#767 - Josh Szeps - Is It Time For Gay Pride To Go Away?

26:18Let's just let your freak flag fly however you want to, as my attitude. How have you want to live your life? Live your life. That's fine. It does get a world -class project. So world -pride day comes along. And I write a piece for the newspaper articulating these ideas, just saying, like, we'll ever come a time at which we don't have to make such a big deal out of this. Now at this moment in time, the public broadcaster is the official sponsor, the official broadcast partner of the festival. And I can see where this is going. So I send the article up the chain and they decline, they decline the external work request for this article to be published sort of at the 11th hour.

27:03It was going to be the main opinion piece in the main Broadsheet newspaper on the day of world pride. And we go back and forth and back and forth and they're like, no, it's a hard no. Why? Because people who present the public face of the public broadcaster, hosts like myself, are not allowed to express opinions about controversial cultural events. Okay, that's legit. But this is at a moment when there are gigantic rainbow flags hanging in the lobby of the building and every single other host, all of them straight, is singing the praises of world pride, having on people from world pride, talking about the fabulousness of world pride, every other radio promo in the ad breaks is about how great world pride is, tune on and world pride, you can hear it on the station.

27:59So it's not that you're not allowed to have an opinion about a controversial cultural event, it just has to be management's opinion. And I was like, right, Okay. So there's a, you know the old gag about the fish who are the yet to two young fish who are swimming along in the ocean and an older fish swims past and says, how's the water today guys? And the two young fish swim on and after all I want to them turns to the other and says, what's water? We are all in certain elite circles in an ocean of water that we don't even recognize. Did the people, did my colleagues feel like they wanted to sense my political opinions?

28:50Not at all. What they wanted to do was prevent the dissemination of hate, prevent unnecessary controversy. Why wouldn't you want to be on the side of gay people? Like, why are you being mean? Why are you always trying to kick a hornet's nest and cause trouble? Like, it's a party. Let's just be cool. Let's be cool with everything. So there's a kind of ideological conformism that doesn't even realize that it has political positions because those political positions just land as so common -sensical that it's just like an opposition to being mean or something like that. So don't touch the trans issue.

29:24Because as you primed it earlier on, And the, he's gonna write this thing, and then the complaints are gonna come in. Right. It's gonna be an administrative burden. Yes. Exactly. Well, that's true. Yeah. So, that was, those were a couple of things where it just became apparent that it wasn't necessarily gonna be as easy for me to maintain my integrity and autonomy and authenticity and credibility as I would have liked. And ultimately then it just became a process of them finding a way to get rid of me really. And luckily, uncomfortable conversations, my podcast, which is now my full -time gig, and we've just started a YouTube channel and we're starting to do live.

30:07Yes, exactly. I'm here with the master. I give you some tips. And now we're doing live. So there are sort of three legs to the stool at the podcast and the sub -stack where you can subscribe and get additional bonus content. And then there's the YouTube channel, and then there's Live Turing. So Douglas is our first live tour. Luckily, I had started doing the podcast before I signed my contract, and so they weren't able to middle in that. So I could do whatever I wanted to on the podcast. And farther down, this is part of exactly. Yeah, so you can't touch it. Because you've been, I mean, you're an episode, like, 150 or something now.

30:41Yeah, I've got lots. And I'll talk to Barry Weiss, and I'll talk to Sam Harris, and I'll talk to whoever, you know, it is and they will say things that are obviously not and applicable in line with the code of conduct of the public broadcaster. But yeah, the wheels fell off and it became an untenable situation. I think there was what was the actual flashpoint? What was the thing that they got you for? Like everything it was banal, it was they didn't get me for anything. It was just like a contract was up. So it's time to renegotiate contracts, you know, just letting you know there might be some, you know, a game of musical chairs where, you know, there might not be another, it might not be availability of a chair for you.

31:20So you might want to, you know, think about that. Look at the rock cast. When was this? When did you bring, when, when was this, uh, this was over the course of the, of the last six months of last year. Yeah. You know, the final. When was your final broadcast? That's another interesting thing, uh, which is that My final, so I resigned on air, and then there was still going to be five or six weeks left of broadcasting. And you like that guy at the sex party that just won't leave. Just hanging around like a bad smell. And then in the final moments when I was doing some publicity for the podcast, October 7th had happened.

32:00There was a lot of heat about Israel and Gaza. And I went on a television show to talk about anti -Semitism in Australia. And the fact that, and I hadn't been at work that day, so I hadn't been able to fill out the external work request form. Now you're supposed to fill out the external work request form even if it's not work and you're not getting paid for it, but if you're going to appear on any other outlet. Like to do this show? Yeah, that's right, exactly. I would have to fill out an external work request form, which is normally just a piece of paperwork and it's a formality. But I wasn't at my computer to log into the internal intranet where I have to submit the form to go to the blah, blah, blah.

32:40So I did this show and it was on a conservative network and it was on Sky News in Australia, which is not friendly necessarily the public broadcaster. But I was explicitly, I was absolutely inundated with requests to talk about my departure and to talk about the public broadcaster and to throw them under the bus after this all happened and when I made my statements on the air, I declined everything. I didn't want to be a bad loser. We left on good terms. I love the place. I love the people I worked with there. I think that it's being run well. This is just a fundamental sort of difference of opinion and priorities.

33:15So I didn't take anything. In fact, I declined a number of media requests that would have been really, really useful to me. Big profiles in newspapers and stuff because I just knew that they'd end up skewing it in a way that was unfavorable to my former employers and they didn't want to do that. But I did this thing about anti -semitism and they used that as a pretext to say that because you didn't fill out your external work request. You're not welcome back to do your final show and say goodbye to your audience. So take the final. What a bitter ending. So every opportunity there was for, I guess, conciliation and for us both to be the bigger parties were sort of squandered.

33:57And the reality is, I get it. You know, people are gonna be cautious. People are gonna be risk averse. People are gonna cover their arses. People don't want trouble. Not everybody has to be a trouble maker. I am. And it's so much better. Now I feel like there's a weight lifted off my shoulders. I mean, my sub stacks of subscribers doubled instantly when I left and then doubled again. And the week of the month after. So financially, I was happy to hear. I was happy. And now I get to just have rolled around and have conversations with people like you. You're mud. You're mud with the rest of us. So I learned this thing from Andrew Schultz.

34:38Not someone that you might immediately think is like an insight into like philosophical wisdom of mainstream media. But he's a smart guy and he said, I came up with basically Schultz's razor. it's not coordination, it's cowardice. So from the outside, it looks like a coordinated attempt to try and trans the kids or to deny some particular narrative. From the inside, it just looks like people that are terrified of losing their jobs. Yeah, and it may not even be cowardice. It may be something more insidious, which is the water thing, which is a form of group think or echo chain verification of like our minds, right?

35:17But it's, so on some instances, it'll be cowardice. Like, although they don't, I mean, even cowardice is too pejorative. Because if they thought that this was a really important issue to cover, they would have the courage to do it. And they show that every single day, journalists, social blindness in some way. It's, yeah, it's like, like I've spoken to, when I obviously received a bunch of pushback before doing the trends interview. And the producers who would articulate their pushback would say things like, I mean, it's just not that very interesting. It's like it's one of these kind of fringe things that some people like to scratch at, but like it affects so few people.

35:55It's like a culture war thing. People love to bang on about it all the time, but like there are so many more important things that we could be talking about. That's where their heads are at, right? So it's not that they're thinking, this is a really important story, but I'm gonna have to pay a price. They might be thinking that a little bit or they might be thinking it subliminally. It's more that we're developing an environment in which, I think, in part thanks to social media and algorithms, we're all living increasingly inside echo chambers. We're being nudged in directions because we're seeing content that is tailored by Silicon Valley to either reaffirm what we already believe or caricature what we don't believe.

36:39Right? Right. I mean, stage two or stage four at the, like, shiny object cycle. That's right. And even if you don't engage in the society object cycle, there are also so many more media outlets now that it's not like everyone is reading the New York Times anymore. Every person has their own kind of collection, their own mosaic of different places that they're getting information from. And throw into that the algorithm, which is designed to elicit some kind of reaction, right? It's good to design to favor content that is going to get you to either like it or comment on it or share it or something.

37:12and the kind of content that does that is not neutral nuanced content. The kind of content that does that is content that reinforces what you already believe or demonizes what you don't. So I think a lot of these people will be like, you know what? This is just not landing. This issue is not landing for me in my media ecosystem as something that is worth paying attention to, whether that's the criticism of, you know, aggressive gay pride or the criticism of pediatric transgender issues or you can go on and on with diversity, equity, and inclusion, or Black Lives Matter or feminism or the Me Too movement or something like that, when you feel like the world is actually, the bubble that you live in is actually the entire world, it's very difficult to understand why anyone would want to puncture that bubble if they're not just an asshole.

37:56Can you describe for the non -Australians amongst us what the current sort of cultural landscape is like with regards to culture war stuff in Australia? Because from the outside, it looks like... Yutes and bogans and good day for a beer and streakers on cricket pitches and barbecues. Right. But I see that lady on Sky News who often speaks to Douglas or like repurposes Piers Morgan's content and stuff. And I think, okay, the only reason that there would be a market for that, it's quite heavily anti -woke, yes. The only reason that there would be a market for that That is if there is a narrative to push up against.

38:40Yeah. I mean, there is not, I would say the culture war is much less hot in Australia than it is in the US, much less. When you see clips from things like sky news, that is, that has a vanishingly small audience. It has nothing like the power of Fox News. It's a little bit of a group of Murdoch -Halby horse, like let's just sort of keep this thing going and it is not shaping. Of course, there are people who are very plugged into Twitter and there are people who are very plugged into Podcast to stand and who are very riled up. But a lot of it's inherited, I think. A lot of it is kind of like, you know, where they're seeing what's going on with the craziness in America.

39:20And it's very selective as well. Like, you know, it's a bit like people have asked me, you know, is London now a no -go zone because of Muslim fascism. And I go to London and I'm like, well, no, it's not. So you actually go to Australia. It's quite reasonable. The culture war is not hot. There are people who cynically want to manipulate things like the transgender issue in order to express a little bit of latent bigotry, probably. But what it is is a highly conformist society. Aussies have sold the world this crocodile dundee, Steve Irwin image that were all rugged outdoorsmen, who buck conformism and we're individually quite compliant and orderly on the inside.

40:06Yes, actually, the vast majority of the population live in just a handful of big cosmopolitan multicultural cities. If anyone wants to look at the heat map, it's basically 95 % living in these little red dots in the old middle of it, just the way. Totally, totally. And so, you know, these are places where latte, sipping, shardonnay, swilling middle classes right there, you know, they can't go to work down the street. And so that breeds a certain kind of, I don't know, I was he's love a rule. We love to follow a rule. We love to, there's an ethos called Shelby Wright, which is, it's gonna be okay.

40:49Like, you know, dramas. You know, I don't worry too much. Is that similar to stiff upper lip? No, stiff upper lip has more backbone to it. She'll be right is more like an appreciation of mediocrity and the interests of not ruffling any feathers. That's not shit. Yeah. Just like that's the crap version of stiff upper lip. It's stiff upper lip if you take Churchill out. Right. And you put Chamberlain's studs in the nerfed version of that. Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting that looking at, especially COVID is a good flashpoint for this. I think first dose uptake in the UK for adults was like 93%, I think 93 % of people maybe even more ended up getting their first dose and then it was in the 80s for both second and third.

41:38I'm going to guess it's probably something similar. Oh yeah, it's massive in Australia. Well, we were in prison until we got vaccinated through you. You had more of an incentive to do it. So maybe the UK is even more broadly. But I find myself doing that, you know, I come over to the US and I spend time around here and like the inbuilt, I call it like Q desire, the British want to stand in a queue. It's so strong. It's such a compulsion that we have. But it speaks to a broader, quite orderly, and we know our place. Yeah. And we don't want to ruffle any feathers. Yes. And whereas America was built, genetically, it is the progeny of people from Ireland that said, yeah, fuck it.

42:25I'll go on that boat for six weeks. Let's see what happens. Yeah. So you just have that pioneer spirit here. I don't think we do. I mean, Australia is really interesting because I mean, if you talk about the origins of Australia, of course, it's a convict colony. It's a penal colony. So it was, you know, you would expect that a bunch of criminals would be pretty out there as well. Yeah, exactly. And we certainly don't have the British sense of, well, we don't line up as well as the Brits do. I got to say, but there's a thing where there's just like, there is a sense of, so there's a thing that sociologists talk about, which is horizontal trust versus vertical trust in the society.

43:01Some societies have very strong horizontal trust, meaning that you have trust in your peers, you have trust in your in strangers, you have trust in other people. And vertical trust is trust in a hierarchy or trust in authority, in the government and institutions. Very interesting. You can imagine societies that have a lot of horizontal trust, but not a lot of vertical trust. So like the Greeks, for example, you know, will have... They'll... You can leave your door open and expect that you're not going to get robbed, but the moment authority is involved, you don't have any trust whatsoever. What would be the opposite?

43:33The opposite would be any station country, like maybe China, where you wouldn't trust another person on the streets as far as you could throw them, but you absolutely trust in the hierarchy of authority. Yes, study government. Yes, study government, exactly. And what was weird during COVID is you sort of noticed that Australia and New Zealand have kind of inherited a bit of an East Asian outlook. I don't know how that happens exactly. I mean, we're in that neck of the woods. Chinese people have a lot of, yeah, right. whether we're susceptible to the Chinese style. So, yeah, we did, we were extremely obedient.

44:07I mean, there was a whole thing, but I don't wanna go, well, I don't have to revisit the entire history of COVID, that people might vaguely recognize me from a moment on Joe Rogan, if they don't already know me, where. It's a big kick off that one. We had a, you know, I love Joe, I've done Joe's show. Joe, that's you as well. Thank you. I'm glad. I did a show seven times. When I was on Half Post Live, he saw something that I did, which was a funny sort of like social justice just run in with a very woke person where I was just like basically saying like that. She was saying that, oh, of course, I'm, of course, you know, I would disagree with her because I'm a white man and white men love disagreeing with women of color.

44:41And I was like, hang on, I didn't give up my right to have a rational point of view just because I was born with balls and like, I was born white. What are you talking about? Talk to me like I'm a rational human being and talk to me as if I'm a cardboard cut out of some identity and she hung up on it. But you don't have enough intersectional points, right? Like, right. White gay men are the straight men of the LGBTQ world. That's right. Yeah. Black straight men are the white man of the black world. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. It's true But I do like to if people use the I pull the identity card I can always just at least I've got that least I can say like I find your homophobia Sickening We were just arguing about politics and I'm like I see I see I see you But so Joe saw that like back in 2014 2015 and invited me on a show and and then I basically had an open invitation for the while I was in the States and went on seven times, but the last time that I was on was during the heat of COVID and it was right at that moment when there was a spot, West Spotify and some artists were pushing back against Joe because of alleged misinformation and so on and there was a moment where he was saying something that was a point, an article of faith essentially among the anti -vaccine community, which was not true in the way that it was being presented and so we looked it up and it turned out that I was right on that thing and that went viral and then of course you know seeing in another media organizations like a football exactly and then they're like oh you know Australian slams Joe on his own show which is not what happened at all we were having an amicable conversation it's just two two two goes that get on and have spoken for like 50 hours and people were like people would hit me up and go wow like it's so brave to like stand up to Joe Rogan in his own and layer.

46:29And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? I mean, we're friends. My attitude towards friendship is I'm gonna call you on your bullshit. It was pervertly amicable. It's like if you say something that's not true, Chris, I'll be like, that's not true, mate. Come on, like, you know, let's figure this out. I'm gonna sit there. It just, it shows how little balls everybody else has. If they think that a conversation means with a person in a higher position of power in that context, means that you have to sit there and shut up and agree with everything? I say it's nonsense. Don't forget as well that there is no such thing as a well -meaning disagreement on the internet.

47:02Yeah, every disagreement on, especially Twitter as ground zero, but pretty much anywhere, no one ever says, hey man, I think that you're wrong on this point. Let me just take you through this or another card that's even more rare is, that's out of order. Like you can't, you don't get to say that. Yes. Everything is this sadonic, cutting, passive aggressive. I'm cooler than you. Nothing can get to me. That tenor online, I fucking hate. I very much just want to say the thing as it is. I've a club promoting for 15 years. Someone wasn't coming in the night club, it's because you're too drunk mate.

47:46It's because you don't have guests list, it's because we're full, it's because the ticket, you bought the ticket for the wrong evening, that's not my problem, I'm sorry, that's yours. whatever it might be. But online, it's all about trying to, I'm cooler than you with my funny little comment. Here's a quote tweet about something that you said this new question mark. It's all about that. So this, yeah, this sort of dunk porn doesn't have any room in it for people who disagree on certain things to be friends on others. It doesn't have any latitude at all for people to disagree in a way that they could get on afterward or to disagree in an earnest manner.

48:26It's like earnestness is what's very, very absent from all of this. It's all sardonics, sarcastic. It's like the worst British comedy, right? Just permanently back and forth. Between every... Yeah, that's interesting. And then you add on top of that, this other thing of like, you don't have standing to talk about this because you're not from the community. also adds on to that if you're talking about the social justice left, right? So I think the right is very good at this kind of sardonic, nod, nod, wink, wink, shit posting, kind of like dunking on everything, like not taking anything seriously, which I agree is actually really dangerous.

49:01It's not just annoying, it's actually dangerous. David Pakman does that from the left a lot. Right. His entire tenor on his show is a very sort of passive -aggressive. Well, we're just one second. I've got a thing to do. And it's like a, people get back into corners with questions that are purposefully done to try and make them look safe. David doesn't land that way for me. That's interesting. He did a number of times. I've seen it. I think that maybe because he doesn't see you as activating his anti -body wristband. Right. I see. But he certainly did it with the guys from trigonometry. He did it when he came on my show.

49:38And for instance, one of the examples was I referred to the BLM riots as the BLM riots. and he said, right, it's sorry, sorry, right. Is that accurate? I haven't heard anybody outside of Newsmax or OANN, call it that. And I was like, are we talking about the same as we're burning? Are we talking about the same mostly peaceful protest? So shopfronts were smashed. Yeah, David lost, and then he did a couple of shitty moves after the trigonometry interview. And that's unfortunate. He was like, just slimy shit. I kind of thought he was better done. Maybe he was something in off day, maybe he had a couple of off days.

50:17Maybe, I mean, I generally like David, but he's just, I listen to his content for a while. He's like not on, again, it's about being on a team. I'm just allergic to teams. I don't want to be on a team. Like I'm the tribe of the, you know, I want to be one of the leaders of the tribe of the tribalists, like people who just feel like, I mean, just carbonals are going to come for you. It's something not too much. Exactly. I know. Yeah. Yeah, it's an in joke about, in fact, Chris Kavanaugh. Yeah. Hello, Chris, love you. But I mean, I just, yeah, where were we before we talked about Pacman? Oh, yeah, that's right.

50:49So in addition to the snarkiness, on the left, there's a highly sensorious kind of hysterical attitude about you don't have standing to talk, like, like, like, read the room. Read the room, bro. Yeah. Like, you know, you don't just, this isn't your time. This isn't, yes, exactly. This is a time for you to be listening. It's not a time for you to be speaking. Yes. Right. I mean, the other day I was talking about, it just happened to be gay pride, Marty Gray in Australia again. So this came up again. It sounds like I'm obsessed with this issue. It's not it just happens to have happened. But didn't they get rid of cops?

51:21Oh, so this is what also happened. So this is a funny story. I like this. For the past quarter of a century, the uniformed police in Sydney have had a float in the So gay and lesbian police officers have had their own float in the Marley Gras as a way of float. Was that the gay and the gay? Yeah, they're on it. Right. What are they wearing? The uniforms for the normal uniforms. They're normal uniforms. They're normal. They're normal police. Like gay version. Regular police uniforms. And in the late 90s, this was a watershed moment because it was a way of taking gay rights and gay pride from being a fringe group that only freaks and perverts were into for the your local Bobby.

52:03Yeah, exactly. This is legit. You know, this is now a part of a community celebration that involves everybody. This is universal. Even the people who had previously been beating gays and lesbians in the riots of the 1960s and 70s are now well not the individual people. But the people who represent the institution that was prejudiced towards gays and lesbians, they now march. Then in the 2010s, the police force officially apologized to the LGBTQIA plus, That's what I'm supposed to say, community for the historical wrongs, for the hard harms that have been done by police against gays and lesbians.

52:39So everyone had kissed and made up. And then at the recent gay pride, which we call Māori Grā, a week or two prior, a gay couple who were reasonably prominent socialites in Sydney were killed allegedly, murdered allegedly by someone who they knew who was the young guy who was either an ex or just a stalker, but we had known one of them. This was a tragic, tragic domestic violence situation essentially where allegedly, I mean, they've disappeared. The guy then headed himself into the police.

53:27The He wasn't on duty. It wasn't a case of police brutality. It was a case of domestic violence where one individual went rogue. And as a result, the organizers of gay pride, the Madi Grah Board, convened an emergency meeting and uninvited the police from holding their float because it would be too hurtful and triggering to other participants to see police officers involved in Madigua. Now, there will be police officers there. I mean, they're going to be, they're going to be like, it's a huge event. So there will be uniform police officers on duty. But there won't be ones. So apparently those aren't triggering, but the ones who are standing on the giant penis or whatever it is, arch, they are, they are, they are, they weren't dressed normally.

54:18Right. So this caused a fewer or essentially an argument about whether or not the mainstream sort of gay and lesbian institutional activist class has become too identitarian and too fragile and too, I suppose, obsessed with a narrative of victimization instead of pride in the community of Andro, when you read this, a little bit. So my phone lit up with phone calls from the opinion editors of all the big newspapers saying, what do you think and do you wanna write something for this? And so I wrote something basically saying the cops should be allowed to participate. This person wasn't, you know, functioning in his capacity as a police officer.

55:07Not all cops. Not all cops. Not all cops. I mean, literally not all cops, right? And not only not all cops, He wasn't even being a cop when he was doing this thing. And the police force responded exactly as you would want them to and was equally horrified and has the guy in custody. And my basic argument was like, why are we sort of leaning into a narrative of our own fragility and victimization? Like as if we're incapable, we're going to be triggered and traumatized and it's going to make us feel unsafe to witness this stuff when the original virtue of civil rights in the 1960s and 70s, not just for gays, but for black people as well and all other minorities women and feminism.

55:56The idea was an idea of universalism. It was an idea that all people should be treated equally, regardless of their sex or gender or job or uniform. And that seems to have been replaced now by an ethos of identitarianism and tribalism where we're sort of picking goodies and baddies on the basis of whether they're in our in group or out group. So I was basically writing a piece arguing, can't we reclaim the universalism, the optimism in a sense of power, can't we take pride in powerfulness instead of powerlessness? And stop scratching at the wounds of the past and be inclusive and try to embrace universalism.

56:38Of course, that got me a huge amount of shit. I'm sure it did. Yeah, if I was a gay Australian person, the last thing that I would want is this like gay fragility, right? Like I don't know, even if it's like white fragility. It's like this is, it's almost being transplanted onto, Well, we must tip to around and we must... Yeah. Coleman Hughes' new book, The End of Race Politics. Really good, is he coming on? Yeah, he got him on. Actually, I just sat down with Coleman yesterday in New York. And this is to record, or... Yes, we recorded for my part of the cast. We're also recorded for my YouTube.

57:13So people should check out the YouTube as well, because I'm starting to do like, rather than just record things in the studio or via Zoom. I also want to make it a bit more fun and do some stuff outside that sort of feels a bit more like comedians and cars getting coffee and they have us walk on the other side. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, sorry. I don't know if you know Thomas Chatterton Williams, who's another really interesting guy. He and I caught up and we just went to Riverside Park and just sat outside and Chatterton walked around Grant's tomb and talked shit and then Coleman Hughes and Jesse Singord.

57:43Yeah. And if you know Jesse, Jesse, that's how Tradoc's thingy thingy. Yeah, right. So the three of us hung out. So that video will all be, it's not up yet, but that's all coming to you too. It'll be a lot of fun for them. before this one does. But with Coleman's new thing, he kind of highlights the patronizing nature of assuming that black people are very fragile and that we must step on eggshells around them, which is a soft bigotry in a way. And it's the same thing with, again, true equality is when you have to put up with the same level of shit that everybody else does. Yep. And in terms of who gets to talk about this stuff, just looping back to like who has standing and like, you know, read the room and kind of, you know, now is a time to be quiet and just to listen.

58:36When I wrote that, of course, the reason why the three newspaper editors called me is because I identify as gay. But the arguments that I was making really have nothing to do with my own gayness. I have a special pedestal because I happen to be married to a man. And I was in a room talking to another bunch of people and they were all sharing my, my sense about this that was kind of agreeing with me and one of the guys said, well, thank God you can say it. And I was like, you actually can say it. You as a straight guy, you actually are allowed to say it. And I actually am allowed to have an opinion about the way that blacks and whites should get along in society even though I'm not black.

59:16And I actually am allowed to have an opinion about how we should be dealing with children with gender dysphoria, even though I'm not trans. And I actually, you know, like, we all live in this fucking society. This is a demos. We're in a democracy. We get to hash it out. We get to have conversations. We get to wrestle with this shit. I want a capacious public square that is ram -bunctious and fun and funny and playful and when it needs to be earnest and serious and that wrestles with things that you're not allowed to wrestle with because that's the only way that we're going to progress. I mean, yeah, your lived experience will have informed some of the insights that you have about pride and global pride day, but presumably a sufficiently smart, while reasoned person could have got pretty close to that without having to...

1:00:00Of course they could. I mean, they could look, if what you're investigating is what it feels like to be in the closet or come out of the closet or what it feels like to walk through the world as a Pakistani woman or what it feels like, to be a five year old transgender person with one leg, then you need to talk to those people to get a sense of what it feels like. But if what you're talking about is like how society should respond and think about the way that it structures itself, the way that it talks to itself, and the way that it deals with grievances, then that's something in which we all have a say, including straight white males.

1:00:40Talk to you. He's being on Allah. Talk to me about the problem with the anti -woke, because, again, being a part of your tribe -less tribe, presumably you've got problems with both step number four, which is like the left -wing re -response, but also step number two, which is lame. So there is this cynical industry of anti -woke right -wing shitwards, really, who will use the spectra of cancel culture as an excuse to push beliefs that they've always had in the first place. Cancel culture is something that really began with the right, was perfected by the right. McCarthyism was cancel culture, the sensoriestness of the religious right against pornography and the hysteria of the war on drugs.

1:01:33These were all right wing. Harry Potter, when Harry Potter first went. Harry Potter, yes, exactly because it was demonic or the most ban book. the most banned bucket the 21st century Harry Potter and not banned by the left. No, that's why that lady's thing, the witch trials object was so clever. She actually people should listen to that episode of uncomfortable conversations with Megan Phelps wrote because they've already heard it is modern wisdom conversation with them. Yeah, but she's great. She's fantastic. She's so good. But so, where was I just going with that? The anti -woke industry. Anti -woke industry.

1:02:12Right, the anti -woke industry. There's a cynicism to it. There's a kind of like, I kind of got you and what did you just say? There was, we've got the sort of left -wing story goes out, the right -wing response to that, what it causes downstream is for the shitwads industry to spin up. Right. And then the sensoriousness, well, cancel culture was perfect. Yes, that's right. There was something, the particular thing that I was thinking of there was a multi -parten, right? So, a multi -parten comes out with the life of Brian. And of course, it's the right wing that doesn't want, you know, they're absolutely looting their shit.

1:02:55They've got their tits in a tangle because it's satirized in Christianity. And so the right perfected cancel culture, and what's happened recently is that the left has lost its focus on the bread and butter of the left, which is uplifting working people and striving for equality and caring about class, essentially, and wanting economic justice to becoming obsessed with the narcissism of small differences between our tribes and the color of your skin and who you want to sleep with and what your gender identity is and so and in so doing, they've become as sensorial and hysterical as the right always used to be.

1:03:32And that has now triggered some bad actors, many bad actors on the right to take the moral high ground and complain constantly about cancel culture. A cancel culture that they themselves have been complicit in or their movement have been complicit in for bloody decades. Let's talk about McCarthyism, right? And the sorry history of... I don't know what that is. Oh, sorry. So in the 1950s, the Cold War, Senator Joe McCarthy wanted to crack down on communism in America, and basically created show trials for anyone who was suspected of being a communist, many of whom were just innocent left -wing people.

1:04:08And basically blacklisted half of Hollywood and half of the creative arts in this country in a witch hunt of communists. It was devastating, it was sort of Soviet style, it was Stalinist, it was incredibly intrusive, and the right loved it because they thought communism was an existential threat, and you couldn't express any really progressive ideas without potentially being considered an enemy of the state. That was a sorry chapter in American history, and many people who would have been champions of that would now be complaining about the woke cancel culture people. You even see it in real time where you'll have some conservative publications who are champions of free speech supposedly and their anti -work and their anti -cancel culture.

1:04:52And the moment somebody says, you know, some, I don't know, anti -zionists says something pro -Palestinian. All of a sudden they're in favor of that person losing their job. Well hang on a fucking second. Excuse me. Like, my parents were Holocaust survivors. I'm a conflicted, you know, sometimes anti -zionists, sometimes zionists definitely think the Palestinians should have a state, think it's absolutely tragic that the Palestinians and join the situation that they're in, but also deeply uncomfortable with the extremities of some of the anti -ionist rhetoric, which I think is bordering on anti -Semitism, it's complicated.

1:05:23If you're not finding it complicated, you're in the wrong, I'm sorry. The world is extremely messy and extremely complicated. If you're not confused by it, if you're confused by it, then you're on the right track, I would say. These are very messy complicated things, and the only way to resolve them, in fact, the only way to survive the 21st century in an era of algorithms and artificial intelligence and climate chaos is going to be for us all to get on the same page by having conversations, by having uncomfortable conversations, and by talking to each other and wrestling through these things.

1:05:53So don't give me this bullshit if you're on the right by saying that, you know, our cancel culture is coming for us, an endlessly amplifying sort of cherry -picked examples of the extremism of the left, the kind of lips of TikTok phenomenon, where, oh my god, look at this ridiculous protest on some random university campus in the United States. This is the most important thing that we have to focus on every hour of the day. And then the moment someone gets censured for having a position that you disagree with, you pile on as well and you participate in a cancel culture from the other side. Just stop it.

1:06:23Like stop it. We have to engage with people on the basis of ideas. Don't punish people for their ideas. If they're saying something stupid or hateful or wrong, then counter that by saying something right. The solution to a bad idea is a good idea. It's not getting the person who has the bad idea fired, whipping up a mob on social media to try to take them down, storming corporate offices with metaphorical pitchforks to try to ruin people's lives. And I've come out, in support of my enemies, my ideological enemies, to say that they shouldn't have, you know, been petitions in Australia, to have certain people who I vehemently disagree with, who I think are doing real damage, to have their contracts with their publishers canceled or to pressure behind the scenes for them to lose a podcast or other.

1:07:12And I've actively said to my colleagues and friends, don't do it, don't go down this path. You don't want to open this door. You don't want to end up living in a society where everybody is trading on egg shells, aren't able to say what they think, worried about triggering trip wires, worried about the mob coming for them. and we, I mean, it's gonna come for you. You'll reap the world one. You will reap the fucking whirlwind, and even if you don't reap it personally, you will reap having to live in a world in which people feel stifled and suppressed and afraid. Speaking of protests at live talks, did you see Concenting Kissin is in Australia at the moment and shame I'm just missing him.

1:07:55But I'm actually using up with him to break the door down. What? Have you not seen this video? I haven't seen it. I've been traveling for the past week, I haven't seen anything. You should be on Twitter. You should be locked into the main frame. It should be directly IV. So Constantine is at what looks like some prestigious university, big vaulted halls, and he's giving some sort of a talk up on stage. There's these big wooden doors, huge arched motherfuckers, and the banging and chanting and like, and they're obviously trying to break in. And this woman goes over with a blanket, put a blanket at the bottom of the door to like just drown out a little bit more of the sound, because maybe there's a bit of gap or whatever, puts a little bit of thing, Constantine takes it.

1:08:35Yeah, that'll fix it. Yeah, Constantine says something and everything continues. But Douglas Murray as well. And there's going to be a lot, you've got. Yes, there already is. Yeah, there already is. So, talk to me, you know, you've got Constantine, Russian immigrant living in the UK, and you've got Douglas going over to Australia. What is the, what's happened with your tours so far? Is the petitions for? Yes, live shows, we don't want this to happen. Not in our city. Yes, no hate, man. No hate, Chris. Why, in favor of hate? Why, in favor of Douglas spreading his hate? Douglas and Josh spreading their, spreading hate and spreading it.

1:09:15I don't know, man. It's something's happening. Something's happening in the world. I think since COVID, friends and colleagues of mine who were on the heterodox side of things have careened completely off the rails into far right conspiracy land. And on the left, friends and colleagues of mine have careened off the rails into if you disagree with us then by definition your peddling ideas that are so bad that you shouldn't be allowed to say them. And yet we live at a time when everybody has more ability to counter ideas than they've ever had, right? Everybody, sure, not everybody can write an opinion piece for the newspaper or have bazillions of podcast listeners as we have the good fortune to do, but we didn't get there from from me because I was born there, right?

1:10:17I mean, we earned it and anybody can earn it now. You have the capacity to push back against bad ideas, but there's something on the left at the moment, which is sensorious, hysterical. It's a group think. And it has brought into an idea about what discourse is supposed to be that is completely detached from the values of traditional liberalism and the Enlightenment. Like it's like these people are not aware of John Stuart Mill and are not aware of the idea that the best way to progress as a society is to have a maximally large conversation about things so that together you can weed out what's and what's not true, what's useful and not useful, what's hateful and not hateful.

1:11:11And communally, collectively, you can sort of arrive at better and better ideas. That's what the Enlightenment was. That's why we're surrounded by the prosperity that we are, basically, because a few scots mostly came up with the idea that human beings should be maximally tolerant of other ideas and respectful of each other's property, and including intellectual property, and engage with them rationally on the basis of science and reason, instead of on the basis of superstition and prejudice. That's why the West has achieved what the West has achieved, essentially, along with the industrial revolution, which was largely generated by those same principles.

1:11:54And yet there's now a push That is almost messianic in like its self certainty. It's like people who are like, we don't need all this troublesome talking. We already have the answers. We know that Douglas Murray is a fascist Zionist. We know that he says intolerable things about Muslims. He's an Islamophob. Let's march in the streets, go and get Josh and Douglas. No hate. No hate, isn't he? Get rid of the hate. Well, that's very convenient, isn't it? Everyone you don't like is just hate. like what are you talking about? How would we know whether he's right or wrong until you're unless you hear him?

1:12:33And when you do hear him, push back, tell him he's wrong. I mean, and then the counter -argument always ends up being, well, what if it was a Nazi? Would you platform a Nazi? What if it was someone saying that we should kill all the Jews? No, I wouldn't platform such a person because that's not an interesting point of view and it's likely to get lots and lots of people immediately hurt. But let's set the bar a little higher than I rather a feat intellectual Englishman who has accurately predicted some of the some of the royling social issues and cultural schisms that have emerged over the past 20 years.

1:13:09There's an idea from my friend Gwinderbogel called a semantic stop sign. One way people and discussions is by disguising descriptions as explanations. For instance, the word evil is used to explain behavior, but really only describes it. It resolves the question not by creating understanding, but by killing curiosity. And that's the same as like, no hate. Yes. The mantis stop sign. Right. Right. Yep. And when you called the BLM riots, riots, you were also engaging in hate, in a sense, right? It's like the bubble is inescapable. And I mean, this is something I'm also cautious about in expanding uncomfortable conversations from podcast into YouTube, into live events that I too don't get caught in a bubble.

1:13:59You know, I don't want to... Yeah, there's this phenomenon of audience capture where you think that the audience wants something and so you keep on feeding it to them. I'm very wary of that. It's very hard, man. I mean, you know, you are... You want to make things that add value to the world. You want to embrace your own curiosity. That's what you do. You're following your instincts. That's something that's super, super important. Yes. It's your best competitive advantage. It's the way that you can stay ahead of trends. It's the way that you come across as unique. And it's also the most enjoyable thing for you to do because it's just natural outpouring of whatever you're interested in.

1:14:35But you also want to do things like it's not just your pet project. This isn't a fucking hobby. It's somewhere between business enterprise, an environmental impact movement, a way to nudge the world and leave behind some sort of legacy that you think is at least one tiny fucking microscope movement of culture was done maybe by one conversation for one family of people that I had. So I can see audience capture being basically puppeted by throwing red meat to your audience to only give them what they want and what they're going to agree with. And on the opposite side, being like some dude yelling about whatever he's interested in in his basement that no one listens to, like on that spectrum, there is a middle ground that you want to try and achieve.

1:15:17Yes, well, I mean, some guy yelling in his basement about something that he seems to be interested in is definitely not my aspiration. But I do think that some dude talking in his basement about some of the most important issues and with some of the most intriguing intellects in the world in ways that are considered taboo and in ways that could get you in trouble in a mainstream institution is has an appeal and that in order to maintain the integrity of that, actually the best sort of load star, the best light on the hill is still my own sense of integrity, interest, and authenticity because the problem with listening too much to your audience is that the tiny fraction of your audience who actually reaches out to you and tells you what they like and don't like do tend to be the most invested.

1:16:06And it's a self -selecting group. I learned this in talk radio. You know, sometimes I started as a talk radio producer when I was just starting out. And the host of the radio show would like sometimes do something and he'd say, look at this, the board's lighting up, everyone's calling in. And I'd be like, well yeah, but the board has eight lines on it. And there are 300 ,000 people listening, right? So the measurement of how many people are calling in is just a measurement of, is there a sufficiently invested minority of people who are willing to pick up the phone and talk to me? Doesn't necessarily mean that the other 300 ,000 people find that particularly interesting.

1:16:43And similarly, it's important to know that the people who really, really, really, you know, you're throwing red meat to because they're super, super ultra fans, that's fabulous. God bless them. I love you. Don't unsubscribe. But nonetheless, at the end of the day, I'm not going to give you exactly what you want because I think there's a bigger pool of people. I can't have a reasonable center. And I should add here, when I say center, some people misunderstand that and they think, oh, Josh is just a kind of person who positions himself between two poles and whatever the left does and whatever the right does, Josh is gonna sit comfortably in the middle and shout at both of them.

1:17:20That's not what I mean by the center. What I mean by and maybe center is the wrong term. I sometimes call it the radical center. What I mean is a position where I try to evaluate what the most reasonable position is, regardless of whether or not the left or the right happen to agree with that thing. Sometimes I'll put me on the left, sometimes I'll put me on the right. The average is going to end up being the problem that you have there is, I think most ideological beliefs aren't about what you believe. They're about shows of field to your side or the other. and what people see in someone that they can't predict is an unreliable ally.

1:17:56Yeah, this is why I am an unreliable ally. Well, that's a huge problem. You know, if we know, don't, no need to worry about Josh. He's on board with the trans stuff, he's on board with the gay stuff, he's on board with the abortion stuff, he's on board with the immigration stuff, he's on board with the gun control and the taxation and all the rest of it. If I know one of your views and from it, I can accurately predict everything else, then we don't need to worry about him. And this is, you know, people have got lots of problems with Sam Harris, but one of the biggest ones that no one really ever talks about is that he's one of the most unreliable allies that you're ever going to have.

1:18:31And I have to presume that Sam believes the things, it's way easier to say, oh, he's confused or he's captured or he's, he's, he's deranged in some way or he's whatever, whatever thing it is. Because for Sam to arrive at a lot of the positions that he holds, He pays like a pretty high price for them. He regularly loses huge swaths of his audience. He regularly gets made fun of online and Twitter and stuff like that. It'd be way easier for him to either not comment or to comply, you know, what's the like one -z outfit that I'm a part of and I'll just sort of slot this next view in on the end of that.

1:19:14So the incentive to do something that pisses off any group And this is the same for it to matter if you're not going to podcast or anything like you're at work and someone brings up something and you just find yourself the Compulsion to just go yeah, yeah, I know isn't it isn't it awful? And you go I don't think that I don't think that I don't think isn't it awful I think I completely understand why that thing happened all the reverse the human compulsion for compliance in Many people I'm one of them is is unbelievably strong. And I understand that we've got guys like Douglas or a Ben Shapiro or whatever, who just like effortlessly sit in tow curling cringed debate and seem to revel in it like pigs in mud.

1:19:56Cool. That's not, I think most people, and for the, you know, the silent majority of people pleases out there. Yeah. Understanding there are these poles. There are these sort of compulsions and desires that your inner state has to just, we'll just smooth the water. But Chris, do you feel comfortable in that state? No, no. Being disagreeable both in personal life and on the show is something I'm actively having to work unbelievably harder. Disagreeable in a personal exchange like we're having now or disagreeable about an abstract idea when you're publishing it on social media or elsewhere. First one.

1:20:41Right. First one. If you know that position that I had about like this fucking shiny object cycle, that I think sits somewhere in the middle of a bunch of things, but it's going to piss off a lot of people because they say no, no, no, it is righteous. We do need to be able to be pushed back against this stuff. I'm fine to do that. It's more so into personal. Yeah. So for me to, you know, if I was around the water, I don't think Sam has that either. And I don't think I have that either. But he and I both share and I think you do as well if I want to psychoanalyze you a desire to scratch behind the surface of what's really going on in a way that you know is going to piss people off just to get to the intellectual juice of what's actually happening.

1:21:26I think it's largely a fight between your discomfort at upsetting people on one side and your desire for intellectual satisfaction on the other. Yes. And it's a few reawescing to you is what pulls you through. And it's interesting you say that you would be easier for Sam Harris to sort of strategically in a panda to particular groups. Of course, that's not true at all because I know Sam well and he would find it incredibly difficult to betray himself. Right. Because he's a man of immense integrity and authenticity. So the easiest thing for him to do is the thing that he is doing, which is to be true to himself and to have credibility in his own eyes and to get up in the morning and look in the mirror and respect himself.

1:22:01And so the anti ally thing is interesting. Yes, of course, you're not an ally to the tribes as they currently constructed in society. You're not an ally to the right and you're not an ally to the social justice left. But you are an ally to people who value integrity. And I suspect there's a lot of those people actually. People will disagree with me on particular issues. My gamble here is that they will always value the fact that I'm free from bullshit, that I'm authentic and that I have integrity, right? I'm an ally on that. So yeah, I'm not going to be an ally on your fucking pet issue. You know, don't come at me because I said the wrong thing about X, Y, or Z.

1:22:45But you know that I will be arriving at that conclusion rationally and reasonably. I'll be respecting my people who I disagree with. I'm not going to be demonizing them. I'm not going to be strong -maning them. I'm going to be trying to articulate things that I disagree with in as generous a way as possible. I'm going to be epistemologically humble and try and understand the limitations of my own knowledge and always hedge a little bit and say on the other hand, I do understand that other people, other reasonable people can disagree on this particular issue. And I'm an ally on that. Richard Dawkins once said something about people who get offended when he criticises their religion.

1:23:19He said, I respect you too much to pretend to respect your stupid beliefs.

1:23:28That's how I feel about everything. Everything. Don't come at me and tell me that you're offended because of what I'm saying. It's a sign of respect to you to believe that you are capable of hearing what I'm articulating. And if it's wrong, tell me why. Don't try to get me fired. Tell me why it's wrong. And I will respect your position. I mean, if it's a really stupid position, then I won't, of course I won't respect it. But I will use the yardsticks of reason and rationality to try to understand you. And I will always have you back on that. I will always be an ally of people who do that. I just won't be part of your tribe.

1:24:05I mean, it's bloody ridiculous what you were just saying about how you can predict people's opinions on things on the basis of other opinions. Like if you tell me what you think about corporate tax rates, I can predict with some certainty what you think about climate change. They're two completely fucking different ideas. Why can I make that prediction? Because you've gone down a bloody checklist of, oh yes, all right, this is what my tribe tells me to believe. You know, on something, take immigration. I think part of, I think one of the reasons why I was initially successful in the United States to the extent that I was was, because Americans are actually quite open to hearing, and I wonder if this is your experience as well.

1:24:41hearing, it's kind of advice from a friendly foreigner, or like the take of an ally from abroad, who sees things differently. Like I've never understood why it's a crazy idea to secure the Southern border and to bias America's immigration policy towards migrants from who you choose from all over the world. Like I love migrants. I love living in Sydney, which is incredibly multi, one of the multi -ethnic cities in the world. I, you know, I'm a huge fan of immigration and Australia picks its people very, very specifically. And in fact, after the Second World War, Australia made a conscious decision that the price to pay to increase the population massively and have one of the highest per capita immigration rates in the world, and I think it's number one on a refugee resettlement, one or two Australia.

1:25:30In order to the price you have to pay to get the populace to agree with that, is to have a bloody brutal border policy, which is obviously not easier if you're in an island than if you have a physical border. But you have to make this fast -earned pact where you go, if the people feel that they are in total control, then you give them the freedom to be generous towards foreigners, and you can have a high immigration rate and a highly multicultural society with very little pushback. The reason why you have anti -immigration sentiment as high as it is in the United States and in the UK, UK as well, and I believe the reason why you had Brexit and the reason why you had Donald Trump was in part because people felt like things were spilling out a They felt like there was demographic change that they couldn't handle that nobody was in control of.

1:26:13There were hordes coming in from somewhere or other. They didn't know who these people were. As a pro -immigration person, I always was on the kind of conservative side of this even though I'm on the left. So there so people would find it hard to peg when I got here and I think Americans kind of appreciated that. I like like he's a foreigner. Well, I remember I went on the air one of the first times I went on the air on half -boss life. We were talking about But voter ID laws in the United States, which for people who don't know if they're outside the states, some states introduce the requirement to show ID when you vote at voting poll.

1:26:48Normally, you don't have to show any ID. You just go up and you give your name and you vote. So they say, let's secure the polls by requiring people to show ID. Now some states misuse this and abuse it by saying that you can show a gun license, but you can't show a student card. In order to cherry pick the kinds of demographic, demographics who they want to vote. But the fundamental principle, everybody else at half -posting all my left -wing colleagues were like, this is a way of suppressing people of color because people of color tend not to have, you know, up to date, they move more. Basically, the idea is that poorer people move more and are less likely to have IDs.

1:27:25And poorer people are black, of course, they never say the poor bit. They just claim that it's racist. It's racist. Yeah, it's a racist policy, essentially. Well, they're blind to class problems and economic problems unless the race problem unless they race problems. Exactly So I just went on the air and I was like I Mean Sorry for not telling the party line here, but Who doesn't have An ID like you've never driven a car you've never been to a bar You never got on a plane like who are these people who are now? I'm sure this is a very privileged thing. I'm sure lots of people don't have ideas But the fact that I could say that and make that makes me an enemy to the left, right?

1:28:05But I'm also an enemy to the right because I'm not saying it for the same reason that they are. I want to secure the border. I want to take a lot more people. I want a lot more Bangladeshese in America. But why do Bangladeshese get discriminated against just because they can't walk across the Rio Grande? Yeah. But isn't it interesting that the only way you've been able to get away with saying that is by not having the left or right presupposition requirement of somebody that was born in this country. Oh, he's able to ask that question because he doesn't know. He's able to ask that question because he's just interested.

1:28:38Yes. And it's a rational question to ask. But I do it in Australia as well, even where I am, you know, and native. And just sorry, we'll ask that on that point about sort of building up, flexing the muscle of being disagreeable in one -on -one communications. I don't think it's necessary for everybody to fight every fight. I don't think it's necessary in the office when someone says something that you regard as being tribalistic or that is evidence of them being trapped in an echo chamber. For you to go to the wall on that, I think it can be deranging. Jordan Peterson was in Australia and he tweeted when his plane landed.

1:29:20It's a big thing in Australia now as a bit of background to do a land acknowledgement or an acknowledgement of country before you do anything, right? This has become part of the culture. So this is a, it's a way of saying of First Nations Australians that the land that we're now on is, and you name the tribe of the land or whatever it is, okay? It's a way of signaling. It will, it will, it will get started out a bit virtue signaling. I think in the US, it's still highly virtue signaling because it hasn't become mainstream yet. But in Australia, it is completely normalized to begin a meeting by saying just want to respect the traditional owners of the land, the so -and -so people.

1:29:58Now, that can get a bit ridiculous. It sounds silly. It does sounds... I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what's really fucking silly. I'll tell you what's really silly is when you're like in a Zoom meeting with four white middle -aged ladies who are from HR and they all try to do it. Like then it's like, what do we do? Is this a mutual masturbation club? We're all just telegraphing to each other that we're on the correct page. Like it's a virtue signal, anything. Nonetheless, the airlines in Australia now do that. You land and they go, you know, welcome to Melbourne, you know, the traditional, you know, place of the so and so people.

1:30:34So Jordan Peterson tweets out, Stop this virtual signal like nonsense. You're a communist, you know, blah, blah, blah, as I don't wanna have this shove down my throat. And I'm like, bro, love you. Pick your battles. Pick your battles. You don't have to be, you don't have to be, you're not gonna win it and it sounds petty. Not everything is an existential fight. So I would say like, don't become the asshole who tries to call everyone out. But I understand the compulsion on that, you know, I see, I explained this on a Q &A recently about how I really enjoy the fact that I have this unreasonably reasonable audience for the most part.

1:31:18But as you brought up, we don't know what get compels people to comment and whatever it is is unified at least across some subset of people that are commenters. So comments always kind of have the same tanner to them. A lot of them converge onto a few broad buckets of whatever they're talking about. But as the channel grows, because you remember the insults, not the compliments, any increase in channel size doesn't feel like an increase in support. It just feels like an increase in hate because you start to accumulate more of these outlier events whereby people find a thing that they think is reprehensible.

1:31:53and I started to, I've started to notice maybe in the last six months, at least the beginning of why people of whatever Jordan size or whoever size could be motivated to like see

1:32:13conflict everywhere because they are so used to just this barrage of bullshit online. And the problem with a barrage of bullshit is that there is probably some streaks of piss that you could have paid attention to in that bullshit. And the whole thing is just washed to one side. So what do you do? You see everything is an attack. Everything is something that you can go for. You should go up against. Picking your battles when you're in the middle of a war is unbelievably difficult. It is, but it's so necessary. It's actually so necessary because you're deranged by your experience of the world. Like you become everybody.

1:32:54It's so, and you know, fucking champagne problems. Yeah, I get it. Like this is the job you chose. This is the platform like, oh boohoo. Oh, understood. I agree. But that doesn't fix the dynamic that we're talking about. The dynamic is still going to persist. Whether you or me or anybody believes that it should be that way or it shouldn't be that way. But you have to just, you have to be cognizant enough to take a 30 ,000 foot view and go, So that dynamic is also taking place on the other side. So the people on the other side of politics, my opponents are also receiving the same kind of crazy bullshit from people who would regard themselves as being on my side.

1:33:33Therefore we're both trapped in mirror image echo chambers of hate that are ratch that are extremifying us. The algorithms are also, you know, load that on, plus load on the fracturing of the media landscape, plus load on the cowardice and group thing of mainstream media institutions that are failing to wrestle adequately with some of the issues that you want to talk about. And you have a recipe for a self -reflexive feedback loop of ever greater polarization, which is only going to lead to ultimately, I do fear, tearing society apart into some kind of low -grade cultural, genuine civil war, which could mean, you know, at least the temporary collapse of civilization in the 21st century.

1:34:18So you can't participate in it. You've got to find a way. I sometimes regard my job as, I'm not necessarily gonna agree with me, but I want to talk in such a way that I can nudge both sides 10 % closer to understanding each other. And if I've done that, then I've done my job. I don't want to be going 10 % further away. And all the incentives, as you say, are pulling me 10 % further away. They're trying to make, they're trying to radicalise us. It's our job to resist them. It's our job to make sure that whereas generous as possible towards people who disagree with us, we don't exaggerate minor slides.

1:34:56We play a big game, we talk about the big stuff and we talk about it in ways that everybody who's listening unless they're literally about shit crazy can sort of understand that we're being fairly reasonable about. Talk me through what you see for the next five or ten years when it comes to culture and the landscape of conversation and stuff like that. I fundamentally disagree with the doom orism, the world is ruined, everything's going to hell in a hand basket. A perspective, I fundamentally disagree with it because I think that people are super agentic and the ability for people both individually and collectively to adapt and to come together in different ways is essentially unpredictable, but it does seem to be becoming increasingly predictable.

1:35:46The tribal, this is the, you know, classic cycle of shiny objects syndrome that we're going to see. What do you think? Run me through your prediction for the next slide. I mean, it's so hard to know, isn't it? It's like my, I tend to agree with a guy I had on uncomfortable conversations called Toby Walsh, who is Australia's leading artificial intelligence researcher, he runs the AI lab at the University of New South Wales, who says he thinks everything's going to be fine. In fact, great, ultimately, and the next 20 or 30 years are going to be really rough. What a time to be alive until we figure out what's going on.

1:36:28And I, I say that because I mean, you're a good example of the potential of the agentic person, right? that transformation, self -reliance kind of, you know, putting in place, and anyone who's had this experience is aware that it is available to us. You know, in the first year of the pandemic, I put on about 10 kilos, like more than 20 pounds, eating ice cream and watching Netflix. And then in the second year of the pandemic, I lost like 50 pounds, like 20 kilos. All right, and I've maintained that screw you waiting since, yeah, you know, and I started working out and I started eating properly and I started giving a shit.

1:37:08And anyone who's had that experience of sort of reasonably radical and fast, I can change the nation, I can change my world. Yes, that's absolutely possible. And that is available to us in every single second of the day. And I think it's a wonderful thing that you do, and I think it's a wonderful thing, that Joe does to the extent that his content is about that as well. I mean, Joe is one of the reasons why I have a podcast. I went on Joe's show before I had a podcast. And after the show, he was like, what are you doing with these dumb, dumbs at, you know, Huff Post? You know, a podcast. And I was like, all right, I'll give it a shot.

1:37:37He's an inspiring person. He's a person who helps people. He's a person who has done an enormous amount for everybody in the community. I'll always be appreciative and grateful to Joe. And he gave me exposure, like massive exposure when I wasn't a person who deserved it. Well, maybe I deserved it, but I didn't know other avenue for it. And so, yes, to the extent that people can get into that, can lock into that, fabulous. Do most people in practice This lock into radical transformation of themselves on a daily basis. They don't. So the temptation, the sort of cookie jar that's in the kitchen, always looking at you and the temptation to take the cookie, which is this supercomputer in your pocket with apps that are designed with algorithms to just be constantly begging for your attention, using the principles of like poker machines, like intermittent rewards that will time your notifications on precisely the number of microseconds, milliseconds, that the engineers know are likelyist to coincide with when you're most vulnerable and susceptible to responding to that notification, to looking at it and to therefore grabbing your attention and dragging you back into their multiverse of madness.

1:38:52Those temptations are very hard to counter. Artificial intelligence is this other wrench in the works that is going to have untold ramifications. I mean, now we have video that's just being brought out. And, you know, when it is, when there is no barrier to disseminating bullshit, what's that going to look like? How long is it going to take humankind to figure out how to regulate this and how to think about this. I mean, I hope that in the future we'll look back on this period as if it was an era where like I can't believe everyone was just walking around with Kalashnikovs, you know, but we didn't regulate Kalashnikovs.

1:39:36We were just like, hey, we invented the Kalashnikov. Let's all have one. And at some point in the future, I mean, I'm leery about governments, you know, regulating things because they're usually so bad at doing it, but there has to be some kind of break on the way that artificial intelligence is going to intersect with algorithms to be able to devise maximally addictive and maximally deranging content. And I can't see how the average person is going to be able to resist it. Yeah, resist it. Regardless of the self -actualized actions that we want them to. What's happened in Australia, what's happened in the UK with vapes?

1:40:12You know, smoking, you know, these sort of laws that are coming in. And basically what what it's been deemed is that even though this isn't legal, it is able to hack the human system in such a compelling way that basically people don't have full control of themselves. Therefore, daddy government needs to come in and assist them toward an outcome that we think on balance is probably best for everybody. Your phone is way stronger of an intrinsic drug dealer. than a vapours. It's think about how many times you've been sat on a plane, you pull your phone out and unlock it and cycle through a bunch of apps before you realize that you're 35 ,000 feet in the air.

1:40:52It's ridiculous. It's a compulsion. It's so hard. And to the biggest still for me now, so many, I think episode 10, I had with Kai Wei, who was the guy that created the light phone, which is now in its second or third generation. It's six years ago I've been thinking about this. Tristan Harris, I first ever heard him on Sam Harris's show, phenomenal, interesting guy talking about variable schedule reward and how the human psychology gets a limbically hijacked to stay on time, screen time and stuff like that. All of this stuff, six years later, I'm still only marginally better with my phone use than I was back then.

1:41:25It is a... Do you have the apps on your phone? You know, social media? I have two phones. So I have one cocaine phone and a kale phone. Cocaine phone has got all of the stuff on. What you really need is three. You really need a third phone. So you need one which is that's my take about phone that is people that really need me have got that number And it's got Uber and Kindle and audible and maybe YouTube if you want and it means I can get about and do whatever second one which is Messaging for most people that's the number that almost everybody has that's your Instagram. That's whatever That's just tethered in that should be on a string.

1:42:02Yeah, like a fucking landline in the house And then the optional third phone which is meditation timer the stuff that you do if you have a morning routine where you need a... And where to Twitter go on the Tethered Phone? Twitter goes on the Tethered Phone. 20 goes on the phone to me. Yeah, come on. I mean, I took the apps off my phone about a year ago, and it's been dramatically improved my life. I mean, I don't... Yes, if I really want to, I can open a browser and I can log in and I can check something if I need to. But your lizard brain remembers that that's one point of friction, and it doesn't want to...

1:42:36You know, if you tell it, it's not great. It doesn't fall over there. Opal, which is like a bit more of a scheduleable, intense, screen time thing. And Opal's fantastic. I've been using that for about six months now. And we mean all of my friends. We'd used to do a series on the show called Life Hacks. It's like, you know, like 25 episodes, maybe if this is fucking life hacks, only then 750. It's a significant portion of this show. It's based on these life hacks. And it's like, dude, I got this new recipe for making a toasted sandwich. but this is the very particular sandwich maker that you need.

1:43:08And you need to get the 450, not the 400, because the 400 has like a drip tray doesn't work. Or this is a new meditation app that we're using. Or this is, at once found, I still do find, I think it's a gate 35D in Amsterdam, Skipoll Airport is the only set of benches in all of Amsterdam Airport that doesn't have handrails between them. So if you need to have a nap at some point, now you often get packed in photos from people like at 35D, you do them so glad that you told me about this. There's a website as well, sleeping in airports, which I saw in the background. Look at it. I'm like traveling.

1:43:40I use all my, like I acquire miles cheaply and then spend them on expensive things. I'm always flying and you know, seeing a realize first class and stuff and using the rule that we have is we can tell the guys about it. We can say, look, here's a new thing that I'm using, but until it's past the six month mark, it doesn't count as being a viable hack. So it takes a little waiting for the six month window, but opals past the six month window. So that, Opal, just as a practical thing for people. And then the second one is Cold Turkey, which is the equivalent essentially for Mac. So you download Cold Turkey and you set up schedules throughout the day and you can block any website you want.

1:44:16You can also block apps. And for me, it's like Twitter, Instagram, blocked. And the only way you can set it to, the only way you can get around is to donate money to charity. So if you donate a dollar to charity, and it's just linked to your car, Don't need money to charity and you get to look at Twitter for five minutes or whatever if you really really need to do it That's great. So that's that's been part of my solution But no, I don't disagree it's a Drainaging time where people have basically got a hacker a human system human OS hacker sat in that pocket And I do one of my smartest friends has a question that says What will be studied by historians, but is ignored by the media?

1:44:57right. And I think that the proliferation of dopamine hacking, limbic, attack smartphones in everyone's pocket is probably going to be up there. I mean, that's a beautiful line. May I say, what will be studied by historians that are being ignored by the media? I mean, that exemplifies why I've gone independent with uncomfortable conversations really because I don't want to be chasing, I don't want to be a cat with the laser a pointer who's chasing the latest story or the latest outrage, the latest news cycle. I do want to be someone who is in some sense writing the first draft of history as best we can as it's going on.

1:45:37And so that's why a lot of my guests will not necessarily align with the usual heterodox, like there's a kind of, we all know the guests who keep showing up on some of the same podcasts over and over and over again. I don't spend the majority of my time doing that. I'll also, I mean, I recently had on this indigenous academic who is this wonderful guy who's skeptical about like all of these kind of virtue signally, kind of white savior type practices that have emerged around the wisdom of the native truths and everything. And yet, as an indigenous bloke himself, he's not like a, he's not a kind of anti -woke like dissident.

1:46:16He is very much a spiritual person. to draw a lot of meaning from the traditions and spirituality of this ancient culture. So like, it's not about, for me, it's not about dunking and shitting and like, well, why is everything going crazy? It's about like, let's understand as best we can where everybody is coming from. Quite apart from anything, it's just really interesting. I mean, it's just more a more interesting way to live than to constantly be sniping and being to see, you know, to observe conflict where there isn't any. You can very much down -regulate whatever another person, even the most aggressive, egregious.

1:46:50We saw this in nightlife, a drunk person that can't get into a club with their friends. There's that. Only above that is a mother protecting her children. That's the level of intensity that you have. So much of the de -escalation involves just getting the other person to, mostly through questions and to stand where you're at. So, you know, if someone says something like, it's been looking at how many episodes you've done this year, and there's only been an X percent of them are women, or something like that, and I'm like, oh, that's okay, which women would you like to see on the show? Please send me suggestions.

1:47:23And immediately, almost without fail, people go, oh, actually, yeah, this person's a month. Thank you for the suggestion. I genuinely appreciate the suggestion. Really de -escalates it. The problem is it's so rare. The reason it de -escalates so well is that people are waiting for the cutting, things are done fast. Throwback. But yeah, man, I don't know. I really hope that I hope that our lives, that my lifespan, your lifespan, everyone listening, isn't some bizarre, like, prelude to an endilic future where we are forced to pay the costs, like those women that were making watches with fucking radium.

1:48:04And, you know, we just didn't know the side effects. We just didn't know them back then. And that all of us are going to live in this weird, mentally deranged, tribalistic, limbically hijacked world. And then we die. And then two generations from now, it's like, oh, that may just be the price we pay. My dad was born in a refugee camp during World War II in Switzerland of Jewish parents who fled from Poland in 1938 and lived, my grandmother lived her in, you know, than first 20 years of her life being hunted by Nazis and almost being sent to Auschwitz and all the rest of her family were wiped out.

1:48:39And at that moment, it was the stakes were high enough that reasonable people got their shit together and they built a fuck ton of bombs and a fuck ton of bombers and they blew the Nazis out of the water. And you know, decent societies like Australia and America and the UK and Canada, welcome and then people like my grandmother, I mean my grandmother, my grandmother, when after the war she went to the port in France where they were loading refugees onto boats to go to the new world and the person who was signing people in to allocate people to particular ships said, you can go to the United States or Canada or Australia, which one do you wanna go to?

1:49:27And she said, which one's furthest from here? Every generation puts up with its traumas in order to aid the eventual progress of human civilization. I'm an optimist about the long game. I think human resilience and ingenuity is strong enough that it will triumph. And in every era, you know, sometimes there were just blessed generations. The boomers got lucky. You know, they were born at a time where nothing really happened. They got to watch Seinfeld and watch Bill Clinton play this saxophone and then retire rich after the biggest property boom in the history of the world. And I suspect that our fate or maybe our children's fate will be trickier.

1:50:15I mean, you know, quite apart from anything, even if you're skeptical about climate chaos, it is a near certainty that the world is going to get a lot more chaotic, it's going to get a lot more unpredictable storms are getting more intense droughts are getting more intense hurricanes are getting more intense bushfires are getting more intense at the very least even if you don't regard it as an existential threat it's going to be a pain in the ass it's going to be an enormously expensive pain in the ass we're going to have to rebuild constantly your flights are constantly going to be delayed because a thumb, more thunderstorms, you know, it's just going to be enormously expensive and annoying.

1:50:58And you add that stress to the stresses of the hijacking of the limbic system and to the stresses of society not knowing what's true and what's false because anybody can generate an image of President Biden being assassinated and it's completely convincing and it can be disseminated online.

1:51:20When AI has the ability to move markets, which it already does by producing some bullshit, like if it can manufacture a convincing example of an airplane crashing and the AI itself can go short on airlines and then make a profit in the 30 seconds after it posts the airline crashing, Then even if we can correct that in 90 seconds, the AI has still made it killing. Like what are the incentives that we are blundering into? I can't see how it's not extremely stressful for us and our children to figure out what to do about all this. We need wise heads to prevail. We need to not get caught up in nonsensical culture war spats on social media.

1:52:09We need to not worry too much if an airline, you know, gives a nod to Indigenous people when it lands. They're a bigger games to play. I don't think that the thing we need to be worrying about is a Marxist woke takeover of Universities, and I don't think that a thing we need to be worrying about is Transgender activists grooming our children. Like both sides both the extremes of both sides are flying off the rails They're in echo chambers of their own either victims, essentially, I think, to echo chambers. We need to remain even killed. I mean, and the last thing I would say about the challenge of this moment, which still relates to algorithms, is that it's not just that you've got an addictive supercomputer in your pocket, which is tugging at your attention.

1:52:55It's also that you're being encouraged to curate your own life in real time. So it's like there's a constant, sort of demon on your shoulder that is whispering in your ear to say like is this meal that you're having You know sufficiently pretty that you should be posting it on Instagram Or is that thought that you just had sufficiently witty to post it on to post it to Twitter? So you're in the process of like kind of This is funny thing. We're like and then of course this predates social media I mean I was backpacking around India and we were in nor we were in like cashmere sort of in the wilds of the Himalayas when I, with a couple of mates of mine, when we were in our 20s, and we climbed to the top of this mountain where there was a Buddhist temple to watch the monks prepare for the day.

1:53:50And I was sitting there on, you know, outside this temple watching the sunrise and was struck by just how incredibly wild that situation was and how incredibly beautiful full it was and how surreal it was. And my two friends are amateur photographers, and so they had their whiz -bang cameras, and they're scrambling all over the mountain, scrambling all over the temple, and they're getting the right photo and the unit, and after the sun's risen, we climb all the way back down, and they're comparing their cameras, and I, oh, look at this one, oh, that's a great one, oh, that's gonna come up really great, and I'm standing there going, you missed it.

1:54:32You missed it, you missed the moment. You got the photo and you didn't get what I got. Consciousness is like precious. This is a brief window of time that we're here.

1:54:49The corrosive impact of having these super computers in our pocket is not just that they're distracting our attention from living our lives. It's that the actual living of life becomes more difficult, becomes sometimes impossible. If you're always thinking about whether it can be a piece of content, that's why I'm pretty clear about keeping my content my content and my life, my life. Experience life, don't document your life. Resist the shiny object. Resist the shiny object. Live, man. Live. Josh Slapps, ladies and gentlemen, Josh, I appreciate you. I'm really, really glad that you came through when we wanted you to find time to do this.

1:55:25Me too. Me too. It's an honor. Thanks for talking to me. It's great. Why should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of them. Comments of your conversations, the substack is probably the easiest place to start. Uncomfortable conversations .substack .com. You can subscribe there for free. I mean, they're a free and paid versions, but if you're free, then you'll be able to, you know, you'll find the podcast and everything or just search on any podcast app for uncomfortable conversations or on YouTube now that we've got these live YouTube thingies. We're doing it. Thanks, mate. Thanks, Josh.

1:55:48Cheers.