0:00

The wedding I was just at the

0:02

groom is a decade younger than

0:04

me He doesn't even have the same type of

0:06

glasses and it or the same type of beard.

0:09

We have only two things in common He wears

0:11

glasses. I wear glasses. He has a beard I

0:13

have a beard and people people would just be

0:15

looking at me be like you guys You

0:20

guys could be brother I like that the zingers are

0:22

just becoming a means for you to complain about what

0:24

happened to you This week, that's how I use the

0:26

five four tops It's

0:31

clear the the best podcast

0:33

I can make is very different from the Ideal

0:36

podcast in terms of what I want to

0:38

make the podcast I want to make is

0:41

just like Peter gets on the mic and

0:43

bitches about his life I

0:45

turn it off and people for some reason pay

0:47

for it if that could be my job. Oh

0:49

my god You're describing the Joe Rogan experience There

0:52

are people who've made this work. All right, I'm just gonna give this

0:54

a whirl. Let's do it. All right Peter

0:58

Michael, what do you know

1:00

about doppelganger by Naomi Klein? I

1:02

deeply empathize with being mistaken

1:04

for someone else Because

1:06

everyone thinks that I look exactly like

1:08

every other white man with a beard

1:11

and glasses Okay, so

1:13

Peter it's finally

1:15

happening we are

1:17

talking about a

1:19

good book This

1:28

is the moment that all of our fans

1:30

have been clamoring for I

1:33

mean, I don't really know why we're covering this other than the

1:35

fact that this is a book that I've been reading And

1:41

it will be refreshing to talk about a book

1:43

that I have some quibbles with but in like a polite way I

1:46

feel like a lot of the books that we talk about on this

1:48

show are we're trying to reveal the sort of conservative Project

1:51

or they're like reactionary bullshit underneath them and Naomi Klein is

1:53

not that person. She's not like a crazy person cryptocentric.

2:01

We're not talking about somebody who's like

2:03

doing this, I'm a liberal, but it's like,

2:05

no, she's an actual liberal and she's dedicated

2:07

her life to like defending and

2:10

promoting leftist causes. Yeah, she wrote the Shock

2:12

Doctrine. Good book. Naomi Klein is actually like

2:14

a really important writer to me because I

2:16

read no logo. And I ended

2:19

up working in corporate human rights for 11

2:21

years. Like it was not the only thing,

2:23

but it was like a big inspiration for

2:25

me. And she, the

2:27

entire book is about basically the radicalization

2:29

of Naomi Wolf and the weird experience

2:31

of being mistaken for this woman who's

2:34

like falling down the rabbit hole. And

2:36

Naomi Wolf is also kind of important to me

2:38

because the beauty myth, that was another book that

2:41

I read in high school. And it was the

2:43

first book where I was like,

2:45

I agree with this, but I

2:47

don't think any of these numbers

2:49

are correct. So what is

2:52

your, what is your relationship with these

2:54

two ladies? Naomi Klein was one of

2:56

the first nudges I got

2:58

out of just like center

3:00

left moderate liberalism. I haven't

3:03

read any of her other books. She

3:05

seems largely cool from a distance. Naomi

3:08

Wolf, I never read the

3:10

Beauty Myth, I know of it. I

3:12

sort of was loosely aware of her

3:14

work and then got more aware of

3:17

it a few years ago when she

3:19

got exposed in that

3:21

radio interview where one of

3:23

her books was basically revealed

3:25

to be built on shoddy

3:27

research. We will be

3:30

watching that clip later. Hell

3:32

yeah. That was very funny to me.

3:34

I love to watch someone get fucking,

3:36

just get their life's work torn apart.

3:40

You were, the thing is you were not a professional journalist at

3:42

that point. So I feel like you could take glee in

3:44

that. I felt such deep empathy for her

3:46

in that moment. And it won't happen

3:48

to us and here's why, and this is

3:50

my advice to all journalists, never

3:53

try to make a comprehensive

3:55

affirmative case for anything. Just

3:58

spend your entire career. being a

4:01

snarky little bitch. That's

4:03

my advice to all journalists. So

4:07

the book Doppelganger, it's

4:09

basically, it's like a

4:12

somatic dissection of this

4:14

idea of having doubles. The

4:16

idea that sort of with the rise of the

4:18

internet, we're all like different forms of ourselves, right?

4:20

You're a different person on

4:22

LinkedIn and on Instagram and on Twitter. She

4:24

notes the living mirror world,

4:26

how a lot of its superficial features kind

4:28

of look like journalism or look like research

4:30

and it's very difficult to tell. The core

4:32

of the book and the thing that

4:35

I wanted to dive more deeply into is essentially

4:37

like what happened to Naomi Wolf over

4:39

the last 20 years, right? You have

4:41

this person who is like a very

4:43

prominent feminist scholar and author and then

4:46

you sort of fast forward 20 years

4:48

and now she's just like an anti-vax

4:50

crank and like not even just

4:52

anti-vax. It's like she's into like chemtrails.

4:55

She does weird shit about like the

4:57

birth control pill has like taken

5:00

away women's ability to smell and

5:02

it's like why everyone is gay.

5:04

She's just like really, really, really

5:06

far down a rabbit hole. I'm

5:09

very interested in the fundamental question

5:11

of whether Naomi Wolf sort of

5:14

has sort of lost her mind in some

5:16

way or whether she was like a natural

5:18

conspiracy theorist who also happened to be a

5:20

sort of occasionally brilliant feminist theorist at the

5:23

same time. The entire like first

5:25

half of the book is basically foreshadowing.

5:28

Like this person is going to like

5:30

go get her. Right, right. Her career

5:32

begins in 1991 with her book The

5:34

Beauty Myth which essentially says

5:36

that like as women were gaining

5:38

all of these progressive wins, the

5:40

patriarchy pushed back in the

5:42

form of like bullshit beauty standards. Like

5:44

beauty standards that nobody would ever live

5:46

up to. Right. As soon

5:48

as this book comes out, it was a runaway

5:51

bestseller. It did super well. A lot of like

5:53

second wave feminists said that like this was the

5:55

beginning of like a new generation of feminists

5:57

like taking up the mantle. But immediately the

5:59

review views started to notice

6:01

a couple of discrepancies. So

6:05

one of the numbers that people pull

6:07

out is that in the book, Wolf

6:09

says that eating disorders are really common

6:11

in America and 150,000 women every year die

6:13

of anorexia. I

6:18

read about this claim after her

6:21

sort of downfall in 2019. There

6:23

were a lot of those like circling back to the beauty myth. Yeah.

6:26

And so she basically is claiming that

6:28

anorexia has this massive death toll and

6:30

the actual number is like low three

6:32

figures, something like that, right? It's hard

6:34

to say. I mean, eating disorders are

6:36

so hard to track because it's also

6:38

reported. And then dying of anorexia is

6:40

difficult to kind of measure because sometimes people

6:43

just have heart attacks, right? Like not everybody

6:45

with anorexia is like super thin. So it's

6:47

difficult to, it's difficult to track, but

6:49

it's so easy to say that it's

6:51

not 150,000 people. Like I

6:53

think if you're like in your thirties at

6:55

a certain age, you probably have a friend,

6:59

some acquaintance within two degrees of separation

7:01

from you that has died in a car

7:03

accident. The numbers that she's quoting

7:05

here are four times higher than the number

7:07

of people killed in car accidents every year.

7:09

So like if this was true, you would

7:11

have like numerous acquaintances who

7:13

had died of anorexia. It's like,

7:15

it just is not plausible at all.

7:18

The defense of her that I will give is that

7:20

this is actually a mistake that her source made.

7:22

So there's a 1988 book called

7:25

Fasting Girls that she is relying on

7:27

for the sort of the statistics on

7:29

the prevalence of eating disorders. And

7:32

so this book is relying on a newsletter

7:34

from the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association, which

7:36

was like the major eating disorders association at

7:38

the time, which said 150,000 people have anorexia. Okay.

7:44

This author, not Naomi Wolf, this author

7:46

somehow mistranscribed that as 150,000

7:49

deaths. And

7:51

so this is a sort of original sin of

7:53

this was not Wolf. But

7:55

still, I mean, when you see a number like that, you

7:58

should pause. Look, in

8:00

her defense, pre-internet, you have to go find

8:03

like another book that has the data and

8:05

come on. I mean, who's got the time

8:07

for this? But then, so what she says is,

8:09

you know, by the time this starts getting pointed

8:11

out in reviews, she claims that she

8:14

had already found it and fixed it.

8:16

It's only the first edition of the book where

8:18

that number was in it and like that was removed,

8:21

fixed, republished. But then

8:23

I got this book. So

8:25

I got it from Amazon and I looked

8:28

at like, what does the text say now?

8:31

And so I'm going to send you what it says now. So

8:33

this is the updated text. This

8:35

does not include any mortality statistics.

8:38

Okay. The number of women

8:40

with the disease has increased dramatically throughout the Western

8:42

world starting 20 years ago. Dr.

8:44

Charles A. Murkowski of Gracie Square Hospital

8:46

in New York City, an eating diseases

8:49

specialist, says that 20% of American college

8:51

women binge and purge on a regular

8:53

basis. Roberta Pollack's side

8:55

in Never Too Thin agrees with

8:57

the 5% to 10% figure for

9:00

anorexia among young American women, adding

9:02

that up to six times that figure on

9:05

campuses are bulimic. If we

9:07

take the high end of the figures, it

9:09

means that of 10 young American women in

9:11

college, two will be anorexic and six will

9:13

be bulimic. Only two will be well. The

9:16

norm then for young middle class American women

9:18

is to be a sufferer from some form

9:20

of the eating disease. Yeah. What

9:23

do you think, Peter? I don't know. You

9:26

may not have the numbers on the top of your head, but you know it's

9:28

not 80%. Maybe the general point

9:30

is like, this is widespread and that's

9:32

a defensible point, but it's just not

9:35

this widespread. There's just no fucking way.

9:37

There's just no way. The thing is

9:39

you don't want to throw out the

9:41

baby with the bathwater here. They're

9:43

like eating disorders are extremely prevalent in

9:45

America and extremely damaging. Yeah. Some

9:47

of the criticism of this book at the time

9:49

like had this weird misogyny to it where they're

9:52

like, this lady says that eating disorders exist. I

9:54

guess preaching to the choir here, but there's

9:56

also an image in

9:58

people's minds when you talk about. certain things

10:00

like eating disorders where you're talking you're

10:02

thinking about someone whose life is consumed

10:04

by it. Right. Little types of disordered

10:07

behavior related to food, very common. Extremely

10:09

common. And if you wanted to say

10:11

that that was like 60-80% then I

10:13

think that's quite defensible. But to say

10:15

that bulimia and anorexia, you know, very

10:17

discreet disorders are reaching those numbers,

10:19

it's just not true. Yeah, I mean the

10:21

National Eating Disorders Association says it's

10:23

between 10 and 20 percent

10:25

of college women have some form

10:27

of eating disorder. So 20% is the

10:30

high range, right? And when you look at

10:32

bulimia specifically, this is within

10:34

a 12-month time span, 7% of college

10:36

students report binging and 1% report

10:39

purging. Okay. So these are thankfully

10:41

pretty rare behaviors, right? But again,

10:43

it's like these are real problems but it

10:46

makes it so hard to defend wolf

10:48

and to defend this book because it's

10:50

like you can't get basic shit like

10:53

this this wrong. Right. There's an academic

10:55

article, this is wild from 2004, called

10:57

a critical appraisal of the anorexia

10:59

statistics in the beauty myth colon

11:02

introducing wolves overdo and lie

11:04

factor where they look at 23 different

11:07

statistics in the book and they're like here's

11:09

her estimate and here's like the sort of

11:11

academically accepted estimate and like all

11:14

but five of them are wildly overblown.

11:16

Some of them are overblown by an

11:18

order of 10. Some of them don't even

11:20

make sense on their face so she says a million women

11:23

suffer from eating disorders in America but

11:25

then she also says that 3.5 million

11:27

women in the UK suffer from

11:30

eating disorders. The UK's population is smaller than America

11:32

but they have three times more sufferers

11:34

or eating disorders like that. Just as an

11:36

author like that you should try

11:38

to reconcile those two figures. Well that's

11:40

true of terse though. It happens. So

11:44

throughout the 90s she continues writing

11:46

books on feminism. She has one

11:48

called Fire with Fire, another one

11:50

called Promiscuities, then one called Misconceptions

11:52

and one. The 1990s are basically

11:55

like the peak of her respectability.

11:57

Yeah. By the end of the 1990s she is a parent. currently

12:00

consulting Al Gore. Yeah, doesn't

12:02

she become like a generic

12:04

democratic political consultant for a

12:06

bit? Yeah, for like a very brief

12:09

period. Yeah, she's working with Hillary Clinton and

12:11

this is an excerpt from Klein's

12:13

book. I'm going to try to

12:15

just say Klein and Wolf because every time I say Naomi, I

12:17

confuse myself. By the end of the

12:19

decade, Wolf was considered such an authority on all things

12:21

womanly that during the 2000 presidential election,

12:23

Al Gore, the Democratic Party nominee, hired

12:26

her to coach him on how to

12:28

appeal to female voters. Her

12:30

widely reported advice was that Gore had to

12:32

get out from under Bill Clinton's shadow and

12:34

transform himself from a beta male to an

12:36

alpha male, in part by wearing

12:39

earth-tone suits to warm up his

12:41

robotic affect. Nothing says

12:43

alpha like a bunch of browns. Browns

12:45

and dark greens. Alpha shit. Alpha

12:48

shit. Okay, wow. She's

12:50

a pioneer. I mean, there's no way around it. You

12:54

didn't get yelled at for our Lean In episode and I could tell

12:56

you were about to say something and you're like, no, no, no, it's

12:58

not worth it. Wrong. Wrong.

13:01

No. I was thinking something so

13:03

feminist that I thought the world wasn't ready for it.

13:07

This is so bleak that

13:09

someone that is credited with advancing

13:12

feminist thought is just like, you

13:15

got alpha males and beta males. Are you

13:17

an alpha or a beta al Gore? I

13:20

know. In this picture, you are

13:22

leaning in towards Tipper. You want to be

13:24

straight up. She leans towards you. We will

13:26

get into this, but the central question with

13:28

this is like, how much of a conspiracy

13:30

theorist was Wolf before all of this like

13:32

anti-vax stuff? And also like, how much of

13:34

a conservative was she? Because she's

13:36

sort of casting herself as a feminist and she's talking about like the dangers

13:39

of beauty standards, people kind of cast

13:42

her as his leftist. But a lot of her ideas

13:44

were fairly conservative to begin with. Yeah, I mean, there's

13:46

always been that sort of tension between

13:48

the second and third waves

13:50

of feminism, right? Where it's like, how

13:52

do you talk about like female independence

13:55

within the sort of

13:58

patriarchal superstructure? Right. So

14:00

what does this mean for whether we should

14:02

be doing what we want when what we

14:04

want to do is maybe informed by these

14:06

patriarchal norms? Exactly. Klein

14:09

tells the rest of the story kind of out of

14:11

order because she's doing it thematically, but I am

14:13

putting the pieces back in order. So after the

14:15

Beauty Mist comes out in the 1990s, basically at

14:18

the height of her powers, Wolf

14:20

goes to, I believe it's Oxford, where

14:22

Klein is studying. And

14:26

Klein is, she hasn't become a writer yet.

14:28

She's not famous. I think Wolf is a little bit older

14:30

than her. And so she is just a

14:32

student journalist. And she is assigned

14:34

to go cover Wolf giving

14:36

a talk at her campus. So

14:39

I'm going to send you this excerpt

14:42

from Klein's book. This is the ending

14:44

anecdote of the book. You're

14:46

destroying Klein's narrative structure. I know

14:48

she's listening to this livid. But

14:51

I think this moment is so

14:54

fucking deranged. And I think it's

14:56

supposed to be kind of a twist. But I think it's

14:58

actually kind of important for everything comes

15:00

afterwards. So I'm going to

15:02

send you this. Oh my God. Okay.

15:05

I just read it. Don't do

15:07

it. Sorry. Sorry. After

15:09

the Q&A wrapped up and the mingling began,

15:11

I introduced myself as a student journalist with

15:14

a shared first name who was scheduled to

15:16

interview her. Wolf locked her eyes

15:18

on mine. I knew it was you, she

15:20

said. You look like you've just been raped.

15:25

Long silence. Oh my God. It's a

15:27

fucking deranged thing to say to somebody. Can you fucking

15:29

imagine? I truly cannot. I've

15:32

never said anything even remotely close to this

15:34

in any form. That is

15:36

one of the most fucking wild things to say to a

15:38

human being. It's something

15:40

that is purely designed to

15:43

unsettle the person's equilibrium.

15:45

And establish dominance in some way. It actually seems like

15:47

something weird, like something a man would say to

15:50

another man is being like, I'm the alpha in

15:52

this exchange. It is really fucking weird. Which we

15:54

know that's something she believes in, right? Yeah, exactly.

15:56

The dynamics. Yeah. And

15:59

like, I guess the client. then describes that like

16:01

she sort of at the time thought this was like

16:03

edgy and cool. It was like a

16:05

way that sort of I don't know kind of

16:07

I don't know how to put this but sort

16:09

of manipulative people do this like instant intimacy with you

16:12

like you're sort of sharing a secret and they're

16:14

doing it by saying something kind of shocking. Klein

16:16

says that at the time Klein had had a

16:18

really bad week apparently because she had written something

16:21

pro-Palestinian for the student newspaper

16:23

and was just getting like yelled at from like

16:25

all corners of the campus. And so

16:27

she was what she was reading in

16:29

me was like some form of trauma like I

16:31

was projecting some form of trauma and she

16:34

read it as like sexual trauma. So then

16:36

they become friends and they're like pen pals

16:38

for a while. Okay. So all

16:41

of this is sort of getting at

16:43

the fact that like Wolf had like

16:45

little inklings of some conservative beliefs and also

16:47

just being kind of a fucking weirdo. Right. Fairly early

16:50

and like her work was really shoddy from

16:52

like basically day one of her career as

16:54

a public intellectual. So

16:56

then in the early 2000s she starts

16:58

to sort of go off the rails.

17:01

Klein says in the new

17:03

millennium something changed in Wolf. Maybe it

17:05

was Gore's electoral loss or George W.

17:08

Bush's electoral theft and the way some

17:10

of the post-vote recriminations focus on her

17:12

controversial campaign role. Perhaps it was something more

17:14

personal. An unraveling marriage with two young kids

17:16

she's made reference to a year of chaos

17:18

right after I turned 40. Whatever

17:20

the cause Wolf's soaring profile dropped significantly

17:23

in the early and mid 2000s. In 2007

17:25

she publishes a book

17:28

called The End of America, Letter of

17:31

Warning to a Young Patriot which is

17:33

about how the Bush administration was basically

17:35

tilting toward a fascist regime. I read

17:38

a review of it in Reason,

17:40

God Help Me, where it says,

17:42

Wolf commits a bewildering series of

17:44

mistakes that demonstrate not even a

17:46

rudimentary understanding or familiarity with the

17:48

subject of fascism. Readers are told

17:50

that Hitler was a propaganda master because he

17:53

was trained as a visual artist. He was

17:55

not. Nor did Nazi propaganda

17:57

minister Joseph Goebbels develop the practice

17:59

of his embedding journalists. It's

18:02

very, it's like a weird mirror image

18:04

of liberal fascism, where she's just

18:06

like, do you know who else had

18:09

embedded journalists? I love people who are

18:11

able to identify increasingly innocuous things that

18:13

Nazis did. And be like,

18:15

you know, who else did this? Yeah, Nazis took

18:17

showers. You know who else loved a salad? Yeah.

18:20

Every now and then. So it

18:22

seems like the conspiracism really ramps up around

18:24

the Occupy Wall Street stuff in 2011,

18:27

you know, after the police

18:29

crackdown on the protesters, she says

18:31

this is like a new era of fascism

18:33

in America. She then publishes a book

18:35

in 2012 called Vagina, a New

18:38

Biography. There's a

18:40

2019 article in New York Times

18:42

called Naomi Wolf's Career of Blunders

18:44

Continues, where they say,

18:46

Vagina so profoundly misrepresented the workings

18:48

of the brain, I'm not sure

18:50

science writers have recovered. This is

18:53

a very troubling interpretation of science.

18:55

I can't find the data behind

18:57

her claims. Beverly Whipple, the scientist

18:59

who discovered the G-spot, said upon

19:01

reading it, hold on, there's one lady

19:03

who discovered the G-spot. Well, we all

19:05

we all know men have never found

19:07

it. Huge Alfred dudes. Well, so what

19:10

is the science that is being proffered

19:12

in the book? I was

19:15

like, I don't want to look this up. But then

19:17

I was curious. I guess she's saying that like, vaginas

19:19

can feel grief. You can tell

19:22

someone's like internal mental state by

19:24

like measuring various things in their vagina, kind

19:26

of like a mood ring or something. I

19:29

just don't think that's true. I do think

19:31

it's true. That just sounds right to

19:33

me. I think it was something where

19:35

like, again, her heart is in the right

19:37

place. Like, yeah, reclaiming, destigmatizing, great. Michael,

19:40

you do not have to read that in

19:42

good faith. I'm

19:44

trying. This is classic Hobbes. He's like,

19:46

you know, you're like, look, the we

19:48

have to admit the vagina is magical.

19:52

Well, there's a whole thing where gay men pretend to

19:55

be grossed out by vaginas. And I don't want

19:57

to do that. But I am genuinely like very

19:59

bewildered by the whole thing. So when she's like,

20:01

vaginas feel grief, I'm like, I don't know, does my

20:03

penis feel grief? Okay, sometimes. Yeah. All

20:05

right. No, I, I sort

20:08

of assumed that like the title of the

20:10

book was like a little bit of shock

20:12

value, right? Vagina monologues, like, yeah, we're crossing

20:14

that, that sort of social boundary and just

20:16

saying vagina to get your attention.

20:19

But it's actually pretty cool to write

20:21

a book that's like vaginas can think.

20:23

Yeah. See, you've

20:26

reached it, you've reached the Hobbes singularity.

20:29

So then the next decade, it seems

20:31

like she sort of falls deeper into

20:34

conspiracy land. I'm going to send you

20:36

a excerpt from Klein's book. In the

20:39

decades since Occupy, Wolf has connected the

20:41

dots between an almost unfathomably large number

20:43

of disparate bits of fact and fantasy.

20:46

She has floated unsubstantiated speculations about the

20:48

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, saying he is,

20:50

quote, not who he purports to be,

20:53

hinting that he is an active spy

20:56

about US troops sent to build field hospitals in

20:58

West Africa during the 2014 Ebola

21:00

outbreak. She has said this was not

21:02

an attempt to stop the diseases spread,

21:04

but a plot to bring it to

21:06

the United States to justify mass lockdowns

21:09

at home. Okay, that

21:11

that's just right wing shit. I remember

21:13

that. Yeah, about ISIS beheadings of US

21:15

and British captives. She has said

21:17

these were possibly not real murders, but

21:19

staged covert ops by the US government

21:22

starring crisis actors about the results

21:24

of the 2014 Scottish referendum on independence,

21:26

which the no vote won by a margin

21:28

of more than 10%. She

21:31

claimed the results were potentially fraudulent

21:33

based on an assortment of testimonies

21:35

she collected. Okay, Scottish referendum

21:37

truth or I've never heard of before.

21:40

Once you become a conspiracy theorist, every

21:42

referendum is fake. Every election, every election

21:44

isn't real, you know, also, I love

21:47

that she's claiming that they were fraudulent

21:49

based on an assortment of testimonies she collected. When

21:51

I was in Edinburgh in 2008, a guy gave

21:53

me and my friends hashish, while we ate fish.

22:00

relationships and then told us that Bush did 9-11. So

22:04

I assumed that he was one of the testimonies

22:06

that she collected. Yeah, based on the testimonies you've

22:08

heard, Bush did do 9-11. So

22:10

speaking of her ability to

22:12

assess evidence, we are now going

22:15

to fast forward to June of Yes.

22:18

Here we go. And

22:20

a BBC radio interview.

22:24

This is on the BBC, so I couldn't like get

22:26

it, but somebody has uploaded it to YouTube. They've

22:28

done, there's like a little bit of audio editing.

22:30

I don't know if it's like noticeable, but just

22:32

in case you hear anything weird, that's the YouTube

22:34

written. You

22:36

get a sentence, as I mentioned, of

22:39

penal servitude for 10 or 15 years, and I found

22:42

like several dozen executions.

22:45

Several dozen executions. Correct. And

22:48

this correct amiss apprehension that is

22:50

in every website that the last

22:52

man was executed for sodomy in Britain in 1835.

22:56

I don't think you're right about this. One

23:00

of the cases that you look at that's

23:02

salient in your report is that of Thomas

23:04

Silver. It says, teenagers

23:08

were now convicted more often. Indeed

23:11

that year, 14-year-old Thomas Silver was

23:13

actually executed for committing sodomy. The

23:15

boy was indicted for an unnatural

23:17

offence, guilty, death recorded. This is

23:20

the first time the phrase unnatural

23:22

offence entered the Old Bailey records.

23:25

Thomas Silver wasn't executed, death

23:28

recorded. I was really surprised by this,

23:30

and I looked it up.

23:32

Death recorded is what's in,

23:35

I think, most of these cases that

23:37

you've identified as

23:39

executions. It doesn't mean that he was executed.

23:41

It was a category that was created in

23:43

1823 that allowed judges to

23:46

abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death

23:48

on any capital convict whom they considered

23:50

to be a fit subject for pardon.

23:53

I don't think any of the executions you've identified

23:55

here actually happened. Well,

23:58

that's a really important thing to invent. investigate.

24:00

What is your understanding of what death

24:03

recorded means? Death recorded, this is also

24:05

from, I've just read you the definition

24:07

of it there from the Old Bailey

24:09

website. But I've got here a newspaper

24:11

report about Thomas Silver and

24:13

also something from

24:16

the prison records that showed the date

24:18

of his discharge. The prisoner

24:20

was found guilty and sentence of

24:23

death was recorded. Yeah. The jury recommended

24:25

the prisoner to mercy on account of his youth. I

24:28

think this is a kind of, when

24:31

I found this, I didn't really know what

24:33

to do with it because I think it

24:35

is quite a big problem with your argument.

24:37

Also, it's the nature of the offense here.

24:39

Thomas Silver committed an indecent

24:41

assault on a six-year-old boy. I

24:50

love you too. Thank you. Oh my God, dude. I

24:53

don't know how the rest of it goes. Oh

24:56

no. When that initial, when

24:58

she's like, well, that's an important thing to assess.

25:00

Someone should look into this. Just

25:02

devastating. I'm

25:04

just, I'm retreating from public life if they found

25:07

in her shoes. It's

25:09

game over. It's so dark how he's like, oh,

25:11

I went to the Old Bailey website. Right. He

25:14

found the correction like, the first place you would

25:16

go for like super basic

25:18

fact-checking. Like I fucking

25:20

Googled it. Yeah. Is how

25:23

he found out. Naomi. Naomi.

25:25

Naomi. Like fundamentally, you're not a

25:27

fucking historian. You're way out of

25:29

your depth. Why are you doing

25:31

this? It's even worse than this,

25:33

Peter, because this book is a

25:36

adaptation of her PhD thesis. She

25:38

went back to school as an adult.

25:40

Oh, God bless. This is what's so

25:42

fucking fascinating to me and like a

25:44

weird, like systemic breakdown. How did nobody

25:46

else read this? Like, didn't she do

25:48

a PhD defense of this in front

25:50

of other academics? She has a supervisor.

25:53

And her supervisor, Claudine Gay.

25:58

When this popped up, this is like the first time that the average. person

26:00

who's like moderately well-read,

26:03

heard any real detail about her and

26:06

her work. But when it

26:08

pops up in the context of

26:11

her career, it's sort of like, well,

26:13

yeah. Well, of course. The

26:15

death recorded part of this interview is the part

26:17

that I think gets the most attention. But

26:20

that thing at the end right before the

26:22

little sound effect is in

26:24

some ways potentially worse, that the

26:26

whole book is about how consensual

26:28

relations between gay men were prosecuted

26:30

and gay men were executed for their

26:33

consensual relationships. A lot of the examples

26:35

are actually child molesters. A

26:37

lot of these people were like monsters. And

26:40

you're saying that it was homophobic to put them in jail. I'm

26:43

sure the prison system was very bad back then,

26:45

but it's like you need to find real cases

26:47

of this. You can't have – one

26:49

guy I think had sex with a horse or

26:52

something. And it's like whatever you think

26:54

about that, it's not a consensual human

26:56

relationship, Naomi. It shouldn't be part

26:58

of your book. Yeah. The only

27:00

word they can say is nay. You

27:04

have to have stolen that from something, Peter. Nope.

27:07

You got a horse rape joke ready? Look,

27:09

have I sent you the pictures of

27:12

the Argentinian horse dancer? What? No.

27:15

All right. I was just an Argentina and there's like –

27:17

we have to cut this, but this is just for us. And

27:19

he sort of does like a almost dancing show with

27:21

a horse. He stands on the horse and

27:24

then he's like – the horse lies down

27:26

and he's like lying next to the horse,

27:28

caressing the horse's face. It's meant to show

27:30

like this bond between the man and the

27:32

horse. They're still like comfortable with one another.

27:35

But you're ever – we're looking at it and you're like, wow,

27:37

this guy really looks – seems like he fucked the horse. And

27:41

I'm not someone who takes pictures. When I'm on

27:43

vacation, everyone in my life complains about this. Can

27:45

I see pictures? And I'm like, I've got two.

27:47

Okay. I'm not going to take pictures

27:49

of this guy and the horse though.

27:51

And you were like, Mike is going to say something involving

27:54

sex and a horse and I'm going to have a quip

27:56

ready. I'm just saying, I've been thinking – look, I've been thinking about

27:58

it. This has been on the – a

28:00

little bit. All right, let's, hold on, I'm gonna turn

28:02

this, I'm gonna turn this around and send you a

28:04

picture of the guy with the horse and then we

28:06

can move on. All right, send it, send it, send

28:08

it. It's extremely important, hold on. Oh

28:11

my god. It's

28:14

like pillow talk. I

28:18

mean, dude, when I'm, at first he

28:21

was doing like, at first, sorry, I know

28:23

I could be a good move on. At

28:26

first he was doing like a handstand on the horse

28:28

and I was like, oh cool, we're gonna see like

28:30

a horse sacrobatic. The rest of it is just him,

28:32

just like cuddling with the horse in different ways. It's

28:34

like first base. Yeah. This is a wedding full of

28:36

like, the best way to put it is very nice

28:38

people. They were not the type of people where you

28:40

could be like, so you guys see that horse fucker?

28:43

Do you think they're gonna fuck

28:45

the horse or what? Like, I'm Jeff.

28:48

Right. I do feel like everyone, like, across

28:50

everyone was looking at him being like, this is like a

28:52

little bit too intimate with the horse, you know? Well, you

28:54

know, I mean, in Argentina, you know what they feed

28:56

gay horses, right? Hey.

29:01

I'm allowed to tell homophobic jokes on this podcast. One

29:04

of us can do this. That's something I

29:07

would never do. Wait, do you want to

29:09

hear the other homophobic joke from my high

29:11

school? Yeah, of course. What does a gay

29:13

snake say? Oh,

29:16

God. I'm sweating. I

29:19

actually can't. The

29:26

fact that we somehow

29:28

transitioned into the one thing I've been

29:30

thinking about all week, the guy fucking

29:33

his horse. That

29:37

doesn't came up without me prompting it,

29:39

just horse fucking came up. And it's

29:41

like, hey, did you know that in

29:43

the past week I actually had

29:45

a horse fucking experience? That's like when you say like,

29:48

I should buy some shorts or something and then you

29:50

open an Instagram and it's giving you ads for shorts

29:52

and you're like, uncanny, these tech companies. My

29:54

Google ads are like, whatever wanted to fuck a

29:57

horse? Okay,

30:00

focus, focus. I'm sorry. It's

30:04

good that we're in like a giggly

30:07

mood because we're now entering the phase

30:09

where we read off a bunch of

30:11

Naomi Wolf tweets. Oh yeah, okay.