Andrew Doyle: British comedian, playwright and writer who holds a doctorate in Shakespeare and created the satirical woke-activist character Tatiana McGrath. Author of 'The End of Woke,' he has relocated to Arizona to make creative work with Rob Schneider.
What this episode covers
Doyle and Rogan center the conversation on free speech, contrasting America's First Amendment and Brandenburg incitement test with the UK, where roughly 12,000 people a year are arrested over social media posts. They trace how 'woke' ideology captured British institutions, the BBC, police, courts and the NHS, and discuss the gender-medicine scandal, grooming-gang cover-ups, and mass immigration in the UK and Sweden. Long tangents cover conspiracy thinking (Shakespeare authorship, Laurel Canyon/CIA, Macron's wife), AI censorship in ChatGPT versus Grok, identity-driven recasting in film, and prediction-market and UFC betting fraud. The two debate whether societal decay is organic ideological capture or a coordinated plan to sow chaos and justify control. They close hopeful that the internet and the 'brick wall of reality' are turning the public against censorship, with Britain's Reform party poised to break the two-party system.
Recommended on this episode
Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties
Tom O'Neill
“And that's the book Chaos by Tom O'Neal, which is a brilliant book, which is very well doumented in details Jolly West and his influence on the Manson family”— Joe Rogan
The guest's own work
The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counterrevolution
Andrew Doyle
“And then you wrote a book. It's called The End of Woke. How the Culture War went too far and what to expect from the counterrevolution.”— Joe Rogan
The End of Woke
Andrew Doyle
“But in the meantime, your book, The End of Woke, it's available. Did you do the audio version of it?”— Joe Rogan
Tatiana McGrath books
Andrew Doyle
“but then I wrote two books as her. I did a live show as her.”— guest
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon
David McGowan
“like a suspicious scenes inside the canyon. It's a crazy book. It's uh it's fun. It's kind of fun.”— Joe Rogan
Time to Think
Hannah Barnes
“there's a book by Hannah Barnes called time to think which found that between 80 and 90% of all adolescence referred to that clinic were samesex attracted”— guest
Irreversible Damage
Abigail Shrier
“there was a a lawyer for the ACLU tweeting about how he wanted Abigail Shrier's book banned and he said this is the hill I will die on.”— guest
Defending My Enemy
Aryeh Neier
“There was a book by a guy called Aya Nia who was the head of the ACLU called Defending Miami.”— guest
ChatGPT
OpenAI
“And I could I found it. It came up on Chuck GPT. And then it deleted.”— guest
Grok
xAI
“I went out to Grock and it did it straight away because Grock isn't saying that you uh are too delicate”— guest
Perplexity
Perplexity AI
“Well, let's try Perplexity. Put that into Perplexity.”— Joe Rogan
Ripley
Netflix
“Have you seen the Netflix series Ripley about the talented Mr. Ripley?”— guest
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Anthony Minghella
“you remember there used to be that film with Matt Damon years ago. It's the same story, same novel, an old Patricia Highmith novel.”— guest
The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan
“Isn't that a problem in the new Odyssey? Helen of Troy is black.”— guest
Pulp Fiction
Quentin Tarantino
“That's a plot in pulp fiction, isn't it? Where Bruce Willis's character bets on something he knows he's going. He loses the fight.”— guest
Big reveals from this episode
- Claims more than 12,000 people are arrested in the UK each year over social media posts, up from ~3,000 in 2020.
- Recounts Lucy Connolly sentenced to 31 months for a swiftly deleted tweet, serving over a year.
- Says the BBC gave its internal LGBT desk veto power over news stories critical of trans activism.
- Reveals comedy writer Graham Linehan was arrested by five armed officers at the airport shortly after appearing on the podcast.
- Notes Ted Cruz unwittingly retweeted Doyle's satirical Tatiana McGrath account as if it were real.
- Describes ChatGPT repeatedly showing then deleting a public-domain UK news article he was researching.
- Asserts a disproportionate number of trans-identified kids come from Hollywood families used as 'virtue flags.'
- Plays Yuri Bezmenov's 1984 KGB 'ideological subversion' interview as eerily predictive of today's culture.
Worth remembering
- The US Brandenburg test requires speech be intended and likely to cause imminent violence to be prosecutable; the UK threshold is merely whether people found it offensive.
- The theory that Shakespeare's work was written by an aristocrat traces to an American named J. Thomas Looney.
- Old Loeb Classical Library editions translated everything except the sexually explicit passages, which were left untranslated in Latin.
- Doyle cites a finding that 80-90% of adolescents referred to London's Tavistock gender clinic were same-sex attracted.
- A girl named Fox Varian who detransitioned won a $2 million lawsuit after a double mastectomy at 16.
- Troy was long thought purely mythical until Heinrich Schliemann's 1870s excavations at Hisarlik in Turkey.
- The cyclops myth may have originated from ancient people finding elephant skulls, whose central trunk cavity looks like a single eye socket.
- An ad framing 'Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you' reportedly produced a 2.7-point shift toward Trump among viewers.
- Sweden, once Europe's highest-trust low-crime society, now has among the most gun and bomb attacks of any non-warring country except Mexico.
- The UFC cancelled a fight over suspicious betting tied to a fighter allegedly conspiring to lose with inside knowledge of an injury.