the kleptocrats of the center, the nut jobs of the far right, the apathy of the nonvoters, the woke lunacy, and the dreamers of third party options, we are going to do with either Trump or Biden in office. Four years ago, before Trump took the oath of office, I was at a dinner in Los Angeles with Sam Harris and Dave Rubin. Sam was talking about how he was going to have to hold Trump accountable with his broadcasts, and I said something that I'd like to think turned out to be wise. "Sam, you just can't do that," I said. He asked why I would say that given my feelings, which were not out of line with his. I said, "I've studied Trump's style, and it's based around deliberate ambiguities that left and right can be counted upon to hear as meaning different things. If Trump makes n nested ambiguous statements in a minute, he will create a minimum of two to the n legs of the decision tree that must be considered given your strategy. He will thus be able to force you and the rest of the unsuspecting United States public intellectuals to waste much of your intellectual life for four to eight years picking up after him. He just needs to knock over the intellectual vases faster than you can glue the shards back together. And no matter how good you are, you aren't going to make it through like that." "So what will you do instead?" he asked. I said, "I will make one or more clear statements that Donald Trump represents an existential risk to the fabric of The United States and that I expect he will use his freedom as an outsider to do a combination of both very good and very bad things. But I'm not going to let him run my intellectual life every day on his truly ingenious brain farts. I will then focus my energy and attempt to hold my own party, the Democrats, intellectually accountable so that we can win with someone we can believe in." And except for that part at the tail end, I think I did about as well as I could have in anticipating the problems and formulating a strategy during these four years. So why be absent? Well, I haven't gotten to the part about article fifty eight yet. Recall that I don't believe that fake news was an authentic narrative in November of twenty sixteen. So what was it then? Well, I don't know. But if I had to guess, I would say that there was probably a meeting somewhere around early November of twenty sixteen where it was decided that The United States needed a narrative to buy time for its aggrieved institutions so that the twenty twenty election could be fixed to the greatest extent possible. And I believe that fake news was likely the placeholder that had been settled upon. That would be the origin of the gradual changes in terms of service across Twitter, Facebook, and Google and how the structural changes were coordinated that would gradually erode all protections for free speech across the platforms. That's where data and society and its crazy guilt by association minus any methodology technique appeared. In essence, the four year battle plan was to figure out how to use the fake news meme to gain greater narrative control of the news. Only there was a new problem. We the people had become enmeshed in the news. We shared stories and links. And to control the news now meant the institutions had to control us as ordinary people much more aggressively. We all opined often and often better than the professional commentariat at that. And long form podcasting, as led by the popular Joe Rogan, became seen as the great embarrassment and threat to mainstream legacy media. People dying to be treated like adults with long attention spans dropped NPR and The New York Times as home to the sixteen nineteen project, which its leader openly admitted was attempting to get America to riot, and flocked to podcasts hours in length to listen to Snowden or Bernie Sanders on Joe Rogan. And there was no plan to stop this that was working when they finally realized just how powerful these podcasts are. You could hear Roger Penrose one minute and Eddie Bravo the next. Everyone knew that simply calling Sam Harris gross and racist and Joe Rogan alt-right, Ben Shapiro a Nazi white supremacist, Peter Thiel anti-gay, Bret Weinstein anti-Black, and Maajid Nawaz an Islamophobe was beyond stupid. I mean, our audiences had spent hours listening to us and interacting with us at events. It wasn't just that the mainstream media was bullshitting the American public. They were gaslighting us all around people that we already knew, and failing so long as there were people willing to risk their reputations to shatter that evil spell. So they figured out that we needed the platforms in part to reach each other and proceeded to change the platform rules over and over again to make them vague, illogical, ideological, inconsistent, and actually impossible to understand. Add to that that these platforms were now patrolled by a new religious police, if you will, as if Twitter were Saudi Arabia and the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice was replaced by the Trust and Safety Committee. No one could say what the rules were. What exactly was deadnaming, for example? Is saying that Bruce Jenner won the nineteen seventy-six decathlon years before Caitlyn Jenner even existed a punishable offense? Only the Trust and Safety Committee could tell you. Which brings us to Article Fifty-Eight of the Soviet-era Russian Penal Code, which introduced the concept of enemy of the workers and counterrevolutionary activities as the major crime. You see, Article Fifty-Eight was a law where everyone was guilty, but not everyone was prosecuted. Thus, any inconvenient person could be disappeared into the gulags or executed in show trials under Article Fifty-Eight, and that is where we are. Shortly before the election, a provocative mid-October New York Post article on Hunter Biden appeared that could not be shared on Twitter or Facebook, which is, of course, insane, but also anticipated. Here's why. They failed to come up with a workable strategy to control us because there is really nothing they can do short of totally draconian China-like measures, and so they will ultimately lose this battle one day. The jig has been up for years now, but the legacy and tech powers do not know how to concede. So they gaslight, they harass, and they threaten individuals that don't agree to silence themselves. And sure enough, just like with Article Fifty-Eight and the show trials, the tech platforms treat trust and safety as a star chamber where you can be accused without being told what you did wrong and tried in absentia. Hell, we are all guilty of violating these terms of service because they aren't real, well-defined, or even self-consistent. Which brings me to what I said to my brother Brett not long ago when he proposed Unity twenty twenty as a plan to undermine the control of the two-party duopoly by drafting a Republican and a Democrat to run together. I told him it couldn't work unless an extraordinary piece of luck occurred and that it was a bad use of political capital to call everything dangerous like this election make or break. The other thing I said was that Unity twenty twenty-four is a good idea, but that he should do this project in a separate account on Twitter and Facebook. He did not listen at first and released video on his own YouTube channel. Very quickly, the Articles of Unity account that they had set up on Twitter was suspended without explanation. Links to Unity twenty twenty websites shared through direct messaging were labeled suspicious and spam by Twitter's religious police. It appeared that the thought of Americans coming together and burying their hatchets was seen as a serious offense, which the usually forward-thinking CEO Jack Dorsey himself could not face for reasons that remain utterly opaque. A short time later, Brett logged into Facebook to find that his personal account, in which he had not posted for some time, had been irreversibly closed, reviewed, and that there were no appeals possible while stating no reason for the expulsion. After a public outcry from Joe Lonsdale, Tulsi Gabbard, myself, and others, and some back-channel communication to Facebook board members, the account was mysteriously opened again with a claim that it had merely been flagged by a system. Clearly, whatever Facebook was doing, it was willing to lie about this in front of the eyes of the world right before an election. Either it was reviewed and the claim about a mere system flagging the account was fake news, or there was no review and claim of human review was fake news. In either case, Facebook, just like The New York Times, Twitter, CNN, and all the other supposedly authoritative media, have been pushing the very fake news that they claim to decry. There are now no other possibilities for those of us who have been watching this space that bear scrutiny given the inconsistency of the claims. And so I took the time off so as not to give too much surface area to Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai, and whomever they are coordinating with or delegating to in the two to three months before the election and a couple of months thereafter. It is what the financial professionals call the uncompensated risk of losing my ability to communicate with you while the tech and media worlds are going for broke to control this election. If I knew that there was a good choice for you to make in the election, the risk would have a purpose. But I can see the unraveling of the United States fabric with either choice. It made me sad to pull back from something I love doing, and it's a real cost to me as it's significant income to miss out on at a time that I want to be building for retirement, presumably sometime in my eighties the way I'm going. But truth be told, there were also some other more minor issues I was having with COVID exposure and guests in the studio, loss of privacy, and some sad interactions with unstable people in my communities who seem to need psychological help. I may or may not choose to say something about these issues later. But I've missed doing the portal for you all, and I will be back in twenty twenty-one with perhaps a few episodes before then. But in the meantime, remember that one of the portal creeds is to only go long heroism if you can short martyrdom as part of the trade. I didn't enjoy us having to get Brett reinstated at Facebook, as no ordinary person without connections or followers would get this treatment. And we still haven't succeeded in getting Jack to explain what is going on at Twitter with the suspensions. So stay safe out there. You don't have to swing for the fences on this election because, quite frankly, both of these are terrible options. Vote however you feel is right. Because if I'm right, the real work is going to come after this, the most bogus of US elections that I've ever witnessed. Be well, everyone. Regular listeners to The Portal know that loyal sponsor Skillshare is a great fit for our audience of autodidacts. It's essentially a practical online university on your pocket smartphone filled with classes on everything you care about, taught through high-quality short instructional videos, which are curated by Skillshare to avoid you wasting your precious time sifting wheat from chaff that you might find on other sites where anyone can post while claiming to be an expert. That tiny subscription fee may actually be a huge help to you disguised as a cost. At Skillshare, members get unlimited access to thousands of inspiring classes with hands-on projects and can either choose feedback from a community of millions or to learn in isolation according to style. 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That means that more quality candidates will see it fast. So try Indeed out with a free seventy-five dollar credit at indeed.com/portal. This is their best offer available anywhere. Go right now to indeed.com/portal. Terms and conditions may apply, may result in employment and greater profitability. Offer valid through December thirty-first. [outro jingle] Is there only one such voice left in Europe? That was the thought running through my mind when I first met today's guest. I can't exactly remember how much I knew about Douglas Murray before I met him. I had heard his name and perhaps that he was both far right and gay, which while clearly possible is usually a warning sign in the United States that our activist media is unhappy with someone breaking ranks with its various narrative arcs. But Douglas is, for the moment, a much larger voice in Europe in general and in the UK in particular than he is in the States, so I was not particularly familiar with him. When I met him, it was electronic and one-sided. I was watching YouTube in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Twelve people had been gunned down in cold blood for exercising their European freedom of expression, eleven men and one woman. Three writers, five cartoonists, two in their seventies, one over eighty, Christians, Muslims, and Jews murdered side by side showed that the attackers were as happy to kill those of their own faith as they were any others, for this was not about religion, but control exerted through a chilling threat of deadly force against any and all who disagreed with the AQAP or Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. And there somehow was Douglas in the immediate aftermath of the mass killing being interviewed on Al Jazeera of all channels. I admit I fell instantly in love with him. "That's a pretty atrocious question, if I may say so," were Douglas's first sharp words in response to what was quite literally an atrocious question, given that the host asking it was eagerly skipping over discussing the dozen fresh corpses in a new atrocity to ask instead about the potential backlash to the killings. Douglas's voice was measured and controlled while dripping in the polite indignation and disgust for which the British are justly famous. There's an old aphorism now associated with Douglas's late friend Christopher Hitchens that a gentleman is defined to be a man who is never rude by accident, and Douglas here was every inch the gentleman. The concept of heroism is much discussed these days in the realm of Marvel Comics, but rarely seen in the wild as it were. This was the real thing, leadership, and my younger listeners will forgive me for saying so, but this was the best of masculinity personified. I do not have this kind of courage. I know because many years ago I had begged my best friend and his sister not to write as Shia Muslims in defense of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses when Ayatollah Khomeini's famous fatwa was first issued. What I learned back then from my Muslim friends was that jihadist Islam was a totalizing movement, and the problem was not with Islam, but with the absolutism with which it was often practiced. My friends were not absolutists, but as Muslims explained the danger clearly to me. I was not distinguishing properly between totalizing and non-totalizing Muslims. What I came to believe back then is that we must fight all totalizing ideologies, even if some of them happen to be associated with religions. If ownership of a Prius led fifteen percent of Prius owners to become totalitarians who would excuse the murder of anyone who dared drive a Chevy Volt or Tesla, we would need to defeat them. The primary reason that religion gets dragged into this is that there are very few large and potent totalizing movements left after the internet and the twentieth century had their way with them. North Korea, Islam, and social justice, for example, do remain potent, while traditional communism, market fundamentalism, the Catholic Church, and even violent nationalist terror movements like ETA, the IRA, PKK, Tamil Tigers, PFLP, etc. have oddly taken it on the chin. So if you want to understand the world in which we live, where totalizing movements still exist but are few in number, it is still essential to listen to voices more courageous than my own. Listen to Douglas's debate with Julian Assange. His defense of Western civilization is actually twofold. At the first layer, he is making many of the subtle arguments we need to hear but are too afraid to say in the present period. But underneath that, his courage, decency, wit, and eloquence in the modern era is itself an argument for some of what we have lost from the Europe of a previous age and what made it for a time the center of world progress in science and letters. Not everything that Europe achieved can be attributed to plunder, slavery, and oppression after all. Much of it was simply Europeans achieving by thinking more clearly and courageously than their rivals. I hope you will enjoy this uninterrupted conversation with a personal hero of mine and good friend, Douglas Murray, after a few brief messages from our sponsors who bring you this show. [gentle music] Think about this. If you're a business owner up against the uncertainty of 2020, your own legacy code is your competitor's advantage. Don't let your accounting programs and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. It's time to upgrade to returning sponsor NetSuite. 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Interview[edit]

[intro music]

Eric Weinstein: Hello, you've found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I get to sit down with my friend Douglas Murray, who's over here from the UK, where he is associate editor at The Spectator. He's also an author, uh, most recently, I believe, of The Madness of Crowds, but also The Strange Death of Europe before that, uh, and in general, one of the most keen observers of the American scene from abroad. Douglas, welcome to the US and The Portal.

00:28:03
Douglas Murray: It's a great pleasure to be here.

00:28:05
Eric Weinstein: Well, I've been, uh, looking forward to this for a while for our audience. Now, I don't know when we're going to be releasing this episode, but right now we are within a month of the, uh, end of the beginning of the US election, and there is a tremendous amount to say. But I worry that we in the US don't actually know what it is that's going on, and that it's affecting the rest of the planet. What is it that you're seeing on this trip to the US that, uh, maybe is somewhat surprising? It's been a couple of years since you've been here.

00:28:35
Douglas Murray: Yes, it is. Um, uh, it has been a couple of years. Uh, I'm touring around the US all month ahead of the election. A, a friend in New York said when we talked about this, "Oh, I see, it's disaster tourism."

00:28:47
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:28:49
Douglas Murray: It's sort, sort of. It's like those people who take package holidays to North Korea.

00:28:53
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah.

00:28:54
Douglas Murray: Um, it's, uh ... Well, it's a very interesting time to be here, obviously, whatever happens. Uh, I do have some general sort of feelings. One is that perhaps something that has cr- cr- crept up on me, and it's crept up on all of you, but I'm really struck particularly by how much more deranged everybody is than they were when I was last here. And I would say of all the people that it's ... that are, uh, visibly hurting, visibly hurting, are my liberal left-wing centrist friends, who just have been erupting all the time. It's ... Conversations are quite hard. Uh, I see what, what I described a little while ago as being the sort of snowplow of American politics that's occurred in the last few years, where if you just venture anywhere into what used to be the, the middle of the freeway, this snowplow just comes down and casts you to one side or the other. And, uh, that's just very clearly got a lot worse, and I don't know if the election, whatever way it goes, can resolve that. Maybe it'll placate it for a bit. I mean, that's, that's the main thought. The other thought, of course, is that I'm here in the midst of a, well, ongoing pandemic. Your country is reacting to it in a similar way to my own, uh, with all of the s- similar concerns that it brings with it. And, um- You know, it just feels like layer upon layer on top of the problems that already existed here and the questions that already existed here. Um-

00:30:34
Eric Weinstein: Do you think we're just getting started with these problems, and that this is really the beginning of a, um, towering skyscraper of, uh, insurmountable conundrum, and that these are really the first few levels and that we're, we're no- we're just getting going?

00:30:49
Douglas Murray: It does feel like that a bit. I mean, I mean, the sort of obvious reduced version of that is, you know, I don't know, does it make things better if Biden wins or if Trump wins, you know? I mean... And I can't help thinking, well, the underlying questions remain similar. Um, uh, you know, we, we are all at the moment, as I said, in this time where it seems to me, you know, you, you fight through one layer of the layers on top of everything, and you just find another. You know, you could, you could find a way through understanding the pandemic, but then you find politics, and then you find something else, and just on and on. Uh, but yes, it does feel a bit like that. I f- I find that about the pandemic in particular, this awful feeling that it's a sort of prelude to something, not the main event, you know.

00:31:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I, I have to admit, as a guy who would like to be able to think about this scientifically-

00:31:48
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:31:49
Eric Weinstein: ... I don't know where I can turn, and in part-

00:31:51
Douglas Murray: Right

00:31:51
Eric Weinstein: ... um, I know it's a little bit late to get in on, on, uh, on UK bashing, uh, given that the empire's been given up and all that, but to lose like, I don't know, nature.

00:32:05
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:32:05
Eric Weinstein: I, I don't know that I trust the Royal Society to be-

00:32:07
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:32:07
Eric Weinstein: ... an ar- an arbiter of things scientific, and I think you guys are in better shape than we are. Uh-

00:32:14
Douglas Murray: Well, well, possibly. I m- I, I had a, at the very beginning of the Corona era, I made the observation that this country had a, th- this country, America, had a particular problem, which is that every other country turned out to have some residue of, um, collective responsibility or, you know, non-partisan trust.

00:32:39
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:32:40
Douglas Murray: Uh, in the UK it turned out that, you know, a conservative government was able to... I mean, think of it this way, it, it was able to mandate that all young people not in a committed relationship and living with their partner should be forced into celibacy for months. You know, they did it. Um-

00:32:58
Eric Weinstein: With 100% compliance.

00:33:00
Douglas Murray: Y- I can't say I kept a tally.

00:33:02
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:33:03
Douglas Murray: Um, but, you know, it, it turned out that we a- actually did have significant levels of societal trust-

00:33:10
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:33:10
Douglas Murray: ... which by the way in Britain we had said in recent years we didn't have. I mean, and I, and to some extent I thought maybe all of the last years had been sort of performative to that extent. We'd kept on talking about what a divided country we were, yet, um, a pandemic came along and we turned out to have pockets of residual societal trust. We, for instance, wanted to hear from the Queen. You know, that was a rather, rather wonderful moment for some of us. Uh, it really, you know, we wanted to hear from somebody who had that perspective and length and, and wisdom, and could put it into some context of what we'd been through before and what we'd get through now. Um, th- every country had a version of that. I mean, I was struck by the fact, same thing in France, you know, Macron at the beginning, there was a some kind of unity. It was the same in, in most countries, except for the United States, where you couldn't even come together on a pandemic. You couldn't even come together on that without it being highly politicized and in an election season turned into a were you pro-Trump or anti-Trump. And I thought that was a, and think still, that is a very, very bad sign for this country.

00:34:10
Eric Weinstein: It's a, well, it's atrocious. But, uh, from a... And I hope, I hope this isn't too hopelessly utilitarian, but it is really the function of having a queen around that-

00:34:21
Douglas Murray: Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah. No, I'm a big, big fan. I mean, I, I think you guys made a mistake, but-

00:34:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think most of the time it's better off not to have one, but on the rare occasions that you need something, I don't know that it has to be a queen, but I, I always talk about the break glass in case of emergency-

00:34:37
Douglas Murray: Yes

00:34:37
Eric Weinstein: ... people you're supposed to keep aside from the political fray.

00:34:40
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:34:40
Eric Weinstein: So for example, David Attenborough, another one of yours-

00:34:43
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:34:43
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, has, uh, now ventured onto Instagram because of his concern, uh, at the end of his career for the planet.

00:34:50
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:34:50
Eric Weinstein: And it's important to have people, um, who, who unite.

00:34:56
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes, it is. Uh, and of course, as you well know, I mean, pockets of residual trust in expertise of particular kinds. I mean, one of the things I've found very, very hard about the, the pandemic has been that, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not a virologist. Um, I've never spent any serious amount of time before this year thinking about pandemics. As, um, as a friend of mine in the security area said to me at the beginning, "It's so annoying." You know, the pandemics guys were always like the people who you left during their panels at the conference because you didn't think it was relevant. [laughs]

00:35:31
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:35:32
Douglas Murray: Um, sort of annoying that these people should have had more attention on them. I, I didn't. I'm guilty of this. I didn't spend much time thinking about pandemics, if any. And so when it came along, I, I, like I think most people, thought, "Well, I'll trust the people who know." I do have now a very serious set of questions, I think we probably all do, and concerns, not least on the fact that first of all, the people who I and most of the rest of the public trusted turn out to have been wrong in significant ways. I'm thinking of things like the Imperial College study that predicted, um, mortality rates at, at a level which you just haven't seen in any country, whatever the country's policy is. You know, you don't see these figures in Italy, you don't see them in Sweden. Um, and- It turned, when it turned out that those same people who I trusted and my fellow countrymen trusted, had pulled the same graphs out with BSE, for instance, I started to get a sense of, uh, ennui about this. You thought, "Oh, that's a shame." Uh, you know, I, I, I was very willing to put... I m- I mean, think, you know, we all l- were locked in our houses on the advice of these people. One of whom, by the way, in classic British fashion, you know, you're never very far away from a Carry On movie, turned out to tell everyone else to remain in celibacy and turned out to be h- going off to shag his mistress every, uh, other, other day and, uh, breaking lockdown in a uniquely sort of, uh, British way. Um, but these people first became slight laughing stocks and then actual, a- actually I think a significant amount of, of bitterness started to creep into it, and I think the next one will be doubt over everything. I mean, I've, I've... I have this very concerning thought that the pandemic was a wonderful first peri- it was a period at first that was wonderful for science, because it showed that science was a, was perhaps the only thing left that we trusted, and that actually when the scientists appeared with the politicians, then we thought, "Okay, they're serious." This isn't like a newspaper columnist appearing with the politicians. But then-

00:37:50
Eric Weinstein: Yes

00:37:51
Douglas Murray: ... something happened.

00:37:52
Eric Weinstein: All right. Well, keep going.

00:37:53
Douglas Murray: Well, put it this way. I saw there's a, a, um, a climate, uh, change, uh, rather extremist climate change, very extremist climate change group in the UK called Extinction Rebellion, who have been putting up posters in the last few months in my country saying, "We trusted the scientists on COVID, now let's trust them on the planet." And I thought, "You have got that exactly the wrong way around. You've got that exactly the wrong way around." The public are currently thinking, "We did trust the scientists. They turned out to have led us into significant error. We're not listening to them again."

00:38:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:38:35
Douglas Murray: I mean, i- i- it's quite at this stage, it would have to be, um, the plague, a, a child-slaying plague, the Black Death, to make us listen to the scientists again.

00:38:51
Eric Weinstein: So you're saying that the reservoir of trust that was in Britain, even for the scientists, after, at this point in the COVID epidemic-

00:38:59
Douglas Murray: Yes

00:38:59
Eric Weinstein: ... is almost drained?

00:39:00
Douglas Murray: I would've said it's very nearly drained, yes.

00:39:05
Eric Weinstein: Interesting.

00:39:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

00:39:06
Eric Weinstein: Let me ask a que- a different question. Is long form podcasting the last bastion after science, not because it's particularly rigorous, not because it's credentialed, but because you're actually hearing people struggling with reality-

00:39:24
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:39:24
Eric Weinstein: ... in a non-institutional framework? Is the real problem, and this is a very US-centric, um, perspective, that our institutions are all susceptible for institutional reasons, and it doesn't, there's no kind of institution that can resist this, uh, sort of decay. E- even a-

00:39:45
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:39:45
Eric Weinstein: ... scientific institution is now falling, uh, prey to the same pressures-

00:39:51
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:39:51
Eric Weinstein: ... as a, a- as a financial institution, as a medical institution, as a journalistic in, uh, institution. All of these institutions are falling. A- and, you know, if you'd asked me for the most trusted institution, at least-

00:40:09
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:40:09
Eric Weinstein: ... as far as I can see things in America, at some point I might have said, "Well, it could be Caltech."

00:40:15
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

00:40:15
Eric Weinstein: Uh, it could be the Democratic Party. It could've b- be the Supreme Court.

00:40:19
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:40:19
Eric Weinstein: Right now for me, honestly, it is Trader Joe's.

00:40:22
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:40:23
Eric Weinstein: Because Trader Joe's has stood up. They will not change Trader Jose or Trader Yusuf or any of-

00:40:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:40:28
Eric Weinstein: ... these things because they th- [laughs] they think this is ridiculous.

00:40:32
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:40:32
Eric Weinstein: There are pressures on institutions to lie to us.

00:40:36
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:40:36
Eric Weinstein: In particular with respect to health, because one of the things that early on in this epidemic, it became very clear we didn't have the masks we were supposed to have.

00:40:43
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:40:44
Eric Weinstein: And therefore, we would have to tell a precursor story about masks being dangerous or not working-

00:40:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:40:50
Eric Weinstein: ... so that people wouldn't buy them, so that we could have them for our healthcare professionals. And that, that to me was a great crime. I noticed that to a lot of other people, it's like, well, of course they're telling a lie because they have to.

00:41:02
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

00:41:02
Eric Weinstein: And I thought, "Well, if you do that too much, you're gonna lose science writ large."

00:41:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah. I, I, I agree. I, I think that's... I think, I think the masks thing was one of the first and most worrying turns in that, for precisely the same reason. It was an obvious, manifest, provable lie.

00:41:19
Eric Weinstein: Do you have things that you can trust still in, in the UK? Has the BBC managed to steer clear of this, or are they going-

00:41:25
Douglas Murray: Not really. I, the- there's a claim that... They, they, they certainly have more trust than other broadcast media organizations. Uh, at times of national crisis, the BBC, trust in the BBC has usually been good. Actually, uh, the, the stats that we have, the opinion polls this year show that m- that a decline in... That, that almost, uh, certainly for, in the opening months of the virus, the tr- trust in institutions rose in almost every case other than the media.

00:41:55
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

00:41:55
Douglas Murray: And the media plummeted. Um, I, I mean, my own view of that was that it was because the media, it didn't know what questions to ask. I, I, but I include myself in this. As I say, I'm, I've, I'd never thought about viruses in any depth before. Um, but if you were a BBC correspondent and you had to ask questions of the government at the press conference every day, and you didn't know about viruses, you were reduced to weird journalistic games like X has said this and now you're saying this, Minister Y, aren't you in contradiction? Or you said this a couple of days ago and now you're saying this, isn't that a, a U-turn? Uh, this is the result of what, you know, us know-nothing humanities people do-

00:42:45
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, no, no, no

00:42:45
Douglas Murray: ... when-

00:42:46
Eric Weinstein: This is-

00:42:46
Douglas Murray: Uh-

00:42:47
Eric Weinstein: ... happening to all... I, I'm a technical guy with a technical degree.

00:42:51
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:42:51
Eric Weinstein: I couldn't follow the reasoning at all. And what you're talking about-

00:42:54
Douglas Murray: Right

00:42:54
Eric Weinstein: ... is what I call the checksum theory of politics. When you're handed a file to install on your computer and you wanna know whether or not it's been corrupted, you can't read all of the lines of code to find out that-

00:43:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:43:05
Eric Weinstein: ... that they're all in the right place. But there's some consequence-

00:43:08
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:43:08
Eric Weinstein: ... of the r- right lines of code being present called a checksum-

00:43:12
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

00:43:12
Eric Weinstein: ... which you can inspect, which is far easier to monitor. And I think that-

00:43:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:43:16
Eric Weinstein: ... a lot of the questions that you're talking about are, if I can't understand what you're saying, like I don't... I may not know what a bleeblediblop is-

00:43:24
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:43:24
Eric Weinstein: ... but if you said yesterday that they were essential, and if you say today-

00:43:27
Douglas Murray: Yes

00:43:27
Eric Weinstein: ... that they're, uh, absolutely horrid, I can at least ask you-

00:43:32
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:43:32
Eric Weinstein: ... to clarify between your two positions with a zero knowledge orientation relative to what a bleeblediblop even is to begin with.

00:43:39
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:43:39
Eric Weinstein: And as a result, we're in this incredibly low level of s- state where we're just trying to say, "Did, did you make any sense?" Or, or-

00:43:47
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:43:48
Eric Weinstein: Is there any coherence to your perspective?

00:43:50
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:43:51
Eric Weinstein: We can't actually tell what we're asking. I, I... by the way, I had a lot of very top technical talent on the, on, on phone calls early on with Corona. Nobody was making sense.

00:44:01
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:44:01
Eric Weinstein: And I'll tell you, the one thing that we actually do- did know early on is that this has nothing to do whatsoever with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

00:44:09
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:44:09
Eric Weinstein: Like, I don't know how we came to such a strong conclusion so quickly, but the one thing we know about this virus is is that that absolutely isn't implicated.

00:44:17
Douglas Murray: Why do you say that?

00:44:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think it's a joke. I think we worry that it might be implicated, and there's some political reason or economic reason for absolutely, um, treating anyone who thinks that it might be of interest as a lunatic. Like, that, that seems to me to be a policy decision. I would certainly... I- if it had one tenth of 1% chance, I certainly wouldn't be calling it settled.

00:44:44
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:44:45
Eric Weinstein: Why... There's, there's a very interesting-

00:44:46
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:44:46
Eric Weinstein: ... move when we take something off the table.

00:44:48
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:44:49
Eric Weinstein: So the, the two other ones that I will give you would be, uh, climate science is settled science-

00:44:54
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:44:54
Eric Weinstein: ... and vaccines are 100% safe.

00:44:56
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:44:57
Eric Weinstein: Any time... I, I can, as a scientist, I can check those two statements-

00:45:02
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:45:02
Eric Weinstein: ... instantly, and they're both false. Now, it doesn't mean that I'm against vaccines or I don't think that the planet is warming up due to human activity. But when somebody says, "Trust the scientists," they're really saying something like, "We, the UN, have gathered the IPCC and gotten a consensus statement. Please accept that as if it was somehow, uh, settled at the level of the laws of arithmetic," which it-

00:45:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:45:25
Eric Weinstein: ... absolutely is not.

00:45:26
Douglas Murray: Yeah, those... There's a set of those, aren't there? I mean, one was, I mean, s- a s- relatively small number of people knew that the World Health Organization was another of those international organizations that wasn't exactly what it called itself. But now a very large number of people know that. Uh, and again, we have this issue of residual institutional trust. Um-

00:45:51
Eric Weinstein: Do you... You, you saw this famous video with the, I guess, a Hong Kong journalist trying to ask this-

00:45:55
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely

00:45:56
Eric Weinstein: ... person from the WHO, and he's pretending that he can't hear. And then she says-

00:45:59
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:45:59
Eric Weinstein: ... "Well, shall I ask it again?" She's... He's like, "No, let's move on."

00:46:02
Douglas Murray: [laughs] That's right.

00:46:03
Eric Weinstein: And, and then he reaches for the, the kill button.

00:46:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

00:46:05
Eric Weinstein: And he's... This is a bad magic show that I'm forced to sit through every day.

00:46:11
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, uh, the, um-

00:46:12
Eric Weinstein: And long-term, long-form podcasting can talk about the bad magic show.

00:46:15
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

00:46:16
Eric Weinstein: The key issue is-

00:46:17
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:46:17
Eric Weinstein: ... CNN or NPR or The New York Times can't.

00:46:22
Douglas Murray: And it's not just because of length and the ability to summon up different and competing ideas and play them off against each other. It's not just that, is it?

00:46:33
Eric Weinstein: There's a group of people from Finland who put mushrooms into instant coffee who pay for this show, right? Called Four Sigmatic, for instance.

00:46:43
Douglas Murray: Right. You, you didn't give me a, the good stuff. I should... Yeah.

00:46:46
Eric Weinstein: Douglas... Secretly, Douglas is actually drinking Four Sigmatic. No.

00:46:50
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

00:46:51
Eric Weinstein: The, [laughs] the fact is is that this show is one person.

00:46:54
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:46:55
Eric Weinstein: And, um-

00:46:56
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:46:58
Eric Weinstein: We, we have a bunch of crazy advertisers.

00:47:00
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:47:00
Eric Weinstein: It's not like P- Porsche a- and Mercedes aren't choosing to advertise on the show and threatening, "Eric, you know-

00:47:06
Douglas Murray: Sure

00:47:06
Eric Weinstein: ... you had Douglas Murray on. It's quite dicey."

00:47:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah. He's not one of us.

00:47:09
Eric Weinstein: He's not one of us, you know.

00:47:11
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

00:47:11
Eric Weinstein: We're, we're worried about this demographic slipping away.

00:47:13
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

00:47:14
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, at some level, that's what's giving us our independence.

00:47:18
Douglas Murray: Sure. Absolutely. Uh, but just going back to this thing, I mean, the institutions, uh, it, it does... It is striking if they, if they can't deal with the, the complexities. Um, it al- it al- it's, it's worrying when the institutions can't be as complex as the public are. I mean, I... One of the things that's been on my mind throughout all this has been, um, moments when the public are clearly watching and nobody comments that the conclusion... Nobody comments on the conclusion the public are likely to have come f- come to. For instance, when mass protests break out, and maybe we shouldn't get onto this yet, but when mass protests break out, one of the things the public is clearly doing is thinking, "Well, we'll see, because there ought to be a second wave now. Interesting. There hasn't been. Why is that?"

00:48:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, remember, the real public health problem i- is, uh, systemic racism.

00:48:12
Douglas Murray: I'm aware of that.

00:48:12
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] So-

00:48:14
Douglas Murray: Uh, but, but you know-

00:48:15
Eric Weinstein: But the intellectual whiplash

00:48:17
Douglas Murray: ... even before we get on... Yes.

00:48:17
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:48:17
Douglas Murray: But even before we get onto that-

00:48:19
Eric Weinstein: All right

00:48:19
Douglas Murray: ... I think-

00:48:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:48:20
Douglas Murray: ... there is the issue of things that were not noted, which the public can clearly note. We can notice that everybody who went on the protests doesn't appear to have spent the res- you know, the s- succeeding weeks in bed Gasping for breath. This means that, that people seem to know more than everyone who's speaking to them, including those in authority, who are then left repeating a mantra that the public less and less believe. And this, with the Wuhan-

00:49:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:49:00
Douglas Murray: ... lab is obviously a part of that. I, I remember just before the, the thing went really bad, speaking to people in government in this country and elsewhere who, you know, "Well, you know, this is the area where they have a laboratory that does some of this stuff." And then a few weeks later-

00:49:19
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:49:19
Douglas Murray: ... it was announced that unless you believed that a bat at a wet market-

00:49:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:49:25
Douglas Murray: ... caused it, you were a total psychopath maniac.

00:49:30
Eric Weinstein: And am I, am I right that the wet market is not one thought to sell bats? My understanding is, is that it is a wet market that is not a purveyor of, of, uh, of bats.

00:49:40
Douglas Murray: I mean, I, I, I-

00:49:41
Eric Weinstein: I don't know whether that's-

00:49:42
Douglas Murray: I don't know

00:49:42
Eric Weinstein: ... yeah.

00:49:42
Douglas Murray: I haven't, I haven't i- investigated-

00:49:44
Eric Weinstein: You haven't spent that much time in the Wuhan wet market.

00:49:46
Douglas Murray: No. No. I mean, uh, when, when, when there was the bat thing, I ... A moment of levity that's maybe needed, maybe not. Uh, uh, um, when the, the bat theory came up, you know, I s- I said that it vindicated one of my long-held theories, which was, the problem with human beings is that someone always shags a monkey.

00:50:02
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:50:02
Douglas Murray: You know? It's always been a disappointment of mine in our species, you know, there's just always just one, one guy away from doing that, you know. And, uh, and this is one of the things that makes the survival of our species extraordinary. Uh, uh, um, I mean, obviously it's extraordinarily precarious. And I thought, "Oh, there's always gonna be one person, you know, who, who, who soups up a bat and then eats it." And then, and then of course as time went on, one realized actually the, the bat one was the less embarrassing story that the Chinese might want to get out. It wasn't, as some of us thought at first, the most embarrassing thing.

00:50:35
Eric Weinstein: Uh-huh.

00:50:35
Douglas Murray: It was, it was actually the less embarrassing thing. Um, and then we had the, the phenomena of, I think first of all the Australian intelligence services and, um, you know, one of the five eyes. Uh, uh, I think it was the Australians first that said, "Actually, we think this might have come from a laboratory." And then again, there's another bit of whiplash, because in the meantime in- institutions had said-

00:51:00
Eric Weinstein: Yes

00:51:00
Douglas Murray: ... "That's a conspiracy theory."

00:51:01
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:51:02
Douglas Murray: And then one of the five eyes says it, and the Australian government, and I think then the New Zealand government, calls for an official inquiry into it. And then the Chinese government tries to do everything it can to punish the Australians. And yes, I mean, by this point one's neck is, is sore. Um-

00:51:21
Eric Weinstein: Unless one gives up any attempt to believe any of this, right?

00:51:26
Douglas Murray: Yeah. [laughs]

00:51:27
Eric Weinstein: A- and, and this issue about ... Well, I don't know what vantage point I wanna pull back to to analyze this with you.

00:51:35
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:51:36
Eric Weinstein: The total collapse of institutional integrity-

00:51:40
Douglas Murray: Yes

00:51:40
Eric Weinstein: ... across all sectors-

00:51:41
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:51:41
Eric Weinstein: ... across the entire Anglophone world almost.

00:51:46
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

00:51:46
Eric Weinstein: May- maybe there's a pocket of integrity somewhere.

00:51:49
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

00:51:49
Eric Weinstein: But-

00:51:50
Douglas Murray: It's, it's very hard

00:51:51
Eric Weinstein: ... um, WTF?

00:51:55
Douglas Murray: Right. Yeah.

00:51:56
Eric Weinstein: And, and why is it that you [laughs] and I... I mean, I have to admit we have these late night calls, um, which is difficult because it can't be late night for both of us. Uh-

00:52:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah. I, I don't mind when you call me in the early hours.

00:52:09
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:52:09
Douglas Murray: Hope you're lunch. [laughs]

00:52:11
Eric Weinstein: So w- what... Douglas, what the hell's going on?

00:52:14
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

00:52:14
Eric Weinstein: I mean, it's as if we're under some kind of swarm attack where every institution goes mad-

00:52:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:52:23
Eric Weinstein: ... in succession.

00:52:25
Douglas Murray: Yes. I, I, um, as you know, I mean, I, I thought that ... I thought for a long time the, the, the job of the era is not to go mad, you know, first.

00:52:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:52:33
Douglas Murray: The thou shalt not go mad is absolutely the first rule of the time. And I did think when, when the pandemic first came and we did all think, or a lot of us thought as we were told, that, you know, we'd s- we'd be losing a lot of our loved ones-

00:52:51
Eric Weinstein: Mm

00:52:52
Douglas Murray: ... that that was an even more important, uh, um, impulse. Uh, okay, this is, this is gonna, this is gonna sort some of the wheat from the chaff. You know, this is gonna reveal the stoics in our society, you know?

00:53:05
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:53:05
Douglas Murray: Um, and I can't say that I was entirely, I mean, obviously I was gloomy about the prospect, but I thought in some ways, I mean, that's a, that's a generational challenge in that case. And, um, it's an invitation to seriousness, you know, above anything else. Uh, it'll clear debris away. It'll give us g- greater clarity. And then of course among much else, the fact that the virus turned out not to be what we thought it was at the beginning.

00:53:33
Eric Weinstein: Have you lost anyone close?

00:53:36
Douglas Murray: I have one friend who died from, from the virus. Wonderful, uh, Indian economist, Deepak Lal. He was with UCLA, who was... I only discovered quite a long, long time afterwards actually, in the flood, flood of news.

00:53:49
Eric Weinstein: Huh.

00:53:49
Douglas Murray: But Deepak's the only person I know who, who, who died from it. He was 80. A wonderful, wonderful man. Um, but I mean, I had, I had friends at the beginning of the virus, you know, who, who got it. I mean, a friend of mine who's 94 who got it, and I just thought, "Oh, hell." And after a couple of weeks, you know, she called me back and told me she was better.

00:54:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:54:11
Douglas Murray: And then I... Then that was one of the ones for me that made me think, "Oh, that's interesting." Because if it was what we'd thought it was, it would ... Do, did that ... It wouldn't be possible.

00:54:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I ... But probably there's some sort of predisposition that if we only knew to look for the marker or something we would-

00:54:25
Douglas Murray: Right

00:54:25
Eric Weinstein: ... understand that our odds are, you know, greatly different.

00:54:29
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:54:29
Eric Weinstein: There's something about the fact that we never came up with the right intellectual framework.

00:54:34
Douglas Murray: Yes.

00:54:34
Eric Weinstein: We were so focused on flattening the curve-

00:54:36
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:54:37
Eric Weinstein: ... which I think- Was about what I've called depths of discretion, where if you, if you're wildly unprepared because you haven't responded to your own literature telling you to prepare for a surge need as opposed to some slight variation around regular, you know, modal needs, um, then what you do is you try to say, "How do we make sure that everyone changes his or her life-

00:55:01
Douglas Murray: Right

00:55:01
Eric Weinstein: ... in order to, uh, make sure that we don't have a triage situation where a physician has to say, "You get a ventilator and you do not""?

00:55:09
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:55:10
Eric Weinstein: But you-

00:55:10
Douglas Murray: Did you, did you lose anyone close?

00:55:12
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I don't think I've lost anyone close. We lost, um, John Horton Conway, a mathematician, uh, you know, musicians like John Prine-

00:55:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:55:22
Eric Weinstein: ... great songwriters. So there, there, there are deaths that-

00:55:25
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:55:25
Eric Weinstein: ... have mattered to me. I've, I've had people-

00:55:27
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:55:27
Eric Weinstein: ... in my community, um, for the portal-

00:55:30
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:55:30
Eric Weinstein: ... who've lost grandparents-

00:55:32
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:55:32
Eric Weinstein: ... and the likes. But, uh, I don't think I've lost anyone close to the virus.

00:55:36
Douglas Murray: One of the things that, that, that, that made me... I, I've been uncharacteristically silent on lots of issues to do with the virus because I haven't, I haven't felt confident because of a set of the same problems we're all in. Um, there were certain people who from the outset said, "This is all nonsense." And I, I didn't feel at all that I could go along with them because of the odd outriders which I was coming across in my own life-

00:56:01
Eric Weinstein: Yes

00:56:01
Douglas Murray: ... as well as reading about. You know, I... People who I knew who were young who really were gasping for breath when they got it.

00:56:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:56:10
Douglas Murray: And, um, and I suppose it's also like a lot of us, you know, have loved ones who have underlying conditions. I would... I, I felt perhaps it's a sort of fatalistic pagan element of my personality, but I did feel quite strongly that, you know, if one was blase about it, certainly if one was blase about it publicly, you know, the gods would strike. I, I don't know quite why I still have this feeling.

00:56:37
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I think it's marvelous that you do-

00:56:38
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah

00:56:38
Eric Weinstein: ... because it's, it's a self-protective one even if though it's-

00:56:41
Douglas Murray: Yes

00:56:41
Eric Weinstein: ... technically irrational.

00:56:43
Douglas Murray: Yes. Um, well, it's like, you know, pride before a fall and, and all those sorts of cliches, which are cliches because they're, they're true.

00:56:51
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:56:51
Douglas Murray: Uh, you know, you really should expect that the gods will come and smite you if you're too, you know...

00:56:58
Eric Weinstein: How many of them?

00:57:00
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Oh, so many.

00:57:00
Eric Weinstein: All of the gods.

00:57:01
Douglas Murray: All of them.

00:57:02
Eric Weinstein: All the best gods.

00:57:03
Douglas Murray: One great rush of gods to take out Murray. Um-

00:57:07
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:57:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah, I, I d- I did feel that. I still feel that, that a bit. Um, uh, and, and as I say, I mean, you know, we've all been trying to work out exa- It's, you know, so you, so one finds themself in this position, you think, "Well, I, I don't, I don't... I know I don't believe what the health secretary's telling me anymore."

00:57:24
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:57:24
Douglas Murray: "But I also don't believe what his most ardent critics are saying." And I just don't know in this terrain between, other than, you know, be careful, be sensible, but my idea of careful and sensible obviously isn't the same as everyone else's. And I don't know how you would institutionalize that or, or make it a national policy.

00:57:43
Eric Weinstein: But none of this is making any sense to me-

00:57:46
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:57:46
Eric Weinstein: ... at all because we haven't developed the right intellectual framework. We developed a framework for public health, and forgive me for saying this.

00:57:53
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

00:57:53
Eric Weinstein: This is not popular, particularly with my very left of center, uh, social world. But I believe that public health is all about lying-

00:58:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

00:58:01
Eric Weinstein: ... and about habituating public health people to figure out how do you get a distorted, uh, outcome... Sorry. How do you get a distorted comment to produce a beneficial outcome?

00:58:15
Douglas Murray: Mm.

00:58:15
Eric Weinstein: You have the right to distort whatever. Like you could make it rhyme-

00:58:18
Douglas Murray: Right

00:58:18
Eric Weinstein: ... so that more people can remember it.

00:58:20
Douglas Murray: Right. Uh, yes. Um, like, uh, coming up with a sort of five Ps and all that sort of thing.

00:58:25
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like all-

00:58:26
Douglas Murray: The three Ls. It's always like what if one of them doesn't start with a P, you know?

00:58:29
Eric Weinstein: Right, and then you, you force, you coerce it into doing that.

00:58:32
Douglas Murray: Yeah. You go protect, prevent.

00:58:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:58:35
Douglas Murray: Parlor games. I don't know. It doesn't matter. You just, you just m- I don't believe that stuff.

00:58:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's like reading, writing, and arithmetic.

00:58:40
Douglas Murray: Yeah. [laughs]

00:58:41
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] You just-

00:58:43
Douglas Murray: Um

00:58:43
Eric Weinstein: ... shove it into the circular hole no matter what the shape of the peg.

00:58:46
Douglas Murray: Um, y- yes. I... What, what, what would you come up with to try to explain it, or to understand it rather?

00:58:55
Eric Weinstein: I, I would just tell people, hey, the intellectual ante for this game went way up. You need 10 ti- you need to bet 10 times the amount of brain power and storage space for this than y- you usually do. You know, i- if you, if you followed, like, let's say in the UK, the Premier League-

00:59:13
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

00:59:14
Eric Weinstein: ... you have a very clear idea about all the players who pass through your team, you know-

00:59:19
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

00:59:19
Eric Weinstein: ... the, the, the, the history.

00:59:21
Douglas Murray: Right.

00:59:21
Eric Weinstein: You know, the ways in which the weather c- might influence the game in an outdoor versus an indoor. I don't know, all of this stuff. Bring that level of complexity that you would bring to football or soccer-

00:59:32
Douglas Murray: Right

00:59:32
Eric Weinstein: ... into virology-

00:59:34
Douglas Murray: Yeah

00:59:34
Eric Weinstein: ... and you'll be fine. And this is-

00:59:36
Douglas Murray: Right

00:59:36
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, this is the key f- thing that we got wrong about television, is that we used to think that television was the idiot box-

00:59:42
Douglas Murray: Right

00:59:42
Eric Weinstein: ... until we realized that it, it allowed for more character development than even film.

00:59:48
Douglas Murray: Yeah, absolutely. Um, uh, the, the couple of things that al- also concern me about this are on the public health one, obviously we... At, at the beginning of this whole thing, certainly in the UK, and I think in America to some extent, uh, we had this thing of we must protect the health service. You know, we must protect the hospitals-

01:00:07
Eric Weinstein: Mm

01:00:07
Douglas Murray: ... by not being ill and going into them. Uh, of course, I mean, I and others said at the time, uh, you know, actually the health service exists to protect us, not the other way around. Uh, it isn't that we form a ring of steel around it, but that it's meant to form a ring of steel around us. And then I... Then of course you started to hear, I know, that a, a grateful public was sort of sending donuts to doctors who had nothing to do other than spend their day eating donuts. I'm not saying in all cases. At the beginning, there was certainly a fight on, on the front line. But since then, our health service has been moribund. Uh, we, we set up hosp..., we set up a 10,000 capacity hospital that didn't take a patient.

01:00:49
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:00:52
Douglas Murray: And of course, one version of that story is it didn't take a patient because we all locked ourselves in our houses. But another one is, no, that's-

01:00:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, see, I guess what my take on it is, is that at some level you had a multivariate situation.

01:01:06
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:01:07
Eric Weinstein: The virus was not simply the flu.

01:01:10
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:01:10
Eric Weinstein: It wasn't, it wasn't the, it wasn't the 1918-

01:01:15
Douglas Murray: Right

01:01:15
Eric Weinstein: ... Spanish flu.

01:01:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

01:01:17
Eric Weinstein: It wasn't the bubonic plague.

01:01:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:01:18
Eric Weinstein: It wasn't a cold and a sniffle.

01:01:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:01:20
Eric Weinstein: And what we kept doing was reaching for an analogy to something it wasn't.

01:01:26
Douglas Murray: Right.

01:01:26
Eric Weinstein: And none of the analogies worked because we didn't build the intellectual space for something new, which is-

01:01:32
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:01:32
Eric Weinstein: ... okay, whatever the main parameters are that tell you-

01:01:34
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:01:34
Eric Weinstein: ... what this, what this virus is, here's what we need to worry about.

01:01:38
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:01:39
Eric Weinstein: Like for example, morbidity as opposed to mortality-

01:01:42
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:01:42
Eric Weinstein: ... wasn't very well-

01:01:43
Douglas Murray: Right

01:01:43
Eric Weinstein: ... understood. Does this really end up in the brain? How, you know, what are the consequences?

01:01:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:01:50
Eric Weinstein: But again, I, I really have the feeling that this somehow masks the real story, and the real story to me is that we are not the people who won World War II anymore.

01:02:02
Douglas Murray: Say more.

01:02:04
Eric Weinstein: We have an idea, like you, you and I are both o- of an age that we were born a good deal, I was born 20 years after the conclusion of World War II, but I still have the idea, we put a man on a moon, we won World War II.

01:02:20
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm, mm, mm. Yeah.

01:02:21
Eric Weinstein: And we, I don't think did, I don't think this society would be capable of fighting a World War II.

01:02:32
Douglas Murray: I'm never confident of that claim.

01:02:34
Eric Weinstein: All right. Well, this is interesting.

01:02:35
Douglas Murray: Um, well, uh, and because, uh, I, I don't-

01:02:38
Eric Weinstein: I don't think the US would be capable of knowing what to do about a European problem.

01:02:45
Douglas Murray: I, I, I... The only thing is, it, it didn't know what to do twice before.

01:02:49
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:02:50
Douglas Murray: Um, I, I, you know, my own, my own instinct on this is always that, that, that people aren't n- never are the people they are going to be unless the events-

01:03:00
Eric Weinstein: Happen

01:03:01
Douglas Murray: ... happen. Um-

01:03:02
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:03:04
Douglas Murray: The, the, the, the famous example being the Oxford Union debate before World War II-

01:03:08
Eric Weinstein: Yes

01:03:08
Douglas Murray: ... in the 1930s when the Oxford Union voted by a majority that it would not die for king and country.

01:03:12
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:03:13
Douglas Murray: And everyone at the time was hands up in the air in horror at the pacifism of the new generation, who 10 years later were fighting their way through Normandy. And, um, s- that, so this happens. And-

01:03:25
Eric Weinstein: No, no, I, I quite agree

01:03:27
Douglas Murray: ... and, and as I say, there was a little residual part of that at the beginning of the virus, albeit the most minimal version. And if our generation's challenge is to sit on our ass-

01:03:36
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

01:03:36
Douglas Murray: ... for weeks, then there's some irony and- [laughs]

01:03:42
Eric Weinstein: It's quite funny of a, in a horrible way.

01:03:43
Douglas Murray: Yeah, absolutely.

01:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:03:45
Douglas Murray: It, it, it's everything that we worried [laughs] that our generation would be-

01:03:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, because we were called before-

01:03:49
Douglas Murray: ... our great challenge

01:03:49
Eric Weinstein: ... after 9/11.

01:03:50
Douglas Murray: Right.

01:03:50
Eric Weinstein: Americans w- wanted to do something. It's like, "Go shopping."

01:03:54
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:03:54
Eric Weinstein: It's like, you're kidding.

01:03:55
Douglas Murray: And the great call-up this time was to sit on the sofa eating-

01:04:00
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:04:00
Douglas Murray: ... Cheetos and watching Netflix. Um, yes. I, I... So as, as I say, I'm, I never think it's totally settled, all of that-

01:04:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:04:08
Douglas Murray: ... greatest generation sort of thing. Um, I do think that aside from the, the, the public health element of this, there is just, there are a set of other things that we haven't dealt with. And one of them, which is the only bit that I do take the sort of 1940s comparison with is, are we able or willing to live with risk? And that's, to me, clearly the element of this that's now, um, being contested. A portion of our societies clearly think that zero risk is the desirable aim at this stage.

01:04:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, a very large group of people, I, I don't even know what the w- pretend to believe this?

01:04:55
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, yeah. No, I hear-

01:04:56
Eric Weinstein: How does one even imagine-

01:04:58
Douglas Murray: I know

01:04:58
Eric Weinstein: ... that what risk can be remo- I, I don't understand what it means.

01:05:01
Douglas Murray: Um, uh, uh, the only way I can interpret it is, um, for instance, I mean, in each of our countries we have these polls that show the public perception of the mortality rate is wildly higher than the actual rates. I mean, in America, the general public think more people have died than in World War II in America from the virus. In my own country, it's similar. I mean, people think that percentiles of the population. It, it's not, it's nowhere near.

01:05:24
Eric Weinstein: But, but this is this thing I'm saying about, about public health, which is we have to lie to people-

01:05:29
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:05:29
Eric Weinstein: ... in order to get them-

01:05:30
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

01:05:30
Eric Weinstein: ... to undertake a behavior to actually make sure that the levels are lower.

01:05:35
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:05:35
Eric Weinstein: So in effect, I think that the way a public health professional might see this, and I, I, this is horrible, is, well, we did have that perception, uh, pushed out, and thank God the public overreacted because that's why, that's why our numbers are so low in terms of mortality.

01:05:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

01:05:51
Eric Weinstein: So mission accomplished.

01:05:52
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:05:52
Eric Weinstein: Y- yes, you've degraded the trust-

01:05:54
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:05:54
Eric Weinstein: ... in all of science in order to pull this off, but for the price of scaring the living crap out of a large number of people-

01:06:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:06:01
Eric Weinstein: ... we can get the death rate somewhat lower.

01:06:03
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Uh, the, well, so the f- the first thing is the pu- public perception versus the reality-

01:06:08
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:06:09
Douglas Murray: ... which has obviously taken a hit. The second is, a, a percentage of people in the general public in each of our countries who actually t- tell the pollsters that they like the lockdown-

01:06:19
Eric Weinstein: Yes

01:06:19
Douglas Murray: ... or they want the lockdown. We had at one point, I think in May or June, 28% of the British public saying that they, they would like the lockdown to continue, even if all five conditions the government had set for lifting the lockdown were met.

01:06:32
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:06:33
Douglas Murray: [laughs] And you say, "Who are, who are these 28%?"[laughs]

01:06:38
Eric Weinstein: That's not inconsequent.

01:06:39
Douglas Murray: No.

01:06:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:06:40
Douglas Murray: Um, I think by the way the answer is very, uh, um, maybe it'll be unpopular thing to say. I think the answer is quite a lot of people who for instance found the furlough scheme in which the British government gave 80% of, paid for 80% of salaries.

01:06:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:06:52
Douglas Murray: And 80% of a salary if you don't have to commute, and you don't have to go into the office, and you can sit in your underpants all day is, is very attractive. So there's, there's a lot of people quite willing to take that. It depends on other variables of course. Have you got a garden? What age are you? Do you own a house? Can you pad around a bit? Or are you, you know, a millennial stuck in a rented flat staring at the walls and climbing up them? I mean, all that stuff definitely makes a difference. Um, but, but that, that, that 28% sort of who just couldn't get out again-

01:07:26
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:07:27
Douglas Murray: ... obviously also includes the, the elderly and, and the very worried.

01:07:31
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:07:31
Douglas Murray: And we all know, you know, cases legitimately and otherwise of that. And then there's the, the younger people who are, you know, excessively I think worried about the virus. But that, that 28% is a very revealing one, and they exist everywhere. And then you've got the one of, the one that's hard to read, which is the high numbers of, of the general public who want more stringent measures. We had a poll recently that said 70% of the public wanted curfews.

01:08:03
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

01:08:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah. I mean, either this plays to some deep sexual fetish of the British nation which wants to be-

01:08:11
Eric Weinstein: Who you have many

01:08:13
Douglas Murray: [laughs] You don't need to tell me. [laughs]

01:08:17
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:08:17
Douglas Murray: Um, you, you either, it's, it's either some desire to be dominated by the government and told you're bad, and locked down like, you know. I won't extend the metaphor.

01:08:27
Eric Weinstein: No, I think you should-

01:08:28
Douglas Murray: No

01:08:28
Eric Weinstein: ... 'cause our ratings will soar, sir.

01:08:29
Douglas Murray: I, I, but you [laughs] it also might be banned from YouTube for explicit content.

01:08:35
Eric Weinstein: What?

01:08:35
Douglas Murray: Um, [laughs] I don't know.

01:08:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, we're headed that way anyway I'm sure.

01:08:38
Douglas Murray: Um, uh, but, but it, it's either that or, and this is how I read it.

01:08:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:08:44
Douglas Murray: People tell pollsters this, they even tell their friends that, but they really think that, that the, that the lockdown, that the curfew is for other people.

01:08:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, maybe, but it also is killing FOMO.

01:08:57
Douglas Murray: Right.

01:08:58
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:08:58
Douglas Murray: That's not a, that's not a bad thing.

01:08:59
Eric Weinstein: Like, if I think about all of my very wealthy, very successful friend, I know this is sucking for them. Even, even if they're in slightly better shape-

01:09:07
Douglas Murray: Right

01:09:07
Eric Weinstein: ... on their yachts with gardens or whatever it is that they do.

01:09:10
Douglas Murray: Right. Yeah.

01:09:11
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I do think that worldwide FOMO has never been lower.

01:09:15
Douglas Murray: That's a good thing. It'll-

01:09:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, weirdly

01:09:17
Douglas Murray: ... it'll reduce one type of anxiety.

01:09:18
Eric Weinstein: It, it does.

01:09:19
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:09:19
Eric Weinstein: And the... But again, all of this, I can't help but feel that... See, I, I was worried about something like this, and I talked about this twin nuclei problem which-

01:09:33
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:09:34
Eric Weinstein: ... COVID may well fall into if, if the Wuhan lab turns out to be a little bit more important than the government has assured us or our press has assured us it is. Um, this is one of my concerns, and then it, it doesn't stop there. I'm worried that somehow all of Western society is exhausted. And here's the weirdest statement I can possibly make. If I just take the Anglophone countries, and I think about the UK as central, um, to, to the Anglophone, uh, group, the Five Eyes as you said, you're about the only voice that sounds like I remember and like I expected. You're the only person whose voice... Like, you know, w- in, in, in a rather ironic twist of fate, uh, atheists have canonized Christopher Hitchens, right? They've decided that in death he is, uh, he is more perfect than he ever was in life. And that kind of erudition, courage, wit, and willingness to take on issues as if they matter in real time-

01:10:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:10:49
Eric Weinstein: ... we're not getting a ton of it crashing over our shores from the UK, and we don't, we're not producing ... That's why Jordan Peterson in part-

01:10:56
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:10:57
Eric Weinstein: ... rocketed to fame, or my brother became well known to more people, is that there are almost no voices that are willing to stand up for what we believed 25 years ago.

01:11:09
Douglas Murray: Why do you think that is?

01:11:11
Eric Weinstein: I was gonna ask you given that it's my show.

01:11:13
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Um, well, I don't know. I can't talk about myself, but, but, but-

01:11:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, so forget you. Then there's almost no one out there who sounds like we expect.

01:11:26
Douglas Murray: I'm not su- I'm not entirely sure I'm clear about what you expect.

01:11:29
Eric Weinstein: I expect someone to say something on behalf of, uh, let's say free speech. So when we had the situation, I mean, the, look, the, the-

01:11:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:11:39
Eric Weinstein: ... the place that I became aware of you was in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre-

01:11:44
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:11:44
Eric Weinstein: ... when you went on Al Jazeera and were asked about whether or not this terrible tragedy was going to be bringing a wave of Islamophobia to Europe.

01:11:55
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:11:55
Eric Weinstein: And I can't think of almost anyone else whose correct emotional cadence was, "How dare you?"

01:12:01
Douglas Murray: Mm. Well, I mean, I do that when I f- feel one of my own personal tripwires deeply trodden.

01:12:09
Eric Weinstein: Oh, okay. So let's, why does no one else have one of these deep personal tripwires? I expect to hear your voice, and often no one else's to be blunt.

01:12:19
Douglas Murray: Mm. Um-

01:12:21
Eric Weinstein: Uh, clearly you're uncomfortable with this. For those of you listening at home-

01:12:23
Douglas Murray: Well-

01:12:23
Eric Weinstein: ... Douglas is making all sorts of strange faces, which I'm not-

01:12:27
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

01:12:27
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm not used to.

01:12:28
Douglas Murray: Uh, well, I, I mean, I'm always slightly, you know, in a, maybe in a sort of British way, I find it hard to analyze myself.

01:12:35
Eric Weinstein: Oh, get over yourself.

01:12:36
Douglas Murray: Well-

01:12:36
Eric Weinstein: I mean, that, that's not the issue. The issue is that there really isn't almost anyone else that we're hearing I mean, people are listening in on John C- to John Cleese-

01:12:45
Douglas Murray: Hmm

01:12:46
Eric Weinstein: ... to, I don't know, Ricky Gervais or-

01:12:48
Douglas Murray: Hmm

01:12:48
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, there's a very small number of people who are saying, "This is all madness."

01:12:56
Douglas Murray: Well, as I say, I mean, it, it, it... If you're gonna try to remain sane in the era-

01:13:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:13:02
Douglas Murray: ... you have to have something to draw upon. Um, and I do think, actually, that a very important task is to encourage younger people to, to spend their time developing such assets.

01:13:17
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:13:19
Douglas Murray: Um, now, a part of it is w- I suppose what we used to call the character. Um-

01:13:27
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:13:29
Douglas Murray: Uh, one of my he- heroes was, was a totally obscure figure. There's a British novelist called Simon Raven who wrote some sort of Anthony Powell light-

01:13:41
Eric Weinstein: Mm

01:13:41
Douglas Murray: ... novels in the post-war period. He was a rather rackety figure. Uh, was, uh, expelled from school, chucked out of Cambridge, and then s- chucked out of the army. He was chucked out of everything, so he had to be a novelist. [laughs]

01:13:56
Eric Weinstein: I see.

01:13:57
Douglas Murray: Um, but he had a godfather who, uh, was a pilot in World War II, and I remember, um, he was a sort of... He was always a hero who... I read somewhere that, well, in a biography of Simon Raven, I suppose, that, uh, uh, his, the godfather had been in a plane, a two-seater plane in the war, and at some point he and hi- his co-pilot were shot down and plummeting to earth, and, um, and Simon Raven's godfather was overheard by his co-pilot saying, uh, "This is unfortunate."

01:14:27
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:14:28
Douglas Murray: "This is the end." [laughs] And they actually survived.

01:14:33
Eric Weinstein: But in that fashion.

01:14:33
Douglas Murray: This became, this became, yeah, this became, um, family lore, you know? Um, uh, I mean, personally, I admire the sort of stoicism like that. I always did, and I was brought up with it. I mean, I... The downside of it is it includes the stuff of not analyzing emotions and much more.

01:14:50
Eric Weinstein: I, I understand that, but wasn't everyone brought up with it? I mean-

01:14:52
Douglas Murray: Uh

01:14:53
Eric Weinstein: ... you, you, you hardly seemed alone 50 years ago. This would not have marked you out in particular. The stiff upper lip is still sort of, uh... You used the word earlier, performative.

01:15:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:15:09
Eric Weinstein: I don't recall growing up with that word.

01:15:11
Douglas Murray: No. No. Well, well-

01:15:13
Eric Weinstein: Ev- everything now is, is through a very different lens, a- and the language that we use on a daily basis-

01:15:20
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:15:21
Eric Weinstein: ... many of these concepts and words didn't even exist.

01:15:25
Douglas Murray: Yes, but I mean, we, we, we've undergone this unbelievable revolution which has gone on in my lifetime, let alone in yours, uh, of, of things that are now normal that w- that were totally abnormal. I, I, I mean, I, I, I say all the time when, when young readers-

01:15:40
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:15:41
Douglas Murray: ... I'm very fortunate to have a lot of young readers, a lot of young listeners like you, and, and, um, you know, I say to them, "One of your first tasks is deve- to develop meaningful personal relationships, and to have friends who want you to do well and who care for you, and who, who you care for, and who will be there for you when you need them and who need you. You shouldn't make it transactional. But work on that, the development of such meaningful relationships in your life. Don't spend your time trying to get thousands of followers online who don't give a shit about you. Just, just don't do that." Now, the first part of that was obvious always. The second part of it has been in competition for the first part for some time, and a lot of young people have been encouraged to take the wrong path on that. They can correct that-

01:16:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:16:31
Douglas Murray: ... and they should be encouraged. They need told to correct that. Um-

01:16:35
Eric Weinstein: I'm not sure. I, I, I'm, I really wanna debate this with you.

01:16:38
Douglas Murray: Go on.

01:16:38
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:16:40
Douglas Murray: Oh.

01:16:41
Eric Weinstein: So it seems to me that maybe even the value of friendship has decreased because we're not even entirely sure who our friends are, because they're being... All right, let me pull all the way back. I have said to you, I think as recently as yesterday maybe-

01:16:58
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:16:58
Eric Weinstein: ... that, um, that the phone is not what we thought it was. We're carrying around this device.

01:17:05
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:17:05
Eric Weinstein: We thought that it was a, a version of the Library of Alexandria that we carry in our pockets-

01:17:10
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:17:10
Eric Weinstein: ... and somehow what it really seems to be is a toolkit for rewiring the human mind in ways that we have no-

01:17:17
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:17:18
Eric Weinstein: ... we, we, we lack all understanding.

01:17:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah, absolutely. Of course. It's changed, it's changed everything and as always, we have no idea of how much it's changed us as we're going through it.

01:17:27
Eric Weinstein: Right. Now, in some sense, it's changed my, my friends from, from childhood and from early adulthood, and so I don't know whether it hasn't changed both-

01:17:38
Douglas Murray: Hmm

01:17:39
Eric Weinstein: ... like if you think about a, a relationship as having two nodes, the two participants-

01:17:42
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:17:42
Eric Weinstein: ... and an edge between them.

01:17:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:17:44
Eric Weinstein: I'm not positive that it hasn't changed-

01:17:47
Douglas Murray: Sure

01:17:47
Eric Weinstein: ... all three of those things, the two, the two actors or agents a- as well as-

01:17:51
Douglas Murray: Oh, yes

01:17:52
Eric Weinstein: ... the way in which they interact.

01:17:53
Douglas Murray: Of course. But I mean, you have to be strict-

01:17:54
Eric Weinstein: Is it worth more or less?

01:17:55
Douglas Murray: You have to be strict about this stuff, and you have to fi- find your own rules. I may be a somewhat ex- exacting friend-

01:18:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:18:02
Douglas Murray: ... in this regard, but I mean, I have fairly regularly ... Quite, quite, by the way, particularly since the, uh, pandemic-

01:18:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:18:08
Douglas Murray: ... I have found myself telling my friends to put the bloody phone down.

01:18:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:18:14
Douglas Murray: No, I don't want you to show me the thing on the screen. I want you to tell me.

01:18:18
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:18:19
Douglas Murray: Okay? I don't need to see the video. I'd rather that you described it to me. It'll be more fun.

01:18:24
Eric Weinstein: I haven't, I haven't encountered this before.

01:18:26
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, it's because this year in particular, people are even more into this. Um, I, I, I found I have to say it, not to, not to everyone, but to some people. Uh, uh, surprising people do it, will whip out their iPad and show you some- will, whip out the phone and show you something. I don't want that. I want to spend the time with you. I don't want the distraction I, I want what I can't get elsewhere. And I think people have to do this. Um, including by the way on strange things like, and we have to, you have to, again, you have to have your own rules on this. Um, don't look up the thing you can't remember.

01:19:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I try to tell this to people, remember some poems because-

01:19:04
Douglas Murray: Absolutely

01:19:04
Eric Weinstein: ... storing them between your ears allows you to make references to them. If they only exist on the internet-

01:19:11
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:19:11
Eric Weinstein: ... then you won't necessarily be able to make a connection between two of them.

01:19:15
Douglas Murray: By the way, th- this is a very... This, I'm so glad you said that. This is a very, very deeply held view of mine. Um, I heard it, I heard it once as a schoolboy when a man called Terry Waite, who was held captive in Lebanon famously in the 1980s, was an envoy of the then Archbishop of Canterbury, uh, was kept hostage. For years when I was growing up, Terry Waite's name was in the news all the time.

01:19:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, all the time.

01:19:38
Douglas Murray: Um, and, uh, he once came to my school after his release, and he, he gave an extraordinary talk, it remained with me, about how he had got through years chained to a radiator in a basement in Beirut. And one of the things I'd never forget him saying was, was that he had the opening of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot in his mind all the time. You know, "Time present and time past are both contained in time future. Time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable," and on. And I remember when he started reading that, and particularly was reciting it, and particularly when he got to the passage, um, you know, what is it? Um, "Footfalls echo in the memory down the passage which we did not take. Through the door we never opened into the rose garden." And I was just blown away, first by the words, but secondly by the, the embedding of an intuition I already had, which is that you'll need this stuff.

01:20:43
Eric Weinstein: You'll need this stuff.

01:20:44
Douglas Murray: By the way, the, the late George Steiner, who I'd, I was sadly, I didn't know, but who I once also heard giving a, a lecture when I was a boy, um, also deeply impressed this on me. Um, Steiner, anyone who doesn't know, was sort of the main sort of middle European intellectual who came to England. I suppose in some ways always lost some of the fame to Isaiah Berlin. Um, but Steiner was a, a remarkable figure. Um, the kind we don't see very much anymore, but didn't see much then. And h- h- he, uh, this was very much what he would impart to you, which was, um, what you have up here, the bastards can't take. And, you know, Steiner had endless stories of examples of this, some, some of which were deeply mov- all of which were deeply moving. You know, Russian poets who would know... A, a Russian poet who knew Don Juan of Byron's off by heart, and when imprisoned in Gulag, translates it in her head into Russian, and it becomes the version in Russian. Um, what is it? Uh, um, um, the, uh, at the 1937 Writers' Conference in Moscow, um, uh, the, uh, the Russian novelist who... Now, why have I blanked on the name suddenly? You have to edit that. Um, why have I lost his name?

01:22:28
Eric Weinstein: I won't let you look it up, you know that.

01:22:30
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Um, oh, you know. The, the, the... God, I hate it when this happens. Um, um, author of Doctor Zhivago. Why have I lost the name?

01:22:48
Eric Weinstein: Pasternak?

01:22:48
Douglas Murray: Pasternak. Why have I lost Pasternak? That's bad. There's mental deterioration.

01:22:53
Eric Weinstein: Don't worry. Press on, sir.

01:22:54
Douglas Murray: Mental deterioration right there. Pasternak stands up at the 1937 Writers' Conference-

01:23:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm

01:23:00
Douglas Murray: ... and, um, uh, you know, because... Sorry, this is a bit of a diversion, but it's worth doing maybe. Um, of course, '37 is the year, worst year of the purges. He knows he can't speak, he can't not speak, and everybody knows Pasternak has to speak. And I think, I mean, all the figures for the number of people at the 197-... '37 Conference of Writers who survived to 1939 is, you know, tiny. Pasternak, by the last day, everyone says, "You've, you've got to say something." And Pasternak gets up onto the, the, the podium and, uh, and s- says one number, and everybody rises. Uh, it's the number of the Shakespeare sonnet, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past."

01:24:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

01:24:00
Douglas Murray: And Pasternak did the translation of this into Russian, which they say is as beautiful as any of the words in English, and every of the writers recites the translation of this Shakespeare sonnet in Russian, and he survives.

01:24:14
Eric Weinstein: How odd.

01:24:15
Douglas Murray: But, um-

01:24:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:24:18
Douglas Murray: ... my point is that this, th- the knowledge that you'll need stuff, that it'll fortify you through your life, is a very deep instinct with me. And so when people say, you know, it's worth memorizing in order that you keep your brain, um, going and, and it's a useful cognitive exercise, I think it's, it's not, [laughs] it's not just that. It's, it's, you know, part of the purpose of it, but in fact the most important purpose is you need to steel yourself for what's coming.

01:24:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, y- t- to your point, I mean, you, you know the old song, uh, "The way you wear your hat, the way you-"

01:25:02
Douglas Murray: Sure

01:25:03
Eric Weinstein: ... sip your tea, the way-

01:25:04
Douglas Murray: Gotcha

01:25:04
Eric Weinstein: ... memory of all that?

01:25:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:25:05
Eric Weinstein: They can't take that away from me.

01:25:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:25:08
Eric Weinstein: Um, this idea of what cannot be taken.

01:25:10
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:25:11
Eric Weinstein: Uh, years ago in the, uh, town of Hội An in, uh, Vietnam, I saw... There's a, a marvelous one-stringed Vietnamese instrument, which I'm gonna mispronounce because nothing can be pronounced from Vietnamese unless you're an expert, uh, which is gonna be spelled something like the đàn bầu, and I saw it in a window. And the woman of the house saw that I was admiring this, invited me in, and they wheeled in a man who'd clearly lost his marbles, um, and was sort of, I remember him as almost drooling, not really able to speak some form of English. And at some point, somebody brought in a guitar, and he started playing his own transcription of Chopin onto the guitar.

01:26:01
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

01:26:03
Eric Weinstein: So I thought, "Oh, this is rather strange."

01:26:04
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:26:04
Eric Weinstein: A drooling idiot who's lost his mind who can play Chopin, and it appears to be his own transcription-

01:26:10
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:26:10
Eric Weinstein: ... on a guitar. None of it made any sense.

01:26:13
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:26:13
Eric Weinstein: And then out came an album of newspaper clippings about how this man had been a journalist, and a courageous one, who'd been sent for reeducation by communists.

01:26:23
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:26:24
Eric Weinstein: And they had destroyed his body and rewired his mind.

01:26:27
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:26:27
Eric Weinstein: And somehow he had held on to this thing that he was.

01:26:31
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

01:26:32
Eric Weinstein: And this, you know, there's a lyric, um-

01:26:36
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:26:36
Eric Weinstein: ... in a Bob Dylan song, which I'm very partial to, uh, where he says, "Buy me a flute and a gun that shoots tailgates and substitutes." And then the line is, "Tra- strap yourself to a tree with roots because you ain't going nowhere."

01:26:49
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:26:49
Eric Weinstein: And I think about this i- idea of the tree with roots.

01:26:52
Douglas Murray: With roots, yeah. [laughs]

01:26:52
Eric Weinstein: What is it that has survived two world wars, and what would you like-

01:26:56
Douglas Murray: Right

01:26:56
Eric Weinstein: ... to tie yourself to?

01:26:57
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:26:58
Eric Weinstein: Whether or not you think that it actually makes sense-

01:27:02
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:27:02
Eric Weinstein: ... it's important to make sure that you're tied to some things-

01:27:05
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:27:05
Eric Weinstein: ... that have just- that have survived through all of the tumult that the 20th century-

01:27:09
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:27:09
Eric Weinstein: ... could throw it.

01:27:10
Douglas Murray: Yes. This is... Look, it, it's not the only answer. I know some people who think that it is at the moment. Uh, um, Marcus Aurelius alone cannot get us out of this problem, but he helps.

01:27:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:27:24
Douglas Murray: Uh, Boethius can't alone help u- help us out, but he can help. Um, uh, I think that there has been a fundamental mistake in the transmission to particularly younger people, including my own generation to an extent. It wasn't ma-

01:27:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, what-

01:27:44
Douglas Murray: There was a, there was a mistake about what... There was a mistaken impression of what life was going to be like, and I do feel the consequences of this are landing.

01:27:54
Eric Weinstein: And what was... What do you consider your generation? May I ask your birth year?

01:27:57
Douglas Murray: Well, I don't know. I mean, uh, this is very rude of you. I was, um-

01:28:01
Eric Weinstein: I'm an American. Get over it

01:28:02
Douglas Murray: ... I was born, I was born in 1979.

01:28:04
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:28:05
Douglas Murray: Um-

01:28:05
Eric Weinstein: So you, so I'm at the beginning of Gen X-

01:28:09
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:28:09
Eric Weinstein: ... and you are effectively ri- right at the end.

01:28:11
Douglas Murray: Right. I was, by the way, ID'd in an alcohol shop in LA last night.

01:28:16
Eric Weinstein: Well done, young man.

01:28:17
Douglas Murray: I know. I told him I'm coming back always.

01:28:20
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:28:22
Douglas Murray: Um, no, uh, uh, uh, I, I sort of think I got the, I think I got the end of something, partly because of the nature of my education and the places I was educated in the end, um, and partly because of self-taught things, and I gr- I graduated towards certain people and certain ideas because of what I intuited as being worthwhile.

01:28:44
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:28:45
Douglas Murray: Um, however, um, s- uh, I know quite a lot of people who are my age and younger who didn't imbibe all this, and who f- I mean, look, ta- take an obvious one. It's unfair. It, it doesn't have the, it doesn't have the pull on me that it does for some people. I don't think-

01:29:05
Eric Weinstein: Because lots of things are unfair. You can't make life fair.

01:29:07
Douglas Murray: Just... Yeah. I, I just, it, I don't find it an intoxicating point.

01:29:12
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:29:12
Douglas Murray: Um-

01:29:13
Eric Weinstein: But that, then that comes back on us.

01:29:14
Douglas Murray: Sure.

01:29:14
Eric Weinstein: So for example, when we-

01:29:16
Douglas Murray: Of course

01:29:16
Eric Weinstein: ... we complain about people who are seeing that everything is being unfair, then people say, "Well, are you claiming that it's unfair to call everything unfair?"

01:29:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah, and, and, and of course, the, the laziness that can crop into it is that you end up ignoring things that are genuinely-

01:29:29
Eric Weinstein: Unfair

01:29:29
Douglas Murray: ... unfair, and, and fairness is actually an important thing. Um, and you end up being blasé about things you shouldn't be blasé about. That's just quite, quite, uh, quite a problem. Um, but, uh, I- I mean, it's an interesting like... I mean, one of my... I only met him once, but somebody I admired enormously in my 20s, Irving Kristol, and um, I remember Irving said somewhere, uh, about inequality. He said, "Maybe it's a Jewish thing," he said, "but I, I, I'm not interested in inequality. I, I, I, I, I don't find it interesting in sports. I don't find it interesting in economics. I'm just not interested in it."

01:30:07
Eric Weinstein: What does that mean?

01:30:08
Douglas Murray: He, he didn't think equality was the desirable goal.

01:30:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, I agree that equality isn't a desirable goal.

01:30:13
Douglas Murray: I agree.

01:30:14
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I, I actually hold that point of view now.

01:30:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No.

01:30:17
Eric Weinstein: But I don't think that that's... I think that the economists who refuse to study inequality-

01:30:26
Douglas Murray: Absolutely. This is-

01:30:26
Eric Weinstein: ... actually consigned us to a world in which political economy dominates regular forms-

01:30:31
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:30:32
Eric Weinstein: ... of expression like honest market interactions-

01:30:34
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

01:30:34
Eric Weinstein: ... or a proper use of a ballot box.

01:30:37
Douglas Murray: Well, this, th- th- this is, this is the example I want to give because on the one hand, it's a very, it's an in- interesting and important generational instinct to have. On the other hand, if you apply it across the board, you miss things, and we have missed things.

01:30:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, l- l- let's try a, a, a different version of this. One of my claims is that the world appeared much smarter to me several decades ago-

01:31:02
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

01:31:02
Eric Weinstein: ... because- People were running heuristics that matched the world they lived in.

01:31:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:31:08
Eric Weinstein: In other words, they weren't actually-

01:31:11
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:31:11
Eric Weinstein: ... fundamental thinkers, but... And I, I give the same example in order to, to drive it home. If the river usually flows, and you're used to swimming in the swimming hole-

01:31:22
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:31:23
Eric Weinstein: ... when it freezes over, and you talk about going swimming or diving, you're revealed not to have updated for a phase change.

01:31:31
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah.

01:31:32
Eric Weinstein: And I believe that in a low inequality world-

01:31:35
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:31:35
Eric Weinstein: ... fetishizing equality is a peculiar thing.

01:31:39
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:31:39
Eric Weinstein: When you get to, I don't know, Brazilian levels of inequality-

01:31:44
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

01:31:44
Eric Weinstein: ... you do have a different beast on your hands.

01:31:47
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

01:31:47
Eric Weinstein: It's not the same thing. That regime doesn't work.

01:31:50
Douglas Murray: Yes. There's a, there's a, there's an additional problem in that, isn't there, Eric, which is that... [sighs] Uh, uh, there's a set of problem which people don't counter, or they don't contend with rather.

01:32:04
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:32:05
Douglas Murray: Because the only people who've been thinking about it are people with the wrong answers.

01:32:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, you're driven away because the people who fetishized something, uh, actually defined the field, and you're repulsed or-

01:32:18
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:32:19
Eric Weinstein: ... put off by-

01:32:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:32:20
Eric Weinstein: ... by, by those founders of that particular disc.

01:32:23
Douglas Murray: I, I mean, I mean, I think we've discussed this before in private, or I know we have. The... W- And it goes back to the conversation we were having about virology, which is w- who can you trust on the area that you don't know about?

01:32:35
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:32:36
Douglas Murray: And how do you know they're not pulling s- a fast one when you're not looking? And, um, o- on a range of things, I think that's, that an explanation of where our politics and culture's been going bad is through taking our eye off things because the people who claimed to know about it were people we knew to have the wrong answers. The-

01:33:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:33:03
Douglas Murray: You know, I say this, right? I've been guilty of this myself. You know, I'm more on the right than you are. Uh, but, uh, the right didn't contend with inequality because the only people talking and thinking about inequality were people who had bad answers, which was therefore capitalism's the problem. And so we just wanted to keep away from it.

01:33:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, I had the same feeling on the left-

01:33:27
Douglas Murray: Right

01:33:27
Eric Weinstein: ... which is that I don't want to banish inequality from the system. That is not a goal, that it would be a terrible thing.

01:33:34
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:33:34
Eric Weinstein: And effectively, the only way to banish inequality is through high levels of violence, and then you will watch the whoever is-

01:33:40
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:33:40
Eric Weinstein: ... meting out the violence is going to become the new unequal class.

01:33:44
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah.

01:33:44
Eric Weinstein: The thing doesn't add up.

01:33:45
Douglas Murray: No.

01:33:45
Eric Weinstein: And so if you're an intelligent progressive-

01:33:48
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:33:48
Eric Weinstein: ... I mean, one of the things I, I contend with is that my... I feel like I hate communism mu- much more than my right of center friends who are willing-

01:33:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:33:56
Eric Weinstein: ... to mumble about it all the time, but they're not necessarily willing to pick up the stick and fight it.

01:34:01
Douglas Murray: But wasn't that al- almost always the case with communism on the left?

01:34:04
Eric Weinstein: The-

01:34:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah. The, the, the, the left who were anti-communist w- knew what they were dealing with

01:34:08
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my gosh.

01:34:09
Douglas Murray: Right? Yeah.

01:34:09
Eric Weinstein: I mean, it's a ter- Because the, the, the thing about the c- communism is that in order to get humans to do something so n- so counter to our nature-

01:34:19
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

01:34:19
Eric Weinstein: ... you usually need a threat.

01:34:22
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

01:34:22
Eric Weinstein: Right? So violence tends to be implicit in communism.

01:34:26
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

01:34:26
Eric Weinstein: Whereas if you're a progressive, wanting to live in a very violent society seems a very strange thing-

01:34:32
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:34:32
Eric Weinstein: ... even if the violence is state controlled and mostly kept in its sheath. But-

01:34:36
Douglas Murray: Yeah. We should get on to violence shortly by the way, but, but, um, but before we do, can, can I suggest that, I mean, there, there are-

01:34:43
Eric Weinstein: You can take over the show. You can do whatever you want.

01:34:45
Douglas Murray: No, no, no. No, no. I'm, I, I wouldn't dream of it. Um, uh-

01:34:48
Eric Weinstein: Do you know how much work you would save me?

01:34:49
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Um, can I suggest, though, that... Well, I mean, there'll be a r- We, we should for the sake of balance among other things think of a right-wing, left-wing alter- version of the same thing, something the left isn't contending with because they believe the right will smuggle in a load of dangerous stuff if they did. Um, I suppose abortion rights might be one in America.

01:35:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, abortion, I mean, abortion rights-

01:35:15
Douglas Murray: Uh

01:35:15
Eric Weinstein: ... is very good because you have the twin sins-

01:35:18
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:35:18
Eric Weinstein: ... of, uh, the right wing calling every fertilized egg a baby-

01:35:25
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:35:25
Eric Weinstein: ... and the left wing referring to a-

01:35:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:35:28
Eric Weinstein: ... child about to be born in a few minutes fetal tissue.

01:35:32
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

01:35:33
Eric Weinstein: Right? It's like-

01:35:35
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes

01:35:35
Eric Weinstein: ... we, we're, we're deathly afraid of talking about embryology, Carnegie stages-

01:35:40
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:35:40
Eric Weinstein: ... and human development.

01:35:41
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that, that is partly because of this, because we, w- because particularly on the left you will sense that the people who've been doing the thinking about it have the worst answers.

01:35:50
Eric Weinstein: I can't stand the pro-life-

01:35:53
Douglas Murray: Oh

01:35:54
Eric Weinstein: ... intellectual corpus-

01:35:57
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:35:57
Eric Weinstein: ... held by those with whom I caucus.

01:35:59
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:36:00
Eric Weinstein: Sorry. Sorry. The... Sorry. The pro- the pro-choice cau- uh, caucus is disgusting-

01:36:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:36:05
Eric Weinstein: ... relative to late term-

01:36:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

01:36:07
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, pregnancies.

01:36:08
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:36:09
Eric Weinstein: And the pro-life caucus is horribly authoritarian with respect-

01:36:13
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:36:13
Eric Weinstein: ... to personal business surrounding-

01:36:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely.

01:36:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:36:16
Douglas Murray: Uh, there, there's probably... Well, there are plenty of other ones. I'm trying to think. Maybe to think, think of one other just as a guess.

01:36:21
Eric Weinstein: We could do, we could do immigration. Yeah.

01:36:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah, immigration. Im- immigration's a very good one. Uh, I noticed this with Strange Death of Europe that, uh, you know, I was trying to get the political class in Europe in particular to think about immigration more, more, more deeply, and I, I kept discovering along the way that, that you couldn't get the left to do it because they, they intuited that the only people who've been thinking about it were the right, and the right had horrible-

01:36:46
Eric Weinstein: Well, only had hate in their heart

01:36:47
Douglas Murray: ... horrible methods. Yeah. Well, they had h- hate in their hearts, they assumed, uh, the worst possible motivations and the worst possible answers. And so they-

01:36:54
Eric Weinstein: But in part-

01:36:54
Douglas Murray: ... wouldn't contend with... And it, it is such a... And it was such a visible mistake that the left should have been thinking about it.

01:37:00
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:37:00
Douglas Murray: In fact, there were elements of the left, of course, who did. I mean, trade unionists and others did think about immigration because of w- labor-

01:37:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the odd thing

01:37:07
Douglas Murray: ... wages and, and much more. But those people disappeared. I mean, those people disappeared, uh, certainly in my country by the, the, the- ... '90s and 2000s.

01:37:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I, I, I feel like Ishi, last of his tribe, where I come from a, an earlier left-of-center position on immigration.

01:37:23
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:37:24
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, this was held by Cesar Chavez, and, you know, who might have a mural painted to him-

01:37:29
Douglas Murray: Mm. Yeah

01:37:30
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, today. But on the other hand, uh, the Sierra Club was definitely restrictionist and-

01:37:35
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:37:36
Eric Weinstein: ... and, and the farm workers union were restrictionist.

01:37:38
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

01:37:39
Eric Weinstein: And it was in the '80s when we killed off organized labor-

01:37:42
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:37:42
Eric Weinstein: ... that it became unthinkable, and the only reason to oppose immigration was because of your deep-seated hatred for your fellow man-

01:37:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:37:50
Eric Weinstein: ... who was different of hue than you were. I mean, some such-

01:37:52
Douglas Murray: Man

01:37:52
Eric Weinstein: ... nonsense, right?

01:37:54
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:37:54
Eric Weinstein: And this... I, I give this as a check, which is-

01:37:59
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:37:59
Eric Weinstein: ... can you, can you find a single article that will talk about what I call, um, xenophilic restrictionism?

01:38:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:38:10
Eric Weinstein: And there isn't any.

01:38:11
Douglas Murray: Exactly. No, no, at some point, uh, we've said in private before, but a, a long time ago, these x- xenophobe should not have been tied, tied completely to restriction.

01:38:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, every slaver-

01:38:26
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:38:26
Eric Weinstein: ... was a, was a, you know, in some sense-

01:38:28
Douglas Murray: Was a-

01:38:28
Eric Weinstein: ... a xenophobe-

01:38:29
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

01:38:30
Eric Weinstein: ... eager to import as much labor-

01:38:31
Douglas Murray: Absolutely

01:38:32
Eric Weinstein: ... as possible.

01:38:32
Douglas Murray: I mean, as, as a slave owner, as you might have said, with early open borders-

01:38:36
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:38:36
Douglas Murray: ... activists.

01:38:37
Eric Weinstein: The, the, the, the whole principle here-

01:38:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:38:39
Eric Weinstein: ... is that they're independent objects.

01:38:41
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:38:41
Eric Weinstein: I've talked about this with the four quadrant model-

01:38:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:38:42
Eric Weinstein: ... and all of this nonsense.

01:38:44
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:38:44
Eric Weinstein: But, um, this is this question we can't get around our own institutional narratives. It is only-

01:38:51
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

01:38:51
Eric Weinstein: ... a part of the institutional narrative that says we wanna make sure that, uh, he or she who mentions restrictionism instantly feels pain, so that the very thought about restricting-

01:39:03
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:39:03
Eric Weinstein: ... immigration and... Well, let's talk about a difference between the US and the UK. We do not have a Rivers of Blood speech. Many of us don't even know what that is.

01:39:12
Douglas Murray: Mm. True. Lucky.

01:39:14
Eric Weinstein: Well, what is the Rivers of Blood speech, and how does that affect UK thinking on immigration different than, let's say, what you observe of the US feelings about immigration? And then I wanna get... use this as a, um, launch pad to discuss-

01:39:31
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:39:32
Eric Weinstein: ... a particular tick of conservative thought.

01:39:35
Douglas Murray: You know, I mean, that, that for American, uh, listeners who don't know, yeah, that was nine- 1968 when, uh, Enoch Powell, uh, shadow cabinet minister was, uh, gave a speech, uh, in which he referred to-

01:39:50
Eric Weinstein: Shadow cabinet. Can you just say a few more words?

01:39:51
Douglas Murray: Sorry, he, he, he was the, the party was in opposition at the time. He was the conservative, uh, member of parliament, very distinguished thinker, extraordinary mind, and a very haunting figure in British politics because I remember him from boyhood, um, and as he met, met him a number of times as a child. He was, he was a captivating figure in lots of ways. He was like an Old Testament prophet, and he was a philosopher in politics, which as you know, is a bad thing normally. I mean, it's bad for them.

01:40:20
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but he was talking about a force that would transform the UK-

01:40:25
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:40:25
Eric Weinstein: ... forever.

01:40:25
Douglas Murray: And then-

01:40:26
Eric Weinstein: And it did.

01:40:27
Douglas Murray: And it-

01:40:27
Eric Weinstein: Did it not?

01:40:27
Douglas Murray: Yes, it did. And, uh, the reason why people still talk about Enoch Powell, whereas they don't talk about Edward Heath, who fired him-

01:40:33
Eric Weinstein: Mm

01:40:33
Douglas Murray: ... for the speech, uh, is because he was onto something. I'm being careful here. He was, he was onto something. And the conservative critique of where he went wrong, among other things, is that he used such lurid language, that the speech in which he, he said, you know, that he saw, like the Roman, he saw the River Tiber foaming with much blood.

01:40:55
Eric Weinstein: And some of this was actually filmed, right?

01:40:57
Douglas Murray: Yeah, some of it, not all of it. Um, uh, anyhow, it, it did completely captivate and galvanize the debate. Dock workers and others marched, you know, "We're with Enoch." Um, uh, and others were disgusted by it. The Times of London ran a leader column calling it an evil speech. And there was something very, very off with it. I mean, I, I, I concede this. You know, I, I, I-

01:41:21
Eric Weinstein: But, but this is exactly why I think it's, it's, it's fascinating because of the point-

01:41:26
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:41:26
Eric Weinstein: ... that you earlier raised, which is that there's something about the treatment with which something is touched. One of my huge-

01:41:32
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:41:32
Eric Weinstein: ... complaints about Trump is not that he does nothing right.

01:41:35
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:41:36
Eric Weinstein: But every right thing that he does, he touches with this Trump-

01:41:41
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:41:41
Eric Weinstein: ... thing, whatever it is. And-

01:41:44
Douglas Murray: Yes, and it, by the way, it's, it's, it's a, it's a real problem, this, isn't it? Because in a way, whenever anyone says, "Yes, it's the tone I don't like," you think that's the coward's last refuge very often. It's, you can't deal... You can't counter the facts. You can't counter these. You can't... But you don't like the tone. And yet, the conundrum of this is, sometimes the tone does tell you an awful lot.

01:42:07
Eric Weinstein: I think the tone sometimes is actually part of the content.

01:42:12
Douglas Murray: Right.

01:42:12
Eric Weinstein: And sometimes it isn't.

01:42:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:42:14
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:42:15
Douglas Murray: But-

01:42:15
Eric Weinstein: And so, you know, one of the things that I struggle with is that I am expected in m- most of my private life-

01:42:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:42:23
Eric Weinstein: ... to hate Trump for exactly the same reasons that everyone else in my group hates Trump.

01:42:29
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:42:30
Eric Weinstein: And I'm supposed to know that no credit can be given for any good thing that happens-

01:42:34
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:42:34
Eric Weinstein: ... because, you know, to the extent that someone makes the trains run on time and you acknowledge this, it just means that they have the opportunity to kill that many more of their opposition.

01:42:44
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

01:42:45
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so the idea that Trump, we were promised for, you know, fascism in the streets.

01:42:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:42:50
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't, doesn't appear to have happened-

01:42:52
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:42:52
Eric Weinstein: ... wholesale. And then y- you know, you get these refrains like, "Well, what about the detention centers and-

01:42:58
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:42:58
Eric Weinstein: ... the cages-

01:42:59
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:42:59
Eric Weinstein: ... and the children and they-"

01:43:01
Douglas Murray: This, this is all, this is all, I mean, yeah, it does go back to the '68 speech point because the, the, uh, the conservative critique, by the way, of Powell was, was that he had made immigration an impossible to discuss subject for decades afterwards.

01:43:15
Eric Weinstein: That's the issue.

01:43:17
Douglas Murray: Um, my late friend Roger Scruton wrote a very- Very powerful essay 15 years ago or so w- about the speech saying, it w- titled Should He Have Spoken? Uh, which is, is a very interesting, thoughtful, uh, go over of that question, which is still in a way haunts Britain. Um, and I think that maybe whatever happens at your election, maybe this will remain the case for some time with anything associated with Trump, that it will have this, should he have said that?

01:43:52
Eric Weinstein: Do you remember the dress?

01:43:54
Douglas Murray: Which one?

01:43:55
Eric Weinstein: The one that was either black and blue or white or gold.

01:43:58
Douglas Murray: Oh, yes.

01:43:58
Eric Weinstein: White and gold.

01:43:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:43:59
Eric Weinstein: So the great danger-

01:44:01
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:44:01
Eric Weinstein: ... is, is that almost everything has become the dress.

01:44:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

01:44:06
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:44:08
Douglas Murray: Yes

01:44:08
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, if I think about the Enoch Powell speech, because I'm not British, and because it doesn't have the spell... Uh, like this is an example of something that casts a spell inside of the UK that is not, um, felt in the US, right?

01:44:24
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:44:25
Eric Weinstein: It's very interesting because-

01:44:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:44:29
Eric Weinstein: ... there are shortcuts that you can take when talking about immigration. For example, I tend to talk about software, hardware, and firmware.

01:44:38
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:44:39
Eric Weinstein: Right? Where in essence, hardware is your genetics, this melanin content of the s- of the skin, which everyone seems to be so fascinated by at the moment-

01:44:47
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

01:44:47
Eric Weinstein: ... which I don't believe. Then there's a question about the software, which is like what do you think? What political party do you belong to?

01:44:56
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:44:57
Eric Weinstein: But there's also this different issue of the firmware, like the operating system that rides on the hardware, and I'm very particular about firmware, and I'm almost-

01:45:06
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

01:45:07
Eric Weinstein: ... indifferent to hardware.

01:45:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:45:08
Eric Weinstein: I don't really care about... I, if you told me that there was an advanced European-like civilization in Uganda-

01:45:16
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:45:16
Eric Weinstein: ... where everyone was Black but me-

01:45:18
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:45:20
Eric Weinstein: ... I would be far happier to live in that society where the firmware was familiar and, and the hardware-

01:45:26
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:45:26
Eric Weinstein: ... was foreign-

01:45:27
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:45:28
Eric Weinstein: ... than to live in a world in which the firmware got swapped out and everyone shared my exact genetics.

01:45:34
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes.

01:45:36
Eric Weinstein: Like, I, I really care about firmware nationalism.

01:45:39
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:45:39
Eric Weinstein: I don't want hardware nationalism.

01:45:41
Douglas Murray: No, absolutely. Uh, one of the, but one of the, the, the, the problems we may well be going through is that, um, we can't seem to cope with this, um, you know-

01:45:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, the, the reason I bring this up is that I, I brought that up at a dinner with... I mean, I, I have this problem that I get along with conservatives and libertarians even though I'm not in either group.

01:46:04
Douglas Murray: Well, that's because we're still... If I... You know what I'm saying, sir, it's because we're still, still willing to talk.

01:46:09
Eric Weinstein: You're still willing to talk for the moment.

01:46:11
Douglas Murray: Yes. It may be-

01:46:12
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, no, it's worse than that, sir

01:46:13
Douglas Murray: ... in America it might be because the right feels that it's also been winning. I mean, it might be something to do with that. I don't know.

01:46:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, winning is a complicated concept because-

01:46:21
Douglas Murray: Sure

01:46:21
Eric Weinstein: ... it's multivariate. You're losing in some places, you're winning in others.

01:46:25
Douglas Murray: Of course.

01:46:25
Eric Weinstein: And I think the, another reason is, is that a lot of the thinking left has been driven towards the right. So this is what I've referred to as the thinkquisition-

01:46:35
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yes

01:46:36
Eric Weinstein: ... where if the l- if, if the occupied left is Spain, and the right is, is behaving as the Ottoman Empire welcoming-

01:46:44
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:46:44
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, Jews who are a little bit under the gun, initially you don't see yourself as, uh, as Ottoman. You see yourself as [laughs] displaced or, you know-

01:46:53
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

01:46:53
Eric Weinstein: ... what, what, what was de Gaulle doing in England? Was he being British-

01:46:57
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:46:57
Eric Weinstein: ... or was he-

01:46:57
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

01:46:58
Eric Weinstein: You know, I'm expected to love the Democratic Party, and I view it as like the occupied Democrats or Vichy Democrats.

01:47:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

01:47:05
Eric Weinstein: I don't know what it is.

01:47:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:47:06
Eric Weinstein: It's some... It's been something for-

01:47:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:47:07
Eric Weinstein: ... 28 years since Clinton.

01:47:09
Douglas Murray: But as I said, I mean, I, I-

01:47:11
Eric Weinstein: Well

01:47:12
Douglas Murray: ... I may be too flippant in saying th- th- this about the right, but go, go on with the...

01:47:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, what I was gonna say at th- about this dinner-

01:47:18
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:47:18
Eric Weinstein: ... was that as soon as I started getting into this hardware, software, firmware-

01:47:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:47:23
Eric Weinstein: ... the call from the host came as, "Too complicated, Eric." And I thought-

01:47:30
Douglas Murray: Do you think the host did think it was too complicated, or just wanted to stop you?

01:47:32
Eric Weinstein: I think that it has to do with the fact that the host has an idea that this is that lefty stuff where you guys can't say these words that the rest of us can say and circle around, which is like, for example, if somebody were to say at my table, "They're taking our jobs-"

01:47:50
Douglas Murray: Hmm

01:47:51
Eric Weinstein: ... I would get very upset.

01:47:53
Douglas Murray: Sure.

01:47:54
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't mean that I don't know exactly what that person is saying. It doesn't mean that I haven't written a peer-reviewed paper that actually embodies-

01:48:03
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:48:04
Eric Weinstein: ... what is meant by that phrase, but that phrase is a shortcut.

01:48:08
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:48:08
Eric Weinstein: And it's a, it's a, it won't-

01:48:10
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:48:10
Eric Weinstein: ... do for somebody on the left to say they, which is people who are-

01:48:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:48:14
Eric Weinstein: ... more or less like me that don't happen to hold my citizenship-

01:48:17
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm. Mm

01:48:18
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, taking our jobs. What do you mean our jobs? Do, did we not have immigration befo- like there's so much wrong-

01:48:25
Douglas Murray: Sure

01:48:25
Eric Weinstein: ... with the statement, "They're taking our jobs-"

01:48:27
Douglas Murray: Mm. Yeah, yeah

01:48:27
Eric Weinstein: ... that I, I can't get around the way the right might express that point. The right... To, to your earlier point-

01:48:38
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:48:38
Eric Weinstein: ... that the right will taint this with a kind of jingoism or a, a nationalism or patriotism bordering on something less savory. A- and my feeling is no, I would rather spend three pages and get it right and show that it has nothing to do with xenophobia or jingoism.

01:49:02
Douglas Murray: Well, yes.

01:49:03
Eric Weinstein: And, and the right's point is, that's not gonna win elections, dear boy.

01:49:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Well, maybe part of the problem with this is that everyone is currently behaving as if they're in permanent campaign mode-

01:49:16
Eric Weinstein: Yes

01:49:17
Douglas Murray: ... when it's not their bloody job. You know, I mean, this is what's so infuriating, particularly in America at the moment, is like what do you think this dinner table is? Is it a place where friends congregate and we exchange ideas, or is it some ver- some low-grade version of the Veep debate?

01:49:37
Eric Weinstein: Exact- This is, the quality of our relationships at the table-

01:49:42
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:49:42
Eric Weinstein: ... are so much higher than the quality of our relationships with these things I call creatures who have-

01:49:48
Douglas Murray: Right

01:49:48
Eric Weinstein: ... fused with their parties, or they've fused with-

01:49:50
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:49:50
Eric Weinstein: ... their institutions. It's like cyborgs. We're no longer human, but-

01:49:54
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:49:54
Eric Weinstein: ... part man, part machine, right?

01:49:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:49:56
Eric Weinstein: And so the issue of watching a family blow apart because of their adherence-

01:50:03
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:50:03
Eric Weinstein: ... to two players they've never met-

01:50:07
Douglas Murray: I know

01:50:07
Eric Weinstein: ... who hold points of view that they would never be able to-

01:50:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:50:09
Eric Weinstein: ... get behind.

01:50:11
Douglas Murray: This has to be fought.

01:50:13
Eric Weinstein: It has to be fought.

01:50:13
Douglas Murray: It has to be fought very hard by everybody in their personal lives. I kn- I know it's happened a certain amount in my own life. People have been willing to blow up what they should love most for this bloody political game.

01:50:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the-

01:50:28
Douglas Murray: And I, I-

01:50:28
Eric Weinstein: I would rather-

01:50:29
Douglas Murray: Has to be called out, stopped. We- we- we-

01:50:33
Eric Weinstein: I'm, I'm with you

01:50:33
Douglas Murray: ... have far too much tolerance of it. I've noticed this in the last few weeks in America. Every time I have sat down at a dinner table, I, um, maybe I will lose the remaining friends I have. I'm not gonna name any names.

01:50:42
Eric Weinstein: Let's just fucking do it.

01:50:42
Douglas Murray: Okay.

01:50:43
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:50:43
Douglas Murray: I'm not gonna name any names, but every single time in every city I have been to-

01:50:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:50:47
Douglas Murray: ... that I have seen fr- friends who are on the anti-Trump side, at some point in dinner they have lost it at somebody else at the table. I, as you know, am high on disagree-

01:51:00
Eric Weinstein: Now, I will point out that you came to our Shabbat dinner recently. So you have used the word every, sir.

01:51:10
Douglas Murray: Um, I think it was day after Shabbat.

01:51:13
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:51:13
Douglas Murray: Or it was. But I think-

01:51:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:51:16
Douglas Murray: ... I think that holds.

01:51:17
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yes. I guess it was after Shabbat. But it, it-

01:51:19
Douglas Murray: Yeah, but my, my point holds.

01:51:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, but-

01:51:21
Douglas Murray: With our-

01:51:21
Eric Weinstein: My wife and I started going into various disagreements. We're both on the same side of the aisle-

01:51:26
Douglas Murray: Right

01:51:27
Eric Weinstein: ... and we still don't hear the world the same way.

01:51:28
Douglas Murray: So, exactly. I, I'd forgot how embarrassing to say that and to have forgotten that it was-

01:51:34
Eric Weinstein: It was so clever that you would bring it up in this way

01:51:36
Douglas Murray: ... your table was, your table was one of the tables-

01:51:37
Eric Weinstein: And then-

01:51:38
Douglas Murray: ... on which it happened [laughs]

01:51:38
Eric Weinstein: Exactly.

01:51:40
Douglas Murray: Um, but as you-

01:51:41
Eric Weinstein: Daniel Douglas

01:51:41
Douglas Murray: ... a- as you know, I'm, I am, I'm high on disagreeability in public and highly agreeable in private.

01:51:47
Eric Weinstein: I find that most disappointing.

01:51:49
Douglas Murray: I'm sorry about that.

01:51:50
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:51:50
Douglas Murray: I, I can't, I can't ... I actually do have a pacifying instinct around the dinner table because I don't want that stuff.

01:51:58
Eric Weinstein: I think it's completely logical that you would be that way.

01:52:00
Douglas Murray: Right. I'm glad to hear that.

01:52:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:52:02
Douglas Murray: Um, uh, I'm just incredibly struck by it on this visit, and I'm worried by it. And I dislike-

01:52:10
Eric Weinstein: This is the spring of our relationships

01:52:11
Douglas Murray: ... I dislike ... Exactly. I dislike it. I, I, I genuinely, I like discussion in private as in public-

01:52:19
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:52:20
Douglas Murray: ... which involves people saying what they think, and somebody else saying, "That's interesting. Why do you think that?"

01:52:24
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:52:24
Douglas Murray: On almost any issue. Now, it's true that there are occasions where somebody might say something so reprehensible that you say, "You know what? I just don't think I wanna be part of this anymore."

01:52:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, that, that's true.

01:52:36
Douglas Murray: Very, very rarely.

01:52:38
Eric Weinstein: Well-

01:52:38
Douglas Murray: I can think of, I can think of maybe one or two occasions it's happened in my life.

01:52:47
Eric Weinstein: That's extraordinary.

01:52:48
Douglas Murray: But I am not up for people blowing up every time they sit down over a meal in order to fight something over which they care more than they need to.

01:53:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let me try to steel man the perspective of those who are blowing up so that we-

01:53:09
Douglas Murray: Sure

01:53:09
Eric Weinstein: ... can at least play with it, right?

01:53:10
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:53:13
Eric Weinstein: I believe at the moment that we are about to make decisions that may destroy our societies.

01:53:18
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:53:18
Eric Weinstein: I don't think that it's assured that the-

01:53:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:53:22
Eric Weinstein: ... the US and the UK are gonna go on indefinitely given where we are at the moment.

01:53:26
Douglas Murray: Sure.

01:53:26
Eric Weinstein: And it's a very strange thing to say because whatever it is that we're suffering from is a subtle thing. It's not, if I look visually at the world, there's no reason that we should be about to implode, but clearly there's a lot of indication that the visual is not matching where we are.

01:53:41
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:53:41
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So if you imagine that this is actually weirdly life and death-

01:53:45
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:53:45
Eric Weinstein: ... for, for, for peoples, right? For, for countries, for nations, for ideas, I do think that the stakes are extraordinarily high.

01:53:53
Douglas Murray: Yeah. No, I agree.

01:53:53
Eric Weinstein: To your point about what you've called the snowplow earlier in our conversation, I've talked about this as the A-frame roof where you're trying-

01:54:00
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:54:00
Eric Weinstein: ... to dance at the top, and then-

01:54:02
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:54:02
Eric Weinstein: ... it gets more and more peaked.

01:54:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:54:04
Eric Weinstein: Right? And therefore-

01:54:05
Douglas Murray: It's exactly the same thing the other way around. Yeah. Yeah

01:54:06
Eric Weinstein: ... it's exactly the same thing.

01:54:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:54:08
Eric Weinstein: Okay. In that circumstance, the problem is that the places for people to collect are now so unthinkable.

01:54:21
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

01:54:22
Eric Weinstein: Like, you know, the old dirty little secret of immigration in the past was that the two positions that matter not at all are open and closed borders, because that doesn't happen.

01:54:34
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:54:34
Eric Weinstein: But because the public is somehow trying to conduct this conversation-

01:54:38
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

01:54:38
Eric Weinstein: ... and these are the natural shelling points, right? Which is like-

01:54:41
Douglas Murray: Mm

01:54:41
Eric Weinstein: ... I re- I know how to say no restrictions and I know how to say full restrictions.

01:54:45
Douglas Murray: Mm.

01:54:45
Eric Weinstein: I don't know how to say, um, I want these 36 pages of code implemented with these, [laughs] this shifting priority and points basis and all that kind of stuff. So in general, the more of us that have gotten involved in a discussion like immigration on Twitter or something to that effect, uh, we find ourselves discussing nonsensical, tr- traditionally nonsensical-

01:55:07
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

01:55:08
Eric Weinstein: ... positions. And therefore, we're terrified of each other, because somebody says, "I don't understand why we have to have borders. No people are illegal."

01:55:16
Douglas Murray: Right.

01:55:16
Eric Weinstein: And the other person says, you know, "God, grit, and guns made America great." And what kind of conversation is that? It's no kind of conversation at all.

01:55:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah. It's, it's suboptimal.

01:55:26
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's, it's, it's a child's- ... conversation of, of, of two dystopias, neither of which should ever happen.

01:55:33
Douglas Murray: Okay. One point before that, before I move on, I wanna make. Uh, we have actually seen, again, it's one of these things, maybe 2020 is a, is w- a year where we, among other things, notice things that we don't talk about at the time.

01:55:46
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:55:48
Douglas Murray: Sorry. There is a total ban, I'm gonna give you the exception of course, there's a total ban on my countrymen coming to this country at the moment-

01:55:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:55:56
Douglas Murray: ... instituted by the President.

01:55:57
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:55:57
Douglas Murray: Did you think that would ever happen in your lifetime?

01:55:59
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:55:59
Douglas Murray: No. Right.

01:56:01
Eric Weinstein: I should say I was shocked when we locked Charlie Chaplin out of the United States on a visit home.

01:56:07
Douglas Murray: Right.

01:56:09
Eric Weinstein: And I was shocked when we locked Paul Robeson and Linus Pauling into the country.

01:56:13
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

01:56:13
Eric Weinstein: So anything of this-

01:56:14
Douglas Murray: Right

01:56:15
Eric Weinstein: ... like I, I, I've noticed these kinds of behaviors in the past.

01:56:18
Douglas Murray: Okay. But, um, obviously, I, I'm, I've here, I've mostly got an exemption on journalistic grounds for being in the States.

01:56:23
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:56:23
Douglas Murray: But, so there are exceptions. But, um, I return to this point, that you, when you say that that's a totally unfeasible scenario, that we are dealing with two extremes, neither of which are workable, I just would add the, the, the visuals are otherwise at the moment. I mean, I have-

01:56:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:56:40
Douglas Murray: ... wh- when I first saw-

01:56:41
Eric Weinstein: Sorry, but your, your presence, the fact that there are exceptions-

01:56:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah, yeah

01:56:44
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm not saying that you can't tilt temporarily towards great restrictionism.

01:56:48
Douglas Murray: Okay. Okay. Temporarily, yes. Okay.

01:56:49
Eric Weinstein: Right?

01:56:49
Douglas Murray: Temporarily.

01:56:50
Eric Weinstein: E- even the temporarily, you, you know, during the Chinese Exclusion Act and other things-

01:56:54
Douglas Murray: Yeah

01:56:54
Eric Weinstein: ... we're not so proud of in this country.

01:56:56
Douglas Murray: Sure.

01:56:56
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, there's a long period between, what was it, like the, the McCarran, the McCarran Act would've been in like the '50s.

01:57:04
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:57:04
Eric Weinstein: The immigration, the great change was 1965. Um...

01:57:10
Douglas Murray: I, I, I'm, I'm not say- I, I'm not saying, I mean, uh, my point is, is, is that certainly in a, in, in the short-

01:57:17
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:57:17
Douglas Murray: ... or medium term, it's possible. Some things are possible we thought were not possible. I never thought I would see Justin Trudeau announcing that no foreigners will be allowed into Canada for a while.

01:57:24
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:57:24
Douglas Murray: Okay. So these things have happened this year. People have noted them. They're not completely insane things anymore, and one of the things we're gonna have to dance with going forward is that memory.

01:57:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, so for example-

01:57:38
Douglas Murray: On a range of things

01:57:39
Eric Weinstein: ... the Seattle exclusion, Capitol Hill exclusion zone.

01:57:42
Douglas Murray: Absolutely.

01:57:43
Eric Weinstein: What the heck was that?

01:57:44
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

01:57:45
Eric Weinstein: Now-

01:57:46
Douglas Murray: That could all happen and did happen this year, and we haven't absorbed-

01:57:50
Eric Weinstein: Although it un-happened almost as quickly as it could happen.

01:57:54
Douglas Murray: Happily so, but-

01:57:56
Eric Weinstein: Portland went, went on for a bit longer.

01:57:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Um, still going on. Um, but, but just, just to return to the, as it were, the steel manning point-

01:58:04
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:58:04
Douglas Murray: ... which you made, ma- make, I, I, I'm very c- c- glad you raised that because it's, it's, it's been on my mind since I've been here, and one of the things that I've, I've thought repeatedly is, as far as I can see, my left-wing friends in America and never Trumper friends have, have, um, have a basis that is totally understandable, which is something like how could we ever forgive anyone who allowed this man to be in power?

01:58:36
Eric Weinstein: You find this understandable?

01:58:37
Douglas Murray: Yes.

01:58:39
Eric Weinstein: Oh, my gosh.

01:58:39
Douglas Murray: Yeah, I do.

01:58:40
Eric Weinstein: Wow.

01:58:41
Douglas Murray: I, I, I don't sympathize with it completely.

01:58:43
Eric Weinstein: I feel like we, I feel like we, the left, elected him.

01:58:45
Douglas Murray: Oh, right. Okay.

01:58:45
Eric Weinstein: And I'm so angry. Well, I'm just, this is something which I don't understand at all.

01:58:51
Douglas Murray: Hmm.

01:58:52
Eric Weinstein: Because my feeling is y- you, God, Donald Trump couldn't have been elected without the Clintons.

01:58:59
Douglas Murray: Sure. Of course, of course. No, no. I, I go along with all of this.

01:59:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:59:03
Douglas Murray: I'm saying, I'm saying that, that if I was to steel man what the left is thinking-

01:59:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Oh, sorry

01:59:06
Douglas Murray: ... about this-

01:59:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:59:07
Douglas Murray: ... it's saying, how did you allow this man with these reprehensible character traits and so on to be, to be able to get to the highest office in the land? And they blame the right for that. They, uh, they blame his, everyone who voted for him, and what's more, they've come to blame everybody who expresses any, as they see, ideological cover for his position. For instance, I, I believe I have written this. I've very, very rarely written about Trump in recent years-

01:59:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:59:30
Douglas Murray: ... because I find it, it fundamentally not as interesting as everyone else in the world does, and I think it's very hard to-

01:59:36
Eric Weinstein: Right, right with you, sir

01:59:37
Douglas Murray: ... and I don't think it's possible to say anything very new. And when people say to me occasionally-

01:59:40
Eric Weinstein: Well, one of the greatest risks of the next administration, should Donald Trump manage to f- find his way into office again-

01:59:47
Douglas Murray: Hmm

01:59:47
Eric Weinstein: ... is the intellectual opportunity cost of discussing nothing else for four years.

01:59:51
Douglas Murray: Absolutely.

01:59:51
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

01:59:52
Douglas Murray: And it's happened to too many of my friends and, and, and colleagues

01:59:54
Eric Weinstein: All right. Sorry, I was-

01:59:55
Douglas Murray: But, but, but the-

01:59:57
Eric Weinstein: ... stepping on your words

01:59:57
Douglas Murray: ... the point is, i-i- um, with this is, they have decided that everybody who ... I, I, I wrote once recently, um, I, I broke my own rule because the Trump administration is trying to do a trade deal with the United Kingdom, my own country. We, we in my country are struggling to arrange a trade deal with the U- the European Union. Um, it's very suboptimal for my country to be in a position where we didn't have a trade deal with either with the EU or the US. The Democrats, the Democratic Party have, um, made v- very unpleasant threats to my country about a trade deal. Nancy Pelosi, in her unbelievable ignorance, unfathomable ignorance and rudeness to my country, has-

02:00:39
Eric Weinstein: Let's see if you can get me to stand up for Nancy Pelosi. This will be interesting.

02:00:41
Douglas Murray: Let's see.

02:00:42
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:00:43
Douglas Murray: Um, has, um, has threatened the United Kingdom because she believes-

02:00:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:00:47
Douglas Murray: ... that an element of the withdrawal agreement from the EU of the UK, this is more than many of your listeners will... I'll do this fast.

02:00:55
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:00:56
Douglas Murray: She and some Democrats believe that the UK's withdrawal from the EU puts in ultimate complete danger the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that brought to an end the very violent and awful hostilities that had gone on for 30 years in Northern Ireland.

02:01:10
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:01:12
Douglas Murray: Um, several Democrat senators signed a letter threatening the UK- With this. It's, it's a misunderstanding of the facts, in my opinion. Other people contest that, obviously, but it... I believe it's a misunderstanding of the facts. Several, uh, Democrat senators signed a letter, uh, um, saying that the UK should, will not have a trade deal with the US if we withdraw from the EU in this manner. This is a complete trap for my country, and Nancy Pelosi very virulently and unpleasantly the other week stood up and repeated that same claim. One little addendum to that to anyone who thinks I'm somewhat too fixated on this point.

02:01:52
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

02:01:52
Douglas Murray: The signatories of the letter included, um, uh, m- members of your g- governing class who for 30 years supported the IRA, the Irish Republican Army, when they were killing people in my country, putting bombs in pubs, shooting farmers in the back of the head because they were from the wrong confessional class in their view, carrying out the most brutal massacres on the mainland of the UK and in Northern Ireland, and who did this for years with the support of people in power in this country. And this country, and I'm, as I'm sitting in America, I'm very pleased to be sitting here, allowed NORAD and others to raise money for these barbarians to carry out these acts of violence. And, and the fact that people who gave cover for the IRA for years now are threatening the UK, now they're not all Democrats, okay, but this is a threat of violent people. It's using violent people for a political purpose down the road to threaten another country over a trade deal. I put that out there on that. On the other hand, the Trump administration-

02:03:04
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:03:04
Douglas Murray: ... has been trying to get a trade deal with the UK.

02:03:07
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

02:03:07
Douglas Murray: Okay. So to that extent, I believe that the Trump administration is better for the UK in trade terms than the Biden administration would be. When I say that, it's... And if I say that at an American dinner table these days-

02:03:25
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:03:25
Douglas Murray: ... I will be accused of having given cover to Donald Trump, of agreeing with every character trait, of personally wanting to grab every pussy I can, and much more. And that's, that's the breakdown of the situation in this country.

02:03:38
Eric Weinstein: By pussy, I should say that Douglas actually means cowards. Correct?

02:03:44
Douglas Murray: Very much so.

02:03:44
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.

02:03:45
Douglas Murray: Very much so. In a very real sense.

02:03:47
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:03:49
Douglas Murray: Um, and I-

02:03:52
Eric Weinstein: Douglas

02:03:53
Douglas Murray: ... this is, this is part of the problem.

02:03:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's... You have to train people properly. You have to say something to the effect of, "Did Hitler do nothing right," right?

02:04:00
Douglas Murray: Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:04:01
Eric Weinstein: And then they're like, "What are you talking... Uh, uh, uh."

02:04:03
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:04:03
Eric Weinstein: Then you have to say, "Well, do, do you think that the Nazis were, were wrong to, uh, buckle to the Rosenstrasse protest and return partially Jewish men to their non-Jewish wives out of the concentration camps? Or would you have preferred, uh, that they send those people to their death as well?" It's like, well, that's an absurd blah, blah, blah. And then you start to realize that this has to do not at all with the intellectual point-

02:04:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:04:26
Eric Weinstein: ... but with party discipline.

02:04:27
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:04:27
Eric Weinstein: The key point is we've all agreed as if they're... And I, I wanna get to this point. I feel like there was a conference that none of us were invited to that, that came to some very strong conclusions, and they've all circulated this list of correct answers.

02:04:43
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:04:43
Eric Weinstein: Like, we've decided that Donald Trump is odious-

02:04:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:04:47
Eric Weinstein: ... and every good thing that he does must be made into a bad thing so that there is no break in party discipline.

02:04:53
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:04:54
Eric Weinstein: Now, I wasn't at this conference.

02:04:55
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:04:56
Eric Weinstein: So when I hear that there's a peace deal in the Middle East, I say, "Okay, that's pretty good."

02:05:02
Douglas Murray: That's good. Yeah.

02:05:02
Eric Weinstein: That's good.

02:05:03
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:05:03
Eric Weinstein: But everyone's like, "No, no, you can't do that."

02:05:05
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:05:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, that is-

02:05:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:05:08
Eric Weinstein: ... such intellectual poison.

02:05:10
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's poison to everyone. Can I give another example? Sorry, I've, um-

02:05:13
Eric Weinstein: Please

02:05:13
Douglas Murray: ... I sort of... I, I favor anecdote if sometimes I've dated you probably, no, but, uh, this is one that's been on my mind a lot. Uh, a couple of years ago, I was invited to, so, uh... I don't boast that I'm invited to things you're not, Eric. I'd hate to give you FOMO in 2020.

02:05:27
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:05:27
Douglas Murray: Um, but, um, no, I was-

02:05:29
Eric Weinstein: If there was anything to be invited to other than a Zoom call. Go ahead.

02:05:32
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Um, I, uh, I was invited to dinner in, in, uh, London, which really did comprise... I don't believe in the term the establishment. I find it lazy, and, and I think there are multiple establishments at any one time, and, uh-

02:05:45
Eric Weinstein: Conjunction alert.

02:05:47
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:05:47
Eric Weinstein: But...

02:05:48
Douglas Murray: But, um, I was... It was really a, a dinner of people who I really would regard as the establishment in multiple areas of public life.

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

02:05:57
Douglas Murray: Very distinguished figures and, and, and for some reason me as a sort of grit in the oyster

02:06:02
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:06:02
Douglas Murray: ... presumably. Anyhow, everyone was asked to go around the table and say what they thought... This is about two years ago.

02:06:09
Eric Weinstein: You just referred to yourself as a pearl in waiting.

02:06:12
Douglas Murray: I did. Oh, yeah, that was, that was... That was-

02:06:14
Eric Weinstein: Interesting

02:06:14
Douglas Murray: ... oh, dear

02:06:15
Eric Weinstein: ... uncharacteristically self-kind of.

02:06:17
Douglas Murray: Oh, well. Okay. I, I didn't mean it that way. Um, anyhow-

02:06:20
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:06:21
Douglas Murray: ... um, I was... I, I meant the grit in the soup or something, didn't I?

02:06:27
Eric Weinstein: No.

02:06:27
Douglas Murray: Uh, anyhow, uh, the point is, is that w- we were... They went... Th- th- they-

02:06:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:06:30
Douglas Murray: ... go around the table, uh, everyone to, uh, explain what they thought the long and short-term threats to the country were, and, uh, everybody did the same thing. Everybody in the room talked about how Brexit and Trump were the biggest problems we faced because they had unleashed populism, and that therefore everything must be done to stop Brexit and Trump. The very, very few people who applied themselves to the long-term question at all, and almost nobody did, said that probably long-term the largest challenge was China. And they got to me, and I said I'd rather not speak. Yeah, I'd, I'd wait. At the very end of the evening, uh, the host said, um, "Douglas, you know, you've been uncharac- uncharacteristically silent, and that's usually a worrying sign." What do you, what do you think? And and I s- I said, I said, "You're all mad. You're all completely mad."

02:07:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:07:33
Douglas Murray: Um, and y- y- among, among much other madness, you've decided that the general public, the majority of the public must be warred against. I mean, I know there's a dispute about electoral procedure here, but, uh, of the voting-

02:07:50
Eric Weinstein: No, but we-

02:07:51
Douglas Murray: The, the majority

02:07:51
Eric Weinstein: ... we, we don't like ourselves.

02:07:52
Douglas Murray: Right. But I mean, like if in my country, when the majority of the public, when 52% of the public votes something, I don't go against the majority of the public if you've, you know, are in a position of authority.

02:08:02
Eric Weinstein: You were supposed to be tricked into Uni- in, into a United States of Europe involving the UK.

02:08:07
Douglas Murray: That's right.

02:08:07
Eric Weinstein: And-

02:08:08
Douglas Murray: And the public said no

02:08:09
Eric Weinstein: ... the public said no.

02:08:10
Douglas Murray: No. Absolutely.

02:08:10
Eric Weinstein: How can you not agree to be tricked into a United States of Europe?

02:08:13
Douglas Murray: Right. And, uh, uh, in my own view, whatever the, the concept, you just don't war on the general public. And, and, and if it... Here's the, the larger thing was that I said, "It makes no sense that you would, that, that in the long term you identify, I think correctly, the geostrategic and financial competit- ... the only one that's a competitor to the United States and is likely to overtake it in our lifetimes. Nobody else is. Y- you identify this," and this is before the, the, the Wuhan business, um, "you correctly identify that, but you have decided that although that is your long-term threat, your short-term task is to, among other things, take out the only elected official-

02:09:00
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:09:01
Douglas Murray: ... who has shown any desire to deal with the long-term threat. Now in, in, uh, in inadequately with bluster and much more, but how is that a strategy?

02:09:14
Eric Weinstein: Assuming that many of the people who came to your dinner arrived in luxury automobiles-

02:09:20
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah. For sure

02:09:20
Eric Weinstein: ... what percentage of those luxury automobiles were purchased by funds that involved China in one way or another?

02:09:28
Douglas Murray: Oh, well, that's true.

02:09:29
Eric Weinstein: And so the problem is-

02:09:31
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:09:31
Eric Weinstein: ... I know that my pusher is going to end up killing me, but if I-

02:09:35
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:09:35
Eric Weinstein: ... kick up arms against my pusher, I might not get my fix.

02:09:38
Douglas Murray: I've been reading that book, Hi- The Hidden Hand, you know, about Chinese in- infiltration. The West is very, very interesting book, filled with facts and, and not by any means nuts. Um, and, uh, yes, I, I, I share this, th- th- this suspicion about a number of-

02:09:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, this-

02:09:56
Douglas Murray: ... people around the table that night and, uh, and some of it's proven and, you know, yeah.

02:10:01
Eric Weinstein: You, you know my aphorism that the, uh... I should, I should standardize it, I guess, but that the idealism of every age is the cover story of a major theft.

02:10:12
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

02:10:14
Eric Weinstein: So my concern is that the Davos idealism was the cover story of a theft, uh, inside of advanced developed countries of its elite from the streams that would normally go to its workers. And so the key-

02:10:34
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:10:34
Eric Weinstein: ... problem is that-

02:10:35
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:10:35
Eric Weinstein: ... you have to intimidate the workers-

02:10:37
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:10:38
Eric Weinstein: ... to think that the GDP, which is not being distributed to them, uh, particularly well-

02:10:44
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

02:10:45
Eric Weinstein: ... um, is somehow serving their interest because it is going to the country. So as long as a financial-

02:10:50
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm-hmm

02:10:52
Eric Weinstein: ... group, you know-

02:10:52
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

02:10:53
Eric Weinstein: ... in the City of London is doing well, then the idea that it is unpatriotic to fight this global agenda. And I think that in part, one of the next idealisms that was supposed to follow-

02:11:06
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:11:06
Eric Weinstein: ... the Davos idealism was the actual dissolution of national identity in a much more aggressive fashion. That multiculturalism is when you still can say what distinct cultures are, but when you've thrown all the cultures together and you can't say what anything actually is-

02:11:23
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:11:23
Eric Weinstein: ... everyone is a mutt. There is no-

02:11:25
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:11:25
Eric Weinstein: ... distinguishing aspect.

02:11:27
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Well, that was all meant to make conflict impossible among much else.

02:11:32
Eric Weinstein: The, the-

02:11:33
Douglas Murray: The melding together. O- one of the, one of the-

02:11:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, the US, the United States of Europe, I think, was a post-World War II concern-

02:11:40
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:11:40
Eric Weinstein: ... in which you had to trick people first into f- fiscal or financial union without political union.

02:11:48
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:11:48
Eric Weinstein: Then you had to create a secondary political cr- uh, financial crisis because people would not have the ability-

02:11:54
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:11:54
Eric Weinstein: ... w- as long as the common currency was present to inflate their debts away.

02:11:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:11:59
Eric Weinstein: And then you would force, uh, effectively-

02:12:02
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:12:02
Eric Weinstein: ... a, a Teutonic, an Anglo- Anglo-Teutonic state-

02:12:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:12:07
Eric Weinstein: ... into being.

02:12:08
Douglas Murray: Yes. The people for him, the answer was always more Europe-

02:12:11
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:12:11
Douglas Murray: ... whatever happened. Uh, which is again, what the public in Britain r- r- resisted. Um, yes.

02:12:17
Eric Weinstein: Now my problem is that I actually love the individual constituents of Europe.

02:12:21
Douglas Murray: Yeah, I know, I know. But yes, but, but the thing was undoubtedly, uh, uh, conceived as an answer to war.

02:12:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing, that Europe went from being the most dangerous hotspot in the world to a Disneyland for American tourists looking to have a few weeks-

02:12:40
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:12:40
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, you know, on a Eurail pass.

02:12:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. There's a very funny, uh, one of his less read novels, Michel Houellebecq's, uh, La Carte et le territoire, uh, uh, The Map and the Territory-

02:12:52
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:12:52
Douglas Murray: ... uh, is, is sort of set in a not very far off Europe in which, you know, it's just simply Disneyland for Chinese tourists, and it's, it's worryingly, uh, close to the bone. Um, but anyway, um, the, the, the, the point is that in all of this, we are obviously missing ... Th- th- th- this is my main reason for not writing and wanting to talk much about Trump and Brexit-

02:13:16
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:13:16
Douglas Murray: ... and so on, is because I feel like there's ... It's all important, it's very important, but it's not as important as the things we're missing.

02:13:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is exactly, exactly my problem, and this goes back to this conversation I was recalling for you. Um, in the, uh, interregnum between the 2016 election and Trump's inauguration in 2017, I found myself, uh, at a dinner with Sam Harris and Dave Rubin, and- Um, Sam was talking about how terrible Trump was, and how it was important to call him out on his nonsense, and I said to Sam, um, "If Trump creates three nested ambiguities, uh, you'll have two to the third or eight different possible legs of a decision tree as people try to figure out which way-"

02:14:05
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:14:05
Eric Weinstein: "... each of them went."

02:14:06
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:14:06
Eric Weinstein: And I said, "At that rate, you have to come up with eight different responses-"

02:14:12
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:14:12
Eric Weinstein: "... when he only had th- had to issue three weird statements. If you keep that up all through a Trump presidency-"

02:14:19
Douglas Murray: Yes.

02:14:19
Eric Weinstein: "... you will do nothing else. It is-"

02:14:21
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:14:21
Eric Weinstein: "... you are going to have to get out of the Trump-"

02:14:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:14:23
Eric Weinstein: "... call-out business."

02:14:24
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:14:24
Eric Weinstein: And he said, "What's your solution?" I said, "I'm gonna say once at the beginning that I viewed Trump to be an existential risk to the- to the soul of America."

02:14:33
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:14:33
Eric Weinstein: And that, by the way, that never said whether I, I viewed the Democratic Party to be an existential risk-

02:14:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:14:39
Eric Weinstein: ... which I think that it was so long as it continued in its kleptocracy and its nonsense, but that it-

02:14:46
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:14:46
Eric Weinstein: ... could reverse itself, whereas I see Trump as being unable to change who he is. This is what he is, this is what he does-

02:14:53
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:14:54
Eric Weinstein: ... for both good and bad. And that's what I've done for, for this presidency, which is-

02:14:59
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:14:59
Eric Weinstein: ... that mostly I've spent my time calling out the left so that the left can beat Trump i- from a meaningful rather than a kleptocratic perspective.

02:15:07
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm. Mm.

02:15:09
Eric Weinstein: But, you know, the thing that I posted-

02:15:10
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:15:10
Eric Weinstein: ... the other day on Twitter was video of a warthog that was still alive being fought over by a leopard and a hyena, and I thought, "Why would the warthog want to express a preference as to whether to be eaten by a hyena or a warthog?"

02:15:27
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:15:27
Eric Weinstein: Yes, you know, maybe the leopard-

02:15:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:15:28
Eric Weinstein: ... is el- elegant-

02:15:29
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:15:29
Eric Weinstein: ... and the hyena distasteful.

02:15:31
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:15:31
Eric Weinstein: But I'm trying to think of how do I get rid of a lep- a leopard and a hyena together? What... You know, it's a, a... I find this of no interest-

02:15:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:15:39
Eric Weinstein: ... because neither of these things-

02:15:41
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:15:42
Eric Weinstein: The only, the only importance is does this buy me a little bit of extra time and room to escape?

02:15:49
Douglas Murray: Yes. Oh.

02:15:50
Eric Weinstein: And, and the thing about, about Brexit is this is the repudiation of an ideology that was the cover story of a theft. The theft-

02:15:59
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:15:59
Eric Weinstein: ... is being fought.

02:16:00
Douglas Murray: Yes.

02:16:01
Eric Weinstein: And people don't know how to fight the theft. They don't know who picked their pockets and how.

02:16:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:16:05
Eric Weinstein: These people we call the elite don't appear to be extremely productive.

02:16:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:16:09
Eric Weinstein: They don't appear to be extremely intelligent. In fact, they say all sorts of stupid things.

02:16:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:16:14
Eric Weinstein: But what they are is a triumph of sharp elbows over sharp minds. And-

02:16:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:16:18
Eric Weinstein: ... that is mysterious because we don't know how they sign their pieces of paper. We don't know-

02:16:24
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:16:24
Eric Weinstein: ... what their words mean. We don't know where they meet.

02:16:26
Douglas Murray: And we also, we also now can... This, they're more transparent than they've ever been. I mean, that's, that's... I often said that, uh, the point at which you really go off a person isn't necessarily when you dislike something about them. It's when you see through them, and with institutions it's the same.

02:16:52
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:16:53
Douglas Murray: An institution can be quite dislikable. In fact, most are in some ways. You say, like, uh, visa agencies, border agencies, ev- every institution's got dislikable things.

02:17:03
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

02:17:03
Douglas Murray: The problem is when you see through it, and with a set of our authority figures-

02:17:10
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:17:11
Douglas Murray: ... with a set of our elites, as it were, we see through them now.

02:17:14
Eric Weinstein: Do we?

02:17:15
Douglas Murray: Uh, well, a growing number of us can. Uh-

02:17:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm, I re- I'm confused about this. If I think about unprecedented access that, for example, Prince Andrew gave in that unbelievable interview, um, was that transparent or was that opaque? What was I even looking at? That was one of the strangest things I've ever seen in my life.

02:17:34
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:17:34
Eric Weinstein: I had the feeling that I was able to see because the cameras were present, the reporter was present.

02:17:40
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:17:40
Eric Weinstein: She asked exactly the questions I would've expect-

02:17:43
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:17:43
Eric Weinstein: ... expected her to ask.

02:17:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:17:45
Eric Weinstein: The performance was so baffling to me that I realized that there was no way I had of processing what I was watching.

02:17:55
Douglas Murray: I didn't have that. I thought it was transparent.

02:17:58
Eric Weinstein: Tell me what you saw, because it's as, it's very strange to me that this issue of the dress crops up absolutely everywhere. We can't agree on what we've seen even though we watched the same footage.

02:18:08
Douglas Murray: Uh, c- can I back up and say it's worse than that?

02:18:12
Eric Weinstein: Please.

02:18:12
Douglas Murray: Uh, uh, yes. Uh, the one that's on my mind, which I haven't been able to persuade people to pay attention to, it's a version of your dress id- um, but it... the one I can't, that, that I just couldn't get people to focus on was what happened a couple of years ago at Chemnitz, a town in Germany, where there wa- a, a, a video went online posted by a leg- an alleged Antifa account-

02:18:40
Eric Weinstein: Mm

02:18:40
Douglas Murray: ... that was new. A Twitter account published a video of what appeared to be sort of white German males running after some immigrant-looking men across a highway. And this was released with the, the caption saying, um, the, this was a, a migrant hunt. Now, Chemnitz at that point was in a rather tricky situation because a, a, a migrant had killed a local man, stabbed a local man, and there was a lot of ill feeling, and it could, could easily be whipped up by-

02:19:12
Eric Weinstein: Mm

02:19:12
Douglas Murray: ... unpleasant actors, and so there... uh, from every side. Uh, the, um, the video went like that. That day-

02:19:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:19:20
Douglas Murray: ... the chancellor made a statement on the video that we cannot live in a country-

02:19:24
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:19:24
Douglas Murray: ... where migrants are hunted-

02:19:25
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:19:26
Douglas Murray: ... and so on. The, the head of the domestic intelligence service in Germany, um, uh, s- s- Hans-Georg Maassen, said publicly, "The video doesn't show that. This isn't the video." Now- ... there's a dispute over exactly what happened. He ended up being re-

02:19:48
Eric Weinstein: Sacked

02:19:49
Douglas Murray: ... relieved of his-

02:19:49
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:19:50
Douglas Murray: ... position. Was saved by another member of the Merkel government into another position. They're not able to take that up. Um, this is a very, very important case.

02:20:01
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:20:02
Douglas Murray: Because I can't think of another example in our societies, even here in America, where it's been as clear as that. First of all, where all these people who care about infiltration and, and foreign interference, and all these sort of things, like, where did this Twitter account come from, and in whose interest was it?

02:20:17
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:20:17
Douglas Murray: That it, that this video should emerge, and have you ever seen the stakes that high that the chancellor and the head of the intelligence service disagree on a video's contents? And these, these stakes are wildly higher than people realize.

02:20:34
Eric Weinstein: Have you seen the body cam footage of the George Floyd arrest?

02:20:39
Douglas Murray: Yeah, I saw a bit of it, yeah. I, I, yeah.

02:20:41
Eric Weinstein: That's a big problem because the narrative that got established in order to-

02:20:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:20:47
Eric Weinstein: ... justify why-

02:20:47
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:20:47
Eric Weinstein: ... suddenly people were gathering-

02:20:50
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:20:50
Eric Weinstein: ... in large numbers when everybody had been on lockdown. Th- there's this weird thing that what I've called the gated institutional narrative-

02:20:59
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:20:59
Eric Weinstein: ... or GIN.

02:21:00
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:21:01
Eric Weinstein: In general used to know what it wanted to say before the facts came in. It, the narrative arcs were established.

02:21:09
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

02:21:09
Eric Weinstein: And occasionally-

02:21:11
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:21:11
Eric Weinstein: ... you'd get a surprise move.

02:21:13
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:21:13
Eric Weinstein: And so I had... I think I said that there were three in my lifetime at some point where the, the GIN broke in a big way. So like you had, you had old situations like the fall of Najibullah, where-

02:21:25
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:21:26
Eric Weinstein: ... in this far off land, there was a small problem, or there was one with, I forget what his name is, Camaratta in Venezuela who was like president for a day or something, because there was probably a CIA sponsored coup that didn't work out. So there's small interruptions in the GIN, but the big ones were, um, September 11th.

02:21:44
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:21:45
Eric Weinstein: Uh, the crash, uh, the fall of Lehman Brothers.

02:21:50
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:21:51
Eric Weinstein: Um, and the... Uh, what was my other one? I can't even remember. But then like-

02:21:57
Douglas Murray: Jeffrey Epstein

02:21:58
Eric Weinstein: ... the election of Donald Trump, and then-

02:22:00
Douglas Murray: Right

02:22:00
Eric Weinstein: ... you came Jeffrey Epstein and his death. In 2020, the narrative can't keep up-

02:22:06
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:22:07
Eric Weinstein: ... in general.

02:22:08
Douglas Murray: Yes.

02:22:09
Eric Weinstein: COVID broke the narrative.

02:22:11
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

02:22:11
Eric Weinstein: So the number of arrivals of truly surprising things where the GIN doesn't know what to say-

02:22:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:22:18
Eric Weinstein: ... is fantastic-

02:22:21
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:22:21
Eric Weinstein: ... in its acceleration.

02:22:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Well, um, uh, the Floyd killing, uh, l- l- lays often, I mean, as, as an outsider of this country obviously, but you, you can't help noticing it. Like, what about the, the non-white policemen involved standing there?

02:22:41
Eric Weinstein: I don't think that that has... Well, in a previous... I, I do these audio essays in front of-

02:22:48
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

02:22:49
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, a lot of the releases that I do.

02:22:51
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:22:51
Eric Weinstein: One of which I did was a five-word law for the modern era of social media.

02:22:57
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:22:57
Eric Weinstein: And there are these two things that are very similar five-word laws, but there's McLuhan's, the medium is the message.

02:23:03
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:23:03
Eric Weinstein: And there's Say's law from economics, supply creates its own demand.

02:23:08
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:23:09
Eric Weinstein: So what I claimed is that, uh, optics creates its own substance.

02:23:14
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:23:15
Eric Weinstein: The importance of the George Floyd killing or death, however you see it, is that it was optically perfect-

02:23:24
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:23:24
Eric Weinstein: ... as a lynching, provided you didn't ask hard questions.

02:23:28
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes, yeah.

02:23:29
Eric Weinstein: To give up an optical lynching caught on video-

02:23:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:23:33
Eric Weinstein: ... simply because there are m- mitigating and complicating and confounding variables-

02:23:40
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:23:41
Eric Weinstein: ... was not possible because in fact, in a weird sense, you have a very strong belief that there's prejudice and bigotry that seldom lends itself to simple description.

02:23:53
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:23:53
Eric Weinstein: Finally, we've got one.

02:23:54
Douglas Murray: Finally got one. [laughs]

02:23:56
Eric Weinstein: And then the idea is if it's optically perfect and that creates its own substance, that is the minds of many people agree that this-

02:24:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:24:04
Eric Weinstein: ... this officer, Derek C., and his knee on this neck caused this death-

02:24:09
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:24:09
Eric Weinstein: ... through prejudice and bigotry-

02:24:11
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:24:11
Eric Weinstein: ... then the Tony Timpa killing in Dallas-

02:24:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

02:24:15
Eric Weinstein: ... can't... That-

02:24:16
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:24:16
Eric Weinstein: ... that violates the rule. That's, that would complicate the optics.

02:24:20
Douglas Murray: This bu- th- th- all of it reminds me of this, what we discussed at the beginning with the COVID thing because th- the problem with thinking one's way through this era is if nothing else, needing to know everything about the event and trying not to know everything about the event. Because if you have to find out everything every time, then we, we, the opportunity cost is too great. It goes back to this thing, but it's worth doing when you believe that it is a revealing of the-

02:24:46
Eric Weinstein: That's very true

02:24:46
Douglas Murray: ... GIN narratives break, and the one that c- that always occurs to me about this country is the number of times that we are asked not to notice that, you know, an alleged white supremacist or racist killing is carried out by law enforcement in a bewilderingly diverse law enforcement situation in cities where the head of police is Black, the mayor is Black, the senator's Black, the representatives in Congress are Black.

02:25:16
Eric Weinstein: Internalized racism.

02:25:17
Douglas Murray: Where, you know, everybody, everybody in the system-

02:25:22
Eric Weinstein: The optics must be saved

02:25:22
Douglas Murray: ... the m- uh, the optics have to be saved, and we still have to pretend, despite the fact that almost everybody in the system is Black-

02:25:28
Eric Weinstein: It's intolerable

02:25:28
Douglas Murray: ... that it is a white supremacist killing.

02:25:30
Eric Weinstein: It is intolerable.

02:25:30
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:25:31
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:25:32
Douglas Murray: And w- w- w- but if I say so, the thing that makes the, the thing that links it to the COVID thing-

02:25:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:25:37
Douglas Murray: ... I mean, the thing, it's the same-

02:25:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:25:39
Douglas Murray: ... problem going on is I don't want to be made into one of those people who says white supremacy doesn't exist. Or bigotry doesn't exist, or racism doesn't exist, or I don't think the police in America have problems with race. But we-

02:25:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, I got out of this by claiming that there is a bigotry shortage.

02:25:56
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

02:25:56
Eric Weinstein: That the amount of anti-bigotry machinery-

02:25:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:25:58
Eric Weinstein: ... that's ginned up-

02:25:59
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:25:59
Eric Weinstein: ... and the number of out and out bigots that exist-

02:26:02
Douglas Murray: Of course. Yeah

02:26:02
Eric Weinstein: ... are mismatched.

02:26:03
Douglas Murray: I, I, I describe this as a supply and demand problem in fascism, in society.

02:26:06
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.

02:26:07
Douglas Murray: You know, massive demand and sort of supply.

02:26:09
Eric Weinstein: We know exactly what to do if we have an actual fascist.

02:26:11
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

02:26:11
Eric Weinstein: Now, where will we find one?

02:26:13
Douglas Murray: We make them world-famous.

02:26:14
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

02:26:15
Douglas Murray: Yeah. We, we make them absolutely-

02:26:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is, this is why Richard Spencer is such an oddity.

02:26:20
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah. David Duke wheeled out every four years as if he's a major political figure.

02:26:24
Eric Weinstein: Yes. Well, the, the, but, but what otherwise, what will the Southern Poverty Law Center do?

02:26:29
Douglas Murray: Absolutely, since it's got-

02:26:30
Eric Weinstein: I mean-

02:26:31
Douglas Murray: ... gazillions of dollars to do nothing but libel people.

02:26:35
Eric Weinstein: Our friends.

02:26:35
Douglas Murray: Including our friends.

02:26:36
Eric Weinstein: I know.

02:26:38
Douglas Murray: Here's to that, Maajid Nawaz.

02:26:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:26:40
Douglas Murray: Uh, um, yeah, occasionally our friends take large amounts of money off these bastards.

02:26:43
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:26:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Um, but y- y- I, this, this, this, um... So, so th- here, here's where we're pushed to. We, we're pushed to the situation where we notice these things.

02:26:55
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:26:55
Douglas Murray: The, the, the thing you're pushed into is to say, I think you're chasing dragons. And then any sensible person has this knowledge that although dragons may not exist, nasty things do, and you wouldn't want to be caught holding your dick-

02:27:17
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:27:18
Douglas Murray: ... when that comes out. And it's the same, it's like for the COVID thing. It, it seems to me intolerable to sustain the narrative that our governments have had about-

02:27:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, the-

02:27:29
Douglas Murray: ... the virus, yet you don't want to be stuck in the position you're being put into because y- you don't want the gods to come down and slay one of your nearest and dearest.

02:27:40
Eric Weinstein: It's very frustrating. I mean, to, just to, to riff off that analogy, the fact that large venomous monitor lizards exist, uh, they clearly do. And if I get too emphatic about saying that there are no dragons, I may say there are no Komodo dragons.

02:27:54
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:27:54
Eric Weinstein: And if I do that, then I'm getting it wrong. And I'm tempted to do that every four seconds because-

02:28:00
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

02:28:01
Eric Weinstein: ... I don't believe that the Ku Klux Klan has taken over the United States.

02:28:04
Douglas Murray: No.

02:28:04
Eric Weinstein: I don't believe that Jim Crow is going... I don't believe that every day, every Black person in America gets up realizing that today they're likely to die at the hands of law enforcement.

02:28:14
Douglas Murray: No.

02:28:14
Eric Weinstein: And what I've claimed previously is that, um, the people who claim that there's no link between Islam and terror are people who have no close Muslim friends, because that's-

02:28:25
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

02:28:25
Eric Weinstein: ... what's discussed at Muslim dinner tables.

02:28:26
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:28:27
Eric Weinstein: The people who, um, you know, are so worried about Black Lives Matter are very often, uh, without close Black friends-

02:28:37
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

02:28:37
Eric Weinstein: ... because quite frankly, there's a huge dispute inside Black America-

02:28:42
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm, yeah

02:28:42
Eric Weinstein: ... as to whether or not, you know, as, as, as some Black friends of ours have said, it's a white cult. Um-

02:28:49
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm, yeah

02:28:49
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, the, there is this very strong sense that those of us who have actually imbibed multiculturalism and diversity within our friend group-

02:29:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:29:01
Eric Weinstein: ... are looking at these manias and these social panics-

02:29:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:29:06
Eric Weinstein: ... and are saying-

02:29:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:29:08
Eric Weinstein: ... doesn't anyone know any actual women, Blacks, Jews-

02:29:12
Douglas Murray: Hmm, hmm

02:29:12
Eric Weinstein: ... conservatives?

02:29:14
Douglas Murray: No.

02:29:14
Eric Weinstein: Like, we're forming these impressions of large groups of people as if they are something-

02:29:20
Douglas Murray: Hmm

02:29:20
Eric Weinstein: ... other than what they are.

02:29:22
Douglas Murray: Yes. And we're, um, and the crucial point is we, we're being fed divisive and untrue stories.

02:29:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, so this is what I want to get to about the, what I've called the Iago media and Iago institutions-

02:29:33
Douglas Murray: Right

02:29:33
Eric Weinstein: ... from the Othello character-

02:29:34
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:29:35
Eric Weinstein: ... who deranges a pair of lovebirds-

02:29:38
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:29:38
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, into a murderous frenzy.

02:29:40
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

02:29:42
Eric Weinstein: What do we do to stop this I- Iago effect, particularly within American media, where we have all of these legacy groups, whether it's Southern Poverty Law Center as a, as a previously, um, terrific institution that-

02:29:58
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:29:59
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, was seeking to do good work-

02:30:00
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:30:00
Eric Weinstein: ... or journalistic-

02:30:02
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

02:30:02
Eric Weinstein: ... they get taken over by-

02:30:05
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:30:05
Eric Weinstein: ... this need to, to, to, to earn their keep by publishing-

02:30:09
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:30:10
Eric Weinstein: ... crazy nonsense.

02:30:12
Douglas Murray: Yeah. And-

02:30:12
Eric Weinstein: And we're gonna lose the court system. I don't think it's going to be possible for-

02:30:15
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:30:15
Eric Weinstein: ... Maajid Nawaz to win judgments in future. Like, we have a jury system, and if this critical race theory-

02:30:23
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes, yes

02:30:23
Eric Weinstein: ... continues apace, we are not going to be able to empanel juries.

02:30:28
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. I, I, um, well, I keep g- giving you things which I'm saying I don't think we have a term for, but I wish we did. Let me do another one. [laughs] Um, I've become acutely aware in recent years of the fact that there, there needs to be a term for a thing that is inaccurate and wrong, but which somebody since, believes so sincerely because of the information they've downloaded throughout their lives, that you are not able to reason them out of it at this stage. Uh, let me give a very quick example. It happened in my own country. I, uh, I really don't want to bang on about Brexit. Let me do it very quickly. It happened in my own country after 2016 when I discovered there were really people in my country who did believe that membership of the EU and withdraw- well, withdrawal from the EU meant we were leaving Europe. We would no longer be able to listen to German Lieder. We would no longer be able to visit Paris. We wouldn't be able to eat Italian food. We would be stuck-

02:31:33
Eric Weinstein: Couldn't swim across the channel because it was gonna get wider

02:31:35
Douglas Murray: ... no, we would be stuck in this inward-looking windy island-

02:31:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:31:39
Douglas Murray: ... forever.

02:31:41
Eric Weinstein: Which you can't grow any grapes for wine.

02:31:44
Douglas Murray: You can actually, but-

02:31:44
Eric Weinstein: Barely.

02:31:45
Douglas Murray: You, you, your, uh, your-

02:31:46
Eric Weinstein: It's pretty marginal

02:31:47
Douglas Murray: ... my wine, my wine grower friends in, in Britain would kill me if I allowed you to get away with that slur. Um, let me just say that- This I hadn't thought of before.

02:31:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

02:31:56
Douglas Murray: I really hadn't at all contended with it.

02:31:58
Eric Weinstein: That it was that deeply held.

02:31:59
Douglas Murray: It was that deep. Y- you know, people like me said, "What are you talking about? The EU and Europe are not the same thing. We will still go there. Y- we will still learn the languages if we have any sense and, uh, a- and the ambition to do so. We will still imbibe the culture. We'll still read the books. What are you talking about? You think I'm not gonna listen to continental music? You think I simply want to listen to f- English folk song and do Morris dancing? You really think that's the point of this exercise?" But you discover in vain-

02:32:27
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:32:27
Douglas Murray: ... you make this argument, primarily because the job had been very well done for a generation on a generation so that y- younger people in particular did believe these two things were completely tied up because they had been throughout their lives. And I realized it was exceptionally difficult, if not impossible at this stage, to divorce these two things. Now, what if one of the things that's going on in your country at the moment-

02:32:52
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:32:52
Douglas Murray: ... and to a lesser extent in mine, is the same thing in relation to race?

02:32:56
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:32:57
Douglas Murray: In particular. I mean other things as well, but, um, allow me to give a couple examples. Um, when the great soprano Jessye Norman died, uh-

02:33:07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:33:07
Douglas Murray: ... earlier this year, um, it's announced in the BBC, uh, front page as... Basically the spin of the story is Jessye Norman was a soprano who sang opera despite being Black. And, you know, she was very unusual in the opera world, obviously, because, you know... And I mean, I grew up listening to Jessye Norman, among other sopranos, saw her sing, saw her perform. I- And I just read this obituary and I thought, "You're trying to change our memories."

02:33:44
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

02:33:46
Douglas Murray: Herbert von Karajan recorded Wagner with her in the 1970s. If, if that's possible, you don't get to pull this shit on me in 2020. You don't get to rewrite the past. Now, the problem of- with this is that most of this is less provable. Can I give, give another example? A really, really boring one.

02:34:06
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, I insist.

02:34:07
Douglas Murray: Um, when I grew up, BBC children's television in the 1980s, the, the presenter was a rather camp Black man-

02:34:18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:34:18
Douglas Murray: ... who's still on television called Andy Peters. This is the first time his name's been mentioned on this podcast. I'm shocked that you don't know him.

02:34:24
Eric Weinstein: Sorry.

02:34:25
Douglas Murray: Um, and, and the evening news was read by Moira Stuart, and, and on the BBC and on ITV it was S- Sir Trevor Mc- Trevor McDonald. Now these people have retired. I am currently being encouraged to pretend that when I was growing up, the BBC children's presenter was not Black. The evening news on the BBC was not a Black woman. When you turned over to the other channel to watch evening news, it wasn't a Black man who was knighted reading the evening news. Now, I'm i- i- irritated by this, sometimes infuriated by it, because they're trying to rewrite my memory of the recent past. But I have to accept at some level that if you are 20 years younger than me-

02:35:12
Eric Weinstein: Yes

02:35:12
Douglas Murray: ... and you're at university, and you're being told you live in a white supremacist society, nothing remembers these people. There's no institutional memory of them because our institutions don't have any memory. The culture doesn't have a memory that goes back more than a few hours, and so everyone is being rewired. And we ha- And at some point we are all gonna have to contend with, maybe we already are, people you cannot shift because all of their reference points and all of their memory has been changed. And I don't know how we deal with this.

02:35:49
Eric Weinstein: Have you seen this done in real time as opposed to historically?

02:35:55
Douglas Murray: Well, it feels like real time because it's happened in my lifetime.

02:35:58
Eric Weinstein: No, I mean where you're looking... Well, let me give you a famous example from the US. I don't know whether you know it. Have you ever heard of the Dean Scream?

02:36:07
Douglas Murray: Hmm.

02:36:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is a good one for you. Howard Dean was running-

02:36:12
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:36:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

02:36:14
Douglas Murray: Yes.

02:36:14
Eric Weinstein: I believe it was in Iowa and he-

02:36:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. Of course

02:36:16
Eric Weinstein: ... he placed something like third.

02:36:18
Douglas Murray: Of course.

02:36:18
Eric Weinstein: And so he has to give this rousing speech.

02:36:20
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:36:21
Eric Weinstein: He says, "If you, you know, if you'd told me we got- we'd give our eye teeth to, eye- eye teeth, uh, to place third. And you know what, know what we're doing next? We're going to New Hampshire, and South Carolina, and Texas, and California, and Idaho, and then we're going to Washington DC. Ya hah!"

02:36:37
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

02:36:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

02:36:38
Douglas Murray: I've, I've seen it.

02:36:40
Eric Weinstein: Nothing happened. It was a total non-event.

02:36:43
Douglas Murray: Mm. Right.

02:36:44
Eric Weinstein: It was a total non-event.

02:36:46
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:36:46
Eric Weinstein: And every talking head got on TV and said, "In a surprising and bizarre meltdown, Howard Dean today addressed supporters appearing momentarily to lose it on stage in a crowded room." And with that weird voice-

02:37:00
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:37:00
Eric Weinstein: ... controversial, uh, controversial politician, Howard Dean.

02:37:03
Douglas Murray: Controversial.

02:37:04
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:37:04
Douglas Murray: Controversial. Error.

02:37:05
Eric Weinstein: Adjective-

02:37:08
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:37:08
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, job description, proper name.

02:37:11
Douglas Murray: Controversial, controversial professor.

02:37:12
Eric Weinstein: Controversial podcaster.

02:37:13
Douglas Murray: Yes. Absolutely.

02:37:13
Eric Weinstein: Eric Weinstein. Controversial podcast guest.

02:37:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

02:37:16
Eric Weinstein: Douglas Murray.

02:37:17
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah. No, they, they, they've done that to me recently. When, when I was on Joe Rogan recently, Joe said something which was, uh, some people say it's accurate, some people say inaccurate about the setting of fires.

02:37:27
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:37:27
Douglas Murray: Uh, it became a huge thing because of Joe's deal with Spotify, and everyone reported it. And I noticed these various sort of American magazines who, and papers who were just delighted to think that they'd caught Joe slipping up.

02:37:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:37:40
Douglas Murray: And Joe, Joe apologized about it, and, uh, these papers said, you know, "He's on with controversial writer Douglas Murray." Uh, uh...

02:37:46
Eric Weinstein: Far-right figure Douglas Murray.

02:37:47
Douglas Murray: No, they, they didn't put far, far right or I'd have sued their asses, but, um, controversial they can get away with. Excuse me?

02:37:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, you saw my experiment with controversial Professor Paul Krugman

02:38:00
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, yeah

02:38:00
Eric Weinstein: ... where there were no, despite the fact that he was clearly controversial-

02:38:03
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:38:03
Eric Weinstein: ... and a professor, there's no instance because it's a formula.

02:38:06
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

02:38:06
Eric Weinstein: And it's a way of tagging a human.

02:38:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:38:08
Eric Weinstein: Now, what I'm, what I'm curious about is do you believe that we are living in a gaslit society, full stop?

02:38:20
Douglas Murray: Um, yeah, I don't like gaslighting as something, mainly because of the number of people who use it who I f-

02:38:25
Eric Weinstein: Well-

02:38:25
Douglas Murray: ... find-

02:38:27
Eric Weinstein: To hell with those people-

02:38:27
Douglas Murray: Sure

02:38:28
Eric Weinstein: ... because we had red pill before they had red pill.

02:38:30
Douglas Murray: Yeah, okay, okay, okay.

02:38:31
Eric Weinstein: You know, the hipster perspective is it comes from an actual film, so.

02:38:34
Douglas Murray: I, I te- So I te- I tell you, v- I, I think we all keep getting distracted from the things we should be doing.

02:38:42
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:38:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah. And this has never been clearer than in this year.

02:38:46
Eric Weinstein: Are you aware of an affect shift in yourse- in, in yourself, in your per- in your own person?

02:38:51
Douglas Murray: At the moment?

02:38:52
Eric Weinstein: Yes. You and I have spent... We haven't been friends for decades as we should have, we should have done.

02:38:59
Douglas Murray: I know.

02:38:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um, but we have, we have logged a few miles.

02:39:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:39:04
Eric Weinstein: And in general, I find that you are one of the most hilarious people I deal with.

02:39:10
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:39:10
Eric Weinstein: And I don't sense the same mirth in our conversations.

02:39:16
Douglas Murray: [sighs]

02:39:17
Eric Weinstein: It may, it may not be you.

02:39:18
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:39:18
Eric Weinstein: It may be me killing, killing the buzz, but there is some way in which we're not our... I don't think we are ourselves. We're shifted.

02:39:25
Douglas Murray: Uh, it'd be sad if that was the case. Um-

02:39:28
Eric Weinstein: Could be that it's just morning, and we haven't started drinking yet.

02:39:30
Douglas Murray: Yeah, it's possible. It's gotta be after 6:00 PM to really get me going.

02:39:33
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:39:34
Douglas Murray: Um, I, I, I mean, I think it, to an extent, I, I... By the way, I actually find that I've had a certain, there is a certain shift I, I, if you really want, you know, my, my only personal analysis, any shift in my own, uh, position-

02:39:51
Eric Weinstein: It's perhaps I'm less fun.

02:39:53
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:39:53
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:39:53
Douglas Murray: I think it's probably that.

02:39:54
Eric Weinstein: Probably right.

02:39:55
Douglas Murray: Uh, but no, the, the, the, uh, the, the, the only noticeable shift in myself I noticed was, was when I was writing The Strange Death of Europe, and writing about migration, and following all of that in the middle of this decade. I, uh, I, I was very, very, in a very, very gloo- gloomy black place because I was writing about what I saw as being an almost insuperable issue, issue, problem. And, uh, when I wrote Madness of Crowds, I enjoyed myself enormously. And, um-

02:40:24
Eric Weinstein: Seems perverse, but I'm sure there's, there's method to this madness.

02:40:26
Douglas Murray: Well, because I'll tell you, I actually said this a couple times to interviewers. I said, "You'll notice everything about me changes."

02:40:33
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:40:34
Douglas Murray: Uh, I will be very, almost as I learned recently from somebody, the term is black pilled-

02:40:44
Eric Weinstein: Black pilled

02:40:44
Douglas Murray: ... when I'm talking about, uh, uh, Strange Death. And, uh, when I'm talking about Madness of Crowds, you'll notice that my whole demeanor changes. Uh, I thought why that is, and, uh, uh, there were several explanations. One was m- it's so funny. I mean, you and I talked. I think I say in the acknowledgments of The Madness of Crowds that, you know, I o- I owe several of the thoughts in the book to you and conversations with you. And, um, y- like me, you know that, I mean, a lot of this is hilarious. A lot of the stuff about gays, and women, and race, and trans is so damn funny. I did the audiobook for The Madness of Crowds.

02:41:25
Eric Weinstein: So are we now at the portion of the show where we make fun of gays, trans-

02:41:29
Douglas Murray: Oh

02:41:29
Eric Weinstein: ... Blacks, and women?

02:41:30
Douglas Murray: Oh, you bet.

02:41:32
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:41:33
Douglas Murray: Um [laughs], welcome to the demonetization.

02:41:35
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:41:36
Douglas Murray: Um, so-

02:41:37
Eric Weinstein: And that's all the time we have with-

02:41:39
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

02:41:39
Eric Weinstein: ... Douglas Murray.

02:41:41
Douglas Murray: No, but I am... It's very fu- When I did the audiobook to Madness of Crowds-

02:41:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

02:41:45
Douglas Murray: ... which I'm glad to say has been a roaring success, I, I just had a great time.

02:41:49
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:41:50
Douglas Murray: Now, that sounds sort of, you know, again, don't, don't, don't pat yourself on the back, Douglas. I laughed so much, not just because of the wittiness and the sharpness of the prose-

02:41:59
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:41:59
Douglas Murray: ... but the, um, the, the, the things I was quoting.

02:42:03
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:42:03
Douglas Murray: Because it's so self-evidently ridiculous, uh, as you know.

02:42:08
Eric Weinstein: If you break it out of its natural context.

02:42:09
Douglas Murray: If you break it out of its natural... I'm not, and I'm, I'm not, I'm not willing to take this crap as seriously as some people are.

02:42:15
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

02:42:15
Douglas Murray: I'm willing to take some of it very seriously, 'cause I know what they're trying to do. But so- some of it is just obviously laughable, and I kept on having to say to the sound people, you know, "Please be assured I'm, I'm laughing, not at my own jokes, but the, the things I'm quoting," you know?

02:42:28
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:42:29
Douglas Murray: Uh, it, it's very hard to read, read a sentence of Judith Butler out loud and not just burst, burst out laughing. Um, it's self-evidently ridiculous once you, once you vocalize it. Anyhow, the point I'm making is that I, I was trying to work out why, why does everything about my demeanor change in this? And I realized it's because it's winnable. I honestly think all of that stuff's winnable, and I perk up.

02:42:54
Eric Weinstein: Because it's something to do.

02:42:55
Douglas Murray: But, well, it's something to do, but it's, it's, it's a good thing to do.

02:42:59
Eric Weinstein: And you can attract people.

02:43:01
Douglas Murray: And, and I think we can win. Now, I, I, and I think, by the way, maybe we should get onto this a bit, in a bit, but I think it's a very important thing. I, it's not just a pose. I think it's a very important thing to say, "Here's something that y- y- we can win."

02:43:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:43:14
Douglas Murray: Uh, um, particularly people on the, on the ideological right, uh, uh, tend not to have very many of them. They, they spend all their time moaning and talking about how beleaguered they are even when they're in power. And, um, uh, but, but here's-

02:43:27
Eric Weinstein: In the US, they obsess about a flat tax, which they never get.

02:43:30
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:43:31
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:43:32
Douglas Murray: And, uh, and, and nothing else [laughs]. That's what's so amazing. They talk about nothing else about the conditions of society other than a flat tax.

02:43:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, something like that.

02:43:40
Douglas Murray: Um, what else might we do after the flat tax? Whatever you like.

02:43:45
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:43:45
Douglas Murray: Leave it up to you guys. Um, no, so, so, so my point is, is to, to a great extent, our attitudes are dependent on whether we think things are winnable.

02:43:55
Eric Weinstein: Right. I agree with that.

02:43:57
Douglas Murray: Uh, um, my feeling with, w-with, with, with 2020 so it, so far is that one of the things it's told me is that we have to be exceptionally judicious about how we spend our time.

02:44:10
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

02:44:11
Douglas Murray: And that we have to be very, very careful that we are not being manipulated into narratives one after the other. I think I said to you before, uh, my impression once George Floyd kicked off was, uh, and people who read the updated version of Mass of Crowds will know this. I mean, I, I explain there what I think was going on. But, uh, you'll know that I, I, I think I said to you once on the phone, I just feel like the, our society's become like this Eye of Sauron.

02:44:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:44:40
Douglas Murray: You know, we, we, we, we focused... In January, we were meant to be in a climate emergency where all governments in the world were being, uh, ma- primarily in the Western world, were being told, "You have to c- a- admit, you have to legislate. There is a climate emergency going on." And then we had a pandemic, which seemed m- like a more immediate emergency. [lips smack] And then the people who'd been doing climate emergency went on to pandemic emergency. And then after May, we had the racist emergency. And, uh, uh, it just... Right, we're only halfway through the year with three emergencies in. The Eye of Sauron is focused on, on, on climate, COVID, race. I'm not up for this.

02:45:27
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:45:27
Douglas Murray: I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm not up for spending my life doing this in whatever order you, you tell me to-

02:45:32
Eric Weinstein: To be constantly reactive.

02:45:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah. I'm, I'm not... I, uh, that's why I spent the s- the early weeks of lockdown when I thought, "Okay, maybe we're all gonna die," just reading Tolstoy because I thought, "This is something I want to do. This is, is, is a n- a nourishing thing to do, and I'm, and I'm not gonna get caught out on this, on this train." Now, in retrospect, some people might legitimately say, "Well, you missed realizing what the COVID thing was as well." But as I say, I, I did that fatalistic thing of, okay, this is one that's not in my bailiwick. But, um, but I, I strongly, I, I strongly feel that we should have learnt this from the year so far, that first of all, we keep being distracted.

02:46:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:46:11
Douglas Murray: Secondly, everything we're distracted onto, we don't make better. It's a disastrous thing to realize. Like, we didn't solve climate.

02:46:22
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

02:46:23
Douglas Murray: We didn't solve COVID. We sure as hell haven't solved race. In fact, we make everything worse.

02:46:31
Eric Weinstein: Well, what do we do about all of these, um, British shootings by unarmed policemen of, uh, of Blacks in the UK?

02:46:40
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is, uh, this is-

02:46:42
Eric Weinstein: That is a tough problem to solve, sir.

02:46:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, as, um, uh, regular readers will know my crack on this, which is I saw the first major Black Lives Matter protest in the UK four years ago. I went along to see it in Central London and was, uh, amused and fed into my, my pleasure and irony that, uh, uh, the thousand or so protesters were walking along Oxford Street with their hands in the ar- air, imitating what they thought to be the Ferguson chant, saying, "Hands up, don't shoot," accompanied all the way along their protest by unarmed British police officers who couldn't have shot them if they'd wanted to. Um, and, uh-

02:47:15
Eric Weinstein: They could have held up their fingers, sir, in a menacing fashion with the thumb cocked back to effect-

02:47:19
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:47:19
Eric Weinstein: ... the position of a hammer.

02:47:20
Douglas Murray: Um, the, the, um, you know, they, uh, th- they, they, they've been trying. I actually wrote in the New York Post this morning a piece saying I really resent now the American culture wars spilling out across my country. I, I, I'm not up for this. I think it's highly undesirable. The, the, the world has many things that they should thank America for, but your culture wars is not one of them. And it's being overlaid everywhere, and sometimes people say, "Why are the English-speaking countries so vulnerable?" Uh, because they're English-speaking countries, and America's the dominant power, and so we get all the spillage faster.

02:47:55
Eric Weinstein: What do you think about-

02:47:56
Douglas Murray: The French don't get it so far

02:47:57
Eric Weinstein: ... pseudo-English-speaking countries? Sweden, India.

02:48:02
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah. Well, th- th- they, certainly Sweden and other countries like that, they, they get, get part of this. I mean, it made no sense to me after George Floyd that there was, uh, looting on the main luxury shopping street in Stockholm.

02:48:12
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

02:48:13
Douglas Murray: Or why men in Brussels started hurling things at the police. So yes, there, there is this overlaying of it onto everything, which-

02:48:21
Eric Weinstein: So maybe that's so bizarre and so crazy that we should ask this question: Why is this happening everywhere all at once all the time?

02:48:30
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

02:48:30
Eric Weinstein: I agree that it may be more intense in the Anglophone nations.

02:48:34
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

02:48:35
Eric Weinstein: But certainly it seems to be the case that there is some synchronizing behavior. There's something in the environment-

02:48:44
Douglas Murray: Right

02:48:44
Eric Weinstein: ... in the ethos seeping through the internet. Who knows what?

02:48:47
Douglas Murray: What do you think that is?

02:48:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think it has to do with a very long chain that begins with a slowdown in scientific progress-

02:48:58
Douglas Murray: Yes. Mm

02:48:59
Eric Weinstein: ... and that the, it, the... I don't know how to put this exactly. But the inventions that we've, we've brought into our lives, from the pill-

02:49:10
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:49:11
Eric Weinstein: ... to fiat money, to the mobile web, where, uh, communications and semiconductor technology, uh, collide, have left us in a world where we are bizarrely exhausted.

02:49:25
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:49:25
Eric Weinstein: We don't even know what the word exhausted means. We don't believe in religion. We can't get rid of our need to believe in religion. I do think that the appearance of words like narrative, which was always present, and performative, which I think is relatively recent-

02:49:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:49:40
Eric Weinstein: ... in origin, means that we're sort of dealing with a world where we're searching for new language. The example that I like to give is that for a period of time, there was a strange phenomena that attractive women would take pictures of themselves in bathroom mirrors and post them And we didn't talk about it because we didn't really know how to say, "Isn't it strange that women are pointing cameras at themselves in restaurant bathrooms?" And then somebody created the word selfie, and everybody said, "Yes, of course. Now we have language for it."

02:50:12
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:50:13
Eric Weinstein: The same thing with a word like performative.

02:50:15
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:50:16
Eric Weinstein: Um, we somehow are recognizing that there's a worldwide economic and technological slowdown.

02:50:26
Douglas Murray: Yes.

02:50:26
Eric Weinstein: It isn't occurring in, in the twin areas of communications and semiconductors, so that continues apace.

02:50:33
Douglas Murray: Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

02:50:34
Eric Weinstein: And we don't have individual lives and futures that we're interested in contributing to, and I'm gonna add one more aspect. Perhaps the biggest disaster in my own per- private life, which I did not realize in real time was going to be this profound, was an interaction between Rachel Maddow and Rockefeller University. And she was invited to Rockefeller University, which is very interesting, because it's one of only a tiny number of universities that have no undergraduates.

02:51:09
Douglas Murray: Right. Okay.

02:51:10
Eric Weinstein: Right? So you have UCSF-

02:51:12
Douglas Murray: Sure

02:51:12
Eric Weinstein: ... Rockefeller, but still absolutely top in the world. And she gets into the main auditorium, and I believe that there are paintings that are commissioned of the Nobel laureates who have worked at Rockefeller, as well as people who've, you know, been elected to the National Academy, and are thought to be the absolute leaders in the world. And she utters the phrase, "What is up with the dude wall?"

02:51:35
Douglas Murray: Oh, yes, yes, yes.

02:51:36
Eric Weinstein: And the pictures come down, because no one can defend the concept of a so-called dude wall.

02:51:44
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes, yes. Yes.

02:51:45
Eric Weinstein: Now, I am very open to the idea. I have particular female scientists who I feel did not get their due.

02:51:53
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:51:53
Eric Weinstein: Emmy Nurder would be one.

02:51:55
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:51:55
Eric Weinstein: A woman named Madame Wu would be another in physics.

02:51:59
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:52:00
Eric Weinstein: Um, I don't disbelieve, as per our earlier discussion, that there is no racism, no sexism in science.

02:52:09
Douglas Murray: Sure.

02:52:09
Eric Weinstein: But I don't think it's anything like the levels that we're seeing.

02:52:12
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

02:52:12
Eric Weinstein: And I am unmotivated-

02:52:18
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:52:18
Eric Weinstein: ... in a weird way, when I don't believe that I can do anything that will cause a name to go into the historical record. It really matters to me that-

02:52:27
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:52:27
Eric Weinstein: ... there's some meaning to the world-

02:52:30
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:52:30
Eric Weinstein: ... after I'm gone, of my life.

02:52:32
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:52:33
Eric Weinstein: And the phrase, "What is up with the dude wall?" Was powerful enough. Like, when, when Nikole Hannah-Jones utters this phrase in a tweet, it would be an honor-

02:52:45
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

02:52:45
Eric Weinstein: ... when she's responding to-

02:52:47
Douglas Murray: Somebody saying the s- yeah

02:52:47
Eric Weinstein: ... let's call them the nine- the 1619 riots.

02:52:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

02:52:51
Eric Weinstein: My feeling is w- so now we're gonna topple s- statues of not only slavers and Confederate general- generals that may have been put up as intimidation.

02:53:01
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:53:01
Eric Weinstein: But also George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and an elk.

02:53:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

02:53:06
Eric Weinstein: We're gonna top-

02:53:08
Douglas Murray: The, the burning of the elk was one of the things that made me think, maybe the era is just pagan.

02:53:14
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:53:14
Douglas Murray: I mean, uh, the, the fact that you would have to gather around a burning elk night after night struck me as [laughs] informative.

02:53:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, did they do anything bestial and...?

02:53:24
Douglas Murray: I don't know. I think you just burn the elk.

02:53:26
Eric Weinstein: I mean, if they sodomized the elk-

02:53:27
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:53:27
Eric Weinstein: ... while burning it, I would, I would know where we were.

02:53:29
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. Abso-

02:53:30
Eric Weinstein: But I can't figure out-

02:53:31
Douglas Murray: You know where you are with a chap when he's up to that.

02:53:33
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:53:34
Douglas Murray: Um, the, uh... You know, th- this, uh, this-

02:53:38
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] It's just so stupid.

02:53:39
Douglas Murray: Yes

02:53:40
Eric Weinstein: I can't take it.

02:53:41
Douglas Murray: The, the [laughs] the dude wall stuff is, is the really sinister... Is, is really sinister. By the way, again, I mean, it's a sort of recurring theme in this conversation, this thing of not wanting to be pushed where they're trying to push you.

02:53:54
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

02:53:55
Douglas Murray: Let me-

02:53:56
Eric Weinstein: They're trying to push me into becoming a bigot.

02:53:58
Douglas Murray: Right.

02:53:58
Eric Weinstein: They want me to be a misogynist.

02:53:59
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

02:53:59
Eric Weinstein: They want me to hate Islam. Nothing doing.

02:54:01
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. They want, they, they want you to say there's no sexism, or there's no racism, or there's never... Et cetera, et cetera.

02:54:09
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:54:09
Douglas Murray: And, and we can't do that-

02:54:11
Eric Weinstein: And it's not true

02:54:11
Douglas Murray: ... because we don't want to do that. But the moment we concede that, then they're gonna try to pull us down into lies.

02:54:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing. Who can still dance on the A-frame roo- roof or avoid the snowplow?

02:54:22
Douglas Murray: Yes.

02:54:22
Eric Weinstein: We don't w- so-

02:54:24
Douglas Murray: Yes. Not, not very many people can. [laughs]

02:54:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the thing. Is it really down to 20 people, and you know them all because 18 of them live, uh, i- in the modern version of your Rolodex?

02:54:34
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Well-

02:54:36
Eric Weinstein: Because it's the people who can speak in public, and I really do think this has to do with institutions.

02:54:40
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:54:41
Eric Weinstein: The existence of Noam Chomsky is something I repeatedly discuss.

02:54:45
Douglas Murray: Mm.

02:54:45
Eric Weinstein: Because Noam Chomsky was a dissident-

02:54:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

02:54:47
Eric Weinstein: ... employed by an institution without being sacked.

02:54:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:54:51
Eric Weinstein: We have lost the ability to employ the critics-

02:54:56
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm

02:54:56
Eric Weinstein: ... within the institutions that they are meant to keep honest.

02:55:00
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes. Uh, the... We, we, uh, uh, let me ho- hold onto the institutions thought for, for a second, and first though say something about the, again, about the dude wall. Um, o- o- one way to try to counter this, it may, may sound like a purely tactical play. It isn't. It is... You know, I test myself, um, um, as we all do, on, you know, you know, what, what one's feeling about certain moves that are being made at the moment. And most of it is sanguine or irritable or disliking-

02:55:36
Eric Weinstein: Mm

02:55:36
Douglas Murray: ... and much more. Occasionally, one comes along which really gets under my skin. There was one recently where, because again, all of the spillage of this happens everywhere.

02:55:48
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:55:48
Douglas Murray: There was one recently where someone online said to someone else, you know, something like... It was, it was somebody of ethnic minority saying to somebody who was white, you know, because we've had the statue pulling down in Britain as well, um, you know, "Why should I care about your ancestors?" And, you know, I just, I thought, you know, you think you just pull down statues of all of the people we admire. Admiral Nelson is the latest one they're talking about pulling down because of a forged letter hauling him onto the pro-slavery side before his death in 1805. You th- you think-

02:56:27
Eric Weinstein: He's also not a, not a millennial.

02:56:30
Douglas Murray: He was also guilty of not being a millennial. I, I, I think, I think he wasn't on board with gay marriage. I can't remember.

02:56:34
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:56:35
Douglas Murray: Look, he was a Navy man, so he could've been. I, I'm f- I'm, I, I'm horrified. This is the one that gets, gets me.

02:56:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:56:45
Douglas Murray: Uh, you, you, you keep, you keep covering the statue of Churchill in, in graffiti that says racist. You, you keep, uh, uh, graffiti-ing the Cenotaph, which is the memorial to the dead of the two world wars. Um, y- y- y- you keep doing that, and then you say, "We don't give a damn about your ancestors." What's the instinct that, that kicks in that's not very noble but, but anyway is an instinct worth putting out there? I, I s- the instinct says, you know what? If you don't give a damn about my ancestors, I don't see why I should pretend to give a damn about yours, so let's go at it. Fine. You wanna go at that? We can do that. Here's the ignoble version of that in the American context. You wanna tell the majority of the population, who are still white, that 13% of the population who are Black are allowed to demean and talk in a derogatory fashion about the majority. How long do you think that's gonna last? Now, the problem with this is not only that it's ugly, but it also pos- puts one in the position of the Muslim Brotherhood as opposed to Al-Qaeda, which is you're gonna have to put yourselves in my hands because otherwise it's the guys who are gonna set off car bombs every hour. It's not a nice position. I didn't like it when the Brotherhood did that.

02:58:04
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

02:58:05
Douglas Murray: I don't like it when people do it now. Nevertheless, it's probably something we should have in our minds. Like, the thing you're pushing, maybe deliberately ... I mean, maybe, maybe what is being done in those things is in fact like the 68ers who hoped that if they taunted the police enough, the police would behave in the way they thought the police would behave and would reveal the true fascist nature of the state. We see this in, in America today with people, you know, like white men and women screaming at Black policemen, people who I just admire beyond anything. The, the, the self-restraint of these men as these spoiled brats scream at them and try to make them hit them, you know, in order to reveal the true na- racist nature of the state and so on. Um, it seems possible that w- that this is the move that people are trying to do. They are trying to rile us up. They're saying, "We're gonna come for every single one of your holy things."

02:58:59
Eric Weinstein: Yes, that's what they're doing.

02:59:00
Douglas Murray: And, and we then want to see if you snap. Um, and we have that problem, and then you get onto the institution one, which is that nobody, as you know, nobody in an institution now can tell the truth. And it's slightly worse than that, which is that-

02:59:22
Eric Weinstein: Now, I'm used to my saying stuff like that, and then people calling me an extremist. Do you believe what you just said?

02:59:28
Douglas Murray: Yes, I mean, I, I don't doubt that there are some-

02:59:29
Eric Weinstein: My, my, my phrase is almost everybody, particularly in an institution, is lying about almost everything almost all the time. That's where I believe we've gotten.

02:59:38
Douglas Murray: Right. I, I certainly think it's ... I can, uh, de-weaponize a little bit of my statement as I, as I ... I, I don't doubt there are some peop- I know, I know people in institutions who, who think about all the things we're thinking about and are troubled by the same things and, uh, and so-

02:59:52
Eric Weinstein: But when they, when-

02:59:53
Douglas Murray: But they don't speak. They don't speak.

02:59:54
Eric Weinstein: When they speak ex cathedra-

02:59:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:59:56
Eric Weinstein: ... they either say nothing at all-

02:59:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah

02:59:59
Eric Weinstein: ... they mumble something saying, "Oh, I had to say that"-

03:00:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:00:01
Eric Weinstein: ... or they muddle it out.

03:00:04
Douglas Murray: They, they approach me in the, in the manner of a 1950s homosexual, you know? They effectively tap their foot under the cubicle door at me. It's not something I like, and I feel a mixture of things with them, including pity and distaste. Um, but yes, I, I think that what would happen to you if you were in any university or government department or the BBC or The New York Times and you said, "Look, I think this whole Black Lives Matter thing, I mean, it starts in a good place, but my God, it goes to hell quite fast, doesn't it?"

03:00:45
Eric Weinstein: I, I, I go someplace different. I say, "Look, forget Black Lives Matter." They ... Somebody includes one line that says, "We protest Israel because of its genocidal, uh, nature as a state."

03:01:00
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:01:01
Eric Weinstein: Use the word genocide and Israel-

03:01:03
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:01:03
Eric Weinstein: ... I don't care about any of the rest of your organization.

03:01:05
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

03:01:07
Eric Weinstein: You, you know, it's like-

03:01:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:01:08
Eric Weinstein: ... it's not like-

03:01:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:01:09
Eric Weinstein: ... this is a really good apple pie except for the arsenic.

03:01:12
Douglas Murray: Right. Right, right, right.

03:01:13
Eric Weinstein: I, I've made a wonderful pot roast-

03:01:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:01:14
Eric Weinstein: ... except for the arsenic.

03:01:15
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

03:01:15
Eric Weinstein: It's like, as far... as long as there's arsenic, I'm not talking about anything el-

03:01:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Um, you, one of my fa- favorite ones is, uh, what if, uh, uh, if you're at any of these institutions and you're told to do the trans stuff and you say, "What about this autogynephilia stuff?" How long do you last? I mean, if you do this-

03:01:36
Eric Weinstein: Trans, trans is complicated for a different reason, because it's an umbrella category, and-

03:01:40
Douglas Murray: Right

03:01:40
Eric Weinstein: ... just the way stroke is an umbrella category, where you have stroke from excessive thinning and stroke from excessive clotting.

03:01:47
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

03:01:48
Eric Weinstein: It may be that two things downstream are both called stroke-

03:01:52
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:01:52
Eric Weinstein: ... but their etiologies are different and the-

03:01:54
Douglas Murray: Right

03:01:54
Eric Weinstein: ... remediations are different. And the problem with trans is not any particular aspect. I mean, it's one of these situations in which some people desperately need In my opinion, some surgery to save their lives-

03:02:07
Douglas Murray: Sure, sure, sure

03:02:07
Eric Weinstein: ... because they've made three attempts, and every indication is that something-

03:02:11
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:02:11
Eric Weinstein: ... has happened since, you know, since birth.

03:02:13
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. As you know, this is my view as well. I, I-

03:02:15
Eric Weinstein: But then there's another group of things, situations where it's clearly social contagion.

03:02:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. And, and, yeah.

03:02:20
Eric Weinstein: Why are you forcing me to use one term to co- cover two totally different situations?

03:02:24
Douglas Murray: Absolutely. Unless the aim is, again, to, to, to, to, to-

03:02:26
Eric Weinstein: To make sure that you trip up, and then we can boycott

03:02:29
Douglas Murray: ... exactly. But to go back to this institutions thing, I mean, it seems to me so obvious now. It- it- I mean, it's happened with friends of ours. Uh, uh, the minute you get into the, the realm of the thing that they want, that they can kill you over, they get you.

03:02:46
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:02:46
Douglas Murray: I mean, um, I don't know how Jordan survived at, uh, uh, Toronto. Uh, I think, you know, I'd, I'd... M- maybe let- let's not go into that bit of it. But when Jordan Peterson is offered the, I think, unpaid, non-stipendry position at Cambridge University for one term-

03:03:04
Eric Weinstein: Yes

03:03:04
Douglas Murray: ... to be at the divinity faculty in order to research, I think he wanted to give some lectures on the Book of Exodus. [lips smack] Uh, um, a- a- and they get him. They get him, 'cause you're not allowed that. We can have controversial professor roaming free.

03:03:21
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:03:21
Douglas Murray: We cannot have him associated with an institution, and so we'll come up with a BS thing of one standing beside somebody with a T-shirt which didn't say the approved thing.

03:03:31
Eric Weinstein: Whatever.

03:03:31
Douglas Murray: By the way, sorry, one other thing. Again, a bit of personal, uh, vendetta. I mean, w-

03:03:36
Eric Weinstein: All right

03:03:36
Douglas Murray: ... if I can't do that here. Um, there's a, there's a professor at Cambridge, one of the more minor colleges, of Indian origin, rather, very, very privileged woman, um, who, uh, rampages around Twitter saying racist things about white people. Uh, she's promoted.

03:03:55
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

03:03:55
Douglas Murray: She was promoted this year. The institution says, we will promote an anti-white racist when we find them. In fact, we'll do it, we'll do it rather visibly to rub your noses in it, as it were. But we can't have controversial Professor Jordan Peterson coming near us. Controversial young junior research fellow Noah Carl, thrown out of the university one year earlier because of bogus claims about his research by people who didn't know anything about his field of expertise.

03:04:27
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

03:04:27
Douglas Murray: They do that one year. The next year they promote the person who does the anti-white racism. Um, this is, this is the transparency problem. I would have liked to have lived in a... I, I went to Oxford. I never thought highly of Cambridge, but I, I, I know a few people who do, and-

03:04:41
Eric Weinstein: We're gonna bring that in here?

03:04:42
Douglas Murray: I would... Exactly.

03:04:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:04:43
Douglas Murray: I'm gonna hit them low.

03:04:45
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:04:45
Douglas Murray: I, I, um... No, I mean, seriously, I, I, I would like to live in a world where Cambridge University didn't pull that stuff.

03:04:52
Eric Weinstein: I mean, it does have the Lucasian Professorship, so I think it's rather important that we retain it.

03:04:56
Douglas Murray: I'd like to retain it.

03:04:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:04:58
Douglas Murray: I'd like to retain it, but they make it very, very hard. They make it hard, not least by making themselves part of this tripwire mechanism that's operating in our society.

03:05:06
Eric Weinstein: So this is Cambridge, but not Oxford?

03:05:08
Douglas Murray: Well, it has-

03:05:10
Eric Weinstein: It's everywhere, so

03:05:11
Douglas Murray: ... it has happened almost everywhere. It has happened everywhere. I would say that, I mean, when Oxford University was first invited to pull down Rhodes, Cecil Rhodes' statues, it actually resisted it. It looks like it's gone along with it this time. Again, because [lips smack] when a man is killed by a cop in Minnesota, it's now seen as being totally obvious that there should be another assault on the statue of Cecil Rhodes in Oxford. Um-

03:05:31
Eric Weinstein: You were not able to follow this logic.

03:05:33
Douglas Murray: No, I thought he didn't have any responsibility for it.

03:05:35
Eric Weinstein: Ah.

03:05:37
Douglas Murray: Uh, y- the, um-

03:05:40
Eric Weinstein: But maybe, maybe we don't understand what this logic is. Maybe at some level this is so preposterous to us that we don't actually entertain what the transmission mechanism is because it's prima facie insane.

03:05:55
Douglas Murray: Yes.

03:05:56
Eric Weinstein: And therefore we're not at liberty in some sense to say, I wonder if I had to program a computer with rules. Like, if I let this be-

03:06:03
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:06:03
Eric Weinstein: ... a data set, and I tried to train some deep learning algorithm, and I tried to figure out, okay, um, when some policing incident goes awry somewhere, what is the propensity to tear down an elk? [laughs]

03:06:18
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

03:06:20
Eric Weinstein: There has to be some probability of transition that that's going to occur.

03:06:24
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Do we have to hide our elks every time, every time this happens?

03:06:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, the... There's a lovely old song of Flanders and Swann about a gnu.

03:06:35
Douglas Murray: Oh, yes.

03:06:35
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

03:06:35
Douglas Murray: Great fan of that.

03:06:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

03:06:37
Douglas Murray: Um, look, perhaps one way of doing it is, is that... [lips smack] Well, this is the thing. In, in the sort of quieter moments of this year-

03:06:48
Eric Weinstein: Yes

03:06:49
Douglas Murray: ... um, when I've had the opportunity to reflect, uh, I suppose the answer I've come up with is that the problem of all of this is that it's something to do and that whether we-

03:07:08
Eric Weinstein: It's meaning

03:07:08
Douglas Murray: ... it's meaning.

03:07:09
Eric Weinstein: It's meaning because we have not g-

03:07:11
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:07:12
Eric Weinstein: It's like omega-

03:07:13
Douglas Murray: So-

03:07:13
Eric Weinstein: ... omega-3 fatty acids being crowded out by omega-6.

03:07:17
Douglas Murray: Yeah. So we have... We'd lost God. We have the God-shaped hole still, and very few things even aspire to fill them.

03:07:31
Eric Weinstein: Nation-shaped hole?

03:07:33
Douglas Murray: Nation-shaped hole.

03:07:35
Eric Weinstein: Family-size hole?

03:07:36
Douglas Murray: Yeah. And the problem... Again, I don't like being stuck in left-right dichotomies, but the right basically is, is uninterested in everything other than the economics.

03:07:49
Eric Weinstein: Weirdly.

03:07:50
Douglas Murray: Weirdly. Which is, is sort of fine in one sense, so long as the tide is always rising, and you and I know that the world we are now entering is one in which the tide is far from rising. So the right's- Unwillingness to address those things looks like a very, very serious-

03:08:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, they are learning.

03:08:11
Douglas Murray: Okay. But it looks like a-

03:08:12
Eric Weinstein: Like the libertarians learned through COVID that you can't pretend that every man is an island.

03:08:17
Douglas Murray: Right. Okay. Yes. I, I w- I wish li- libertarians had been smarter earlier on that stuff. I, I, I have a deep-

03:08:25
Eric Weinstein: I love a lot of them, but I c- it, it... They, they live in a simplified world-

03:08:29
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:08:29
Eric Weinstein: ... in which the connections between people are undervalued. I'm sorry.

03:08:32
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I've always been frustrated by this and, and, and, and there's an element, sorry to say this to my libertarian friends, but an element of cowardice involved in that. The-

03:08:41
Eric Weinstein: I'll say the same thing about the rationality community, that you're, you're opting out-

03:08:45
Douglas Murray: Absolutely

03:08:45
Eric Weinstein: ... of the total human condition.

03:08:47
Douglas Murray: Yes. And so, so the problem we find ourselves in is the right can bother with this. The left has had to, or deliberately or otherwise, come up with things to fill the gaps.

03:09:02
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:09:03
Douglas Murray: All of which are plausible and decent in the places they start somewhere around the origin. You know? Let's, let's not have people prejudiced against because of character traits over which they have no say. Good, good, good ambition. I, I, um... If you didn't want to make it your life's work, you'd have to accept that you might look bad by saying so, and so it is quite a desirable thing to spend your life doing, and sp- particularly if it meant that it was just like the story we tell of the civil rights struggles in the latter part of the last century. If it's the perception that you just need to do one last push once, and you get there, and you will always hold that ground.

03:09:45
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:09:45
Douglas Murray: Which I don't believe. I, I, I, I think-

03:09:47
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is one of the things I'm starting to learn about. For example, there was a resistance to what would now be termed second wave feminism-

03:09:55
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:09:55
Eric Weinstein: ... which I found very distasteful.

03:09:57
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:09:57
Eric Weinstein: Where, you know, somebody would say some... Terms like feminazis and things began-

03:10:02
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:10:02
Eric Weinstein: ... and man-hating feminists. I would think-

03:10:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

03:10:05
Eric Weinstein: ... what are you guys talking about?

03:10:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

03:10:06
Eric Weinstein: Somebody wants to, to work in an office-

03:10:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:10:09
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, and, and you're acting like this. And I, I, I now increasingly wonder whether people who are looking at second wave feminism and extrapolating it out to some sort of 17th wave social justice theory-

03:10:23
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:10:24
Eric Weinstein: ... were actually focused on a slippery slope problem, and were weirdly talking about where this could lead-

03:10:31
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:10:32
Eric Weinstein: ... which I don't think it had to lead.

03:10:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:10:33
Eric Weinstein: And in, in fact, I think it was absolutely necessary that... On what basis would you segregate education at the highest level? I forget when Princeton-

03:10:43
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:10:43
Eric Weinstein: ... went coed and things, or when they had their first... You know, if you look at like, for example, the first Black student to, uh, graduate from every one of the major universities, there's some that are, you know, 1800s, very early on, others like 1950s.

03:10:59
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:11:00
Eric Weinstein: So, you know, there's a huge range-

03:11:02
Douglas Murray: Wow

03:11:02
Eric Weinstein: ... of these behaviors that were once present. But I think one of the things that I'd also like to, to hear from you, just as, as we... The original conceit of our, um... You know, we used to have Alistair Cooke doing the Letter from America, and we had de Tocqueville, uh, famously-

03:11:18
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:11:18
Eric Weinstein: ... commenting on the American landscape. I do wonder, um, as a gay man, how you see heterosexual relationships because I think you've been an incredibly-

03:11:27
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:11:27
Eric Weinstein: ... astute observer from outside-

03:11:30
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:11:31
Eric Weinstein: ... as to changes in heterosexual courtship, male-female relations.

03:11:35
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

03:11:35
Eric Weinstein: And I wonder, after a short bio break, whether I could entice you to, um, give us some carefully chosen observations on that dangerous topic.

03:11:44
Douglas Murray: I'd love to. Let me first say something about the meaning of life.

03:11:47
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

03:11:48
Douglas Murray: Um...

03:11:49
Eric Weinstein: I did like that.

03:11:50
Douglas Murray: [laughs] Uh-

03:11:51
Eric Weinstein: Why you cracked a smile and ruined everything, I don't know.

03:11:54
Douglas Murray: Oh. [laughs] Um, no, because I didn't quite finish that thought about... Is it where the deep thought of what is happening?

03:12:02
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

03:12:04
Douglas Murray: Uh, and I'd like us, m- maybe not now, but I'd like us collectively, the way your, your listeners and others to, to start to, to... We, we need to talk about this more and better. There is, there is a very clear disjunct between the story we've been telling ourselves about what we are-

03:12:26
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

03:12:27
Douglas Murray: ... and, and an intuition that we feel about ourselves as human beings. And I'm gonna struggle with the language of this because we all do, and it's part of the human condition to struggle with it. But there is a mismatch, and very few people are speaking into it. The mismatch is we ran science over the last few generations, perhaps longer. I mean, you may even say we ran the Enlightenment-

03:12:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm

03:12:58
Douglas Murray: ... um, which was one of the best ways in which we could do it. I'm not with my Enlightenment sort of, all we need is the Enlightenment friends-

03:13:06
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:13:07
Douglas Murray: ... um, because I think they miss this element. Uh, before that, we ran religion as the, the primary explanation mechanism. We don't have an explanation mechanism. I've said before, we, we might be the first people in human history to have no explanation for what we're doing, which leaves us in a very disadvantaged position. It makes us vulnerable to Mount Banks and frauds and others. But we need to do better at this, and I think that if I was to try to put my finger on it, it would be something like, um, a w- w- There's something we know about ourselves which is not adequately expressed or even spoken to in the culture, and I think of it as being, um... It comes along in the fact that, for instance, if you said, "You, Eric Weinstein, um, you're a consumer."

03:14:01
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:14:02
Douglas Murray: You would say, "Well, yes, but why would you talk about me as if I'm only a consumer?"

03:14:08
Eric Weinstein: I would say no.

03:14:09
Douglas Murray: Okay. Say no. Good As a fast way around it. Um, if you said, um, uh, you're a capitalist or you're, you're a free marketeer or you're, you're a voter-

03:14:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:14:20
Douglas Murray: ... you see all of these things, almost everything you have now, you're a social justice activist.

03:14:24
Eric Weinstein: You're right.

03:14:25
Douglas Murray: You- th- th- so none of it does it. What is it? It's because there has ... We have a very s- strong instinct as a species that these things don't sum us up, and can't. Now, people are coming along at the moment from, particularly from the radical left saying, "Okay, but you could sum yourself up in other ways. You ... We, we will fi- we will encourage you to sum yourself up because of a character trait, and the character trait will be based on something you can't change. But also you will find meaning by warring in order to further this thing." This isn't addressed by anyone else, but it's, that's speaking to a depth. That's speaking to a depth, because it's saying we're going to solve a cosmic injustice.

03:15:07
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:15:07
Douglas Murray: That's worth doing with your life. Why is nobody countering this with anyone, anything else? Now, because, because the rest of it is this entirely now unfilled terrain-

03:15:18
Eric Weinstein: Yes

03:15:18
Douglas Murray: ... which involves the need to say, um, I know I am, we are more than what the age tells us we are, and that we have the same questions that everyone has had before, and we have nobody wishing to provide answers. I have, I think, a favorite version of the question, the biggest question, which comes up in Rilke in the, the Duino Elegies. Uh, he's, Rilke says somewhere in there, um, "Does the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us at all?"

03:15:57
Eric Weinstein: Oh, that's beautiful. I don't know that quote.

03:16:00
Douglas Murray: And, uh, the way we end up living always is to think at best we will say hopefully.

03:16:11
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

03:16:13
Douglas Murray: And this is my system for doing so, and, and in religion obviously we get the answer there. W- there is a secular version of this, which is what you alluded to when you referred to the, um, the dude wall.

03:16:25
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:16:27
Douglas Murray: Let's say the Nobel.

03:16:29
Eric Weinstein: Secular immortality.

03:16:30
Douglas Murray: Secular immortality.

03:16:31
Eric Weinstein: Right. Or if you were doing economics, you would talk about overlapping generations models rather than lineage.

03:16:37
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:16:37
Eric Weinstein: And so this issue of how immortality works-

03:16:41
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:16:41
Eric Weinstein: ... in each individual field really matters-

03:16:44
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:16:44
Eric Weinstein: ... because you, you have to avoid nihilism and solipsism-

03:16:48
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:16:48
Eric Weinstein: ... and all of these sorts of-

03:16:49
Douglas Murray: Yeah. And-

03:16:50
Eric Weinstein: ... intellectual pitfalls

03:16:51
Douglas Murray: ... th- th- the crucial thing is you don't just have to because it isn't good for you.

03:16:54
Eric Weinstein: Yes. Well, because it's also not-

03:16:58
Douglas Murray: It, but it-

03:16:59
Eric Weinstein: It's not true.

03:17:00
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:17:00
Eric Weinstein: And, and, and, and you see, you, you don't code computers much.

03:17:05
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:17:05
Eric Weinstein: Okay. There's a distinction in, in object oriented programming called is-a versus has-a, and the, the way I typically talk about it is if you're not careful, you will define a Lamborghini as a radio.

03:17:19
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:17:19
Eric Weinstein: Because if you say what is a radio? Well, it's something that-

03:17:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:17:22
Eric Weinstein: ... picks up, uh, radio waves and converts them into audible sound.

03:17:27
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:17:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, a Lamborghini can do that.

03:17:29
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:17:30
Eric Weinstein: Right? So to say that a Lamborghini is a radio is completely perverse. Nobody will accept that statement.

03:17:36
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:17:37
Eric Weinstein: However-

03:17:38
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:17:38
Eric Weinstein: ... the idea that you have a voter, you have a consumer-

03:17:42
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:17:42
Eric Weinstein: ... you have a worker-

03:17:43
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:17:43
Eric Weinstein: ... you have an Anglican.

03:17:46
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:17:46
Eric Weinstein: Whatever it is that you think of, if you think of those-

03:17:50
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:17:50
Eric Weinstein: ... as what we would call member variables-

03:17:52
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:17:52
Eric Weinstein: ... and that that which is Douglas, let's say-

03:17:54
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:17:55
Eric Weinstein: ... would be the meta object.

03:17:57
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:17:58
Eric Weinstein: And then all of these meta variables like Douglas as voter-

03:18:01
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

03:18:03
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, Douglas as boyfriend-

03:18:04
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

03:18:05
Eric Weinstein: ... all of these things are in fact things that you have a rather than are.

03:18:10
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes.

03:18:10
Eric Weinstein: Now, that one linguistic shift-

03:18:12
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:18:13
Eric Weinstein: ... is a profound one.

03:18:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:18:15
Eric Weinstein: Um, there's another way ... So I- I'm very taken with the idea, and you, you and I have ta- discussed this at length privately, that many times we're one rhetorical device away from being able to say something-

03:18:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:18:28
Eric Weinstein: ... and no one's figured that out.

03:18:29
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:18:30
Eric Weinstein: So for example, when I have to defend, um ... Pe- people try to trick you into the following. They'll say, "I think," um, let's say, "Black power."

03:18:43
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:18:44
Eric Weinstein: So am I supposed to say all power?

03:18:48
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:18:48
Eric Weinstein: Brown power? White power? Wait, wait, wait, what? [laughs]

03:18:51
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

03:18:52
Eric Weinstein: You know?

03:18:52
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:18:53
Eric Weinstein: Okay, well, on one, on the one hand from a symmetry perspective, white power versus Black power is almost the same statement.

03:19:00
Douglas Murray: True.

03:19:01
Eric Weinstein: However, we've got one mapped to something completely different.

03:19:05
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

03:19:05
Eric Weinstein: And we don't notice the wi- the weird ways in which this occurs.

03:19:08
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:19:08
Eric Weinstein: So famously I say, what is vanilla? Vanilla has two opposite meanings.

03:19:13
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:19:13
Eric Weinstein: It is either the most flavorful of, of, uh, flavorings-

03:19:17
Douglas Murray: Or it's the base

03:19:18
Eric Weinstein: ... or is the-

03:19:19
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:19:19
Eric Weinstein: ... least interesting base that is supposed to be effectively undetectable-

03:19:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah

03:19:23
Eric Weinstein: ... and it's completely neutral.

03:19:24
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:19:25
Eric Weinstein: Same thing happens with white versus European. I have no interest-

03:19:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:19:28
Eric Weinstein: ... in white.

03:19:29
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

03:19:29
Eric Weinstein: I have a tremendous interest in Europe.

03:19:31
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

03:19:31
Eric Weinstein: Tremendous.

03:19:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

03:19:33
Eric Weinstein: And the idea that Europe is both-

03:19:35
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:19:35
Eric Weinstein: ... seen as the most bland thing in the world.

03:19:38
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:19:38
Eric Weinstein: You know, white men can't jump, white men can't dance, white men-

03:19:41
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah

03:19:41
Eric Weinstein: ... can't do a thing.

03:19:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:19:42
Eric Weinstein: Versus what produced La Sagrada Família and the Bach Cello Suites.

03:19:48
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

03:19:48
Eric Weinstein: You know, it's like I can't even fit these in my head. Another one of these things I don't notice is, for example, the idea that if I say, um, the size of someone's head may be related to, uh, that person's intelligence. Like, my God, that's like scientific racism. It's phrenology.

03:20:06
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:20:06
Eric Weinstein: You know, are, are you reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1911? What, what is your problem?

03:20:12
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm. Mm.

03:20:12
Eric Weinstein: Then I say, "I'm not worried about Zika virus because I don't think microcephaly has any cause." Are you kidding? Do you know what the cognitive impairment from having a small head would be? Have you noticed that you're carrying both of these programs in your brain, and that you have a rule that says, "I will not attempt to access them"?

03:20:29
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:20:29
Eric Weinstein: At the same time, it's like you, you can't be out in the street because we have a deadly virus and we all have to pull together. You must be out in the street-

03:20:36
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:20:36
Eric Weinstein: ... because we have a, an incredible problem-

03:20:39
Douglas Murray: Well

03:20:39
Eric Weinstein: ... of public health in our racism.

03:20:40
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. Uh, yeah, where, what happened with obesity as well this year.

03:20:44
Eric Weinstein: Well-

03:20:44
Douglas Murray: Um, but-

03:20:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, we, we can't even give people life-saving advice necessarily. Like, when I saw this virus-

03:20:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah, that's when it bec- that's when it becomes... Yes, exactly. That's when it becomes dangerous, when the, when the, when the thing you're meant to sustain for societal purposes becomes deadly. That would be the time ordinarily where you'd, where you'd, where you'd change the program.

03:21:04
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm coming up on having lost 50 pounds because I believed that, um, that I was a sitting duck, uh, with my BMI where it was by not paying attention to my body when COVID struck.

03:21:18
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:21:19
Eric Weinstein: And I listen-

03:21:21
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:21:22
Eric Weinstein: ... and people immediately say, "Well, that's fat shaming." You know? That you can't talk about-

03:21:25
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:21:25
Eric Weinstein: ... life-saving advice because it's fat shaming.

03:21:28
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

03:21:29
Eric Weinstein: The contradictory pressures that we've taken on-

03:21:31
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

03:21:31
Eric Weinstein: ... like if you think about this-

03:21:32
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:21:32
Eric Weinstein: ... the idea that head size and shape, on the one hand, we know it from scientific racism.

03:21:37
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:21:38
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, we know it from the Zika virus. We've been given two contradictory instructions-

03:21:43
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:21:43
Eric Weinstein: ... and we've been given no expert guidance as to how to get these concepts-

03:21:47
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

03:21:48
Eric Weinstein: ... to play well within a single mind.

03:21:51
Douglas Murray: I agree. L- l- l- just, just return to us, return to us for a nanosecond to the, uh, this other point. We, we are, we are being clogged up, and the clogging up appears to be the purpose for a lot of people.

03:22:06
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:22:07
Douglas Murray: And the problem is that both the clogging and the unclogging becomes purpose. And my own view is that some of the unclogging that you and I both have tried to do-

03:22:20
Eric Weinstein: Mm

03:22:21
Douglas Murray: ... our different ways, and the, the various people we know try to do, is in order to get somewhere else.

03:22:27
Eric Weinstein: Correct. Like, it's not intrinsically interesting just to point out contradictions.

03:22:31
Douglas Murray: Right. I, I'm, I'm not interested merely in, uh, um, showing why hucksters like, uh, the 1619 Project people, and, uh, Robin DiAngelo, and, uh, Kendi, and all these people. I'm not, I'm not interested in just, like, diffusing bits of the bombs they've-

03:22:51
Eric Weinstein: The indulgence merchants

03:22:52
Douglas Murray: ... they've... Yeah. I'm not interested in just diffusing the bombs-

03:22:55
Eric Weinstein: Yes

03:22:55
Douglas Murray: ... that they've put into our society. Although, I do think that needs to be done. I've done a certain amount of it. You've done a lot of it. I think that... I think it's, it's very worthwhile, but I think all the time we have to all have our eyes on the further-

03:23:10
Eric Weinstein: Meaning, purpose

03:23:10
Douglas Murray: ... on a further goal

03:23:12
Eric Weinstein: ... a journey. I agree with this.

03:23:13
Douglas Murray: And, and I'm just... Again, I come back to this, this, this, this point. You know, I was so worried this year that the virus would become something we all did.

03:23:23
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:23:24
Douglas Murray: You know, that we would all become interested in, you know, getting to Christmas, and that's 2020 done. And in 2021, what can we arrange? What can be arranged for us? And before we know it, we're all gonna be on our deathbeds-

03:23:42
Eric Weinstein: Right. What did we do?

03:23:44
Douglas Murray: ... having, you know... I mean, it's, it comes back to what I said. We've had four years where some of our friends have spent four years reacting to the US president. It's not time well spent. It's not nothing, but it's not far off. W- w- if this keeps happening, the opportunity cost for our societies and for us as individuals is just too great.

03:24:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:24:09
Douglas Murray: And we, we, w- we both have to f- w- we all have to find a way to do the declogging, but not only to do that.

03:24:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, you know, I, I, I, I have a certain love for wildlife videos, much as I find them disturbing.

03:24:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:24:25
Eric Weinstein: Very often, whenever you have a swarm, uh, and it could be army ants, it could be hyenas, it could be lions, whatever it is, you have this phase where, for example, if you look at lions taking down an elephant.

03:24:41
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:24:42
Eric Weinstein: Um, very often the lions nip at the elephant to distract it, to exhaust it.

03:24:48
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

03:24:49
Eric Weinstein: Wolves will do these sorts of things. And you always have the narrator say, you know, "What the animal doesn't realize is that it's using its energy, and it will quickly become exhausted." And you're thinking, like, well, what happens if you don't respond to those nips?

03:25:03
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:25:04
Eric Weinstein: It's not clear to me that there's a strategy-

03:25:07
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

03:25:07
Eric Weinstein: ... like even if I notice that I'm wasting my time doing this, these people are at it every day on the other side.

03:25:14
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:25:14
Eric Weinstein: This is their point. This is their mission.

03:25:16
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:25:16
Eric Weinstein: Their mission is to make sure that you can't have rational thoughts in public-

03:25:22
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:25:22
Eric Weinstein: ... unless they have a particular kind of, uh, redistributional outcome.

03:25:27
Douglas Murray: Well-

03:25:27
Eric Weinstein: And I do think that one of the key issues-

03:25:29
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:25:29
Eric Weinstein: ... that we're, we're, we're dealing with is that we have many observations that are not in broad circulation, one of which is that the supposed pro-empathy movement-

03:25:38
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:25:39
Eric Weinstein: ... you would imagine would be a broadening of empathy movement.

03:25:42
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:25:43
Eric Weinstein: How do we make sure that people who previously did not have empathy extended to them-

03:25:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:25:47
Eric Weinstein: ... like the homeless-

03:25:48
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:25:49
Eric Weinstein: ... or the obese-

03:25:49
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:25:49
Eric Weinstein: ... or whoever it is, um, that they're included.

03:25:53
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:25:54
Eric Weinstein: Right? It has nothing to do with most of it.

03:25:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:25:56
Eric Weinstein: Most of it has to do with the idea that it's a redistribution of empathy.

03:26:02
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:26:03
Eric Weinstein: That the people who we have empathized with previously-

03:26:06
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:26:06
Eric Weinstein: ... in this understanding-

03:26:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah

03:26:07
Eric Weinstein: ... now need to be drained of their empathy.

03:26:09
Douglas Murray: There's a limited, there's a limited q- amount of it in the bank, and we have to spend it differently.

03:26:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, I wouldn't say it that way. I would say that it is... There's a division about oppression. Should oppression be eliminated, or should it be reversed?

03:26:24
Douglas Murray: Well, obviously what we th- what with the era we're in is it should be over-corrected.

03:26:29
Eric Weinstein: I think that that's, the overcorrection is a feature, not a bug. If I don't get to visit some of what you visited upon me in getting to a new equilibrium-

03:26:40
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:26:41
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm not interested. And so this is, this is the move where somebody says, "Oh, so it sounds like you're feeling a little uncomfortable. That's how the rest of us feel."

03:26:50
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:26:50
Eric Weinstein: Right? And if I say, for example, like, here's an easy one. Um, you would think that white, older white men would be the most privileged group in this anti-intersectional Olympics, right?

03:27:04
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm. Mm.

03:27:05
Eric Weinstein: They have some of the highest suicide rates in the United States.

03:27:08
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:27:08
Eric Weinstein: Much higher than Black men, and much higher than y- you know, younger Black females versus older white men.

03:27:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:27:14
Eric Weinstein: Night and day different.

03:27:15
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

03:27:16
Eric Weinstein: And they want to make this move, um, when redistributing empathy.

03:27:24
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:27:24
Eric Weinstein: Which is, well, they'll be fine. And you're like, no, no, no, these are suicides. They're not going to be fine. They're dead.

03:27:30
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm. Mm.

03:27:31
Eric Weinstein: And you're like, well, now you see how other people... Well, no, I'm looking-

03:27:34
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:27:34
Eric Weinstein: ... at suicide as an exchange rate.

03:27:36
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

03:27:37
Eric Weinstein: If this group has a higher suicide rate-

03:27:40
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:27:40
Eric Weinstein: ... how are you so sure-

03:27:43
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:27:43
Eric Weinstein: ... that money means what you think it does?

03:27:46
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:27:46
Eric Weinstein: That race means what you do.

03:27:47
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:27:47
Eric Weinstein: That gender... Like, how do you know you haven't gotten the whole thing wrong? Because at least we know that when somebody chooses to take his or, his own life-

03:27:56
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:27:56
Eric Weinstein: ... that that is an equalizing decision.

03:27:59
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes. The, uh... It's, uh, it's the problem in this country that's obviously looming, by the way, isn't it, all of this. Everyone I, everyone I speak to from any political direction now talks about race more than they did four years ago, and they're all becoming aware of the, of the vengeance.

03:28:21
Eric Weinstein: Say more.

03:28:22
Douglas Murray: Um, does anyone in any line of work in America now not think obsessively about race in the workplace?

03:28:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's worse than the workplace. That's a-

03:28:31
Douglas Murray: Oh, no, no, I'm just saying for starters.

03:28:33
Eric Weinstein: No, no, I agree with that.

03:28:34
Douglas Murray: This wasn't the case. This wasn't the case even a few years ago. It was an issue.

03:28:38
Eric Weinstein: It was an issue.

03:28:38
Douglas Murray: It's been an issue for a long time. Uh, people would talk for, you know, the, the inability of, for instance, a, oh, I don't know, to, to, to fire an underperforming Black colleague.

03:28:50
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

03:28:50
Douglas Murray: Was b- that's an issue for a long time.

03:28:52
Eric Weinstein: Or-

03:28:52
Douglas Murray: And I would add to that, uh, um, Black friends who talk, have talked amusedly about the advantages they get for, uh, uh, for being Black. I, I, I, I spoke recently to a, a Black friend that says it's one of the few, you know, sort of obvious things is if, if, if you're Black you don't have to wear a mask. [laughs] 'Cause n- nobody who's white will tell you off for not wearing a mask if you're Black.

03:29:15
Eric Weinstein: I actually don't necessarily believe that.

03:29:17
Douglas Murray: Really?

03:29:17
Eric Weinstein: My guess is, is that, see, me... I mean, I do think that there is a fair amount of prejudice-

03:29:27
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:29:27
Eric Weinstein: ... based on behavioral characteristics.

03:29:31
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:29:31
Eric Weinstein: I mean, it is a very tricky subject because-

03:29:33
Douglas Murray: Sure

03:29:33
Eric Weinstein: ... the place in which race has really changed in my mind is under my roof.

03:29:38
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:29:39
Eric Weinstein: Because I'm in an interracial family-

03:29:41
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:29:41
Eric Weinstein: ... and race was not a big part of daily life in my house.

03:29:45
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

03:29:47
Eric Weinstein: And coming to have to see-

03:29:51
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:29:51
Eric Weinstein: ... a spouse or a child-

03:29:53
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:29:54
Eric Weinstein: ... through the lens of race is an incredibly-

03:29:57
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:29:58
Eric Weinstein: ... distasteful thing-

03:30:00
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:30:00
Eric Weinstein: ... when race isn't relevant. It's not the case-

03:30:02
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

03:30:04
Eric Weinstein: You know, if, if, if we're talking, for example, about who has to put on suntan lotion-

03:30:08
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

03:30:09
Eric Weinstein: ... it's more important that I put on suntan lotion than, than, that my wife does if there's not much left in the bottle, right? Okay.

03:30:16
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:30:16
Eric Weinstein: That there race can matter.

03:30:18
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

03:30:19
Eric Weinstein: But th- this issue about is it po- you can't get past race. Colorblindness is a, is a, uh, is a fake thing pushed by a white-

03:30:30
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:30:30
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, patriarchy-

03:30:31
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:30:31
Eric Weinstein: ... blah, blah, blah.

03:30:32
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:30:32
Eric Weinstein: Horseshit.

03:30:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:30:34
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I'm not saying-

03:30:35
Douglas Murray: You don't-

03:30:35
Eric Weinstein: ... that you never notice it.

03:30:36
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:30:36
Eric Weinstein: I'm saying that you can go three weeks without ever having a thought that runs like that.

03:30:40
Douglas Murray: Right. I just say turn to the, the, the workplace is, is, is one, but, uh, I hear it of everywhere else as well now in this country. It, it, it, this country has been very successfully re-racialized by people of all, from all directions.

03:30:53
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I can't stand it.

03:30:55
Douglas Murray: And I can't either. It's, it's, it's exceptionally ugly and, um, and it's obviously gonna get a lot worse. When people know that they have been prejudiced against because of their skin color, it really doesn't matter what skin color is, they're going to feel resentment.

03:31:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, but part sh- part of this has to do with the Immigration Act of 1965-

03:31:14
Douglas Murray: I agree

03:31:14
Eric Weinstein: ... because there was a white, Black dynamic-

03:31:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:31:16
Eric Weinstein: ... that was relevant in the country before 1965. And the browning of America, without necessarily most of that coming from-

03:31:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:31:25
Eric Weinstein: ... let's say West African stock that mirrors the-

03:31:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:31:28
Eric Weinstein: ... the imported slave population-

03:31:30
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:31:30
Eric Weinstein: ... that is now the core of Black America, um, I think that in many ways the question was, well, what would happen to Black issues?

03:31:39
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:31:40
Eric Weinstein: Because it's a large, it's a large minority in-

03:31:43
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:31:43
Eric Weinstein: ... in this country.

03:31:44
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:31:44
Eric Weinstein: And I think that then what y- they, what people tried was let's make it Black and brown, people of color.

03:31:50
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

03:31:50
Eric Weinstein: And then it turns out that, okay, well, Asians are now overperforming supposedly in terms of entrance to elite universities.

03:31:58
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah.

03:31:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, we can't do that.

03:32:00
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. No, in my, in my country, the, the, the, we route for Indians, uh, uh, um, far ahead of white people in Britain.

03:32:08
Eric Weinstein: Ha- have you heard of the bamboo ceiling?

03:32:10
Douglas Murray: Oh, yes. Yes, yeah, yeah.

03:32:11
Eric Weinstein: Right?

03:32:11
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:32:11
Eric Weinstein: So we have, we have-

03:32:12
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:32:12
Eric Weinstein: ... East Asian engineers inside of tech companies-

03:32:15
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:32:15
Eric Weinstein: ... looking at the ascendancy of South Asians- To the top jobs in these tech companies-

03:32:22
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:32:22
Eric Weinstein: ... claiming that the problem is brown on brown or whatever you wanna call-

03:32:27
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah

03:32:27
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, it's, it's completely internal-

03:32:29
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:32:29
Eric Weinstein: ... to so-called people of color.

03:32:30
Douglas Murray: But again, all, all, all of these, all the programs we're running, apart from running against each other, is, is, is so unfit for purpose. Uh, the one that I can't bear that's happened since I was last in this country, with the 1619 Project and everything, is this unbelievable imbibing by people, by ser- by people who used to be serious in this country, of this gunk about Europeans and America. I mean, as a, a Dutch historian wrote recently, actually, in The Spectator, what, what exactly were the Europeans meant to do after they found America? We- were, were they meant to go back home and go, "Shh..." We- were they meant to say, "We've discovered [laughs] this amazing place. I don't think it has any potential. I wouldn't bother with it. There's a large land mass over there. Doesn't appear to be at all heavily populated, um, but, uh, I don't think we should be of much interest in there. Somebody else will find it." What exactly was, were they meant to do? The, the current, the current thing gives out these incredibly easy to dispel ideas that, that this country-

03:33:46
Eric Weinstein: But-

03:33:46
Douglas Murray: ... could be understood in a way that is not useful to-

03:33:50
Eric Weinstein: Okay

03:33:50
Douglas Murray: ... understand the country.

03:33:51
Eric Weinstein: But let's, le- let's think about a way in which we could understand what the claim is. If you look at things that we talk about incessantly, for example, um, giving blankets with smallpox as presents-

03:34:05
Douglas Murray: Sure

03:34:05
Eric Weinstein: ... to the native population-

03:34:06
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:34:06
Eric Weinstein: ... using pestilence against them-

03:34:07
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:34:10
Eric Weinstein: ... um, that I think we can all agree is horrific.

03:34:15
Douglas Murray: By the way, in, in the Australian context, much of this is contested, but-

03:34:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:34:19
Douglas Murray: ... definitely, yeah.

03:34:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I'm not claiming that I know.

03:34:21
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:34:21
Eric Weinstein: I, I've spent zero time-

03:34:23
Douglas Murray: Right

03:34:23
Eric Weinstein: ... looking at this. I, I, I'm willing to assume that we've done some horrible things-

03:34:27
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:34:28
Eric Weinstein: ... relative to the local population.

03:34:29
Douglas Murray: Sure.

03:34:29
Eric Weinstein: Just as, let's say Lenape Indians, I believe, massacred a s- was one of the first-

03:34:33
Douglas Murray: Right

03:34:33
Eric Weinstein: ... school massacres.

03:34:35
Douglas Murray: But, um, a- a- again, I, I come, I come back to this thing because it, it, it affects everybody now.

03:34:40
Eric Weinstein: Right. Well, but-

03:34:41
Douglas Murray: Um, but who, who-

03:34:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's come back after a bio break-

03:34:46
Douglas Murray: Okay

03:34:46
Eric Weinstein: ... and instead of starting where I thought we were gonna start, let's start, uh, around this question of-

03:34:51
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:34:51
Eric Weinstein: ... why it's so hard to defend the cultures from which so much-

03:34:56
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:34:56
Eric Weinstein: ... has sprung.

03:34:57
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:34:57
Eric Weinstein: All right. Stay tuned. I always like to say this. And we're back. Douglas.

03:35:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:35:05
Eric Weinstein: It seems to me that right at the moment, one of the things that we're having a real difficulty with is that we haven't formulated rhetorically effective ways of expressing reasonable love and pride in the lineages that have added up to so much that might be loosely thought of as Western civilization.

03:35:26
Douglas Murray: Hmm.

03:35:28
Eric Weinstein: Or, or Indo-European civilization.

03:35:31
Douglas Murray: Hmm.

03:35:32
Eric Weinstein: And my question is, are we in part going to lose our society because nobody's figured out the right way of getting words to play together that indicate that one wishes to take responsibility for the excesses and negative aspects of one's society, but without groveling and, um-

03:35:52
Douglas Murray: Hmm

03:35:52
Eric Weinstein: ... pretending that everything one's ancestors did was horrible and that there's nothing to be proud of?

03:35:59
Douglas Murray: Um.

03:36:00
Eric Weinstein: Do we, do we have a problem that... This really comes down to the fact that it's a puzzle. The comedians, for example-

03:36:07
Douglas Murray: Hmm

03:36:07
Eric Weinstein: ... weren't able to tell jokes for a period of time because the rules-

03:36:09
Douglas Murray: Hmm

03:36:09
Eric Weinstein: ... around joke telling had changed, and then they figured out-

03:36:12
Douglas Murray: Hmm

03:36:12
Eric Weinstein: ... that there were new ways of saying these jokes. You know, Joe Rogan did this j- joke about, uh, wrestling is gay, and the audience would have this horrible, you know, realization that they were, uh, in the audience for a bigoted comic, and everybody would-

03:36:29
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:36:30
Eric Weinstein: ... [gasps] you know, do this, and he said, "Wait, what do you think I just said? I didn't say it was bad. I said it was gay." And then he goes into this description of-

03:36:36
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:36:37
Eric Weinstein: ... oiled bodies and-

03:36:37
Douglas Murray: Oiled bodies, sweaty men pinning each other to the floor

03:36:39
Eric Weinstein: ... booty shorts and all this kind of stuff, and he's like-

03:36:41
Douglas Murray: Ex-

03:36:41
Eric Weinstein: ... "If that's not gay, then what is?"

03:36:43
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

03:36:43
Eric Weinstein: And that kind of, um, innovation, like Chappelle did this where he blames his audience.

03:36:51
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes, that was very impressive.

03:36:51
Eric Weinstein: Uh, this is very similar to what happened in the '90s where you went from old style advertisements to one, I think I remember one where, um, instead of good things happening to people who use the product, bad things happen to show that they're in on the joke. So a person takes a swig from a soda can and goes, "Ah," and they don't notice the Mack truck that mows them down.

03:37:13
Douglas Murray: Hmm.

03:37:13
Eric Weinstein: It's like, "It's that refreshing." Like, that would be a '90s style innovation.

03:37:17
Douglas Murray: Oh.

03:37:18
Eric Weinstein: Are there ways of defending Western civilization we just haven't thought of because all the old ways seem not to take responsibility for the negatives?

03:37:26
Douglas Murray: Uh, it could be, uh, we live... The, the clear thing is that we live in an era of revenge.

03:37:34
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

03:37:34
Douglas Murray: You know, we live in an era of vengeance against the West. Sometimes-

03:37:37
Eric Weinstein: You can't say vengeance. You can say justice.

03:37:40
Douglas Murray: Y- sh- I say vengeance.

03:37:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So is, is-

03:37:45
Douglas Murray: Um

03:37:45
Eric Weinstein: ... vengeance a Russell conjugate of justice?

03:37:48
Douglas Murray: Um, well, could be. Uh, I, I think not for the following reason, which is, is that it's, it's said in the tone of vengeance, often u- unadulteratedly. For instance, the Emp- have you heard the empire strikes back term?

03:38:06
Eric Weinstein: Mm-mm.

03:38:07
Douglas Murray: The empire strikes back has been, for 20 years or so, a description of, uh, immigration in Europe.

03:38:14
Eric Weinstein: I see. Hmm. Interesting.

03:38:16
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah. They like it. Oh, you don't like the immigration? Well, the empire strikes back.

03:38:23
Eric Weinstein: I see.

03:38:24
Douglas Murray: Ah. Now, of course, your obvious play to that is to say Okay, and when does the empire reassert itself and strike back? This is ugly.

03:38:35
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

03:38:36
Douglas Murray: They want u- they want to make us ugly. Um, but it's vengeance. It's never clearer to me than in America. It's, it's, it's, it's spoken in the term of vengeance. I, I-

03:38:49
Eric Weinstein: But you said it-

03:38:49
Douglas Murray: Where we just were about, about this, to do with the Europeans and America and this whole continent.

03:38:54
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:38:55
Douglas Murray: It's spoken as vengeance. Um-

03:38:58
Eric Weinstein: Yes, we're very interested in vengeance, but we can't bring ourselves to say it.

03:39:01
Douglas Murray: Yeah. They, they want people to suffer. Look, look at the use of the term whitey.

03:39:07
Eric Weinstein: Whitey?

03:39:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:39:08
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah.

03:39:09
Douglas Murray: Now, what, what is that? What is... What's gammon? What's gammon?

03:39:14
Eric Weinstein: What is gammon?

03:39:15
Douglas Murray: Gammon is a term used by alleged anti-racists to describe white m- men of a certain age, in particular due to the alleged hue of their skin, particularly when irritated.

03:39:29
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

03:39:29
Douglas Murray: Do we have anything in the language as common and as acceptable now to describe, for instance, an irate Black man? No, and you wouldn't want to find one either.

03:39:42
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

03:39:43
Douglas Murray: But gammon, totally, totally reasonable, totally respect... Laughter, used by white people as well, hoping to buy themselves some time. Um-

03:39:52
Eric Weinstein: Well, throwing each other over-

03:39:54
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:39:54
Eric Weinstein: ... in an attempt to slow the advance.

03:39:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Um, so, uh, I think this is vengeance, that we're in a period of vengeance against European history in particular-

03:40:04
Eric Weinstein: Hmm

03:40:04
Douglas Murray: ... what's seen as being the West, Western history. And there's, of course, one particular gigantic logical fallacy waiting to hit these people like the truck in the 1990s-

03:40:14
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:40:14
Douglas Murray: ... advert with the refreshment drink. The giant logical fallacy p-

03:40:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:40:20
Douglas Murray: ... about to plow them down-

03:40:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

03:40:22
Douglas Murray: ... is the misapprehension they have that what we call Western liberal society is the default position of mankind.

03:40:31
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

03:40:32
Douglas Murray: They think Western society is your vanilla. They think it's your non-colored base paint, and they're totally wrong because most of Euro- most of human experience is the Congo, Russia. You know? They have no damn idea.

03:41:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, this, this is the sort of Chas fallacy, which is that if we can just get the police to stop policing, then everything will be utopian.

03:41:08
Douglas Murray: Yes. And I, again, I don't think we have time for these people, and I think that we don't have time for... You know, because-

03:41:14
Eric Weinstein: They're, they're not serious points, and they can't, they shouldn't be engaged b- because i- in that fashion because in order to do so, all conversation has to derail until these-

03:41:24
Douglas Murray: Until these people learn a lesson.

03:41:26
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:41:26
Douglas Murray: You know, that's the annoying thing because arguably, what they're going through is the thing that intermittently is necessary. We've discussed this before. I think we discussed it in Sydney with your, your theory about the nuclear bombs being let off every now and then. You know, um-

03:41:40
Eric Weinstein: You're just gonna drop that like that 'cause I haven't talked that much on this program.

03:41:43
Douglas Murray: Okay.

03:41:43
Eric Weinstein: All right.

03:41:43
Douglas Murray: Well, anyway, just, it's totally crazy.

03:41:45
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:41:46
Douglas Murray: Crazy. We, we get wine and dine in private, and it's just all nuclear bombs.

03:41:50
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:41:50
Douglas Murray: Um, the [laughs] um... No, but it, it, it's, it's this, this thing of do, do you have to remind people on a, uh, some intermittent basis of, of, of what can happen? And the answer historically is it seems yes, and the great regret of those of us who would like to avoid all of those things is that we actually can know it without having to learn it, and there are always people who hurtle forward who need to learn it again. You know, the people in, in Chas discover, lo and behold, that, you know, without a police force, a man can rape a woman and just walk away.

03:42:32
Eric Weinstein: Who knew?

03:42:33
Douglas Murray: Who knew other than all humans in history?

03:42:36
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:42:37
Douglas Murray: Um, uh, uh, with- without a police force, the business doesn't have any protection when the mob comes and decides to burn the whole damn thing down. Who knew apart from everyone in history? So th- th- this is, as I say, this is the truck that's coming towards these people, and the question really is can they learn the lesson privately, or do they have to do it and pull everyone else into their remedial lesson? And I strongly hope, like everybody else, that it's the first of those two things. You know, I, I take a certain sadistic pleasure, as we mu- all must, in those stories that occasionally emerge and usually get a very long write-up in The New York Times of some idealistic couple from Seattle who decide-

03:43:19
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:43:19
Douglas Murray: ... to take a tandem cycling holiday through Waziristan and, you know, b- b- believe that, you know, if only we all tandemed together more, we'd have a s- future of more justice, and they all get, you know, sort of gang-raped and murdered by a group of jihadis or something. And you, you sort of can't help thinking, "Well, you know, I'm very sorry for their family. I'm sorry for them they had to learn this lesson that way."

03:43:43
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:43:43
Douglas Murray: And it's obviously not the case with everyone. I stress that not everyone in Waziristan is a gang-raping murderer. I'm just saying that, you know, uh, anyone who knew the world could have told them it isn't what it looked like to them when they were growing up in Seattle. You know, and it, and it's, it's just regrettable that the ca- catastrophic nature of human existence is so badly transmitted to these people, and I'm afraid, sorry to sound terribly anti-American at this moment, but this is-

03:44:11
Eric Weinstein: I have noticed the shift.

03:44:12
Douglas Murray: Really?

03:44:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:44:13
Douglas Murray: Okay. It's a consequence of the fact that the people... We're all suffering the spillage of this.

03:44:20
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:44:20
Douglas Murray: And it's come from people in America who think they know everything about the world and have never left these shores. I'm sorry, but you have an incredibly ignorant left.

03:44:29
Eric Weinstein: With this-

03:44:30
Douglas Murray: You have an incredibly ignorant internationalist class. You have an incredibly parochial internationalist class, let alone the nationalists. You, you, you have people who believe they've got the whole thing sussed. And they think that this situation you've had in this country is the default situation, and they're willing to burn this whole damn thing down to learn that it's not, and then they're gonna take everyone else with them at this rate. You know, I'm fed up of the spillage of American ignorance on these matters coming into my own country, coming all across Europe as well. We have our own, our own problems. And this particular one of, for instance, re-racializing everything or making relations between the sexes all but impossible. You know, having to move all sexual relations and indeed courtship to Tinder.

03:45:17
Eric Weinstein: Or to a lawyer's office.

03:45:18
Douglas Murray: Or to a lawyer's office is something that's spilled out from the town we're sitting in, as it happens.

03:45:24
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

03:45:24
Douglas Murray: And I, again, I, I, I don't know how we encourage these people who are ignorant about this to learn this, but they're gonna have to learn it fast and not make us all have to go through the lessons with them.

03:45:35
Eric Weinstein: So, so I think it has a lot to do with individual lessons that have interactions, right? I don't know if you've been following at all this Coinbase, uh, shift. Uh, Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase-

03:45:49
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:45:49
Eric Weinstein: ... who said effectively, "We are an idealistic company. We have a, an idealism and a dream, and we can't afford drug interactions between different idealisms." It's not that your idealism is wrong-

03:46:03
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:46:04
Eric Weinstein: ... but if you bring-

03:46:05
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:46:06
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, your idealism, let's say, uh, you have a, um, an idealism about the Israeli state, and you, uh, on the other hand, have an idealism about Black Lives Matter, and now you have got a problem because there's an inter- inter- interference. You're trying to work with somebody-

03:46:22
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:46:22
Eric Weinstein: ... and their organization says something about, you know, the state of Israel and, and you have a, a- an organization that is idealistic for the state of Israel.

03:46:31
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:46:32
Eric Weinstein: What can, what, what can a company like Coinbase do? Because they're not in charge of all of the medications that people are taking-

03:46:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:46:39
Eric Weinstein: ... for so- society's ills. And so their point was, at work, we're gonna try to limit the drug interactions-

03:46:45
Douglas Murray: Right

03:46:45
Eric Weinstein: ... between our idealism-

03:46:46
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:46:46
Eric Weinstein: ... so that we can actually get something done.

03:46:47
Douglas Murray: Th- this would be the optimal thing that we did in our societies, yes.

03:46:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is coming from the US, so you're welcome.

03:46:53
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah. And thank you. I, I, I accept this import with alacrity.

03:46:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:46:57
Douglas Murray: Um, yes. Th- this is the thing. We, we, we have to do this. We have to strip this stuff out. I've, I described it before. This is moral asbestos. It has to be stripped from the building. It's, it's unfortunate that the era we're speaking in is the era where the asbestos is still being put in every cavity. I strongly urge people to stop the people they find doing this job.

03:47:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, you know, we have-

03:47:26
Douglas Murray: And do a bit of undoing.

03:47:27
Eric Weinstein: We had a very interesting situation with an innovation which I believe, if I'm not mistaken, may, may have originated in Toronto, I could have that wrong, around 2011, which was the advent of the so-called SlutWalk.

03:47:40
Douglas Murray: Hmm.

03:47:41
Eric Weinstein: In which in order to get rid of a persistent problem, which is the claim that, um, feminine attire could be seen as, uh, inviting, uh, the idea would be that women would march in the most provocative clothing possible t- in order to demonstrate that there is never a cause for reacting sexually towards a woman-

03:48:05
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:48:06
Eric Weinstein: ... based on your understanding-

03:48:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:48:09
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, of whatever agreed upon non-explicit signaling was taking place. Now, one can understand-

03:48:16
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:48:16
Eric Weinstein: ... wanting to get rid of an argument that can be made and, and saying, "Hey, I've got a great idea. Why don't we actually attack the idea that there's ever an excuse to assume that somebody was inviting, uh, amorous behavior?" On the other hand, that actually had a lot to do with having an agreed upon language which was not explicit-

03:48:40
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:48:41
Eric Weinstein: ... protecting females by saying-

03:48:43
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:48:43
Eric Weinstein: ... "Look, this thing is, is sort of a progressive-"

03:48:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:48:47
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, handshake that gets more and more intimate as both sides decide-

03:48:51
Douglas Murray: Right

03:48:51
Eric Weinstein: ... that they're ready to move to the next level. But then effectively what we do is we, in order to get at a, a lacuna in our vocabulary of moves, we destroyed an entire language of courtship.

03:49:04
Douglas Murray: Yes.

03:49:04
Eric Weinstein: And I was wondering, um, you know, in, in some sense, as a keen observer of, of heterosexuals but fr- coming from a homosexual perspective-

03:49:14
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:49:14
Eric Weinstein: ... what do you see going on between men and women from the outside that, uh, we can benefit from sort of a, a less interested eye?

03:49:25
Douglas Murray: Hmm. Uh, uh, you, I m- I was so thrilled when, as, when you described me over dinner as the de Tocqueville of heterosexuality.

03:49:32
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:49:35
Douglas Murray: Um, you know, one of the pleasures of writing The Madness of Crowds was writing the chapter on men and women.

03:49:39
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

03:49:40
Douglas Murray: Because I knew that I was able to say s- so many things that my straight friends were not able to say, male and female.

03:49:47
Eric Weinstein: I'm just gonna nod my head not knowing what's coming next, actually. I actually don't know what's coming next.

03:49:51
Douglas Murray: I, I honestly feel sorry for you guys.

03:49:55
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

03:49:56
Douglas Murray: Um, it used to be the case that the, the, the, the straights felt sorry for the gays because the gays had unhappy lives and...

03:50:03
Eric Weinstein: We've always looked at you-

03:50:04
Douglas Murray: You know?

03:50:04
Eric Weinstein: ... with a bit of envy.

03:50:06
Douglas Murray: Sure.

03:50:06
Eric Weinstein: More than a bit of envy.

03:50:07
Douglas Murray: Well, well, yeah, of course, because there, there were aspects of... As a memorably a straight friend of mine once said to me, "Oh, God, I wish we had straight bars."

03:50:14
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:50:15
Douglas Murray: And I said, "What are you talking about? Don't you have them everywhere?" And he said, "No, but I mean like a straight bar where we really could, like, just go in and the women knew that they were also there for that purpose and..."

03:50:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh, really, for me, it's musical theater that I've been eyeing.

03:50:28
Douglas Murray: [laughs] You can have that.

03:50:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

03:50:30
Douglas Murray: You can have, you can have mine of musical theater.

03:50:32
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

03:50:33
Douglas Murray: Um, I, I do think it's been made, um, intolerable. And by the way, again, the era of revenge, so much the, the pleasure which women and some men are taking- In sexually torturing heterosexual men is extraordinary to me. I mean, the, the, the recognition that the benefits of recent sexual advances can be made, can- are, are accrued by a tiny number of heterosexual men, and that the rest should be tortured is, is one of the things I think is least attractive in the age. Again, the, the, uh, the, the language of revenge. I think that... I mean, several things. One is that the big underlying one is that m- women are trying to make men into something that women don't want.

03:51:26
Eric Weinstein: That's... On the surface, that would sound like very self-defeating and paradoxical behavior.

03:51:32
Douglas Murray: Sure. Well, they don't realize that's what they're doing.

03:51:34
Eric Weinstein: Is that right?

03:51:34
Douglas Murray: Yes. So-

03:51:37
Eric Weinstein: You sure?

03:51:38
Douglas Murray: The, the attempt to feminize the heterosexual male-

03:51:41
Eric Weinstein: Right

03:51:42
Douglas Murray: ... to make him, [lips smack] um, beseeching and rather pathetic. I mean, by... This is also, this is, uh, throughout the advertising culture much more. The pathetic male is, is a v- the very common theme now. Uh-

03:51:59
Eric Weinstein: You have to be able to-

03:51:59
Douglas Murray: ... the male is the one who cannot do anything, and the kids and the mother need to do it, or the girlfriend. Um, and this, this spills out onto everything, and it's of course because it's come about because the male part of the dance is not permitted. And then there's... That's just one layer. And then you have the layer which is most interesting to me, which is... I mean, sexual relations are so interesting because people think there's only one thing they want.

03:52:31
Eric Weinstein: Say more.

03:52:32
Douglas Murray: Oh, um, there's this perception, you know. I mean, people know what they want, and they go and get it. No, they don't.

03:52:37
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:52:38
Douglas Murray: They want lots of different things. Um, this is more the case with men than with women, but men want a, a, a reliable partner who is, uh, chaste except for, for them, and they also want other things.

03:52:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:52:57
Douglas Murray: And this is a very big juggle. Women have a little bit of that. Some has m- a lot less. Um, but women also want contradictory things in relation to sex, like everything else. One of the things that fascinates me most is that around the same time as the Me Too thing emerged, and we got into this ridiculous overcorrection on sexual relations, we'd just come to the end of a period where all bookstores were absolutely packed with tables full of the most best-selling S&M female porn.

03:53:33
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:53:34
Douglas Murray: What was it that was happening in that era? Nobody seems very interested. I mean, people of my mother's age group were reading E.L. James, the Fifty Shades of Grey. I don't think they'd been imbibing S&M porn before. But it spoke to something. Something was going on in all of this.

03:53:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, you have the concept of a bodice ripper.

03:53:54
Douglas Murray: Right.

03:53:55
Eric Weinstein: Right? And I do think that-

03:53:56
Douglas Murray: Which is genteel compared to this stuff we're talking about

03:53:58
Eric Weinstein: ... well, it's very interesting. I mean, in part you're getting into the question of we use, we've used a term rape fantasy in the past that does not appear to reference actual rape.

03:54:12
Douglas Murray: Yes.

03:54:12
Eric Weinstein: It's a highly stylized-

03:54:14
Douglas Murray: A stylized fantasy

03:54:15
Eric Weinstein: ... thing that doesn't-

03:54:18
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:54:18
Eric Weinstein: ... that doesn't actually match reality in any way.

03:54:22
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

03:54:23
Eric Weinstein: And so in some sense, the key question is, uh, w- what is literary BDSM, and what did we think it was?

03:54:31
Douglas Murray: Mm, mm.

03:54:31
Eric Weinstein: It's not clear... I mean, th- this is the reason that I'm slightly uncertain about these things.

03:54:37
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:54:38
Eric Weinstein: Uh, a friend of ours, um, in a group of women said the following sentence. She, she being a heterosexual female. "What is wrong with us women? We seek out alpha males, and then the instant we get them home and they try to alpha us, we cry foul."

03:54:58
Douglas Murray: Oh, sure.

03:54:59
Eric Weinstein: And I think that that has to do with something that's actually understandable, which is that the fantasy, going back to, let's say-

03:55:07
Douglas Murray: Yes

03:55:07
Eric Weinstein: ... The Little Prince-

03:55:08
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:55:08
Eric Weinstein: ... is the taming of the other. And so-

03:55:12
Douglas Murray: Sure

03:55:12
Eric Weinstein: ... finding a successful wild beast-

03:55:14
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:55:14
Eric Weinstein: ... and converting it into your own private attack dog-

03:55:18
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:55:18
Eric Weinstein: ... where the teeth only point out.

03:55:20
Douglas Murray: Yes, except that they also want the... They do want the alpha male on occasion.

03:55:25
Eric Weinstein: Do and don't, do and don't, do and don't.

03:55:26
Douglas Murray: Exactly.

03:55:26
Eric Weinstein: And in some-

03:55:27
Douglas Murray: Do and don't and don't

03:55:27
Eric Weinstein: ... but of course-

03:55:28
Douglas Murray: Of course. When they don't-

03:55:29
Eric Weinstein: So that is in fact weirdly normal.

03:55:31
Douglas Murray: It's totally normal.

03:55:32
Eric Weinstein: Agreed.

03:55:33
Douglas Murray: It's totally normal.

03:55:34
Eric Weinstein: Right.

03:55:35
Douglas Murray: It's... Maybe a strange moment to cite St. Paul, but St. Paul says this in, in one, uh, uh, um, syllable sentences-

03:55:50
Eric Weinstein: Mm

03:55:50
Douglas Murray: ... in, I think in the Letter to the Galatians, "That I would not, that I do. That I do, that I would not." That's, that's-

03:55:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, but the-

03:55:57
Douglas Murray: That's, that's, that's-

03:55:58
Eric Weinstein: But these higher order things, like for example, in order to try to find a less sexually gendered version of roles that works across male hetero and homosexuality, the concept of top and bottom was born-

03:56:15
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

03:56:15
Eric Weinstein: ... which is an uncomfortable-

03:56:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah

03:56:18
Eric Weinstein: ... um, fit, if you will.

03:56:19
Douglas Murray: Or, or fem and, uh, butch in lesbian-

03:56:21
Eric Weinstein: Femme and butch

03:56:22
Douglas Murray: ... territory.

03:56:22
Eric Weinstein: Right. But the concept of topping from the bottom.

03:56:26
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

03:56:27
Eric Weinstein: Right? The idea that-

03:56:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:56:28
Eric Weinstein: ... the bottom may be ostensibly controlled-

03:56:32
Douglas Murray: In power, in control. Yes

03:56:32
Eric Weinstein: ... but actually empowered.

03:56:34
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

03:56:35
Eric Weinstein: Um-

03:56:36
Douglas Murray: Is a version of the, of the, of the, um, Sex and the City, "I, I fucked him."

03:56:43
Eric Weinstein: Yes. So for example, in Yiddish, shtup-

03:56:46
Douglas Murray: Yeah, shtup. Yeah

03:56:47
Eric Weinstein: ... for, for, for fuck, if you will, uh, is literally, I think, push, and it's only transitive from male to female Uh, and that language having more or less died out-

03:56:57
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:56:58
Eric Weinstein: ... um, it's sort of preserved in amber except for the Orthodox-

03:57:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:57:01
Eric Weinstein: ... who continue to speak it.

03:57:02
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

03:57:03
Eric Weinstein: So, you know-

03:57:04
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:57:04
Eric Weinstein: ... that's a good example of a situation which is, is weirdly trending. Now, of course, Sex and the City is a show about four gay men going through their lives in, in Manhattan, uh, as acted by four heterosexual women.

03:57:17
Douglas Murray: Mm. Yeah, of course.

03:57:17
Eric Weinstein: So it's a bit confusing.

03:57:18
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know a lot of people who tried that. Didn't, didn't, didn't work for them.

03:57:22
Eric Weinstein: Well, exactly.

03:57:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

03:57:23
Eric Weinstein: And I think that in part, um, this issue about, um ... I think one of the most insightful, um, thinkers on sexuality for me has, has been Caitlin Flanagan, and, and we've-

03:57:37
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:57:37
Eric Weinstein: ... talked about her before. And her comment was, "It would appear that from here on out, heterosexual sexuality, uh, is to be dictated and determined by, uh, females exclusively."

03:57:50
Douglas Murray: Mm.

03:57:50
Eric Weinstein: And this idea-

03:57:51
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:57:51
Eric Weinstein: ... being that because of the asymmetry of the danger-

03:57:54
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:57:55
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, between male-female relations with respect-

03:57:58
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:57:58
Eric Weinstein: ... to sexual dimorphism, the fact that males are larger and stronger-

03:58:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

03:58:01
Eric Weinstein: ... and more aggressive sexually, that in effect, women would be changing the rules and the refereeing at women will.

03:58:08
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes. Well, that, that, that's, that's the position we're in, and it's why men are having such a hell of a time.

03:58:13
Eric Weinstein: What is happening on the gay side of the fence that mirrors this?

03:58:17
Douglas Murray: Uh, there is talk of, um, the fact that younger gays now are adopting the sexual, um, uh, ideas that are happening in the straight world. Um, let me give one example of that, which is that, um, the gay world was much more ... Again, I mean, I, I say this as non-value judgment for now, but, um-

03:58:40
Eric Weinstein: You've been out for how long?

03:58:42
Douglas Murray: Um, all my adult life.

03:58:43
Eric Weinstein: All your adult life.

03:58:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah. For 20, 22 years. Um, uh, the ... So I, I, some people, by the way, say that I have an, um, an off view of, for instance, those occasions where there's borderline stuff when a man and a woman and they claim this. Some people claim I have an off-kilter understanding of this because of the nature of being gay and what I'm seasoned the gay world, and that's possible.

03:59:13
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

03:59:13
Douglas Murray: But I think it's actually not an unhealthy world and, and what I'm talking about is things like, oh, I don't know, you're in a bar, you, you need to squeeze through a space and somebody touches you on the ass as you do. It's not the end of the world, you know? You didn't ask for it, but you're in a highly sexualized place, and so what? It's quite flattering. You don't always want it. If you really didn't want it, you would ... You'd ... You know. Uh, but you're in that game. You're in the, in the sort of sex-like world. It's in the mix. Um, I don't by any means underestimate the extent to which a lot of women, rightly, the r- the rightful thing of the sexual correction is there are places we didn't think of as being sexual places, which were turned into sexual places by men who made that misunderstanding. And I recognize that. That's, it's an awful and horrible thing for that to happen. I mean, it'd be like if I was, I don't know, in a studio and suddenly somebody, you know, touched me. Why would you do that?

04:00:25
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

04:00:26
Douglas Murray: I, I, I recognize there are ... My point is, is that, is that, um, there is, there is a, a high tolerance in the gay world for, or has been a high tolerance for the fact that, you know, you're in a sex game. It doesn't mean you're having sex all the time. It doesn't mean you're, you know, some-

04:00:40
Eric Weinstein: People are trying to get together with each other, and that there's going to be a certain amount of type one and type two error.

04:00:46
Douglas Murray: Right. So w-

04:00:47
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

04:00:47
Douglas Murray: ... for instance, in, uh, uh, one of the most interesting things in the, uh, in the whole thing was when pe- when these things started to come to court-

04:00:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm

04:00:57
Douglas Murray: ... a few years ago. You know, one of the only gay ones involved an MP in the UK, and actually when it came to court, the whole thing fell apart because the men who were said to have suffered included one who on the witness stand said, "I'm not a victim."

04:01:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:01:11
Douglas Murray: "I was in a bar with him. We were all very drunk. He shoved his hands down my pants. I said, 'Oh, come on,' and he took his hands out. I don't consider myself a victim. This should never have come to court." That was a brave thing to say, and it was an important thing to say, and I, in my view, there needs to be a little bit more of that. But, um, and again, I'm not minimizing the fact that some people are in a position where they really don't want that, and they've made it clear.

04:01:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:01:34
Douglas Murray: And they do feel violated.

04:01:35
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:01:36
Douglas Murray: Um, but, uh, y- w- the, the, the point is, is that there is, there is a dance that happens among gay couples which is made easier by the fact that ev- that each one knows exactly what the other one is basically after.

04:01:50
Eric Weinstein: They both have the experience of being male and interested, and so there's no mystery in some sense as to-

04:01:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah. That's not to say there aren't dances that happen and, and, and, and much more, but, um, y- the understanding of that space is, has been clearer. Now, I stress, I'm told, or I'm, I, I learn quite often that, uh ... I, I hear, I should say, the, the story that younger gays are picking up the sort of, uh, the heterosexual move on sex. I'm, um, you know, and I'm increasingly, you know, um ... I would say, I would s- actually s- I'd, I'd go as far as to say sex negative. Um, gay world was, was exciting in lots of re- for lots of ways. One was it was basically sex positive. I mean, it, it didn't ... There were people who didn't do that. Um, famously sort of there were couples who even in popular gay culture were sort of ... It was an, it was a trope of the sort of slightly prissy gay couple who thought they were better than everyone else.

04:02:57
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

04:02:58
Douglas Murray: Um, but- Um, broadly speaking, the gay world was s- sex positive. It, it was one, ba- basically if you wanted sex, you, you have it.

04:03:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, you've removed pregnancy.

04:03:10
Douglas Murray: You've removed pregnancy.

04:03:11
Eric Weinstein: And so that was a huge boon.

04:03:13
Douglas Murray: Absolutely. And, um, and stigma to a great extent because, I mean, none of this is... Of course, all of this is always moving. But I mean, this, uh, and of course, you know, it was given the biggest imaginable knock back by the AIDS crisis. Um, but, uh, I, I think to a great extent the, the, the debate is still going on. The, the, the to and fro is still going on about the extent to which sex should or should not be stigmatized and in what situations. But the viewing it in a sort of positive light seems to be quite normal. Um, and I do think, uh, I joke about the pity I feel for straight friends, but I do think as... I, I do mean in a way because I, I see all the time things like you enter-- It happened to me about a year ago at a, at a, at a gathering where I, I, I just... The whole thing was owned and run by the women who were holding everybody in the, the whole space captive. And the men all, uh, behaved in the way that I've discussed with your brother known as, um, uh, cuttlefishing. I mean, they were, they were having all the men, the straight men were behaving as these diminutive, rather pathetic, beseeching beings, and they were doing... And I said to several of them, "I know what you're doing here. I know what you're doing. Y- you need to stop the rampaging females from taking you out," and they could at any moment in this gathering.

04:04:40
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So one of the curiosities that I have is that I have a fair number of female friends who are livid at the depopulation of the dating environment-

04:04:51
Douglas Murray: Of course

04:04:51
Eric Weinstein: ... of men that they find to be masculine and attractive.

04:04:55
Douglas Murray: Of course.

04:04:55
Eric Weinstein: My question though is they don't stand up and say, "You're not speaking for us all." Like, uh, if you... Speaking of my brother, my brother somehow, he's not great on organization and executive function historically, but he got, I don't know what it was, eight or nine leading Black public intellectuals-

04:05:16
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

04:05:16
Eric Weinstein: ... on one Zoom call-

04:05:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah

04:05:18
Eric Weinstein: ... to do a show, and it was astounding to watch so many varied and different, uh, Black men and women. I think there was only one female.

04:05:28
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Chloe, yeah.

04:05:29
Eric Weinstein: Chloe Valdary. Um, talking and disagreeing-

04:05:35
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:05:35
Eric Weinstein: ... but strongly rejecting what has been portrayed as Black America's voice.

04:05:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

04:05:42
Eric Weinstein: Right?

04:05:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

04:05:42
Eric Weinstein: And saying, look, these are all corrections. You're part of an inter- You're, you're, you're listening in to an internal conversation and you're getting confused-

04:05:49
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

04:05:50
Eric Weinstein: ... and here are very different perspectives. It strikes me that we are not hear- hearing, um, tr- loud trans voices that are saying-

04:06:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:06:01
Eric Weinstein: ... "Knock it off. There's way too many things under the trans umbrella-"

04:06:05
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

04:06:05
Eric Weinstein: "... and we're torturing people," because you're asking them to clap when a person who's been male for a very long time suddenly converts to female and dominates an athletic competition.

04:06:14
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

04:06:14
Eric Weinstein: Everybody is going to, of course, have, have a, have an issue. Or, um, you know, i- if, if... I don't know if you saw the shooting of two sheriffs in Compton.

04:06:25
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:06:25
Eric Weinstein: Um, and immediately after, uh, a gentleman, I think in a yellow hoodie, he was like, "Oh, it's going down in Compton." And then he's showing the cops having been shot in the car, and he's-

04:06:36
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:06:36
Eric Weinstein: ... he's like a half a block or a block from it. And there are a collection of Black figures screaming, "No justice, no peace"-

04:06:43
Douglas Murray: No, no, no

04:06:43
Eric Weinstein: ... before the police even arrive. In other words, to your point-

04:06:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:06:47
Eric Weinstein: ... we're talking about vengeance.

04:06:49
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

04:06:49
Eric Weinstein: Now, it may be that these are dirty cops. I don't know what the history, I don't know what the story is.

04:06:53
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:06:53
Eric Weinstein: However-

04:06:54
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:06:55
Eric Weinstein: ... what we're seeing is an absence of moderating in-group voices-

04:07:00
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

04:07:01
Eric Weinstein: ... where I expect-

04:07:03
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:07:03
Eric Weinstein: ... that the leading people pointing out what's wrong with the excesses of a Marxist, uh-

04:07:10
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:07:10
Eric Weinstein: ... cult with antisemitic issues, for example-

04:07:13
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:07:14
Eric Weinstein: ... we don't have a huge number of Black voices saying-

04:07:16
Douglas Murray: No

04:07:16
Eric Weinstein: ... "Stop torturing our white brothers and sisters."

04:07:18
Douglas Murray: No. And by the way, but, but in that case, uh, it's obvious who they would be. It would be Black people saying that.

04:07:24
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:07:24
Douglas Murray: The problem with the male, female, the, the sex thing is that it's not... Well, it is clear to me in a way, but it's not clear to the, the protagonists who would be the one who said, "Stop doing that." Because a, a woman who says, "Look-

04:07:38
Eric Weinstein: Right

04:07:38
Douglas Murray: ... we're creating these men that we don't find attractive. We pret- we pretend the enemy is alpha men, but a lot of us want the alpha men. We certainly want them in certain rooms in the house." I won't-

04:07:49
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

04:07:50
Douglas Murray: ... go into which ones. Uh, we don't want these weird gamma figures. We don't want the sort of people who are being shown on all the mugshots or arrest shots in Portland.

04:08:01
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:08:01
Douglas Murray: We don't want... We're, we're not attracted to these people with, like, a bit of pink hair and rouge on one cheek and maybe a piercing through the... We, we don't want them. Women don't want that stuff. They don't find it attractive. Tiny numbers of them do.

04:08:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:08:14
Douglas Murray: But the rest do not. And the men can't say it because the men, even the, the men who would be... Well, first of all, also there's the, uh, thing that any man who describes themselves as alpha is always just intolerably awful.

04:08:29
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

04:08:30
Douglas Murray: And, but the, the alpha traits, as it were, in men have been so, um, vengefully assaulted that, that the men have to get away with being these versions of themselves that are pathetic, and they're hoping to do it to get through this era. And I have this conversation with them all the time.

04:08:51
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

04:08:51
Douglas Murray: You know, it's, it's a survival mechanism to get through the era we're in. I feel so sorry for them because this, apart from anything else, it makes it much harder to find a partner, much harder, because nobody's being really honest about what they're after. And th- and they will tell people, they will make some people be people they're not, and thus be unattractive

04:09:14
Eric Weinstein: But th- this again is a re- this is an issue of rhetoric. So for example, when... One of the things that I've learned is that advertising contradicts politics.

04:09:29
Douglas Murray: Mm. Yes, I agree. Yeah.

04:09:31
Eric Weinstein: So for e- so for example, if I take any phrase like male gaze-

04:09:39
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:09:39
Eric Weinstein: ... male gaze is a bad thing. Then I take the phrase, "Turn heads this summer," is an advertising phrase.

04:09:45
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah.

04:09:46
Eric Weinstein: Invite the male gaze.

04:09:47
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:09:47
Eric Weinstein: Make sure that you get your share of male gaze.

04:09:49
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:09:49
Eric Weinstein: That is, uh, used to sell clothing.

04:09:52
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

04:09:52
Eric Weinstein: Then somebody will say, "There's no such thing as provocatively dressed. Does not exist."

04:09:57
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah.

04:09:58
Eric Weinstein: Then you look up on Google Shopping, and you say, uh, CFM.

04:10:05
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:10:05
Eric Weinstein: Right? Which literally is come schtuk me-

04:10:08
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

04:10:09
Eric Weinstein: ... with the middle word changed.

04:10:11
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:10:11
Eric Weinstein: And you see a bunch of shoes.

04:10:13
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

04:10:14
Eric Weinstein: Now-

04:10:14
Douglas Murray: This is the same with make him drool

04:10:15
Eric Weinstein: ... you're marketing to people who are buying these shoes.

04:10:18
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

04:10:19
Eric Weinstein: And they're not all drag queens.

04:10:21
Douglas Murray: No.

04:10:21
Eric Weinstein: Right. And so now the idea is if I take any... Like, make him drool.

04:10:28
Douglas Murray: Make him drool. Yeah, yeah. Of course.

04:10:29
Eric Weinstein: Make him drool-

04:10:30
Douglas Murray: That's a good one

04:10:30
Eric Weinstein: ... will have... There'll be a, an ad campaign which is speaking about psychogenic arousal.

04:10:36
Douglas Murray: And you know, uh, um, if you try and make her drool, all you get is some things about cats-

04:10:41
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

04:10:41
Douglas Murray: ... who dribble when they sleep. And so check it.

04:10:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, but-

04:10:46
Douglas Murray: There is no equivalent. Yeah

04:10:48
Eric Weinstein: ... but the point is that the p- political assertions are contradicted-

04:10:53
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:10:55
Eric Weinstein: ... just the way w- we have these divided minds.

04:10:58
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:10:58
Eric Weinstein: And the key question that we, we, we, we face is what, what is the rhetoric that allows us to point out that the minds are at least divided? So for example-

04:11:09
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah

04:11:09
Eric Weinstein: ... a different version of this on Instagram would be, you might say, "I think that gendered behavior is passe." And then I look at a f- young woman who's got 3.8 million followers, and her captions on her photos say things like, "Headed to the beach. Uh, what should I, what should I wear today? You know, the yellow bikini or the blue one?"

04:11:33
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:11:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, why is that captioning worth 3.8-

04:11:37
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:11:37
Eric Weinstein: ... million followers?

04:11:39
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:11:39
Eric Weinstein: Obviously, it has to do with the fact that we're not over these things in the slightest.

04:11:43
Douglas Murray: No, we're not. And, and, and, and that's what's, that's what's so irritating about the, the simplicity of what I think of as being the neo-puritans.

04:11:50
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

04:11:50
Douglas Murray: The neo-puritans who, who've come along in the American counter, sexual counter-revolution in recent years, um, are not, have n- have denuded people of the capacity to have sex, the capability to have sex, and find sex.

04:12:04
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

04:12:05
Douglas Murray: And the p- the, the, the, the moves back are unfortunately mirroring that. So they're becoming men's movements that, for instance, obsess about how often they masturbate, or believe you shouldn't, you know, and save themselves, and do certain dieting things, and all s- all this sort of stuff. It's j- It's like a men's move against the thing that some women have forced on them in a different way, and it's an attempt to reclaim, to reclaim it. And also... And of course, what it all demonstrates is, is, is our inability to deal with, with a complex issue, which is nevertheless the issue which most of us know most about in our lives, 'cause it's the one we practice the most often, which is how to get around the issues of sex, and deal with it and, and, and enjoy it, and not overstep, and all, all sorts of other stuff. We, we've all, almost everyone in their lives has danced around this. We kn- and we know the, the other thing, we know how complex the game is.

04:13:06
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:13:06
Douglas Murray: And the problem about it is that people keep coming along saying that the game is simple.

04:13:10
Eric Weinstein: This is... Well, I would say that the institutions keep echoing those who say that the game is simple, and very often you'll have two different segments, uh, on the same show over three days, let's say-

04:13:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:13:22
Eric Weinstein: ... that go in exactly contradictory directions.

04:13:25
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:13:25
Eric Weinstein: So for example, if you want, um, you know, if you listen to the disembodied institutional voice, it will say, uh, you know, "Princess such and such sizzles in a, in a red off-the-shoulder number." Does she sizzle-

04:13:42
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:13:43
Eric Weinstein: ... in a red off-the-shoulder number? Right?

04:13:46
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm.

04:13:46
Eric Weinstein: And-

04:13:46
Douglas Murray: A man sizzling, by the way-

04:13:48
Eric Weinstein: But-

04:13:48
Douglas Murray: ... in a suit is just an unpleasant sight.

04:13:51
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, not necessarily.

04:13:52
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:13:52
Eric Weinstein: For example, um, if you, if he was a rap star-

04:13:57
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah, that's true

04:13:58
Eric Weinstein: ... then it would be seen as, you know-

04:14:01
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:14:02
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, he's stunned in a, in a, in an Armani tuxedo.

04:14:06
Douglas Murray: Stunned. Yeah, yeah, yeah, stunned. Sure, sure.

04:14:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's stunned, there's sizzles, and then you can conjugate everything creepy.

04:14:11
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:14:11
Eric Weinstein: Like I don't know if you've ever seen these, um, photo, uh, video reels where men affect female poses.

04:14:20
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Mm.

04:14:22
Eric Weinstein: You know, like d-

04:14:23
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:14:24
Eric Weinstein: ... if a woman is in a, i- i- is in a, a bikini and is on all fours affecting-

04:14:29
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:14:29
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, the lordosis behavior of a large feline-

04:14:32
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:14:33
Eric Weinstein: ... um, the brain accepts this as if it were normal.

04:14:37
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:14:37
Eric Weinstein: If it sees a man doing that-

04:14:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:14:39
Eric Weinstein: ... it's, uh, the fourth wall is instantly broken.

04:14:41
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:14:41
Eric Weinstein: What the hell is he doing?

04:14:43
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm-mm, mm, mm.

04:14:44
Eric Weinstein: Right? And so-

04:14:45
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:14:45
Eric Weinstein: ... in a very weird way, we're not allowed to observe ourselves because-

04:14:48
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:14:48
Eric Weinstein: ... sex is intrinsically duplicitous.

04:14:51
Douglas Murray: Yes. I, I, I... I mean, we have to find ways around this and, uh, uh, broadly speaking, the one I am in favor of is just, is v- just vie- is viewing sex more positively. And I thought that was, um... I would have thought of any [laughs] thing one might a- argue for this would be a winner. But, uh, uh, it's definitely aga- against The, the current era. And by the way, there is of course an inbuilt problem in it, which is not just the, the, uh, extent to which it's handed out, or indeed able to be enjoyed and indulged in, and the certain unfairnesses that can exist around that. It is also the case that it isn't entirely cost-free, and this is a-

04:15:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's, there's-

04:15:31
Douglas Murray: You know

04:15:31
Eric Weinstein: ... the cost-free aspect. There's also what I've... I don't know that I've spoken about this yet, but, um, there's, uh, the tax return principle that I believe-

04:15:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:15:39
Eric Weinstein: ... very strongly in.

04:15:40
Douglas Murray: Right.

04:15:40
Eric Weinstein: Which is, if you want to learn my tax returns-

04:15:44
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:15:44
Eric Weinstein: ... one strategy would be to accuse me of engaging, you know, "I'm convinced, Eric, that you are taking money from the North Korean government-

04:15:56
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:15:56
Eric Weinstein: ... and that this explains-

04:15:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:15:58
Eric Weinstein: ... your, uh, your fine jacket."

04:16:00
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

04:16:01
Eric Weinstein: Well, my initial instinct is to say, "No, no, no. Here's all my pay stubs. Please, take all my private information."

04:16:08
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:16:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, what does someone do when they're accused of some sexual impropriety?

04:16:15
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:16:15
Eric Weinstein: Because in order to defend themselves, they now have to-

04:16:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:16:18
Eric Weinstein: ... dip into stuff that is no- nobody's business.

04:16:21
Douglas Murray: Um, y- yes. Uh-

04:16:24
Eric Weinstein: And so in, in-

04:16:24
Douglas Murray: But in all of which, it always reminds me of, uh, one of the reasons why, uh, there's certain religious, um, practices which I'm, which occasionally somebody will, um, laugh at, and I always say I, I wouldn't tease people on that, because almost any religious practice to an outsider looks ridiculous.

04:16:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, as I-

04:16:43
Douglas Murray: So don't do it.

04:16:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:16:44
Douglas Murray: Like, just don't do it. It's, it's very discourteous. And, um, and anyhow, it, it, it, the, the, the, the example comes to mind because it's the same with sex.

04:16:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:16:56
Douglas Murray: I, I think that a reasonable, in the genuine sense, liberal-minded person-

04:17:00
Eric Weinstein: Mm

04:17:00
Douglas Murray: ... should, should hold in their head the fact that, you know, no... To every man, and to everyone, certainly to every man, um, there are few things in life more important than how, where, and when they get sex.

04:17:13
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

04:17:15
Douglas Murray: But to everybody else, that man's concerns are ridiculous.

04:17:20
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely.

04:17:20
Douglas Murray: Absolutely every other person on the planet, and that you should assume that just though you could do that to other people, you probably shouldn't, because you're gonna, it's gonna come back to you, too.

04:17:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is, this has to do with the fact that the brain, the human mind, has a particular state for the protagonist, which is us in our story.

04:17:41
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:17:42
Eric Weinstein: And it has every other state colored differently.

04:17:45
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes.

04:17:45
Eric Weinstein: And so I remember being at The Coffee Connection in Cambridge, Massachusetts-

04:17:49
Douglas Murray: Ah

04:17:49
Eric Weinstein: ... seated next to two lovebirds, and they were cooing at each other, like, "Who's my little wookum snookums?"

04:17:55
Douglas Murray: Yeah. No, no.

04:17:56
Eric Weinstein: Right?

04:17:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:17:56
Eric Weinstein: Now, there's nothing ridiculous about it.

04:18:00
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:18:00
Eric Weinstein: "Who's my little wookum snookums"-

04:18:02
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:18:02
Eric Weinstein: ... is a completely reasonable thing to say-

04:18:04
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:18:04
Eric Weinstein: ... if that's your idiom.

04:18:06
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:18:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, I, I-

04:18:07
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:18:07
Eric Weinstein: ... look, I had this problem here where I had Ashley Matthews in your chair.

04:18:10
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:18:11
Eric Weinstein: And the idea was we were gonna talk around sex-

04:18:13
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:18:13
Eric Weinstein: ... but we weren't going to talk about sex in any way that was exciting, right? And so this trying to introduce yourself-

04:18:21
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:18:21
Eric Weinstein: ... to your own mind-

04:18:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:18:22
Eric Weinstein: ... and finding out that what you-

04:18:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:18:25
Eric Weinstein: ... think of as hot is obviously ridiculous-

04:18:32
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:18:32
Eric Weinstein: ... to somebody else.

04:18:33
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yeah. Well, everybody else. Everybody. Or that's... Um-

04:18:38
Eric Weinstein: You know, there's certain conventions that we've agreed to accept.

04:18:41
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Uh, uh-

04:18:43
Eric Weinstein: So like for example, you know, and I mentioned-

04:18:44
Douglas Murray: The limited, yes

04:18:44
Eric Weinstein: ... lordosis behavior.

04:18:46
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

04:18:46
Eric Weinstein: Anything that curves the spine-

04:18:48
Douglas Murray: Right

04:18:48
Eric Weinstein: ... in a particular way will generally be seen to be hot, because there are universals.

04:18:52
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

04:18:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, for example, the idea of persistent mammary glands, uh-

04:18:57
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:18:57
Eric Weinstein: ... not during nursing is peculiar to the human species-

04:19:00
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:19:00
Eric Weinstein: ... among 5,000 species-

04:19:01
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:19:01
Eric Weinstein: ... of mammals. It means that there is a universal-

04:19:06
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:19:07
Eric Weinstein: ... fetish of the human breast because it-

04:19:09
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:19:09
Eric Weinstein: ... actually has informational content.

04:19:10
Douglas Murray: Which is famously particularly much the case in India, you know?

04:19:14
Eric Weinstein: In what sense?

04:19:14
Douglas Murray: In, uh, um, a s- online search, uh, res- i- i- in Indian men have a particular likelihood of searching for women who are in lactating phase. It's quite interesting, actually.

04:19:26
Eric Weinstein: Oh, lactating f-

04:19:27
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah.

04:19:27
Eric Weinstein: Huh.

04:19:27
Douglas Murray: It's, it, it's, it's one of those interesting things that the, the sort of, you know, once everyone realizes that Google search results weren't as secret as they thought they were.

04:19:34
Eric Weinstein: You know, there's a-

04:19:35
Douglas Murray: There's quite a lot of things you can find out, not least of course famously the number of Arab men who want to see photos of women pretending to be IDF soldiers before they strip.

04:19:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:19:43
Douglas Murray: Um, but i- i-

04:19:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, you, you know that there's this famous, uh, Bollywood song, uh, Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai.

04:19:50
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:19:51
Eric Weinstein: Right, which is like, "What's under my, my sari blouse?" And, uh, you know, I think it's my heart, my dil, or something like this.

04:19:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:19:58
Eric Weinstein: But it's-

04:19:58
Douglas Murray: But it's not what-

04:19:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah

04:19:59
Douglas Murray: ... you're thinking of.

04:20:00
Eric Weinstein: But, but they play with s- with, with certain idioms.

04:20:02
Douglas Murray: But, uh, uh, um, it's, it's an endlessly interesting thing, this, because we are, we are very interested in what other people do and are interested in, and always hope that nobody's interested in what we're interested in. Like n- want to know what it is that gets us off. And the, the, it, it's a very, it's one of the reasons why it's so, such a dangerous moment. Because, um, as I say, my, I, I th- I think a reasonable attitude towards sex is it should be very important to yourself and you should assume it's of no significance to other people.

04:20:33
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:20:34
Douglas Murray: And, and, and, and, and try to live this out elsewhere. So, um, don't over enjoy the attempts to demean other people through whatever their sexual proclivities are. But then you have the layer on top of that which has come in in the last three years in particular, which is the, the men caught out in what are shown as sort of pathetic things. I'm thinking of, I mean, it's an embarrassing one, but I mean the Louis C.K. affair. It, it, it shows him, you know, it shows him and by extension men in a rather pathetic light, is the presumption-

04:21:09
Eric Weinstein: Because of the existence of a kink

04:21:12
Douglas Murray: ... because of the existence of a kink. And I, I found that when it was going on to be... Obviously, you know this. Some women said this was unpleasant Some wo- one woman in particular did say, "Yeah, no, he asked me about this, and I, you know, never, it didn't affect me," sort of thing. And I admired her enormously for saying that. I thought, oh gosh, if more people did that, if, if the people who don't see themselves as victims. But the presentation of the, the way we can only talk about it in the language of victimhood also means that even, I don't want to be judgmental about it, but a sort of, a s- a vaguely pathetic, as it were, situation which is being laid out should be presented as if it is the most domineeringly appalling thing means that we only can talk in the language of victimhood.

04:22:00
Eric Weinstein: It's an interesting point. I don't know whether you're familiar with the Nicki Minaj video-

04:22:04
Douglas Murray: I am. I write about it. Anaconda

04:22:06
Eric Weinstein: ... Anaconda. Yeah.

04:22:06
Douglas Murray: Yeah, I'm, I'm obsessed by that. You should know about this.

04:22:08
Eric Weinstein: All right.

04:22:08
Douglas Murray: I can't believe you d-

04:22:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, we may have talked about it

04:22:11
Douglas Murray: ... I, I did, yeah. We, I've, I did we-

04:22:12
Eric Weinstein: We talked about the final scene.

04:22:14
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:22:14
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

04:22:14
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm obsessed by this. I write about it in Madness of Crowds. It's, it's, it's a very, very important video.

04:22:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:22:19
Douglas Murray: This is, yes, the, uh, the, the, the s- the-

04:22:22
Eric Weinstein: I call it strip club feminism, where the male, after innumerable sexual provocations with no other purpose-

04:22:30
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:22:31
Eric Weinstein: ... uh-

04:22:32
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:22:32
Eric Weinstein: ... loses himself and makes the mistake of touching-

04:22:35
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:22:36
Eric Weinstein: ... the female slightly

04:22:37
Douglas Murray: On the hips slightly, yeah

04:22:38
Eric Weinstein: ... and then she's disgusted-

04:22:40
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

04:22:41
Eric Weinstein: ... and leaves.

04:22:41
Douglas Murray: Yeah, no, no. This is, um, a- a- and there are so many versions of it. I, um, the, the pole dancing thing, uh, as alleged fitness regime workout. Um, uh-

04:22:54
Eric Weinstein: I have strong feelings about that, so watch yourself

04:22:56
Douglas Murray: ... okay, okay.

04:22:57
Eric Weinstein: Okay, go ahead.

04:22:58
Douglas Murray: And, but, but all of this is, all of this-

04:23:00
Eric Weinstein: Speaking of which, you've seen the Indian sport art form athletic competition that is effectively male pole dancing?

04:23:09
Douglas Murray: I shall Google it immediately after this interview.

04:23:11
Eric Weinstein: You're in for a treat, sir.

04:23:12
Douglas Murray: Um, the [laughs] um, I, I-

04:23:17
Eric Weinstein: Focus

04:23:17
Douglas Murray: ... I, I do think that it's [laughs] I know. [laughs] Um, I do think that it's, it's, it's this thing, again, we, I write about it in Madness, the, uh, you know, sex- sexy without being sexualized, all of that.

04:23:31
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:23:31
Douglas Murray: All those conjugations. Um, I, I, I just think we need, we need to think about this more carefully, more cautiously. Again, nobody wants to be pushed into the terrain of pretending that sexual, um, uh, um, uh, unpleasantnesses don't exist.

04:23:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, but, but that's-

04:23:49
Douglas Murray: But, but, but equally, we, we just can't concede the ground we've conceded in recent years.

04:23:56
Eric Weinstein: See, I think this is, again, the same sort of issue that we were talking about with trans before, which is how do you give advice to two people who need to hear opposite things?

04:24:04
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:24:05
Eric Weinstein: So my friend makes the point that, um, the, uh, reckless child needs to be told, "Do not stare at the sun during an eclipse. You will destroy your eyes."

04:24:15
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:24:15
Eric Weinstein: The timorous child needs to be told, "If you glance at the sun, you will not necessarily go blind. Don't overdo it."

04:24:22
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:24:23
Eric Weinstein: And the inability to-

04:24:25
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:24:25
Eric Weinstein: ... give a textured and differentiated message-

04:24:28
Douglas Murray: Yeah. But this is also, this is also the m- what I describe i- in Madness of Crowds as the, the problem of the disappearance of private and public language, because ordinarily, in any other, this is going, it goes back to your point about the mobile phone and what it's done to us.

04:24:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:24:40
Douglas Murray: At any previous point in our species we would have known what to do with this. You said one thing to the timorous child and another thing to the, uh, to the, uh, reckless child, and you could do that. It's only today, in this era in our evolution [laughs] that we are having to find a way to say the same thing, not just to everyone on the planet, but a thing to potentially one person and potentially to everyone on the planet, and that's one on all of this stuff we're struggling with. We're struggling with communication, we're struggling with consistency and morality because we are trying to juggle with that fundamental communication shift, and it's, it's no wonder we've, we're confused because... And, and I suppose the only way forward, the only way through this is to be honest about some of it.

04:25:27
Eric Weinstein: Or to realize that we actually have to innovate new ways of speaking.

04:25:31
Douglas Murray: Around this, yes.

04:25:31
Eric Weinstein: I believe that Obama was actually in the process of innovating a way, and I particularly commend to everyone his speech on affirmative action-

04:25:39
Douglas Murray: Oh, yeah. Mm

04:25:40
Eric Weinstein: ... where what he did was he said, "If you are having the feeling that you have been traditionally frozen out of a different-

04:25:47
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:25:47
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, uh, world or educational path, you have to realize that we need to do this to remediate past wrongs. And if you are feeling that you are being treated unfairly, this is actually something that needs to be taken very seriously, and this is completely understandable-

04:26:03
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm

04:26:04
Eric Weinstein: ... because, in fact, there is an aspect of unfairness to the whole thing."

04:26:07
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

04:26:07
Eric Weinstein: And what he realized, I think, was that everyone heard his or her own version-

04:26:13
Douglas Murray: Version

04:26:13
Eric Weinstein: ... louder than they heard everyone else's.

04:26:14
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes.

04:26:14
Eric Weinstein: So it was possible to give one speech to a group of people-

04:26:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:26:18
Eric Weinstein: ... and then count on the blind men to, to-

04:26:21
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:26:21
Eric Weinstein: ... to take the elephant and turn it into-

04:26:23
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:26:23
Eric Weinstein: ... a bunch of different experiences.

04:26:26
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:26:26
Eric Weinstein: I think that we are not-

04:26:28
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:26:28
Eric Weinstein: Part of the problem is, is that when we invented our version of the printing press, which was the Internet that became the mobile and social Internet, we didn't invent all of the kinds of speech that we needed to go along-

04:26:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:26:42
Eric Weinstein: ... with this new innovation.

04:26:43
Douglas Murray: Yes. Yes, yes.

04:26:44
Eric Weinstein: And so we imagine that this wasn't that big of a deal. When John Brockman-

04:26:47
Douglas Murray: Oh

04:26:48
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, I think as far back as something like 2010, um, asked his annual question to the effect of, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?"

04:26:58
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:26:58
Eric Weinstein: The most common answer that he received back was, "Not at all." And he said, "You would have thought..." He said to me p- particularly, he said, "You would have thought that I asked them, them how a toaster was changing the way they thought." That nobody seemed to s-see this-

04:27:14
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:27:14
Eric Weinstein: ... in terms of the impact on their lives. And I, I really believe that in part when you receive a, a, a desist order that you violated a capital law-

04:27:24
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:27:24
Eric Weinstein: ... in Pakistan s-

04:27:26
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:27:26
Eric Weinstein: ... and you've never been to Pakistan, you have no dealings with Pakistan-

04:27:28
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:27:28
Eric Weinstein: ... you're sitting in Montreal. Why are, are you, why is Twitter passing along a notice that you might be under a death sentence in Pakistan?

04:27:35
Douglas Murray: A- absolut- and, um, unfortunately this, I mean, one of the things I think, I think the timorousness of the age has been caused in large part by this. I, I noticed it some years ago, by the way, because we should, we should try to solve, we should try to at least point towards some, uh, uh-

04:27:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, this, this is gonna be the last question coming up

04:27:52
Douglas Murray: ... answers. Yeah. I mean, we, we have to find a way through this. We have to find a way to not have timorous people, and, or at least not to have everyone made timorous. And I noticed some years ago, there's a, uh, or there was a f- f- an event in London where I think five people gave speeches in totally different f- fields. One was a, a, a biologist, one was a novelist, one was a... And I just, and, and it wasn't a particularly interesting evening except for in one regard, which was that I think three or four out of the five speeches at some point, if not at the beginning, involved the speaker saying, "And it's not what you read about me on the internet."

04:28:27
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:28:28
Douglas Murray: And I just thought, that's interesting because-

04:28:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is the age of misportrayal

04:28:31
Douglas Murray: ... so, so I, I had only heard of one of the speakers once before.

04:28:35
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

04:28:36
Douglas Murray: And I actually said to one of them afterwards, "You know, we don't actually spend our time reading about you on the internet. We don't Google you." I mean, now they w- the problem was they weren't onto nothing, which is that if you did put their name on the internet, and then whatever comes up on the fallacious, totally appalling and abhorrent site Wikipedia, would include a load of untrue information about them, which they were trying, like me, which they're trying to correct, and there's no mechanism to correct them, and so a version of your life is put out there by this despicable company. Um, this, these people were fr- afraid of one legitimate thing, and they had also all been suffering through the fact that this era which everyone pretended wasn't gonna change everything, meant they were all every day imbibing criticism of themselves that before they would only have heard in a row from somebody who knew them quite well, and even then very rarely.

04:29:26
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:29:27
Douglas Murray: And, and, and they were all sort of, I thought, I thought they're all sort of traumatized. And I think to an extent, in the same way that our era has, has imbibed a form of catastrophism about everything, we've imbibed this. We've imbibed the, the, the, the feeling that we are all being assaulted and assailed all the time because we can't get off our damn phones, and we are seeking out... It's self-harm. It's self-harm. We're seeking out people who don't like us and listening to them, and it's making us, again-

04:30:05
Eric Weinstein: People. I think some of them are bots

04:30:07
Douglas Murray: Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. But you know, some of them are, are real lunatics.

04:30:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:30:11
Douglas Murray: And they, th- they, they, they, they are having an effect.

04:30:16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure.

04:30:16
Douglas Murray: I c- I, I know so many people-

04:30:18
Eric Weinstein: Okay

04:30:18
Douglas Murray: ... who have been fundamentally affected by this, and th- they have to be saved. A- also, by the way, we have to not celebrate people for suffering. You know, uh, the, the, the, the sort of I've been... This is a particularly female move, it has to be said, but the, "I've been criticized even very unpleasantly," even sometimes in really reprehensible terms, you know, either racially or sexually.

04:30:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Hmm.

04:30:40
Douglas Murray: "I've been criticized like this online." Doesn't mean you're right. Doesn't mean you're right. Doesn't mean you get to win. The Kathleen Newman move. She does a reprehensible interview. She makes a fool of herself. Some of us point it out, then some people online criticize her, and then she's the victim. Th- there are all sorts of moves like this, but it has meant that the age desires victimhood.

04:31:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, you, you start, you start your sentence, uh, you know, in a, in ridiculous fashion. Like, as a Portuguese penguin in America, I feel that.

04:31:09
Douglas Murray: Right.

04:31:09
Eric Weinstein: It's like, well, why did you tell me you were a Portuguese penguin, you know? Um-

04:31:13
Douglas Murray: Mm-hmm

04:31:14
Eric Weinstein: ... that sounds ridiculous to you. How about if I started, as a Jewish man in America, as a Black man in America, as a gay man in America, as a gay man from Puerto Rico. You know-

04:31:22
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:31:22
Eric Weinstein: ... at some level, our new credentialing system-

04:31:25
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:31:26
Eric Weinstein: ... has to do with the idea-

04:31:28
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:31:29
Eric Weinstein: ... it's very much victim takes all because the great pride-

04:31:32
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:31:33
Eric Weinstein: ... gr- great prize rather, is that only a victim is entitled to everything up to murder-

04:31:40
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:31:40
Eric Weinstein: ... in self-defense.

04:31:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:31:43
Eric Weinstein: And I think that the key point is, is that we're looking to unlock the gun cabinet if once you understand-

04:31:48
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:31:48
Eric Weinstein: ... that vengeance is what's on tap.

04:31:50
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:31:51
Eric Weinstein: Right?

04:31:51
Douglas Murray: Yes.

04:31:51
Eric Weinstein: The idea being I need access to the gun cabinet. Let me tell you that I need to defend myself because I'm under an imminent threat, and therefore I'm going to do things-

04:32:00
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:32:00
Eric Weinstein: ... that under any circumstance other than this-

04:32:03
Douglas Murray: Hmm

04:32:03
Eric Weinstein: ... would be absolutely illegal.

04:32:05
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

04:32:05
Eric Weinstein: And this, this search for the rationale to inflict grievous harm on another, this, this has to do with why we're competing, because the victim is the most powerful.

04:32:18
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:32:18
Eric Weinstein: It may be that the victim on his or her own would be less powerful.

04:32:23
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:32:23
Eric Weinstein: But once the victim couples to the state or to institutional media-

04:32:28
Douglas Murray: Hmm. Hmm

04:32:29
Eric Weinstein: ... that combination, that sort of hybridization of a human being as victim and an incredibly powerful structure as protector is like Iron Man getting into his mech suits, Tony Stark becoming Iron Man by getting into a mech suit. Well, now the victim is no longer a victim. Now the victim is an actually super empowered to do what no normal person could do under any circumstances.

04:32:51
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

04:32:51
Eric Weinstein: The question that this brings up for both of us is why are there so peop- so few people with ovarian or testicular fortitude in order to stand up for all of the marvelous things that this anomalously lucky situation affords us? What do we do to induce people? Now, I'm gonna reveal something on this program that I've waited to reveal. Um, people always ask me, well, you, you, you named the IDW. Uh, who was in the intellectual dark web, and you were patient zero.

04:33:28
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

04:33:31
Eric Weinstein: You didn't know it.

04:33:32
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

04:33:32
Eric Weinstein: But if there was anyone in the intellectual dark web, um, I realize after the Charlie Hebdo situation, it was you, and I viewed that as really heroic. And I know in particular because we've also discussed the time that you've taken to spend in refugee camps-

04:33:49
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:33:49
Eric Weinstein: ... the ways in which-

04:33:51
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:33:51
Eric Weinstein: ... I think that you've really, you know, deeply put yourself in contact with those less fortunate.

04:33:55
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:33:55
Eric Weinstein: If I listen to Maajid Nawaz's story of how he met you-

04:33:59
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:33:59
Eric Weinstein: ... um, I've been re- really, really very moved by your willingness to wade into an area where you have deep sympathies with many of the people adversely affected, and been forced to say very difficult things with class-

04:34:14
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:34:14
Eric Weinstein: ... in a, in a extremely fraught environment.

04:34:16
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:34:17
Eric Weinstein: What is it that we can do, and by the way, everybody should check out this Al Jazeera clip, to induce people towards public courage to stand up for what they actually believe in, and to do so in a decent rather than in a simply a powerful fashion?

04:34:38
Douglas Murray: I think the first thing is just to know what you're at risk of losing.

04:34:41
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm.

04:34:43
Douglas Murray: I think that's the overwhelming thing. You know, I'm very fortunate because I've been a writer all my life, which... And I can gravitate towards things that interest me. That's a, that's a wonderful position to be in, you know? Anyone who wants to be a writer, this is a, you know, a call to do that for that reason, among much else. Um, and I, and I think difficult issues are the most interesting ones, you know? I've sort of always written, from my first book in a way, I've written about knotty, difficult things. And if you look at knotty and difficult things, you should look them in the face. But it's meant that along my career, I've been lucky enough, fortunate enough to travel to an awful, awfully large array of places, and seen an awfully large, perhaps too large array of ways in which human life can fall out. And I never l- I never had taken it all for granted, but you simply can't see the rest of the world.

04:35:46
Eric Weinstein: It does not look like Portobello Road.

04:35:48
Douglas Murray: It does not.

04:35:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:35:50
Douglas Murray: It does not. And I... You know, even in the non-war zones, you know, even as you know, I mean, travel around India and try to tell yourself that life in America is benighted. Um, travel around much of China and try to tell yourself that human rights are not respected in the United States of America or the United Kingdom. Let alone all the countries I could list, which I've seen firsthand the extent to which human life has even less, in fact, much less value in the eyes of people in power than in the places I've just mentioned.

04:36:37
Eric Weinstein: Or a place like Thailand that hasn't been colonized, and yet-

04:36:41
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:36:41
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, if you look at a Thai demonstration or if you go to a Muay Thai fight or all sorts of things, things come with the human condition that don't have anything to do with, you know, the, the, the impact of, uh, colonialism, let's say.

04:36:56
Douglas Murray: Right.

04:36:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm.

04:36:56
Douglas Murray: Yeah. And I, yes, and I'm... And, and I think people should try to sort of shrug off this, these boring paradigms that they've been put into, you know?

04:37:05
Eric Weinstein: But what's fun? What's exciting? Like in other words, we have a chance in part, and, and I, I've, I've listened to you because I generally discourage people from doing this for the main reason that people start off very eager and they say, "How do I get involved? How do I speak out?"

04:37:18
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:37:19
Eric Weinstein: And then I, I always say, "Look, make sure you can afford to lose your job."

04:37:23
Douglas Murray: Well-

04:37:23
Eric Weinstein: Make sure you can stand up to a mob. Once those people say, "Yes, I've made these decisions," I'm quite willing to tell them about all the great things that can happen to them-

04:37:33
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:37:33
Eric Weinstein: ... when they do stand up. But I don't wanna lure people-

04:37:36
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:37:37
Eric Weinstein: ... who are ill-prepared and-

04:37:38
Douglas Murray: Right

04:37:39
Eric Weinstein: ... them say, "Well, you know, I, I took your advice, and now I'm out of a job."

04:37:42
Douglas Murray: No, abs- absolutely. I remember a friend of mine in Northern Ireland saying to me many years ago, "Have you ever urged somebody to step forward and they've been killed?" And I said, "It hasn't happened to me yet." He said, "Uh, happened to me." You know, um, I, I, it's a much less, um, dangerous scenario I suppose we're talking about, but, uh, I, I, I don't, I don't urge people to be kamikaze. I mean, I, I wouldn't mind-

04:38:06
Eric Weinstein: Short-

04:38:07
Douglas Murray: ... not large number-

04:38:08
Eric Weinstein: Long heroism, short martyrdom is our slogan.

04:38:10
Douglas Murray: Right. And, and you know, my view is you wouldn't need kamikazes if, um, everyone took one step forward. You know? I, I'm for everybody being, taking one step forward.

04:38:23
Eric Weinstein: Except you.

04:38:25
Douglas Murray: Well-

04:38:26
Eric Weinstein: Your way forward.

04:38:27
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

04:38:29
Eric Weinstein: Dude.

04:38:29
Douglas Murray: That's what my mother fears.

04:38:30
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:38:31
Douglas Murray: Um, uh-

04:38:32
Eric Weinstein: I'm with her

04:38:32
Douglas Murray: ... I am... Look, I don't feel it. I mean, I am, uh, I feel great, apart from for the state of the world, um, particularly for the state of America. But, um, y- you know, uh, if you, if you, if you get-

04:38:55
Eric Weinstein: You-

04:38:55
Douglas Murray: ... if you get an idea of what it is that you want to defend-

04:38:59
Eric Weinstein: Right

04:38:59
Douglas Murray: ... and it's deeply embedded-

04:39:01
Eric Weinstein: Right

04:39:02
Douglas Murray: ... then you can dance in all the ambiguities and dance on all the cliff edges. It's-

04:39:08
Eric Weinstein: But you may die as well, but the thing that I would say is, if you know that all of this is nonsense-

04:39:14
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:39:15
Eric Weinstein: ... and you, and you just keep your mouth quiet and you mouth things that you have to mouth because you're on a board-

04:39:21
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:39:21
Eric Weinstein: ... or- You don't wanna lose your spot in line for law school or whatever it is that you're worried about happening.

04:39:27
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:39:28
Eric Weinstein: Make no mistake, you will be dying for quite some time.

04:39:31
Douglas Murray: Mm. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, this is a long death. Um, uh, I also think that in a way, and again maybe this is a personality trait of cer- certain people, but I remember w- uh, Christopher Hitchens, who you mentioned earlier, uh, who was a great friend and I was thinking about recently because I'm just reading Martin Amis' book about him. Uh, Hitch once said, uh, that in sh- in Sarajevo in the '90s when the, the city was being shelled by Serb forces, he and various other journalists and others who had made it in and, you know, and, uh ... He said that one night he was standing on the sort of the, the walls overlooking the city and, you know, guns going off and all that sort of thing. And he said a fellow journalist sidled up to him, you know, was also smoking, and said to Christopher, uh, "Wouldn't it be a wonderful time to be in love?" [laughs] And, um, uh, he said about sort of half of audience has got what he was saying. But, um, the, the instinct that, that human life is best lived in comfort is, is an, is a perfectly reasonable instinct, and most people want it. But the instinct that human life is also precarious-

04:40:50
Eric Weinstein: Yes

04:40:50
Douglas Murray: ... and that the precariousness isn't a problem necessarily, certainly not all the time, that an element of risk, you know, this comes back to the Covid thing. It comes back to everything. An element of risk is, uh, it can be a problem in certain circumstances, and in other ways it's just energizing beyond anything. And, uh, the, uh, if you're gonna take any risk, then you might as well take the risk of telling the truth, um, n- not just because you might get something out of it or achieve something out of it or feel better about yourself, but because we all might get somewhere.

04:41:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is ... I joke frequently about my anger, uh, at homosexuals for monopolizing the concept of a closet.

04:41:30
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:41:31
Eric Weinstein: That there are closets i- in every area of human endeavor, and you shouldn't jump out of closets regular- regularly.

04:41:39
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:41:39
Eric Weinstein: Like, I don't think vaccines are 100% safe.

04:41:42
Douglas Murray: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

04:41:43
Eric Weinstein: Maybe 99.8-

04:41:44
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:41:44
Eric Weinstein: ... but not 100. When you do it, there's no turning back, and you have to do it a little bit or you're really not alive.

04:41:52
Douglas Murray: Mm. That's right.

04:41:53
Eric Weinstein: But if you do it too much or you become addicted to it, because-

04:41:55
Douglas Murray: Yes, there are people who are addicted to it

04:41:57
Eric Weinstein: ... exactly.

04:41:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:41:58
Eric Weinstein: I, I'm thinking about a situation I was just in with my son where we were scuba diving in Belize, and we happened to encounter a Caribbean reef shark, uh, quite unexpectedly. Now if you've never seen one-

04:42:11
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:42:12
Eric Weinstein: ... it's like a scaled down great white. It's got the same classic profile. And the first thought was, "Holy shit, it's a great white shark." And then it darted away, and the, you know, you're, you're, you're reduced to scuba signals, so you can't really tell from your guide, "No, no, no. Don't worry, it wasn't a great white. It was ... " But the next thought was, "Oh, crap. It's gone. How do I find it again?" Right? So the idea being that you went from a state-

04:42:38
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:42:38
Eric Weinstein: ... of total terror to, wow, that's the most fascinating thing I saw on this dive. How do I get some more?

04:42:43
Douglas Murray: Yes, yes, yes.

04:42:44
Eric Weinstein: And I do think that in part-

04:42:46
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:42:46
Eric Weinstein: ... you need to balance the pleasure-

04:42:49
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:42:49
Eric Weinstein: ... of being yourself and standing up-

04:42:52
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:42:52
Eric Weinstein: ... and saying something real with the terror and self-protective nature of I need to retain some healthy fear.

04:42:58
Douglas Murray: That's right.

04:42:58
Eric Weinstein: And I feel ... I, I worry that we haven't done a good enough job-

04:43:02
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:43:03
Eric Weinstein: ... of pushing out a how-to manual for people-

04:43:05
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:43:05
Eric Weinstein: ... who are thinking about taking the first steps to saying, "Hey, you know what? I don't necessarily know-"

04:43:12
Douglas Murray: Yeah

04:43:12
Eric Weinstein: ... what does believe women mean when two women are arguing about a point of fact and they both can't be correct? Like, I can't figure out what you mean by believe women.

04:43:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah.

04:43:20
Eric Weinstein: Not because I don't wanna believe women.

04:43:23
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:43:23
Eric Weinstein: Because I don't think what you're saying actually makes sense.

04:43:25
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:43:25
Eric Weinstein: That would be an example of something where you could get quite hurt-

04:43:29
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:43:29
Eric Weinstein: ... for obser- o- observing s- what is absolutely obvious.

04:43:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah. Yeah.

04:43:33
Eric Weinstein: Like, if you said, "Believe Paraguayans."

04:43:36
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm.

04:43:36
Eric Weinstein: What if they, what if two of them get into an argument?

04:43:39
Douglas Murray: Mm. Mm-hmm.

04:43:39
Eric Weinstein: Believe religious people.

04:43:40
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:43:40
Eric Weinstein: What if they don't agree on an origin story?

04:43:42
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

04:43:42
Eric Weinstein: None of it makes-

04:43:42
Douglas Murray: What if one's sunny, one's shit? [laughs]

04:43:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. And I wonder if the ... Part of, part of the thing is, is that we haven't pushed out an attractive concept-

04:43:52
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:43:52
Eric Weinstein: ... of an affiliate p- program-

04:43:53
Douglas Murray: Yes

04:43:53
Eric Weinstein: ... for people to get their feet wet and start to learn that-

04:43:56
Douglas Murray: Well-

04:43:56
Eric Weinstein: ... they might be, they might have a rhetorical gift for this stuff.

04:43:58
Douglas Murray: Yeah. All I can say is that people should try it. Uh, they should dip their toe in the water. Um, I, I can't urge it enough. Um, and-

04:44:10
Eric Weinstein: You, you have, you have good dinners. You still have friends.

04:44:12
Douglas Murray: Look, I've got terrific friends.

04:44:14
Eric Weinstein: You travel the world.

04:44:16
Douglas Murray: I'm lucky enough to travel the world, even in this era. Um, I, I c- I, I ... There's a very, very strong thing that it's important to stress in this, which is that people broadly speaking in our circle, uh, how do I say? Vaguely of friends and others, um, have quite often been por- been portrayed by others, it goes back to what you were saying about, you know, controversial professors and such, in ways that are not really accurate.

04:44:41
Eric Weinstein: Right.

04:44:41
Douglas Murray: So Jordan is portrayed as controversial professor-

04:44:45
Eric Weinstein: Right

04:44:46
Douglas Murray: ... when there's nothing, almost nothing he says that should in any way be controversial. Certainly not any more than things-

04:44:52
Eric Weinstein: Certainly not as a psychometrician.

04:44:54
Douglas Murray: Yes, and, and certainly-

04:44:55
Eric Weinstein: I, I may disagree with him about his devotion to IQ as a reliable psychometric-

04:44:59
Douglas Murray: Right

04:44:59
Eric Weinstein: ... but it's not, it's a scholarly sort of an issue.

04:45:02
Douglas Murray: And it's certainly not the case that, uh, anything he says should make him be awarded that label, as opposed to multiple other academics playing in appalling fields who certainly should be described as controversial. So anyhow, the point is we've been sort of wrongly designated in all sorts of ways. And I've found this quite often, uh, not just in other people but for myself, in being portrayed as in some way a sort of outright or outlier. And, um, and so I, you know, I sort of have to stress to people not only that it doesn't feel like that, but it's not the case. You know, I'm not like- Hanging on by my fingertips to respectability, such as it is and such as I would desire it. I write for all of the major newspapers in my country. Um, it's a wonderful thing, but they all want me in their pages, and it's a great honor. And-

04:45:53
Eric Weinstein: Would you, would that be true here?

04:45:54
Douglas Murray: Um, here less so, partly because, um, I, I'm not here and I don't write in the newspapers here. Secondly, I think you have a particular problem with your media here, and the m- your media here is particularly degraded. That might be-

04:46:08
Eric Weinstein: It's been v- very violent.

04:46:10
Douglas Murray: Yeah. It v- it, it's appallingly d- I mean, I mean, for instance, I mean, The New York Times has a couple of times teased me to try to get me in. And then-

04:46:17
Eric Weinstein: The former paper of record.

04:46:18
Douglas Murray: Exactly. Y- then it always is what I think it's gonna be, which is that they have no intention of running the most careful version of what I think-

04:46:28
Eric Weinstein: Right

04:46:28
Douglas Murray: ... in their pages. And in, and that former paper only ever writes about me when it wants to assault me. But, um, but no, I think it would be different here. You're quite right. But the point I'm trying to make is I'm, I'm totally mainstream. Okay? My books, you know, are all bestsellers. I, again, I'm enormously grateful for this. This is not a boast. But, you know, my first book's about to re- be reissued for the first time in 20 years since its first publication. I have wonderful friends from a bewildering array of places. And I will not have people who are genuinely obscure people-

04:47:12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

04:47:12
Douglas Murray: ... who deserve their obscurity, and genuinely incurious and uncredentialed and unthinking try to portray me or any of the rest of us as in some way the, the weirdos. Uh, it's not the case.

04:47:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's this British expression, "Oh, do fuck off."

04:47:32
Douglas Murray: Uh, I invite them to do so.

04:47:33
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

04:47:33
Douglas Murray: Yeah. And, um, so, so it really, it really has to be stressed. I'm, I'm, I'm f- getting fed up of the number of people who sidle up to me-

04:47:41
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

04:47:42
Douglas Murray: ... and ask me about my, you know, benighted status.

04:47:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

04:47:45
Douglas Murray: It's not like that. It's not just that it doesn't feel like that. It isn't like that.

04:47:49
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's-

04:47:50
Douglas Murray: And it isn't, I think, for most of us. And I think that the, I think that the era of the, of the, of hiding behind victimhood-

04:47:58
Eric Weinstein: Yes

04:47:58
Douglas Murray: ... as a, as, as a way to excuse oneself and permit oneself to say things that are true-

04:48:05
Eric Weinstein: Mm

04:48:05
Douglas Murray: ... really ought to stop. There's a new phase that's needed on this, as with so many other things.

04:48:13
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I, my personal take on it is that this culture war ends the moment the world's least intersectional person has to tell the world's most intersectional person that he, she, it is wrong.

04:48:25
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:48:26
Eric Weinstein: And it's a matter of fact. It's not a question of privilege. It's just-

04:48:30
Douglas Murray: Mm

04:48:30
Eric Weinstein: ... there are times when what you're advocating for, you know, if you, if you decided that what we should do is we should, uh, uh, cut up babies and use them for spare parts, it's very important that the most unsympathetic person, you know, Bartholomew P. Wigglesbottom XVII, be able to say, "That is a stupid idea."

04:48:50
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:48:51
Eric Weinstein: Even if Bartholomew is absolutely a not a sympathetic character in any way, shape, or form.

04:48:57
Douglas Murray: Mm.

04:48:57
Eric Weinstein: So it sounds to me like, um, you know, in essence, you do have some hope, if not for the, to undo the strange death of Europe, at least to undo the madness of our current moment.

04:49:07
Douglas Murray: Absolutely.

04:49:07
Eric Weinstein: And that what we should be doing is bringing more young people in with the confidence that there's a place for them at the table-

04:49:12
Douglas Murray: Absolutely

04:49:12
Eric Weinstein: ... and that there are careers and dinner parties and good cheer, and that there will be people of all races, colors, and creed waiting to welcome them in.

04:49:20
Douglas Murray: Yeah. We are, we are larger in number, and we will be larger in number, and we'll be larger in number than the appalling people on the other side, with whom you wouldn't want to dine anyway.

04:49:32
Eric Weinstein: Very good. Well, uh, you've, you've been dining on the ideas of one Douglas Murray, here from the UK. Uh, enjoy his books on The Strange Death of Europe and The Madness of Crowds, as well as his first book, which is being reissued under the title?

04:49:47
Douglas Murray: I mean, it's called Bosie. It's a biography of Alfred Douglas, the man who brought down Oscar Wilde. And I've written a new autobiographical preface which explains how I came into this world.

04:49:57
Eric Weinstein: So run, don't walk, to your, uh-

04:50:00
Douglas Murray: [laughs]

04:50:00
Eric Weinstein: ... to your local bookseller or Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. Uh, you've been through The Portal with Douglas, but please subscribe to us on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you subscribe and listen to podcasts. Then navigate over to the YouTube channel and please subscribe there. And remember to click the bell icon to be notified when the next video drops. And, uh, other than that, take care of yourselves and be well, everyone. [outro music]