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Speaker 1: It's time for all the attitude, all the opinion, all
Speaker 1: the information, all the debates of this now the Leighton
Speaker 1: Smith Podcast powered by News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Podcasts two hundred and seventy one for February twelve,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five. You know, there's so much choice when
Speaker 2: considering content, and that's the only negative I can think
Speaker 2: of when it comes to a weekly program. So many
Speaker 2: issues from international sources a at home. Many of those
Speaker 2: are crossovers that affect more than one country. Many of
Speaker 2: them have global impact. But of course I'm stating the obvious.
Speaker 2: But this is only the second podcast of the year,
Speaker 2: and I will approach it this way. On the thirties
Speaker 2: of August last year, at nine fifty three a M
Speaker 2: I received the following email. Peter wanted me to reach
Speaker 2: out to you as he will be in New Zealand
Speaker 2: from December three until the end of January and wanted
Speaker 2: to see if we can schedule an in person interview.
Speaker 2: He said that you gave him the best model of
Speaker 2: wine he has ever had, and still thinks about it. So,
Speaker 2: having dampened my palate, I decided that we'd follow up
Speaker 2: and arranged for something at the end of his Well,
Speaker 2: actually we didn't arrange it then. We just agreed that
Speaker 2: we would talk later, because with the holiday period and
Speaker 2: going away, etc. It threw things into a bit of confusion.
Speaker 2: But we ended up getting together right at the very
Speaker 2: end of his stay in the country. And what you
Speaker 2: will hear shortly will either aggravate you, maybe even beyond belief,
Speaker 2: or it will satiate you. But Peter Bagoshian lost his
Speaker 2: position as assistant professor at the university he was at
Speaker 2: because he refused to bow too. Matters woke and one
Speaker 2: could only say good on him. We interviewed him twenty fifteen,
Speaker 2: so it was ten years ago, and this came quite
Speaker 2: out of the blue. We hadn't communicated since he was
Speaker 2: here back then. He is an author. The publications could
Speaker 2: be found in well, there's too many to read, to
Speaker 2: be honest, let me name some that you'll recognize. New
Speaker 2: York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Quillette, The
Speaker 2: Philosopher's Magazine, Philosophy's Future, Skeptical Inquirer, The Spectator USA Today,
Speaker 2: Scientific American. You got the picture, and that isn't even
Speaker 2: half of the number of outlets that has been listed.
Speaker 2: He is currently a founding faculty fellow at the University
Speaker 2: of Austin, and the fact that he's involved with the
Speaker 2: University of Boston, that is the new university that I
Speaker 2: have that I have commented on a number of times,
Speaker 2: was impressive. So on near his last day in the country,
Speaker 2: he came to the house and we recorded for about
Speaker 2: an hour and a quarter. It came down to a
Speaker 2: little less than that, but nevertheless it's a reasonably lengthy interview.
Speaker 2: It turned out in the end that the Free Speech
Speaker 2: Union was responsible for his visit here, not all of it,
Speaker 2: because he stayed those couple of months, as you'll hear.
Speaker 2: But coincidentally, around the same time, I received this from
Speaker 2: the Taxpayers Organization or Taxpayers Union should I say, dot
Speaker 2: Org from Jordan Williams. And it's relevant to where we're going,
Speaker 2: so let me include some of this trigger warning. This
Speaker 2: email is likely to upset you. This email is longer
Speaker 2: than usual but important. It will likely see kickback from
Speaker 2: those who like to attack anyone who dares to criticize
Speaker 2: spending when it relates to indigenous matters. The media won't
Speaker 2: touch it. But frankly, unless we take on these sorts
Speaker 2: of roughts, new Zealand's reputation for accountable government won't last long.
Speaker 2: A few months ago, the Taxpayers Union, when public exposing
Speaker 2: the taxpayer funded science project. Our research is uncovered to
Speaker 2: and this is no joke, record whales, mixing those sounds
Speaker 2: with recordings from healthy Carrie forests to take into unhealthy
Speaker 2: Carrie forests, playback the audio recordings and assess whether the
Speaker 2: whale music could be effective in soothing Carrie trees and
Speaker 2: beating myrtle rust and Carrie dieback. You really couldn't make
Speaker 2: this up. Now to recap it was part of the
Speaker 2: National Science Challenges, which are to bring together the country's
Speaker 2: top scientists and use the best science to address the challenges.
Speaker 2: One of the challenges related to protecting New Zealand's by
Speaker 2: a diversity, including our iconic trees. Now recall that MBIE
Speaker 2: officials insisted that as part of the project made range
Speaker 2: Mary must be on the same footing. That's traditional mari
Speaker 2: must be on the same footing as colonial science. Their
Speaker 2: description not his. As in Jordan, Williams. Mbie's justification for
Speaker 2: this project is that, according to Mari legend knowledge, sperm
Speaker 2: whales and Carrie trees are brothers. The hypothesis taxpayers are
Speaker 2: forking out to test is whether the whales have a
Speaker 2: calming effect on the trees and therefore helped the trees
Speaker 2: resist disease. We're not making this up. It's literally on
Speaker 2: the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment website. That's MBIE.
Speaker 2: After we blew the whistle on the project, official spent
Speaker 2: months playing games and refusing to answer our basic questions
Speaker 2: on the oranga that is well being project. The project
Speaker 2: is managed by MBIE, but the actual payments are from
Speaker 2: Land Care Research and after much determination that is staff time,
Speaker 2: James and the research team have finally got to the
Speaker 2: bottom of how much was spent on the na Rakau
Speaker 2: Taki Taki project. Officials are still refusing a line by
Speaker 2: line breakdown. I wonder why. But in total, this Madenga
Speaker 2: Mari based research cost taxpayers four million, twenty seven twenty dollars.
Speaker 2: That's right, four million plus GST was paid to investigate
Speaker 2: whether recording whale sounds mixing them with recordings from healthy
Speaker 2: Kai forests and playing them to unhealthy cari forests and
Speaker 2: other nonsense such as the language of the domain of tane,
Speaker 2: all in the name of healing them and science. Here's
Speaker 2: what the four million paid for. There's only one thing listed,
Speaker 2: sonic tapestries of rejuvenation and well Being. And then there's
Speaker 2: a bit about the project. As part of this investigation,
Speaker 2: we've uncovered that the research was outsourced to a private,
Speaker 2: not for profit company, te Tira Wakamataki Limited. And that's
Speaker 2: when we came to a stunning realization which now explains
Speaker 2: why the departments have been so cagey about giving us
Speaker 2: information on the project. According to te Tira Wakamataki Limited's website,
Speaker 2: its co founder and trustee is Melanie Mark Shadbolt. And
Speaker 2: here's the startling thing. Miss Mark Shadbolt is also the
Speaker 2: co director of the very same bio Heritage Science Challenge Science.
Speaker 2: That's what it is, bio Heritage Science Challenge Science. I e.
Speaker 2: The government initiative funding the project. I had the team
Speaker 2: work through the Finances and Charities Commission records of Miss
Speaker 2: Mark Schadbolt's company. Company's casts are almost entirely salaries and
Speaker 2: its charitable purposes merely provides advice, information and advocacy. Nice
Speaker 2: work if you can get it. Now there is more
Speaker 2: you want it, I think. So it's bad enough that
Speaker 2: this taxpayer money was spent in the first place to
Speaker 2: research what we all know is nothing more than a
Speaker 2: myth Wales being brothers of the ki and that they're
Speaker 2: able to communicate with each other. But when the provider
Speaker 2: of these nonsense projects playing music to trees is also
Speaker 2: one of the two co directors of the Overall Science Challenge,
Speaker 2: what hope is there that the taxpayer will get value
Speaker 2: for money or scientific knowledge will be advanced. And here's
Speaker 2: the kicker. The project leaders openly admit that this isn't
Speaker 2: even real research. They describe it as a way to
Speaker 2: give Mari knowledge equal footing with science, claiming it doesn't
Speaker 2: need to meet scientific standards because it's about restoring maudi,
Speaker 2: that is life force, rather than achieving measurable effective results.
Speaker 2: Now it is more than that, but I think you
Speaker 2: get the drift. So within a few moments we will
Speaker 2: join Peter Bagoshian. So what is the one thing that
Speaker 2: people are not talking about in this country?
Speaker 3: The Maori's indigenous ways of knowing? We're not being honest
Speaker 3: about that, and the fact that the Maori have been
Speaker 3: a stagnant society around for people keep exaggerating it. The
Speaker 3: longer we go on, the more people make preposterous claims
Speaker 3: of how long the mari have been around as indigenous
Speaker 3: people here. And the fact that stagnant societies like the Maoris,
Speaker 3: like the Marii society, is something to be proud of.
Speaker 3: It's not something to be proud of. Being stagnant and
Speaker 3: a miserated and having no method of error correction, or
Speaker 3: no fruits of the Enlightenment, or no freedom of expression,
Speaker 3: freedom of the press. These are not things to be
Speaker 3: proud of. Quite bluntly, anybody who says so should be.
Speaker 3: There are things to be ashamed of as a culture,
Speaker 3: not a genetics, not a race, but as a culture.
Speaker 3: It's not a good thing to be a stagnant society
Speaker 3: for X thousands of years.
Speaker 2: So you've been in the country for about two months, correct,
Speaker 2: and you picked that up when you first came. I
Speaker 2: picked that up.
Speaker 3: You know. I was tuned into the whole Maori the
Speaker 3: controversy around the listener letter and the Maori ways of knowing.
Speaker 3: I interviewed Elizabeth Ratza and Kendall and other people. And
Speaker 3: I'm just stunned by how people have a kind of
Speaker 3: deference to anything and everything with the word Maori in it.
Speaker 3: They're not speaking openly and honestly about tribal violence. They're
Speaker 3: not speaking openly and honestly about the fact that a
Speaker 3: society has pretty much remained unchanged. They're not speaking honestly
Speaker 3: and openly about anything. They're to their cowards to in fear.
Speaker 3: And everybody knows it, just no one speaks it. When
Speaker 3: you say everybody knows it, how do you know it?
Speaker 3: I mean, how do you know that they know it?
Speaker 3: Because they'll give pause, or they'll prevaricate, or they'll obfuscate,
Speaker 3: or they'll change the subject. But when you bring them
Speaker 3: back around to the conversation, they'll at some point, if
Speaker 3: you press them long enough with questions, they'll just say
Speaker 3: I don't want to talk about it, or we shouldn't
Speaker 3: talk about it, and they'll make an explicit acknowledgment that
Speaker 3: they just don't want to talk about it. But you know,
Speaker 3: to paraphrase Feineman, the the easiest person to.
Speaker 2: Fool is yourself Fineman, the scientist. Yeah, the easiest.
Speaker 3: Person to fool is yourself and not talking about your
Speaker 3: problems does not make them go away, It only exacerbates them.
Speaker 3: So the problems with you know, and then you're trying
Speaker 3: to fix the problem on the back end with affirmative action,
Speaker 3: with diversity initiatives. Those are neo colonial American exports. You're
Speaker 3: trying to fix the problem on the back end, but
Speaker 3: you're not being honest about the culture or the Maori culture.
Speaker 3: You're just not being honest about it. I mean, you
Speaker 3: can keep not being honest.
Speaker 2: About what's to be honest about.
Speaker 3: Well, do you think it's a good thing that a
Speaker 3: culture has been stagnant for thousands of years, not developed
Speaker 3: basic technologies, dental technology, telecommunications, any kind of paved any
Speaker 3: kind of modern technological infrastructure, medicine. These aren't good things.
Speaker 3: There's there's nothing to be lauded. There nothing, And the
Speaker 3: people who loud it should be ashamed of themselves. They're
Speaker 3: keeping people miserated. They're making a virtue of being a misery.
Speaker 3: Who's doing that identitarian left, the left, but the whole society.
Speaker 3: I see the whole society in the grips of this,
Speaker 3: being terrified of being honest about the Maori. Again, I
Speaker 3: have harbor no animus against the Maori. And it's again
Speaker 3: I want to make crystal clear, I don't think that
Speaker 3: this is a genetic thing. I think this is strictly cultural.
Speaker 2: All right, let's run through a couple of things. Sure,
Speaker 2: it is only recently, including the first podcast of this
Speaker 2: year when I when I made a comment that I
Speaker 2: came here forty forty five years ago to this country
Speaker 2: and people were talking about marry issues. Yeah, constantly, there
Speaker 2: was problem here and the problem there, and they had
Speaker 2: you know, they weren't getting this, and they weren't get
Speaker 2: it was it was a it was almost a full
Speaker 2: time conversation. Here we are forty plus years later. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and as far as I'm concerned, nothing's changed, because really.
Speaker 3: Okay, of course it hasn't changed, because the only way
Speaker 3: to change, the only way to solve a problem is
Speaker 3: to be honest about it. You can keep dancing around
Speaker 3: the problem or keep lying about the problem, but that's
Speaker 3: not going to make the problem go away. That's actually
Speaker 3: going to make the problem more difficult to solve, and
Speaker 3: then you're going to have to jerry rig outcomes on
Speaker 3: the back end. So, for example, you're going to have
Speaker 3: to demean things that we have developed in our culture
Speaker 3: that we know work. We know the meritocracy works. We
Speaker 3: know it works. I mean, just look at the California
Speaker 3: fires as a recent example of dea I hires and
Speaker 3: deranged firefighters. You know, needing more women, female lesbians as firefighters. No,
Speaker 3: so you can't fix the problem on the back end
Speaker 3: by creating spaces for individuals who are indigenous people who
Speaker 3: don't get in on the basis of merit I mean,
Speaker 3: that's a recipe for the decline, the rapid decline of civilization,
Speaker 3: because you're undermining what you know works. These are just
Speaker 3: to be clear, I do not consider this to be
Speaker 3: I know people are going to be just to be
Speaker 3: a conservative value. This is not a conservative value.
Speaker 2: Well what is it? I don't want to put boids
Speaker 2: in your mouth.
Speaker 3: I don't know. An enlightenment value, a value of falsifiability,
Speaker 3: a value of something that's been tested and tried. I mean,
Speaker 3: meritocracy work.
Speaker 2: We just know where nobody wants to go to.
Speaker 3: People will lie to you and they'll say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 3: I'll fly in a place if the plane, if the
Speaker 3: pilot was a diversity higher. But if you say to them,
Speaker 3: what would you put your kid in the plane? You
Speaker 3: have two choices. You know that the pilot has been
Speaker 3: hired as a means of by an honest, meritocratic system
Speaker 3: one pilot and the other pilot was a diversity higher
Speaker 3: Who are you going to put your kid? You got
Speaker 3: to get your kid from A to B, from Auckland
Speaker 3: to christ Church. Who do you want flying the plane?
Speaker 3: I mean, we know the meritocracy works. Do you want
Speaker 3: your surgeon to be have have gotten there because of
Speaker 3: the color of the skin or his last name? No,
Speaker 3: that's truly insane. That's a recipe to destroy the whole civilization.
Speaker 2: So let me ask you then about your thoughts on IQ.
Speaker 2: What would you say about the about the IQ of
Speaker 2: different different racial groupings around the world. Does it vary?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So that's out of my area of expertise. That's
Speaker 3: the one thing that literally nobody can talk about. It's
Speaker 3: very difficult to parse out those issues. Let me say this,
Speaker 3: I think it was Krick said, there's no reason to
Speaker 3: believe people whose ancestors have been subject to different evolutionary
Speaker 3: pressures would have similar kind of cognitive attributes. It's outside
Speaker 3: my domain of expertise. I can't say. But one thing
Speaker 3: that I can say is, even if it's conclusively found,
Speaker 3: as Richard Hayter and Charles Murray and others have argued
Speaker 3: that there are direct cause or relationships between where one's
Speaker 3: ancestors were from and iq r G. More generally, that
Speaker 3: doesn't mean you should treat an individual based differently based
Speaker 3: upon that data, because there are always outliers for that.
Speaker 3: But it's just another thing that we're not being honest
Speaker 3: about it. And I can already tell you what's happening.
Speaker 3: We're hiding IQ data or we're not letting allowing people
Speaker 3: to research that because we don't.
Speaker 2: If you truly believe.
Speaker 3: Like if you genuinely, from the bottom of your heart
Speaker 3: believed that there were no racial differences in IQ, you
Speaker 3: should be screaming from the rooftop that we demand a
Speaker 3: rigorous investigation of this with the best available tools and
Speaker 3: scientific methods. But no, they're not doing that. They're claiming that,
Speaker 3: you know, this is an ethical we can't do this,
Speaker 3: This is hurtful.
Speaker 2: So that tells you right there that the people don't
Speaker 2: believe it. Are you talking about here or are you
Speaker 2: talking about it anyway? In general?
Speaker 3: You know I'm talking primarily in the well in the anglosphere,
Speaker 3: but in the United States in particular.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's really.
Speaker 3: The last thing, that's really the last taboo, because there's
Speaker 3: there's kind of cultural relativism. There's no reason to believe
Speaker 3: that all cultures are the same. In fact, by definition,
Speaker 3: there's some people do some things better in their cultures
Speaker 3: than others. But when you're talking about IQ, you're talking
Speaker 3: about an immutable characteristic. I mean, it's really interesting if
Speaker 3: you look at the data on you know, Nobel Prize winners,
Speaker 3: for example, the overwhelming majority haven't been just Jews, but
Speaker 3: Askanazi Jews. Stephen Pinker, the Harvard psychologist, has done some
Speaker 3: really interesting work on identical as well as other people.
Speaker 3: Identical twins separated at birth. So identical twins separated at birth. There,
Speaker 3: you know, with the Gaussian distribution of Caucasians with one hundred.
Speaker 2: Being in the mean.
Speaker 3: Heredity had and again heredity and race or different concepts.
Speaker 3: But if heredity had nothing to do with it, you
Speaker 3: would expect that if you could pluck two people off
Speaker 3: the street, their IQ would be identical. Then identical twins
Speaker 3: separate at birth, there'd be eight points but identical twins
Speaker 3: separated birth are only four points difference. So that shows
Speaker 3: you that it has something to do with that. Genetics
Speaker 3: have some and again those are not those terms are
Speaker 3: not interchangeable. But genetics has something to do with it.
Speaker 3: But again, we're not talking about it. We're not being
Speaker 3: honest about the nature of the problem. We're just not
Speaker 3: talking about it.
Speaker 2: There's a row of books behind you, all written by
Speaker 2: Thomas Soul. I love Thomas sol indeed. Yeah, and he
Speaker 2: is a prime example of how you can succeed if
Speaker 2: even though people think you fall into a lower category
Speaker 2: of whatever you're thinking of talking about. Yeah, so we should,
Speaker 2: we should.
Speaker 3: Just so you know, Thomas Soul just defines a conservative
Speaker 3: as someone who wants to conserve the society. That's why
Speaker 3: I said, this isn't a conservative point of view. I
Speaker 3: don't think wanting to conserve a culture that is stagnant
Speaker 3: for thousands of years is a good thing.
Speaker 2: And nobody. The fact that people are.
Speaker 3: Not willing to admit something that is so incredibly obvious
Speaker 3: on the face of it tells me that there's a
Speaker 3: that people are just not being honest, they're just lying,
Speaker 3: or that either that or they're just fund they're just
Speaker 3: incredibly ignorant.
Speaker 2: All right, So let's let's take a prime example in
Speaker 2: this country. And it's not it's not solo of there
Speaker 2: aren't enough married doctors. And I'm looking back behind us now,
Speaker 2: but it's a bit of history. And so you make
Speaker 2: it easier for them to get into medical school. Or
Speaker 2: if you've got one hundred applicants for medical school and
Speaker 2: you're only taking thirty, then you reload the you reload
Speaker 2: the values of the applicants. Yeah, is that wrong?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean if it's wrong in a number of
Speaker 3: it's not just wrong morally. I mean because to do that,
Speaker 3: if you only have a certain number of slots, then
Speaker 3: by definition, you're discriminating against people on the basis of
Speaker 3: their race. So that's a moral wrong. I don't believe
Speaker 3: people should be discriminated against the base of their race.
Speaker 2: But you're arguing the argument here is that there are
Speaker 2: not enough of a particular race, and you've had the
Speaker 2: problem in America recently with the Japanese.
Speaker 3: That's not an argument, that's a claim. People are making
Speaker 3: the claim that there should be more Maori physicians.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, so okay.
Speaker 3: So if you want to do that, then the way
Speaker 3: to do that it's a longer term solution that nobody Again,
Speaker 3: I guess the emerging theme in this conversation is people
Speaker 3: just don't want to be honest about it. You have
Speaker 3: to provide everybody with a public education of the first rate.
Speaker 3: That's John Rawls's ide the American philosophers.
Speaker 2: But then you've got to make them go to go
Speaker 2: to school and get the education that you're providing.
Speaker 3: So if you wanted Jerry rig the outcome and say
Speaker 3: well X number of people have to be Maori, then
Speaker 3: the problem is that nobody is going to trust a
Speaker 3: Maori physician because they're going to think they're all affirmative
Speaker 3: action in and that if there are some wonderful Malori
Speaker 3: physicians in the same way that there are some you know,
Speaker 3: the best physicians, it's just taken as what people it's
Speaker 3: just normative in the UK are people from India, but
Speaker 3: they don't have asterisks over their heads.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So if you do that, not only do you undermine
Speaker 3: the meritocracy, not only is it racist, not only is
Speaker 3: it unfair to those people. Not only are you not
Speaker 3: going to improve patient outcomes, but you're going to achieve
Speaker 3: exactly the opposite.
Speaker 2: Of what you wanted to achieve.
Speaker 3: People just aren't going to trust Mallory physicians, and why
Speaker 3: should they because they didn't earn the position.
Speaker 2: Well, the quote is something along the lines of give
Speaker 2: them time and they learn. Great.
Speaker 3: That doesn't mean that you need to It doesn't mean
Speaker 3: that you need to throw away an entire system of
Speaker 3: the things that you know what works. So that's the
Speaker 3: other thing we're not being honest about. If you place
Speaker 3: people in positions, assuming that there's some kind of a
Speaker 3: competence hierarchy, if you place people in positions and I'm
Speaker 3: not talking about like you know, writing, creative or something.
Speaker 3: I'm talking about something that's something about which there's a
Speaker 3: right and the wrong, like boxing or jiu jitsu or
Speaker 3: something because of combats, but basketball or something. If you
Speaker 3: do that, then you will have people who are not
Speaker 3: capable of achieving those outcomes by definition, because they would
Speaker 3: have already achieved the outcome. Now you could say long term,
Speaker 3: they'll achieve the outcomes, but at any given time, like
Speaker 3: time t you're going to be having physicians and pilots
Speaker 3: and fire fighters, etc. Who are not capable of discharging
Speaker 3: the responsibilities of their office. It's just that's what it
Speaker 3: means to not hire some of the base of merit.
Speaker 3: So you're undermining your whole civil not just your society,
Speaker 3: the whole civilization. You're bowing to people, you're bowing in
Speaker 3: a Again, as much as I try not to make
Speaker 3: this to be political or ideological, it simply is you're
Speaker 3: bowing to a group of leftists, you're bowing to radicals.
Speaker 3: You're basically saying that people who have lived in a
Speaker 3: stagnant society for thousands of years, there's something virtuous about that.
Speaker 3: There's literally nothing virtuous about that, and anybody who argues
Speaker 3: that there is should be ashamed of themselves. They're a charlatan.
Speaker 3: They're just a fraud.
Speaker 2: I don't think people have the capacity to realize that.
Speaker 3: Well, if that's true, part of the reason is because
Speaker 3: you're not having honest conversations about the nature of the problem.
Speaker 3: You're just not No longer you don't have honest conversations,
Speaker 3: Like you said, you've been here for forty years, the
Speaker 3: more difficult it is going to be to solve the problem.
Speaker 2: What about rates of.
Speaker 3: Incidents of violence in these communities?
Speaker 2: What are you gonna do?
Speaker 3: Just ignore them or say that's just their way of
Speaker 3: knowing or and that's the other thing that the whole
Speaker 3: idea that you want to would want to include something
Speaker 3: in the canon of science that is simply not science
Speaker 3: because you want to be deferential to certain groups of
Speaker 3: people's collective sensibilities. That's completely insane. That's my friend Gad.
Speaker 3: Sad would call that suicidal empathy.
Speaker 2: By the way, speaking of GED's head, Yeah, what's his
Speaker 2: best word?
Speaker 3: To consumer instinct? I think was really a great book.
Speaker 3: He has another book that's coming out. I haven't read
Speaker 3: that yet. I think it's still in the process of
Speaker 3: being written. It's almost completed now. But he's an evolutionary
Speaker 3: psychologist who's done some phenomenal work with consumer behavior. I'm
Speaker 3: going to do an event with him, i think in
Speaker 3: two weeks at the University of Austin.
Speaker 2: The reason I'm interested in, Gad said, is because I
Speaker 2: bought The Parasitic Mind only just recently, great book. Phenomenal
Speaker 2: sec of books just over there are all new, and
Speaker 2: I'm just itching for the time to get into that now.
Speaker 2: He's fantastic. It's a fantastic there's my hobby over the
Speaker 2: Christmas holidays, It's my hobby all year, but I made
Speaker 2: it a bigger hobby over the Christmas holidays to buy
Speaker 2: more books the parasitic mind, How infectious ideas are killing
Speaker 2: common sense? Correct? The guy's a genius, He's great. So
Speaker 2: I'm avoiding another aspect of this discussion for the moment.
Speaker 2: I want to postpone it because it's more to be
Speaker 2: said in the vein that we're discussing. Take Austraight in
Speaker 2: Aborigines as an example. During the vacation period, I drove
Speaker 2: Carolyn and a couple of friends to a place in
Speaker 2: New South Wales where I lived for a couple of years,
Speaker 2: three years actually, when I was in six and nine,
Speaker 2: and it's basically countrified. And we drove down the street
Speaker 2: and I said, that house there was the house that
Speaker 2: was the home of the only Aboriginal in the school
Speaker 2: that I went to, primary school that I went to.
Speaker 2: And they made the exceptions for him with his footwear
Speaker 2: because his toes were already splayed and he wouldn't he
Speaker 2: refused to wear shoes, and they tried to get into
Speaker 2: wear shoes and he wouldn't wear shoes, so they made
Speaker 2: exceptions for him. But he was he was not adopted.
Speaker 2: He was taken in under some scheme. It wasn't he
Speaker 2: wasn't living there with his parents, and so he was
Speaker 2: being taught the European way, if you like, or the
Speaker 2: advanced way of living. Now in the end, he left
Speaker 2: because he didn't fit in. Now, I can't tell you,
Speaker 2: because of the age that I was exactly what went on,
Speaker 2: what happened. All I know is that one day he
Speaker 2: just didn't come back to school. So what I'm really
Speaker 2: driving at is how do you transition the knowledge from
Speaker 2: one group to another when you're confronted with people who
Speaker 2: who either don't want to know or won't let their
Speaker 2: kids know, or what a live.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean I was just
Speaker 3: in spent some time in Romania, and I was talking
Speaker 3: to people they used to be called Gypsies, they are
Speaker 3: called Roma now who.
Speaker 2: Kind of blew my mind.
Speaker 3: With some of the things that he told me. I
Speaker 3: was asking him about problems with I don't know if
Speaker 3: I can swear on your show, but right, problems with
Speaker 3: the you know, the Roma encounter, and he said, you know,
Speaker 3: one of the problems is you need to fill out
Speaker 3: on paper for applications for things like licenses, and they
Speaker 3: just cannot. And this guy was an advocate for these folks.
Speaker 3: They have tremendous difficulty writing between the lines. I mean,
Speaker 3: such strong cultural bonds of the things that they value
Speaker 3: that are completely normative in those societies, and yet we
Speaker 3: don't live by the rules that they live by. The
Speaker 3: key is not to bow or to bend your whole
Speaker 3: society to that. The key is that you have to
Speaker 3: have certain values like well, you know, people have to
Speaker 3: have shoes, people have to be dressed when they go
Speaker 3: to school. Now, if the argument is well, you've been
Speaker 3: wrong about things in the past, that's one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 3: We have been wrong about things in the past, and
Speaker 3: we've treated people of different races horribly, and that's something
Speaker 3: that we should talk about. You know, what does that entail?
Speaker 3: Does that entail?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 3: People think in entails reparations or homosexuals, Like, we have
Speaker 3: done some pretty terrible things to people in the past,
Speaker 3: But that's not a reason to throw away the norms
Speaker 3: of civil society, right. That's that the bigotry of low
Speaker 3: expectations is expecting that people who are indigenous can't put
Speaker 3: shoes on their feet. I mean, that's completely insane. Anybody
Speaker 3: can put shoes on their feet. I mean they maybe
Speaker 3: they don't have a value of putting shoes on their feet.
Speaker 3: But public schools are by definition public and their public institutions,
Speaker 3: and there are certain norms that people should adhere to
Speaker 3: when they participate in and function in civil society, and
Speaker 3: that that shouldn't be even remotely controversial, but evidently it is.
Speaker 3: You know, I just gave a talk to the University
Speaker 3: of Ucklhand. Evidently there's some people upset about my upset
Speaker 3: about me going there and speaking to the faculty. And
Speaker 3: I said, well, let's tell them to come home and
Speaker 3: they'll give I'll just talk to them the whole time.
Speaker 3: I'll give them the hopeful you disagree with me, you
Speaker 3: come to the front line. But they can't do that
Speaker 3: because they themselves are kind of epistemic victims. They themselves
Speaker 3: are trapped in their own web of deceit and lies,
Speaker 3: and they're they're really they're trying to institutionalize these ideas
Speaker 3: virtue signal that they believe these things, think that they're
Speaker 3: better people, so they don't participate in dialogue. Okay, well,
Speaker 3: then then you're contributing to the problem. You're contributing to
Speaker 3: the Again, the best words admit of a miseration. You're
Speaker 3: contributing to the miseration of the Maori. There's no reason
Speaker 3: people anybody can put shoes on their feet. And if
Speaker 3: the kid legitimately can't afford shoes, I guess this is
Speaker 3: my leftist impulse for economics, then then the school should
Speaker 3: buy them shoes. If a kid can't afford healthcare, I mean,
Speaker 3: I guess I'm a leftist in that sense too. I
Speaker 3: think that anybody up to the age of eighteen to
Speaker 3: twenty one should be afforded public health care.
Speaker 2: What's your angle on school lunches.
Speaker 3: Well, again, so the view that I adopt, and I
Speaker 3: strongly believe that this is a rationally derivable view, is
Speaker 3: that John Rawlsey interview. We shouldn't try to fix outcomes
Speaker 3: through affirmative action or diversity hires. We should so it's
Speaker 3: not a quality of outcome. We don't want so many
Speaker 3: physicians to our Maori. We want opportunities for people. We
Speaker 3: want a quality of opportunity. And the best way to
Speaker 3: give a quality of opportunity, for example, in school lunches
Speaker 3: is everybody should not only have public education in the
Speaker 3: first rate. But everybody should have fantastic food, they should
Speaker 3: have great vegila, and if that means that we have
Speaker 3: higher taxes.
Speaker 2: Then will so be it. But that is when you
Speaker 2: have when you.
Speaker 3: Try to do the best that you can as a
Speaker 3: society to have strong institutions to level the playing field.
Speaker 3: And then if you don't have Maori doctors, you don't
Speaker 3: have them. But you don't try to just make more
Speaker 3: Maori doctors by admitting then people who aren't qualified. You
Speaker 3: try to give young people a quality of opportunities so
Speaker 3: they can rise and achieve in the society and then
Speaker 3: let the chips fall where they may.
Speaker 2: How do you break the custom hold on groups of
Speaker 2: people growing up with and being can I say brainwashed
Speaker 2: with customing habits? Well, we're all brainwashed and indoctrinated with
Speaker 2: with you know, you're you're talking about escaping escaping the
Speaker 2: thousand years true, and if you're going to have them
Speaker 2: as part of your initial education first seven years stuff,
Speaker 2: then how do they break out of that?
Speaker 3: I said, very it's a very complicated question. The number
Speaker 3: one thing is that you don't have people And again
Speaker 3: I'm trying to not make this political or ideological but
Speaker 3: it just simply is. And I'll criticize the right in
Speaker 3: a minute. You don't have people on the left saying, oh,
Speaker 3: you know, they're not good enough, we need to lower
Speaker 3: the standards. You don't have people who patronize them on
Speaker 3: the left. You don't have people who make exceptions or excuses.
Speaker 3: You treat everybody fairly. I guess on the right you
Speaker 3: see a kind of I think the right, at least
Speaker 3: I can't speak to this country, but the right in
Speaker 3: America has been a catastrophic failure on that. They're just
Speaker 3: expecting that people who come from you know, this isn't
Speaker 3: only racial people who come from poor socioeconomic backgrounds, broken homes,
Speaker 3: et cetera. They're expecting them to just achieve. In Detroit,
Speaker 3: certain school systems in Detroit, people have to bring in
Speaker 3: their own toilet paper. That's a public disgrace, right, yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a disgrace. It's as can tell you a crazy
Speaker 3: story about my kids school. You met my son who
Speaker 3: they closed all the men's rooms in the schools, so
Speaker 3: they had to go to someplace else when they wanted
Speaker 3: to use the restroom, the toilets.
Speaker 2: But I think the right has been.
Speaker 3: A failure, and they've not funded or gave adequate funding
Speaker 3: to the things they should have. And as a consequence
Speaker 3: for that, we get a bunch of truly, truly crazy
Speaker 3: people on the left advocating completely insane ideas, and that
Speaker 3: has That was a spell that was cast over the
Speaker 3: whole society. That only now was Trump is at being loosened.
Speaker 3: The diversity, equity, inclusion, the well, anything that falls under
Speaker 3: that umbrella.
Speaker 2: You don't think you're racing too well the finish line
Speaker 2: too early.
Speaker 3: No, I think these people, I think the average American
Speaker 3: is sick of it. But I do think that the bureaucrats,
Speaker 3: the apparatuic chicks are still in the institutions. They're still
Speaker 3: in the educational institutions. They're still in colleges of education
Speaker 3: and teacher training programs. And it's is going to take
Speaker 3: a long time to finally extirpate the last vestiges of
Speaker 3: the derangement syndrome that's overtaken us. It's going to take
Speaker 3: a while, but Trump has. I mean, if you've seen
Speaker 3: the videos of like Trump going or random places like
Speaker 3: La casinos, I'm not La. Yeah, people are cheering him,
Speaker 3: et cetera. Like I think he has right now, he
Speaker 3: has he certainly has the mandate by votes. But you know,
Speaker 3: you know, and that's the other thing. A lot of
Speaker 3: these people are on the run. They know he's coming
Speaker 3: for them, they know he's and they should be terrified
Speaker 3: because they've thrown the whole society in assesspool for fifteen
Speaker 3: at least fifteen years, probably twenty.
Speaker 2: Where would you start with accountability for that?
Speaker 3: It's hard because the people when you've changed the raison
Speaker 3: detra of the institutions, when you've you've changed the mission
Speaker 3: of the institutions, they these folks believe that they're accountable
Speaker 3: to you know, you mentioned Gad said pretty much exogenous values.
Speaker 3: You know, these are values that have paresthetized liberalism. I
Speaker 3: wrote about that in my first book in twenty thirteen.
Speaker 3: These are not values that are endemic to liberalism, you know,
Speaker 3: the idea that.
Speaker 2: It By and large, they b.
Speaker 3: They bartered class for race and gender, and so they're
Speaker 3: obsessed with anything that has an identity level salience because
Speaker 3: completely obsessed by it, and so they're willing to do
Speaker 3: literally crazy things like completely destroy institutions, destroy the family,
Speaker 3: like truly crazy things.
Speaker 2: And what makes them what drives them to do that.
Speaker 2: I mean, why do they do it, Why did they
Speaker 2: do it? And why do they get the idea in
Speaker 2: the first place? Then what drives them to try and
Speaker 2: fulfill it? Are they aware of the damage they're doing.
Speaker 3: No, they want to do the damage because they think
Speaker 3: that the society itself is racist, patriarchal, homophobic, ableists.
Speaker 2: Have you heard any arguments that count of that that
Speaker 2: make you think, well, maybe they run.
Speaker 3: Well, no, because they don't talk to you. They don't
Speaker 3: engage in conversation, because conversation is as Aubrey Lord said,
Speaker 3: the Master's tools cannot disable to dismantle the Master's house. Conversation, dialogue, dialectic,
Speaker 3: all of those things at the root of the problem.
Speaker 2: That's why.
Speaker 3: One of the reasons they don't talk to you, that's
Speaker 3: one of the reasons they so. My writing partner, my
Speaker 3: primary writing partner, James Lindsay, is coming to New Zealand,
Speaker 3: to Auckland and around New Zealand next month. And I
Speaker 3: told Jonathan from the Free Speech Union that they brought
Speaker 3: me down here on tour. I'm like, listen, he should
Speaker 3: not be given any talks. I'll take exactly what he
Speaker 3: should be doing. He should be debating people, and that's
Speaker 3: what you should do every single day, seven days a week.
Speaker 3: I think he's here for ten days or something. He
Speaker 3: should just debate people, and you call him out, name
Speaker 3: and shame him. I go after every single one of
Speaker 3: these people, like the New Zealand Herald. I'd target every
Speaker 3: single one of them, these far left maniacs who have
Speaker 3: actively just tried to destroy the civilization, and I would
Speaker 3: call him out. I would name and shame them, and
Speaker 3: I would say, you want to play by the you
Speaker 3: want to see at the adulta. You come and you
Speaker 3: have a debate. We've brought our guy, let's go. They
Speaker 3: won't do it. They won't do it because they're cowards,
Speaker 3: and they know at some level that what they say
Speaker 3: is not sustainable, it's not rationally drivable. It's conspicuously ideological.
Speaker 3: And these people are not only intellectual midwies, but complete
Speaker 3: cowards because if they weren't, but prove me wrong, prove
Speaker 3: me wrong, great, prove me wrong. Have them come and debate. Jim,
Speaker 3: you're not a coward. You think your ideas are rationally drivable.
Speaker 3: You're not an idealogue. Great James Lindsay will be here
Speaker 3: in March, we're going to set up debates.
Speaker 2: Okay, here's I think this is a fair question. Sometimes
Speaker 2: I hate being fair. You've got somebody who's coming who's
Speaker 2: an expert, knowledge, speaking, power, approach everything. Right.
Speaker 3: Well, he's a content knowledge expert.
Speaker 2: So he's he's top of top of his grade, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I mean he's my writing partner, he's a
Speaker 3: friend of mine, and I think so, okay, that's my opinion.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, so it's not everybody that can that can
Speaker 2: argue successfully what they might think. Okay, so you're saying
Speaker 2: that they should come along and be destroyed.
Speaker 3: I'm saying that, Well, then maybe there's a reason to
Speaker 3: reconsider what you believe. Maybe there's a reason to that's
Speaker 3: a reason to be more.
Speaker 2: Humble because you can you can have an opinion about something. Yeah,
Speaker 2: believe believe something, but lack the ability to express that
Speaker 2: appropriately in a verbal battle.
Speaker 3: But belief is not binary. It's not on off, belief takes.
Speaker 3: Belief is on like a Likert scale, strongly agree, agree,
Speaker 3: Like that's just not how belief operates. But okay, we'll
Speaker 3: give them ten guys. I'll put Jim against ten guys
Speaker 3: from the New Zealand Herald. I'll call out the whole
Speaker 3: New Zealand harold all of them, the editors and the staff,
Speaker 3: all of them.
Speaker 2: You any need to, and I can provide you with names. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well give it. Okay, So there's something people in New
Speaker 2: Zealand don't do. Name them. Go ahead, name them. I'll
Speaker 2: name them. I'll tweet them out.
Speaker 3: I'll personally challenge them to debate James lindsay, are they
Speaker 3: left as maniacs? Are they identitarian lunatics? They're perfect. I
Speaker 3: want them to feel what it's like for the damage
Speaker 3: that they have caused, for the madness that they have
Speaker 3: inflicted on society. Now I can't speak to these people
Speaker 3: as individuals, but I can say that their ilk and
Speaker 3: the legacy media, and the lies and the corruption they
Speaker 3: have spread, and the fact that they've used their platform,
Speaker 3: you know x formally Twitter has made the legacy media
Speaker 3: irrelevant to a certain extent. But if you want to
Speaker 3: make the claim that, okay, well some people can't defend
Speaker 3: what they believe, then my response to you is maybe
Speaker 3: they shouldn't believe it.
Speaker 2: I'm an atheist.
Speaker 3: I could put out a tweet or something tomorrow saying
Speaker 3: I'm leaving Auckland in a week. I would like to
Speaker 3: debate Christians. I would like to challenge Christians. I literally
Speaker 3: I could do that round. I have a one hundred Christians
Speaker 3: lining up to debate me. I guarantee you, I can
Speaker 3: tell you with total confidence that's true. The apologists would
Speaker 3: come out of the woodwork. You cannot do that with
Speaker 3: the identitarian left. I mean, look, the New Zealand Herald
Speaker 3: is a discretion race. It's just a disgrace. It's an
Speaker 3: it's it's filled with ideologues. It's like the Guardian. The
Speaker 3: Guardian is is just a an organ of the Democratic
Speaker 3: Party of Labor. I mean that's you have to call
Speaker 3: these people out. You can't push, you can't push your
Speaker 3: foot around. You just have to call them out.
Speaker 2: You do realize there is a there's another media athletic
Speaker 2: that's worth.
Speaker 3: Which one stuff. Well, let's let's get them to debate too.
Speaker 3: Let's get them with James Lindsay.
Speaker 2: They want debate, they want, they want, they want print
Speaker 2: you later, they want they won't give you the space.
Speaker 3: Okay, then you know what would make make a rational
Speaker 3: person respect them? If they say, listen, you know we're
Speaker 3: not going to debate because we're ideologues. We have no
Speaker 3: reason to believe what we're going to we believe other
Speaker 3: than it make it gives us status that we jockey
Speaker 3: for in our own communities. If you said that, if
Speaker 3: they came out and said that, okay, we're conspicuous ideologues,
Speaker 3: there's really no reason to believe it. We just want
Speaker 3: to gain, we want a virtue signal. Okay, great, that's
Speaker 3: then they're honest. So they're also dishonest because they don't
Speaker 3: say that.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't.
Speaker 3: So people in New Zealand are really nice, they're really pleasant,
Speaker 3: they're just but this is a cultural war. Like you
Speaker 3: have to get over that, Like you have to call
Speaker 3: these people out. They're attempting to brainwash citizens and they're
Speaker 3: not willing to they're not willing to defend their ideas
Speaker 3: in a public venue. A shame on you.
Speaker 2: Now, what kicked this off was my question to you
Speaker 2: about who was most who would you hold most responsible? Yeah,
Speaker 2: legacy media exactly. That was the answer that I would
Speaker 2: have given your legacy media. And well I wouldn't have
Speaker 2: even called it legacy media. But you know, because there's
Speaker 2: the other sorts of media that's just as bad. Maybe.
Speaker 2: I mean I heard a little of an American commentator
Speaker 2: on the radio this morning who was as usual because
Speaker 2: right from the very get go, when Trump came down
Speaker 2: the escalator, this guy I headed in for him, sure,
Speaker 2: and and he rips him at every opportunity he can get.
Speaker 2: And this morning he was he was picking up, he
Speaker 2: was picking up points of what Trump's done in this
Speaker 2: in this first period, and well either faking it or
Speaker 2: lying about what the what the real story was. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm used to it, and therefore it usually
Speaker 2: saves me the trouble of sweating over it because I
Speaker 2: don't listen. This morning, I caught it accidentally.
Speaker 3: All right, listen, I want to I want to linger
Speaker 3: on this because I think this is really important. Let's
Speaker 3: go back to what you just said. Okay, So these
Speaker 3: people they're not expert debaters or they have no they're
Speaker 3: not used to speaking in front of the public. Great, okay, great,
Speaker 3: no problem. I have zero problem with that. Why don't
Speaker 3: you find four or five academics. Why don't you find
Speaker 3: people who move it fairly high? I mean, there's a
Speaker 3: country of five million people. Find people fairly high in
Speaker 3: the public space and say these people were going to
Speaker 3: host a debate in New Zealand. Herold is going to
Speaker 3: host the debate James lindsay versus our experts, like or
Speaker 3: they don't even have to say our experts. We're gonna
Speaker 3: invite and I guarantee he'll show, he'll come. Well, why
Speaker 3: don't they do that? They can make money from it.
Speaker 3: They'll sell tickets, they can monetize it on YouTube. They
Speaker 3: probably make ten grand easy.
Speaker 2: You probably feel this. So they don't do it, not.
Speaker 3: Because they can't find people, but because they know their
Speaker 3: ideas are bankrupt.
Speaker 2: They just know they're not true.
Speaker 3: Look, if you if you got somebody here.
Speaker 2: Look, they don't know that I can agree with you.
Speaker 2: They don't know. They don't know that it's not true.
Speaker 3: Look look, look, let's say that I had somebody coming
Speaker 3: here who was an expert in I don't know, electromagnetism
Speaker 3: or you know, radioactivity or something, and then I got
Speaker 3: a bunch of other people who are like, well, you
Speaker 3: know what. Or I have someone here who doesn't believe
Speaker 3: there's any such thing as electromagnetism. And let's say he
Speaker 3: has a massive political plat, a massive platform across social media.
Speaker 3: You have no problem finding people to do it. You know,
Speaker 3: there are a bunch of people who actually believe, like
Speaker 3: Mark Sergeant, that the Earth is flat. They literally believe
Speaker 3: that the Earth is flat. Mark Sergeant. I had him
Speaker 3: come in for a guest lecture in my class once.
Speaker 3: It was fascinating, like he actually believes the Earth is flat.
Speaker 3: But my point to you is, if you're not willing
Speaker 3: to defend your ideas publicly, if you're not willing to
Speaker 3: be more humble about what you claim to believe, then
Speaker 3: at the very least you should be able to present
Speaker 3: experts for people. When somebody comes to the country and
Speaker 3: you don't have to pay him, so there's not a
Speaker 3: financial argument there, so that people can hear the argument
Speaker 3: and decide for themselves.
Speaker 2: So you should.
Speaker 3: Your goal is not to indoctrinate people ideologically. Your goal
Speaker 3: is to present the news and have people made decisions
Speaker 3: for themselves. You're laughing.
Speaker 2: I'm laughing silently, and it's killing me.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I mean, I feel really strongly about this because
Speaker 3: because I think it's a tremendous problem that's overtaken the West.
Speaker 3: The ideological capture of our institutions is a tremendous problem,
Speaker 3: and That's why I think the move that we need
Speaker 3: to make now or in New Zealand is we have
Speaker 3: to call out these people. We have to name names,
Speaker 3: we have to call it specific people for what they're doing,
Speaker 3: for the damage they're doing to society. The trans thing
Speaker 3: is another thing. That's another form of damage that they're
Speaker 3: doing to children. I mean, the damage that these people
Speaker 3: are doing is more or less endless.
Speaker 2: Well we go on with that. There's two words that
Speaker 2: stress strung together. Say it all. Now. I had a
Speaker 2: guy once tell me there is no such thing as
Speaker 2: common sense.
Speaker 3: Well, I would have said to him, well, first I
Speaker 3: would have asked him to defy it, but I would have
Speaker 3: said to that if that's not the case, then why
Speaker 3: don't more people die from just wandering out into the
Speaker 3: middle of the street.
Speaker 2: I'll just write that down. I mean, to have somebody
Speaker 2: say that to you in all sincerity, yeah, just leaves you.
Speaker 2: It leaves you speechless.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, I mean I The first thing that I
Speaker 3: thought of was just to think of cross cultural examples
Speaker 3: where people had common sense, like putting her hand on
Speaker 3: a stove, like if it really wasn't true, then you'd
Speaker 3: have the number of people who would be randomly, or
Speaker 3: who would not randomly, who would be injured from things
Speaker 3: that you would think common sense would be a prophylactic against,
Speaker 3: would be just in order. In fact, it would almost
Speaker 3: be infinite if there were those things, as common sense,
Speaker 3: I'd open that door and walk off the balcony. Right,
Speaker 3: So I just don't. I mean, that just seems to me,
Speaker 3: on the face of it to be false.
Speaker 2: I'm just thinking of another example. Yeah, and it involves
Speaker 2: the corporal punishment. Okay, so your kids sticking a knife
Speaker 2: into the into the light socket, or he's about to
Speaker 2: put his hand on the on the stove for the
Speaker 2: second time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, usually it only takes once.
Speaker 2: But okay, yeah, but he didn't get there, I said,
Speaker 2: going to put his hand on okay for the second time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you've already warned him off. Yeah, it's a little four
Speaker 2: year old or whatever. Yeah. What do you do on
Speaker 2: the second occasion when he's being disobedient and about to
Speaker 2: burn himself? Well, I'm gonna say, wipe out his hand forever? Maybe? Okay,
Speaker 2: Well those are different.
Speaker 3: If the stove is just hot and he's gonna burn
Speaker 3: his hand, you let him burn his hand. But if
Speaker 3: the stove is red hot, you do not let him
Speaker 3: put his hand.
Speaker 2: On the stove. Is it not appropriate to take the
Speaker 2: first example? Yeah, and deal with it then, so that
Speaker 2: the second example doesn't have to be played out only if.
Speaker 3: He knows there's this reason that it's not being imposed
Speaker 3: on him externally. If he knows that, once he understands
Speaker 3: the reason for why he shouldn't or she shouldn't put
Speaker 3: her hand on the stove, and then that's just a
Speaker 3: trial and error thing. Haven't touched a hot stove. I mean,
Speaker 3: I have no problem with I used to do in
Speaker 3: my kids when they did stupid shit.
Speaker 2: Did you punish your kids physically? No? Never?
Speaker 3: Never, never ever?
Speaker 2: Why?
Speaker 3: I guess a certain extent I might have. I guess
Speaker 3: got lucky with great kids. But I don't really believe
Speaker 3: in corporal punishment. I think that there are other ways.
Speaker 2: That's the point that I'm that I'm arguing with. We
Speaker 2: we had a corporal punishment band, Yeah, put the whole country.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and in schools or for parents hitting their kids anyway, okay, okay,
Speaker 3: anyone anyway.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so that you your kid, your kid disobeys you
Speaker 2: because he's a little monster. Yeah, and you can't literally
Speaker 2: Smakey's backside.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the same Denmark. Other countries, you know they have.
Speaker 3: So if you're asking me what I think about that,
Speaker 3: I don't really know. I think that's the kind of
Speaker 3: thing that seems like a moral question, but it's really
Speaker 3: an empirical question.
Speaker 2: It's like, what is that?
Speaker 3: You know, we have these moral sensibilities about it, but
Speaker 3: I think it's really and there are so many variables
Speaker 3: it's hard to tease out. But I guess you'd have
Speaker 3: to just look at the data for how effective is it.
Speaker 3: I will say that if my mentor told me an
Speaker 3: interesting story. He never raised his voice at his kids,
Speaker 3: or certainly never hit them. And then one day his
Speaker 3: son wanted to get a tattoo and he slammed his
Speaker 3: foot in his fists on the table and he screamed no,
Speaker 3: and his son was freaked out. And he told me that,
Speaker 3: So this is fucking If you don't mind, I'll just
Speaker 3: go down this rabbit hole for a second. He told
Speaker 3: me this super interesting story about his neighbors. You know,
Speaker 3: the guy is always yelling in his kid, your shit,
Speaker 3: your life is worthless.
Speaker 2: You're never gonna mount to anything.
Speaker 3: And then you know, if a kid left his bike.
Speaker 3: In the car, he'd drive over his bike. The problem
Speaker 3: with that is that you well, there are many prompts
Speaker 3: that but among those is that you become inured to
Speaker 3: a censor, you become immune. He told me this story,
Speaker 3: this is if you give me and it indulge me
Speaker 3: for like a minute, it's a great story. So I
Speaker 3: think it is of chickens. So if you have chickens
Speaker 3: in a pen, there's a pecking order of the chickens.
Speaker 3: So Chicken one will pack all the chickens. Chicken two
Speaker 3: will get pecked by chicken one, but will not be
Speaker 3: packed by the other chickens. Chicken three will get pecked
Speaker 3: by one and two, and we'll pack the others. And
Speaker 3: he was a psychologist, and they tried to reverse the
Speaker 3: pecking order of the chickens to make chicken one chicken
Speaker 3: seven and chicken seven chicken one. And they did that
Speaker 3: by putting an electrical collar around the chicken's neck and
Speaker 3: giving them a zap, so whenever they like, can't see
Speaker 3: it her, but whenever they went down to pack another chicken,
Speaker 3: they'd zap it. So now my question to you is
Speaker 3: was it easier to make chicken one chicken seven or
Speaker 3: chicken seven chicken one. Yeah, it's a hard it's a
Speaker 3: hard question. How long have I got Yeah, it's a
Speaker 3: hard question. Yeah, I'll go for the last one. It's
Speaker 3: easier to make chicken seven chicken one.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So no, it's easier to make chicken one chicken seven
Speaker 3: because when chicken one doesn't get packed, one single jolt
Speaker 3: makes some chicken seven. So there's a profound lesson there
Speaker 3: in you know, recidivism, how we call programming, what program
Speaker 3: we give prisoners for, how we punish kids in school.
Speaker 3: If you're told your life is shit and you're never
Speaker 3: going to mount to anything by your father, then when
Speaker 3: you get to schools, you need increasingly harsh disciplinary punishments.
Speaker 3: But that's why we know, I mean, the data is
Speaker 3: pretty overwhelming that it doesn't work. You know, those Scared
Speaker 3: Straight programs that we had when I was growing up,
Speaker 3: when they had these guys come in and they who
Speaker 3: were in prison and there like these big tattoo muscle guys.
Speaker 3: The outcomes are pretty clear on that those didn't work.
Speaker 3: And among the reasons that harsh punishment doesn't work is
Speaker 3: because you're talking about people who are like chicken. You know, four, five,
Speaker 3: and six the most minor punishment. That's why the criminal
Speaker 3: justice system is in a sense backward. We should be
Speaker 3: punishing people most severely for their first defense.
Speaker 2: Well, i've realized that I'm What I meant to say
Speaker 2: when I opened my mouth was it's easy to make
Speaker 2: one number seven.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, yeah, it's easier to make one seven.
Speaker 2: That's what it takes. One jolt, and so here's here's
Speaker 2: another one. Here's another way to think about it.
Speaker 3: My mentor was also telling me this story about a
Speaker 3: guy who kept punching himself in the head. He was
Speaker 3: in a mental institution, and they tried everything and they
Speaker 3: could not make this guy stop punching himself in the head.
Speaker 3: So what they did was they attached electrodes to his
Speaker 3: arms and when he went up to punch himself in
Speaker 3: the head. Yeah, it's a behaviorism. It's the same thing.
Speaker 3: And it took only two jolts for this guy to
Speaker 3: never punch himself in the head again. Now I'm going
Speaker 3: somewhere with this story because it gets back to an
Speaker 3: earlier question that you asked me. So, I don't know
Speaker 3: if your listeners will know what a VCR is.
Speaker 2: You know, yea.
Speaker 3: So he had that recorded on a VCR and he
Speaker 3: sent that. You know, those tapes used to get you know,
Speaker 3: messed up. When you played him enough, the tapes would
Speaker 3: kind So he sent that to the IT department and
Speaker 3: he told them to fix it, and it came back.
Speaker 3: They cut out the part where they zapp the guy.
Speaker 3: Now why did they cut out the part when they
Speaker 3: zapped the guy because it was against the ethics the
Speaker 3: ethics board, it said, it's showing the harmful exploitation of
Speaker 3: you know, people who are wards of the state. So
Speaker 3: is a consequence for that that critical piece of human
Speaker 3: knowledge that can be used to help people is now
Speaker 3: forever lost from the canon of knowledge. It's been erased.
Speaker 3: It's been erased. So that's an example. Because you asked me,
Speaker 3: how do we get in this situation, whether it's IQ
Speaker 3: or what have you. We got in the situation because
Speaker 3: we have norms that we've imposed upon, systems that have
Speaker 3: made the method of error correction less transparent and impossible to understand.
Speaker 3: That's how we're in this situation. It started with the
Speaker 3: French postmodernist Drria Leotard Fuco. It metastasized throughout our academic systems,
Speaker 3: and then we're in this nightmare situation that we're in
Speaker 3: now with these lunatics who have controlling institutions. I mean,
Speaker 3: these people are total lunatics.
Speaker 2: Is it now appropriate to draw on the most recent
Speaker 2: experience of American politics one thousand percent? Because you and
Speaker 2: I had a discussion a couple of days ago with
Speaker 2: regard to what was happening. I asked you how you
Speaker 2: reacted to the well to the election result, and what
Speaker 2: happened since January twenty. What was your response.
Speaker 3: I remember my exact response, but I will say Harris
Speaker 3: was an abomination.
Speaker 2: She's the worst.
Speaker 3: Possible person one could have picked. She would have been
Speaker 3: not only more of the same, but more racism, guys
Speaker 3: as anti racism, more anti meritic, detocracy, more division, more strife,
Speaker 3: more enmity, more illegals. I mean, truly the worst possible candidate.
Speaker 3: We could have had, more legacy, media and more. I mean,
Speaker 3: I could go on and on. I am incredibly relieved
Speaker 3: with seeing, among those things that are in my domain
Speaker 3: of expertise in purview, I am incredibly relieved to see
Speaker 3: some of the things Donald Trump has done. And to
Speaker 3: be clear, I think he is a deeply he was
Speaker 3: a deeply deeply flawed candidate.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry who Trump, It was a deeply flawed candidate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but I think he's done a phenomenal job. He
Speaker 3: wasn't my first vivak Ramaswami I thought would have like
Speaker 3: he's sharp. But I think given the context, I think
Speaker 3: Trump is the man to do what he's doing. I mean,
Speaker 3: we need that in our country.
Speaker 2: That'd be quite just something. Sure why Activist politicians are
Speaker 2: up in arms this week after Trump signed orders effectively
Speaker 2: shutting down all DEI related officers within the government, seeing
Speaker 2: employees on paid leaf pending inevitable pink slips. The usual suspects,
Speaker 2: including House Minority Reader leader Hakim Jeffries and the Democrat
Speaker 2: rip ilhan Omer, held a press conference to voice their
Speaker 2: outrage over the fast paced elimination of DEI. And that's
Speaker 2: just the start. Good can't come soon enough. Democrats threaten
Speaker 2: righteous litigation over Trump's shutdown of the EI officers. That's
Speaker 2: the that's the headline. What chance have they got? Oh?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, I probably not, probably not much. I think
Speaker 3: Americans are sick of it. I probably not much, but
Speaker 3: we'll see. Maybe the wage and effective campaign. I would
Speaker 3: say it's small. I mean, look, it's discriminated against people
Speaker 3: on the basis of their race, like Asian Americans are
Speaker 3: discriminated against in the base of the race for admissions
Speaker 3: to elite institutions.
Speaker 2: We know that.
Speaker 3: So you're but don't don't lie about what you're doing.
Speaker 3: Just say what you're doing. We don't want Asians, we
Speaker 3: hate Jews. Just say it.
Speaker 2: What would happen if they did so?
Speaker 3: Well, I wouldn't respect your beliefs, but I'd certainly respect
Speaker 3: them more. Well, thanks for being honest, you know when
Speaker 3: I used to say when you know, I had a
Speaker 3: debate with the Islamic scholar once and I couldn't get
Speaker 3: him to say that the punishment for apostases should be death.
Speaker 3: Finally he said it. It's a little I can tell
Speaker 3: you how I got him say it, but I at
Speaker 3: least respected him more for saying I would have respected
Speaker 3: him more if he set it up front. But don't,
Speaker 3: just don't deceive yourself. These people hate Jews and they
Speaker 3: hate Asians, and they should just say it, we hate
Speaker 3: Jews and we hate Asians. Okay, Well, then now we
Speaker 3: know who we're dealing with. Right now, now, no one's
Speaker 3: lying to each other. And we know you hate Jews
Speaker 3: and we know you hate Asians, so great, all.
Speaker 2: Right, Now, there are some sources, one in particular that
Speaker 2: I'm thinking of, some sources that will tell you that
Speaker 2: straight not because they believe it, because they know that
Speaker 2: that's what you just said is correct. And I'm talking
Speaker 2: about public figures. But there are very few of them
Speaker 2: who will simply call a spade of spade and call
Speaker 2: them out when when it's uh, when it's appropriate. So
Speaker 2: is that the media's fault.
Speaker 3: I think it's a combination of things. It's you know,
Speaker 3: it's it's it's a Calvin Trilling said that things are
Speaker 3: really attributable to a single cause.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I mean I've seen people holding on college campuses pro
Speaker 3: Hamas science. I mean Hamas is a terrorist organization. I've
Speaker 3: you know, at the Sydney Opera House there were cantidates.
Speaker 3: They're chanting gas the Jews.
Speaker 2: No no, no, no, no, no no no no no no.
Speaker 2: Are you're saying that? I think it was wigs the Jews.
Speaker 3: Oh no, they lied about it, right, they lied about it.
Speaker 3: But but but but that's the other thing that that
Speaker 3: but that makes my point, they're lying about it.
Speaker 2: They're just lying about it. So there are people say,
Speaker 2: so are the politicians, Well yeah, they're lying about it,
Speaker 2: and the police, well they're also lying about it.
Speaker 3: I'm saying you should if you hate Jews, just say
Speaker 3: I hate Jews if you will, like, there's no reason
Speaker 3: to lie about it.
Speaker 2: I think, I think in your part of the world
Speaker 2: there are plenty of people who are prepare to say that.
Speaker 3: Well yeah, well yeah, it doesn't mean I in fact,
Speaker 3: I detest those views. I think that they're an abomination.
Speaker 3: But at least they're being honest with you. You know,
Speaker 3: like with these people with the DEI, people with the
Speaker 3: radical identitarian leftists, they're they're they're even worse than that
Speaker 3: because that they're operating under a system, you know. I mean,
Speaker 3: did you see the whole Claudine Gay thing when she
Speaker 3: went before Congress. Remind me it's a it was so
Speaker 3: I mean, it was the really the beginning of the
Speaker 3: end of DEI.
Speaker 2: She was which which university?
Speaker 3: She's Harvard, She's the serial plasirest at Harvard. Yeah, and so,
Speaker 3: you know, the slightest thing is a microaggression if you say,
Speaker 3: you know, where are you from?
Speaker 2: What have you.
Speaker 3: But chanting death to the Jews is fine? Are you
Speaker 3: kidding me? Like? Are you kidding me? But that's who
Speaker 3: the type of people you're dealing with, and so let's
Speaker 3: I just think we need to be honest about who
Speaker 3: we're dealing with.
Speaker 2: Is is the transition, which is of course still underway,
Speaker 2: will be underway for quite some Timere's the transition likely
Speaker 2: to hold? Do you think? And I'm talking not just
Speaker 2: not just not just for the next couple of years,
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean, is it going to roll on
Speaker 2: because finally people have been working up.
Speaker 3: It's a great question, I with a potentially unintended pun
Speaker 3: of waking up. I think if you look at intellectual history,
Speaker 3: every generation is subject to a zeitgeist or a value.
Speaker 3: You know, in Homer's time it was strength, Aristotle's time
Speaker 3: was the Athenian gentleman. Voltaire's time it was humor. Every
Speaker 3: every society has some every kind of epica, every age
Speaker 3: has some value. Our society has been beset recently by
Speaker 3: multiple simultaneous mass delusions, and so it's very difficult to predict,
Speaker 3: to predict the next mass illusion, but suffice it to
Speaker 3: say it's coming. I don't I have some suspicions about
Speaker 3: what it is. That's kind of but who knows what
Speaker 3: it would be. But you can only addres us one
Speaker 3: mass illusion is at a time. It's very difficult to
Speaker 3: have a kind of universal prophylactic against people becoming delusional.
Speaker 3: It's almost impossible. That's why you need strong institutions. That's
Speaker 3: why you need corrective mechanisms. Capitalism, democracy, free speech. That's
Speaker 3: why those things are indispensable.
Speaker 2: Let's deal with free speech. Okay, just for a moment. Sure,
Speaker 2: how far can we cope with free speech being free
Speaker 2: speech in its fullness?
Speaker 3: Yeah, up to the incitement of violence? And then what happens, Oh,
Speaker 3: then it's illegal. There are other things that are illegal,
Speaker 3: like slander, defamation. I mean, we have a pretty robust
Speaker 3: pedigree in the legal infrastructure for this. You know, the
Speaker 3: history of jurisprudence is, you know, when we come from
Speaker 3: broadly the same tradition, although the Americans kind of veered off.
Speaker 3: We have a pretty good infrastructure for this, and.
Speaker 2: It's worked until it becomes violent.
Speaker 3: The incitement of violence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, well so so it happens, right, there's an
Speaker 2: there's an instance, and it's patently obvious and there's a conviction,
Speaker 2: So what what what do we do? And those words
Speaker 2: that were spoken? Or ban people who are speaking those words? No,
Speaker 2: I mean you know, and when you and when you've
Speaker 2: when you've got and this I have, I have to
Speaker 2: throw this in. Sure, when you've got X now doing
Speaker 2: the job that it's doing. I've seen some pretty rough
Speaker 2: stuff on there.
Speaker 3: Sure. So here's a good rule of thumb people can
Speaker 3: think about. Ideas do not deserve dignity. People deserve dignity.
Speaker 3: And so if you want to say what should or
Speaker 3: should not if you're trying to think of a how
Speaker 3: do I know what can what cannot? What I can
Speaker 3: or cannot say? I mean, there's a general rule of
Speaker 3: just don't be a dick. But the next rule down
Speaker 3: is if it's an immutable characteristic of a person, there's
Speaker 3: no point to criticize it because they can't change it.
Speaker 3: But if it's all ideas should be subject to criticism,
Speaker 3: and those include religious ideas or atheist stick ideas as well.
Speaker 3: Anything that's an idea should be open to criticism. But
Speaker 3: any immutable property of a person like me, criticizing your age,
Speaker 3: your eye color, that's not open to criticisms. That shouldn't
Speaker 3: be open to criticism. But I'm not saying that should
Speaker 3: be illegal either.
Speaker 2: Sorry what you like, I don't care.
Speaker 3: Yeah, But but I mean the whole point of of
Speaker 3: you're trying to you're trying to offer some kind of
Speaker 3: corrective mechanism so that we can fix errors in our thinking.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: So that's one of the reasons that's Is it about
Speaker 3: cognitive liberty, yes? Is it about hearing different epistemic systems
Speaker 3: and different ideas?
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: Andrew Doyle has a great little book about this.
Speaker 2: He's the.
Speaker 3: English PhD from Oxford called Free Speech. It's very easy,
Speaker 3: very simple to read, little book. Yeah, he's Titiana McGrath
Speaker 3: and I think he's working with Rob Schneider. Now in
Speaker 3: in he was on gb News he had free Speech Nation.
Speaker 3: But anyway, he details this in his in his book.
Speaker 3: But that's one of the things that people don't talk
Speaker 3: about that I've talked about on tour here is free
Speaker 3: speech is a means of error correction. I mean, that's
Speaker 3: the other thing. To get back to the Mallory and
Speaker 3: get back to these tribal civilizations. They've just quenched that,
Speaker 3: they've quelled any kind of free speech you see that
Speaker 3: in the Islamic world like you can't. Really, that's why
Speaker 3: you need blasphemy laws. There are no blasphemy laws against
Speaker 3: electricity or gravity. You don't need them, right, you don't.
Speaker 2: You don't need them.
Speaker 3: There are corrective mechanisms there too, but you only need
Speaker 3: them if there is insufficient evidence to warrant belief in
Speaker 3: a conclusion. That's why you need blasphemy laws.
Speaker 2: There's no other reason for it. But there are no
Speaker 2: blasphemy laws against Christianity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there are no blasphemy laws against electricity either. I
Speaker 3: could go out in the street and scream all day
Speaker 3: long that electricity is a right wing conspiracy, our Martian conspiracy.
Speaker 3: We don't need laws against that.
Speaker 2: So we don't need laws against Christianity.
Speaker 3: Against criticizing anybody should be able to criticize any any
Speaker 3: religion or any thought system they want or atheists and
Speaker 3: atheists fall into that pasca too, and any idea is
Speaker 3: subject to.
Speaker 2: Criticism, all right. I mean I'm not arguing with that
Speaker 2: at all. Yes, I was just I was just intrigued.
Speaker 2: You've got you've got you've got laws against speaking about Islam, yes,
Speaker 2: but no laws against speaking about correct it's a standard.
Speaker 2: So what I'm what I'm asking, what I'm really driving at,
Speaker 2: I suppose is what you said to follow on that
Speaker 2: you you need it because or you have it because
Speaker 2: you have laws against criticizing Islam because.
Speaker 3: Well, the real I'll give you the real reason there
Speaker 3: are lies against criticizing it in the UK is because
Speaker 3: they're afred. People are afraid. That's why I they don't
Speaker 3: criticize it.
Speaker 2: Oh you mean English people.
Speaker 3: Or people people in general. I mean I never criticize
Speaker 3: it because I don't. I'm not particularly keen about having
Speaker 3: my head signed off with the butter knife. Yeah. So,
Speaker 3: I mean I would never go around burning the Quran,
Speaker 3: defecating on it.
Speaker 2: Probably ill advised, but but there's no trouble was putting across.
Speaker 3: Serrano's piss christ Yeah that's right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I.
Speaker 3: Mean that's because Christians aren't going to rise up and
Speaker 3: just start killing people. I mean, it's like the Book
Speaker 3: of Mormon, right when we're fundamentally afraid. That's why many
Speaker 3: atheists have no problem criticizing Christianity but will never criticize Islam.
Speaker 3: Part of its fear, part of it. There are other
Speaker 3: reasons for that as.
Speaker 2: Well, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're also beholden to this kind of sacredness of
Speaker 3: the brown people. Nonsense, there are no sacred people. There
Speaker 3: are no sacred ideas either. They're just ideas and people,
Speaker 3: and no one people and no ethnicity or no race
Speaker 3: has dominion over any ideas.
Speaker 2: So I think to wind this up, almost reluctantly, you've
Speaker 2: been here for two months, living here, loved it in
Speaker 2: the in the middle of Auckland. But you've done plenty
Speaker 2: of travel. You were here in twenty fifteen last Yeah,
Speaker 2: with you, we read a great time, we interviewed, and
Speaker 2: there's another part of that story. Maybe we'll get to
Speaker 2: it in a minute. The point is that we have replaced,
Speaker 2: we have replaced the government that was garbage a little
Speaker 2: every year ago, and we are making progress in the
Speaker 2: right direction. But it's not satisfactory, not if you stake
Speaker 2: it against what's going on now in your country. So
Speaker 2: from your perspective, from what you've seen two months here,
Speaker 2: a long time, what what would you say was the
Speaker 2: advantage to this country and the disadvantage of this country
Speaker 2: compared to America?
Speaker 3: Oh boy, what a question. Holy moly. I mean, there
Speaker 3: are a lot of incredible things about this country, and
Speaker 3: a lot of less than incredible things are few.
Speaker 2: It very much.
Speaker 3: Reminds me of the US and the nineties. It's safe, clean,
Speaker 3: I hope knowing people here think, oh, it's not that
Speaker 3: say it trusts me. It is compared to so to
Speaker 3: blue cities with blue governors. You know, the city where
Speaker 3: I was living was a it was a cesspool of
Speaker 3: degenerates and lunatics and homeless people. It was terribly it's
Speaker 3: truly dangerous and frightening. So it's clean, it's safe. Public
Speaker 3: transportation isn't that great here the whole. I've never heard
Speaker 3: of a major metropolitan area who's literally closed its whole,
Speaker 3: its entire trade station, dia literally train lighted.
Speaker 2: I've literally never even heard.
Speaker 3: Of such a thing. But you know, I had dinner
Speaker 3: the other day with the Minister of Justice. He just
Speaker 3: comes waltz is in, sits at the table, doesn't in
Speaker 3: a security escort, doesn't need like guys surrounding with guns.
Speaker 3: One of the first things you notice here is that
Speaker 3: the air is crisp and clean. I think I think
Speaker 3: somebody mentioned to me they're not used to seeing English
Speaker 3: signage without homeless people. It's interesting, you know, like you
Speaker 3: see a lot of birds and stores here. I still
Speaker 3: can't get used to people driving on the left side
Speaker 3: of the road. It's just like it literally cringe every
Speaker 3: time I'm it.
Speaker 2: Is the one area that I disagree with with you
Speaker 2: so far. Anyway, driving in the road, Well you're talking
Speaker 2: about driving on the right, Yeah, and that's where I belong.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, and it's better I could. I could
Speaker 3: never there's something terrifying to me. You know, I'm fifty eight.
Speaker 3: I'm just driving on one side of the road the
Speaker 3: whole my whole life. But I think that the first
Speaker 3: thing you notice, particularly coming from uh A, Buddhapest where
Speaker 3: I was, that the people in Buddhabet, like so many
Speaker 3: people smoke, which I think is completely insane. It's a
Speaker 3: truly horrific activity and obviously grossly detrimental to one's health.
Speaker 3: But people vape here, which is kind of weird. It's
Speaker 3: like a weird culture. But I'd much rather have them
Speaker 3: vaping than smoking, because when I walk by them vaping,
Speaker 3: it doesn't really bother me, but smoking's like it asphyxiates me.
Speaker 3: The climate's been been really good here. The building codes
Speaker 3: are kind of weird to me. I live in the
Speaker 3: CBD and I've been in some buildings like I don't
Speaker 3: know they I just can't. The whole idea that you know,
Speaker 3: you would push a button to exit a place is
Speaker 3: weird to me, Like, why don't you just open the door?
Speaker 3: What do you need to put a push a button for?
Speaker 3: It just seems like an extra layer of thing.
Speaker 2: Uh, you know.
Speaker 3: And the other thing is, you know the place where
Speaker 3: I'm staying in the CBD has glass doors, Like you
Speaker 3: could never do that in a lot of people just
Speaker 3: destroy the doors.
Speaker 2: Just completely about them to get out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well I don't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well the reason for that is to keep the
Speaker 2: people that you don't want in your in your bi out.
Speaker 3: But they're walking in anyway every time you open the door.
Speaker 3: It's not it's not keeping out. You're not keeping on
Speaker 3: anybody issue. How you're keeping them, How you're keeping them on?
Speaker 2: Well, because every time you open the door they walk in.
Speaker 3: Well, we just have a sensor that opens the door
Speaker 3: when you're there. What's the difference.
Speaker 2: Oh, I see what you mean. You're not you're not
Speaker 2: you're not you're not concerned about having the door locked.
Speaker 3: No, I don't think you could do that in us
Speaker 3: because people just destroy it. But I don't, I don't, No,
Speaker 3: it's just weird to me. The public restaurants here buying
Speaker 3: large are good. The buses are buying large clean, they
Speaker 3: have you know, I think they have had felt seats
Speaker 3: if I remember correctly. No, I think so. I think
Speaker 3: the bus I rode on I took. I think I
Speaker 3: can look later. I think I took a picture of it.
Speaker 3: There's not a lot of graffiti. People are very nice here.
Speaker 3: It's very uh, it's a very but you know, Kiwis
Speaker 3: are very I don't know, they're they're they're really like
Speaker 3: they have a kind of innocence about them, you know,
Speaker 3: they have a kind of like it's hard to explain.
Speaker 3: They have a kind of anti cynicism about them in
Speaker 3: a certain way in relation to other people, in relation
Speaker 3: to interpersonal interactions, I find them very easy to deal with.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's just because they treat me. They're extra nice
Speaker 3: to me because I'm a foreigner.
Speaker 2: I don't know. Could be, yeah, but most most people say,
Speaker 2: most people say when they come here that the locals,
Speaker 2: the natives, if I may, are very friendly. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But the number one thing that I like about this,
Speaker 3: beside the vistas and the view and the people are great.
Speaker 3: It's truly it's the air. The air is incredible here.
Speaker 3: Like I sleep with a seapap. I was telling you this.
Speaker 3: I sleep with a seapap and there's an air filter
Speaker 3: on that and I've only changed it once in the
Speaker 3: two months i've been here. Usually I have to change
Speaker 3: it every three weeks. It's because it gets black. I mean,
Speaker 3: even when I change it was just barely.
Speaker 2: But I don't know. I really like it here.
Speaker 3: There's not a lot of hustle and bustle, which I
Speaker 3: don't think I could live here, but I could certainly
Speaker 3: retire here.
Speaker 2: Well, from what you've seen, if you were going to
Speaker 2: live here, where would you choose?
Speaker 3: Christ Church is pretty nice. I don't think I could
Speaker 3: live in Wellington. Know that that's nice. It's super windy there.
Speaker 3: I almost got lifted off my feet.
Speaker 2: I know. Auckland might be kind of nice.
Speaker 3: There's a lot happening, a lot of restaurants is good.
Speaker 3: Jiu Jitsu in Auckland is a great jiu jitsu.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: I don't know where I choose. I could see myself.
Speaker 3: I guess retiring here. I guess you didn't ask me this,
Speaker 3: but I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you my unsolicited advice,
Speaker 3: my unsolicited, sincere advice to you is And I realized
Speaker 3: I'm gonna say this, and people are gonna roll their
Speaker 3: eyes and they're going to sink this is never gonna happen.
Speaker 2: This is like some crazy.
Speaker 3: American do not let large numbers of unskilled Muslim men
Speaker 3: into your country. That's it, that's my that's my unsolicited
Speaker 3: advice to you.
Speaker 2: Join the club.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's another thing no one's talking about, and no
Speaker 3: one's being honest about.
Speaker 2: Quite true, It's it's now, I'm not gonna you're the guest.
Speaker 2: I'm just I'm just here the guide here. I've got
Speaker 2: plenty of opportunities to say what I really think. But
Speaker 2: I but you, you're correct, And you've only got to
Speaker 2: look at Britain at the moment to see exact people.
Speaker 2: All of Western Europe we're talking about.
Speaker 3: And and and the all three of those things together
Speaker 3: unskilled Muslim men and it's not seek. Seeks have extremely
Speaker 3: low rates of crime, poverty, homelessness, et cetera. If anything,
Speaker 3: they are a lubricant to the society.
Speaker 2: My last question is you were a professor once. Yes,
Speaker 2: we know the story of you becoming a non professor.
Speaker 2: Question is you are now a philosopher, public philosopher? Any
Speaker 2: become a public philosopher.
Speaker 3: That's a really good question. I still haven't figured that out.
Speaker 2: You how do you how do you.
Speaker 3: Become a philosopher?
Speaker 2: I guess you have to.
Speaker 3: Like I go around the world and my YouTube channel
Speaker 3: Peter Bogosian bog h O s SI N, and I
Speaker 3: just interview people. I do this thing called Spectrum Street Epistemology,
Speaker 3: and we ask people how confident they are in their
Speaker 3: beliefs and if they're calibrated to the evidence. And I
Speaker 3: go to do it in multiple languages all across the world.
Speaker 3: It's very difficult to move in the public space unless
Speaker 3: you're on Twitter, you know currently X It's very you
Speaker 3: can be done, but it's hard, especially the angles here,
Speaker 3: it's hard to do. So you have social media metrics,
Speaker 3: you know. I have a university affiliation now, which helps
Speaker 3: a lot. I'm affiliated with the University of Austin. I'm
Speaker 3: a Funding Faculty advisor, so that I was a funding
Speaker 3: faculty fellow, So that helps a lot to have university affiliation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I tour around.
Speaker 3: I do debates, I give lectures, I give talks, I
Speaker 3: talk to I've talked to literally. I mean, you can
Speaker 3: watch a few thousands and thousands people about people I
Speaker 3: don't know.
Speaker 2: There are no actors on anything I do.
Speaker 3: They're just random people off the streets or people who
Speaker 3: come to my events, and I'll talk to them about anything.
Speaker 2: I'll talk to anybody about anything, and it's all I
Speaker 2: still hold that.
Speaker 3: You know, in the Gorgias, Plato says it is better
Speaker 3: to be refuted than it is to refute. That's the
Speaker 3: thing that the people at the New Zealand Herald have
Speaker 3: to get into their heads. It's not a good thing
Speaker 3: to be an ideologue. It's a good thing to change
Speaker 3: her mind in the base of evidence. It's a good
Speaker 3: thing to be honest about what you believe. It's a
Speaker 3: good thing to not deceive people about what you believe.
Speaker 3: It's a good thing to not deceive people about what
Speaker 3: you think is in the best interest of society. When
Speaker 3: you're just drank your own kool aid, I mean, this
Speaker 3: is a disgrace and people aren't calling them out. So
Speaker 3: you be a public philosopher. The other thing is you
Speaker 3: just be honest with people. I'm beholden to no one.
Speaker 3: I can say I've said in this interview exactly what
Speaker 3: I think. I'm literally beholden to no one.
Speaker 2: So how do you How do you make a living? Oh?
Speaker 2: I make a living in a bunch of ways.
Speaker 3: I have a nonprofit foundation that people donate too, and
Speaker 3: that enables me to do things for free, like to
Speaker 3: come to New Zealand. They paid for my airfare. But
Speaker 3: I don't take any money, you know, I give talks here,
Speaker 3: the economy, the economy. No, I just do things. I
Speaker 3: just do a lot of stuff for free, a lot
Speaker 3: of it.
Speaker 2: No, No, No economy on the plane.
Speaker 3: Oh, always economy always. It's you know, I'm sixteen hours
Speaker 3: or twenty one hours in this little flight. I'm like
Speaker 3: a chicken and a coop. Yeah, it's not comfortable, and
Speaker 3: I'm fifty eight, so it's not exactly great.
Speaker 2: But so yeah, so here's here's another question. Then you're
Speaker 2: fifty eight, you're sitting in this little coop seat and
Speaker 2: you're crowded around, and the tortots are dirty and yeah, everything.
Speaker 2: So one of my favorite questions is to promote age
Speaker 2: a little bit and say, well, ask so where do
Speaker 2: you want to be sitting when you're seventy eight?
Speaker 3: Funny, I just did a show with a comedy seller
Speaker 3: on this, my friend Noam. I think that there are
Speaker 3: to be in good health, and I think that there
Speaker 3: are ways to do that are that enable one to
Speaker 3: level up as a human. I can talk about those,
Speaker 3: but no one will do it, so there's no point.
Speaker 3: That's what I do. I mean extremely good shape. I
Speaker 3: just wrestled today for an hour with guys uh half
Speaker 3: literally half my age, So I think I want to
Speaker 3: be in good shape. I want to keep doing what
Speaker 3: I'm doing. I want to do work that matters. I
Speaker 3: want to have people who love me and care about me,
Speaker 3: and people I love and care about. I want to
Speaker 3: be somewhat financially secure so I don't have to worry
Speaker 3: about money. I think ultimately I want to make sure
Speaker 3: I leave the world a better place than when I entered,
Speaker 3: and I think I'm I'm doing the best that I
Speaker 3: can to do that. Now, you know, to bring my
Speaker 3: Remember once when I was a kid, I saw this
Speaker 3: movie of the Some some people were like butchering apes
Speaker 3: and he's a ghastly movie. I started with my dad
Speaker 3: and I said to my dad, man, we've got to
Speaker 3: do something about the apes. My dad turned to me
Speaker 3: in just no entertain and said, what the fuck are
Speaker 3: you going to do about the apes? You can't do
Speaker 3: a damn thing about the apes. Why don't you do
Speaker 3: something you can do something about? And I'm like, Wow, why.
Speaker 2: Don't I do so?
Speaker 3: Then then I think, well, what can I do something about?
Speaker 2: Well? I can.
Speaker 3: You know, I love working with prison inmates. I love
Speaker 3: working with gang members. So I'm working. I might come
Speaker 3: back to New Zealand, hopefully I'll work in the prisons.
Speaker 3: I love working with it's with schools with disadvantaged kids.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I'm doing this thing at Vertex Academy and we'll I'll
Speaker 3: be you know, helping It's an all black school system
Speaker 3: in New York. Taking what I'm good at, teaching people
Speaker 3: how to engage ideas and be honest with themselves and
Speaker 3: honest about their beliefs.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, where I.
Speaker 3: Want to be at seven eight is I want to
Speaker 3: keep doing work that matters.
Speaker 2: Okay, Now, now let's get to the question that I asked,
Speaker 2: Where do you want to sit on the plane when
Speaker 2: you're seventy eight? Oh?
Speaker 3: I probably won't be flying at seventy eight very much.
Speaker 3: But I mean, I just it's a gratuitous expense to
Speaker 3: spend in first class. I just wouldn't do that, even
Speaker 3: if I had the money. I don't have the money,
Speaker 3: but I wouldn't do that even if.
Speaker 2: I did a class below that. Yeah, probably that class.
Speaker 2: That's probably a good one. It's probably a good one.
Speaker 2: That's probably where finally I got the answer I wanted. Yeah,
Speaker 2: when you were here last Yeah, there was a standout
Speaker 2: of that trip. Yeah, I found out later, what was it?
Speaker 2: The best bottle of wine I ever had? That one?
Speaker 2: That's the one.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was the best bottle one I have ever had.
Speaker 2: You know that?
Speaker 3: People told me, Oh late in Smith. You know, he's
Speaker 3: New Zealand's Russel and Bob.
Speaker 2: You got to be careful of him.
Speaker 3: You got to be people telling like truly terrible things
Speaker 3: about you.
Speaker 2: And I really loved you.
Speaker 3: I got there and I had a great time. I
Speaker 3: thought you were really great into lawk with her and
Speaker 3: I had really like what are these people talking about?
Speaker 3: I have literally no idea what they're talking about.
Speaker 2: And then you gave me I think you.
Speaker 3: Kept inviting me back for segments, right and then you
Speaker 3: gave me a bottle of wine. I thought it was
Speaker 3: a nice gesture. I didn't think too much about it,
Speaker 3: and I drank it. I was completely blown wise. It's
Speaker 3: literally the best bottle of wine I ever have. I've
Speaker 3: probably told literally a thousand people about that bottle wine.
Speaker 2: That's what you That's what your pa told me when
Speaker 2: she it's true to be six months ago and said
Speaker 2: he's coming down. Do you want to? You know? And
Speaker 2: here we are, so I have for you another bottle
Speaker 2: of wine. I'm not sure it's going to measure up
Speaker 2: to the one that you had last time because because
Speaker 2: of circumstances, but I might even give you two just
Speaker 2: to make up for it. It's very kind of, very
Speaker 2: kind of you.
Speaker 3: I find you to be an honest person, and I
Speaker 3: appreciate you give me the time to think, and I
Speaker 3: appreciate the opportunity to have gotten to a little know
Speaker 3: you a little bit more with my son and having
Speaker 3: dinner with us. And I'm just very grateful.
Speaker 2: I'm glad I met your son. He's a good boy.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Appreciate that.
Speaker 2: Peter Bagotia, where do we find you?
Speaker 3: As the saying goes, I'm on XT at Peter Bagosian
Speaker 3: b O G H O S S I N. I'm
Speaker 3: on YouTube, Instagram, on pretty much every every platform. I
Speaker 3: have a podcast like everybody, and I do these street
Speaker 3: events where I go around I talk to random people
Speaker 3: I don't know, so fun stuff.
Speaker 2: Man, you are now free to go.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: I'll be tired. I'll be tired to this for the
Speaker 2: next two hours editing. Okay, well cool, well, thank you.
Speaker 2: Maybe maybe maybe before that, we'll shear something on the
Speaker 2: way out. Liverrix is an antihistamine made in Switzerland to
Speaker 2: the highest quality. Leverix relieves hay fever and skin allergies
Speaker 2: or itchy skin. It's a dual action antihistamine and has
Speaker 2: a unique nasal decongestent action. It's fast acting for fast relief,
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Speaker 2: over twenty four hours. Leverrix is a tiny tablet that
Speaker 2: unblocks the nose, deals with itchy eyes, and stops sneezing.
Speaker 2: Lebrix is an antihistamine made in Switzerland to the highest quantity.
Speaker 2: So next time you're in need of an effective antihistamine,
Speaker 2: call into the pharmacy and ask for Leverrix lv Rix
Speaker 2: Leverrix and always read the lake will take us directed
Speaker 2: and if symptoms persist, see your health professional farmer broker
Speaker 2: Auckland Layton Smith. All right, missus producer in for the
Speaker 2: mail room at number two hundred and seventy one. How
Speaker 2: are you doing good? How are you? I thought you
Speaker 2: were too hot.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty hot day. But rather have this than
Speaker 4: the pouring rain and freezing cold.
Speaker 5: Thank you?
Speaker 2: Okay, now, good morning, mister Smith. While I enjoyed the
Speaker 2: exchange with mister Jones, there was an issue that I
Speaker 2: believe encapsulates the actions of the Mary Elite and Mary Party,
Speaker 2: a concept extensively explored by historian Christopher Lash in his
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy nine work The Culture of Narcissism American Life
Speaker 2: in an age of diminishing expectations. Let's strung around a
Speaker 2: bit lately, hadn't anyway, goes on, We've witnessed the self
Speaker 2: absorbed Mary elite promoting Maori interests to the clear detriment
Speaker 2: of the rest of the country. Their actions aligned with
Speaker 2: the principles of cultural narcissism, where a group's self centeredness
Speaker 2: leads to prioritizing their interests above national well being. This
Speaker 2: approach fosters division and weakens national unity, which ironically seems
Speaker 2: to be their objective all the while they claim victim
Speaker 2: status from those oppressive colonizers. Now, while advocating for cultural
Speaker 2: identity is important, it should never come at the expense
Speaker 2: of marginalizing others. A balanced approach that respects and integrates
Speaker 2: the various cultural perspectives is essential for fostering a cohesive
Speaker 2: and inclusive society. However, the Marrie elites have shown no
Speaker 2: interest in that superb piece of thought and writing. Thank
Speaker 2: you from someone in Brisbane.
Speaker 4: Leyton Wayne says, what a start the new year of
Speaker 4: your podcast. Since the Coalition was formed, I've found Shane
Speaker 4: very interesting. When he is interviewed, he gives credit where
Speaker 4: credit is due to his coalition partners, which is unusual
Speaker 4: in New Zealand politics. Your podcast drew him out further
Speaker 4: on several issues. And most people I know just want
Speaker 4: to have a constructive debate on the treaty, but all
Speaker 4: legacy media want to do is cover protest, which just
Speaker 4: ostracizes them as the media. Soawce even more, I put
Speaker 4: TV one News on the other day for the first
Speaker 4: time in weeks and after the first two items turned
Speaker 4: it off. Can't anyone just report the news objectively anymore
Speaker 4: and let the receiver decide their views are at all,
Speaker 4: rather than being told what to think. I was impressed
Speaker 4: with many of the ways Shane put things such as
Speaker 4: Trump's inauguration speech unmanacling and unfettering people from being cocooned
Speaker 4: as unjust for all the wrongs of history to party
Speaker 4: Mauri's foul conception of where Mary sits is a crutch
Speaker 4: which stops people from taking responsibility. They use it as
Speaker 4: a recruitment tool, waste land of TikTok and other such
Speaker 4: intellectual deserts. He asks, what is the essence of being
Speaker 4: a New Zealander? We must rail against the conceptions of
Speaker 4: history's worst actions forming everything we are now and deliberate
Speaker 4: and deliberate on Wow what statements? And the echo chamber
Speaker 4: of social media represents microaggression and amplify as the environment
Speaker 4: we have by seeing small slites amplified, which fuels grievance,
Speaker 4: culture and legacy media celebrates it. There was a lot more, so,
Speaker 4: thank you so much, and I do trust we hear
Speaker 4: from Shane further in the future. I've already sent your
Speaker 4: podcast link onto two sets of friends who I am
Speaker 4: sure will appreciate it a lot.
Speaker 5: And that's from Wayne.
Speaker 2: Wayne, that's very much appreciated. Thank you, and just see
Speaker 2: if you can double up on your two Yeah, think
Speaker 2: double up every time. It's varied mail room this week,
Speaker 2: and I'm pleased about it, Laton. As an ex member
Speaker 2: of the RNZ Navy, it's been a very difficult time
Speaker 2: to watch a proud navy turn itself into a woke
Speaker 2: cult outfit with very little integrity. The hm n z
Speaker 2: S munawood Nui was sunk on a reef in Samoa
Speaker 2: by a DEI appointed commanding officer who had never commanded
Speaker 2: the ship before, but came from the Royal Navy. She
Speaker 2: and her wife did a motor home tour of New
Speaker 2: Zealand a few years back. She loved New Zealand so
Speaker 2: much that she did in exchange to the New Zealand Navy.
Speaker 2: They gave her command of a ship that had a
Speaker 2: very complicated drive system that no other naval ship has,
Speaker 2: hence its sunk on a reef. There have been two
Speaker 2: other occasions where female DEI appointed officers have been relieved
Speaker 2: of command. One crashed her ship on the jetty in Auckland,
Speaker 2: causing hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage. The second
Speaker 2: for being a bully of the crew below her and
Speaker 2: her use of standover methods that the crew found very
Speaker 2: difficult to deal with. So the complaints came flying from
Speaker 2: all levels that of hence budget is point nine of
Speaker 2: one percent zero point nine of one percent of GDP
Speaker 2: and the Navy is losing a seventeen percent of personnel
Speaker 2: every year since the COVID lockdown. I had two young
Speaker 2: neighbors that left the Navy after five years and are
Speaker 2: now in the Australian Navy twice the pay and far
Speaker 2: better conditions. No DEI and no marie culture and married
Speaker 2: bullies that's so rife in the New Zealand defense forces.
Speaker 2: No white intelligent guys want to stay. When people complain that,
Speaker 2: they get told to get on with things as the
Speaker 2: married culture is part of the New Zealand way of life,
Speaker 2: so these highly intelligent people leave. The Navy has forty
Speaker 2: percent women and forty percent marry that's the DEI quota,
Speaker 2: so it's no longer the defence force. I knew she
Speaker 2: is from Trevor I'm not sure about the I can't
Speaker 2: confirm those forty percent figures, but Driva sounds like he
Speaker 2: might have a good idea.
Speaker 4: Lad Allister says Lad and I know many people say this,
Speaker 4: but your podcasts are such a blessing. I just listened
Speaker 4: to podcasts two seventy and must say I like to
Speaker 4: interview with Shane Jones. Now there's a man that has
Speaker 4: common sense, which is in such short supply with most politicians.
Speaker 4: On that note, Minister Watts could do with a large
Speaker 4: dose of common sense, as well as quite a few
Speaker 4: of the national ranks, and in my view, their leader,
Speaker 4: who has been an utter disappointment as the leader of
Speaker 4: this great nation.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't get carried away about the great nation at
Speaker 2: the moment. It's small to be a great nation.
Speaker 4: I think I'm involved in the grocery industry, says Alistair.
Speaker 4: And something has to be done on shoplifting, which is
Speaker 4: just an epidemic at the moment. Some stores are having
Speaker 4: theft multiple times a day, and at the end of it,
Speaker 4: we the honest shopper pays for it all. I remember
Speaker 4: a few years ago the number was a million dollars
Speaker 4: a day lost. I hate to think what it is
Speaker 4: now with all the weakness on crime of our government.
Speaker 4: What really worries me labor Greens that will get into
Speaker 4: power the next election. Then we will see our nation
Speaker 4: disintegrate with more debt. I voted for New Zealand first
Speaker 4: and agree with most of their policies, apart from Winston
Speaker 4: talking about a two state solution which will never happen.
Speaker 4: I do like what President Trump has to stay on
Speaker 4: that matter, and I'm so happy he won the election.
Speaker 4: People who don't like him, in my opinion, don't know
Speaker 4: that man or what he has done for people over
Speaker 4: the years. I've just ordered The Builders Stone by Melanie
Speaker 4: Phillips herd her on Outsiders Today. Very good, he says.
Speaker 4: He says, keep up the good work and not long
Speaker 4: to podcast three hundred alistair.
Speaker 2: Apart from my little bit of nitpicking, it was an excellent,
Speaker 2: excellent piece of correspondent and thought. Thank you from Chuck.
Speaker 2: Thought you might be interested in this if you have
Speaker 2: not seen it already. Climate the movie this shows there
Speaker 2: are many climate scientists who do not support climate change hysteria.
Speaker 2: They may have different views as to whether COTWO affects
Speaker 2: the climate at all, or say the science is unsettled,
Speaker 2: like doctor Stephen Coonan, even if COTWO warms the planet
Speaker 2: a little, is that harmful? More people die from extreme
Speaker 2: cold than extreme heat. I note you said the government
Speaker 2: supports Simon Watt's view on climate change. You just interviewed
Speaker 2: Shane Jones. It appears he does buy into this nonsense.
Speaker 2: The same could be said about David Seymour. I would
Speaker 2: bet there are a few National MPs who would not
Speaker 2: support Watts. Remember Maureen Pew, Yeah, but you remember the
Speaker 2: beating she took. I just hope that many more people
Speaker 2: vote for ACT or New Zealand First, so that Luxon
Speaker 2: is not able to dictate climate policy that will cost
Speaker 2: New Zealand billions that we cannot afford. Somebody said, somebody
Speaker 2: said recently, no one's ever heard of Simon Watts. I
Speaker 2: think they need to.
Speaker 5: Layton Judath says, it's wonderful to have you back. Laighton.
Speaker 4: So enjoyed listening to the lovable rogue Shane Jones. The
Speaker 4: country needs more of his common sense and straight thinking.
Speaker 4: I look forward to more of your wonderful interviews with intellectuals.
Speaker 4: We don't have enough of them in this country. I
Speaker 4: have high hopes that twenty twenty five will be the
Speaker 4: dawning of growth and prosperity after what has been an
Speaker 4: austere a few years.
Speaker 5: Cheers, says Judith, and keep up the excellent.
Speaker 2: Work Judith appreciated very much. This week's podcast with Shane
Speaker 2: Jones was so entertaining, if only the government would take
Speaker 2: more notice of him. Below is the email I sent
Speaker 2: to Simon Watts for your interest from Leon. Dear Minister,
Speaker 2: I wish I could afford to purchase enough copies of
Speaker 2: A Clime of Climate actually by Andrew Hollis and two others,
Speaker 2: and send a copy to every MP in New Zealand.
Speaker 2: There are many facts included in this book which the
Speaker 2: general public are not aware of, or not just the
Speaker 2: general public. Leon. Seventy percent of all gas emissions are
Speaker 2: from volcanic activity. If all the ice melted, the sea
Speaker 2: level would rise fifteen millimeters that's two inches. We are
Speaker 2: shown melting ice from the Pacific Ocean side, only not
Speaker 2: the Atlantic side, where the ice is building up. We
Speaker 2: are not told that there is volcanic activity beneath the
Speaker 2: Antarctic shelf. New Zealand produces zero point one percent of
Speaker 2: the world's emissions that our government continues to lead the
Speaker 2: world with emission deduction at the cost of our primary
Speaker 2: industries and much of our table food in the not
Speaker 2: too distant future if we're not careful. All plant life
Speaker 2: is dependent upon the supply of carbon dioxide to remain
Speaker 2: healthy so that they can supply oxygen to humans and
Speaker 2: all air breathing species. Yet we're trying to reduce carbon
Speaker 2: dioxide from the U s atmosphere. Thankfully, President Trump is
Speaker 2: leading the way as he recognizes climate change theory as
Speaker 2: a hoax, and the USA is withdrawing from the Paris Accord,
Speaker 2: actually has already done it. Also, I understand that the
Speaker 2: Australian MP Peter Dutton has already indicated Australia will withdraw
Speaker 2: as well if they win the next election. When will
Speaker 2: your government wake up? Leon, Here's the answer that I'd
Speaker 2: give you. They won't wake up, and the reason is
Speaker 2: because they will not avail themselves of any rational thinking
Speaker 2: because they don't seek it out. They say that's the
Speaker 2: way it is. That's what Luxelon has said too. Anybody
Speaker 2: something along the lines. In fact, I'll include the quote
Speaker 2: in the podcast elsewhere because I haven't got it here.
Speaker 2: I know what I would say to him anymore, Layton, worry.
Speaker 4: Before one more from me, David says, I was reading
Speaker 4: the news this week about the half year economic fiscal update,
Speaker 4: whereby the government kept a four billion dollar ACC for
Speaker 4: the year off the books. I was intrigued by that figure,
Speaker 4: so probed around the ACC website and found the linked
Speaker 4: report for the year ending thirty June twenty twenty four,
Speaker 4: published a month ago. Now, I know nothing about audits,
Speaker 4: but some of those numbers are disturbing. If the idea
Speaker 4: is to keep the entity above water over the coming years.
Speaker 4: It mentions that ACC is liable to lose two billion
Speaker 4: dollars a year over the next few years. It seems
Speaker 4: that so called sensitive claims and David Scott's sexual abuse
Speaker 4: here in brackets, are now and will be in the
Speaker 4: future a major factor in contributing to the deficit. Far
Speaker 4: be it for me to downplay these sensitive claims. But
Speaker 4: I'm flummoxed by the table shown on page forty five.
Speaker 4: And he does send you a copy latent that states
Speaker 4: the average cost of each sensitive case equates to one
Speaker 4: hundred and fourteen million dollars. In view of the governments
Speaker 4: struggling to balance the books. I wondered if there was
Speaker 4: an appetite to scrap ACC and let Vivid Insurance take
Speaker 4: up the slack. After all, New Zealand is the only
Speaker 4: country in the world that has gone down this no
Speaker 4: blame policy. It would appear that ACC has something like
Speaker 4: fifty seven billion dollars in investment assets that the government
Speaker 4: could use to retire debt if the entity was sold
Speaker 4: off to private antipart enterprise. And David goes on to
Speaker 4: continue to make his case. And it's a very good
Speaker 4: and lengthy email, but that's the guts of it.
Speaker 5: Basic.
Speaker 2: That's it right now. This one is this one is
Speaker 2: longer than yours, and I'm just wondering if I might
Speaker 2: leave it till the I will. I leave it to you.
Speaker 2: But it's to do with the gene Technology Bill, but
Speaker 2: covers more ground than that.
Speaker 5: Good that means I can get out of this oven. Well,
Speaker 5: I haven't.
Speaker 4: Actually too hot to carry on, all right, remind me
Speaker 4: of that in three months time. I'll just give you
Speaker 4: a quick one. Deborah says, thank you for interviewing Shane.
Speaker 4: That was really informative. I just wish we could have
Speaker 4: him as Prime Minister so much old fashioned common sense.
Speaker 4: Regards Debbie, and I'll give you this quick one from
Speaker 4: Paul High. Layton, Jeffrey Tucker and Rummish the Kerr have
Speaker 4: been doing superb work at Brownstone Institute. George Friedman has
Speaker 4: pointed at and still is pointing at the big cycles
Speaker 4: that bring this type of upheaval into reality. And he's
Speaker 4: talking about the narrative shift in modern history that George
Speaker 4: has written about. So says Paul. So we listeners to
Speaker 4: the radio and podcasts of Leyton Smith, we're aware of
Speaker 4: the storm. Thanks for all you do. It's priceless and
Speaker 4: that's me, Paul.
Speaker 2: That's very generous. Thank you, and you can go good.
Speaker 2: I don't want your melting I.
Speaker 5: I'm fanning myself with a four paper.
Speaker 2: See you next week, you will, okay. So from Mario,
Speaker 2: the quality that you show in every podcast is very
Speaker 2: much needed and appreciated in this information battle in New
Speaker 2: Zealand and triumph of reason over the current madness. I'm
Speaker 2: writing to you regarding the proposed bill that is now
Speaker 2: in Parliament past the first reading on the seventeenth of
Speaker 2: December twenty four, the Gene Technology Bill and then lists
Speaker 2: of one, two, three, four, hundred conduies a lot, so
Speaker 2: bear with us number one. With this horrendous bill, it
Speaker 2: seems that we have no right to know what we're eating.
Speaker 2: The people behind this bill, in their infinite wisdom, are
Speaker 2: not envisioning any labeling of genetically released products after so
Speaker 2: many years of caution, as advised initially by in two
Speaker 2: thousand and one by the Royal Commission, we are facing
Speaker 2: a potential deregulation that will inevitably change New Zealand forever.
Speaker 2: Since there are no safeguards contrary to the advice of
Speaker 2: the Royal Commission in two thousand and one, the impact
Speaker 2: of this bill can be very devastating for New Zealand agriculture.
Speaker 2: Primarily affected will be organic food industry. All farmers will
Speaker 2: be in danger of losing their ge free status and
Speaker 2: the exporters will be hit by the significant downturn in
Speaker 2: sales to their overseas partners. It just seems that the
Speaker 2: Gene Technology Bill is accommodating the biotech industry and shows
Speaker 2: total disregard for a large number of farmers, organic farmers
Speaker 2: and wider public who would not like to have ge
Speaker 2: crops or ge contaminated crops. Secondly, economic losses. According to
Speaker 2: the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research report, there would
Speaker 2: be ten to twenty billion dollars drop in the export
Speaker 2: demand across the whole agricultural export sector. Number three sovereignty sold,
Speaker 2: Foreign regulators and trade deals decide what is safe for US.
Speaker 2: Number four environmental harm. Once the ge free image is lost,
Speaker 2: it'll be impossible to restore that image since the ge
Speaker 2: contamination is impossible to recall anyway. This is just a
Speaker 2: short and simple introduction to a possible harm that New
Speaker 2: Zealand is facing. I didn't go further than agriculture, but
Speaker 2: other areas adversely impacted would be tourism, no doubt, because
Speaker 2: once New Zealand's clean and green image is tarnished, there
Speaker 2: will be negative consequences in tourism as well. You already
Speaker 2: had Guy Hatchett in your interviews, and I think he
Speaker 2: would be an excellent choice on the subject of the
Speaker 2: gene technology bill. Also, Professor Jack Heinemann from the University
Speaker 2: of Canterbury, in his submission to the Health select Committee
Speaker 2: explains why the proposed bill is not up to scratch,
Speaker 2: and yes, perhaps you could have him on your podcast too.
Speaker 2: Oway en Z's commissioned n z Eier economic report that
Speaker 2: clearly highlights the economic risks to the country and our
Speaker 2: Ministry of Foreign Affairs MPAC agrees that it is rushed,
Speaker 2: poorly thought through and has very real negative trade implications.
Speaker 2: I would like to express, Mario concludes. I would like
Speaker 2: to express my thanks to Linda Grammer from get free
Speaker 2: dot org dot NZ for vital information and links. Now, Mario,
Speaker 2: I didn't know who Jack Heineman was, so I ran
Speaker 2: a check and there's quite a bit of detail. So
Speaker 2: let me let me just touch on this because it
Speaker 2: will be included somewhere somewhere else. I suspect, let's cut
Speaker 2: the crap on gene technology. Society should be asking itself
Speaker 2: why it needs to trade the security of its regulations
Speaker 2: for unsecured promises from the visions of genetic engineers, argues
Speaker 2: molecular biologists to Jack Heineman. The government has proposed to
Speaker 2: reset and to remove some regulations on making and releasing
Speaker 2: genetically modified organisms GMOs. Is it a new conversation based
Speaker 2: on a new risk equation or an ultimatum? Now, initially
Speaker 2: I had another two and a half or was a
Speaker 2: three and a half page. It doesn't matter. It was
Speaker 2: getting very complicated, and it's the sort of thing you
Speaker 2: need to say in print in front of you unless
Speaker 2: you are a medical genius. Of course, see the print
Speaker 2: in front of you, and we able to go back
Speaker 2: on and reread it so that you can grasp it appropriately.
Speaker 2: But I can tell you where you can find it
Speaker 2: if you want to want further. It is from the
Speaker 2: Spinoff was published on August twenty nine last year, August
Speaker 2: twenty nine, twenty twenty four, and it's by Jack Heinemann
Speaker 2: h EI n em A double N and it's entitled
Speaker 2: Let's cut the crap on gene technology. Now. It wasn't
Speaker 2: my intention to include anything major on climate matters in
Speaker 2: two seven to one. But on account of the fact
Speaker 2: that this has just arrived in my inbox as I
Speaker 2: was preparing to send it send it off for production,
Speaker 2: let me let me adopt this for today. The atrocities
Speaker 2: in current government policies are nowhere more evident than in
Speaker 2: the area of energy policy. The overarching policy atrocity is
Speaker 2: to be observed in any and all of the measures
Speaker 2: designed to reduce anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions to net zero,
Speaker 2: a bizarre concept when natural emissions, for instance from volcanoes
Speaker 2: and oceans disgorging absorbed carbon dioxide in a currently warming climate,
Speaker 2: greatly exceed anthropogenic emissions, and of course cannot be abated.
Speaker 2: The policy vehicle to achieve net zero is to replace
Speaker 2: energy generated by fossil fuels with so called renewables. There
Speaker 2: is nothing, well, not much. There is nothing wrong with
Speaker 2: renewable energy in some applications solar cells, operating water pumps
Speaker 2: and the like in remote locations, for instance. But nobody
Speaker 2: hailing from local institutions and businesses that have the government's ear,
Speaker 2: nor the international associations to which they pander, seem to
Speaker 2: have told the government that electricity costs increase logarithmically with
Speaker 2: increasing percentage of renewables in baseload supply. This is because
Speaker 2: large scale renewables incur massive costs avoided by controversial fossil fuel, nuclear,
Speaker 2: TiO energy sources, including but not limited to the cost
Speaker 2: of very large tracts of land. Now I shall put
Speaker 2: the rest of it aside, and we shall assume consumption
Speaker 2: of it, very likely next week. But there is one
Speaker 2: more headline that I think deserves quoting. It also is
Speaker 2: from an Australian Publication, as was the previous outtake from
Speaker 2: The Australian yesterday from Judith Sloan, Government's pride in carbon
Speaker 2: tax is proof it's out of its depth. Government's pride
Speaker 2: in carbon tax is proof it's out of its depth.
Speaker 2: You don't suppose that's applicable that in this country? Also?
Speaker 2: Do you? It most certainly is and that will take
Speaker 2: us out for podcasts two hundred and seventy one. If
Speaker 2: you would like to write to us then please do
Speaker 2: latent at NEWSTALKSB dot co dot nz or you can
Speaker 2: address Carolyn if you want, c O. L y n
Speaker 2: at NEWSTALKSB dot co dot nz. Love to hear your
Speaker 2: opinions for some reason, especially today and today's discussion. So
Speaker 2: we shall return within the week with podcasts number two
Speaker 2: hundred and seventy two. So there is only one thing
Speaker 2: left to say, thank you for listening, and we'll talk soon.
Speaker 1: Thank you for more from Newstalks EDB. Listen live on
Speaker 1: air or online and keep our shows with you wherever
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