Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I'm speaking with author, columnist, and political

commentator Douglas Murray, who's been on my podcast a number of times. We talked about

his latest book, not so long ago, The War on the West. We discussed how a misguided purpose leads

to abject misery and hopelessness, the cowardice of experts who choose silence experts and others,

let's say you choose silence in the face of malevolence, the psychology of fear, and the necessity of

willful exposure to combat that fear. So we went out for dinner last night to Royal 35, which was

very good. That's a steakhouse that looks like a classic mafia also place as far as I'm concerned,

but they make great steaks. And one of the things we talked a little bit about was your

burgeoning interest in purpose. And so I'm curious about that. So the first question I have,

I guess, is why why you think that's attracted your interest, that particular topic?

I think it's because I just increasingly noticed, as I'm sure you do, that it's the question underneath

former soul questions in our day. A lot of the things that you and I spend a considerable

amount of our time railing against are things we critique, criticize, find holes in, push back

against, but you're always confronted by the fact that you're dealing with somebody who believes

that they find their sense of purpose from the thing that we find, you know, untruthful,

irritating or worse. And you see all of these versions in our day, I think, of misguided

purpose. Purpose used to the wrong ends, meaning found in places that really don't give much

satisfaction, but give people the drive to get up in the morning and act sometimes well,

often malevolently, more often than not, perhaps malevolently. But it seems to me that

this sort of meaning crisis is one that many of the people that you and I have problems with,

should we say, are actually addressing, I mean, in their own inept and sometimes malevolent way,

they are sort of speaking to a death. Well, one of the things the left does very well,

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